“My parents taught us to be gracious and to say thank you for gifts,” Denise told Vogue. “My mother was very easygoing about that. Her attitude was that presents did not make you a kept woman. Someone pays for your apartment … If you’re happy, what difference does it make?”
It seems that they were only too willing to allow Nicole, their second daughter, to be sold into a man’s custody, they were only too happy to allow her to be kept. They seem to have designated this an acceptable life for a young woman to get herself into. And having a sense that being a man’s prize object, his Maltese falcon, his Fabergé egg, is somehow a respectable role for a real live human being, an actual woman, a living doll, is the beginning of thinking that just about anything he does to her is completely fine.
Nicole was apparently bred and buttered and baked by the sun just to be a thing of beauty, more show pony than Thoroughbred. “People said somebody wealthy and famous would nab her,” Valerie Rigg, a high school acquaintance, said of Nicole in one of those posthumous who-is-this-mysterious-dead-lady articles that appeared in The New York Times. “She just seemed bound for that. Nicole was famous to us.”
“Everybody was in awe of her,” added Jo Hanson, Nicole’s home economics teacher in high school, where Nicole, yes, was homecoming princess (if Ms. Hanson is an aging spinster with a bit of a drinking problem, the remake of Picnic is already cast). “We get a lot of beautiful students, but she was the ultimate beauty. The girls liked and admired her. The guys were in love with her.”
Evidently, in an era when it is assumed that women must pursue careers—or at least make a show of it—just as men do, Nicole was presumed exempt from a young age. She did not, after all, go to LA to take acting classes and go to auditions, nor did she have plans to model. She kind of went to meet her fate, to be discovered, to become somebody’s baby.
As bits and pieces about the Brown family emerged over the course of the trial, it became clear that the O.J. Simpson murder story—which at first appeared to be compelling because of the elements of fame, of a fading athletic career, of a well-kept Hollywood wife—was most bizarre because of the Brown family and the prosperous Southern California dream that they represented. In the first place, one couldn’t help being fascinated with the Browns simply because, though there was only a mother and four daughters, that household seemed to rage and teem with women, like a New Orleans bordello or an Old Testament desert clan or any Jane Austen novel. Beautiful women, too. Only Denise and Nicole have that Ali MacGraw arch-exotic face, in both the blonde and brunette versions, with a Vertigo-sharp resemblance between the two sisters—like twins born two years and twenty-two Clairol shades apart—that is so striking and jarring that little Sydney Simpson was said to have begged her aunt to bleach her hair to look just like her dead mom, as if Denise were Kim Novak and this was all just a Hitchcock movie. The yin-yang pairing of the two oldest Brown daughters (like a video version of the Beach Boys’ dream of “Two Girls for Every Boy”), along with the simple profusion of femininity in the family’s house of babes—the reptilian remnant of every male brain teems with the fantasy of fucking all those sisters, of rapaciously tearing through everything under the roof that wears a skirt—added a few ducats to the bride-price attached to the younger and less gorgeous girls, Dominique and Tanya. According to Faye Resnick, O.J. viewed the collective wealth of womanly charms among the Brown sisters as “the ultimate trophies”—which somehow increased Nicole’s individual worth to him.
And during the trial, when the three surviving Brown girls posed for a New Yorker spread by Annie Leibovitz in a Laguna Beach parking lot with Nicole’s Jeep Cherokee, the reverse image of that flowing femininity was writ large: instead of seeming like Sirens singing their mating song, coming out with legs spread open wide to every passerby, calling out their availability to the highest bidder, in this photograph the Browns became protective and defensive, a girl gang of three, with tough, bitter faces, expressions that said, Don’t mess with me—I’ve got sisters.
“For some observers, the Brown daughters appear as if they are at an endless summer camp,” Marie Brenner writes. “They are very attached to their mother and one another. When they travel, they are in and out of one another’s hotel rooms, staying up late into the night.”
But still, I feel certain, though these girls look hardy and hale, freckled and muscled, recovery survivors who could easily make it into Playboy’s “Girls of Hazelden” issue (if, heaven forbid, such a thing should ever be conjured up), though it looks as if these women are competent and in control of their own lives, something is obviously not quite right. David Margolick, the reporter who covered the trial for The New York Times, calls this strange feeling everybody has that the Brown girls—frankly, the mother and father too—are just a little bit off, “the Tobacco Road aspects of the story.” In the simplest terms, even before the murder, one must have noticed that there is something rather odd about a family living in a house in Dana Point in which two of their fully grown daughters—Denise and Dominique—both live at home, each with her own illegitimate child. Now, I have no problem with women choosing to be mothers without marriage, but when not one but two daughters are in that same situation and are both forced to live with their parents as a result while another daughter is being beaten by her husband about sixty miles due north, something is just not good.
It is also strange that while the Goldman family made their presence strongly felt in court day in and day out (Who can forget Kim’s wail when the verdict was announced?) and O.J.’s mother and sisters lent family support all the way through, after a while no one from the Brown family came to court at all, with the youngest sister, Tanya, being the only one to even attend intermittently. “What’s happened to the Brown family?” asked Dominick Dunne in one of his monthly, morally outraged (and not for no reason) pieces of O.J. trial reportage for Vanity Fair. “They almost never come to court anymore. Occasionally Tanya, Nicole’s youngest sister, and her fiancé, Rico, come by, but the family as a unit has not been seen for weeks in their section of reserved seats. To my way of thinking, it is a mistake for them not to come … On the other side of the aisle, the Simpson family are … constant in their attendance. You have to say this for the Simpsons, no matter how you feel about the guilt or innocence of the defendant: They’re a united family in their support of O.J., and they’re respected by everyone.”
In his novelized account of the whole O.J. business, published in November 1997 as Another City, Not My Own, Dunne expanded his indictment of the Brown family, claiming that when he confronted Juditha about her clan’s truancy, she simply shrugged, complaining that the courtroom was her “least favorite place to be.” Even the sole sister who was present for at least part of the proceedings comported herself in a way that was no credit to the Browns: “It’s unusual when an innocent victim’s family is so unsympathetic,” Dunne moans in Another City. “When Tanya, the youngest sister, who couldn’t be nicer, finally came, after a little prodding from me, she brought her fiancé, a hot number called Rico, and they necked in the courtroom, right in front of the jury … At one time, Rico had his legs spread apart like this, and Tanya, who was in a miniskirt up to here, placed one of her legs between his two legs, and Rico had his hand on Tanya’s thigh. This is not a great look for the sister of the victim, when the African-American females on the jury don’t have a very high opinion of Nicole in the first place.” Meanwhile, Denise justified her disappearance from the trial—glaring in the aftermath of her own dramatic testimony—because she was spending much of her time globetrotting on behalf of battered women’s shelters; Geraldo Rivera’s people booked her interview and speaking engagement schedule. Even Dunne, who seems genuinely fond of Denise in her girlish gutsiness and her apparent lack of guile, can’t help observing that whatever nobility may be read into her fundraising activities to benefit abused wives, her inability to undergo the sedentary inactivity of sitting through a trial on behalf of her own deceased sister “makes it look like s
he’s trying to get famous on Nicole’s death.”
As for the mother, who was born in Germany and had this European elegance thing going on that made you think she had real class—and was therefore presumably the last Brown bastion of propriety—was said to have been a confidante of O.J.’s until the end, which might explain why she felt uncomfortable going to the trial. “Judi had often taken O.J.’s side when Nicole complained,” Sheila Weller writes in a book that, I feel compelled to keep remembering, was actually told from the Brown family’s point of view, with their explicit cooperation. “[W]hen O.J. sought to win Nicole back after their divorce, Judi had told him that he was foolish to have confessed his infidelities to Nicole.” In I Want to Tell You, O.J.’s very own book—insofar as anything with pieces of paper bound between two covers can be called a book—written, as Mein Kampf was, while the accused was jailed, O.J. even takes the time to say, “In the last four years I would talk to Judy more than anybody else in the Brown family. I was so close to Judy that I talked to her more than Nicole did. Through Nicole’s mother, I tried to understand Nicole.” This sentiment, of course, sounds completely sweet, until you recall that the last four years are the operative words. They mark the time after the separation and divorce, when only a deeply manipulative control freak would seek advice from his ex-mother-in-law on how to deal with his ex-wife. This is inappropriate behavior, indicating what’s known as a boundary problem.
(By the way, you might notice that O.J. spells Judy differently from Sheila Weller; being as this is Southern California, I’m betting on Weller’s version. Also, as those who’ve seen photographs of his suicide/fugitive note might recall, O.J. also spells “privicy,” “teammatte,” “tottally,” “buddie,” “morr,” “allways,” “promblem,” “murtually,” “spaerate,” “I’v,” “futurr” and “recitly” in his own special way. Even phonetically he’s way off—“recitly” doesn’t even sound like “recently.” Now, I know this is a cheap shot, that lots of bright and capable people can’t spell, but the note was also grammatically incomprehensible and punctuated as if it were a work of modernist poetry, which it wasn’t, I don’t think. Sentences like “I wish we had spend more time together in recite years” and “Know manner what I love you” are so thoroughly subliterate that this letter ought to be used the next time they have hearings on the conflict between academics and athletics at Big Ten schools or other universities with serious spectator sports. Naturally, everyone focused on the evidentiary value of O.J.’s note—we were amused and appalled by the smiley face he made in the O of his signature, and a few people might have noticed that he spelled “battered” correctly. But, since I don’t think O.J. Simpson is stupid, this missive registered with me as, more than anything, a striking blow against American education. Nobody should be able to graduate from high school—or get through any part of college—so pathetically unable to place words intelligibly onto paper.)
There isn’t nearly enough known about the family dynamics to know exactly why the Brown sisters have this air of not having fared very well in the world, and anyway that Freudian murder mystery is never easy to solve. The simple fact that the Brown parents stayed married would seem to be reason enough for the daughters to have a better shot at mental health than many do. The only thing we know is that Juditha and Lou lived in sin before marrying, not very common back then—both Denise and Nicole were born out of wedlock because Lou’s divorce took so long to go through—but once again, no real explanation for anything. There were suggestions that Lou molested or abused the girls, but that too is only speculative. It seems silly to psychoanalyze Nicole posthumously (it’s hard enough to do when someone is alive), but suffice it to say that there is just something not quite right with these people. You know how some people give you the creeps, make you feel like they’re keeping secrets and you ought to count yourself lucky for that—well, the Browns are just such a group.
All the beauty and quasi-California quasi-European elegance of this family’s picture make it seem as if the Browns ought to invite sympathy, ought to be ones you hope and root for. But they aren’t. No matter how much I came to learn about this family over time, after a while only one thing stood out: all four daughters had breast implants, but not one had a college degree.
I once went to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Los Angeles, Hollywood to be precise, and it was there that I discovered what I call stripper feminism. It was a Sunday morning, and even inside this rec hall type of place it was ridiculously bright like it always is in LA. Amazingly, nobody smoked. There was a small desiccated man with thin bits of long hair—he looked to be about a hundred and two—whom everybody called “Cubby”; somebody told me he was Hubert Selby, Jr. There were a number of children of celebrities milling about the room, among them Rain Pryor, who, after the murder, had actually talked with reporters about a brief relationship she’d had with Ron Goldman. But mostly there were a lot of anonymous muscle shirts and generously splayed and displayed tattoos—on boys and girls—and I felt like I was stuck in a Henry Rollins monologue.
A number of young women had occasion to speak that day, either because it was an anniversary or because they were designated to give testimony about sobriety. At any rate, they all had a similar quality that I couldn’t quite isolate and identify until one of them spoke for about fifteen minutes. She began by asking God to grant her humility and to help her to tell the truth so that she wouldn’t fall prey to a tendency to embellish. And she used that word, “embellish,” which I think of as a big word, or at the very least a glossy substitute for the more common “exaggerate.” So she told her story, about her Southern California upbringing, about drinking whole jugs of her mother’s Gallo Chardonnay, about getting so gone and passing out but never waking up in Brazil or any of those exotic places drunks wake up in, about waking up in her own urine and vomit, about her boyfriend the junkie who took all her money, about how she used to make a living dancing in bars. I assume she meant stripping. There are a lot of ex-strippers in recovery. Anyway, she went on to say how she’d been sober for two years, and now she has these great women friends, and she feels so lucky. And I could tell by the fact that she said women and not girls or chicks (as I would have) that she’d picked up some AA version of feminism, or maybe it’s some bar-girl version of it, and I guess it’s been a good thing for her.
Now, here’s the truth about stripping or lap dancing or topless go-go dancing or whatever variation you want to make on that theme: I know that in recent years many “respectable” strip clubs have emerged—some, like Pure Platinum, are even small chains—and working in any of these places has been made to appear glamorous, with talk of girls who earn up to $1,000 a night. I have no idea how true those numbers are, though I have spent time talking to some of the girls who do this for a living, and they all say they’ve never taken in that much money. But I think regardless of where a woman does her stripping, any attempt to see it as “empowering” work, to pretend that men handing her money for just appearing half naked before them is a sign that she has entranced them with her beauty or her boobs or anything like that is silly. I can understand why a lot of women have stripper-for-a-night fantasies: the way Drew Barrymore did her dance at the Blue Angel in New York was probably great fun. It’s something I would like to try. I think the sexually exhibitionistic high would be a real trip.
But if it’s your life, your livelihood, it eventually must dehumanize you. The fact is that you’re really begging with your body. Every last dollar you make is on the basis of some man or group of men’s approval, it’s based on pleasing and pleasing and pleasing some more. And that’s just plain degrading.
Lots of strippers end up with drug problems, and many more just drink. There is no scientific data to support this pronouncement, but I’ve been to a lot of AA meetings and they are always full of women who say they bottomed out working as exotic dancers.
Well, I imagine Nicole could be one of these girls at the Hollywood AA meeting—that’s where she migh
t have ended up if she hadn’t married money and if she weren’t so beautiful and if she took all the wrong turns and found herself drinking to get through it all, if she found herself dancing topless at some bar on the Sunset Strip, or maybe at one of those places near LAX, if she found herself drunk and strung out all the time because she was the homecoming queen and now where had life taken her? If she found herself conscious enough just once in a while to wonder: How did life turn so ugly and wrong?
If a very different Nicole, if one she seems destined to never have been, had ever made it to recovery, she might have discovered so many things. She might have discovered the kinds of stuff I heard listening to the woman who spoke at that AA meeting, and reiterated by many of her friends who responded to her little speech. They were all pretty girls, and they were all well-spoken, and yet they all reflected on a life of partying and going to the beach and never taking themselves seriously, and never learning to take care of themselves at all. All of them seemed to have “danced in bars” on and off, or for a long stretch of time. Somehow the process of sobriety helped them learn some things that a good education, that going to school instead of beach-bumming around, might have taught them in the first place: the importance of being treated with dignity and respect, and of finding work and love and relationships of all sorts that are not shameful or degrading. They all had this reasonable brightness that was unschooled, which is certainly what the Brown girls suffer from. I wondered how these girls in AA, all intelligent enough, it seemed, to qualify for some kind of schooling in the vast state and county systems that California offers, had managed to just drift. All of them seemed to be taking courses and going back to school at last, but it seemed to me they could have avoided a lot of trouble had they just gone to college in the first place.
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