Later in the evening, my entourage and I took off for another club, and I guess Nicole was gone by then, because I didn’t see her. About an hour later, when I left the second club, alone, I found myself thinking about her, and missing her a little. And on the drive home I decided to stop by her house, the one on Gretna Green, to see if she was still awake. I parked on the street and approached the front door, and as I drew close I noticed lights in the window and went to have a closer look. Nicole was inside, on the couch, with a friend of hers, Keith Zlomsowitch, one of the partners at Mezzaluna, a Brentwood restaurant. It was pretty hot and heavy. I took a deep breath and turned to go, but paused to knock on the front door—I rapped on it twice, hard—just to let them know that they’d been seen.
I went home and got into bed, alone, and I must tell you—I was pretty steamed. I think maybe it was just beginning to dawn on me that the marriage was over, and I wasn’t real happy about it.
The next morning, I went off to play golf, and I forgot all my woes, but on my way home I called her and told her that we needed to talk. I stopped by the house and she invited me in, and right away I let her know that it was me who’d rapped on her front door the previous night. “What you do is your business, but the kids were in the house,” I said. “I don’t think it would be too cool for them to walk in on that shit.”
Nicole was very apologetic. She said that she’d been drinking, and that she had never meant for anything to happen with Keith, and that nothing like it had ever happened before.
I didn’t know what to say, so I reminded her of our little agreement. “We both decided that if we were going to get involved with somebody else we would tell each other. From where I was standing, that looked pretty involved.”
“No,” she said. “He’s just a friend. It’s never been like that with him and that wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Well, it happened,” I said. “And before it happens again, at least think about the kids.”
I left, feeling lousy. In my opinion, shit like that doesn’t happen unless you let it happen. You always hear stories about guys crying to their wives about some woman they screwed while they were away on a business trip or something, and how it didn’t mean anything—that they’d been drinking and they were just missing them and that it just sort of happened. Well, that’s bullshit. You’ve got to be in a place in your relationship for something like that to happen, and I was beginning to see that Nicole was already in that place. As for me, I wasn’t there yet. I was still acting like a married man. And guess what? I hadn’t been laid in months.
A couple of weeks later, late that May, my suspicions were confirmed. Nicole went down to Cabo San Lucas with some friends of ours, including Bruce and Chrystie Jenner, and one of them called to let me know that she’d met a guy there. I felt like I’d been kicked in the nuts, but I handled it. Life throws some shit at you, and you deal with it. I went in and looked on my kids. They were both fast asleep. They looked like angels.
A couple of days after that, with Mother’s Day looming, Nicole called and told me she was flying back, and wondered if I could drive the kids down to Dana Point so we could all spend the day with her family. I took the kids and met her there, taking flowers for both Nicole and Juditha, and the whole family went to church together. Nicole and I stayed for dinner, and drove back late that night. The kids fell asleep in the car.
“That was nice, Nicole said. “Thanks for coming.”
“It was fun,” I said. But it wasn’t fun. All along, I’d been expecting her to tell me about the guy she’d met in Cabo, per our agreement, but it didn’t look like that was going to happen.
We got back to my place and put the kids to bed, and that’s when Nicole broke the news. “I met someone,” she said. “A guy I’m pretty crazy about.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
“What do you mean you know?”
“Some of my friends were in Cabo, too, remember?”
I didn’t say it angry, and I didn’t say it with attitude, and I didn’t pass judgment. I just said it: I know you met someone. Period.
There was nothing else to say.
When Nicole left, I poured myself a drink and sat on the couch and tried to figure out what it all meant. Strangely enough, by the time I’d finished my drink I felt kind of relieved. Nicole was telling me it was over. It was that simple. For four months, I’d been wining and dining her and sending her flowers and being the perfect estranged husband, but now I didn’t have to keep trying. I had wanted her back, yes, but obviously the feeling wasn’t mutual. She was done with me. If I kept chasing her, what kind of fool would I be? Hadn’t the woman just told me that she was in love with someone else? So, yeah—I accepted it. My marriage was over. My wife didn’t want me anymore. It was time to move on.
2.
SO HAPPY TOGETHER
FROM THAT NIGHT on, as God is my witness, I made absolutely no effort to pursue her—never once talked to her about the possibility of reconciling—and I defy anyone to show otherwise. The following day, I called her—and I kept my emotions out of it. “I thought about what you said, and I get it,” I told her. “Let’s have the lawyers help us get through this as quickly and as amicably as possible.”
Maybe deep down I hoped she would say something—“Oh no, O.J.! It’s not like that! We can work this out!”—but that didn’t happen. She grumbled a little about the lawyers, but that was about it, then she started talking about personal shit—managing the kids’ schedules, her crazy family, money issues, and so on—so I tuned her out. I realized I was going to have to pull away from her completely, and when she paused for breath I told her that it might be best if we didn’t talk for a while.
“Why?” she said.
“We should let the lawyers handle it,” I said.
I’d seen plenty of couples in similar situations, and they tended to get highly emotional during the proceedings, and that generally made everything worse. As I said, I wanted to keep my emotions out of it.
“Okay,” she said.
“Great,” I said.
I remember hanging up and thinking, Well, O.J., it’s time to get back in the game.
The funny thing is, during the previous three or four months a lot of my friends—including Marcus Allen and his wife, Kathryn—had been pushing me to start going out with other women, but I wasn’t interested. I thought I still had a chance with Nicole, and I thought I should wait it out. I’ll be honest with you, I’d been bothered by that one incident—when I saw her through the window of her house, going at it on the couch with Keith Zlomsowitch—but I would have been willing to forget it. The way I saw it—or the way I rationalized it, anyway—a fling or two might actually be a good thing, especially if it made her see that I wasn’t as bad as all that.
Anyway, it didn’t quite work out that way. At the end of the day, we were headed for divorce court, and at that point it was pretty much out of my hands.
That same night, I was out at an L.A. club, with friends, when I ran into a Hawaiian Tropic model I’d known years earlier. She came over to say hi, and to offer her condolences. “I hear you and your wife separated,” she said.
“We did more than separate,” I said. “We’re getting a divorce.”
She was sorry to hear that, too, she said, but not so sorry that she refused an invitation to dinner. She came over to the house a few days later, and we had dinner, and all I could think was, O.J. is coming out tonight!
Sure enough, after dinner we retired to the bedroom. Just as we were starting to get serious, I heard someone at my front door, so I excused myself and went down to see who it was. Kathryn and Marcus were outside, and they’d brought a friend with them—a woman. Her name was Paula Barbieri, and she was absolutely stunning. I remember thinking that she looked a lot like Julia Roberts, only prettier.
I invited them in and got a round of drinks, and I just couldn’t take my eyes off Paula. Unfortunately, she wasn’t in the market. She’d gotten married r
ecently, and it hadn’t worked out, so she was in the process of getting an annulment. Of course, from where I was sitting, that was a good thing.
That’s when my housekeeper came into the room and signaled to me. I couldn’t understand what she was doing. Couldn’t she see I was in the process of falling in love with this gorgeous creature? I got up and went over. “What?” I said.
“There’s a woman upstairs, in your bedroom,” she said.
Shit! I’d forgotten all about Miss Hawaiian Tropic. I told the housekeeper to have her come down, and she did, and of course Paula and my friends were there, and it was a little awkward. But what could I do? We had another round of drinks, and I showed my guests to the door, and then Miss Hawaiian Tropic and I retired to the bedroom. That was the night I began life anew as a single man.
Of course, the next day, I couldn’t stop thinking about Paula, so I called her and we began to see each other, but not romantically. She wasn’t ready for that yet—she had that annulment to get through—and I didn’t mind. I just felt good being around her: This was the kind of woman a man would wait for. We went out as friends for about a month, and it was a real clean period in my life. I wasn’t drinking, and I’d stopped eating meat for a while, and I felt physically pretty good—except for the arthritis, and my knees, which were both banged to hell from the years of football. Paula was also into clean living. She never had anything stronger than a glass of wine, and she was serious about staying in good shape. She had to be: She was a model, and a very successful one at that. Strangely enough, this was the first time in my life I’d been out with a woman who worked. I liked it, to be honest. Maybe it made her more interesting to me, maybe it gave her more substance—I’m not sure—all I know is that every time I saw her I liked her more.
It was during this period that Nicole’s phone calls started becoming more and more frequent, even obsessive, you might say. She would begin with some news about the kids, as she always did, then get to talking about her various personal problems—whether it was with friends, with Kato, or even with this guy she was supposed to be so damn crazy about. The constant phone calls got to be a little much, frankly, especially since Paula and I were beginning to get more serious about each other, so most of the time I ignored them. I knew that if it was about the kids, and it was urgent, she’d call Cathy Randa, my assistant, and Cathy always knew where to find me.
Thankfully, I was actually pretty busy during this period. I went down to New Orleans for about ten days, for the Olympic trials, and spent most of July in Barcelona, covering the Olympics. When I got back, I did some traveling for Hertz, and for a few other corporate clients, and in the fall I returned to New York to cover football. I came back to L.A. from time to time, of course—once to do a story on the Los Angeles Raiders, and a couple of times to shoot scenes for the Naked Gun sequel—but I hardly ever saw Nicole, and I liked it that way. In fact, whenever I had to pick up my kids, I usually asked Cathy Randa to fetch them for me. I didn’t want to get into anything with Nicole—not about the kids, not about her love life, and not about my own love life—and I thought this was the wisest course of action.
Then the calls began again, but this time they were less about her various problems and more about the issue at hand—specifically, the divorce proceedings. This was when she informed me that some of her friends had been advising her to exaggerate my so-called violent tendencies. She had told them what I’d said right after the 1989 fiasco—that I would willingly toss the prenuptial agreement if something like that ever happened again—and apparently they thought she should try to use that to get a better settlement out of me. “They want me to say that I’ve been traumatized by the repeated batterings,” Nicole said.
“Repeated batterings!” I said. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? What repeated batterings?”
“I know,” Nicole said. “I can’t believe it either. They’re trying to convince me that I’m a victim of abuse.”
I didn’t know what she was going to do, frankly, but I figured that when the time came she’d do right by me. As it turned out, I was called to the stand first. I admitted that I’d become physical with Nicole in 1989, and I described in detail the events leading to the blowup, and I pretty much blamed Nicole for the argument. Still, I took full responsibility for my response. I also said that Nicole had attacked me on several occasions, in the years prior and in the years since, but that I had learned to handle it by physically removing myself from the room—from the house, if necessary.
Nicole sat in the courtroom, listening, saying nothing, and the session ended before she could take the stand. She came over, smiled pleasantly, and asked if I was free for dinner. We had a very nice time at dinner. I felt like we were married again.
The next day, we were back in court, and it was Nicole’s turn to testify, but she didn’t show up. She reached me on my cell, in court, and said, “O.J., I just can’t do it.” I must tell you, I was pretty impressed. She was a good, moral, churchgoing person, and she simply refused to lie.
While we waited for the divorce to become final, we sometimes hung out together, mostly for the sake of the kids, and it was fairly pleasant. There was absolutely no animosity at that point. Some couples get angry and stay angry, and some just feel sad, and we were definitely closer to the latter type. I think, like many people, both of us wished it had worked out. I had always imagined growing old with Nicole, and watching our kids grow up and have kids of their own, but that wasn’t in the cards. So I dealt with it—we both did—and tried to get on with this business of living.
My oldest daughter, Arnelle, was in college at the time, and one day she asked me how come I wasn’t angry with Nicole. “When she calls, you talk to her. When she asks you for advice, you give it. And when she just needs you to listen to her, you listen. I don’t get it. I thought the divorce was her idea.”
“What’s there to get?” I said. “The marriage ended. We both got us to this place. What sense would it make to be angry with her? When you’re angry, you’re only hurting yourself. Life is too short to be carrying grudges. You gotta move on.”
And that’s what we did, Nicole and I—we moved on. I didn’t ask about her boyfriends, and she didn’t ask about Paula, and whenever we were together we were focused on the kids. The idea was to make them feel safe, to let them know that we were there for them, and that—the divorce notwithstanding—we loved them more than ever.
As it turned out, these little family gatherings began to affect Nicole, too. Before long, she was calling me again, at all hours of the day and night, to tell me how sad and confused she was, and to reminisce about our many years together. I guess that’s normal—part of the grieving process or something—but it was beginning to affect my relationship with Paula, and I decided I needed to put an end to it. Now, when the phone rang, I always checked to see who was calling, and whenever it was Nicole I tended not to answer.
One day she kept calling and calling, and I wondered if something was wrong, but I knew Cathy would be picking up the kids later, and dropping them off, and if anything was wrong I’d hear it from her. But about an hour before the kids were due over, they showed up—with Nicole, not Cathy. I hugged and kissed the kids, and they ran past me, into the house, heading for the pool.
“What’s up?” I asked Nicole.
“Nothing,” she said.
I could see that something was on her mind, but I didn’t pry. If she had something to tell me, she’d tell me in due course.
A few days later, when I was in New York, she called. “I need to talk to you,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“I’m pregnant.”
That kind of threw me a little. “With the guy you’re so crazy about?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Someone else.”
“So you’re not crazy about that other guy anymore?”
“That ended a long time ago.”
“Oh,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.
“
I guess I’m going to have an abortion,” she said.
I didn’t know what to say to that, either. Was I supposed to give her my blessing or something? “I’m sure you’ll do what you think is best,” I said.
“Thanks,” she said.
“For what?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “For listening, I guess.”
One night, not long after, I was busy in my home office, working, and I could see Nicole was trying to reach me. She called my cell, my home phone, the cell again. I finally picked up, angry. “What?” I barked.
“I want to read you something,” she said.
“I don’t have time for this, Nicole.”
“It’s from my will.”
I took a deep breath. “Okay,” I said. “I’m listening.”
“This is in my will, word for word,” she said, and she quoted directly from the document: “‘O.J., please remember me from early in our relationship, before I became so unhappy and so bitchy. Remember how much I truly love and adore you.’”
“That’s very nice,” I said.
“Don’t forget,” she said. “I mean it.”
“I won’t forget,” I said.
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
In October of that year, 1992, the divorce became final. Everything had gone pretty smoothly. Finances, custody, visitation—all that stuff that divorced parents are only too familiar with. As part of the custody arrangement, we agreed to spend the first Thanksgiving and Christmas with the kids, as a family, to give them a little more time to get used to the idea that we were no longer together. We figured we’d celebrate Thanksgiving in New York, at my Manhattan apartment, and Christmas in L.A., and Nicole and I discussed every little detail—down to where I was going to get the turkey, what side dishes the kids liked best, and how many pies she thought we would need. Two days before Thanksgiving, with all the travel arrangements in place, she called to tell me that she wasn’t bringing the kids to New York.
If I Did It Page 9
