All the O.J. That Was Unfit to Print

As jury selection proceeds quietly, the second O.J. Simpson trial seems certain not to produce the same kind of rush-to-publish incited by the first trial.

And this, in retrospect, gives the blizzard of manuscripts elicited by the first trial a kind of historical significance.

Never before have so many wanted to write so much on a subject about which they knew so little, insiders say. And they don’t expect the phenomenon to repeat itself any time soon.

This doesn’t exactly trouble anyone, especially not the publishers and literary agents so afflicted by O.J.-itis the first time around. At that trial’s end, quick tallies reflected at least 40 titles in print or expected. But the numbers nowhere hint at the untold hundreds of manuscripts judged less worthy than those that made it into print and onto “Oprah.”

Like a plague of small flying insects, the O.J. manuscripts, outlines, proposals and letters started appearing over transoms, under doors, in the mail, by courier and in the eager hands of the would-be authors.

“We got more than 300 submissions. There was never a day that we didn’t get something from someone . . . the caddy, the gardener, the next-door neighbor’s maid,” says Michael Viner, founder of Dove Press, and fastest publishing gun in the West when it came to the O.J. case. (He published Faye Resnick’s “Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted,” along with tomes by three jurors, one attorney, and even a parody on the case written by his own Dove staff.)

But most submissions were unreadable, not to mention unpublishable, industry types say.

“There were psychics who could see paranormal shadows in photos taken at the murder site,” Viner recalls. “There were theorists who based whole books on no actual information. And then there were the people who wrote to us as if we were the courts. As if I were Judge [Lance] Ito, as if the jury was in this office.”

Clearly his favorite madcap wannabe author, Viner says, is “the UCLA professor who swears she has a telepathic relationship with Kato the dog--and who wanted to write the murder story as seen through the dog’s eyes.” Viner declined.

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At first, the publisher says, the hundreds of letters, proposals and manuscripts seemed too meaningless to catalog; he was throwing the rejects away.

Then it dawned on him. “There’s something special about all this. It ought to be stored in a time capsule.” Everything was saved for posterity from then on.

In fact, the Simpson murder trial and all its offshoots may turn out to be one of the few events in history to clamber up the intellectual and social ladder, starting as sudsy fodder for the masses who watched the trial each day and ending as an academic Rubik’s Cube, to be debated for years by savants who now see far more significance in it than was originally perceived.

In weeks ahead, as the public goes about its daily business uninterrupted, because the civil trial will not be on TV, scholars will apparently be cataloging, studying and discussing the deeper ramifications of the murders, the trials and the verdicts in American life.

Professors at Cornell University are now working on an O.J. Simpson Archive with the help of a National Science Foundation grant.

Scholars are discussing and debating, as they did in New York the other night at a well-attended panel discussion that was not, according to those who were there, a lowbrow event.

Law professors around the country are holding conferences on the case.

And among the many O.J. books yet to come out is one of essays written by such luminaries as poet Ishmael Reed and retired federal Judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., co-edited by novelist Toni Morrison.

This probably means that the manuscripts so many publishers and agents have discarded will someday be trotted out again for a further look.

Diane Reverand at HarperCollins in New York says she too was besieged with proposals from people who wanted to write O.J. books. She doesn’t know where any of the material went. “The trial produced so much, from so many angles that it was actually horrendous to deal with at the time. I’ve blocked it all from my mind.”

Joni Evans at the William Morris agency in New York represented prosecutor Marcia Clark in her $4.2-million book deal. And something extraordinary happened there too, Evans says. When it was announced that Clark would write with a collaborator, “we had 130 requests from extremely qualified writers who wanted to work on the book. These were not nuts who applied, you understand.”

Under normal circumstances, Evans says, she gets “no more than 10 qualified writers who want to collaborate on any book, no matter how popular or controversial the subject.”

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L.A. literary agent B.J. Robbins also had some offbeat O.J.-related experiences. She’d like to forget the guy who “came to me who said he had already published a book about drugs in Hollywood. He said he was going to blow the top off the O.J. thing with information about how he supplied drugs to all the people involved in the case. I do not know who he was, or where he went. He fortunately never contacted me again.”

Her strangest moment occurred while she was puttering in her kitchen on an ordinary day.

“The doorbell rang. I answered it. This person was standing there, pointing to a van parked at the curb. She said an O.J. juror was hidden in the van, and the juror wanted to write a book. Imagine driving around L.A. with a juror in back and a list of literary agents in your hand. These are very scary people,” Robbins says.

Quay Hays, president and publisher of General Publishing in L.A., says his firm got 136 proposals for books related to the case, “from all sorts of people, including the cameraman from Court TV and family members of one of the court bailiffs.”

What does it all mean? At some point many years hence, we can be certain historians will tell us.