ON THE SCENE / PATT MORRISON : The Craziness of Day No. 1, Frame by Frame

Hundreds of reporters, scores of hours of video, thousands of words expended to convey the tedium and the lunacy of Thursday in Los Angeles--and this was only the beginning.

It was a day so crazy that O.J. Simpson’s lawyer-friends Robert Kardashian and Leroy Taft, pursued into the street by reporters, took a bus to a Downtown restaurant for lunch and hitched a ride back to court in a police car. And it was a day so routine that in dense traffic a mere block from the courthouse, bored Angelenos who had been expecting legal fireworks had already switched their car radios to Motown, banda , country --anything but O.J.

Yet no one could get away from it.

In a gym in Long Beach, people stayed aboard the Stairmasters so they could watch TV . . . in a Crenshaw district store a saleswoman’s 5-year-old daughter said as the TV came on, “Oh no, not O.J. again!” . . . in a Chicago bar at noontime no one wondered who he was when the waitress asked, “Do you think he did it?” . . . in Atlanta, where, of the 66 color TVs in the electronics department of the Peachtree Street Macy’s, all but two were turned to CNN and Simpson.

The first day of O.J. Simpson’s preliminary hearing could fit anyplace in L.A.’s kaleidoscope:

Variety would call it a plodding legal sequel that couldn’t hold the audience, compared to the original blockbuster, the slow-mo twilight freeway chase of two weeks ago.

And the radio shrinks could say that Americans have had it up to here with O.J. . . . or that we’re so avid for every scrap about the case that the Boston Globe can trill on for a dozen rapt paragraphs about the prosecutor’s “head of tight curls” and the defense attorney’s “deep, deep tan.”

The day, frame by frame:

At 7:30 a.m., , Nicole Brown Simpson’s sisters, parents and friends were sitting in the back booth of a Downtown coffee shop, waiting to attend the hearing.

The hearing that had gotten as much buildup as the opening of a new Steven Spielberg movie began with promising drama, when the helicopters hover into sound and view at 8:40 a.m., tracking the police van bringing Simpson to court.

The courtroom pace moved ponderously, disappointing many who had expected incendiary TV-movie lawyering. But not everyone.

At Jefferson Boulevard and Crenshaw Avenue, where “Pray for O.J.” T-shirts rippled like flags in the late June wind, Jay Akeem paid $10 for an extra-large and said: “We grew up on ‘Perry Mason’ and ‘Matlock’. . . . It’s tedious going through the proceedings, though. I was watching this morning, the forensics, the LAPD woman--(it was) getting real technical, but it’s important.”

At the Legends sports bar in Santa Monica, Steve Grospitz was late for lunch with his sister Lori because he had been watching the case. “I actually was kind of wanting for this to get started; we heard so much hearsay. I was interested in what the court was going to do. Michael Jackson, the Menendez thing.” But the city’s energy, he figures, “is kind of exhausted.”

And at an Encino electronics shop, Frank Peters stood transfixed before Simpson’s hearing in Warholian replica on 25 screens: “It can get boring and bogged down at times, but overall, it gives an understanding of judicial process.”

With only 80 seats in the courtroom, news stations and the curious found livelier events out on the courthouse sidewalks. Seesaw debates went on between Simpson supporters and people such as Jewish Defense League leader Irv Rubin, who demanded via bullhorn that defense attorney Robert L. Shapiro not forget his “Jewish brother, Ronald Goldman,” one of the victims.

Nearby, artist Rodney Vanworth created an instant mural when he spread a six-foot canvas on the sidewalk and invited people to write on it with markers. He had already drawn the figure of a red-smeared woman with knives sticking out of her body, a shoe, a jail cell, a sink and a toilet and a trophy with the words “hero” and “pity the victims” written on it.

In Brentwood, as police searched an empty lot for more evidence, it was like old times--2 1/2 weeks ago when Brentwood was the center of the action.

Noted Brentwood resident Richard Riordan, out for a stroll near his home, was hailed by a limo driver. “Mayor!” the man hollered, and then, with a flourish, told his passengers--Australian tourists visiting the murder site--”This is the mayor of Los Angeles!”

A delivery man from A Votre Sante restaurant, who had fed the media mob in Brentwood last month, lost no time in returning Thursday, joining other caterers who followed the helicopters to the police search. Sean McFarland handed out menus for fare like whole wheat chapatis filled with hummus. “This is Brentwood,” he said. “Nobody eats anything with fat in it.”

Commerce has been part of big legal cases since fast-buck artists sold toy monkeys on the sidewalks outside the Scopes evolution trial in 1925.

Outside the courthouse, shirt-seller K.T. had virtually cleared out all 20 dozen shirts--”Don’t Squeeze the Juice” and “Pray for O.J.”--in two days. One woman asked K.T., “Do you have any with the opposite point of view, like ‘Fry O.J.’?”

Just as white Ford Broncos suddenly had higher appeal after the Simpson freeway chase--a Georgia dealer reportedly parked one in front of his lot with the sign, “As Seen on TV”--a Downtown cutlery store was inundated with requests for a particular style of large knife after witnesses at the hearing testified that Simpson had bought one there.

City Hall sidewalks served as little more than a parking lot for TV vans--and they all got parking tickets.

In one city councilman’s office, the receptionist admitted that “there’s a TV in back that no one’s supposed to know about.” And standing with the smokers on the west steps, Vivian Sarpong complained that she had gone to a drugstore Thursday morning to buy “one of those little TVs, and they were all sold out!” At her desk, she prepared “a little spot for my TV. Got a little piece of cardboard in case anybody comes by, I can flop it down, cover it up.”

If people watched or listened at work, most tried to do so unobtrusively.

At the Radio Shack in the bowels of the Arco towers, a TV showed the Simpson case--but partly because the reception was too bad to get soccer.

And at Mezzaluna, the bright, prow-shaped Brentwood restaurant where Nicole Simpson last ate and Goldman last worked, waiters sliding the luncheon specials into the menus looked up at the television suspended from the cloud-painted ceiling, and murmured about the day’s legal doings in overheard snippets like “special circumstances” and “and then he walks.”

The start of the hearing coincided with lunch hour in other parts of the country.

In the back room of Mother Hubbard’s in Chicago, claims adjuster Alona Sanders got to monitor the case at work the first day--but today is another matter. “They came in and told us today that as of tomorrow, they were cutting off the radios during work hours,” Sanders said. “They think it’s interfering with our work.”

It’s soccer, not Simpson, that’s disrupting the Russian parliament by keeping people up until 2 a.m.. And in bookish Boston, one woman’s regular two-hour Saturday phone call to her mother in Ohio has been devoted exclusively to Simpson, and now runs three hours.

Back in Los Angeles, only one moment seemed to vary from the script.

A tall man in a suit walked into the heavily secured court wearing one of the rare white badges identifying him as a member of the defense or prosecution team. He said he was “a good friend of O.J.’s and Shapiro’s.”

When deputies asked Shapiro about that, the attorney said: “I’ve never seen him in my life.”

As deputies tried to corner the man, he fled.

Times staff writers Andrea Ford, John Hurst and Josh Meyer in Los Angeles, Steve Braun and Judy Pasternak in Chicago and Elizabeth Mehren in Boston and Times researcher Edith Stanley in Atlanta contributed to this story.