'NOBODY THAT RICH COULD BE THAT STUPID'

William Cash is amazed

by the cross-racial belief

in O.J. Simpson 's innocence Los Angeles TO CLAIM, as many have done, that the O.J. Simpson saga currently obsessing America resembles a bad television soap or cop 'B' movie is frankly insulting to bad scriptwriters. No writer, however desper- ate, could expect to get away with the tele- vised car-chase scene on the LA freeways, the bloody footprints in Simpson's bath- room, or even the not-guilty plea. Still, what remains perhaps most unbelievable about the Simpson case is that, despite the quantity and quality of evidence, polls show that up to 80 per cent of Americans — across the social spectrum — remain brazenly convinced that their beloved all- American hero arraigned this week and now awaiting trial is indeed innocent. Despite fears that the case would prove racially divisive, neither race — nor logic for that matter — would seem to have a great deal to do with it. In Mr J's Hair Care Salon, for example, on Crenshaw Boulevard and 56th Street, where the O.J. case has been discussed by clients like a stuck record, owner Dottie White, a large, middle-aged black woman with thick glasses said: 'We just don't believe our brother did it — and I tell you why — 'cause blacks don't like to use knives — we're squeamish about blood. "Shoot and go" is what blacks say — blacks like to use a gun. Mexicans use knives — not us. And with all his money he could afford a nice gun . . '

Her assistant interrupted with a more far- fetched theory: 'I think Kato [Brian 'Kato' Kaelin, a family friend who lodged with O.J. and went with him before the murders to McDonald's in the Rolls-Royce] did it 'cause Nicole was gonna tell O.J. they were sleeping together and Kato didn't want to be kicked out of the guest-house.

Next door in the Black Diamond black gym ('for that "diamond hard" physique'), trainer Robert Jackson, his yolky blue eyes glazed like foggy marbles, had personal reasons for believing in O.J.

'Okay, so I'd say he was a bit calm in court,' he said, 'he had a look of "Oh, shit" — I'd be screaming at the cameras, "Why don't you get the motherfucker who did it?" — but could I send O.J. to the death chamber? No, man. I couldn't do that. I couldn't convict him. I'm kind of biased. I like O.J. He was one motherfucker great athlete.'

Another sweating beefcake, jogging on a running machine with a sign above it which read: 'Nobody over 2301bs on this trotter', who refused to be named, said, 'Nobody that rich could be that stupid — to leave all Arabian theme park. those clues. I know he didn't do it.'

Down on 57th Street was a makeshift stall called 'Touch of Class' selling various O.J. Simpson T-shirts; 'Pray for 0.J.'; 'Free 0.1'; 'Let the Juice Looser; `0.J. — Not Guilty'. Owner John Smaulding, sit- ting on a deckchair in black wrap-around sunglasses, his arm scarred with syringe marks, said he was shifting over 50 a day at $10 each. 'People support O.J. more than Rodney King,' he said. 'I'm selling twice as many O.J. shirts. It must have been a Mafia job, a set up. I heard he owed money — gambling.'

If unequivocal black support for O.J. is predictable, it might seem less easy to explain in the wealthy, mainly white west LA neighbourhood of Brentwood, where Simpson owned his $5 million mansion complex. Simpson, in fact, is widely sup- ported by a large section of white Ameri- can males, — who identify strongly not only with his natural sporting prowess, but, very much less politically correctly, his whole macho male image, which included his white blonde trophy wife; his sinister history of wife-beating (in 1989 he pleaded `no contest' to a complaint) had no effect on his Hertz endorsements or NBC sports commentator contracts.

Having driven over from Westchester, Cincinatti, to see °J.'s house, Brian Gilmartin, who owns a company that makes a special security bulb that switches on after you dial 911, said: 'I grew up with 0.J. during the Seventies, for me football was everything. O.J. is being taken on by Big Brother — why aren't the police look- ing for anybody else? I think O.J. knew what happened, but he didn't do it.'

White women, you might have thought, would have O.J. closely marked on their hit list; yet while white feminists hate him, of the dozens of O.J. lookie-loos' who drove by his house the evening I went up there, many turned out to be white mid- dle-class females who had become mes- merised by the Simpson case for reasons they seemed reluctant to probe too close- ly. Put bluntly, many white American women simply find O.J. too sexually attractive to think he could be a double murderer.

Eighteen-year-old Bobby Garretson from Encino, for example, a bubbly, green-eyed, beautiful Californian blonde, who was training to become a flight atten- dant, had forced her boyfriend to drive to 0.J.'s house twice. 'He liked her so much — why should he want to kill her in that way? I'm not prejudiced against blacks, but I've never really fancied a black man. Yet when I saw O.J. on television . . A lot of my friends have said they would like to sleep with a man like that. It's a sort of female fantasy, I guess.'

0.J, has been getting up to 3,000 letters a day in jail. Very few have been hate mail; the vast majority, according to his lawyers, have been from females — many of a romantic, often of a sexually explicit nature. A typical letter, for example, is from someone who wondered whether Simpson recalled running into them when they got off the number 15 bus in Kearney Street in San Francisco in the late 1970s. A letter from a woman in the Bronx simply said: 'I can't seem to get you out of my mind. I'm finding it difficult to focus on anything'; another asked Simpson to 'show me your beautiful smile a little more . or a wink at the camera would be even bet- ter'.

What is most disturbing about the whole case is the complete lack of any moral con- science on the part of either the American public or the media. 0.3. Simpson remains a national hero, 'An American Tragedy', as Time declared on its cover, as if it were his tragedy, rather than the victims' he is accused of butchering.

Everybody — again, except the victims — has cashed in on the story. Witnesses have already been bought off by the National Enquirer, television ratings have soared. The same company that is printing the '0.J. Simpson' T-shirts sold on 57th Street are also printing another which reads 'Remember Nicole and Ronald'. Even a police officer has been accused of looting some possible evidence from °J.'s house in order to sell it.

William Cash is the American correspon- dent-at-large for the Daily Mail.