Covering the Crime--Hollywood Style : Celebrity: The din outside O.J. Simpson’s mansion is the media clamoring for a tidbit or two. ‘Middle America wants to know,’ a photographer says.

It was midday in L.A. and the morning after of the season’s first big celebrity scandale. A din filled the lawn across the street froJ. Simpson’s mansion. The Hollywood press corps was settling in for another long siege.

“It’s almost like a morbid family reunion,” said a segment director for “Hard Copy,” the dirt-dishing TV show. “You see the same people, and everybody’s friendly. Hi, Stacey!”

She dashed off to give a big hug and an air kiss to a story coordinator for “Inside Edition.”

Another star, another crime, another shocking exclusive on prime time.

It was Tuesday, and dirty laundry day once again for the folks on the rich-and-famous beat. Last summer it was the Michael Jackson brouhaha and the arrest of Heidi Fleiss, the accused madam to the stars. Then came winter and the Tonya Harding ice-bashing affair. Spring brought Roseanne and Tom Arnold, and their on-again, off-again divorce.

And now comes summer--or almost summer, anyway--and the killings of football great O. J. Simpson’s ex-wife and a friend outside her Brentwood townhouse. So back again they flocked to stake out yet another celebrity lawn--the mainstream press and the scandal sheets, the TV and the tabloids, the paparazzi and the camera crews.

“A certain part of it is our job,” sighed one print journalist who was whiling away the Simpson watch by working a crossword puzzle.

“It’s a gray area. It feeds itself. We create it, and it creates us, and our audience needs it and it’s a vicious cycle.”

She paused meaningfully.

“Is elan another word for verve ?”

Not far away, Stacey Gualandi, the story coordinator for “Inside Edition,” said the Simpson story has a gravity that other recent celebrity scandals have lacked, in part because of the brutality of the slayings and in part because Nicole Simpson had two children.

“There is an excitement, some adrenaline,” Gualandi said. “But you feel sorry for the people at the same time. With Roseanne and Tom (Arnold), there was this feeling of wondering whether it was truly legitimate. This is a very serious situation.”

But for the looky-loos who found their way to Simpson’s mansion on Rockingham Avenue, the vigil itself proved entertaining.

“This is the story everybody wants to know,” said Robert Johnson, a middle-aged man who said he works nights for the phone company and who spent Tuesday morning peering through the green wrought-iron gate.

The scenery, for the most part, was obscured by dozens of mike-toting, note-scribbling reporters who felt the same way. But that was OK with Johnson, a self-described “media groupie” whose chief regret Tuesday was that he was out of town last year for the media circus that cropped up around Fleiss.

“I like watching you guys,” he said, shrugging good-naturedly as the assorted ladies and gentlemen of the press stood on tiptoe and hopped up and down in an effort to see over Simpson’s front wall.

“I don’t have a life.”

On Tuesday, as the Simpson tragedy continued to unfold and the football great apparently sequestered himself in his Tudor home, there was little else to look at save the antics of the media and the comings and goings of the supportive, the curious and those who happened to be passing by.

Actor James Garner, caught in an early morning traffic jam on the street, cussed out the camera crews. A bicyclist identified by a wire service photographer as Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan pedaled by, although the rest of the press corps did not get a good enough look at him to be sure. At one point, two carloads of Simpson’s relatives arrived; at another, someone drove up in a black Range Rover. (Several reporters were sure it was singer Jermaine Jackson, but when someone shouted, “Hi, Jermaine,” he failed to respond.)

A catering truck showed up, hawking burritos to the cameramen. Diapers and Sparkletts water were delivered, as was lunch from a takeout rib joint, and a pizza from Domino’s that apparently the Simpson party had not ordered.

“That’s a good one,” someone snorted over the driveway intercom when the hapless pizza man identified himself. Bravely, the press corps stepped into the breach and consumed the unwanted afternoon snack.

Several young blond women sauntered past the house throughout the day, conveniently walking their dogs in camera range. The photographer who got punched out by the bodyguard for rock star Prince stopped by in a turquoise Jeep with a TXMDONA license plate.

Things turned tense when a group of teenagers threatened to turn on the sprinklers of the neighbor’s lawn on which some camera crews were camped. Someone in a black Jeep with a USC license plate holder gunned it through a cluster of reporters huddled in Simpson’s driveway, and revved up the motor on the way out.

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But, generally speaking, the only action came when some friend or relative of Simpson’s pulled into the home, and a clattering wave of people and notebooks and wires and cameras and microphones surged in the wake.

Otherwise, the reporters were left to compare notes, speculate, reminisce about the scandals of yesteryear and make note of the ambivalence some felt about covering celebrity tragedies.

A free-lance photographer in a purple sweat shirt stressed that he does not ordinarily cover stories like this, and only agreed to do this shoot because “this isn’t crawling through bushes.”

“See?” he said proudly, pointing to his leg. “No scratches on my knees. I can look in the mirror in the morning and I can sleep at night.”

He cast a disparaging eye around him, as his less discerning colleagues kept a hawklike watch on Simpson’s gate.

“These guys have no life,” he sniffed. “They’re here 12, 14 hours a day scrounging. They’re married to their work. You see the same people here all the time. It’s a big waste. But Middle America wants to know--they eat it up.”

He did a quick headcount. The way he figured, this coverage was costing $10,000 a day in labor costs alone.

“You’ve got enough people here to do a feature film,” he complained.

Nearby, a sound man overheard. A feature film? He laughed.

“It probably will be,” he replied.