O.J. book won’t change any minds

When someone pulls on gloves to open a book, it’s usually a priceless volume: a Jane Austen first edition or a signed galley proof of “Harry Potter.”

I wanted to put on gloves to read “If I Did It” also, but for different reasons. The “yuck” factor in O.J. Simpson’s “hypothetical” account of how he would have murdered his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman is so high that the needle soars right off the scale.

The 200-plus pages of “If I Did It” (Beaufort Books; $24.95) are certainly priceless — to the Goldman family. They won the rights to the book, yanking it away from Simpson and the corporation he set up using his children’s names, a scheme a federal bankruptcy judge called a “sham.”

When Simpson owned the project, booksellers such as Dutton’s and Barnes & Noble refused to stock it. The Murdoch empire, ordinarily shameless, dropped the book and a planned TV interview. Now that the money is going to the Goldmans, to whittle away at their $38 million civil judgment against Simpson, Amazon and Barnes & Noble are taking orders.

Just looking at this book — a red-and-black cover slashed with yellow police tape — you can imagine the Goldmans almost gleefully turning Simpson’s project on its head. The word If is in such small type that I fleetingly thought the Goldmans, who can now do anything they please with the book, had changed its title. Simpson’s name does not appear on the cover — just the phrase “Confessions of the Killer.”

Other than the Goldmans’ heartfelt, overwritten and underedited introduction and Dominick Dunne’s more stylish and ferociously Old Testament afterword (“I love the Goldman family and whatever they do to destroy Simpson, even turning his own book ... against him has my full backing.”), the book fits Karl Marx’s useful observation about history: first act tragedy, second act farce.

What can it be but farce that the book’s ghostwriter was a witness at the murder trial, Pablo F. Fenjves, a Brentwood neighbor of Nicole Brown’s whose writerly testimony of Kato the dog’s “plaintive wail” earned Simpson’s scorn a dozen years later when the two men sat down to work on this book?

What can it be but farce that Simpson complained endlessly to Fenjves about the money chapter in the book, the one describing how he might have killed the victims if he had killed them, griping on and on about how much he hated it.

Mostly of interest

That money chapter is the only reason anyone is interested in this book, and I’ll get to it in a minute. The rest reads like a self-absorbed, self-justifying counseling session: the marriage, the conflicts in the marriage, the end of the marriage, how he wanted to move on but she was obsessed with him, and how he, in turn, was patient and forbearing. But nasty little moments creep in, in spite of Simpson’s own defenses.

Describing the night Nicole famously called the cops on him and police took her statement and her picture, Simpson writes that “she was drunk, she’d been crying, and she was under fluorescent lights without any makeup. Ask me how bad she looked?”

About one of their separations, he writes, “It was a perfect arrangement. I had a family, but I lived alone. How can you beat that?” Maybe this explains why, despite his endlessly repeated concerns that Nicole was having sex and taking drugs in the condo she shared with their young children, he didn’t try to get custody of the kids.

This book is a docudrama in print; readers have to decide which parts are real and which parts are hypothetical. The Goldmans make clear that they believe that the “hypothetical” chapter is the truest part of all.

Fenjves writes that as the original deal fell apart, Simpson backpedaled and claimed the murder chapter was “mostly” the ghostwriter’s work.

But it is that chapter, 32 pages long, that permits Simpson to spend the rest of the book justifying himself. After all, this is not the first time he’s written about his marriage. His jailhouse volume, “I Want to Tell You,” let him take his tale to the public while refusing to submit it to the jury. I lost count of how often Simpson used “honestly” or “to be honest” in “If I Did It,” but every time he did, I believed him less.

About that night

Chapter 6 — “The Night in Question” — begins disingenuously. Simpson complains about arthritis pain so crippling he sometimes can’t pick up a spoon (let alone a knife, hint hint). Then a guy he’d met only a couple of times — someone named “Charlie” — shows up and says something about Nicole’s conduct that sets Simpson off. And off they go to “scare” her.

“Then,” Simpson writes, “something went horribly wrong, and I know what happened but I can’t tell you exactly how. ... I put my left hand to my heart and my shirt felt strangely wet.... (I) noticed the knife in my hand. The knife was covered in blood. ... I wondered how I had gotten blood all over my knife, and I again asked myself whose blood it might be. ...”

And all the perfumes of Arabia ... sorry, wrong literary work.

Money will change hands over “If I Did It,” but the book probably will not change any minds. Maybe Simpson will wind up as the 20th century’s Lizzie Borden, acquitted of double murder but still guilty in millions of minds.

If you still care about this case, if you think Simpson is guilty and you want to help the Goldmans, buy the book. If you think he got a raw deal and don’t want the Goldmans to get a cent of your money, speed-read Chapter 6 at the bookstore, or get it from the library.

Either way, your decision is a moral one, definitely not a literary one.

XMorrison is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.