NICOLE MOVED INTO the Bundy condo in late January and she liked it just fine, but she was still pissed that I hadn’t asked her to move back into Rockingham. “I can’t believe you made me buy my own place,” she whined.
“Nicole, we’ve been through this. Give it time.”
“I’m just saying.”
“I know. You’ve been saying for a while.”
“Well, it makes me wonder,” she said. “I’m trying to be hopeful, but you’re making it really hard.”
“It’s January. We’ve got four months before Mother’s Day. On Mother’s Day, it will be exactly one year.”
“I know,” she snapped. “Stop reminding me. I feel like I’m on trial here.”
The move created one other problem for Nicole, aside from the tax issue, and this one concerned her houseboy, Kato. At the Gretna Green place, he’d lived in the guesthouse, but on Bundy all she had was a little maid’s room, so she asked me if I’d put him up at one of the three guesthouses on my property. It was supposed to be temporary, until Kato could find a place of his own, and I told Nicole I was glad to help out. Within a week, Kato was living at Rockingham.
Years later, when the trial got underway, somebody floated a crazy story about this. They said that Nicole had offered Kato the maid’s room at the Bundy condo, and that he was game, but that I didn’t want them living under the same roof. Again, people didn’t seem to understand that—by that point—I had absolutely no interest in reconciling with Nicole. After all, if I had wanted her back, she would never have bought the place on Bundy. She and the kids would have moved into Rockingham, which is what she’d been hounding me about all along.
In short order, Nicole began to resent Kato. I don’t know what it was exactly, but he was living at the house, and she wasn’t, and I think that really pissed her off. I know it makes absolutely no sense, but a lot of the shit we went through made no sense, and I think my theory’s as good as any.
Now there were two people at Rockingham that really pissed her off: Michele and Kato. (Three if you count me.) But she kept coming by anyway, mostly to hang out by the pool and to torment me with her unhappiness. At one point, she told me, “O.J., when I come by the house, I don’t want to see either Michele or Kato. Kato shouldn’t even be on the property, and Michele should hide in her room until I’m gone. You understand? When I’m around, I don’t want either of them around.”
I looked at her, wondering if she’d lost her mind. Who was she coming by to tell me how to run my home? If she didn’t want to see Michele and Kato, she didn’t have to come by at all. She could drop the kids off out front, and I’d be glad to hang by the pool with them. I told her as much, and she looked at me with such hatred I thought she was going to leap off her lounge chair and attack me. But she didn’t attack me. She picked up her copy of People magazine and ignored me.
To make matters worse, several of her close friends started coming by to express concern about the shape she was in, as if I could do something about it. Nicole was still hanging out with that same bad crowd, they said, drinking too much and clearly doing drugs. Every other day, I heard variations on the same tune: “O.J., you gotta do something about it. She needs help.”
But what could I do? Whenever I brought it up, which was often, believe me, she told me she didn’t want to hear it. Or worse—she stormed out. As usual, everything was my fault. In her mind, if I’d only let her move back into Rockingham, life would be perfect. But I hadn’t let her move back in, and all she had was her friends—and a big tax problem. The tax problem was my fault, too, of course. It was all my fault. Nicole’s life was turning to shit because I didn’t love her, and she was certainly lovable, so the problem was me—I was responsible for everything.
One afternoon, she came by the house to drop off the kids so she could run a few errands, and I thought she looked a little glassy-eyed. When the kids were out of earshot, I asked her if she was okay. I did it nicely—not accusing her of anything, not confronting her. “You know,” I said, “I’m hearing from a lot of people—your friends mostly—that you’re fucking yourself up with drugs and shit. You want to talk about it?”
“Fucking myself up? That’s crazy? What ‘friends’ are telling you this?”
“People who are worried about you.”
She got mad. She said it was bullshit, that these so-called friends of hers didn’t know what they were talking about—that she was in complete control.
To tell you the truth, I didn’t have any concrete evidence to back up the allegations. The woman looked worn down, yes, and she was erratic, and sometimes she seemed completely out of it, but it’s not like I really knew anything. If I had, trust me, I would have done something about it—both for her and for the kids. But when I looked at my kids, and I looked at them closely, believe me, they seemed fine. They didn’t look messed up or haunted or any of that shit. On the contrary, they seemed solid and happy, and they were as loving toward Nicole as they’d ever been, if not more so. If something really bad was going on, I figured I’d see it, but I didn’t see a thing—not in them, anyway. In Nicole, though, the changes only became more obvious with time. She became even more erratic, looked even more worn down, and she seemed increasingly lost. It was hard to understand. For as long as I’d known her, Nicole’s head and heart had always been in the right place. Whenever any of her friends had a problem, they always went to her first. She was solid and clear thinking, and she always made the right moral decision. But that was another Nicole, and she hadn’t been much in evidence lately. In fact, in some ways it was as if the new Nicole was taking over, and I can’t say I much liked her.
One day, right around this time, I was just back from New York, sitting by the pool, in a lounge chair, reading, waiting for Nicole to show up with the kids. The moment they showed up, the kids ran off to the guesthouse with a note for Kato. “What was that all about?” I asked her.
“A letter for Kato,” she said. “I want him gone.”
Kato wasn’t home, but the kids left the note there and they obviously knew what it was about: “Kato’s a freeloader!” “He’s a bum!” “Kato has to find a place of his own because Mom doesn’t want him here.”
I was shocked, but I bit my tongue until they were in the pool, out of earshot. “Why do you have to go and teach them that shit?” I said. “They’re little kids. They don’t need to get in the middle of it.”
She rolled her eyes and stormed off, disappearing into the house. A few moments later, she was back. “Man, I hate that woman!” She was talking about Michele, of course, and I didn’t want trouble, so I went into the house and asked Michele to disappear for a while. “Go down to the Brentwood Mart and get some fresh flowers or something,” I suggested. “Nicole will be gone in an hour or two.”
Michele looked a little upset, but she knew it was for the best. “Okay, Mr. Simpson,” she said, barely audible. “All right. Let me just finish cleaning up the kitchen and I’ll go.”
I went outside and told Nicole that Michele was leaving for a while, and that she could relax, but she didn’t seem very relaxed. She was full of venom. “You’ve got to fire that woman!” she hissed.
And I said, “Nicole, look, if we get back together, Michele already knows that you and her—it’s not going to work out. But let’s just wait and see. We’re still a few months away from that.”
I thought that was a pretty reasonable thing to say, but it must have rubbed Nicole the wrong way. She went back into the house and returned a few minutes later, looking very worked up. “I just hit her!” she said.
“What?!”
“I hit her! I couldn’t help it. I hate her attitude!”
“What do you mean you hit her?! You can’t hit her!”
I got up from the lounge chair and walked into the kitchen and found Michele sitting there, red-faced, tears streaming down her cheeks, trying to call the cops. “I’m calling the police!” she said. “Look what she did to me! She slapped my face!”
She kept misdialing the number—411 instead of 911—so I went over and apologized for Nicole’s behavior and tried to calm her down. “I’ll take care of everything,” I said, setting the phone back in its cradle. “Please don’t call the police.”
“You can’t just hit a person and get away with it,” Michele said, still crying.
“I know, Michele. That’s what I told her. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s gotten into Nicole lately, but I’ll get it handled.”
“Well I don’t know what’s gotten into her, either, Mr. Simpson, but I can’t take it anymore.”
I went outside, pissed, and confronted Nicole. “How can you do what you just did? How could you hit that poor lady? I don’t care if you don’t like her attitude—you can’t go around hitting people!”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Nicole snapped, then got up and went over to the side of the pool and told the kids to get out. “We’re going home!” she said. Then she stormed off, with the kids still dripping wet, as if it was me who had done something wrong.
I went back and looked in on Michele again, and I apologized, again, and I told her that I was going to get everything handled right away. I then called Cathy Randa, at the office, and she got my lawyer on the phone. I walked them through what had just happened. “You should have let Michele call the police,” my lawyer said. “Nothing like an assault charge to teach a person a lesson.”
“What am I going to do about Michele?” I asked.
“Talk to her. Make sure she’s okay.”
When I got off the phone, I went back into the kitchen. Michele had pulled herself together, more or less, but she was still very upset. Before I could ask her if there was anything I could do, she turned to me and said, “Mr. Simpson, I just can’t stay here. I’m going to resign.”
We went back and forth on this a little bit, but she was pretty determined, so I told her not to worry about finances or anything—that I would take care of her until she was settled and happy at a new job. “Thank you, Mr. Simpson. I promise I won’t leave until I help you find someone to take my place.”
Within a few days, Michele introduced me to a friend of hers, Gigi, and I hired her on the spot. The very next day—this is in March, 1994—Nicole called to tell me that she thought we should all go to Cabo for a week or two. A bunch of our friends were going, including Bruce Jenner and his wife, Chrystie, and Faye Resnick and her fiancé, Christian Reichardt, and Nicole thought it would be fun. Fun? She’d just created all sorts of domestic havoc for me, and now she was talking about fun!
“I can’t go,” I said, and it was true: I was getting ready to do Frogmen, a television pilot, which was going to start shooting the following week in Malibu, and would continue shooting for several more weeks in Puerto Rico. “I’ve got the show to do.”
“That’s not till next week,” she said.
“I’m not in the mood,” I said.
“Honey. Come on. Please. Do it for the kids.”
So I went—I’m a pushover—and we had a pretty good time, to be honest. The beach, good food, good drink, jet-skis with the kids, afternoon naps in the shade, and more good food and drink at the end of the day. I had to come back that first Sunday, though, to be on location in Malibu bright and early the next morning, and I left Nicole behind with the kids and our friends.
That Thursday evening, as I was on my way home from the shoot, Nicole reached me on my cell phone. “I’m back,” she said.
“I thought you were staying the whole week,” I said.
“I missed you. And I know you’re going to be in Puerto Rico for a whole month, so I wanted to spend a little time with you before you left.”
There was something a little weird about the whole thing—Nicole was never a good liar, and when we got together that night something told me she wasn’t being completely honest with me—but I didn’t pursue it. I accepted what she told me and we had a truly terrific weekend together. She was the old Nicole again—the good one.
On Sunday morning, as I was packing for my trip, I suggested hooking up in Miami in two weeks, where one of my friends was getting married. I told her I’d fly up from Puerto Rico, and she could fly down from L.A., and we could have ourselves another perfect weekend. “Just like this last weekend,” I said.
“It really was perfect, wasn’t it?” she said, and I swear she had tears in her eyes.
“Yes,” I said. “It really was.”
When I left for the airport, I was in a terrific mood, and I remember calling Nicole’s mother from the limo. “I know I wasn’t real optimistic about this whole reconciliation thing, but it looks like I was wrong,” I said, eating my words. “Things are finally beginning to work out.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” she said. “I always had hope.”
It was a real turning point for me. After months of telling myself that our relationship was going absolutely nowhere, I felt as if we were really going to make it.
When I called Nicole from Puerto Rico the next day, however, she sounded like the other Nicole, the one I didn’t like. I don’t know if it was some kind of drug-induced mood swing or something, but the real Nicole had left the building. I can’t explain it any better than that. She just sounded like that other version of herself: Removed, irritable, miserable, venomous—and completely lost.
She was whining about getting older, and how much she hated it, how much it depressed her, and I told her to join the club. I was getting older, too, and a lot faster than she was, but I dealt with it because that was the only option. I asked her to put the kids on the phone, and chatted with them about their day, then I told them I loved them and to go to bed and to behave themselves.
The next evening, when I called to check in, she was even more venomous than the previous night: “Why are you calling me?” she snapped.
“Why am I calling you? To see what’s happening. To speak with the kids.”
“You’re checking up on me, aren’t you?”
“Why would I be checking up on you? What have I got to check up on you for?”
“I don’t want to talk to you,” she said.
“Well, I don’t want to talk to you, either!” I said. “Put the kids on the phone.”
Man, it was weird! This was not the Nicole I’d known and loved for the better part of seventeen years. This was a whole, ‘nother person. At that point, even an idiot could have told you that drugs were involved. You don’t get mood swings like that from eating Wheaties.
I called again a couple of days later, to talk about the Miami trip. Don’t ask me why, but we’d discussed it and I thought it was still happening. Maybe I was still hopeful. After all, less than a week earlier I’d called her mother to tell her that things were going great, and they had been going great—so it seemed a little strange to just give up on her.
“What about Miami?” she snapped, that edge in her voice again.
“We’ve got to figure out the flights and stuff,” I said.
“I don’t have time for this shit right now. Stop hassling me!”
“Hassling you? How the fuck am I hassling you? I’m trying to plan our trip!”
“Well, this isn’t the time for it!” she said, and she hung up.
The next morning, early, my phone rang. It was her. “Hi honey. Did you sleep well? Do you have a big day on the set?” Holy shit. What was I dealing with here?
She called again the next day to tell me that she had spoken to her mother, who had agreed to come up the following weekend to take care of the kids while we were in Miami. But at that point I was no longer interested in going to Miami with her. I felt like a goddamn yo-yo.
“What do you mean we’re not going?” she said. “Why?”
“It’s just too much of a headache,” I said. “I’m tired. It’s not worth all the flying.”
She could see I was bullshitting her, and she knew it was because I’d finally had enough of her crap. “O.J., don’t do this,” she said, whimpering. “It’s not me. It’s Faye. She’s doing drugs again, and it’s really bad this time, and she has me really worried. And Cora and Ron are having trouble. Their marriage looks like it’s falling apart.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s complicated.”
I felt bad about Ron and Cora. They were good people, and Cora was a genuinely terrific human being. I didn’t feel all that bad about Faye, though. I’d always felt that she’d been a terrible influence on Nicole, and from what I was hearing those influences were only getting worse.
“I’m really stressed out by all of this,” Nicole said. “I know I’ve been a little on edge lately, but it’s really not my fault.”
That was kind of the last straw for me. Nicole was always blaming other people for her fuck ups. When she had me, it was me. Now that she didn’t have me, it was the people closest to her. “We’re not going to Miami,” I repeated.
“Don’t do this to me, O.J. I was really looking forward to it.”
“I’m not doing anything to you. I just want to get through this shoot and come home.”
“Are you saying this isn’t working?”
Christ! What was I supposed to say to that? Wasn’t it obvious? “Well,” I said. “I’m not feeling all that optimistic. And if you honestly feel it’s working, then something is really wrong with this picture.”
I guess I was trying to be honest, and maybe I was a little too blunt about it, but maybe she needed that bluntness to get her mind around the situation.
When I got back to L.A., I knew almost immediately that it was over. The other Nicole had won. She came by the house with the kids and immediately got into another argument with Kato, calling him a “useless freeloader” and worse—right in front of the kids. It was scary. Her entire face was transformed by rage.
Later, when she was somewhat calmer, and I was trying to pull the story out of her, trying to figure out what had set her off, she told me that Kato wasn’t doing his job. He never helped with the kids anymore, he never ran errands, and he didn’t return her calls when she most needed him. “You’ve got to kick him out,” she said. I told her that she should deal with him herself—Kato was her problem, not mine—and I suggested that she should back off a little. “I think he’s actually been looking for a place to live,” I said.
She looked at me, pissed, shaking her head from side to side. “You don’t give a shit what happens to me, do you?”
“You’re wrong, Nicole. I do give a shit. But I can’t fix everything.”
Man, I’ll tell you: I was really looking forward to Mother’s Day. It was time to bail.
From that day on, I tried hard to keep my distance. The only time I saw her was when I was picking up or dropping off the kids, or on those rare occasions when she herself dropped them at Rockingham. She didn’t look good. She looked tired and strung out, and she seemed to be getting progressively worse. She seemed beaten, in fact.
When Mother’s Day finally rolled around, I can honestly tell you that I had never looked forward with so much pleasure to any Mother’s Day in my entire life. A year earlier, also on Mother’s Day, we had decided to try to save our marriage, and we had given ourselves a full year to do it. Now the year was drawing to a close.
That weekend, we drove down to Laguna—I had a house there, and the Browns lived nearby, in Dana Point. On Saturday, Nicole and I went out to dinner, and I basically told her it was over. To be honest with you, it wasn’t a big deal. She knew as well as I did that it was over, so this was really more of a formality.
“Maybe we tried to get back together too soon,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“That maybe we should have stayed apart longer. I should have worked on myself a little more before asking you to try again.”
“Well, you know, now that you mention it, that’s my one concern,” I said.
“What?”
“You. I want to make sure you’re okay.”
“I’m fine,” she said, and she changed the subject. Suddenly she was talking about Cora Fishman again, and about the complications in her marriage. “I feel kind of bad about it,” she said. “Of all the couples we know, Cora and Ron had the best marriage.” She also talked a little about Faye Resnick, who was having very serious problems of her own. She was still messing around with drugs, apparently, and her boyfriend had finally read her the riot act. “He’s really pissed,” Nicole told me. “He thinks Faye is out of control.”
“What do you think?” I asked.
“It’s not good,” she said.
When the food came, we must have looked just like every other married couple in the restaurant. We sat there eating, not saying much, and from time to time I’d reach across the table with my fork and spear something off her plate.
The next day was Sunday, Mother’s Day. We went to church with some of Nicole’s family. Denise was there with her six-year-old son, and Nicole kept dogging her. “Why is he wearing a black shirt and black pants? What kind of outfit is that for a little boy? And in church, no less.” Nicole was venomous, full of rage and anger, and I kept my distance for the rest of the day.
By nightfall, the bad mood had passed. We drove back to Los Angeles, to her place on Bundy, and I went inside and helped her put the kids to bed.
“Well,” I said, looking at her, and feeling kind of sad. “It’s over.”
“I know,” she said.
We went into her bedroom and made love. We both knew it was going to be the last time, and that this was our way of saying goodbye. It was actually very nice. We fell asleep in each other’s arms.
In the morning, before the kids were up, I slipped out of the house and went back to my place on Rockingham.
It was time to get on with my life.