See What Can Be Done Read online

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  If Hauser’s biography sometimes reads like a screen treatment about making a glamorous life (her epigraphs are often movie quotes, particularly from Marilyn Monroe films, and she uses “Cut to” as a transition; photos, including one of the Browns’ grave in the Ozarks, are affixed), Hirshey’s book—once it gets past its bitter complaint about the Hearst Corporation’s virtual gag order on quoting Brown’s office memoranda—is a bit more like a novel in its attention to narrative tension and pacing and smooth writing. Moreover, Hirshey cleverly transforms her final pages into something akin to an oral history, with several of Brown’s good friends—from the playwright Eve Ensler to Barbara Walters—chiming in. Here is Hirshey on Joan Rivers speaking of Brown’s famous frugality:

  Cheap! Don’t get Rivers started. She recalled a day when she was in a cab and noticed Helen at a bus stop, trying to juggle overstuffed work satchels. Rivers rolled down her window and hollered at her: “Helen, calm down and take a cab! Your husband made Jaws!”

  Brown was politically criticized by better (more conventionally) educated feminists, but she was close to women and believed in sorority—if that is a feminist principle. I think her biographers would say, yes, it is. Once, the young Kate Millett and her fellow Columbia students took over the Cosmopolitan offices and requested that Brown attend a consciousness-raising session and confess to her hang-ups. This Brown did with alacrity (she had spent all those California years in group therapy) and had only gotten to hang-up number eight when she was asked to sit down and be quiet. There was some froideur with Gloria Steinem and a complete standoff with Joan Didion. But she admired Betty Friedan and raved about The Feminine Mystique in print. Like Rivers and Ephron, Brown believed in “Having It All” and wrote a book by that title. “Having It All” is more a fanciful cri de coeur than a feminist idea—most men don’t “have it all”—but it is true that some women do have more energy, opportunity, and fecundity than others, and if they claim to have some advice in that direction that goes beyond dumb luck and childhood zip code, let us see how useful it is.

  Brown in her seventies had to be pried from her post at Cosmopolitan. She was given a decorative title as head of the international division (Hirshey reminds us that there are women in hijabs reading the magazine still). The Hearst Corporation also created a facsimile office for the elderly Brown, one that resembled her former one to a T, though the new one was fake—Hirshey suggests that perhaps even the fax machine was not plugged in, that perhaps nothing was plugged in. At the end, still in her Pucci dresses and fishnet stockings, Brown was wheeled into this office daily and mostly took naps there.

  Her legacy, imprecisely feminist, is one of putting the pleasure principle dead center in a woman’s life—painful cosmetic surgeries notwithstanding—only slightly more complicated than “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” Her biographers defend her from feminist derision and snobbery, and the reader understands this protective inclination, which is rooted largely in affection: Brown was companionable, charitable, self-deprecating—one wants to come to her aid. Hirshey and Hauser do not want her to seem an absurd figure but a unique confection of several eras, cultures, and social strata. She was not an intellectual but nonetheless a wee bit of a philosopher. Her critics might line up to say: Why should men and women have to get tricky with one another? Why all the artifice? Why must snakes be charmed, flesh be doctored? Adults should be treated and behave as adults.

  Yes. But girlfriend, or, rather, pussycat, no matter how evolved, we all contain our basest selves, right up until the end. Get out the fishnets and cast them. Seize life—it’s really there. Such are the ongoing tidings of Helen Gurley Brown.

  (2016)

  Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made in America

  Martin Luther King, Jr. and others have said that Sunday in America is the most segregated day of the week, but the O. J. Simpson verdict, acquittal on all charges, came in on a Tuesday. The jury, after having been sequestered for the better part of a year, took only three hours to deliberate. It knew enough and now wanted to go home. Leaning into the jury box, Simpson’s defense attorney Johnny Cochran had closed with a rousing speech that the verdict would be not just about Simpson but a vote for racial justice generally. “Are you, members of the jury, with the Brothers or with the Man?”—as coprosecutor Christopher Darden described it ahead of time in an objection to the defense strategy. Unknown to a lot of the white world, this idea of voting for something larger than O.J. was felt in many places, not just at the lawyers’ tables.

  When the 1995 verdict was announced, it was a sunny October morning in L.A. Members of the LAPD had come on horseback to the front of the courthouse, in case there were riots. People at work and at home were glued to the broadcast. I myself was standing in front of my television set while my baby napped upstairs, snoozing through his last full year of racial blindness, a condition Simpson quixotically believed in and sought for much of his adult life. “I’m not black; I’m O.J.,” he repeatedly said, though racial community and fellow feeling would come to his rescue in the end.

  Even in the Bronco “chase”—a minimalist newsreel thriller à la Andy Warhol—those who had thought of Simpson as “white” joked bleakly that now that he had cop cars following him he had become black again. (A similar line is uttered by a neighbor over the fictional rendition of Christopher Darden’s fence in the exposition-jammed dialogue of The People v. O.J. Simpson, the docudrama that garnered five Emmys and disconcertingly serves up the case as entertainment and courtroom soap opera.) Young people had cheered on the Bronco from highway overpasses.

  On the day of the verdict, stock trading dwindled. Water usage dropped. So much work stopped that it was estimated that there was “480 million dollars in lost productivity.” Such nationwide attention and suspense suggested that at least some part of the public was alert to this verdict as a species of referendum. Could an African-American man with money get the same breaks that white men with money did? Simpson was a prize to be competed for.

  Black Americans erupted in jubilation at the news of Simpson’s freedom. Crowds hugged in the streets, and the cheering outside the Los Angeles Superior Court startled the LAPD’s horses, which reared back and then were trotted away. In the wake of so many acquittals for the killing and maiming of black Angelenos—Eulia Love, Latasha Harlins, Rodney King—here was one for the other side. In the courtroom one of the jurors thrust his fist in the air in black power solidarity. He was an upstanding citizen but also a former Black Panther—something missed by the prosecution during voir dire.

  White Americans were by and large vexed and perplexed. Jeffrey Toobin, who covered the case for The New Yorker, exclaimed a little cluelessly about the verdict, “I actually thought I might pass out from shock.” Seventy-seven percent of whites believed that Simpson was guilty; 72 percent of blacks believed him not guilty. Rather than closing the gap, the trial increased these percentages by roughly ten points from what they had been pretrial, widening the racial divide in opinion and perception. Whites and blacks had watched the same trial and seen very different things; their responses to the acquittal took place in separate worlds. “Black people too happy, white people too mad,” observed the comedian Chris Rock about the reactions. “I haven’t seen white people that mad since they canceled M.A.S.H.”

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  At the time I had only one white friend who believed completely in Simpson’s innocence—that is, that despite a trail of blood from the crime scene to the Simpson home, he was utterly framed, from beginning to end, not just the victim of perjury and illegally enhanced evidence. This friend has also been known to argue that the Apollo moon landing was an elaborately staged hoax prompted by the Cold War, a belief held by 60 percent of Russians to this day. In a minor coincidence, O. J. Simpson was in a movie, Capricorn One, also about a fake space landing; in so many parts of his Los Angeles life, reality
was ostensible, continually represented as something up for grabs.

  Most other friends of mine, black and white, shared with me the view that despite the amount of incriminating evidence, the LAPD—primarily in the form of the bigoted police detective Mark Fuhrman—had planted and mishandled some of it and lied on the stand and that the case in the courtroom was tainted and so not necessarily proven beyond a reasonable doubt. There was, furthermore, no murder weapon with fingerprints. There was no witness. DNA expert Barry Scheck had poked holes in the forensic science he himself had helped develop. If a man with Simpson’s celebrity and money could not stand up successfully against the judicial system with that system’s habit of casual fudgings, then no black man could. Simpson was the most famous man to stand trial for murder, let alone the most famous black man. “White people couldn’t accept that O.J. never broke down,” the white father of a black son said to me. “White people were waiting for him to fall apart in that courtroom, but he never did.”

  But when I spoke at dinner about it with a well-known (white) film director who believed completely in Simpson’s guilt, and I said offhandedly that I found the logistics puzzling—I could not understand how one person acting alone could have murdered two people like that, so quietly yet brutally, with children asleep upstairs—he looked aghast. “Really? You don’t?” he said. And then he stood up next to the dinner table and enacted it with a samurai’s choreography and an invisible weapon that seemed to be a double-edged sword (well, what isn’t?). Watching the director move so assuredly, if somewhat indecipherably, convinced me that he was in the right line of work. But his invisible murder weapon—like the murder weapon that failed ever to make an appearance at the trial—could have used some assistance from a prop department. (The FX docudrama, which leans heavily on Jeffrey Toobin’s book The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson, suggests in passing that Simpson may have learned some knife techniques from a film he was rehearsing about Navy SEALs.)

  The Simpson trial kept people talking for years. It was a touchstone of race, class, and gender tensions. If not the trial of the century, as it was rather dramatically called, it was certainly the trial of the nineties. And lest Americans have forgotten, or weren’t born yet, or have had their young imaginations muddled by the docudrama—which is replete with the Kardashian girls, plus John Travolta and Nathan Lane doing camp versions of Robert Shapiro and F. Lee Bailey (though strong, deep performances are elicited from the actors playing Marcia Clark, Christopher Darden, and Johnny Cochran)—a new, sober, and intelligent documentary, produced and directed by Ezra Edelman, the Emmy-winning son of the activist Marian Wright Edelman, has emerged from the unlikely source ESPN to look closely at Simpson’s entire life and times and to see him as the complicated construction that he is. It is titled O.J.: Made in America.

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  Many of the books, articles, and films on O. J. Simpson over the years have been aptly titled or subtitled, in Dreiserian fashion, An American Tragedy. When one looks at tragedies, one is not looking so much at the protagonist’s pure or lusty and always unlucky victims. The story—its meaning and complexity—lies with the perpetrator: Othello, Don José, Canio’s Pagliaccio in Pagliacci; only the doomed Carmen gets the title of the opera she is in. And Simpson’s story is an opera—a heartbreaking drama that will always be titled “O.J.,” not “Nicole and Ron.” The tragic hero is one who is in some way exceptional but (as in the above-named tenor roles) is gripped by a fatal flaw that is often jealousy compounded by dislocation. There may be issues of authenticity or fame-induced impostor syndrome or some other variety of exile. Some fault line in society runs through him as well. His strived-for success feels hollow. He is spiritually homeless, humiliated by his lover and maybe also by his work if the fun part is over (Don José), or if he hopes to rest on his laurels (Othello), or if his job is tawdry show business of some sort (Canio/Pagliaccio). Perhaps as part of the story there are themes of race and class or a narrative of comeuppance. All these elements figure into Simpson’s epic fall. After divorcing his high school sweetheart, he married the beautiful eighteen-year-old waitress whom he’d met in a restaurant, and when she turned out not to be the perfect wife for an aging, womanizing man—she retaliated with infidelities of her own—he began to terrorize and hit her.

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  Edelman’s documentary, like the FX docudrama, shows the Rodney King beating right at the start (in the documentary it is shown at the start of each of the five episodes in an opening credit montage of public moments that figure in Simpson’s fate and is explored more fully in Episode 2). In our current time, when some of the most shocking police brutality has emerged for public viewing, one might imagine that the King beating would seem familiar. Yet quite the opposite is true: the footage of it still shocks viscerally to this day. Its pointlessness and sadism resemble a lynching. At that time there were no body cams or cell phones and the LAPD had no idea they were being observed; it was at night and the amount of time given over to the violence is grotesquely leisurely and unperturbed. The black community always knew such things occurred, but when the film evidence emerged, at long last there was proof for the courtroom.

  Less than two weeks later there was surveillance footage of a grocer shooting black teenager Latasha Harlins in the back of the head. At a time when a conviction for crack possession got black people decades in prison, that the grocer in the Harlins murder served no prison time and the Los Angeles cops in the King beating were acquitted of state charges led naturally to community outrage and unfortunately to fiery riots that did nothing to bandage wounds anywhere. When an unarmed black man is killed with impunity by police designated to protect and serve, setting the occasional empty car on fire may seem a natural if desperate response to years of underlying tensions. But whole black neighborhoods going up in flames in Los Angeles reduced poor Rodney King himself to saying, “Can’t we all just get along?”—a question whose answer had already been uttered.

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  Daryl Gates, the head of the LAPD at the time, was famous for weaponizing his police force. He defended chokeholds. He introduced SWAT teams and snipers, a move that was imitated in some other urban police departments, often to disastrous effect (as shown in the Utah community of the 2015 Scott Christopherson–Brad Barber documentary Peace Officer). Edelman’s documentary focuses minimally on Gates, but does manage an extended interview with Mark Fuhrman, the police detective who lied during the Simpson trial regarding his personal history of racism and racist epithets, and who eventually lawyered up and pleaded the Fifth, even to the question “Did you plant evidence?” The prosecution’s loss was less about the glove found at Simpson’s house (which sort of did fit and clearly belonged to Simpson) than about the Fifth Amendment. Also, the forensics team confessed on the stand to taking the blood of the accused from the lab back to the crime scene, admitting it was an unusual thing to do. Though maybe it wasn’t. In any case, the prosecution’s trail-of-blood case was no longer a slam dunk.

  Given the several causes for reasonable doubt, after 267 sequestered days, hovered over by guards and given the occasional conjugal visit, the jury felt entitled to take only three hours to deliberate. Since they had already been present for the entire trial, they believed they’d had more than enough time for a decision. Nonetheless, the jurors were slandered and reviled for doing so, and continue to be even to this day.

  Edelman’s documentary brilliantly portrays the social backdrop to race in Los Angeles at that time, a police culture of officially sanctioned excessive force, leading to several shattering events: the Watts riots, the police killing of Eulia Love in front of her home in 1979, and eventually Rodney King in 1991. In L.A. from 1940 to 1960 the African-American population had grown by 600 percent, many people fleeing Louisiana and Texas only to face California racism as stark as that of the Jim Crow South. “We didn’t ask these people to co
me here,” says Bill Parker, who preceded Gates and was head of the LAPD during the Watts riots. Parker himself was raised in Deadwood, South Dakota, and although he cleaned up the internal corruption on the force, he also turned it into a quasi-military presence, a pernicious, occupying army in black neighborhoods. Reputedly he recruited cops from the KKK.

  The Simpson family had come to California from a Louisiana farm, and Orenthal James was born and grew up in the San Francisco projects. His father became a drag queen and left the family, dying of AIDS in 1985. The documentary leaves viewers to imagine on their own how a black gay father at that time might have affected a son caught up in the stultifying hypermasculinity of sports. It surely bound Simpson to his mother, who appears in Edelman’s film as a sweet, pretty, religious woman, wheeled mutely in and out of her son’s long criminal trial.