THE O.J. SIMPSON MURDER TRIAL : Tales of Drinking and Brawling May Complicate Picture of Sorrow

If you didn’t see Denise Brown break down at the O.J. Simpson trial and cry on television Friday, don’t worry. It will be rerun all weekend.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher Darden saw to that when Brown, his last witness of the afternoon, concluded her testimony with a harrowing story of how an enraged Simpson literally threw her sister, Nicole Brown Simpson, out of his house. Simpson, Denise Brown said, ejected her and her male companion, too.

Denise Simpson’s voice quavered, and then she broke down and cried.

“Are you OK, Miss Brown?” asked Darden.

“Yeah, it’s just so hard,” she replied. “I’ll be fine.”

It was about 2:50 p.m., 10 minutes before the scheduled adjournment. Darden needed no more time. The striking image would be the last trial scene of the week, powerful enough to win a top spot on every news, tabloid and talk show from Friday night through Monday morning.

“Your Honor,” Darden said, “if it please the court, can we adjourn and continue this Monday morning?” Seeing the situation, defense attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. moved in. “May we approach?” he said. But Darden wisely kept the focus on Denise Brown. “Your Honor,” he said, “would the court instruct the bailiff to assist Miss Brown if she needs any assistance?” At this point, with Brown still sobbing, Judge Lance Ito adjourned for the weekend.

*

It was a great parting image for the prosecution. But if you look at all of Brown’s testimony, the image becomes complicated.

Denise Brown, as was her sister, is a tall, attractive woman. She was dressed in a simple black double-breasted suit, and a black blouse. Her hair was pulled back in a prim ponytail.

But the life she described was anything but prim. She told of nights of hard drinking and verbal brawling. It reminded me of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the famous 1920s novelist, and his wife, Zelda, who drank and fought their way across Europe and the United States in an alcoholic haze.

There was the night of drinking at the Red Onion in Santa Ana.

The place was packed. Many of the patrons recognized Simpson. Some crowded around him. Simpson, Nicole, Denise and another man in the party were drinking straight shots of tequila.

“We were all drinking and goofing around and being loud and dancing and having a great time,” Denise Brown said. Then, she said, while Simpson was talking to his fans, he “grabbed Nicole’s crotch and said, ‘This is where babies come from. And this belongs to me.’

“And Nicole just sort of wrote it off like it was nothing, like, you know, like she was used to that kind of treatment. . . . “

On another night, Denise and her date joined Simpson and Nicole for dinner at a restaurant called La Cantina. This time, they were drinking margaritas.

Afterward, they went to Simpson’s mansion. “We were sitting at the bar, talking, having some more drinks,” Brown said. Amid the partying, Denise said she told Simpson “he took Nicole for granted and he blew up. . . .

“He started yelling at me, ‘I don’t take her for granted. I do everything for her. I give her everything.’

“And then a whole fight broke out and pictures started flying off the walls, clothes started flying. He ran upstairs. Clothes started flying down the stairs. And (he) grabbed Nicole, told her to get out of his house, wanted us all out of his house, picked her up, threw her against a wall, picked her up and threw her out of the house. She ended up on . . . her elbows and on her butt.”

Then Simpson allegedly tossed out Brown and her date.

It was at this point in her testimony that Brown began to sob.

*

As I said, I thought of Scott and Zelda as I listened to these stories. I also thought of the old country and western song, “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights.”

Clouded by booze, they just let it all happen. No humiliation seemed great enough to prompt Denise Brown to intervene on behalf of her sister.

“I thought it was really humiliating, if you ask me,” Brown said on the witness stand Friday. But she didn’t drag her younger sister out of the Red Onion. Rather, she went out partying with Simpson again.

What you’ll probably see on television is the final few minutes of testimony, the sobbing Denise.

That’s the image that may stick with the jury, too.

But this middle-class, working-class group of men and women will bring other images back to their hotel rooms--of boozing rich people with enough money and time on their hands to waste their lives in bars.