Word: darden
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...books reflect their authors' public personas. Darden's autobiographical memoir is brooding, complex, ambitious and at times emotionally overwrought. He has a habit, for instance, of referring to Simpson with an unprintable epithet. Shapiro takes a more measured, if Hollywoody, approach. But in both works, details of the lawyers' behind-the-scenes machinations remain strangely compelling. Darden describes a jaunt to the Bahamas, where he unsuccessfully pursued a tip that Simpson was planning to flee there the day of the Bronco chase, and both writers float rumors that juror Francine Florio-Bunten was dismissed under suspicious circumstances. Shapiro also reveals...
...that his diminished role had been planned all along. Shapiro is skilled, in fact, at doling out praise that is either damning or faint, sometimes both: Marcia Clark was an "honorable adversary," he notes before launching into an embarrassing tale about Clark's ex-husband, the professional backgammon player. Darden, he writes in a sly twofer, "hadn't mastered (if indeed he wanted to) Johnnie Cochran's self-proclaimed adeptness at not ever letting people know what he was thinking and feeling...
...well," then describes Bailey rambling one night after a few drinks. He continues to suggest that Bailey was the defense-team sieve, responsible for leaking stories to the New York Daily News and Simpson's original police interview to the tabloid Star, an interview in which, according to the Darden book, a disoriented Simpson was unable to explain his cut hand and unwilling to take a lie detector test. "I'm sure eventually I'll do it," Simpson tells detectives Philip Vannatter and Tom Lange. "But it's like, hey, I've got some weird thoughts...
...inflammatory issue of race, Shapiro has an ally in Darden. While Shapiro places the credit for the team's success mostly on his own shoulders, Darden blames the prosecution's failures on, alternately, the jurors, "12 people lined up at the grinder with big axes," and Cochran, who made it "clear that there were going to be two sides in this case, not prosecution and defense, but black and white...
...Darden blames himself. One of the more wrenching sections of In Contempt involves Darden's description of the glove demonstration, which was his idea. Vannatter's "sausage fingers," he writes, slid easily into the glove, but after Simpson struggled before the jury to put it on, Darden was frozen out of the case. "People ask me now would I do it again," Darden writes. "No. Of course...