That Time I Rode Around With O.J. Simpson
He ate Buffalo Wings, signed autographs and talked about Eminem
Among the strangest interviews I’ve done was with O.J. Simpson, whom I talked to over the phone before a failed pre-New Year’s Eve nightclub appearance in 2001 meant to bolster a career ruined by a murder trial six years earlier.
And when he got to town, I rode with him in his limo and had dinner with him before his “appearance.”
Looking back now, after news of his death Wednesday at 76, it all seems even more other-worldly.
He was at a movie theater when I first spoke to him.
“I’m trying to get in to see ‘Lord of the Rings,’ a series of books that I loved over the years when I was younger,” he told me over the phone. “I’m on my way to see the first showing of it. I don’t like lines, so I get there early.”
His upcoming appearance would be Simpson’s first time in Connecticut in seven years; the first, in fact, “since the weekend my life came apart,” he said. That time, he attended a board meeting for a Shelton-based importer of Swiss Army knives June 4, 1994 — three days before his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman were found murdered in Los Angeles.
Though Simpson was famously acquitted in the criminal trial, he was found liable in a wrongful death civil suit and the charges followed him like a cloud.
“I don’t see it as a hip-hop event,” he said of his booking in East Hartford, to be extensively filmed for a reality series that never got sold. “I know it’s a party, a pre-New Year’s party I’m going to.” But since his kids were spending the holidays out West, he said “I don’t have really much to do, You know, I play golf most every day.”
Taking the gig “gives me a chance to travel a little more” in addition to polish the reputation of the tarnished football hero and movie star charged with a brutal double murder in what was called the Trial of the Century at the time. He was acquitted only to be found liable in a civil suit.
But he said people had been nice.
“I think there’s this thing the media has out there,” he said. “But the people have always been terrific. I mean, from ’95 to now, every time I travel, the people are terrific. And I’ve got to admit, the show I did in Ft. Myers was sort of uplifting to me.”
He was talking about a rap show he had hosted where Wyclef Jean, Lil; Kim, Foxy Brown and Fabolous were all performing. Though only the host, he’s the one who got headlines like “O.J. Juices Concert Atmosphere” in the Naples-News Press.
“I totally did not expect that reaction — not to the degree it was, you know — with them chanting ‘O.J.!’ Hip-hop people have always been supportive.”
Still, he added, “I can’t call myself an expert on hip-hop. I always sort of liked L.L. Cool J’s stuff. But …strangely enough, I’ve become a fan of Marshall Mathers — you know Eminem. When he performed on the Grammys, from the first time I heard that one song, I always saw it the way I think he meant it to be — as opposed to the way the media attacked him with it.”
The song in question was the disturbing “Stan,” about a fan who stalks him but is ultimately kidnapped and is about to be murdered. Kind of a strange thing for an accused murderer to bring up on his own.
“I’ve had crazy fans before and after my ordeal,” Simpson told me. “After my ordeal, I had a lady that, I guarantee you, for a year, hung out at my house, showed up outside my house, showed up everywhere I went, sayin’ that we were married, saying that she was my wife.
“She never really presented any threat,” Simpson said. But hearing that Eminem song “I understood completely what he was saying.”
And part of what Eminem was saying in that song was: “I didn’t slit her throat, I just tied her up..’cause if she suffocates she’ll suffer more, and then she’ll die too.”
“I was always surprised the heat he took for that,” Simpson said, bizarrely. “It wasn’t that he was promoting that, he was just singing about it.”
He kept going on about this.
“Because that is our time. I grew up in the 60s, when they sung about our time, and they sung about what was going on. And if you recall in the 60s, the heat all those groups were taking. Because they were singing about acid and stuff. But they were singing about songs of our time.
“Unfortunately, it’s not all that sweet and nice in the inner city. We’d like to be able to sing about flowers and daisies growing’ in the city, but that’s not what happens in reality, is it? You got AKAs, you got people shooting people, you got gang-bangers. That happens to be reality.
“I’m like everybody. It upsets me when I hear somebody that seems to be celebrating [violence]. I don’t think it’s something that ought to be celebrated.”
Yet when Simpson got to town a few weeks later, people approached him and got autographs — because he was a Hall of Famer, the star of “The Naked Gun” and other movies, or a notorious figure who had been at the center of the Trial of the Century?
At the Buckland Hills Mall in Manchester, he signed basketballs he tossed to fans; at City Steam brewery in downtown Hartford, a waitress approached jokingly with a glass of juice, gratis.
But there also had ben some protests of him coming to town, including from the National Organization for Women.
“It’s a little selective persecution, if you ask me,” he said. “But hey, I’m man enough. I can deal with it.”
In the end, only 100 or so made it to East Hartford club; footage for the event never did make a reality show or career-rectifying feature film that they wanted.
But it was strange to spend part of a day with him, at the club and at the mall, over dinner, where he talked about so many things over a meal of Buffalo wings and bratwurst, about his murder trial, his civil trial, Court TV, football, Madonna and any other topic that struck his fancy.
And it was odd to be in his limousine, trailed by dozens of media representatives bringing to mind the slow chase in his Ford Bronco that mesmerized a national TV audience years earlier.
“Hey, I never travel like this,” he said of the limo. “I told them the one thing I didn’t want was an entourage. Now look at this. Look at this group, It’s kind of intimidating.”
Tooling down the interstate, with adjoining cars honking and waving, O.J. attempted at one point to turn down the radio in the limo. Batting the controls, he accidentally shut it off.
“Juice, you killed it!” one of his entourage complained.
“Hey, watch your choice of words!” Simpson shot back.