Marx, OJ, and me.
Generally speaking, people shouldn’t murder their wives and innocent bystanders and get away with it. Nonetheless I don’t feel great pleasure at OJ’s conviction and sentencing. There are many prominent people, among them those who lied us into Iraq, who deserve serious prison time as much as Simpson.
I never followed his career nor any of his trials very carefully, but do have a small OJ story to relate. About four years ago, I was in a Miami restaurant with my family, and my son pointed out r that OJ was sitting across the room. It was the first day of vacation and I was in a giddy mood, so when he got up and was talking to some people I went over with one of my daughters to chat with him. Out of some sense of the macabre, I took a photo of him standing with my daughters.
We chatted briefly. He was like a good politician, inquisitive about you. In about thirty seconds of questioning –”Where are you from?” “Where did you go to school?”, “Where did your father go to school?” ,– he had found a person we knew in common. (Louis Marx, who had been my father’s friend and business partner in the late 60′s, early 70′s, and is, I believe, Daniel Ellsberg’s father in law).
Make of it what you want, but I doubt having that conversation with many pro athletes.
He’s a charming murderer. So what?
In June of 94 a friend and I were driving home from work, to southern Orange County, heading south on the 5 freeway, which runs the length of the US west coast from Tijuana to Vancouver, BC. Up ahead appeared an assortment of helicopters and at least one small Cessna-type plane.
Having no radio in the car, we were left wondering what was going on; one hell of a wreck we figured at first, but traffic was light for the time of day, and any accident warranting this much attention, in either direction, should have had us all but stopped cold. Soon we noticed the motley squadron was moving toward us. Then, people gathering on the overpasses, looking to the south; cars pulled over to the side of the road, others inexplicably slowing down (in the middle of an unobstructed freeway in So. Cal, this sort of behavior is not just considered irrational but dangerously anti-social, and has probably drawn fire, literally, before).
Finally, the northbound lanes alongside us filled with police cars, running in a sort of phalanx formation; too many to count. The spectacle passed, and we debated what we had seen. I was sure it was the Governor’s or President’s motorcade, though it seemed nuts that this would be announced publicly, or, sadly, that people would be all that interested. At one point I joked: “It’s OJ!” (news of his disappearance had got out earlier that day).
Of course we got home and turned on the television to see the “slow speed chase” on television. What I’ve always found remarkable about it was it passed us by at least thirty miles away from where it would end in LA, and not far from where it’s said OJ was first detected (spotted by fellow motorists on the freeway). The circus surrounding the “chase” was up and running, and televised, with remarkable speed.
So that was my brush with the celebrity murder trial of the century, not very interesting, really just an opportunity for me to insert myself into it. Not much of an arc, really, but something of a punchline: In all the confusion, I never even saw the Bronco!