Let there be no doubt that Nicole had to be complicit in O.J.’s game or it—this relationship with a life of its own—could not have been an adolescent of age seventeen when Nicole was killed. After all, when O.J. rejected Nicole, leaving a possibility that their dynamic would be defused, she begged him to take her back. Perhaps had the murder never occurred, there might have been a few more cycles of violence and realliance, since studies do show that on average, it takes a battered woman between seven and ten failed attempts at leaving before she gets out for real. And no one seems to know whether it takes that many tries because she needs to work up the courage, or if the comings and goings are enjoyable in and of themselves.
As a low-rent cowboy-spooked version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Sam Shepard’s play Fool for Love—which as a movie starred the author and Kim Basinger—is ninety minutes of a couple acting out their emotional violence and sexual rage in an otherwise quiet bungalow colony that is sprawled out in the middle of the Mojave Desert. While they keep getting together and breaking up, the creepy, phantom presence of Harry Dean Stanton lingers in the background as if to suggest that this might all just be a bad dream or a bad drug trip—and that’s if you’re lucky. In the very first scene Eddie, the couple’s male half, announces that he’s come 2,482 miles just to see Mae—an awful long way to go just to be yelled at. Shepard very smartly wrote both the play and its screen adaptation—I think it’s probably his best work—to include all the usual lines that indicate that these two people are inextricably bound: “You know we’re connected, Mae. We’ll always be connected. That was decided years ago.” “You’ll never get rid of me. I’ll track you down everywhere you go. I know how your mind works.” “The second we saw each other, we knew we’d never stop being in love.” These lines are written in the language of genre fiction—spoken as the clichés people resort to when fighting in love, when they are too tired to argue, when it’s best to just say what’s easy, because it really doesn’t matter anyway, there is no chance that you will break up for real.
And Shepard’s all-purpose dialogue is such that the setting might be an American desert oasis, but it could just as easily take place in Ibiza or Istanbul or Ipswich: he’s provided a blueprint for conducting a sick relationship anywhere on earth. The main characteristic of these kinds of unions, which Shepard’s spareness makes clear, is that they don’t end, the adhesive at the heart of this heart-bond clings and sticks like bubble-gum in a knot of hair. At the end of Fool for Love, when the whole pathetic arrangement of cabins goes up in flames, the couple gets into a car and takes off together, understanding down deep and deep down that we belong together, like the refrain in a Rickie Lee Jones song.
And almost every group of friends has at least one problem couple in its midst at one time or another—usually in youth, when one has the energy for such psychodramas; by middle age, the ones who are still alive have grown bored with being driven crazy, and find they much prefer to just be bored. Usually physical brutality is not the issue. Maybe it’s loud public fights, throwing wineglasses, smashing plates, spending an entire dinner party locked in the host’s only bathroom caught in a screaming match that won’t end, dragging near-strangers into their melee, as in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or, if you think about it, like Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, who seem to mop the floor with the people they pull through their mess. These couples end up driving everyone around them crazy, there is the tedious back-and-forth, you’ve spent hours talking it through, helping her find the strength to gather her belongings in some big shopping bags and just bail—and then next time you talk (maybe an hour later), they’re getting married, and you feel, ridiculously enough, kind of gypped, because you have become a co-dependent accessory to their situation, and it’s taking up your life and time and you start to want to see results. No longer do you want to be helpful: you want to get progress reports that you can live with.
“This is the part that breaks my heart,” Cici Shahian, one of Nicole’s best friends, told Sheila Weller, referring to the way friends aided and abetted in the reconciliation with Mr. Simpson. Cici occupies an odd position in Nicole’s clique of girlfriends, as cousin of O.J. intimate Robert Kardashian (who apparently stopped speaking to O.J. after the criminal trial, and was thought to have been a snitch for Lawrence Schiller’s account of the case, An American Tragedy), and probably the only one of these chicks who is single, and certainly the only one who holds a regular job (working at Dove Books, the notoriously cheap, reputedly sleazy-slimy Beverly Hills publisher of tabloid books like You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again and Faye Resnick’s two memoirs). Cici, who seems to manage to live alone without too much trouble, still thought Nicole might be better off back in the mingle of marriage. “We thought that, for all the good reasons—the kids, the family, the relatives, the beach, the birthdays, the holidays: for all the things she loved … we encouraged her,” Ms. Shahian explains. “We encouraged her to go back. Nobody wants to be lonely.”
These friends, like Nicole herself, probably hoped things would get better. Certainly they could not maintain the high pitch for very much longer. Usually marriages that involve rage and infidelity and the use of household appliances and Tiffany lamps as instruments of mass destruction must necessarily burn themselves out. “It is a situation many young married couples find themselves in—one that perhaps more couples find themselves in than don’t—but it is a situation that ordinarily doesn’t last: the couple either reconnects or dissolves,” writes Janet Malcolm in The Silent Woman, in reference to a marriage brought to crisis and damage by the serpentine intrusion of adultery. “Life goes on. The pain and bitterness and exciting awfulness of sexual jealousy and sexual guilt recede and disappear. People grow older. They forgive themselves and each other, and may even come to realize that what they are forgiving themselves and each other for is youth.” The particular marriage whose course Malcolm was charting was the Plath-Hughes debacle, which ended, like the Brown-Simpson mess, not in a state of grace, not with acceptance of wrongs made right, not with deliverance from sorrow and sin, but with death. These women will remain, in Malcolm’s words, “forever fixed in the mess … never reaching the age when the tumults of young adulthood can be looked upon with rueful sympathy and without anger and vengefulness.” As brilliant as Sylvia Plath was and as vapid as Nicole Brown appears to have been, they are alike in that they both died emotionally intestate, guilt and blame and anger and resentment never properly willed or willed away. The last tense discussion is left at a stalemate, a confusion of feelings are stopped short, bottlenecked. Ted Hughes probably has been permanently spent, sapped of some vitality, walking around with the weight of Sylvia’s suicide in 1963, which was followed, in 1969, by the suicide of his inamorata Assia Wevill, the adulteress whom Plath blamed for her marriage’s decline—the new and improved replacement model who not only mimicked her predecessor by asphyxiating herself in an oven, but outdid her by gassing her two-year-old daughter to death at the same time.
And even without the added encumbrance of mental illness or poetic genius or delicate artistic temperament, Prince Charles is stuck in some moment of rift without rapprochement that he needs to live with always, with regard to Princess Diana. He will always feel there’s some conversation they never had, or maybe just some lighthearted moments, when she is married to some international financier and he is married to Camilla, and they are all in attendance at William’s or Harry’s nuptials, and they can smile at each other and think: It was worth it after all. They will never have that.
And, of course, O.J. will never have that with Nicole. But he needn’t feel bad. That relationship ran its course, all its possible permutations, and came to its one singular conclusion, fairly nailing down the cycle of pleasure and pain in a relationship predicated on deceit and abuse, in a partnership where the players have come to love the headache because of the relief they feel when the aspirin kicks in. So people who claim they would love the relationship they
are in if only the fighting and bickering, the cheating and lying, the punches and kicks—all the pain—would just go away, if only we could begin at the beginning before it got bad, and this time we’ll take a different fork in the road: all the people who want to subtract the main ingredient from something that’s been cooking into its current state for months or years are just kidding themselves, failing to see how integral to the moments of joy are the hours and days of agony.
People tend to make the mistake of believing that relationships are pure personality, that left to the abstract arena of just two people who love each other, that in a world where the world disappears, all would be fine, romance would thrive like wildfire in California. People tend also to think that it is circumstances that get in the way of love, that the names Montague and Capulet killed Romeo and Juliet, that World War II separated Rick and Ilsa when she wore blue and the Germans wore gray. They even believe that paparazzi and drunk-driving killed Dodi and Diana, they believe that had the couple lived they’d be planning a wedding and moving into a house in the suburbs of Paris. But people are wrong, failing to see that everyone functions within his circumstances, that being a partisan or a princess is not a mere accident, and even if it is, it is part of you: to be born on a farm in Iowa or to a physics professor at MIT is as integral to who you are as blue eyes or a tendency to go bald in your late thirties. The fantasy of escape from external atmosphere—Let’s run away forever! Let’s go to Tahiti like Gauguin and live like savages! Let’s hide under the big bright sun in Baja!—may just work out once in a while, at least for as long as the relationship remains mutually obsessive (time passes ve-e-e-e-ry slowly when you are far from civilization, in a world without clocks). But most people are stuck in the workaday world.
So let’s get to the truth here: Romeo and Juliet died because histrionics and teenage love made them crazy, crazy enough to think there is nothing in a name. Rick sent Ilsa off into heroism, appearing to sacrifice his love for her to the greater causes that depended on preserving her marriage, for no better reason than that he was a commitment-phobe, plain and simple. He couldn’t deal with the permanent presence of the woman he was smitten by, he couldn’t deal with what next? For Rick, self-marooned in Morocco, it was easier to talk about a hill of beans and walk into the sunset with Claude Rains than to grapple further with love that is future, with life that goes beyond the present. And Diana died because it was as inevitable as London rain, because if you are British royalty there will, somehow, always be an ugly end if you choose to consort with a presumably overbearing, certainly nouveau riche rogue of ill-repute, a man whose machismo probably made him shout at the driver, “Faster! Lose them!” at the sight of some motorbikes and cameras. It happened because Dodi was trying to impress the princess with his imperiousness, with his power and her resulting safety, and he did this even though he knew no one has ever died of being photographed, not even the Amish—but plenty have been lost to car crashes.
But no matter what, all of these star-crossed lovers functioned in an atmosphere made to match their personalities, so that the family feud heightened the romance for Shakespeare’s adolescents, the need to choose duty to the cause over a chance at true love kind of makes the sand blowing in your face and the sound of airplanes at the end of Casablanca feel infinitely more satisfying than any relationship that would have followed.
I hope I am not the only one who appreciated the way The English Patient, when adapted for film in the grand manner of an old-fashioned epic, functioned as a corrective to the Casablanca code, with its pretense of public duty before private desire, particularly when it’s convenient, when it lets Bogey look at a girl and say, “We’ll always have Paris,” when it also lets him imply that we’ll never have children, we’ll never have in-laws, we’ll never have fights about money, we’ll never have to choose between tartar-control and peroxide toothpaste—and best of all, we will be able to say that it was good for the Jews. In The English Patient, however, Ralph Fiennes in the title role is a Hungarian count who experiences himself as a citizen of the world, his greatest loyalty is to air flight and the desert sand. Love, for him, for this weightless and careless man, is an ennobling and humbling experience, and he falls like a plane crash for a married British woman. By the end of the movie—which chooses human beings over international events—he willingly surrenders his maps to the Germans in exchange for transport to his ailing mistress, who lies dying in a desert cave.
Now, it’s not like he happily helps the Nazis: a series of events, lost passports, misplaced papers, British soldiers who want to imprison him for his indeterminate nationality—it is only in the confusion and mess of war that the possibility that love can thrive, even if it is only between two people, starts to seem more significant than ever. Here, the message seems to be, is a man who knows to choose love over politics. “It’s as if the Ralph Fiennes character were saying, ‘I guess the outcome of the war against Hitler doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world compared to the problems of two little people,’ ” Rick Hertzberg complained in The New Yorker, sometime after the film received the Oscar for Best Picture. Now, I don’t know if the fact that my reaction to the movie was diametrically opposed to Mr. Hertzberg’s indicates a difference between men and women or just a difference in sensibility between me and him, but it seems to me that the reason wars have been fought is to make the world safe for love, safe for pursuit of happiness. It’s not that the problems of two people matter more than Hitler, but rather that it is so unlikely that two little people will make a difference anyway, the purest protest against the Nazi hatred is to choose the personal, to refuse to let your heart be a pawn of the political.
Of course, the solution to this conundrum of male violence and female vulnerability, and one that has worked perfectly well for most people, is what’s known as civilization. Whatever behaviors may have been acceptable among the Cro-Magnon men, in the world we live in it is not okay for a man to get woundingly violent with a woman. What keeps the urge in check—on those occasions when, as it is put in many a blues standard, a man has a right mind to shoot his woman down—is that most Protestant of virtues, otherwise known as self-control. In fact, this inner consciousness of the limits on physical force that a man might use against his wife or girlfriend is so inbred and instinctual at this point that most guys don’t even want to beat the women they love. They don’t even much care to beat up the men they hate. In fact, most likely they don’t want to do anything more at the end of a hard working day than grab a beer from the fridge and park themselves on the sofa in front of the television set.
And there lies the perversity in this whole discussion: it is, finally, irrelevant. While the O.J. Simpson trial was the most outsize celebrity event involving spousal battery (or anything else, for that matter), many smaller-scale incidents have received intense and temporary media scrutiny before disappearing into the black hole of tabloid-TV archives; and each of these situations—because they involve taboo violence, the battle of the sexes and issues of power and control that all of us struggle with on some level—come to seem, for their moment, like Everyrelationship, like the center of the universe.
It was not so long ago that Robin Givens and Mike Tyson felt compelled to sit for an interview with Barbara Walters—in the equanimity of their Bernardsville, New Jersey, home, as if sitting in their drawing room for a society artist’s portrait in oils—the small and delicate Head of the Class starlet complaining for all the world to know that she was afraid of her husband, she feared for her life, he drove her BMW into a tree, and what’s next? At the time, The Star and The Enquirer had anointed Ms. Givens as Delilah-of-the-week, and as she began to speak in a shriekish tone, she only enhanced her shrewish reputation. In the meantime Iron Mike sat there impassive the whole time, glassy-eyed and dopey-faced, a big bear injected with some industrial-strength sedative. Between rape and jail and ear-biting in the ring, few people can remember Robin Givens as Tyson’s wife—few people can remember Robin G
ivens at all. Nor does it seem as anything more than a mirage or a mistake that at one time Sean Penn was married to Madonna, at one time they thought it wise to make a movie together, at one time they ended up in Shanghai Surprise. Once it ended—as it had to, this was not exactly a Paul Newman-Joanne Woodward matchup—People’s cover story for the week of 14 December 1987 was headlined “Diary of a Mad Marriage,” and chronicled the “jealousy, booze and brawling” that precipitated the demise of Sean and Madonna’s brief union. Other, less respectable publications catalogued the various ways Sean was supposed to have abused Madonna, hints at handcuffs and ropes abounded beside images of sexual sadism and intimations of real rape (which, in fantasy free form, Madonna later seems to have reenacted in the book Sex).
Axl Rose and Stephanie Seymour could not have looked more in love than they did when caught in a smiling embrace on the cover of the May 1992 Interview magazine—with additional lovey-dovey Bruce Weber shots of lots of tongue-twisting kissing inside. But in due time both Ms. Seymour—the Victoria’s Secret model who appeared as the bride who dies on her wedding night in the video for Guns n’ Roses’ “November Rain”—and Rose’s former wife, Erin Everly, made allegations about getting badly beaten by Axl—and this too became a People cover, under the rubric “Battered Beauties.” With unusually bad timing for a sometime professional boxer, Mickey Rourke, playing the pugilist at rest, was accused of slapping, knocking over and then kicking his model wife Carré Otis just a little over a month after O.J. killed Nicole. In the you-never-can-tell category of wife-beaters was David Soul, the blonde half of Starsky and Hutch, who, as the John Tesh of his day, sang “Don’t Give Up on Us Baby”—a quintessentially seventies hit of the sentimental, rainbow-decal-on-faded-blue-jeans variety, an accidental and embarrassing mood that has been deliberately recast in the nineties as Lite FM. Mr. Soul (apologies to Neil Young) was exposed as physically abusive in October 1982, while he assumed the Humphrey Bogart role in an NBC miniseries version of Casablanca. (I’m not making this up.) After a drunk Soul returned from the set late one night, he announced his arrival at his Bel Air home by cursing and striking at his third wife, Patti (there has since been a fourth). She called the police, who charged the actor with misdemeanor battery. Patti alleged that, in his alcoholic rages, Soul’s violence had resulted in broken bones in her hand and finger, and his cruelty had included sitting on her stomach for twenty minutes while she was seven months pregnant, haranguing her about her assorted flaws.
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