Read Online The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson by Jeffrey Toobin - Free Book Online Page A

tournament for its top corporate customers in the neighboring thirteen-state area. In 1994, playing golf was pretty much all O.J. Simpson did for Hertz, though he did a lot of it. (The previous week, he had played for Hertz in Virginia.)It had been a different story when he first signed with Hertz in the 1970s, when he was still playing football. At that time Simpson starred in some of the best-known television advertisements of the era, which featured the handsome athlete leaping over furniture in airports to make a swift connection to his rental car. “Go, O.J., go!,” a grandmotherly matron shouted after him. At the time Hertz even tied its corporate slogan to its celebrity spokesman, touting itself as “the superstar in rent-a-car.” But a decade and a half later, the company paid him about half a million dollars a year to be, as his friends put it, “the house golfer for Hertz.”
    The creation of a public image—that is, defining what “being O.J.” meant—had been Simpson’s life work. In the years before he was arrested for murder, O.J. Simpson was interviewed countless times about his life story, and he would invariably invoke the same themes, even the same anecdotes. Though it is now difficult to remember in light of the notoriety of the murder case, Simpson for many years enjoyed a clean-cut and lovable image. This was a man who, after all, had been sanctified with a nationally televised “roast” by Bob Hope before he was twenty-five years old. So Simpson often went out of his way to boast in interviews about his hardscrabble origins and rascally past—a history that would take on a more sinister cast after his arrest.
    Orenthal James Simpson was born on July 7, 1947, the third of four children of James and Eunice Simpson, in San Francisco. (His unusual first name, which O.J. loathed, was an aunt’s suggestion of obscure origin.) His father was an intermittent presence in his life; in later life, he came out as a homosexual, and he died of AIDS in 1985. His mother, who worked nights as an orderly and then a technician in the psychiatric ward of San Francisco General Hospital, supported the family as best she could.
    In an authorized, highly laudatory biography published in 1974, when O.J. was twenty-seven, Larry Fox wrote of Simpson’s childhood: “There was the throwing rocks at buses, the shoplifting (after all, they were too young to
buy
beer and wine), the breaking up of parties, and, above all, the fights, the constant fights.” And Simpson himself admitted in an extensive
Playboy
interview in 1976, “If there wasn’t no fight, there wasn’t no weekend.… Sports was lucky for me. If I hadn’t been on the high school footballteam, there’s no question but that I would’ve been sent to jail for three years.”
    When asked about his formative influences, Simpson repeated one story from his adolescence over and over again. The year was 1962, and Simpson, a sophomore in high school, was in trouble. In some versions of the story, he had been caught stealing from a liquor store; in others, he had been arrested for a fight involving his gang, the Persian Warriors, in his Potrero Hill neighborhood. Simpson was asleep in his apartment when there was a knock at the door. Knowing of O.J.’s troubles, as well as of his athletic promise, a concerned adult had arranged for Willie Mays, the legendary center fielder for the San Francisco Giants, to pay a call.
    “Willie didn’t give me no discipline rap; we drove over to his place and spent the afternoon talking sports,” Simpson told
Playboy
. “He lived in a great big house over in Forest Hill and he was exactly the easygoing friendly guy I’d always pictured him to be.” (In a revealing segue in the interview, Simpson went on to defend Mays because “a short time after that, Jackie Robinson took a shot at Mays by saying he didn’t do enough for his people.” But, Simpson protested, “Mays always put out good vibes.”) Of the Mays visit