Smith’s Team Working to Recast Him as the Underdog : Rape Trial: Defense handling of potential jurors and the media show public-relations savvy as well as legal expertise.

Florence Orbach lasted only two days in the jury pool for William Kennedy Smith’s rape trial, but the wise-cracking Palm Beach widow parted with a thought that other potential jurors may have shared.

After fielding defense attorney Roy Black’s questions for part of an afternoon, she told a Palm Beach talk radio host that the prosecutor in Smith’s case “may not be able to compete with that charmer.”

“He’s so smooth,” said the 78-year-old Orbach, who was excused after her tart courtroom observations about the Kennedy family brought a flood of interview requests and raised questions about her fitness and impartiality.

The prosecution may disagree with her assessment, but the observation underscored the legal and public-relations strengths displayed by Smith’s team in the first week and a half of the proceedings. The defense team has shown an ability to make the most of the mixed blessings of the Kennedy name, has exploited every opportunity to dramatize what it considers the unfairness of Smith’s situation and has tried to cast a flattering light on the defendant’s personality.

The defense team also has demonstrated a keen ability to handle potential jurors as well as the courthouse press corps that it must appease. “I think they’ve given a good impression of Smith,” said Bill Wallshein, a local defense attorney and former prosecutor.

Smith, 31, is accused of raping a 30-year-old Jupiter, Fla., woman at the Kennedy family’s ocean-front estate in Palm Beach on March 30. Jury selection began Oct. 30, and the trial is scheduled for Dec. 2 through Dec. 20.

Smith’s greatest strength may lie in Black. Called “the professor” for his low-key delivery, the Miami attorney is chief architect of the defense strategy.

With one hand often thrust deep into a pocket, relaxed in posture and speech, Black has traded friendly banter with jurors, commiserated with them about the ordeal of jury duty and confessed his own nervousness as a public speaker.

When pharmacist Joseph DiNicola explained that his customers did not usually ask him about the Smith case, but much more often asked about the high price of prescription drugs, Black was ready. “That was going to be my next question,” he joked. “Why are the prices so high?”

Black was sympathetic when Orbach complained about being hounded by the press and embarrassed by her jury-box interview being on TV. He praised her for her efforts to follow the judge’s instructions.

In contrast, prosecutor Moira K. Lasch referred to Orbach--out of earshot--as a “borderline incompetent.” Lasch has been formal and unsmiling in court, often introducing herself to prospective jurors as “Mrs. Moira Lasch” and repeating questions to prospective jurors without variation if she is not satisfied with a response.

“You’ve already asked me that twice,” one jury pool member protested wearily at one point.

Black has done what he could to separate Smith from unflattering associations with other members of the Kennedy family.

Day after day, prospective jurors have told Black of their impressions of the family patriarch, the late Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., as a bootlegger. He was the father of the defendant’s uncle, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), whom some said they regarded as a drinker, a womanizer and a man who cavorted half clad in the family home on the night of the alleged crime.

Black has listened patiently. Then he has asked whether his client should be judged by the acts of other family members. A negative answer is suggested in the question and, one after another, the jury pool members have given the desired response.

In such juror interviews, “you’re always trying to shape viewpoints,” defense attorney Wallshein said.

Black has repeatedly cited the heavy press coverage to try to portray his client as a man at risk of being convicted because of his name. Reporters’ calls to Orbach were a “direct attack on the order and dignity of this case,” he said Thursday as he moved to have TV cameras barred from the courtroom. The motion was denied.

On Friday, he moved for a fourth time to have cameras excluded, and to dismiss the jury pool after one prospective juror said that some in the group were hesitant to speak their minds for fear of being embarrassed on television.

Black’s motions to limit media coverage not only laid the foundation for a later appeal on grounds of unfair publicity, they also diverted attention from Smith’s alleged crime to alleged mistreatment of him, lawyers noted.

Although he has denounced some members of the press, Black has been careful to make friends with others.

Dominick Dunne, a novelist and writer for Vanity Fair, wrote one of the toughest analyses of the case for the magazine. But Dunne said he was disarmed when Black, who had reason to be unhappy with him, introduced himself one day at the courthouse door.

Black said he had read “every word,” Dunne wrote. “ ‘You are one hell of a writer,’ ” Dunne quoted Black as saying. “ ‘I just wish you weren’t writing about this .’ ”

Dunne said he considers Black “a brilliant lawyer. . . . I know if I were ever in trouble, I think I would contact Roy Black.”

Since jury selection began, the Smith team has had some success in changing the impression of the defendant’s personality that appears in the news.

A shadowy, even menacing character in many press reports at the time the rape allegation surfaced, Smith increasingly is portrayed as a young man with some very ordinary habits. As described by his recently retained publicist, Smith plays with his puppy, tosses a plastic football on the estate with his lawyers and worries about the trial expenses, which he has promised to bear alone.

This week, a 21-year-old woman named Teresa Kilbourn burst from the crowd in front of the courthouse to embrace Smith--supplying an image that ended up on the front page of the Palm Beach Post.

The photo and recent press interviews with Smith, his mother, his attorneys, jury-selection experts and publicists, last week prompted an angry complaint from prosecutor Lasch. She said the Kennedy family was “manipulating” the press in violation of Judge Mary Lupo’s gag order and suggested that Kilbourn’s embrace was a set-up.

The prosecutor’s office was unable to verify that Kilbourn worked in an adjacent county office, as she had told reporters, Lasch said.

Smith himself has shown in the opening days of jury selection that he can come up with a very presentable quote.

For the most part, he has taken the high ground. Smith did not lash out at the press or his accuser, but praised the system and lamented that “I’m on trial for my family and my family’s on trial for me.”

On Thursday, however, Smith showed that he could be sarcastic. He lashed out at the prosecutor for suggesting that Orbach was incompetent because of her age, saying that Lasch was “walking proof” that “anybody of any age can be incompetent.” Later he said, half-joking, that he had intended that remark to be off the record.

Smith “may have gone too far,” said Wallshein, the defense lawyer.

In other ways, the defense team’s public-relations vulnerabilities have also been evident.

The defense has built its strategy on accusations that the alleged victim is psychologically disturbed and promiscuous--arguments that many find unfair by their very nature.