If I Did It (7 page)

When I got back to L.A., Nicole and I got into what I often
think of as our Period of Confusion. This was early April, a month
before Mother's Day, more than a year before the murders, and
Nicole pretty much began stalking me. She would drive by the
house late at night, and if Paula's truck wasn't out front she'd ring
the bell. Like a fool, I would let her in. That thing that wasn't sup-
posed to happen again was happening again—two and three times
a week. It was messing me up. All the old feelings were coming
back, and I kept fighting them, but Nicole was relentless about get-
ting me back. Still, whenever she broached the subject, I would cut
her off. “We're not getting back,” I said. “We're just doing this.”
“Why are we doing this if you don't have feelings for me?”
“I never said I didn't have feelings for you. I said we weren't
getting back.”
“But—”
“Listen to me: I don't want to talk about it. This is what we're
doing and it's all we're doing. There's no future in it.”
Sometimes, after we made love, we'd lie there side by side,
and Nicole would talk about her therapy. Things were going well,
she said, and she was learning a great deal about herself. She got
into all sorts of psychobabble about her childhood, and “unfin-
ished business,” and about the anger inside her. I listened because
she wanted me to listen, and some of it seemed to make sense, but
at the end of the day it really wasn't an issue for me. If she believed
she was getting better, that was a good thing—and she certainly
seemed to believe.
“ My therapist says I like o be angr y,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“She says I look for trouble because it makes me feel alive,”
she explained. “We've been trying to figure out where this comes
from, so we've been talking a lot about my childhood.”
“So what have you figured out?”
“Not a lot yet,” Nicole said. “This anger thing is mostly
unconscious.”
It might have been unconscious, but I'd seen plenty of it over
the years—especially in the period leading up to the split. Nicole
could mix it up with anyone—a bouncer at a club, some asshole at
the gym, a close friend—over absolutely nothing. Nicole was
always looking to make enemies, and she had finally turned me, the
person she was closest to, into Enemy Number One. I was glad she
was talking about this stuff with her therapist. I remember thinking
that it would have been nice if she'd figured some of this shit out
before the marriage fell apart. I didn't say so, though. Instead, I
said, “That's good. I'm glad you found a therapist you like.”
During this time, this Period of Confusion, we started spending
a little more time with the kids, especially when Paula was out of
town, which was pretty often. It was actually kind of pleasant, maybe
too pleasant, and once again Nicole began to drop hints about getting
back together. I didn't understand it. She'd gone out to “find herself,”
as she put it, and all she'd found is that she wanted me back.
I called her mother one day and asked her what was going on.
“I'm really confused,” I said.
“I'm not,” she said. “I never thought Nicole wanted to leave
you.”

I called her best friend, Cora Fishman, and she told me the
same thing. “She loves you, O.J. She was just dealing with her own
issues and she let things get out of hand. But I honestly don't think
she ever imagined it would lead to divorce.”
“I spent months trying to talk her out of it,” I said. “She had
plenty of opportunities to change her mind.”
“She didn't know what she wanted,” Cora said. “She was
confused.”
“Great!” I said. “Now she's not confused and I'm more con-
fused than ever.”
“Ron wants to talk to you,” she said. “Hold on a minute.”
I held on, and Ron, Cora's husband, came on the line. “How
you doing, O.J.?” he asked.
“I don't know. Like I told Cora, I'm pretty confused.”
“So you've talked with her?”
“With Nicole? Yeah, of course I've talked to her. That's all
we've been doing—talking.”
“About everything?” he asked, and it sounded like he was
fishing.
Then suddenly it hit me. “You mean about Marcus?” I said.
“Wow,” he said, taken aback. “She told you about Marcus?”
“Yeah, Ron. She told me about Marcus.”
“Good,” he said. “Because, you know, I wanted to make sure
everything was out in the open. That's the kind of thing where, you
know, you find out about it later and it fucks everything up.”
“Well it's out in the open, man.”
I then called my own mother to tell her what was going on,
hoping she might be able to help me shed a little light on the situa-
tion. “How do you feel about it?” she asked.
“I honestly don't know how I feel,” I said. “When we're
together, I see how happy the kids are, and that makes me happy,
but I don't know that anything has changed. I don't know that she's
changed.”
And my mother said, “O.J., until you figure this thing out,
you're not going be able to move forward with your life. You won't
be able to commit to a relationship with another woman. You can't
go on like this. You have to get clear on your feelings for Nicole.”
Paula was away again, on another modeling job, so I called
Nicole and asked her if she was free that weekend. This was in late
April 1993. We went to Cabo and had a very nice weekend. It was
just the two of us, with no distractions, and I felt like I was in love
with her all over again. When we got back, I was more confused
than ever. I was trying to figure out if I was really in love, or if I just
loved the fact that she was desperate to get me back. I couldn't help
it. If you get dumped by someone, it feels pretty good when they
come crawling back. They're telling you that they've screwed up,
and that they've loved you all along.
The next day, while I was struggling to make sense of this, she
came by to get the kids. They were out back, in the pool. When I
went to answer the door, Nicole reached up and gave me a little
wifely kiss, then we walked through the house, heading for the
pool. She saw the pictures of Paula again, and made a nasty remark,

and it really pissed me off. I guess she thought our weekend in
Cabo meant I was ready to walk down the aisle with her that very
afternoon, and that by this time I should have dumped both Paula
and her pictures. “That was uncalled for,” I said. “I don't want
you here.”
“Fine,” she said.
She went out back, got the kids out of the pool, and split. I
thought, Great. She made it easy. If I was actually thinking about rec-
onciling—if I was actually crazy enough to think about reconciling—I
don't have to think about it anymore.
Two days later, she called to apologize. She had discussed the
incident with her therapist, she said, and her therapist had told her
that she'd been completely in the wrong. “We had an amazing week-
end, so I was hoping that everything would magically go back to the
way it used to be,” she explained. “That was a mistake. I'm sorry.”
“Fine,” I said.
For the next couple of weeks, we kept our distance, but there
was no denying I had strong feelings for her. I also had strong feel-
ings for Paula, however, and that relationship was much less
volatile, so I wasn't about to make any big changes—my life was
good.
Then one morning, a strange thing happened. Paula was in
town, and she had spent the night, and we were up early because I
was leaving for Cabo that morning. Just as I finished packing, the
limo pulled up outside and I looked out the window. The guys I
was going to Cabo with were all there. They got out to stretch their
legs and looked up at the window and waved.
Paula and I went downstairs and said hello to the guys, then
she kissed me goodbye, got into her truck, and drove out the
Rockingham gate. Not a minute later, as I was putting my bags in
the limo, Nicole pulled up on the Ashford side of the house. The
two women had literally just missed each other. I looked over at my
friends, and they looked at me, all bigeyed and everything: O.J.
that was too close for comfort!
Nicole got out of her car and wandered over, smiling a
friendly smile. She was wearing golf shoes, clickclick clicking
down the driveway, and it struck me as pretty funny. Golf had
never been her thing, but she'd started taking lessons recently to
show me that that she was interested in the same things I was
interested in. Nicole gave me an unexpected peck on the cheek,
said hi to everyone, and noticed the limo. “It looks like you guys
are going out of town,” she said.
“We are,” I said. “We're going to Cabo to do a little golfing.”
“Sounds like fun,” she said.
Anyway, the limo was waiting, and we said goodbye and took
off, and on the way to the airport the guys ribbed me about that
very close call. I remember telling them a little bit about my con-
fused romantic life. I was crazy about Paula, I said, but Nicole had
been pursuing me pretty relentlessly lately. “It's making me a little
crazy,” I said.
One of the guys said, “I wish I had your problems,” and every-
one laughed.
Anyway, we got to Cabo and hit the links and I forgot all my
problems golf is pretty magical that way—but that evening I got

a call from Nicole. She said she was coming to Cabo, too, with her
friend Faye Resnick, whom I'd never met, and she told me that she
was bringing the kids. The next day, like a good exhusband, I went
to pick my family up at the airport, and I dropped them at this
timeshare they'd booked. For the next few days, I shuttled back
and forth between my friends and my family, enjoying my time on
the links, but also enjoying hanging at the beach with the kids, and
taking them jetskiing and stuff. When it was time to head back to
L.A., Nicole said, “Why are you leaving? Why don't you stay for a
few more days?” And my kids piped in: “Yeah, Dad! Please don't go!
We've been having such a great time!” I thought about this—I didn't
have all that much to do in L.A., and Paula was away on some mod-
eling gig and wouldn't be back till early the following week—so I
decided to hang through the weekend.
It was very nice. For the next few days, we were like a regular
family—swimming and playing and eating meals together and just
forgetting about the real world.
Faye hung out with us, too. She was dating this guy, Christian
Reichardt, a chiropractor, but they were sort of on the outs. From
what I overheard during her many phone conversations with him,
some of which got pretty heated, Faye seemed to have a little issue
with drugs, which she apparently didn't consider a problem. When-
ever these calls ended, usually pretty abruptly, Faye would turn to
Nicole and tell her that the problem in the relationship wasn't her—
it was Christian. I thought that was kind of amusing, because that
was pretty much the way Nicole had felt about our relationship.
She was perfect, and I Was the fuckup. I almost said something
about it, but I bit my tongue. We were having a good time and I
didn't want to ruin it.
The last night we were there, Faye was back on the phone with
Reichardt, crying. Apparently, he was willing to take another shot at
making the relationship work, but he wasn't sure he wanted her to
move back in with him. Once again, it sounded eerily similar to my
own situation. It also made me think about the fact that all relation-
ships are messy, and that everyone suffers through their fair share of
pain—and sometimes more than their fair share. The more I thought
about that, especially given the talk I'd recently had with my mother,
the more I began to think that maybe Nicole was right about us. We'd
had something special, and if we wanted it badly enough we could
have it again. She kept hammering at this during those few days in
Cabo: We were a great couple, she said. The kids had never seemed hap-
pier. She'd learned a great deal in the sixteen months we've been apart.
It finally got to me. This was in May 1993, and that Sunday
was Mother's Day. We were still in Cabo, getting ready to fly home
the following day, and I finally broke down and told Nicole that I
was willing to give the relationship another try. But I made myself
clear on one thing. “I can't have you moving back into the house,”
I said. “That's not going to happen. I'm not going to have the kids
move in, then move out again if it doesn't work. They've moved
enough, and it's too disruptive—and I'm not going to put them
through that kind of trauma again.”
Nicole thought this made perfect sense, but she had concerns
of her own. “I don't want to be in a position where we have one
argument and you tell me it's over,” she said.

I thought this was a good point. “Well, okay,” I said. “What
do you suggest?”
“If we're going to commit to this, we need to commit for a
full year.”
I thought about that, too, and it seemed reasonable. It was just
one year, but a year that could alter the course of the rest of our
lives—hers, mine, and the kids'. “Okay,” I said. “You've got a deal.”
“No matter what happens, you stick with it?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “No matter what happens, I stick with it.”
“And if it works for a whole year?”
“If it works for a whole year, you'll move back into the house
and we'll remarry,” I said.
Nicole was so excited that she called her mother, Juditha, and
told her what had happened. Juditha asked to talk to me, and I got
on the phone and made light of the situation. “I'm not really sure
about this little arrangement, but I guess your daughter thinks it's
going to work,” I said.
Juditha told me she was hopeful, too.
The day after we returned to L.A., Paula got back to town. I
called her and told her I had made dinner plans for us, and I went
and picked her up and took her to Le Dome, a fancy restaurant in
West Hollywood, on Sunset Boulevard. I told her what had hap-
pened in Cabo, and I broke the news to her as gently as possible.
Paula was not exactly thrilled, as you can imagine. “Don't expect
me to be waiting for you,” she said.
“The last thing I want to do is hurt you,” I said. “But I
honestly feel like I've got o give this a try. I'm still very confused about
the whole thing, and I need to know if it's going to work. I don't
want to spend the rest of my life wondering if I screwed up my
whole family. I owe it to myself, and I owe it especially to my kids.”
Paula went kind of quiet on me. She was the opposite of
Nicole. When Nicole got mad, she got hot and bothered. When
Paula got mad, she went cold and quiet.
I drove her home, feeling bad, and she didn't invite me in.
To be honest with you, I didn't know if things were going to
work out with Nicole, but in my heart I felt I had to give it an
honest shot. In a way, I still loved Nicole, and I wanted the best
for our kids.
At first, things went pretty easily. I was in New York for a good
part of the summer, working, and when I came home it was always
very pleasant, sort of like a family reunion. Sometimes I would
spend the night at Nicole's place, on Gretna Green, and sometimes
she and the kids would stay with me, on Rockingham. In was a per-
fect arrangement. I had a family, but I lived alone. How can you
beat that?
Before the end of the summer, though, Nicole began putting a
little pressure on me about moving back into Rockingham, and I
reminded her that we had agreed to try it for a full year before mak-
ing that commitment. She knew that, of course, but her lease was
running out at the end of the year, and she didn't want to move
again. It was hard to find a decent rental, she said, and the few
places that were available were incredibly expensive. I told her she
should consider buying a place. If she ended up moving back into
Rockingham, she could treat the new place as an investment, and

real estate on the west side of Los Angeles was always a solid invest-
ment. It was good advice, but it wasn't what she wanted to hear.
She'd go off, pouting, and for a few days I wouldn't hear a word
about it. But before long, it began again: “Why can't we just move
back in, O.J.? This is silly. You know we're going to be living
together soon enough.” Whenever she got too pushy about it, I'd
basically avoid her until she got the message: Stop hounding me. We
had a deal. Honor the deal.
It was a pain in the ass, to be honest, and I got tired of the
endless bickering, but at least she had enough selfcontrol to keep it
from turning into a fullblown argument.
In the fall, we got an enforced break from each other, which
was probably a good thing. It was football season, and I went off to
do my TV analyst thing with Bob Costas and Mike Ditka. She
stayed in L.A., taking care of the kids, and still obsessing about hav-
ing to move.
She was also spending a lot of time with her friends—people
she'd started hanging out with soon after we separated—and I'm
not going to beat around the bush: I didn't like them. Period. I
wasn't all that crazy about Faye Resnick, who apparently had a little
drug problem, I certainly didn't like Keith Zlomsowitch, with
whom she'd had her little “accidental” fling, and I wasn't wild about
the rest of the gang, either. I had met a few of them around town,
mostly recently, when Nicole and I were out and about, and most
of them seemed like pretty marginal characters. I thought a few of
them lived a little too close to the edge. They seemed to be mixed
ti p in all sorts of shady stuff, and one of' them —Brett Cantor, a
waiter at Mezzaluna, a restaurant right there in the heart of
Brentwood—had been knifed to death earlier that summer. The
murder remained unresolved, but there were rumors it was drug-
related.
“I don't know what you see in those people,” I told Nicole one
night.
“They're my friends,” she said. “They're nice.”
I didn't think that was an accurate description. “I don't want
those people around the kids,” I said.
“Jesus, O.J.—they're my friends. You make them sound like
criminals.”
“Maybe they are criminals,” I said. “Maybe you should take a
closer look.”
I kept traveling, generally on business, and when I got home
my first priority was always the kids. I was still trying to make
things work with Nicole, of course, but there wasn't all that much
time for romance, and—to be honest—I'd lost some of my enthu-
siasm for it. I don't know what it was, exactly. I guess I didn't think
it could work, and I didn't like her marginal friends, and I didn't
think she'd learned all that much in therapy, to be brutally frank. I
was also sick of tired of arguing about our living arrangement.
“Let's please don't talk about moving back into Rockingham until
we've done our year,” I repeated.
“You make it sound like a prison sentence!”
“Nicole, come on. You know what I'm saying.”
“My lease is running out in a few months, O.J., and the
Rockingham house is empty half the time. I don't understand this.”

“We had a deal.”
“Can't we change it?”
“Not until we know that things are working out.”
“I think things are working out,” she said.
“Maybe they are,” I said. “But it's early yet.”
I was a long way from thinking that things were working out,
to tell you the truth. All that talk about therapy and seeing the error
of her ways and accepting responsibility was fine, but on closer
inspection it seemed like it was mostly talk. I didn't see that Nicole
had really changed all that much. She was trying hard—that was
obvious—but she was still the same Nicole she'd been when every-
thing started going to hell. She still had that hot temper, and that
anger, and that impatience. And she was still blaming me for all her
troubles: You have that big house on Rockingham. I need a place to
live. You won't let me and the kids move in. She was making me the
heavy, and I didn't like it. But I'd committed to a full year and I was
determined to honor my commitment. The year had begun on
Mother's Day 1993, and we were only half way there.
There were good days, too, though—don't get me wrong.
Times when we'd be hanging out with the kids, having fun, or wak-
ing up at my place in the morning, just a big happy family—the
family we'd always imagined for ourselves. On those days, I actually
let myself believe that things were going to work out, and it colored
everything. Life is good. Nicole is terrific. We're going to make it.
During this period, Nicole's one big beef, which she kept
hammering at, mercilessly, was this business about the house: Why
wasn't I ready w let her move hack in? And my big beef, which I
also kept hammering, equally mercilessly, was about her socalled
friends—people that definitely rubbed me the wrong way. Those
were the two major problem areas, and we bickered about them,
sometimes to a point of exhaustion, but we never let the bickering
get out of hand. And in fact, whenever things looked like they
might blow up, I'd find myself jetting off on business. I'd go to
Tampa or Atlanta, say, to interview athletes for the show, or to New
York, for my regular network gig, and being away from her and our
problems was a real relief.
When I came home, I always appreciated her more, though,
because I'd missed her, but within days I felt like I was walking on
eggshells. I didn't want to have any more arguments. I didn't want
to hear any more shit about our living arrangements. I didn't want
to listen to any more stories about her asshole friends.
Luckily, I got cast in the Naked Gun sequel, and that kept
me busy. We saw less of each other and argued less as a result, and
for a while it worked great. Like a lot of people, we got along a
hell of a lot better when we were apart, and when we were
together we never had quite enough time to get into anything too
serious or damaging.
One day, though, on the set of the movie, I ran into a girl who
was a standin for Anna Nicole Smith, and she and I got to talking.
She began to tell me about some of the wild parties she'd been to
recently, and how she was always running into Nicole with her lit-
tle entourage—a group she described as “a pretty rough crowd.”
And suddenly, I was thinking, Now that's weird. This standin was
basically a parttime hooker—1 believe she worked with Heidi