Publisher’s Book Doubles as Monkey Wrench in Simpson Saga

Before Oct. 18, Michael Viner was mostly famous for having the good taste to marry actress Deborah Raffin.

Raffin is cool and blond, cursed with brains as well as beauty.

The couple has lived for almost 20 years in a home off of Coldwater Canyon Boulevard near Mulholland Drive.

They shop at the Hughes Market on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks.

They give dinner parties where upscale Hollywood meets the glittering literati.

Viner is the last person you would pick to have put the O.J. Simpson trial, temporarily, on the ropes.

But he is the publisher of “Nicole Brown Simpson, The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted.”

It is a book that makes you glad you live on this side of the hill.

Viner has produced several low-budget but well-received films, including “The Dove,” about a kid who sailed around the world solo.

Following all the book-generated legal panic, Viner may be contemplating such a trip.

This saga began several years ago when Viner started Dove, a books-on-tape company that became a major player in the business. Book publishing followed as a natural extension of the tapes.

It was all low-profile and low-key, like the soft-spoken, introspective Viner.

On Oct. 18, his low profile blew sky-high.

The book release was legal dynamite, way beyond what Viner or the authors say they expected.

Viner says he was dazed when he heard that Judge Lance Ito had shut down court upon hearing about the book so that he and the lawyers could speed-read it.

The Faye Resnick book started with a phone call.

“I was approached in August by Warren Cowan, who had been approached by Faye’s lawyer,” remembers Viner. Cowan is a semi-retired public relations executive who knew both the attorney and Viner.

“I listened to what they said about Faye Resnick’s material and said I would be interested in looking at it,” says Viner. He says once he was convinced Resnick was viable, a six-figure book deal was struck.

He flew Resnick, two secretaries and the National Enquirer’s Mike Walker, who would co-author the book, to a private home in Vermont, where they worked “around the clock” with almost no interruptions.

Viner says: “Faye talked into the tape recorder. The secretaries transcribed the material, and Mike Walker put it into book form.”

The almost 24-hour-a-day operation, which began in September, at times looked like a movie on fast forward.

Asked how he would feel if the book caused the judge to rule Simpson couldn’t get a fair trial, he answered, “That will never happen.”

Viner was by no means oblivious to the potential hoopla the book might engender. Still, on publishing day he sounded like someone coming down with a touch of post-traumatic stress disorder.

It’s one of those “you can run, but you can’t hide situations.”

Or as Princess Grace is supposed to have said to Princess Diana: “Cheer up dear, things are sure to get worse.”

Survivors Propelled by Grief, Anger Want MARC to Matter

It was a picture-perfect day, Thanksgiving eve, 1990.

Lin and Clark Squires of Northridge were feeling that all was right with their world.

Their daughter, Heather, a 20-year-old junior at UC Santa Barbara, was home for the holiday. So was their son, Todd, an 18-year-old UCLA freshman.

Their youngest, Marc, a 15-year-old student at Granada Hills High School, had called just after 5 p.m. to say he was going to a party after the school football game, but to tell Heather and Todd to wait up for him to come home.

The fixings for Thanksgiving Day were in various stages of preparation.

“It was one of those times when you are thankful to have such a close, happy family,” Lin Squires says.

Six hours later, Lin, Clark, Heather and Todd were sitting in the waiting room outside the Northridge Hospital Medical Center emergency room, waiting to hear if Marc was going to live or die.

“We’d gotten a call during the evening that there had been a shooting and that Marc might have been the victim,” remembers his mother.

“We raced to the place where the party had been held just in time to see someone put into an ambulance and taken away,” she says.

The family learned at the medical center that it was Marc who had been shot.

All the family could do was “wait, hope and pray,” Lin Squires says.

Marc died on Thanksgiving Day. The gunshot had severed his spine and cut through the aorta. The shot was fired by a gang member who had wanted Marc’s beeper. Family members could never figure out why.

“Marc made money acting as a disc jockey at parties. He wore the beeper so we could keep in touch with him. He went to places where he didn’t know anyone, so he would occasionally ask us to beep him there,” according to his mother.

“If he didn’t feel comfortable about the situation, he would say he was needed urgently at home and leave,” she adds.

For several months, the Squires family struggled with the pain. Then, Lin Squires, a third-grade teacher, and Clark, a food broker, got mad.

The upshot of their anger is an organization called Mad About Rising Crime, which now has a membership of about 500 families.

Its acronym is MARC, in honor of their slain son.

“We are ordinary citizens who want to take back our communities. We want to stop violence, stop gang activities, make our neighborhood safe again,” Lin Squires says.

“It’s my belief it doesn’t matter where you start as long as you start somewhere,” says Squires. The organization sponsors seminars, meetings, parent groups, teen groups and graffiti removal.

The next general meeting of MARC will be at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 16 at the United Methodist Church in Northridge.

Her goal is not only to stop crime and make her neighborhood safe again, she wants to turn “them” into “us.”

Squires says it doesn’t matter so much how the gangs got a stranglehold on today’s young people but pursuing methods to reverse the trend. The turnaround has to start, she says, with parents learning to say “no.”

“Teach your children from the time they are infants that gangs are bad and gang membership will not be tolerated in the household. Say ‘no’ to glamorizing gangs or letting your children look like wanna-be gang members,” she adds.

“It’s only a short step from being trendy to tragedy. Kids dressed up like gang members may be killed just for wearing the clothes,” Squires says.

Overheard

“I’m glad I read the book because I now don’t have to worry about whether the Westside singles are having more fun than we old marrieds in the Valley. Those people live in singles’ hell.”

Sherman Oaks mother to friend about the life described in the Resnick book about Nicole Brown Simpson.