It had a narrative sense that was second to none, an instinct for how to draw the audience’s attention that was assured to the point of flagrant, to the point of gloating, opening—bam!—with a climax, a literal cut to the chase: an S.U.V. burning rubber on the Santa Ana Freeway, the Artesia Freeway, the Harbor Freeway, and, at last, the San Diego Freeway, 20 or so squad cars in panting pursuit. Actually, at 35 miles an hour, the S.U.V. was less burning rubber than going for a spin, and the squad cars weren’t so much in panting pursuit as serene accompaniment, falling into graceful formation behind their leader, a Ford Bronco, the 1993 model, as white as innocence, as a lie. Above, in the clear blue Southern California sky, a dark cloud of news helicopters had gathered, seven in all, the pilots having followed the police transmissions on their scramblers, now very much in on the fun. The footage they shot was broadcast locally and then nationally, one network after another interrupting regularly scheduled programming to air it, NBC cutting between it and Game Five of the N.B.A. championship series, the New York Knicks versus the Houston Rockets. Lining the overpasses in certain cities and neighborhoods like Compton, Inglewood, Watts, large crowds had assembled to offer support, cheer the Bronco on, tell it to go go go, boo those deputy dogs trying to bring it down, stop its run, fuck with its mojo. The emotion of the scene was hysterical, almost lunatic—a Pro Football Hall of Famer and star of the silver screen and all-around Mr. Congeniality super-dude, now a fugitive from justice, wanted for violating, on two counts, Section 187 (a) of the California Penal Code, holding on himself a .357 Magnum, the barrel kissing his temple—yet its pacing was stately, languorous, very nearly balletic, the action hot and lurid and low-down, but the view of the action coolly detached and God’s-eye. A B-movie plot with an art-house director.
A half-hour went by, an hour. So much time, in fact, that the Channel 7 helicopter had to break to refuel, coax Channel 5 into sharing its coverage. The suspense was killing, the public watching with shock-widened eyes an American hero in the middle of a free fall. The question was, would he go splat? (Making a break for it, that was tantamount to a confession of guilt, wasn’t it? He must’ve cut to ribbons that hot blonde ex-wife of his and the hunky young waiter returning a pair of glasses her mom had left at the restaurant—yeah right, at that time of night?—and now was going to hasta la vista himself.) No, the question was, would he go splat on live television? Blow the brains clean out of his head in one long red spatter? Cover the 405 in pulp and gore and fragments of bone? Leave two of his children, already motherless, fatherless as well?
As it turned out, he would not. O. J. Simpson would, along with friend and former teammate Al “A.C.” Cowlings, reach unharmed his house on Rockingham Avenue—“the Rockingham estate,” as the talking heads were so fond of calling it—in Brentwood, where a 27-man SWAT team was waiting for him, a sniper with an AR-15 rifle hugging dirt in the kids’ playground out back. An hour later, after telephoning his mother and drinking a glass of juice, he’d be placed in an unmarked cruiser, transported downtown for mug shots and fingerprints, then given a brand-new identity: Prisoner 4013970 of the Los Angeles County jail. What would have been a story touched only by the scandal-jonesing, if-it-bleeds-it-leads tabloids—the kind of newspapers and magazines you’d line your dog’s litter box with if you had a particularly trashy, no-count dog—had become, thanks to the involvement of a man so famous he didn’t need a name, just a couple of dinky letters, front-page news for even the staidest and snootiest of publications. And the episode with the Bronco had kicked the story up another notch still. Now it was a bona fide phenomenon and national obsession. Ninety-five million Americans had tuned in to some portion of the chase. By comparison, a mere 90 million had tuned in to that year’s Super Bowl. Domino’s Pizza reported record sales for the day. (What? Experience that level of tension, vicarious or not, and you work up one humdinger of an appetite.)
The chase, which happened 20 years ago this month—June 17, 1994—happened because a woman and a man, Nicole Brown Simpson, 35, and Ronald Lyle Goldman, 25, had been brutally slain. Though nobody knew it at the time, out of that horrifying crime something new was born, or maybe “spawned” is a better word: reality TV.
Hello from Brentwood
O.K., so here’s what the Simpson case was: It was a noir murder mystery. More in the style, though, of Twin Peaks than of Sunset Boulevard. This wasn’t a there-are-eight-million-stories-in-the-naked-city-this-has-been-one-of-them-type story. In other words, this wasn’t an L.A. story. This was a Brentwood story. Brentwood, a neighborhood in the Westside at the base of the Santa Monica Mountains, was clean, quiet, family-oriented. It’s where John Cheever liked to stay when he came to California because it reminded him of Connecticut. Lots of greenery and nature left au naturel and houses that cost an arm and a leg but were low-key about it. No nightlife to speak of and proud of it, the social hub the charmingly ramshackle Brentwood Mart, where one could sip an espresso, or a fresh squeezed carrot juice, while reading the trades after dropping off the kids at school, playing a set or two of tennis at the club. Good at keeping out the riffraff, i.e., the nonwhite and the non-loaded, at pretending it was just a simple small town with simple small-town values in the middle of Sodom and Gomorrah Los Angeles. Needless to say, Brentwood, particularly Northern Brentwood, the hoity-toitier half, turned up its nose at vulgar, flashy Hollywood, though you could hardly walk five feet without bumping into a celebrity. At the time O.J. lived there, so did Meryl Streep and Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer. It had its share of behind-the-scenes celebrities, as well: Michael Ovitz, then the entertainment industry’s power broker with the mostest, and Gil Garcetti, the district attorney responsible for prosecuting O.J. Bernard Lewinsky called Brentwood home, too, for that matter, only no one cared yet because his daughter, Monica, wouldn’t land that fateful internship until July of ’95.
All of which isn’t to say that Norman Rockwell would have been happy setting up his easel there. Small-town values with a Sodom and Gomorrah twist might be the best way of describing Brentwood’s ethos. A Brentwood Hello, as we’d learn from Nicole’s B.F.F. and sometimes more than, Faye Resnick, who’d publish a memoir during the trial, Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted, was a local specialty: a woman bestowing upon a casual male acquaintance a blowjob. Hey, it was oral sex, not sex sex—two totally different things. Just ask then president Bill Clinton.
The structure of the Simpson case was, in so many ways, straight out of Murder Mysteries 101, Noir for Dummies: an investigation peels back the pretty, wholesome surface, exposing all manner of rot and stink and tawdriness festering underneath. Nicole’s life since her split from O.J. had been a double one. By day it was dance recitals and P.T.A. meetings and fund-raisers for worthy causes, by night it was (if you believe the rumors) coke-fueled club-hopping and outré erotic encounters with younger men, including, allegedly, Marcus Allen, O.J.’s protégé and close friend. But then, Nicole’s life since she’d been picked up as an 18-year-old waitress, the ink on her high-school diploma still wet, at the Daisy, a nightclub in Beverly Hills, by the athlete and actor, spokesman for Hertz, had always had a schizo quality. The two had looked like the perfect couple—the Heisman Trophy winner with the million-dollar grin, the California dream girl hanging on his arm. Appearances, though, were deceiving. See, O.J. had a real Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde thing going on. Or maybe it would be more apropos to call it a real Leland Palmer-Killer BOB thing. Either way, O.J. routinely abused Nicole physically. (Nicole’s October 25, 1993, 911 SOS would be played for the jury. “He’s back. Please. … He’s O. J. Simpson. I think you know his record … ” The sound of weeping. “He’s going to beat the shit out of me.”) He was, too, a cocksman supreme, giving out the hard yard left, right, and center to seemingly any and all comers, then flying into a jealous rage if Nicole so much as cast a glance in another guy’s direction. A neat freak as well as a sex freak, he also thought her housekeeping efforts sub-par. Living with such a volatile and exacting mate couldn’t have been a picnic for Nicole. It’s no wonder that in pictures she appeared tight-faced and anxious-eyed, smiling but the smile held in check, her look that of a beach-bunny party animal up for a good time, but her affect considerably darker, considerably more troubled, even tormented.
It must be admitted, though, that, as a whodunit, the Simpson case was a flop, with nary a twist or turn. The defense cooked up some cockamamy theory involving Faye Resnick, who at the time of Nicole’s death, they said, was having a bad run with cocaine, and a drug deal gone south. They pushed it halfheartedly at best, though, as if they didn’t really expect anyone to buy it, and were careful to keep it vague—heavy on the paranoia but light on the kinds of details that could be either proved or disproved. (Nicole’s throat had been slit so deeply her head was attached to her body by the merest thread. The murder had crime passionnel written all over it.) Instead of coming up with an alternative killer, they focused their efforts on making their client the victim. Not of Nicole or Ron, of course, but of the L.A.P.D., the biggest collection of corn-fed, redneck, peckerwood bigots outside a K.K.K. meeting, the way they were telling it. (Attorney Johnnie Cochran Jr. would, in fact, go so far as to compare Detective Mark Fuhrman, a made-to-order villain for the defense’s purposes, six feet three inches of handsome, brutal male, fair-haired and blue-eyed, O.J.’s physical equal and opposite, to Hitler—forget the piss-ant Klan—in his closing argument, which got the dander up of fellow Dream Team member and Jew Robert Shapiro.) This was surprisingly easy to do, the times being what they were. The acquittal of the officers who beat Rodney King and the ensuing riots were only two years in the past. Distrust, even hatred, of the department was very much the mood of the moment, particularly among minorities, and the jury was primarily African-American. Actually, the defense’s attack was two-pronged and contradictory: present the cops as a bunch of bozos in regimental blues, guys too dumb to get out of their own way never mind properly collect evidence and, simultaneously, as a cabal of evil-genius racists who concocted an ultra-sinister and far-reaching conspiracy to bring down a charismatic and popular black man by pulling the frame job to end all frame jobs. Not that the mixed nature of their message hurt it any. Not with Johnnie Cochran Jr.—who as a showman would have put Clarence Darrow to shame, who as a showman would have put Orson Welles playing Clarence Darrow to shame—as the bearer. Still, if you watched the trial unfold on the tube rather than in the courtroom, i.e., weren’t a member of the jury and directly under Cochran’s sway, and fell on the honky side of the racial divide, the verdict seemed absolutely off its rocker. Obviously O.J. did it!
For the majority of Americans, certainly for the majority of white Americans, the ending was less a shocker than an outrage, a serious bummer any way you sliced it, but it wasn’t ignored. People stuck around for it, an estimated 150 million of them stopping what they were doing to catch the televised verdict. Which is, I think, the ultimate tribute to the story’s narrative pull: the audience stayed put until the final reel, not an empty seat in the house.
Don’t Drop the Soap
Perhaps, though, the Simpson case worked better, or at least more satisfyingly, as a soap opera, which, of course, it was, too. It was long-running and on daily and compulsively watchable and so dramatic it seemed, at moments, far-fetched. In the 2010 documentary, O.J. Monster or Myth?, prosecutor Marcia Clark, 41 at the time she took the case, said, “When [it] began, all of the networks were getting these hate-mail letters because people’s soap operas were being interrupted for the Simpson trial. But then what happened was the people who liked soap operas got addicted to the Simpson trial. And they got really upset when the Simpson trial was over, and people would come up to me on the street and say, ‘God, I loved your show.’ ”
Soap-opera-ish, as well, were the extreme good looks of the participants. O.J., the leading man, sure. I mean, obviously—47 years old and living the life of a jailbird, in court each day fighting for his freedom, trashed by the media, the public, the victims’ families, and still a total dreamboat, the tired droop to his eyes and mouth emphasizing his handsomeness rather than detracting from it. By participants, though, I really meant the rest of the cast, the supporting performers—Kato Kaelin, 35, and Faye Resnick, 37, and Nicole’s sister, Denise, older by two years, a former Ford fashion model, and Paula Barbieri, 27, O.J.’s steady squeeze, even Nicole and Ron—gorgeous, every single one of them. Or, rather, “gorgeous.” They were, additionally, “smokin’,” “slammin’,” “screamin’,” “bangin’,” “blazin’,” with “hard bodies” and “sick tans” and “killer hair.” Meaning they were those things and had those things yet at the same time they were not and did not. All the hours spent in the gym and the salon and the cosmetic surgeon’s office—“Almost every woman I know has had breast implants,” Faye Resnick either lamented or bragged in her book—had a canceling-out effect. Like, so hot, so what? Which is why they resembled soap-opera actors rather than movie actors: their physical perfection—the symmetrical features on their faces, the David-like proportions of their bodies—leaving nothing for the eye to snag on, the mind to obsess over, finally rendering them interchangeable, forgettable.
Reminiscent of a soap opera, too, was the case’s mix of tried-and-trues and up-and-comers. You had guys who’d been in the public eye for years: O.J., obviously, famous two times over for his exploits on the field and on the screen; Johnnie Cochran Jr., 56, on a serious hot streak after winning an acquittal for actor Todd Bridges on a murder rap, a sharp dresser and a smooth talker, dubbed “the best in the West” by Ebony magazine; F. Lee Bailey, 61, the first criminal-defense superstar; Alan Dershowitz, 55, played by Ron Silver in the Academy Award-winning Reversal of Fortune (1990). Then there was the fresh meat. Kato Kaelin, of course, the face of the trial, or at least the hair. Everybody’s favorite himbo houseguest, maybe not the swiftest guy on the block but cute as a bug and with a nice way about him. Kato was a joke, certainly the butt of enough of them. (The National Society of Newspaper Columnists bestowed upon him that year’s “Sitting Duck Award.”) But the public also couldn’t get enough. According to one poll conducted at the time, 74 percent of Americans could identify him. Only 25 percent could identify Vice President Gore. And though there’d be tell-all books and show-all Playboy spreads in both Faye Resnick’s and Paula Barbieri’s futures, it was Kato who seemed like the breakout star, hands down.
His biggest competition in that regard was, surprisingly, Marcia Clark. The jury was majorly turned off. (In focus groups, mock jurors, when asked to describe Clark, used adjectives like “sketchy” and “strident,” adjectives that were actually code for a noun: “bitch.”) Not the public, though. They couldn’t get enough. Mid-trial she underwent a much-discussed makeover. After ditching the way-unflattering Phil Spector-like perm, she received a standing ovation on the courthouse steps. People magazine would give its two cents: “Hear ye, hear ye! The verdict is in…. Though RuPaul would like to see this legal eagle ‘in more tailored suits and fitted skirts,’ most of our judges agree that Clark’s makeover increases her authority by allowing her to look like the person she really is.” She was mobbed at malls and in restaurants, given V.I.P. treatment at Hollywood hot spots like the House of Blues. And people were curious about her life out of the courtroom. Were she and co-star—ahem, I mean co-counsel—Christopher Darden, a Younger Man at 38, more than just colleagues? Cochran’s favorite joke of the trial was delivered by Jay Leno, who cracked that Darden would have been better off if he’d tried to nail O. J. Simpson instead of Marcia Clark.
It’s worth noting, too, that many of the soap operas O.J. knocked off the air temporarily were about to be knocked off a lot longer than that. Of the 10 biggest soaps of 1994–95, 6 have since bit the dust.
Faking Reality
So, O.K., the case was a noir mystery and a daytime soap. But what it was in addition to these two things and in excess of these two things was a reality show. The first and the best. The tail of the dragon we’ve been chasing ever since. That thing with the Bronco and the black-and-whites on the freeway? That wasn’t a car chase; it was a test run, a pilot episode, the taste that got us hooked, hyped, turned on, junked out, fiending for more, more, more. What made the case such an addictive fix—beyond even the sensational nature of the crime, the glitziness of the players, the almost irresistible pull of the question What really happened?—was the voyeuristic kink it provided. It gave us the dirty little thrill of putting our eye to the keyhole, looking in on a world that we’d normally never have access to. A Hollywood world, only not first-rate Hollywood. Not even second-rate Hollywood. As a running back, O. J. Simpson had been a star, but as a star he’d never burned that bright. (There are a lot of TV movies on that résumé of his.) And when he did land a role in a hit—the Naked Gun franchise (1988–94)—it was playing the stooge, the ditz, the dumb black guy. As Nordberg, O.J. had essentially turned himself into the male Butterfly McQueen.
Third-rate Hollywood, though, is what reality TV is all about. It’s never the Angelina Jolies and Brad Pitts inviting production crews into their homes to install toilet cams in the bathrooms. And if you do get a legitimate contender, i.e., a person who actually achieved a level of success and renown, it’s a contender past his or her prime—an Ozzy Osbourne or a Paula Abdul or a Flavor Flav or a Hulk Hogan. A has-been, basically, looking to stage a comeback. And O.J. was, of course, the original has-been/comeback kid, the prototype: an aging athlete with a dubious acting career, still a Somebody but on the downward slide to Nobodysville. On the downward slide at least until that double snuff job, which put him back on top as far as name recognition went, higher than he’d ever been, in fact, nearly out of sight. He became one of the most talked-about men on the planet. (Boris Yeltsin’s first question when he met President Clinton in 1995: “Do you think O.J. did it?”)
The prototype for that other reality-TV staple, the never-was, was pretty much everyone else associated with the case: Nicole Brown Simpson, a beautiful woman who used her beauty to become the prize of a rich and famous man, which was her prize; waiter-model or model-waiter Ron Goldman; Kato Kaelin and Paula Barbieri, in movies but only barely, reduced to soft-core porn, Surf, Sand and Sex for him, Red Shoe Diaries for her. These people are the Ur-Basketball Wives and the Mike “the Situation” Sorrentinos and the peroxided blow-up dolls from The Girls Next Door.
What made the Simpson case reality-TV-esque, too, was the awareness that it wasn’t reality, that it was reality at one remove. So intense was the media scrutiny that, by the time the trial started, all those who were part of it had grown accustomed to being treated like something scraped onto a microscope slide. But when Judge Lance Ito decided to allow cameras in the courtroom, that sky-high self-consciousness was sent off into the stratosphere. All of a sudden, the lawyers weren’t lawyers; they were lawyers playing lawyers. The judge wasn’t a judge; he was a judge playing a judge. Same with the witnesses, the experts, even the victims’ loved ones. In other words, these people were both characters in the drama and observers standing outside the drama watching themselves be characters in the drama.
A tongue-in-cheek quality, too, began to insinuate its way into the proceedings. Take, for example, the curious role of Larry King in the case. After the Bronco chase, King moved Larry King Live, the whole kit and caboodle pretty much, from D.C. to L.A. On any given night, he’d have as guests a member of the prosecution team and a member of the defense team, some journalist or other, always bending over backward to represent both sides. And he was as scrupulously bipartisan in his social life, dating Suzanne Childs, D.A. Garcetti’s director of communications, and Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, the defense team’s jury consultant, simultaneously. (If he ever got desperate for material, he could’ve just mic’d his sheets, filled a couple episodes with pillow talk.) When Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted was released mid-trial, Ito wrote to networks asking that they postpone their interviews with Faye Resnick. King obeyed, canceling Faye’s spot, and Ito, in thanks, told him to drop by sometime. So, during a midmorning break, King entered Ito’s chambers. Ito began musing about a domestic-violence issue he had yet to make a ruling on, revealing to his confused and surprised listener which way he was going to go. Finally, King suggested they wrap it up, since they’d been together for 40 minutes and the break was supposed to last only 15. King followed Ito through a door, which turned out to lead directly into the courtroom. Suddenly, to his shock, King found himself on-camera, a participant in the very trial he was covering. O.J. called out his name and stood to shake hands. “Thanks for being so fair,” Simpson said, pumping King’s fist up and down. Marcia Clark squealed, “I watch you all the time!” So you had both the accused and the lawyer prosecuting the accused acknowledging that they watched the talk-show host who was watching them.
It was a Brechtian moment, and Brechtian moments would become common as reality TV took over the airwaves: Paris Hilton going on Letterman and saying, “That’s hot,” her catchphrase from her hit show, The Simple Life (2003–7)—Paris doing Paris. Or Lauren Conrad, of The Hills (2006–10) fame, admitting to the women of The View that she never received Spencer Pratt’s apology phone call, even though she was shown receiving it. Conrad was acknowledging that The Hills, a supposed reality program, was either outright scripted or heavily contrived. The cat was out of the bag. Reality wasn’t real.
Predictably, several people involved with the case attempted to have reality careers. Kato Kaelin’s been the most persistent. (For a slacker, Kato sure hustles.) He was on Fox’s Celebrity Boot Camp along with Coolio, Tiffany, Lorenzo Lamas, and one half of Milli Vanilli; he was on Reality Bites Back, a reality parody show on Comedy Central; and on Fox Reality Channel’s Gimme My Reality Show!, a competition among reality stars for—you guessed it—yet another reality show. House Guest, in which he would in every episode show up at a different famous person’s door and ask to crash for a while, was developed but, amazingly, never picked up. Recently he’s partnered with Rhonda Shear, creator of the Ahh Bra, to release the Kato Potato pajamas, a pocket for a remote control and another for a bag of Doritos sewn into every pair. Faye Resnick also took a crack at the reality-star thing, becoming what’s known as a “Friend of a Housewife” on Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. She declined, however, to become a full-fledged housewife because she had a J-O-B job and thus didn’t have the time, and because, according to Radar Online (weirdly, The New York Times did not cover this story), participation was ruining her life. Forensic scientist Henry Lee, whose testimony was key to the defense’s victory, would host Trace Evidence: The Case Files of Dr. Henry Lee, on Court TV, executive-produced by Lawrence Schiller, O.J.’s collaborator on the prison memoir and get-cash-quick scheme I Want to Tell You: My Response to Your Letters, Your Messages, Your Questions. Another witness for the defense, Dr. Robert Huizenga, who examined O.J. three days after the murders and testified smarmily on O.J.’s behalf, is now Dr. H, the too fit guy in a white coat who tells the fatties at the beginning of each season that they’re too fat and should really think about being less fat, on NBC’s The Biggest Loser. Even O.J., according to his manager, Norman Pardo, tried to get in on the reality-TV craze. Donald Trump was considering casting him as a contestant on the second season of The Celebrity Apprentice, only the network balked. Just as well, since, as it turned out, he’d be up to his neck in armed-robbery and kidnapping charges at the time of the show’s filming.
All those lit matches, and yet one after another they sputtered, fizzled, flamed out. It’s as if the O.J. people had had their 15 minutes and weren’t going to be allotted a single second more. No, it’s the children of the O.J. people who’ve really caught fire reality-TV-wise. Because if the Simpson case was the daddy of reality TV, it was every bit as much the baby daddy.
By my reckoning, there have been only three true reality stars: Kim Kardashian, with Kourtney and Khloé providing backup, the bubble-butted version of the Supremes; Lauren Conrad and her cutie-pie buds on The Hills; and Paris Hilton, who struck out on her own after her public break with The Simple Life co-star Nicole Richie. I say true stars because their fame isn’t contingent upon winning a competition or displaying a skill or talent. Not like the contestants of Project Runway or The Voice or Survivor or, God help us, America’s Next Top Model. On the contrary, they do nothing, and that’s their genius, their special gift. They’re celebrated, turned into cover girls and sex symbols (all three have made *Maxim’*s Hot 100 at one time or another) purely for being quote themselves unquote.
That the Kardashian sisters slid out of the greased-up loins of the O.J. case is obvious—a no-brainer. The late Robert Kardashian, O.J.’s friend (read: fan, worshipper, slave, lapdog) for almost 30 years, one of those guys so enamored of the spotlight he was happy just basking in its reflected glow, was, after all, their father. Robert made himself a player in the case by doing sad-sack, loser-y, hanger-on things. He carried O.J.’s garment bag, which prosecutors later speculated may have contained O.J.’s bloody clothes and/or murder weapon, when O.J. returned from Chicago the day after the stabbings. He assumed the bottom-man-in-a-Mongolian-clusterfuck position—a volunteer assistant! get a grip, Bob!—on the defense team. And he read to reporters the note from O.J. that looked like a suicide note, walked like a suicide note, quacked like a suicide note, but was not a suicide note—remember, the one in which O.J. referred to himself as a “battered husband” and signed with a smiley face?—while O.J. hit the road with A.C. in his white Bronco. Incidentally, though it’s a sure thing that Robert sired Kourtney and Kim, Khloé not so much. O.J. may have to take the blame for that one. Manager Norman Pardo floated the possibility to In Touch magazine last November that O.J. bumped nasties with Kris Jenner, then Kris Kardashian, once or multiple times, and that Khloé, the youngest of the Kardashian girls, born in 1984, “could be” the result. Says Pardo, “[The Simpsons and the Kardashians] all took vacations together. There was a lot of partying going on back then.” Kris gives an emphatic unh-uh to the suggestion. But O.J.’s the guy who just can’t say no, and Kris has already confessed to running around on Robert during their marriage. In any case, it doesn’t matter whether O.J. actually shares DNA with the Kardashian girls or not, because if they aren’t his kids genetically they’re his kids spiritually: he made their name. Were it not for the case, it’s unlikely E! would have green-lit a series called Keeping Up with the Kardashians—keeping up with the who?—in 2007. Though, in fairness, Kim did have a popular sex tape to her credit by then. (The times we live in are not so fallen that we exalt murderers, but we can’t seem to resist a plucky gal with a powerful yen to be a star, not overly particular about how or for what, who’s always ready for her close-up, even if it might end in a money shot.)
The link between the Simpson case and The Hills is a little harder to locate, but it’s there nonetheless. Best friend to the show’s heavy, the sinisterly blond and Dickensianly named Spencer Pratt, and the on-again, off-again love interest of the show’s Bambi-eyed ingénue, Lauren Conrad, is Brody Jenner, son of Linda Thompson, Elvis’s old flame, and the ex-wife of Bruce Jenner, the Olympic gold medalist who married Kris after she split from Robert.
And now for Paris Hilton. Paris is a good friend of Kim Kardashian’s, though things haven’t been the same between the two since Paris unkindly if not inaccurately compared Kim’s famed badonkadonk to “cottage cheese inside a big trash bag.” Paris’s sister Nicky is also the goddaughter of Faye Resnick.
Closing Arguments
Adefining aspect of American culture, and a big part of the reason American culture is so appealing, and has been adopted almost as a world culture, is its seemingly effortless mixture of high and low: Mark Twain and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Louis Armstrong and “Potato Head Blues,” Howard Hawks and Rio Bravo, Andy Warhol and those Campbell’s soup cans. The O.J. case, though, was essentially all low—a tabloid story that catered to our basest impulses. And while people were fascinated by it, they at least had the sense to be embarrassed by that fascination. It was trashy, and they knew that it was trashy, and that to give in to the trashiness was to give in to their worst selves. Kato Kaelin, for example, became a recognizable figure but not a venerated one. He wasn’t put on the cover of Vogue as Kim Kardashian was this past April. Nobody, in other words, confused him with a person to admire. There was, too, at the time a rush to find an overriding theme in the case, a larger meaning, a lesson to be learned, a moral to be extracted—the dangers of keeping spousal abuse quiet, race relations in America, the God-like status accorded professional athletes—and thus justification for the intense level of interest it had inspired. In the years following the case, though, not only did the high-low blend skew more and more toward low, and not only did the bar on low drop, is still dropping, but the feelings of shame that accompanied a low binge vanished. Now it’s Twinkies and Coca-Cola for every meal because, hey, Twinkies and Coca-Cola taste good, and because, hey, why not? Vanished, as well, apparently are any bases for judgment. Honey Boo Boo “trends” in the same way that Barack Obama “trends.” There’s no difference between the two. Or, rather, we’re no longer capable of telling what that difference might be. Famous is famous. It’s like the standards and mores and customs of a very particular set of people living in a very particular section of Los Angeles—the standards and mores and customs of Nicole and Ron, of Kato and Faye and Paula and Kris, of O.J., too—have turned into the standards and mores and customs of a nation.
So, O.J., regardless of whether the jury got it right or the jury got it wrong, you have blood on your hands. You killed popular culture.
