The irony did not escape me. Suppose I’d stuck to acting. About now I’d be an aging bit player, who would have given up what was left of her virtue to be invited to a party like this. But here I was. And Kirk Douglas was angling to meet me! I felt like I’d been dropped onto another planet. There was David Geffen on my left, Kirk D. on my right, Ron Meyer on one end of the table, and Betsy Bloomingdale on the other.
The best part of it was that someone, probably Suzanne, had spread the word that the Case was off-limits for cocktail chat. An O.J.-free zone! Everyone was very cool about it. I’ve discovered since that the one advantage of mingling with the glitterati is that they’ve all had to wage their own battles against tabloid headlines. They observe a sort of gentlemen’s agreement with respect to one another’s privacy.
Ray Stark made sure I was introduced to Alan Greisman, who, I learned, had been head of Savoy Pictures and was the former husband of Sally Field. He was also handsome, and apparently available. He asked me out, which probably took some guts considering all this bullshit mystique that now surrounded me. Now, I still thought I could date like any other soon-to-be-divorced mother of two. Obviously clueless. The following item appeared a few weeks down the line in a New York tabloid:
Transformed by her new hair-do, Marcia Clark at 41 has finally emerged outside the O.J. courtroom as a veritable siren, and with her new softer, prettier looks, the prosecutor in the Trial of the Century has even managed to find romance amid her grinding schedule.
According to sources, Clark has recently linked up with actress Sally Field’s ex-hubby, Alan Greisman, through mutual friends… “They have been lovey-dovey all over Los Angeles,” says a source. “I don’t think they even attempt to keep their relationship a secret; they are dining out most nights.”
In fact, Alan and I had only one date. I met him for dinner at a little Italian place in Beverly Hills. We talked for most of the evening about divorce. And by the dessert course I knew that nothing could come of it. Alan was intelligent and charming, but he ran with a flashier crowd than I thought I could handle, at least with the Simpson case on my hands. We parted amiably, without having managed to see any part of Los Angeles together beyond the inside of a restaurant.
I made a couple of other stabs at dating. A friend of a friend introduced me to a single guy she knew. He turned out to know Fred Goldman, but he seemed to enjoy no other claim to fame. Hmmm, I’m thinking. This one’s a good bet, not a fast-laner, not wired to the media. I think I saw him twice; it was barely a friendship. But then one of the tabs found out that we knew each other and asked him if there was a romantic relationship there. He didn’t confirm it; but he didn’t deny it, which seemed dishonest to me.
After that I pulled in my antennae. I was safer with my own kind. From November until the verdict came in twelve months later, I limited my social life to late nights with my co-workers.
CAR TAPE. November 17. I don’t feel like I ever get more than four hours’ sleep, constantly fighting this cough and this cold. I have not a minute to myself. If I’m not working, I’m with the kids. If I’m not with the kids, I’m working…
I don’t really feel very good about our chances in this case, I just don’t think we can get the jury to get over their emotional response to seeing their hero being taken down for this, and the evidence is so compelling. I don’t feel like it’s gonna matter. I feel like I’m going to be standing up there talking to myself, you know?…
But Chris Darden, boy. I pat myself on the back all day long for putting him on the case. What a gem. What a gem! The guy is smart, resourceful, creative, got lots of energy-because he hasn’t been beat up like we have all this time. I’ll give him a little time in front of this twelve-headed monster, and he’ll get tired and beat up too. But he’s wonderful…
Thank God for Chris Darden.
As far as the public and the press knew, Chris Darden joined the team in early November. In fact, he’d been working with us behind the scenes for more than three months.
As I look back on it, I find it amazing that I didn’t think of Chris when I was first drawing up that short list of D.A.s to partner with. He hadn’t even occurred to me. That’s because you tend to think of the people right under your nose. Chris was down on the seventeenth floor in SID.
Eight years earlier, he and I had worked together in calendar court. We had a lot in common. Like me, he was a hard charger, ambitious, tenacious. Back then, after work, Chris and I and a handful of other deputies would all take out the bottles from our respective desk drawers, down a couple of shots, and swap war stories into the night. Then we’d be up early the next morning, ready to charge all over again. During the years since calendar court, Chris and I had gone our separate ways: I to Special Trials; he to the SID, where he handled complaints against cops. We’d see each other from time to time in the courthouse and we’d laugh and joke and talk about the old days.
One summer morning soon after the preliminary hearings, he stuck his head into my office unannounced.
“Hey, Clark,” he hailed me. “Any time for the working class?”
It took me a minute to focus. Cool shaved head. Malcolm X fuzz.
“Chris! C’mon in, man!”
He seemed relieved that I’d recognized him. By the time he took the chair he was having trouble making eye contact. Chris always did have trouble making eye contact. Not just with me, but with judges and juries. Down deep, he is a very shy guy.
Chris gave a detailed account of our reunion in his excellent memoir, In Contempt. He recalled me in a dense cloud of my own cigarette smoke, at a desk fit for a CEO. “She leaned back in her huge brown leather executive chair with the diamond tuck in the back, a chair twice her size, clearly not standard county-issue.”
When I read this, I nearly doubled over laughing. You’d think he was talking about some spike-heeled dame from a film noir. That “brown leather executive chair,” as a matter of fact, was just a ratty old armchair that I’d found some years earlier sitting in a hallway. Some departing Grade 3 had apparently discarded it. It was huge. It was so huge, in fact, that I could actually curl up in it and catch a few winks. Unfortunately, it was infested with termites, and every time I shifted my weight, it emitted a cloud of sawdust-which probably accounts for the haze Chris saw hanging over me that morning in July.
Finally he looked at me.
“I thought you should know the L.A. Times has filed a public records request on Fuhrman.” He slid a file across my desk.
The case was old, 1987. It involved a robbery suspect named Joseph Britton who was fleeing an automated teller machine when he was shot by a couple of police officers. One of them was Mark Fuhrman. Britton sued the city, claiming that one of the two officers had called him a “nigger” and then planted evidence on him.
The problems with Fuhrman just kept on coming. I’d gotten the documents from that disability case Mark had filed against the city in August 1983. It appeared to me that he’d put on quite a show for his psychiatrists. He’d claimed to be suffering from stress growing out of his service in Vietnam (though he hadn’t seen any action), as well as his years going head-to-head with gang bangers. All of this, it appeared, was exacerbated by the strains of his divorce. Yet his job ratings were generally high. No way, I thought, was any judge going to let a cop’s psychiatric reports into the record. But we’d surely have to litigate it. I knew the defense would pull out all the stops trying to get them in.