I WOKE UP EARLY with Nicole still there, fast asleep. I felt pretty bad about the whole thing. I was dating Paula, and I hadn’t wanted this to happen, and suddenly I felt like one of those fools that tries to make all sorts of phony excuses for screwing up. I woke Nicole and told her she had to leave before the kids got up—I didn’t want them to see her there, and to tell Paula about it—then I walked her downstairs and let her out. I felt lousy. I was cheating on my girlfriend with my ex-wife. How weird was that?
At noon, the kids and I left for the airport and went to Vegas and had a wonderful weekend with Paula. I didn’t tell her about Nicole. If that makes me a coward, and I guess it does, then I’m a coward. I justified it like a million guys justify these things: It was a mistake. It would never happen again.
When I got back to L.A., Nicole and I got into what I often think of as our Period of Confusion. This was early April, a month before Mother’s Day, more than a year before the murders, and Nicole pretty much began stalking me. She would drive by the house late at night, and if Paula’s truck wasn’t out front she’d ring the bell. Like a fool, I would let her in. That thing that wasn’t supposed to happen again was happening again—two and three times a week. It was messing me up. All the old feelings were coming back, and I kept fighting them, but Nicole was relentless about getting me back. Still, whenever she broached the subject, I would cut her off. “We’re not getting back,” I said. “We’re just doing this.”
“Why are we doing this if you don’t have feelings for me?”
“I never said I didn’t have feelings for you. I said we weren’t getting back.”
“But—”
“Listen to me: I don’t want to talk about it. This is what we’re doing and it’s all we’re doing. There’s no future in it.”
Sometimes, after we made love, we’d lie there side by side, and Nicole would talk about her therapy. Things were going well, she said, and she was learning a great deal about herself. She got into all sorts of psychobabble about her childhood, and “unfinished business,” and about the anger inside her. I listened because she wanted me to listen, and some of it seemed to make sense, but at the end of the day it really wasn’t an issue for me. If she believed she was getting better, that was a good thing—and she certainly seemed to believe.
“My therapist says I like to be angry,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“She says I look for trouble because it makes me feel alive,” she explained. “We’ve been trying to figure out where this comes from, so we’ve been talking a lot about my childhood.”
“So what have you figured out?”
“Not a lot yet,” Nicole said. “This anger thing is mostly unconscious.”
It might have been unconscious, but I’d seen plenty of it over the years—especially in the period leading up to the split. Nicole could mix it up with anyone—a bouncer at a club, some asshole at the gym, a close friend—over absolutely nothing. Nicole was always looking to make enemies, and she had finally turned me, the person she was closest to, into Enemy Number One. I was glad she was talking about this stuff with her therapist. I remember thinking that it would have been nice if she’d figured some of this shit out before the marriage fell apart. I didn’t say so, though. Instead, I said, “That’s good. I’m glad you found a therapist you like.”
During this time, this Period of Confusion, we started spending a little more time with the kids, especially when Paula was out of town, which was pretty often. It was actually kind of pleasant, maybe too pleasant, and once again Nicole began to drop hints about getting back together. I didn’t understand it. She’d gone out to “find herself,” as she put it, and all she’d found is that she wanted me back.
I called her mother one day and asked her what was going on. “I’m really confused,” I said.
“I’m not,” she said. “I never thought Nicole wanted to leave you.”
I called her best friend, Cora Fishman, and she told me the same thing. “She loves you, O.J. She was just dealing with her own issues and she let things get out of hand. But I honestly don’t think she ever imagined it would lead to divorce.”
“I spent months trying to talk her out of it,” I said. “She had plenty of opportunities to change her mind.”
“She didn’t know what she wanted,” Cora said. “She was confused.”
“Great!” I said. “Now she’s not confused and I’m more confused than ever.”
“Ron wants to talk to you,” she said. “Hold on a minute.”
I held on, and Ron, Cora’s husband, came on the line. “How you doing, O.J.?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Like I told Cora, I’m pretty confused.”
“So you’ve talked with her?”
“With Nicole? Yeah, of course I’ve talked to her. That’s all we’ve been doing—talking.”
“About everything?” he asked, and it sounded like he was fishing.
Then suddenly it hit me. “You mean about Marcus?” I said.
“Wow,” he said, taken aback. “She told you about Marcus?”
“Yeah, Ron. She told me about Marcus.”
“Good,” he said. “Because, you know, I wanted to make sure everything was out in the open. That’s the kind of thing where, you know, you find out about it later and it fucks everything up.”
“Well it’s out in the open, man.”
I then called my own mother to tell her what was going on, hoping she might be able to help me shed a little light on the situation. “How do you feel about it?” she asked.
“I honestly don’t know how I feel,” I said. “When we’re together, I see how happy the kids are, and that makes me happy, but I don’t know that anything has changed. I don’t know that she’s changed.”
And my mother said, “O.J., until you figure this thing out, you’re not going be able to move forward with your life. You won’t be able to commit to a relationship with another woman. You can’t go on like this. You have to get clear on your feelings for Nicole.”
Paula was away again, on another modeling job, so I called Nicole and asked her if she was free that weekend. This was in late April, 1993. We went to Cabo and had a very nice weekend. It was just the two of us, with no distractions, and I felt like I was in love with her all over again. When we got back, I was more confused than ever. I was trying to figure out if I was really in love, or if I just loved the fact that she was desperate to get me back. I couldn’t help it. If you get dumped by someone, it feels pretty good when they come crawling back. They’re telling you that they’ve screwed up, and that they’ve loved you all along.
The next day, while I was struggling to make sense of this, she came by to get the kids. They were out back, in the pool. When I went to answer the door, Nicole reached up and gave me a little wifely kiss, then we walked through the house, heading for the pool. She saw the pictures of Paula again, and made a nasty remark, and it really pissed me off. I guess she thought our weekend in Cabo meant I was ready to walk down the aisle with her that very afternoon, and that by this time I should have dumped both Paula and her pictures. “That was uncalled for,” I said. “I don’t want you here.”
“Fine,” she said.
She went out back, got the kids out of the pool, and split. I thought, Great. She made it easy. If I was actually thinking about reconciling—if I was actually crazy enough to think about reconciling—I don’t have to think about it anymore.
Two days later, she called to apologize. She had discussed the incident with her therapist, she said, and her therapist had told her that she’d been completely in the wrong. “We had an amazing weekend, so I was hoping that everything would magically go back to the way it used to be,” she explained. “That was a mistake. I’m sorry.”
“Fine,” I said.
For the next couple of weeks, we kept our distance, but there was no denying I had strong feelings for her. I also had strong feelings for Paula, however, and that relationship was much less volatile, so I wasn’t about to make any big changes—my life was good.
Then one morning, a strange thing happened. Paula was in town, and she had spent the night, and we were up early because I was leaving for Cabo that morning. Just as I finished packing, the limo pulled up outside and I looked out the window. The guys I was going to Cabo with were all there. They got out to stretch their legs and looked up at the window and waved.
Paula and I went downstairs and said hello to the guys, then she kissed me goodbye, got into her truck, and drove out the Rockingham gate. Not a minute later, as I was putting my bags in the limo, Nicole pulled up on the Ashford side of the house. The two women had literally just missed each other. I looked over at my friends, and they looked at me, all big-eyed and everything: O.J. that was too close for comfort!
Nicole got out of her car and wandered over, smiling a friendly smile. She was wearing golf shoes, click-click clicking down the driveway, and it struck me as pretty funny. Golf had never been her thing, but she’d started taking lessons recently to show me that she was interested in the same things I was interested in. Nicole gave me an unexpected peck on the cheek, said hi to everyone, and noticed the limo. “It looks like you guys are going out of town,” she said.
“We are,” I said. “We’re going to Cabo to do a little golfing.”
“Sounds like fun,” she said.
Anyway, the limo was waiting, and we said goodbye and took off, and on the way to the airport the guys ribbed me about that very close call. I remember telling them a little bit about my confused romantic life. I was crazy about Paula, I said, but Nicole had been pursuing me pretty relentlessly lately. “It’s making me a little crazy,” I said.
One of the guys said, “I wish I had your problems,” and everyone laughed.
Anyway, we got to Cabo and hit the links and I forgot all my problems—golf is pretty magical that way—but that evening I got a call from Nicole. She said she was coming to Cabo, too, with her friend Faye Resnick, whom I’d never met, and she told me that she was bringing the kids. The next day, like a good ex-husband, I went to pick my family up at the airport, and I dropped them at this time-share they’d booked. For the next few days, I shuttled back and forth between my friends and my family, enjoying my time on the links, but also enjoying hanging at the beach with the kids, and taking them jet-skiing and stuff. When it was time to head back to L.A., Nicole said, “Why are you leaving? Why don’t you stay for a few more days?” And my kids piped in: “Yeah, Dad! Please don’t go! We’ve been having such a great time!” I thought about this—I didn’t have all that much to do in L.A., and Paula was away on some modeling gig and wouldn’t be back till early the following week—so I decided to hang through the weekend.
It was very nice. For the next few days, we were like a regular family—swimming and playing and eating meals together and just forgetting about the real world.
Faye hung out with us, too. She was dating this guy, Christian Reichardt, a chiropractor, but they were sort of on the outs. From what I overheard during her many phone conversations with him, some of which got pretty heated, Faye seemed to have a little issue with drugs, which she apparently didn’t consider a problem. Whenever these calls ended, usually pretty abruptly, Faye would turn to Nicole and tell her that the problem in the relationship wasn’t her—it was Christian. I thought that was kind of amusing, because that was pretty much the way Nicole had felt about our relationship. She was perfect, and I was the fuckup. I almost said something about it, but I bit my tongue. We were having a good time and I didn’t want to ruin it.
The last night we were there, Faye was back on the phone with Reichardt, crying. Apparently, he was willing to take another shot at making the relationship work, but he wasn’t sure he wanted her to move back in with him. Once again, it sounded eerily similar to my own situation. It also made me think about the fact that all relationships are messy, and that everyone suffers through their fair share of pain—and sometimes more than their fair share. The more I thought about that, especially given that talk I’d recently had with my mother, the more I began to think that maybe Nicole was right about us. We’d had something special, and if we wanted it badly enough we could have it again. She kept hammering at this during those few days in Cabo: We were a great couple, she said. The kids had never seemed happier. She’d learned a great deal in the sixteen months we’d been apart.
It finally got to me. This was in May 1993, and that Sunday was Mother’s Day. We were still in Cabo, getting ready to fly home the following day, and I finally broke down and told Nicole that I was willing to give the relationship another try. But I made myself clear on one thing. “I can’t have you moving back into the house,” I said. “That’s not going to happen. I’m not going to have the kids move in, then move out again if it doesn’t work. They’ve moved enough, and it’s too disruptive—and I’m not going to put them through that kind of trauma again.”
Nicole thought this made perfect sense, but she had concerns of her own. “I don’t want to be in a position where we have one argument and you tell me it’s over,” she said.
I thought this was a good point. “Well, okay,” I said. “What do you suggest?”
“If we’re going to commit to this, we need to commit for a full year.”
I thought about that, and it seemed reasonable. It was just one year, but a year that could alter the course of the rest of our lives—hers, mine, and the kids’. “Okay,” I said. “You’ve got a deal.”
“No matter what happens, you stick with it?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “No matter what happens, I stick with it.”
“And if it works for a whole year?”
“If it works for a whole year, you’ll move back into the house and we’ll remarry,” I said.
Nicole was so excited that she called her mother, Juditha, and told her what had happened. Juditha asked to talk to me, and I got on the phone and made light of the situation. “I’m not really sure about this little arrangement, but I guess your daughter thinks it’s going to work,” I said.
Juditha told me she was hopeful, too.
The day after we returned to L.A., Paula got back to town. I called her and told her I had made dinner plans for us, and I went and picked her up and took her to Le Dome, a fancy restaurant in West Hollywood, on Sunset Boulevard. I told her what had happened in Cabo, and I broke the news to her as gently as possible. Paula was not exactly thrilled, as you can imagine. “Don’t expect me to be waiting for you,” she said.
“The last thing I want to do is hurt you,” I said. “But I honestly feel like I’ve got to give this a try. I’m still very confused about the whole thing, and I need to know if it’s going to work. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering if I screwed up my whole family. I owe it to myself, and I owe it especially to my kids.”
Paula went kind of quiet on me. She was the opposite of Nicole. When Nicole got mad, she got hot and bothered. When Paula got mad, she went cold and quiet.
I drove her home, feeling badly, and she didn’t invite me in.
To be honest with you, I didn’t know if things were going to work out with Nicole, but in my heart I felt I had to give it an honest shot. In a way, I still loved Nicole, and I wanted the best for our kids.
At first, things went pretty easily. I was in New York for a good part of the summer, working, and when I came home it was always very pleasant, sort of like a family reunion. Sometimes I would spend the night at Nicole’s place, on Gretna Green, and sometimes she and the kids would stay with me, on Rockingham. It was a perfect arrangement. I had a family, but I lived alone. How can you beat that?
Before the end of the summer, though, Nicole began putting a little pressure on me about moving back into Rockingham, and I reminded her that we had agreed to try it for a full year before making that commitment. She knew that, of course, but her lease was running out at the end of the year, and she didn’t want to move again. It was hard to find a decent rental, she said, and the few places that were available were incredibly expensive. I told her she should consider buying a place. If she ended up moving back into Rockingham, she could treat the new place as an investment, and real estate on the west side of Los Angeles was always a solid investment. It was good advice, but it wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She’d go off, pouting, and for a few days I wouldn’t hear a word about it. But before long, it began again: “Why can’t we just move back in, O.J.? This is silly. You know we’re going to be living together soon enough.” Whenever she got too pushy about it, I’d basically avoid her until she got the message: Stop hounding me. We had a deal. Honor the deal.
It was a pain in the ass, to be honest, and I got tired of the endless bickering, but at least she had enough self-control to keep it from turning into a full-blown argument.
In the fall, we got an enforced break from each other, which was probably a good thing. It was football season, and I went off to do my TV analyst thing with Bob Costas and Mike Ditka. She stayed in L.A., taking care of the kids, and still obsessing about having to move.
She was also spending a lot of time with her friends—people she’d started hanging out with soon after we separated—and I’m not going to beat around the bush: I didn’t like them. Period. I wasn’t all that crazy about Faye Resnick, who apparently had a little drug problem, I certainly didn’t like Keith Zlomsowitch, with whom she’d had her little “accidental” fling, and I wasn’t wild about the rest of the gang, either. I had met a few of them around town, mostly recently, when Nicole and I were out and about, and most of them seemed like pretty marginal characters. I thought a few of them lived a little too close to the edge. They seemed to be mixed up in all sorts of shady stuff, and one of them—Brett Cantor, a waiter at Mezzaluna, a restaurant right there in the heart of Brentwood—had been knifed to death earlier that summer. The murder remained unresolved, but there were rumors it was drug-related.
“I don’t know what you see in those people,” I told Nicole one night.
“They’re my friends,” she said. “They’re nice.”
I didn’t think that was an accurate description. “I don’t want those people around the kids,” I said.
“Jesus, O.J.—they’re my friends. You make them sound like criminals.”
“Maybe they are criminals,” I said. “Maybe you should take a closer look.”
I kept traveling, generally on business, and when I got home my first priority was always the kids. I was still trying to make things work with Nicole, of course, but there wasn’t all that much time for romance, and—to be honest—I’d lost some of my enthusiasm for it. I don’t know what it was, exactly. I guess I didn’t think it could work, and I didn’t like her marginal friends, and I didn’t think she’d learned all that much in therapy, to be brutally frank. I was also sick and tired of arguing about our living arrangement. “Let’s please don’t talk about moving back into Rockingham until we’ve done our year,” I repeated.
“You make it sound like a prison sentence!”
“Nicole, come on. You know what I’m saying.”
“My lease is running out in a few months, O.J., and the Rockingham house is empty half the time. I don’t understand this.”
“We had a deal.”
“Can’t we change it?”
“Not until we know that things are working out.”
“I think things are working out,” she said.
“Maybe they are,” I said. “But it’s early yet.”
I was a long way from thinking that things were working out, to tell you the truth. All that talk about therapy and seeing the error of her ways and accepting responsibility was fine, but on closer inspection it seemed like it was mostly talk. I didn’t see that Nicole had really changed all that much. She was trying hard—that was obvious—but she was still the same Nicole she’d been when everything started going to hell. She still had that hot temper, and that anger, and that impatience. And she was still blaming me for all her troubles: You have that big house on Rockingham. I need a place to live. You won’t let me and the kids move in. She was making me the heavy, and I didn’t like it. But I’d committed to a full year and I was determined to honor my commitment. The year had begun on Mother’s Day 1993, and we were only halfway there.
There were good days, too, though—don’t get me wrong. Times when we’d be hanging out with the kids, having fun, or waking up at my place in the morning, just a big happy family—the family we’d always imagined for ourselves. On those days, I actually let myself believe that things were going to work out, and it colored everything. Life is good. Nicole is terrific. We’re going to make it.
During this period, Nicole’s one big beef, which she kept hammering at, mercilessly, was this business about the house: Why wasn’t I ready to let her move back in? And my big beef, which I also kept hammering, equally mercilessly, was about her so-called friends—people that definitely rubbed me the wrong way. Those were the two major problem areas, and we bickered about them, sometimes to a point of exhaustion, but we never let the bickering get out of hand. And in fact, whenever things looked like they might blow up, I’d find myself jetting off on business. I’d go to Tampa or Atlanta, say, to interview athletes for the show, or to New York, for my regular network gig, and being away from her and our problems was a real relief.
When I came home, I always appreciated her more, though, because I’d missed her, but within days I felt like I was walking on eggshells. I didn’t want to have any more arguments. I didn’t want to hear any more shit about our living arrangements. I didn’t want to listen to any more stories about her asshole friends.
Luckily, I got cast in the Naked Gun sequel, and that kept me busy. We saw less of each other and argued less as a result, and for a while it worked great. Like a lot of people, we got along a hell of a lot better when we were apart, and when we were together we never had quite enough time to get into anything too serious or damaging.
One day, though, on the set of the movie, I ran into a girl who was a stand-in for Anna Nicole Smith, and she and I got to talking. She began to tell me about some of the wild parties she’d been to recently, and how she was always running into Nicole with her little entourage—a group she described as “a pretty rough crowd.” And suddenly, I was thinking, Now that’s weird. This stand-in was basically a part-time hooker—I believe she worked with Heidi Fleiss, the so-called Hollywood Madam—and she and three of her little girlfriends had written a book about their experiences, You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again. Now here she was, a call-girl, telling me that my ex-wife was partying with a “rough crowd.” I was pretty upset, as you can imagine, and after the shoot I drove over to Nicole’s house and read her the riot act. “I thought I warned you about these people,” I said. “I’ve told you a million times: I don’t want them around the kids.”
“They’re not around the kids,” she said, which turned out to be a lie. “And I don’t know what you have against them. They’re nice people. They’re my friends.”
“You better open your eyes, Nicole. Nice people don’t go around getting themselves knifed to death. Nice people don’t do hard drugs. Nice people don’t turn into whores.”
“Where are you getting your information?” she snapped.
“I just know, okay?” I said. “I know about the wild parties. I know about Heidi’s girls. And I know about these fucking druggies.”
“You’re crazy.”
“This is not what’s supposed to be happening in my life, Nicole. We’ve been back together for five months and you’re fucking everything up worse than ever. Why is this shit still going on? What are you doing while I’m in New York and traveling all over the place and busting my ass working? I don’t want to hear this bad shit about you, and I don’t want to find out you’re letting these people near my kids.”
I left, still steamed as hell, with Nicole still hollering at me, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying, and at that point I didn’t really care.
When I got back to Rockingham, the phone was ringing as I came through the door. I looked at the caller I.D. and saw it was Nicole, so I didn’t pick up. But she kept calling and I finally had to answer. “What?!” I barked.
“Why did you leave like that?”
“Because I was pissed!”
“You committed to a year, O.J. It’s only been five months.”
“I know I committed to a year! Who said anything about that?”
“Nobody, but you seemed angry. I didn’t want you to be angry.”
“How can I not be angry?”
“Please come back here.”
“What for?”
“So we can talk about it.”
I went back to the house, and to be honest with you I was still angry. I kept going on about these criminals she was hanging around with, and these trashy women, and I told her she had to wise up and look for better friends. I think I kind of worked myself into a frenzy—it was all just pouring out of me—and I guess she got scared or something because she went upstairs and locked herself in the bedroom. I followed her up and banged on the door.
“Let me in!” I said.
“No!”
“You called me to come back here, and now you lock me out?!”
“Just open the fucking door!”
“Stop banging, O.J. Please! You’ll wake the kids!”
“Why didn’t you think of that before you dragged me back here?! Why did you drag me back here, anyway?! So we could argue about this shit!”
In the middle of this, Kato showed up, so I started venting to him. I didn’t realize that Nicole had called the police, and that I was talking so loudly they were able to pick some of it up on the 911 tape. “This goddamn woman!” I told Kato. “She’s got drug addicts and hookers hanging around my kids, and I’m pissed about it.” I went back and banged on the door again. “Why is this door locked, Nicole?! You asked me to come back here, and I’m here!”
I went back downstairs and kept venting at Kato: “She keeps telling me she wants to make this work, and she keeps telling me she’s getting her shit together, but she’s a long way from getting her shit together!”
Meanwhile, she made two calls to 911, back to back:
NICOLE: Can you send someone to my house?
DISPATCHER: What’s the problem there?
NICOLE: My ex-husband has just broken into my house and he’s ranting and raving outside the front yard.
DISPATCHER: Has he been drinking or anything?
NICOLE: No. But he’s crazy.
DISPATCHER: And you said he hasn’t been drinking?
NICOLE: No.
DISPATCHER: Did he hit you?
NICOLE: No.
DISPATCHER: Do you have a restraining order against him?
NICOLE: No.
NICOLE: Nicole Simpson.
DISPATCHER: And your address?
NICOLE: 325 Gretna Green Way.
DISPATCHER: Okay, we’ll send the police out.
NICOLE: Thank you.
DISPATCHER: Uh-huh.
I guess at this point she got off the phone for a minute; then she got impatient and called back.
NICOLE: Could you get somebody over here now, to Gretna Green. He’s back. Please?
DISPATCHER: What does he look like?
NICOLE: He’s O.J Simpson. I think you know his record. Could you just send somebody over here?
DISPATCHER: What is he doing there?
NICOLE: He just drove up again. (Crying.) Could you just send somebody over?
DISPATCHER: Wait a minute. What kind of car is he in?
NICOLE: He’s in a white Bronco, but first of all he broke the back door down to get in.
DISPATCHER: Wait a minute. What’s your name?
NICOLE: Nicole Simpson.
DISPATCHER: Okay, is he the sportscaster or whatever?
NICOLE: Yeah. Thank you.
DISPATCHER: Wait a minute, we’re sending police. What is he doing? Is he threatening you?
NICOLE: He’s fucking going nuts. (Crying again.)
DISPATCHER: Has he threatened you in any way or is he just harassing you?
NICOLE: You’re going to hear him in a minute. He’s about to come in again.
DISPATCHER: Okay, just stay on the line …
NICOLE: I don’t want to stay on the line. He’s going to beat the shit out of me.
DISPATCHER: Wait a minute, just stay on the line so we can know what’s going on until the police get there, okay? Okay, Nicole?
NICOLE: Uh-huh.
DISPATCHER: Just a moment. Does he have any weapons?
NICOLE: I don’t know. He went home and he came back. The kids are up there sleeping and I don’t want anything to happen.
DISPATCHER: Okay, just a moment. Is he on drugs or anything? I need to hear what’s going on, all right?
NICOLE: Can you hear him outside?
DISPATCHER: Is he yelling?
NICOLE: Yep.
DISPATCHER: Okay. Has he been drinking?
NICOLE: No.
DISPATCHER: Okay. All units: additional on domestic violence, 325 South Gretna Green Way. The suspect has returned in a white Bronco.
DISPATCHER: Okay, Nicole?
NICOLE: Uh-huh.
DISPATCHER: Is he outdoors?
NICOLE: He’s in the backyard.
DISPATCHER: He’s in the backyard?
NICOLE: Screaming at my roommate about me and at me.
DISPATCHER: Okay. What is he saying?
NICOLE: Oh, something about some guy I know and hookers and Keith and I started this shit before and …
DISPATCHER: Um-hum.
NICOLE: And it’s all my fault and “Now what am I going to do, get the police in this” and the whole thing. It’s all my fault, I started this before, brother.
DISPATCHER: Okay, has he hit you today or—?
NICOLE: No.
DISPATCHER: Okay, you don’t need any paramedics or anything.
NICOLE: Uh-huh.
DISPATCHER: Okay, you just want him to leave?
NICOLE: My door. He broke the whole back door in.
DISPATCHER: And then he left and he came back?
NICOLE: Then he came and he practically knocked my upstairs door down but he pounded on it and he screamed and hollered and I tried to get him out of the bedroom because the kids are sleeping in there.
DISPATCHER: Um-hum. Okay.
NICOLE: And then he wanted somebody’s phone number and I gave him my phone book or I put my phone book down to write down the phone number that he wanted and then he took my phone book with all my stuff in it.
DISPATCHER: Okay. So basically you guys have just been arguing?
At this point you can hear me yelling in the background, simultaneously venting to Kato and shouting at her.
DISPATCHER: Is he inside right now?
NICOLE: Yeah.
DISPATCHER: Okay, just a moment.
SIMPSON: Do you understand me? … Keith is a nothing. A skunk, and he still calls me—
DISPATCHER: Is he talking to you?
NICOLE: Yeah.
DISPATCHER: Are you locked in a room or something?
NICOLE: No. He can come right in. I’m not going where the kids are because the kids—
DISPATCHER: Do you think he’s going to hit you?
NICOLE: I don’t know.
DISPATCHER: Stay on the line. Don’t hang up, okay?
NICOLE: Okay.
DISPATCHER: What is he saying?
NICOLE: What?
DISPATCHER: What is he saying?
NICOLE: What else?
NICOLE: O.J. O.J. The kids are sleeping.
I guess I’m still yelling at her, still pissed as hell, and Nicole is sobbing by this time.
DISPATCHER: He’s still yelling at you? Is he upset with something that you did?
NICOLE: A long time ago (sobbing). It always comes back. (More yelling.)
DISPATCHER: Is your roommate talking to him?
NICOLE: No, who can talk? Listen to him.
DISPATCHER: I know. Does he have any weapons with him right now?
NICOLE: No, uh-huh.
DISPATCHER: Okay. Where is he standing?
NICOLE: In the back doorway, in the house.
DISPATCHER: Okay.
SIMPSON: … I don’t give a fuck anymore … That wife of his, she took so much for this shit …
NICOLE: Would you just please, O.J., O.J., O.J., O.J., could you please … Please leave.
SIMPSON: I’m leaving with my two fucking kids* is when I’m leaving. You ain’t got to worry about me anymore.
NICOLE: Please leave. O.J. Please, the kids, the kids … Please.
DISPATCHER: Is he leaving?
NICOLE: No.
DISPATCHER: Does he know you’re on the phone with police?
NICOLE: No.
DISPATCHER: Okay. Where are the kids at right now?
NICOLE: Up in my room.
DISPATCHER: Can they hear him yelling?
NICOLE: I don’t know. The room’s the only one that’s quiet.
DISPATCHER: Is there someone up there with the kids?
NICOLE: No.
I’m really losing it about here, yelling to beat the band.
DISPATCHER: What is he saying now? Nicole? You still on the line?
NICOLE: Yeah.
DISPATCHER: You think he’s still going to hit you?
NICOLE: I don’t know. He’s going to leave. He just said that …
SIMPSON: You’re not leaving when I’m gone. Hey! I have to read this shit all week in the National Enquirer. Her words exactly. What, who got that, who?
DISPATCHER: Are you the only one in there with him?
NICOLE: Right now, yeah.
DISPATCHER: And he’s talking to you?
NICOLE: Yeah, and he’s also talking to my—the guy who lives out back is just standing there. He just came home.
DISPATCHER: Is he arguing with him, too?
NICOLE: No. Absolutely not.
DISPATCHER: Oh, okay.
NICOLE: Nobody’s arguing.
DISPATCHER: Yeah. Has this happened before or no?
NICOLE: Many times.
DISPATCHER: Okay. The police should be on the way—it just seems like a long time because it’s kind of busy in that division right now. (To police:) Regarding Gretna Green Way, the suspect is still there and yelling very loudly. (Back to Nicole:) Is he still arguing? Was someone knocking on your door?
NICOLE: It was him.
DISPATCHER: He was knocking on your door?
NICOLE: There’s a locked bedroom and he’s wondering why.
NICOLE: Can I get off the phone?
DISPATCHER: You want—you feel safe hanging up?
NICOLE: Well, you’re right.
DISPATCHER: You want to wait till the police get there?
NICOLE: Yeah.
DISPATCHER: Nicole?
NICOLE: Um-hmm.
DISPATCHER: Is he still arguing with you?
DISPATCHER: He’s moved a little?
NICOLE: But I’m just ignoring him.
DISPATCHER: Okay. But he doesn’t know you’re—
NICOLE: It works best.
DISPATCHER: Okay. Are the kids still asleep?
NICOLE: Yes. They’re like rocks.
DISPATCHER: What part of the house is he in right now?
NICOLE: Downstairs.
DISPATCHER: Downstairs?
NICOLE: Yes.
DISPATCHER: And you’re upstairs?
NICOLE: No, I’m downstairs in the kitchen.
DISPATCHER: Do you see the police, Nicole?
NICOLE: No, but I will go out there right now.
DISPATCHER: Okay, you want to go out there?
NICOLE: Yeah.
DISPATCHER: Okay.
NICOLE: I’m going to hang up.
DISPATCHER: Okay.
Then the cops showed up, two of them, followed by a supervisor, and it took both Nicole and I a little while to calm down. I told the officers that Nicole was exposing my kids to all sorts of unsavory people, which I wasn’t happy about, and she told them that all I did was complain about her friends. I don’t think they were all that interested in the details, because one cop just cut to the chase: “Has he ever hit you?” he asked her.
“Yeah,” she said. “Once. We had this one incident in 1989.”
Once. I hit her once—not even hit her, technically—and ever since that day I’d been known as a wife-beater. Whatever they were thinking, I wasn’t there in the capacity of a so-called wife beater—I was there because I was concerned about my kids.
Let me share with you an excerpt from the civil trial. The man on the stand is Robert Lerner of the L.A.P.D., one of the officers who responded that day, October 25, 1993. The man asking the questions is attorney Robert Baker:
BAKER: Now, in terms of your conversations with O.J. Simpson, Mr. Simpson was upset about the people—and he informed you of this—that his wife was running around with, correct?
LERNER: Correct.
BAKER: And he was upset about the fact that she was, in fact, in his view and from his information, running—having people in the house who were hookers, correct?
LERNER: He was concerned.
BAKER: And he was concerned that there was one person that he thought was bad for his kids and that his wife shouldn’t associate with, and he didn’t want him around the house; isn’t that true?
LERNER. Yes.
BAKER: And that was a gentleman with the first name of Keith, correct?
LERNER: Yes.
BAKER: And he expressed that to you, that in fact these people that were around the house had some sort of dealings with Heidi Fleiss, correct?
LERNER: That’s what he indicated.
BAKER: And he was upset about that, those people being around his house where his kids were; he informed you of that, didn’t he?
BAKER: And he also indicated to you, sir, that he never had intended, nor was he ever considering any physical violence to Nicole Brown Simpson that evening, correct?
LERNER. Correct.
BAKER: And he also indicated to you that the door that she said was broken, before that, she told you he broke—it was broken before he ever went to the house. Isn’t that correct?
LERNER: That’s what he claimed.
This was in October 1993, almost eight months before Nicole was murdered. Still, when the trial finally got underway, everyone acted like my lawyers were making this stuff up. They weren’t. Nicole had been associating with hookers and drug dealers and unsavory characters from way back, and I’d been begging her to keep those people away from my children. And I went on record with my concerns that night when I spoke to the police about it.
Now here’s the weird part: The next day, the very morning after the fight, I was back on the set, working, when Nicole called. “Hey, how you doing?” she said, as if nothing had happened.
“Fine.”
“Did you play golf this morning?”
“No. I’m working. We’re shooting.”
“So everything’s good?” she asked.
She was feeling me out, seeing if I was still angry, and I told her yes, I was very fucking angry. She dragged me back to the house and then called the police on me, and all because I was concerned about my kids, and about the direction her life was taking.
“Great!”
“What are you doing later?”
“Going back to New York. What the hell do you think I’m doing?”
For the next several weeks, I stayed on that crazy back-and-forth schedule. I’d be in New York for the sports show, then fly back late Sunday to work on Naked Gun for a couple of days. Then it was back to New York, with a stop or two on the way to interview one athlete or another for the show. Sunday night, the cycle started all over again—like my own personal version of that movie, Groundhog Day.
Whenever I was in L.A., visiting with the kids, Nicole was generally on her best behavior, but during this period she began to seem unusually tired. I think the stress of keeping it together around me was almost more than she could take. She really wanted this thing to work, so she was determined to be a good little girl, but the effort left her exhausted. I also began to wonder whether she was doing drugs.
The one thing that she wasn’t able to control was this constant harping about our living arrangement. She kept pushing me to let her and the kids move back into Rockingham, and I kept telling her no. I suggested that she rent another place, or, better yet, buy one, and she finally took my advice and found a nice condo on Bundy, near Dorothy Street. There was one major problem, though. She couldn’t afford to buy it unless she sold her condo in San Francisco, and because the timing was wrong she was worried about the tax bite. When she looked into it, she discovered that she could avoid that problem by claiming that the place on Bundy was a rental property, and to indicate in her tax return that she and the kids were actually living with me. I didn’t want any part of that scheme, and I told her so. “The last thing I need is a problem with the IRS,” I said.
“But I don’t understand,” she said. “I’m going to be moving back in with you anyway.”
“I can’t do it,” I said.
She was pretty angry, and for a while the good Nicole was nowhere in evidence. Luckily I wasn’t around too often, but even when I wasn’t home she somehow managed to bring her problems to my doorstep—literally. She would come by the house with the kids, say, to use the pool, and she took to ordering Michele around, acting like she still lived there. Michele tolerated it, but there were limits. One day Nicole asked to be let into my home office, which was locked, and Michele told her she’d have to get permission from me. “No one is allowed in Mr. Simpson’s office,” she reminded her. “It’s one of his rules.”
“I’m not asking you,” Nicole said. “I’m telling you.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Nicole. I can’t let you in without Mr. Simpson’s say so.”
Nicole went off on her, cursing and calling her names, then went out to the pool and grabbed the kids and took off in a huff. She was making friends left and right.
I came home for Christmas, and we focused on the kids, spoiling them with presents. I got a few small presents of my own, but only one of them really meant anything to me, and that was the fact that we didn’t have a single scene or a single argument in the course of that entire week. I don’t know if that qualifies as a present, but I appreciated it, and I made a point of telling her so. To be honest with you, when things were good like that, I always found myself feeling badly—always found myself thinking about the way things might have been. Nicole had given me fifteen great years, but that Nicole hadn’t been around much recently, and the Nicole who had taken her place was not someone I knew or even wanted to know. At that point, I was pretty much biding my time until the year was up. And in some ways, to be honest, I was already gone.
I remember speaking to Nicole’s mother about the various problems—the business with the housekeeper, the questionable friends, the drugs—and she was just as concerned as I was. Unlike me, though, she was still hopeful. “Maybe it’s just a phase,” she said. “Maybe she’ll get tired of running around with those people.”
“Well, I hope so,” I said. “But I don’t know. Whenever I try to talk to her about it, she gets pissed off.”
“I don’t think there’s anything either of us can do,” she said. “Nicole’s going to have to get through this herself.”
I wasn’t exactly sure what it was she was supposed to get through, to be honest. People fail at marriage every day, and they either find their way back or not. The question, for me, even then, was why did we fail—where did we go wrong? Nicole had told me on more than one occasion that she felt as if she’d been with me forever, and that she was tired of living in my shadow. Maybe that was it. Maybe she had sabotaged the marriage so she could go off and relive her lost childhood or something—one of these “delayed adolescence” things. If I was right, and if that was what she had to get through, I figured I had a very long wait ahead of me.