Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  I kept thinking that this was a strangely indifferent way to talk about one’s dead kid sister. Especially since the appearance of opportunism is best reserved for Kato Kaelin, not Nicole’s siblings. Though Denise’s chosen conduit for public life is a charitable foundation, that does not mean that the impulse is not self-serving and self-aggrandizing. Particularly because Denise had not been doing much with her life before the murders occurred—she had even been on welfare for a time, had even been in the Huntington Beach city jail for eight days with a blood-alcohol level so high it’s known as “horizontal nystagmus”—and had now chosen a cause to get involved in that she obviously knew very little about: so little, in fact, that she was unable to be at all helpful to her younger sister, unable to even see that Nicole was a battered wife. Although it was Denise herself who took the muddy-bright mug-shot-like photographs of a swollen, bruised Nicole—pictures that documented the New Year’s Eve 1989 beating and were later found in her safe-deposit box—Denise still denied her sister’s victimization by her ex-husband, even after her death. “She was not a battered woman,” Denise insisted to The New York Times just ten days after the murders. “My definition of a battered woman is somebody who gets beat up all the time. I don’t want people to think it was like that. I know Nicole. She was a very strong-willed person. If she was beaten up, she wouldn’t have stayed with him.”

  Considering this grievous ignorance, it pretty much made me sick to see Denise acting as spokesperson for a cause that she failed to make herself aware of when she could have still made a difference for her own sister. In fact, in the face of such a terrible loss, it seems that quiet shame and contemplative guilt would be the correct response. I mean, I’m glad that Denise can put a whistle around her neck and yell slogans into a bullhorn and become head counselor of Camp Survive-Alive, but that’s the fun part, that’s the ego ride. Showing up and showing support to the people you love and helping out with the real emotional dirty work is the challenge. It’s not so much that Denise failed boot camp—it’s more like she never even bothered.

  Thankfully, on Rivera Live the night of the acquittal, Denise was blocked off from reciting any agitprop when Geraldo asked her father what would happen if O.J. wanted to take custody of Sydney and Justin, the two achingly beautiful children of O.J. and Nicole’s unfortunate union. Lou Brown said he wasn’t much concerned with that. “O.J.’s been in prison for sixteen months,” he said. “I’m sure he has a lot of wild oats to sow, a lot of women to chase after, so I don’t think he’ll be wanting the children all the time.”

  A lot of wild oats to sow.

  That’s where I lost it: A lot of wild oats to sow. Excuse me?

  Is this how you talk about the man you believe killed your daughter and who, at the very least, you know beat her up repeatedly? Do you describe him as a harmless, randy teenager running on a testosterone high? Do you not show a bit more distance and disgust when talking about him on national television? Or has the trial and all its overattentions made these people crazy, Denise trying to invoke Nicole’s name for a cause, which ultimately gives Denise’s life a cause to latch on to, while her father speaks of O.J. as if he’s some regular guy?

  Is this perhaps some form of post-traumatic stress, or are these people, as I have come to believe, more than a little bit strange?

  To be completely fair, in judging the Browns or any other people who have undergone a public ordeal whose glamour quotient is at best recherché and at worst schlocky, the rest of us have to bear in mind that for even those most closely involved in the spectacle, in the Greek drama’s katharsis, life is daily. The quotidian facts of everyday routine must eventually sink in, even to those mourning the dead, and after a while, I suppose, O.J. becomes the son-in-law who set you up in business with the Hertz concession at the Ritz-Carlton and gave you a really nice Rolex watch all those years ago, and a dead sister starts to seem like the totem of domestic violence that she has become to other people, and in that lies a career opportunity, a life opportunity, even a cause opportunity.

  Perhaps I sound like I’m being a bit sarcastic as I give the Browns an out, a reason for their tacky behavior while talking to Geraldo. But I’m not. I truly do believe that at the end of the day, if you remove the bloody glove and the Bruno Magli shoes—or if, say, you displace the grassy knoll and the Texas Book Depository—and if you erase any other props or scenery that have become cultural metaphors, that just scream out somebody died tragically!, you are left with human beings who feel tragically. And they will do strange things: she will visit her husband’s killer on death row and lobby for his pardon, or he will move far away, to Micronesia or Tanzania, anywhere that there is no sign that the departed ever was. Or they may start a foundation, open an office, roll up their sleeves and get to work. Really, there’s nothing wrong with that. I believe that if life gives you lemons, make lemonade, and if you run into a brick wall, sell bricks, and all that Forrest Gump stuff.

  But for Christ sake, fucking get it together for a half hour on television with Geraldo Rivera! For goddamn less time than it took O.J. to kill the two victims, behave with a modicum of dignity!

  Is that too much to ask?

  It really isn’t, and this inability on the part of her father and sister to project some proper degree of sorrow for the public helps illuminate what Nicole must have been up against when she was still alive. Because if these people, her first-degree relatives, cannot give her a dignified presentation on Rivera Live just a little over a year after her death, it is easy to believe that they must have been very inaccessible to Nicole in her life. Of course, all of this, the family’s relative supportiveness or lack thereof, is impossible for an outsider to assess, and may be even more of a mystery to the people involved.

  But the Browns just don’t present well. The obvious thing for both press and public to do is sympathize with the mourners, but there is something so trashy and uncomfortable and itchy about the family that Marie Brenner, writing in Vogue in May 1995, was prompted to summarize: “Reporters who cover trials often say of witnesses that you have to take them as you find them; the same rule applies to the families of murder victims.” Randall Sullivan, a far less generous observer, covered O.J. for Rolling Stone and was more willing to flesh out—or tease out, as the case seems to be—Brown family values as exercised in a court of law. “During O.J.’s preliminary hearing, the Brown women threw up a wall of luxuriant manes, square shoulders and trim waists against the reporters who sat behind them,” Sullivan writes, his disgust, I think, more sincere than snide. “Mother and daughters groomed one another continuously, fluffing hair and smoothing eyebrows. The Brown sisters made jokes about getting fat by sitting on their butts in court all day, wondered who had fed the fish that morning and compared prices on diamond watches. Lou Brown appeared to carry nearly all of his family’s emotional burden, suffering visibly …” This, of course, would be the same Lou Brown of the wild oats remark. Well, whatever. It isn’t really fair to judge a family by a couple of journalists’ courtroom notes because reporters have their own agendas, they have their own butts to sit on, they have no one to buy them diamond watches, they probably don’t have much hair, and who knows how you’d behave listening to tedious testimony in a big stuffy room, and what’s so great about decorum anyway?

  I’d like to give the Browns the benefit of every doubt, frankly because they seem like a very close-knit family, taking great pains not only to spend holidays together, but even for aunts and grandparents to schlepp up to Brentwood from Orange County for Sydney’s dance recital, on what turned out to be the day of Nicole’s death. The daughters vacationed together, and appear to have been genuinely close, sororal. Raging Heart: The Intimate Story of the Tragic Marriage of O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson, was authorized by the Brown family and written by Sheila Weller, a journalist whose previous scandalography filed on hard deadline had been Amy Fisher: My Story. (She has since written a book about Darien date-rapist Alex Kelly.) Because the family cooperate
d, Weller’s book includes many photographs of all the sisters and children and various cousins and extended-family members from the Brown and Simpson clans gathered together for Thanksgiving, or celebrating Christmas in the Simpsons’ New York City apartment, or New Year’s Eve in a hired Cabo San Lucas villa. Even during the criminal trial, Juditha Brown walked over to O.J.’s mother to show her pictures of Justin and Sydney from a recent birthday party, lest the mother be punished for the sins of the son. Far from seeming decadent, indifferent or just plain old bad, the Browns appear to be good family-oriented folk from solidly Republican Orange County.

  But still, there seems to be a missing link or some studied indifference going on here.

  Somehow after insisting that Nicole was not a battered wife, Denise was still later able to testify in court about how O.J. would call Nicole a “big fat pig” when she was pregnant, and how a pleasant evening on the town was spoiled when “he grabbed Nicole, told her to get out of his house, picked her up, threw her against the wall, picked her up, threw her out of the house.” Denise also uttered one of the trial’s more grizzly sound bites when she recalled, “At one point, O.J. grabbed at Nicole’s crotch and said, ‘This is where babies come from and this belongs to me.’ ” When Denise gave this testimony, she sat weeping on the witness stand, clearly distressed. But it does seem odd that only a few months before she could confidently tell The New York Times that her sister was not a battered wife. It also seems strange that Robert Shapiro, O.J.’s original lead attorney, told reporters that Juditha Brown said to him at her daughter’s graveside, “Please take good care of [O.J.]. The children need their father.” This despite the fact that he was, by then, the prime suspect. It is easy enough to drum this up to a misquote or a lie taken out of context in the press, or to Denise’s more careful consideration of events over time, or to guilt and helplessness. But I’m afraid that too much just points to the fact that the Browns were at least passively in cahoots with O.J. all along. They seem to have been aware of his violent temper and tendency to tantrums, if not his outright abusive behavior.

  “Nicole never told us she was battered,” Denise told Vogue. “She would say, ‘He threw me against the wine cabinet, and then we went out to lunch.’ ”

  Juditha told Sheila Weller about a time when, shortly after Nicole had moved into O.J.’s Rockingham estate, mother and daughter had returned from dinner at a hangout called the Daisy—which seems to function as the Rick’s Café Américain of this sad saga—just a little too late for O.J.’s liking, with the immediate result involving an overwrought O.J. throwing Nicole’s heirloom desk out the front door while reprimanding her tardiness. In response, all Judi Brown could do was laugh and leave. The next day, she called Nicole to ask if the desk had been moved back in.

  Judi would also witness several occasions where O.J. got mad at Nicole and threw all her clothing out the window, or tore several family photographs that lined the staircase off of the walls and smashed them on the floor. “Every time they had a fight,” Mrs. Brown told Weller, “he cracked those pictures and threw them down. Nicole had to keep reframing them and reglassing them. I asked Nicole, ‘Why do you even bother to put them up? Why don’t you just keep them down?’ But she had a hard head. She said, ‘No way! Those pictures are going back up!’ She put them back up again and again.”

  Over the years there were fights that were as serious as one in which O.J. beat Nicole, locked her in his estate’s unlit wine cellar while he watched a football game, after which he beat her some more, locked her up again, resumed his television viewing (anyone who has ever lived with a football fan knows that during the season, a given Sunday can involve four games in three different time zones that are all very important), came back to beat her and lock her up again, until, I guess it was too dark for any more football even in Pacific time. There were other incidents that were mentioned a great deal outside the courtroom during the trial, though never admitted as evidence, like the time in 1980 that O.J. locked Nicole out of their Las Vegas hotel room wearing just a bra, or the New Year’s Eve 1989 incident—which did make it to court—that involved a much-replayed 911 call to the police with descriptions of Nicole, once again, cowering for defense, wearing just a bra and, in this case at least, sweatpants.

  Even after this 1989 beating, for which O.J. pleaded nolo contendere to charges of battery, Nicole’s family, who could no longer have possibly found the scenes of flying photographs and dumped desks to be merely amusing bits of domestic drama, encouraged her to stay in the marriage. After Nicole showed her father the pictures Denise had taken of the wounds and bruises she’d sustained, he was still nonplused. “My parents did not take up for me,” Ms. Weller reports Nicole confiding to several friends. “They blew it off. They wanted me to stay with O.J.”

  All of this abuse seems to have been shrugged off as just so much of the usual nonsense between O.J. and Nicole. The Browns were quite fond of O.J., he had charmed them with his personality, his gifts, his help with tuition, his beneficence in setting up Judi as a travel agent and Lou as a rent-a-car man, his kindness in employing various German émigré cousins in assorted capacities, and with his ingratiating generosity in general. With so much goodwill between O.J. and in-laws, the family naturally urged Nicole to just work it out. “O.J. quickly turned himself into a favorite son, setting Lou up in his Hertz dealership and helping Juditha and other family members in various enterprises,” Faye Resnick, a best friend of Nicole’s, explains in her best-selling tell-all as-told-to, Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted. By, in effect, punishing the Browns with kindness, O.J. skillfully kept the whole caravansary in his control. “We used to be very close,” Ms. Resnick claims Nicole said of her relationship with her sisters and parents sometime after her divorce. “But when I left O.J., they weren’t at all supportive. They absolutely wanted me to stay with O.J. It’s just like everything else, Faye. O.J. always controls everyone and everything around him.” Toward the end of her life, Nicole sought counseling from Dr. Susan Forward, co-author of Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them, and in the few sessions she managed to get to, she made it clear she felt dangerously isolated. “Nicole’s terror—her fear of this big man—was so pervasive,” Dr. Forward told Sheila Weller. “She said, ‘I am so alone. Where do I go? The police won’t help me. My family’s not supportive. They wanted me to “work it out” with him—and they’re my only support system.’ ”

  You have to understand, I don’t expect parents to drag a grown woman out of her marriage unless she herself is ready and willing, which is what any battered woman must be before she is able to leave. But they let her be swept away by O.J. Simpson when she was still a teenager, at a point when my mother was still very able to voice her objections to whatever I did (dear God, she still is) and I could be dragged home, or shamed into abandoning my ridiculous course. In fact, one of the abiding mysteries in this story is what would have happened to Nicole had she never met O.J. It all seems so hard to figure: This was an upper-middle-class girl who was bright enough to be in an honors track at Rancho Alamitos High School; why, at age eighteen, was Nicole Brown not in college like most girls with her socioeconomic background? This was 1977, well beyond an era when girls waited at home for their suitors to show up—in fact, even in the fifties women went to college to look for men, and while an education was a mere perk of the more necessary marital pursuit, it happened just the same. While Nicole expressed some interest in studying photography, the possibility of art school or some other form of higher education—despite California’s sprawling and variegated system of state and local colleges—does not even seem to have come up. It does not even seem to have been raised as a possibility to be rejected. After graduation, Nicole moved in with a friend in Los Angeles, took a job waitressing at the Daisy and just kind of bided her time. Although Denise managed to get as far as New York, where she became a Ford model for a period, she found the rigors of the job too taxing, and ended up back in California.
Nicole never even got as far as that. Meeting O.J. Simpson at the Daisy was her destiny.

  With O.J. on the scene, it would seem that any good parent would try to get Nicole to go back to school, to at least take some courses, to do anything rather than become beholden to some flashy football player. Probably the daughter in any situation like that would rebel and complain and claim to be misunderstood and tell her parents that they don’t know what love is. Still, most parents would try to do something. But the Browns never did, never even seemed to have batted an eyelash when at the age of eighteen she told them a much older (and still married) man she had recently started seeing was paying for her apartment in Los Angeles, putting her up so he could see her alone, so that her roommate would not be around when he wanted to be with her. Nor did they seem alarmed when they found a Porsche 914 in their driveway, left as a present for Nicole, who was spending her nineteenth birthday at home; they were never concerned about the implications of such a generous gift, even though Nicole would later say that it was to compensate for a black eye from O.J., a much less desirable present.