There were slight alterations I could make in my approach. I could couch my objections more deferentially. I could smile more. That wouldn’t be insincere, would it? In my private life, I am warm and gentle. At least, I can be. But being made to display, on command, a side of my nature that I normally don’t bring to the counsel table seemed awkward.
I went over and over this in my mind, trying to figure out what was right. Vinson told Gil that the people he’d polled perceived me as “hard.” I should speak more softly. I should get a softer hairdo. I should lose the business suits in favor of—get this—dresses. Just think about the logic here. Vinson claimed that black middle-aged women were carrying a grudge against me. And so the way to defuse them was to gussy myself up like Vanna White? Vinson’s line of reasoning was unapologetically sexist. It was demeaning to me personally. And in the end it was meaningless psychobabble. But we were spooked by a set of odds that were definitely not in our favor.
So I got a goddamned haircut. It was
not
a makeover. The style I’d been wearing to date was frankly unflattering. My hair had always tended to be thin, so I’d had it permed. Suzanne Childs took me to her own hairdresser, Allen Edwards in Studio City. He specialized in soft, natural styles. Allen saw exactly what had to be done. He pulled my fuzzy hair back to the nape of my neck and declared with a flourish, “This must go.”
The transformation was not, in my opinion, miraculous. In fact, it took several visits to Studio City to get it right. But even I had to admit that it was an improvement. My features appeared softer, less matronly. And let’s face it—who’s going to complain about being made to look younger? According to the wisdom of consultancy, these changes should have had a subliminal effect. I would come across as fresher, younger, and, as a consequence, less annoying to middle-aged black women. Go figure.
The “makeover” was big news. A week or so after the cut I drove into a car wash. The radio was on and I heard Howard Stern and Robin Quivers discussing my new ‘do. Howard thought it looked like I’d had chemotherapy. I have to say, I found it amusing. Some of the best commentary to come out of this trial actually came from those guys. But the point is, the buzz would not die. Every time I went in for another trim, or made the slightest alteration, there was another flurry of public commentary about my hair.
Several months down the line, I got my perm straightened. (I’d actually wanted to let it grow back to its natural straightness, but I’d put it off, fearful of calling attention to myself.) The next day, when I got off the elevator at the ninth floor, reporters gave me a standing ovation.
Look pleasant
, I told myself.
They mean well. At least they’re on your side
.
When I walked into court, Lance did a double-take. He noticed the stir my altered appearance was causing.
“Miss Clark… I think,” he quipped.
There was laughter in the courtroom. I joined in, although later I felt uncomfortable about it. The experience produced in me that awful naked feeling of being a teenager changing her hairdo to please the popular crowd. And the irony of it was that this beauty offensive left me feeling more vulnerable than ever before.
A UPI reporter whom I’ve known for years pulled me aside in the hall and said, “Marcia, let me give you one piece of unsolicited advice. Don’t change. You know what you’re doing, just do your thing.”
Do your thing
. I used to have a pretty good idea of what my thing was. Even when my private life was a mess, I could come into the courthouse of a morning and count on doing my thing. And I did it pretty damned well. Now my thing had turned into this weird and seedy game show. And when you’re standing confused and blinking in the klieg lights, it’s easy to lose sight of yourself altogether.
But of one thing I was certain. I couldn’t undo four hundred years of social injustice with a pretty dress and a soft voice.
A
merican Tabloid
I don’t mean to sound like a whiner. I know there are lots of people who would trade a kidney for a few seconds of celebrity. In fairness, I’m willing to concede that under some very special circumstances it can be flattering to be the center of attention. It’s a nice little perk. You feel important for a moment; then you go back to work.
But the escalating media frenzy in the Simpson case filled me with a sense of foreboding. The attention didn’t stop at my work, or even at the length of my skirts. The reporters who besieged Suzanne Childs and her overworked public relations people were interested in “Marcia Clark, up close and personal.” Read: What gives with Marcia’s personal life? I told Suzanne to hold them off. I did whatever I could to discourage them. When I heard that the
L.A. Times
was looking to profile me, I kept ducking the reporter. Poor guy finally threw in the towel and ran something called “The Reluctant Headliner,” which was a piece about how I avoided publicity. Whenever reporters asked Gil about my personal life, he’d say, “I don’t even know if she has a family.” Most of my friends and colleagues were similarly discreet.
Around the middle of July, the
National Enquirer
published its first piece about me. It was a sweetly inaccurate story about how, in my private life, I was a homebody in the June Cleaver mold. They’d found some eight-year-old neighbor girl who was supposed to have said, “What I love best is when Mrs. Clark lets me make cookies with her… . She says little girls are the best helpers when it comes to making cookies and that makes me feel special.”
That one had the guys in my office absolutely howling. For the record, I bake cookies about once a year. As for the kid, I wouldn’t know her to pick her out of a lineup.
All in all, it was pretty harmless fluff. But what worried me was the fact that they would be out there talking to my neighbors at all! Was it because I was going through a divorce? The
Enquirer
had already gotten hold of it, A divorce filing must send out some kind of subliminal alert to those dissolute Brits who run the American tabloids.
Under ordinary circumstances I would not even consider talking about my private life. In fact, when I sat down to write this book, I didn’t intend to touch upon anything personal at all. I’ve had second thoughts about that. So many absurd things have been published about me that I feel I owe you an honest accounting of myself. By “honest,” I do not mean exhaustive. But there are some things about me that I can and should discuss. Things it’s important for you to know. And when you read on, I think you’ll understand why.
Marcia was a very reserved person who came from a very orthodox Jewish family. She would sometimes have her face covered with a veil and before… marriage was even chaperoned by another woman who spoke no English.
National Enquirer
, August 2, 1994.
I was born Marcia Rachel Kleks, daughter of an Israeli immigrant. We were most emphatically not Orthodox. We rarely went to temple. I spent my babyhood in the Bay Area. At the age of three or four I decided to become an actress.
It was more than some preschooler’s daydream. Joel Grey was a distant cousin on my mother’s side—though I only met him once, when I was eight. My mother herself was a classical pianist. By the time she was eighteen, she’d made a recording. She never went on to perform professionally. She married. All the time my brother, Jon, and I were young, she kept that recording locked away somewhere like an old love letter. I never heard it.
When I was six my mother started me on piano lessons. I was a nervous, fidgety kid and had a hard time sitting still long enough to practice. Unfortunately, I was blessed with a good ear, which allowed me to be lazy. I would listen to my teacher play a piece, and then I’d learn it by ear so I wouldn’t have to be bothered figuring out how to read music. I took lessons off and on until I was nine years old, when both my mother and I conceded defeat. But then, I’d discovered dance, a passion that would last a lifetime.
I have a faint recollection of practicing ballet in the living room while my mother played the piano. Unfortunately, I don’t have many of those mental snapshots. For the most part, the memories of my early years are chaotic and incomplete. My father was a chemist with the FDA, and his job required us to move at least ten times while I was growing up. I’d just get settled into a place—then,
wham
, uprooted again. I could never afford to let myself get too attached to anyone or anything. There’s a lot, I’m sure, I’ve never let myself remember.
When I was ten or eleven we moved back to the Bay Area into a new development called Foster City. It was touted by its developers as a sort of Shangri-la laid out along a string of lagoons. The showcase homes had their own boat docks. Ours didn’t. It sat across the street from a beach. We did get a Sunfish, and I learned how to sail. The area was raw and undeveloped in those days. My mother would send me to the store in my sailboat to pick up milk and other small items. As I look back on those days, I realize that I enjoyed a remarkable amount of freedom. And when it wasn’t given to me, I went to great lengths to steal it.
Foster City didn’t have its own school system, so in seventh grade I was bused to a junior high in a very rough neighborhood. I wasn’t exactly born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but I’d never seen anything like this. These kids were all wise in the ways of the streets. Here I was in knee socks and pleated skirts, with long, straight brown hair, sitting next to babes wearing ass-hugging skirts, black fishnets, a pound of makeup, and hair teased into humongous lacquered swells. They smoked in the bathroom, swore like sailors, and didn’t give a damn about their grades or what their parents would say.
Très
cool. I wanted some of that.
I knew
my
parents would throw a fit if they saw me in fishnets, so I came up with a plan to get around them. I went shopping with a school friend who helped me pick out a low-cut V-necked sweater that exposed my nonexistent cleavage. I borrowed a tight black skirt that was way too long for me. I think it was something my friend’s older sister had outgrown. I fixed the hemline problem by rolling up the waistband, then hid the bulge under the bulky sweater. I scored a pair of black hose and doctored the runs with pale pink nail polish. And I bought a pair of cool black pumps. This became my uniform. My secret uniform.
I’d leave the house every morning in normal clothes. Then, when I got to school, I’d duck into the girls’ bathroom, dig into my knapsack, and pull out my finery. There were usually several friends willing to help me tease my long, straight hair to an acceptable height. The black eyeliner, applied with a canoe paddle, and pale pink lipstick completed the transformation. I was ready for class.
Back then the student population was divided into two groups: “surfers” and “greasers.” I liked the greasers, car-addicted, chain-smoking tough guys who swore at the slightest provocation, wore tight jeans, pointed boots, and leather jackets, and poured more oil on their hair than in their engines. I attracted the attention of the leader of the pack. Tom was fifteen—an older man by the standards of a twelve-year-old. He wore his hair slicked back with a ton of lubricant and sported a black leather jacket, his trademark. He was reputed to be epileptic; this somehow only added to his mystique. He had a pair of deep brown eyes, full sensuous lips, and a sexy macho attitude that made him
the
premier catch of the school. Shortly after my own transformation, he decided we had to go steady.
This seemed a very cool thing to do. It was a sure way of getting accepted by the fast crowd and proving how tough I was to boot. So I took Tom’s ring, a heavy metal number that was way too big for me. I tried the prescribed remedy of wrapping yarn around it to improve the fit, but that made it so bulky, I ended up wearing it on a chain around my neck. My steady didn’t mind. He considered it proof of his manliness that his ring hung loose on his woman’s skinny finger.
At recess he’d let me wear his leather jacket, which hit me at the knees. We’d stand together, his arm around me. Periodically, he’d plant an ostentatious kiss on my lips. He’d linger long enough so that everyone could see we were a couple. What they couldn’t know was that he’d repeatedly invited me to go out on dates—usually to Saturday matinees—and that I kept finding ever more creative excuses to decline. Quite apart from the fact that I’d never be able to carry off an actual date under my parents’ noses, I learned that I could expect to be “felt up” and “felt down.” That prospect terrified me. I knew that eventually I’d have to put out or get out. I wasn’t quite sure how to do either.
It was one of my steady’s jealous ex-girlfriends, Linda, who settled the matter once and for all. She sent out the word that she was going to knock out my lights. Tom told me he’d “take care” of her. One day, at noon recess, I went into the girls’ restroom. I’d just finished patting my hair into place when Linda burst through the door, cornered me, and threw a punch. I was agile enough to duck, or she would have knocked me out cold.
“You little bitch,” she growled. “You can’t have Tom; he’s mine. Get it?” She was leaning forward with clenched fists. It would have been funny, it was so trite—except I was scared to death. What had happened to Tom’s promise to “take care” of her? It was clearly up to me.
“Take him, he’s yours,” I told her, in as rational and assertive a tone as I could muster. She seemed surprised, but she backed off. And so I slipped out of a rumble
and
a sticky romantic entanglement within the space of a minute.
My career as a greaser was cut short by my family’s next move, this one to Michigan. I had just turned thirteen. I found to my dismay that the quiet suburb we now called home had no great appreciation for fishnet stockings. The kids in my new high school worshiped all things Californian. They wanted to be surfers. There was only one real “in” crowd. All the rest were wannabes. By my third day, the popular clique—operating upon the mistaken assumption that because I was from San Francisco I must be a surfer girl—took me under its wing. I was ceremoniously escorted to their table in the lunchroom and introduced all around. The girls were all dyed-in-the-wool Heathers. You know the type.