My "Don't Tell OJ Simpson" Moment From 1989

20 years ago.  Wow.  I wrote HERE five years ago about my tangential personal connection to the OJ case. A lot has been made over the last week, because of the 20th anniversary today of the white Bronco freeway chase, about how the verdict in his celebrated criminal case split the nation along racial lines at the time.  And I suppose that's my memory, too.

But I wonder whether, if the wildly popular CBS television show C.S.I. had aired just a few years earlier than its premier in the year 2000, that verdict might not've been different.  I also haven't seen any poll taken today about OJ's guilt or innocence.  I suspect strongly that there wouldn't be such a distinct racial divide on this issue now.

When I Met Kevin Costner

Seeing all the TV commercials on ESPN promoting the release today of Kevin Costner's new film, Draft Day, reminded me of the time I met him in person. 

It was about 20 years ago. His career was near its peak at the time, I think. He'd already made Dances with Wolves (1990) and JFK (1991) and The Bodyguard (1992), and hadn't yet starred in Waterworld (1995). I was in a popular bar in Palo Alto, California with some friends from law school. We were chatting up this group of former sorority girls who had graduated from UCLA a few years earlier, when Kevin Costner strode in. He would've been in his late 30s at the time.

I saw first-hand the power of Hollywood celebrity that night. In what seemed like a matter of seconds, Kevin Costner had insinuated himself into the group of girls with whom we'd been talking  for an hour. And as quickly as he had done so, all their backs were turned to us, and they were having their own, uproarious laughs. Game over. He strode back out of the bar again with two or three of them in tow less than a half an hour later. For years afterward, when I saw seduction scenes in vampire movies, I thought back to this night.

At the time, my friends and I were pretty indignant, not surprisingly. We consoled ourselves by muttering judgmental speculations about whether Costner was married.  And I wouldn't have written this post today if I hadn't seen on Wikipedia just now that he divorced his wife in 1994.

When I Met Newt Gingrich

Did you catch the Newt Gingrich interview on Meet The Press a couple of days ago?  There is some lingering controversy about whether moderator David Gregory 'set him up' and unfairly ambushed Gingrich with questions concerning his views on healthcare reform.  If you like, you can watch the clip below of David Gregory addressing this issue on MSNBC this morning. The clip starts with a citizen in Iowa coming up to Gingrich yesterday and angrily confronting him, asserting that he'd 'undercut Paul Ryan.'  This confrontation reminded me of the time I met Newt Gingrich myself.

It was in 1999, after he had resigned his Speakership and House seat following the 1998 mid-term elections, which had gone poorly for Republicans. A buddy of mine and I walked into an English-style pub near Stanford University in Palo Alto, California one random weekday night and, to our amazement, there sat Newt Gingrich at the end of the bar, having a quiet beer.  The place was pretty much empty.  Just Newt Gringrich (accompanied by what looked like a young Secret Service agent to me, who was not drinking), my buddy and I, and a college-age guy and his girlfriend (who were vaguely hippie-looking).  I ordered a beer and tried to work up the courage to walk 10 feet down the bar and say hello to Gingrich myself.  But after I'd had just a couple of sips of my beer, Newt got up to leave.

As he walked toward the door (passing right next to me), the hippie-looking guy said something profane and  insulting to Newt (which I wont repeat here), in a childish manner that seemed intended to impress his girlfriend.  But unlike in this clip, where Newt politely walks away, that night a decade ago, Newt leaned back toward the hippie guy and said clearly and calmly to him, "F--k off."  

I still enjoy the vivid memory of how the look on  that hippie guy's face transformed so instantly from one of righteous, hands-on-hips indignation to stunned, open-mouthed amazement.

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When I Was Curt With John Le Carre

John Le Carre, now almost 80 years old, is probably best known for his 1963 novel The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.  He gave what he announced would be his final interview to CBS Sunday Morning back in February (embedded below). 

I met him in person very briefly about 13 or 14 years ago when he was giving a lecture one evening at Stanford University. This was less than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and at the time his brand of spy thriller was distinctly out of fashion.  Nevertheless, I was (and still am) a big fan and was genuinely thrilled to hear him speak in person.

Before the lecture started, those of us waiting to attend were milling around out in front.  A white haired older man in a cardigan sweater came up to me and asked very politely if this was the auditorium where John Le Carre was scheduled to speak. Not wanting to get bogged down in conversation with some strange old guy (probably a spy nut!), I said "yes" a little curtly and then stared away.  But he just remained there next to me, in silence. A few awkward minutes later, the doors swung open and we all filed into the auditorium.  "I hope that guy doesn't come sit next to me," I thought to myself.  And to my relief, he did not.

When we'd all found a seat, I looked back to see that older man walking purposefully down the aisle and up onto the stage.  Yup.  That was him. John Le Carre himself. He looked then pretty much exactly as he does in this recent CBS interview, actually.

Oops..

When I Met Tony Curtis At 1 AM In Las Vegas

News is just breaking that actor Tony Curtis has died today at the age of 85. His most famous role was in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959), with Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe. But that film was made well before I was born.  So to me he was most famous for having had relationships with some of Hollywood's most famous leading ladies back in the day, and then for having been married six times.


I remember seeing a  piece about him on Entertainment Tonight 15 years ago or so, which profiled his retired life in Las Vegas as he turned 70. It noted that he had become a well-regarded painter whose works sold for tens of thousands of dollars. But what impressed me most at the time was that he was accompanied by a statuesqe blonde woman who looked to be 30 or 40 years younger than he.  (He later married her.  Jill Vandenberg was 42 years younger than he, as it turns out.)


That profile made a surprisingly strong impression on me at the time. So I I was oddly less surprised than I might have been when I bumped into the couple, literally, on the dance floor of "Club Ra" at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas about a decade ago.  It was well after midnight, and the techno dance music was blaring. As I was dancing on the not-so crowded dance floor, I accidentally bumped into someone behind me.  I turned around to apologize and there was Tony Curtis and this same beautiful, tall blonde woman, looking pretty much like that photo above.  Despite never having seen Some Like It Hot, I instantly knew who they were.  My first reaction was not, "No way! It's Tony Curtis!" though.  Instead, I remember thinking in that instant, "This guy is amazing.  He must be 75, and yet he's out dancing at 1 AM at a club with this beautiful woman in her 30s.  Incredible!"


Before I could say anything, he immediately apologized for bumping into me.  He was really nice, and didn't 'big time' me at all. Then there was that moment he must've had a million times in his life, where he could see in my eyes that flash of recognition. But then my eyes darted to his wife for a second (I couldn't help myself), and then back to him.  I could tell that he knew exactly what I was thinking in that moment, because he flashed a knowing smile at me before dancing on.

Candidate Tom Campbell Pulls TV Ads In California

The Los Angeles Times leads with a story this morning about how Tom Campbell, a republican candidate for US Senate in California, has been forced to pull his TV ads because his campaign is running out of money. You can read the entire article HERE.  High profile political races in big states like California seem to be increasingly dominated by candidates with immense personal wealth who can 'lend' their campaigns large amounts of their own money. That's precisely what Campbell's opponent, Carly Fiorina, has done.  "Though Campbell raised more money than Fiorina in the period between April 1 and May 19, Fiorina has loaned her campaign an additional $3 million in the last few weeks — bringing her personal contributions to at least $5.5 million," this Los Angeles Times article reads in part. "In reports filed last week, Fiorina had $2.1 million on hand, while Campbell had roughly $400,000. A statewide television buy costs upward of $2 million."


I've met Tom Campbell. He was a professor at Stanford Law School when I was a student there 15 years ago.  While surprisingly soft-spoken for a lecturer and politician, he was clearly a brilliant and thoughtful man. So I went to his office one day and volunteered to work on his next campaign. He very politely turned me down, however, explaining that he had agreed with the school not to recruit students. But even after that, he continued our conversation very cordially for a good long time, almost preventing me from leaving disappointed.  I was very impressed by that.


Tom Campbell has already lost two prior senate bids, and looks headed for defeat again in this one.  In the past his 'professorial' demeanor has been blamed for his perceived inability to connect with voters.  And maybe that's his problem.  Or maybe it's his political positions.  But it sure seems like this time he's simply losing a battle of personal checkbooks.  This trend can't be good for our democracy.  

Yahoo! CEO Tells Tech Blogger To "F- Off"

Have you ever heard of the technology blog called "Tech Crunch"?  It was founded by a guy named Michael Arrington, and it's popularity has made him highly influential in Silicon Valley and in the tech world beyond.  But his sometimes haughty demeanor and occasionally caustic commentary have earned him the enmity of an increasingly vocal minority as well. A great example of this is in the 1 minute clip HERE in which Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz tells him to "F**k off" during an on-stage interview at a conference yesterday, a comment that was then widely applauded by those in attendance and has been widely circulated today.


I went to law school with Mike over 15 years ago now and knew him well back then.  He was a good friend, especially during our first year when we lived down the hall from one another in the law school dorm.  A few years later, I also worked with Mike at a prestigious Silicon Valley law firm. I'm really impressed by how successful he's become and how he created it all from nothing after abruptly quitting our law firm at the height of the "Dot Com Boom" (in frustration and disgust, I assumed at the time).


That being said,  from almost the first day I met him as a young student in the fall of 1992, I noticed that he seemed to engender this type of unusually vitriolic reaction from a small minority of all the people he met. It was uncommon and unintentional, but nonetheless reliably recurrent. And usually in women, especially successful women. Fame does not seem to have changed him.

When I Met Jack Kirby In 1988

I met the legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby back in the summer of 1988.  He died on this date in 1994, at the age of 76.    (That's him in the foreground of the photo above, and that's me in the purple shirt. And yes, that is the actor David Carradine in there, too.  I wrote previously about meeting him HERE.)


Jack Kirby rose from humble beginnings as Jacob Kurtzberg in Depression-era New York City to become a legendary comic book artist under his pen name "Jack Kirby," a co-creator of many of today's most famous super heroes, including the X-Men, the Fantastic Four and Captain America, to name just a few (of hundreds).  And that's just the merest hint of his vast influence on the field of comic book illustration and on pop culture in general in post-WWII America. You've probably never heard of him, though. That's partly because in his time comic book publishers did not promote the names of individual creators.  But it's also partly because he was not an enthusiastic self-promotor, unlike some of his collaborators like Stan Lee (a name you may well recognize).   


I was introduced to him in 1988 at a meeting of comic book distributors near Los Angeles.  I was in awe of the man, even though he was physically smaller than I expected (and much smaller than me, even as a teenager), and was by then a little frail as well.  I had to be encouraged to show him some of the sample comic book pages that I had drawn. Despite the fact that my drawings were pretty crude and showed, I suspect, very little artistic promise, he took them with care, looked them over for a surprisingly long time, and then offered me some very sincere, if soft spoken, words of encouragement.  There were no insulting pauses or left-handed compliments in what he said. Just encouragement, offered genuinely.  And I was elated by that.  So enthused in fact, that despite replaying every second of that meeting in my mind over-and-over again for months, it wasn't until maybe a year or so later that I realized he had never actually said anything complimentary about any specific aspect of my artwork.   On reflection, all he'd really done was encourage me to keep practicing, in essence. But he did so in a gentle and positive way that somehow seemed approving.


That's one little moment in time which illustrates the characteristic graciousness of the man, by all accounts. I still have those pages I showed him that day.  And when I look at them today, I don't think of the dozens of hours I spent laboring over them in my childhood bedroom.  I think back very fondly to that three minutes when they were in the hands of the legendary Jack Kirby.

I Met Brett Favre In New Orleans In 1993

During last night's NFC Championship game in the Superdome, Brett Favre looked like a tired 40 year old man out there, taking a real beating, despite still making some great plays.  It made me feel old watching him struggle to his feet after each big hit, because I had met him in person (also in New Orleans, as it happens) at Mardi Gras in 1993, when we were both much younger guys in our early 20s.  


It was at a house party along an early afternoon parade route.  At one point I wandered outside and stood along the curb to catch some of the floats passing by, joining hundreds of other people (mostly young families). As the parade was passing, two huge, athletic-looking guys came out of the same house and stood alongside me, each wearing t-shirts and shorts. One was an immense, Samoan-looking guy in his early 20s who must have weighed 300 lbs., and the other was a very young Brett Favre.  


He wasn't famous then.  He had just finished his first year as the new quarterback of the downtrodden Green Bay Packers.  I only knew who he was because I watched ESPN's SportsCenter almost every night.   No one in the crowd came up to him and said anything while were were standing there. We started talking, though, about nothing much really.  He made a couple of joking references in passing to other NFL players, which was the only time football ever came up. Unlike other high-profile athletes I had met (even college players), who were usually standoffishly polite at best, Brett Favre was unassuming and very friendly that day.  And he was drinking only bottled water, unlike me.  It gave me some insight into how punishing life in the NFL could be when, just 3 years later, he became so addicted to painkillers that he was forced to enter rehab and enroll in the league's substance abuse program. 


I hope that he plays another year, if he can will his body to endure a little longer.

2009 Obit Montage (I Smelled Dominick Dunne)

Obituaries intrigue me. Death creates an occasion for us to pause and re-visit past accomplishments that otherwise fade with time for lack of any other single reason to celebrate them, no matter how historically or culturally important. Only death seems to be compelling and instantaneous enough to give us all a sufficient excuse for a collective and simultaneous pause. NBC Nightly News aired an excellent 3 minute montage of the famous people who passed away this year, which I've embedded below.

We'll all remember that Michael Jackson and Walter Cronkite died in 2009. But this montage made me remember several others. One in particular was Dominick Dunne. I really liked his column in Vanity Fair magazine, and flipped to it first whenever I happened upon an issue. I 'met' him once, too, actually. Well, sort of. It was in an airport (I can't remember which one now), maybe 10 years ago or so. It was not that long after the 1995 OJ Simpson trial, so he was probably at the peak of his fame. I was connecting from one flight to another, and so was walking within the terminal from one gate to another. From behind me on my right, up came Dominick Donne. He was being wheeled in a wheelchair (unusually briskly, I thought), that was pushed from behind by a uniformed sky cap. He looked much older and more frail than I expected, even back then.

As he passed, my first thought (after, "No way, that's Dominick Dunne!") was, "Huh. What's that he smells like? Is it cologne? No. After-shave? I don't think so. What is that?" He smelled, I don't know, like he'd just bathed, I guess. There was also something vaguely feminine about it. But only vaguely. Not perfume, for sure. But almost overpowering nonetheless. I didn't know what that was.

As he passed me (and everyone else), he had this detached but vigilant air about him, which clearly said to everyone around, "Yes, it's 'Me.' But I am way too busy to stop to talk to you. So don't try." Yet he was also very intently scanning the people around him from his seat in that nondescript airport wheelchair, to be sure that he was indeed being noticed anyway. It was a very strange mien for him, I thought, since his literary persona was based in part on skewering the foibles of the idle rich. It was only when I read his obituary a few months ago that I learned this was his standard behavior in public. Oh, and that that smell was in fact his 'inevitable' talcum powder.

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When I Met Marcus Allen (Just Don't Tell OJ)

Writing about having met Junior Seau reminded me that I also once met another NFL Hall of Famer (who also happens to be from San Diego), running back Marcus Allen.

It was in the spring of 1989, during my freshman year at UCLA. I had lost the "dorm lottery" at the start of the school year and so had to live off-campus in an apartment complex in Westwood. I was riding down in the elevator one saturday afternoon with one of my roommates to go out to lunch. But before we got to the ground floor, the elevator stopped and in walked Marcus Allen accompanied by a beautiful blonde woman. My roommate was a heavy set guy who didn't know much about sports. But he got star struck easily (and often, living where we did). So as soon as Marcus gets in the elevator, my roommate looks straight at him and exclaims (way too loudly for the confined space), "No way! You're Tony Dorsett!"

There was about a half second pause where I wasn't sure whether Marcus Allen was offended. But if he was, he caught himself quickly and smiled back and said "no" in a very gracious way, with a knowing glance at the blonde. Undaunted, my roommate pointed at him and tried again, "Franco Harris!?!" That was so insane, it caused all three of us (other than my roommate) to laugh out loud. When the laughter subsided, the woman said sweetly, "He's Marcus Allen." And just then the elevator doors opened and we all went our separate ways forever.

It wasn't until five years later, in 1994, among all the publicity about the murders of OJ Simpson's estranged wife Nicole and waiter Ronald Goldman that I realized the woman in the elevator that day with Marcus Allen was Nicole Brown Simpson herself.

My college apartment complex was renowned at the time for temporarily housing rich divorcees from the area before their divorces were finalized. Just a few months before that elevator ride, OJ Simpson had been arrested on New Years Day 1989 at his Brentwood mansion, just a few miles from that apartment, on charges of spousal battery. (Remember the recording of that infamous 911 call by Nicole?) And during OJ's 1995 murder trial, rumors swirled that, in addition to being a good friend of OJ, Marcus Allen had also had an affair with Nicole.

That was quite a 15 second elevator ride, on hindsight.

Junior Seau Re-Signs With The Patriots (Again)

12-time Pro Bowl linebacker Junior Seau re-signed with the NFL's New England Patriots today, a move that has been widely anticipated since the season started. Junior Seau made his name playing with the San Diego Chargers from 1990-2003, before he was traded to the Miami Dolphins, where he played for three relatively unremarkable (and injury-plagued) seasons. In each of the last few years he has played for the New England Patriots, seemingly at the end of his career as each NFL season has ended, only to re-sign in the middle of the following season (as he has again today).

Junior Seau and I both grew up near San Diego, California, and we're about the same age. The first time I met him was in the late 1980s, when he and I were both still in high school. His high school basketball team (Oceanside) and mine were each in the state high school basketball tournament. Our teams split the court at the San Diego Sports Arena (where the NBA's San Diego Clippers played long ago and where that tournament was being held) for a single scheduled practice session before the tournament started. Despite being a local celebrity even then, Junior Seau was an incredibly nice, approachable young guy with an infectious, broad smile. At the end of our teams' separate practices, our coaches decided that our teams should scrimmage each other. It was during that scrimmage that I got a lesson in how physically superior great professional athletes really are to "mere mortals."

Even then Junior Seau was well known in San Diego as a great high school football player. Basketball was an afterthought for him, it seemed like to me. And yet as we played that day, he was so clearly two or three notches above everyone else on the court. He ran faster, and, seemingly effortlessly, jumped higher and reacted more quickly than everyone else on the court. After that day, I was never surprised when he was recruited to USC,or when he left there early to enter the NFL draft, or when he went on to have a Hall of Fame career in the NFL with the Chargers.

I ran into him again near the end of his career, five years ago or so, after he had been traded to the Miami Dolphins. I was with some friends at an upscale bar in downtown Los Angeles. It was the night before a friend's wedding and, since none of us was from LA, we just sort of found ourselves at this random place having a few drinks after dinner because it happened to be near our hotel. As the night wore on, however, the bar transformed around us into a more exclusive, celebrity-laden place. All of the Los Angeles Lakers arrived (other than Kobe), even Shaq, to celebrate, it turned out, Brian Shaw's birthday. Junior Seau was there, too. I went up and introduced myself and said I was a fan from San Diego. He smiled back politely (if a little weakly) and responded with a well practiced (if distant) "thank you," but nothing more. And then his glance moved deliberately over my shoulder (like that photo above), to something (perhaps nothing) in the distance. I got the message.

He was rich and famous by then, having fulfilled all the promise (and more) of his much-ballyhooed high school career 15 years earlier. But he wasn't as physically imposing as I had remembered. And the infectious smile was gone. (And that was at a party....)

Harry Connick, Jr. On Australian TV

I met Harry Connick, Jr. once. It was at Mardi Gras in New Orleans in 1993. He was the king of the Bacchus parade that year. The parade ended with a black tie ball at the convention center. At one point during the ball I got up from our table and wandered over to check out the elaborate train of parade floats that was parked inside. And it was then that I ran into him in passing. Well, actually, I clumsily interjected myself as he was talking with a young woman (whom he married a year later). I was already a fan of his, and I had been celebrating with friends for several hours, so I was more talkative than I should have been. But he was incredibly gracious about it all.

Yesterday Harry Connick, Jr. made news because of his similarly gracious (but firmly disapproving) response to some performers on an Australian variety show who were dressed in black face. Here's the 1 minute segment about it from NBC news last night:

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20th Anniversary of Tim Burton's 1989 "Batman" Movie

The photo above is of Bob Kane, who created Batman 70 years ago in 1939. He's with Michael Keaton on the set of Tim Burton's "Batman" movie. Last week was the 20th anniversary of the release of that film in 1989. Despite having died in 1998, Bob Kane remains a controvertial figure, in part because he was perceived to have vigorously and inaccurately promoted himself as the sole creator of Batman (at the expense of, most notably, writer Bill Finger), and because from very early in his career he did little of the actual artwork, instead hiring uncredited ghost artists.

I met Bob Kane once. It was at the San Diego Comic-Con (back when it was called that) in the summer of 1987 or 1988. Comic-Con was on a much smaller scale then. It's emphasis was much more on cardboard boxes of comic books selling 3 for a $1, than on movie stars and summer blockbusters like it is today. Bob Kane was handing out yellow buttons (like the one I got from him above), promoting the upcoming film. At the time he handed me that button, the film was still not even in production and so the worldwide hype and "Batmania" that ultimately surrounded the release of the film itself was still over a year away. The Bob Kane I met was just a well dressed older gentleman handing out these buttons while standing in front of a card table. No one was surrounding him.

In many respects, it was the colossal success of that film that changed the "San Diego Comic-Con" into the much grander "Comic-Con International San Diego" that it is today, in the process ensuring (unfortunately) that the way I met Bob Kane would never be repeated in later years.

Did David Carradine do a Michael Hutchence?

Wow. According to the Associated Press, David Carradine was found dead in the closet of his room at a luxury hotel in Bangkok, with, accoding to Thai Police, a rope "tied around his penis and another around his neck."

Contrary to initial speculation, his death may not have been suicide. Rather, it may have been either accidental suffocation, presumably an unintended consequence of an auto-erotic sex act (ala Michael Hutchence), or due to a heart attack following an orgasm. Autopsy results pending. If his death was indeed accidental, in light of that fact that he was 72 years old, is that inglorious? Or is it "amazing," in a Kill Bill sort of way?

I met David Carradine once. As a teenager I was invited to a comic book distributors' meeting in Los Angeles that was held on an unremarkable saturday morning in the summer of 1988 in an undecorated warehouse. I also met Jack Kirby that day. To my utter amazement, at one point in walked David Carradine.

As a child in the 1970s, I had been a big fan of the TV show "Kung Fu." So I recognized him instantly, even though he looked pale and "tired" and had a bit of a paunch that wasn't well hidden by the open collared shirt and polyesther sweat pants he was wearing. And was that a glass of scotch or bourbon he was casually and un-selfconsciously carrying around in his right hand? At 11 AM? (And where did he get that? No one else was drinking.)

Nonetheless, he was the biggest star in the room that day. He knew it and so did everyone else. And while he may have been a shadow of his former self, he still radiated some star power. He wasn't very chatty (at least as far a I saw). But he was amiable, in a distant sort of way.

Above is a picture taken that day, with me as a teenager, Jack Kirby and David Carradine (and in the background, Jim Valentino, who years later would go on to co-found Image Comics).

Accidental death or no, I will try to remember the David Carradine in that photo, with a bourboun dangling listlessly from his hand, rather than the rope dangling from penis image that keeps forcing itself, unwanted, to the front of my mind as I write this.