COLUMN ONE : Illusion, Reality and Heroes : Should it come as a surprise that another American icon--O.J. Simpson--may be tumbling from grace? Not really, say students of society’s love-hate affair with the famous.

Heroes are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials, or none at all.

--Gerald W. Johnson, in his 1943 book, “American Heroes and Hero-Worship”

There is a moment, in the lives of some whom society holds up as idols, when private character collides with a public persona. It is at this juncture that Americans often make a jarring, unwanted discovery: Their gods have feet of clay.

John F. Kennedy, we learn after his death, cheated on his genteel wife. A bloated Elvis Presley, his body brimming with drugs, takes his last breath on a bathroom floor. Jimmy Swaggart cavorts with a hooker. Magic Johnson cuts short his brilliant basketball career, disclosing that his promiscuity is responsible for his infection with the virus that causes AIDS.

Now there is O.J.--so likable, so friendly, so familiar that the initials need not be followed by a last name.

He is not charged with any crime, but he has wandered into a maelstrom that already is tarnishing his reputation, possibly beyond recovery. In the minds of his public lurk unspeakable, unthinkable images that do not comport with their perception of a man who has befriended them through their TV and movie screens.

News vans and paparazzi now surround Simpson’s Brentwood home, angling for the perfect shot. Defense lawyers speak for a man who once spoke eloquently for himself. Ugly details of spousal abuse are being aired anew. Unnamed police sources whisper about shreds of evidence--a bloody glove, stains on a driveway--that may or may not implicate the man many call the greatest running back of all time in the slaying of his pretty former wife and her handsome waiter friend, 10 years younger.

Another hero, it seems, is falling from grace. People are shocked, disappointed. “He seemed like such a civilized guy,” one crushed fan laments as he pores over a newspaper story containing sordid allegations that Simpson had beaten his wife in the past.

Should another tumbling icon come as any big surprise?

Not really, according to psychologists, sociologists and observers of popular culture. Scandals such as the one enveloping O.J. Simpson come about, these experts say, because of the unique tendency of Americans--through television, the movies, the print media and advertising--to embellish heroes by assigning qualities of perfection to those who are not perfect.

“The nature of the medium of celebrity is to make (stars) seem familiar to us,” said David Harris, a San Francisco writer and author of a book on the National Football League. “We think we know them. They are people that are in some way included, in the psychological sense, as extended family. That’s the illusion that keeps being punctured in these things. Stepping back from it, how could we think we knew who he was?”

Yet even Harris said part of him--the part that is purely a football fan--was stunned to learn that police are considering Simpson a suspect in the brutal slayings of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Lyle Goldman. The pair were discovered stabbed to death shortly after midnight Sunday, their blood-soaked bodies sprawled on a walkway near the Brentwood condominium where Nicole Simpson lived with the couple’s two young children.

“Oh no. No no noooo,” Harris said, recounting his reaction to the news. “Not O.J. Simpson. This couldn’t be. I didn’t want it to be true. Nobody wants it to be true.”

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“Famous people are very important in a democratic society,” said Leo Braudy, an English professor at USC and author of “The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History.” Americans, Braudy said, “have an ongoing preoccupation with the famous as enlarged images of ourselves, ideal versions, versions of traits we’d like to have . . . or do have in small amounts.”

Yet the very reason the public can idealize famous people is that stars enjoy a luxury few others have: the ability to create a public image that is separate from--and sometimes not consistent with--one’s private life.

“Fame is the most obvious place where individuals, private people, can create a personality that exists not just for their family or for their inner nature, but for an audience,” Braudy said. “The whole question of who we are when we are alone is something that the issue of fame plays around with in an intriguing way.”

The more people expect of a famous person, experts say, the more difficult it is for the public to accept that their idols fall short of expectations.

When a rock ‘n’ roll star with an outlaw image gets in trouble, the public is not particularly surprised--and experts say the star’s standing may even be enhanced by his escapades. But when, in the wake of the death of Martin Luther King Jr., reports emerge that the revered civil rights leader may have been a philanderer, his admirers are devastated.

“It’s like when we heard about the Watergate tapes,” said Century City psychologist Lilli Friedland. “To hear that the President could talk in that kind of gutter language. . . . It took something away from the power of the office, from the awesomeness of it all. It made it almost too human.”

Over time, through Watergate and other political scandals, Americans have come to expect less of their politicians--so much so that although U.S. Sen. Gary Hart was forced out of a presidential race after being linked with a woman other than his wife, Bill Clinton went on to win the presidency despite allegations of marital infidelity.

But the sports world is a place where people still yearn for untainted heroes to remain untainted, said Steven Stark, who comments on popular culture for National Public Radio. So it is especially devastating when sports heroes fall. Recent sports history is full of scandal, ranging from outfielder Darryl Strawberry’s drug problems to boxer Mike Tyson’s conviction for rape to baseball great Pete Rose’s gambling troubles.

“Sports is this place that we like to think is pure, whereas the rest of society has been corrupted,” Stark said. “It’s a place where clear rules apply. There is always black and white, there is a winner and a loser. In a culture where so much else has gotten confused, where so many other images have gotten blurred, it is very important for people to hold on to these pristine images of sports. So when these sorts of scandals occur in the sports world, it is terribly upsetting to people.”

Also terribly upsetting, psychologists and others say, are scandals in which children are let down.

Consider Pee Wee Herman, who was arrested in a Florida X-rated movie house, said Michael Kamins, a USC marketing professor. “Pee Wee Herman,” Kamins said, “was for kids. You said: ‘Oh my god, how could he do that?’ ”

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A similar refrain--”Could he really do that?”--is now being echoed across the nation about Simpson, despite the legal presumption that he is innocent. The shock is especially acute because of the vast gulf between the football star’s image and the grisly nature of the crime at hand.

Orenthal James Simpson has long been more, much more, than a great football player.

His early story was the stuff of media legends--a local boy who made good and overcame a difficult life, born in what was then the predominantly black Potrero Hill section of San Francisco to a hospital worker mother who was separated from his father.

“He led an aimless, street-corner existence,” reads one 1969 biography of Simpson, “running with a gang and coming close to serious trouble with the law on several occasions before his energies found a positive outlet in athletics.”

His statistics spoke for themselves. When his career ended, he had carried the ball more times--2,404--than any previous running back in pro football history; he had rushed for more yards--11,236--than anyone except Jim Brown; he had gained more ground in one season--2,003 yards in 1973--than any other player before him.

Any athlete can rack up numbers. Simpson had style.

On the field, he was elegant, graceful; when he retired in 1979, the Washington Post sports page wrote of “moves that Nureyev could envy . . . fakes and sprints and balletic leaps, a powerful choreography that elevated running with a football to an art form.”

Off the field, he came across as charming and easy to like--dashing across airports in Hertz rental car ads, picking apart plays as a television commentator in the awkward, yet endearing manner some retired sports stars have, playing hokey characters in Naked Gun movies. He seemed like the kind of guy who would gladly sign an autograph for a stranger, said Harris, the writer from San Francisco.

“After his football career, he succeeded in projecting an extraordinarily warm persona,” Harris says. “While this guy made his living selling rental cars and the like, he did it without seeming to cheapen himself.

“He was a guy without a smudge on him,” Harris said. “If you ask the question: ‘Who is likely to go out and murder his wife?’ there are plenty of sports figures who might come to mind instantly. O.J. Simpson is not one of those. Far from it. He’s at the other end.”

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On Figueroa Street near USC, at a Mexican restaurant and sports bar in the shadow of the stadium where O.J. Simpson made some of his greatest touchdown runs, the Wednesday night scene serves up a mixture of disbelief, confusion and sadness along with the margaritas and cervezas.

“Devastated,” Steve Franks declares himself at the mention of Simpson’s name.

On the big screen, the New York Knicks were duking it out with the Houston Rockets in the NBA finals. But another sport was on Franks’ mind. The fortyish controller of an attorney’s messenger service in Downtown Los Angeles grew up watching Juice cut and fake and sprint, first for the USC Trojans and later for the Buffalo Bills.

“If there is such a glove, if there were bloodstains. . . . To take a knife? . . . “ his voice trails off. “It’s like a dagger in my heart.”

Franks’ table mate, 24-year-old Ladell Wilkins, doesn’t really want to talk about the Simpson affair. Wilkins played some high school football--running back, the same position Simpson played. “I’m a little confused,” Wilkins said plainly. “He was my idol.”

Yet twinned with this sense of disbelief is a grim curiosity, a thirst for more information. Even as the media come under attack for sensationalizing the murders and laying out a case against Simpson before he has been charged with any crime, people such as Franks say they are lapping up whatever information they can get.

“I’m getting hooked,” Franks said. “Today I caught myself reading three papers to find out about the story.”

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Some believe the reason people have heroes, especially sports heroes, is to make them feel better about themselves. Dr. Stanley Teitelbaum, a New York City psychologist who has written about the role of sports in American society, says people “connect how they feel about themselves and their own lives with how the hero is doing.”

Teitelbaum added: “If you latch yourself onto a winning team, and they win, you feel like a winner.” But when the winning team loses, or the hero topples off his pedestal, he said, “it may feel like a personal blow--like if you’re bringing down (my idol), you’re bringing down a part of me.”

When an idol takes a tumble, psychologists and other experts say, there are a series of predictable reactions. Some people become even more loyal supporters, refusing to believe bad news. Some people blame the messenger--often the press. Some become disillusioned, angry, even disgusted. And some watch with fascination, transfixed by the public unraveling of an icon.

“People want to have heroes,” said Stark, the NPR commentator, “but on the other hand there is this sort of interest in the perverse qualities of them at the same time. It’s sort of an American tradition to tear people down.”

Whether Simpson will be torn down in the end depends, in large part, on how the slaying of his former wife is resolved.

Some say that even if he is never charged, Simpson will always be tainted, if only by the revelation that he pleaded no contest to a charge of spousal battery in 1989. Others, such as Dallas Willard, a USC philosophy professor who lectures on the role of sports in society, say that even if Simpson is implicated, he will always be afforded more sympathy than scorn.

“He spent too many years,” Willard said, “wearing those grooves of goodness in the mind of the public.”

Times staff writer Ralph Frammolino contributed to this report.