Photo: VINCE BUCCI/AFP via Getty Images
It was 1991 and I was working at Carnegie Hall as a personal assistant. My six-month postgraduation student-loan grace period was about to end, so I needed a second job ASAP.
My friend worked at a trendy Japanese restaurant called Fujiyama-Mama on the east side of Columbus Avenue between 82nd and 83rd Streets. He told me there was a coat-checker position open. He was a model, and I assumed it was one of those restaurants that only hired gorgeous people. But I landed the gig.
An exciting thing, for 22-year-old me, was the celebrity traffic at the restaurant. One of our regulars was O.J. Simpson. He was also the nicest celebrity of all our clientele — to me, at least. He learned my name, asked me questions, listened to the answers, and would circle back to subjects mentioned during previous visits.
He told me he had a place on the Upper East Side where he would stay when he visited New York, especially during football season, when he’d be on the East Coast to provide commentary during NFL games. In cold weather, he had a coat and gloves to check. Perhaps it was because we often engaged with each other at least twice a visit (coat-checking, coat-retrieving), combined with the fact that I was the only woman working in the restaurant, that Simpson was so nice to me. He tipped me $5 to check his coat and gloves — pretty good today but very generous in 1991.
Now and then, Simpson would come in with men, but the majority of the time, he was clearly on a date, and he definitely had a type: gorgeous, tall, young, and white — sometimes blonde, sometimes brunette.
There was one time when he came in with a woman who, while still younger, was much older than his typical dates. The staff whispered about Simpson being with an “older” woman. When I was downstairs in the coatroom, I heard arguing in the hall by the bathrooms. I peeked and saw it was Simpson and his date. It was the one and only time I saw him in the restaurant with who I later learned was Nicole Brown.
The author, center, at Fujiyama-Mama restaurant with two colleagues in the early 1990s.
Photo: Robin Sayers
No matter his companion, he insisted on sitting at the sushi bar. The manager and the maître d’ would try to convince Simpson that he’d be happier sitting in the back, in our unofficial VIP area. At first, I thought it might be because he enjoyed watching our masterful sushi chef at work. Eventually, I realized he wanted, or even needed, to be recognized. Many times, a customer would come to retrieve a coat and excitedly show me the autograph they’d gotten from him, complete with the trademark smiley face. That kind of interaction with his fans wouldn’t happen if he sat in the back.
When the news of the murders broke, I was still working part time at Fujiyama-Mama. I defended Simpson to my friends. “I’m friends with O.J.,” I’d say. “You don’t know him like I do. There’s no way he could do such a thing.” After the slow-speed chase, I stopped defending him, but I still had trouble believing he stabbed a man to death and nearly decapitated the mother of his children.
The phone call came in the weeks after the murders. One of my bosses at Fujiyama-Mama told me that someone in the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office wanted to speak to me. Me? Why?!
My boss figured it out before I did: It was because I had checked the bloody gloves before they were bloody. They must have heard how frequently he visited Fujiyama-Mama. I spoke with a man whom I understood to be either a junior prosecutor or an investigator in the DA’s office. He posed at least a dozen mundane questions before finally asking the question: Had I ever checked gloves for Mr. Simpson when he visited Fujiyama-Mama?
Yes, many times. Then he asked if I could describe the gloves, which I did — I forget most customers’ glove particulars, but Simpson was famous and tipped me $5, so I remembered his gloves well. They were either dark brown or black. The man asked why I couldn’t definitively name the color. I said that our coat-check area was dark.
He must have spoken to the owner of the restaurant because he knew, and told me, that the room where the coats were stored was brightly lit. True. But the place where a customer passes the coat to the checker was dim, and the first thing you do as a coat-checker is take the gloves and shove them in a pocket. By the time I got downstairs, any gloves were out of sight, so I never saw them under those unflattering fluorescent lights in the coatroom.
The man sounded disappointed. He asked me to call him back if I remembered more after thinking about it. Was he answer-shopping? I wondered. Who knows, but he did call me back about a week later to ask if I remembered anything else, especially the color of the gloves. No, I did not.
The truth is, I was about 98 percent certain that the gloves were dark brown — the color we all learned they indeed were — but I wasn’t 100 percent positive, and I knew I couldn’t in good conscience, and under oath, say otherwise. I would have had no issue testifying as long as I could say I wasn’t confident about the color — but that obviously was of no use to the prosecutors.
Usually, I would have gotten over that 2 percent doubt in order to inject myself into a drama, but thank goodness I didn’t do it in this instance. As my boyfriend at the time said, had I ended up on the stand they would have “Dennis Fung’d me” — referring, of course, to the LAPD crime-scene tech publicly eviscerated by the defense team.
I’ve told this story for nearly three decades. I now cringe at how insane I must have sounded defending O.J. Simpson in the days after the murders. In retrospect, I both pity and envy my younger self, who couldn’t quite comprehend that actors act, narcissists exhibit superficial charm, and sociopaths lie — or even kill — with ease.
As a magazine writer, I went on to interview hundreds of celebrities — actors, directors, athletes, musicians, politicians. Part of what made me good at the job, is that I was never nervous around even the biggest of stars. I could still be tremendously impressed by someone’s talent, but I never again was starstruck. Maybe that is because of the double murderer I once knew.
