A Searing Focus on Ponderous Proceedings

Hundreds of reporters, scores of hours of video, thousands of words expended to convey the tedium and the lunacy of Thursday in Los Angeles--with all this, the mood of the day was best captured by the behavior of a copy machine in the fifth-floor county clerk’s office.

Turning out document replicas to satisfy all the reporters who wanted them, it simply overloaded and stopped.

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--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 cars mired in dense traffic a mere block from the courthouse, radios were blaring everything but O.J.

The first day of O.J. Simpson’s preliminary hearing could fit any place 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.

Caltech could plot the course of Thursday’s newsquake, from the courtroom epicenter, across town, across the country, to a Northridge restaurant where bartender Alex Lunardon fulminated that “every channel that I’ve turned to has it on.”

No matter what, he said, “at 4:30 I’m definitely showing the soccer match. I’m Argentine.”

The trial was everywhere. In a gym in Long Beach, people stayed aboard the Stairmasters so they could watch TV. In a Chicago bar at noontime no one wondered who he was when the waitress asked, “Do you think he did it?” And in the Peachtree Street Macy’s in Atlanta, of the 66 color TVs in the electronics department, all but two were tuned to CNN and Simpson.

The radio shrinks could say that we have had it up to here with O.J. . . . or that we’re so hungry 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.”

But even if some are bored and tired and generally disgusted with the whole O.J. spectacle, that isn’t likely to interfere with the pursuit of the bottom line.

At the Canoga Park Bowl, Priscilla Simone of Woodland Hills remembered that she doubled her usual bartender’s income as patrons glued to her television set stayed and drank during the arrest of O.J. two weeks ago. “If it were you or I, I wouldn’t have made that much money and they wouldn’t have sold all them newspapers,” she said. “It’s a celebrity everyone’s gaining off of.”

The day, frame by frame:

At 7:30 a.m., an hour when even the homeless have just begun to stir on Downtown streets, Nicole Brown Simpson’s sisters, parents and friends were sitting in the back booth of a scruffy Downtown coffee shop, waiting to attend the hearing.

The hearing, which had gotten as much buildup as the opening of a new Steven Spielberg movie, began with promising drama, when the helicopters hovered into sound and view at 8:40 a.m., tracking the police van bringing Simpson to court. (Unlike what one young man assured another on a Downtown street, there is no tunnel from the jail to the courthouse.)

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

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.”

With only 80 seats in the courtroom, news stations and the curious found more engrossing events out on the courthouse sidewalks. See-saw 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. Perennial candidate Melrose Larry Green told a Simpson supporter, “Stand up and smell the bagels!”

Nearby, artist Rodney Vanworth created an instant mural when he spread a 6-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--two weeks ago--when it was the center of the action.

A deliveryman from A Votre Sante restaurant, who had fed the media mob back then, lost no time in returning Thursday and passing out menus for fare like whole wheat chapatis filled with hummus. “This is Brentwood,” said Sean McFarland. “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 fingered a shirt, sniffed and said to K.T., “Do you have any with the opposite point of view, like ‘Fry O.J.’?”

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.” Mayor Richard Riordan’s aides held their breath lest their boss be bumped yet again from an oft-delayed morning news appearance.

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!” She will buy one this weekend. 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.

On the floor of a huge Downtown bank, a woman at a desk murmured that there was a TV around somewhere, but “the bank doesn’t pay me for that, unfortunately.”

“People are forced to watch it, if they want to watch television,” said a frustrated Cheryl Williams of Woodland Hills, who saw the proceedings at Lee’s Natural Nails in Tarzana while waiting for her French manicure to dry.

Manicurist Chau Hoang was envious because only customers at the salon face the TV set while those doing the polishing have their backs to the screen. “We wanted to see it, but we were busy.” she said.

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 snips like “special circumstances” and “and then he walks.”

The start of the hearing coincided with lunch hour in much 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.”

Back in Los Angeles, only a handful of customers were sitting in the bar at Chili’s Grill & Bar in Northridge as the proceedings resumed after a two-hour lunch break. And they were wearing down. “I’m looking for a break from all this O.J. stuff,” said Carmelita Robins(CQ) of Reseda.

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, coveted 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 defense attorney said: “I’ve never seen him in my life,” and the man was hustled out. Contributing to this story was Times staff writer Abigail Goldman