Ben Stein's Diary / Foxes
Stein, Benjamin J.
Foxes by Benjamin I. Stein Monday Aplanned lunch at a very good Italian place in Malibu called Tradinoi. It's a stunningly gorgeous sunny clear day here and I'm meeting my friend Hilda to cheer...
...Even though she was just 20, she ordered the Nazis out of her house, collected whatever little bits of clothing she could find, and came to America...
...Hilda also loves children, and considers it a gift from God just to be around them...
...It's a stunningly gorgeous sunny clear day here and I'm meeting my friend Hilda to cheer her up...
...He had me sign autographs for him and his father, who owns the stand—if a supermarket of fireworks can be called a "stand...
...When the war was over, she took herself back to her town and to her house...
...Now, some of these foolish people might actually think that by running so far for so long O.J...
...You're telling me, a very frequent Alaska flyer, that I'm lying...
...What could motivate a manwith so much good in his life enough to commit murder...
...Amen...
...She's a woman of about forty who is about to become a single mother, exclusively by choice and by plan...
...When I finally got him to bed by telling him an interminable story I made up about Ren and Stimpy in Las Vegas, I left the door facing the lake and the marina open...
...What...
...I'll just get by one day at a time, with love...
...In fact, in my eighteen years in L.A., I can't recall such empty streets...
...It's like revolution...
...Suppose you're O.J.'s lawyer...
...Some might just be so stupid that they go for the spectacle no matter how grotesque...
...Tommy ran around after them to look at them more closely...
...After all, as she often told me (whom she fatefully considered a great expert on raising children), it was a big responsibility, a big expense, and a huge expenditure of time...
...When my turn at the counter came, the young Indian waiting on me looked hard at my face, listened to me for a moment, and said, "Bueller, Bueller...
...and not this myth the media has made up...
...I always thought they were a gilded couple, with him so handsome and so strong, and her so blond and pretty...
...saying how much he loved his kids and his friends, and that people should recall the real O.J...
...I later met the mother for dinner when she was out here from Brooklyn, where she operates a card shop...
...I went to my TV, and there it was...
...There was a "For Rent" sign in front of a beautiful 1950s-style apartment house...
...However, and this is what makes me like her so much, she ruled out abortion from the first moment...
...But suppose you know the realities of the court system...
...I took him out to the garden on Florida Avenue and his eyes widened...
...If you put in "colored person," it tells you "African-American...
...No," she said...
...S.'s speech through Grammatik and see what comes out...
...It was a tiny one-bedroom facing a clean, crystalline pool...
...You also know that in L.A., vide the Menendez Brothers, the insanity defense is an extremely flexible garment...
...I hate people who make a spectacle of themselves—unless it's in front of a camera and they're getting paid for it...
...I was a brooding, frightened child...
...If you put in "girls," the computer program tells you that's sexist and you should instead try "young women...
...Friday T his town has gone murder crazy...
...I talked to her after a meeting and learned that her mother, a German Jew, had been in a concentration camp for five years and survived...
...I'm not going to murder my own child after I wanted one for so long...
...I told her I had one and that I planned to bring it on board...
...How often you fly has nothing to do with it," she said coolly...
...The mother and her sister survived as slave laborers in a munitions factory...
...On the radio, announcers are talking to us, the poor listeners, and also to O.J., begging him not to run anymore, begging him, in the name of his great reputation in sport, to turn himself in...
...We have the coolest fireworks in the world," Tommy screamed...
...They did quarrel about something, but he was very jovial when he was around the rest of the group...
...I was on my way to meet this modern hero of the pro-life movement when I heard a strange story on the car radio just as I was passing Zuma Beach, jammed with sunbathers...
...He served all over the west and then in the American suppression of independence movements in the Philippines...
...But, then, I have been known to be wrong...
...After a lot of words from the helicopter newscasters, he is surrendering—apparently clutching a photo of the woman he is said to have just killed and the children he is said to have just orphaned...
...But some, I think, are mocking this once great man and laughing at his downfall...
...I walked in to look at the apartment...
...He ended by saying that we all mostly owed a debt to the ancestors who thought to come to America...
...What a rush...
...Yes, it will fit," I said...
...He jumped up and down with uncontrollable glee in the light of the sparklers...
...She solicited and got a sperm donation from a friend in a faraway city, and soon became pregnant...
...Inside, my father gave a speech about our family...
...I don't trust him because he wears those very sharp double-breasted con man's suits...
...It won't fit...
...Of course, as she often points out, what we now call "gifted" in 1962 would have been called B-average...
...He also had papers talking about his work as a machinist in an arsenal in upstate New York during World War II—pay, $1.00 per hour—when he was a fairly old man...
...There was a slight breeze, and I could hear the wind pushing the lanyards of the boats against the masts, sounding like wind chimes on water...
...Another is wearing a gangster black shirt andwhat sure looks like a pony tail...
...Most nights I feel as if I have failed at every single thing I ever addressed...
...He looks jaunty in his boater...
...That means the gas chamber, maybe...
...Clumsy people like yours truly can hardly even imagine what that must feel like...
...We don't have fireflies in Sunny (but cold at night) Cal, and Tommy was in ecstasy...
...It's like the day after doomsday...
...We conquered the neighborhood...
...That's just plain sadistic and crazy...
...But it's on my mind...
...But I don't trust him...
...Just suppose...
...As I was looking to see what else it didn't like, I heard on my radio that a friend of O.J., someone weirdly named Bobby Kardashian, was reading what sure sounds like a suicide note...
...I think he would have done anything this country wanted him to do...
...This is becoming a strange day...
...Back at my condo at the mighty Shoreham Towers, I set to work trying to learn to use the Grammatik feature of my WordPerfect 6.0a program...
...Hilda's mom is incredibly strong and to this day almost never gets sick...
...I asked...
...Well, I'd like to at least take it to the gate and see if they'll let me take it aboard...
...A beautifully framed, eloquently written letter from O.J...
...Hmmm...
...Of course, it's only a fantasy, but very revealing of just how much I loathe responsibility...
...Simpson, violence and death are omnipresent...
...I strolled up Laurel while they waxed my car...
...What about Nicole and Ron Goldman...
...You're telling me I'm a liar...
...I know in my heart that this woman will be the exact type who will decide if I am allowed to have heart medication when the Clinton health destruction plan passes...
...Who's talking to them...
...at Mister Chow, a formerly elegant restaurant in Beverly Hills long ago...
...The restaurant turned out to be closed in any event, so we went to my favorite Chinese place and talked about how dangerous L.A...
...This is the way the world ends...
...My little brain is working overtime on this one...
...Well, these are all problems someone else is going to get $300 per hour to think about, so on with the show...
...About a year ago, Hilda decided that she was unlikely to get married any time soon...
...One of the men looks to be wearing sandals...
...Army...
...You know that O.J...
...An erstwhile Nazi was living there...
...Down in my basement, madly killing spiders, sweeping away spider webs and insanely trying to find three months of missing checks, I could hardly stop thinking about Nicole Simpson...
...In the lobby, the doormen and desk clerk were clustered around the TV, breathless, fixated...
...I mean totally nuts...
...I have the recurring fantasy that I will someday just run away and move into a tiny apartment, leave behind my mortgages and stacks of bills, and live in that little room and only do commercials and play with Little Perfect...
...and his girlfriend, Paula Barbieri...
...It's astonishing...
...of some of the few members of the Stein family...
...Plus, I'm still a little unstrung from an incident I'm trying to block from my memory: As I was getting my ticket and my boarding pass, I was asked by the Alaska Airlines clerk, a large woman, if I had any bags...
...There's a duo behind me endlessly shuffling cards...
...Yes, the world is upside down...
...Now O.J...
...When I told Hilda the news, she was in shock...
...So are reruns of "The Wonder Years...
...I guess he really did it...
...He is one clever guy...
...Plus, there has to have been a certain spectacular self-confidence derived from being able to control one's body as precisely and powerfully as a Heisman Trophy winner...
...Suppose it's pretty obvious to you that he did the ghastly deed...
...Then he and his mother took me on a tour of the private zoo they have, with buffalo, cougars, and a panther...
...with his new girlfriend at a party in La Quinta," she said...
...I rushed out of my condo/office to watch this historic moment with Alex and Tommy...
...A revolution and a preliminary hearing are not dinner parties...
...A parade of witnesses is appearing before a judge, in a capital case, probably the biggest such spectacle since the Lindbergh kidnapping, maybe bigger...
...When the Gestapo dirt entered the family house, they simply shot an Benjamin J. Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Malibu, California...
...Beautiful women desiring him...
...Tommy ran around feeding a few miniature horses and waving his arms...
...Plus clippings from the death of FDR...
...If you knew how easy it is to do them and how much they pay—even at my very modest level—you would leave everything in your life behind to come to Hollywood to get onto the gravy train...
...They have a nasty habit of accusing people of crimes that never happened, or maybe I'm thinking of the Manhattan Beach police...
...Tens of thousands of people were lined up on the freeway cheering and whistling at O.J...
...The main things I like are my grandfather's military records...
...Without that, we would all be dead or never born...
...C:1 54 The American Spectator September 1994...
...On the other side of the Edgewater Inn, I could hear the Burlington Northern freights coming through every fifteen minutes, shaking the hotel...
...It's much too big...
...I submitted quietly, planning how I would sue her for intentional infliction of emotional distress...
...You can't bring that on board," she said...
...It sounds a lot more like the work of a sharp lawyer preparing the ground for an insanity plea...
...was on the run and that the LAPD did not know where he was...
...People were buying fireworks as fast as they could plunk down their money...
...Not with a bang but with a lawyer...
...Look what's comin' up the street, Gotta revolution...
...There's talk about a bloodstained Akita, about howls in the night, about rivers of blood pouring down a walkway in Brentwood—and the witnesses are dressed as if they're at a picnic...
...Little kids worshipping him...
...A man is wearing an open-necked shirt...
...She was once a mime, and actually used to be a San Francisco street mime, perhaps the most offensive job on earth...
...He'd never seen them before...
...is a far more famous defendant than the lunatic in the Lindbergh case...
...Just as I pulled in, the radio announcer said a warrant had been issued for O.J.'s arrest on two counts of murder with special circumstances—lying in wait and two victims...
...She also decided that she wanted to have a baby...
...He loves animals...
...write" a fake suicide note, go on a quixotic and bizarre car run, crouch in the back seat with a pistol, then get out of the car clutching a picture frame like some weird football version of Blanche DuBois...
...What better notion than to have O.J...
...There's also talk about how my uncle, or great-uncle, made a fortune on the stock market and then committed suicide after the Crash of 1929, and even talk of a mysterious relative who committed an armed robbery, then went to jail (in those days criminals went to jail for armed robbery), and then came out and became a "chorus boy" in Broadway musicals...
...Tommy and his two pals, Rachel and Alex, and their father, Peter, and I drove about fifty-five miles along a beautiful river to get here...
...Everybody in town is watching him on TV...
...One of the bodies which we reported found in the Brentwood section of West Los Angeles has been identified as the former wife of football great O.J...
...It's almost unbelievable...
...My favorite is the hostess, an aging slattern in a dress so tight she might as well be buck nekkid, and in a loud voice she's calling the whole thing "gross...
...There's something about it that suspends normal reality...
...Madam, don't you know this is history...
...Even my braino parents in Washington are watching it...
...We're in the TWA/Alaska lounge watching O.J.'s preliminary hearing on the TV...
...I'll have to call security if you try...
...You know that he is madly loved by people throughout America and especially in L.A...
...Tommy ran around like a maniac and my father asked me to try to quiet him...
...That Jefferson Airplane song keeps going through my little brain at the car wash...
...At nightfall, we set off lots of bottle rockets, Dixie screamers, pinwheels, black widows, M-70s (M-80s aren't sold any longer, thanks to federal regulations), ground flowers, and sparklers in Peter's yard...
...There's a drunk couple across the aisle from me, madly necking and distracting me from my pile of Wall Street Journals...
...I think it's because he has innate confidence, a very confident mother, and much, much more lavish—though less secure—material circumstances than I had...
...Beyond that, he said, quoting from a prayer he learned when chapel was mandatory at Williams College, we owed it all to God, from whom all blessings flow...
...Afterward, as I headed over to the Sunset Car Wash, I heard the police spokesman say that O.J...
...It was pretty raw, but Shapiro got him off with no jail time at all...
...And as someone who's done a ton of ghostwriting, I can also always spot a ghostwritten document...
...is by the side of the freeway watching...
...Why did O.J...
...You can't," she said...
...It struck me that Tommy is a much happier child than I was...
...Specifically, she wanted a baby so that she could help to carry on her family line despite Hitler's efforts to eradicate it...
...I've fit it overhead many times...
...She then produced from her pocketbook a photo of herself and the other members of the party, including a beaming O.J...
...Apparently, Ferris Bueller is a big fave on the reservation...
...He's riding the freeways in a white Bronco and he's calling Mom on the cell-phone...
...do it...
...They've cut off the network news to follow it...
...is in his driveway...
...I used to see her and O.J...
...whom I've come to admire...
...He came from Russia and went as a teenager into the U.S...
...Then I went home to file...
...One woman is wearing shorts...
...He just loved being an American...
...She's also uniquely good-hearted, and one of the few women I know in L.A...
...They sat at the table next to us so often that we began to greet them and they greeted us...
...This is not an unusual fate in Los Angeles, where there is rarely enough personality left for interest in anyone but oneself...
...At that point, she began to wonder if she should in fact have the baby...
...Certainly, O.J...
...Perfect and I are on our way up to Idaho for a long Fourth of July weekend...
...I just saw O.J...
...Ain't it amazin' all the people I meet, Gotta revolution...
...Our moron mayor, Richard Riordan, lives in Brentwood himself...
...Now, this is news indeed...
...Hmmm...
...The mother's parents were gassed...
...Incredible...
...is a hero...
...Then there's a series of photos of him and my father and aunt...
...The American Spectator September 1994 53 "Look, Daddy," he said...
...could undo what 52 The American Spectator September 1994 he'd done...
...Tommy chased fireflies and my Aunt Pearl came out to smoke a cigarette...
...Your grandfather was the most patriotic man I ever knew," she said...
...I did my commercial, a job akin to paying a six year old to go to Disneyland...
...On the plane, I noticed what I have so often noticed: that passengers in first class are ruder than passengers in coach...
...Fireflies...
...My parents, my sister and brother-in-law, the world's hardest-working human, my niece and nephew, my aunt, a first cousin and her two kids, and some more distant cousins are all in a suite at the River Inn looking at photos of near and far relatives...
...They are nice folks and do a hard job, but they are not always great at investigating crimes...
...He seemed so on top of things...
...Not one is dressed in a suit and tie or in a respectable dress...
...infant son, Hilda's uncle, so to speak, because he would be too much trouble to transport and murder somewhere else...
...She's an attractive woman with jet black hair and pale blue eyes and a perpetual smile...
...The revolution against good sense and decency...
...The attendants, the beautiful Vietnamese girl who takes the cash, the customers, the shoeshine man—we're all jazzed...
...Nixon once told me he could tell a Communist just by the phrases and words he used...
...50 The American Spectator September 1994 Crime has gotten so bad that even in Brentwood, one of the absolutely most expensive neighborhoods on earth, even when the victim is a beautiful, well-to-do woman like the former Ms...
...But she pulled herself together and now teaches mathematics to gifted children in the public schools of Santa Monica...
...We interrupt the CBS news for a KCBS special report," said the announcer...
...The ones' that scream: Stay away—this man is out to take something from you...
...Tommy is largely fearless, easy to laugh, and very, very easy to make friends...
...If you put in "mailman," it tells you to try "mailperson...
...But the whole lounge is gathered by the TV, watching as if they were getting a blood transfusion through the tube...
...Sunday A journey south of Coeur d'Alene to a Nez Perce Indian reservation to buy fireworks...
...The roads were deserted...
...I hope this moves his honor to do something real about crime, instead of trying to nickel and dime the police force into absolute and total demoralization...
...It's like watching the aristos meeting the guillotine...
...Wow...
...I should put Mr...
...Still, I would not trust the LAPD a lot...
...As organized and disciplined as Mom is, that's how unfocused and confused daughter Hilda is...
...Go, O.J., Go," said one cruelly ironic sign...
...By the same token, I, a lawyer, can usually spot another lawyer...
...Friday L ittle Mr...
...I know this guy, Bob Shapiro, who represents O.J...
...The pictures are bewildering and I am hard put to make much sense of them...
...Then he gave me half off the goodies...
...On the next bed, I could hear Tommy's angelic rhythmic snoring...
...But not tonight...
...And she very specifically wanted a baby to replace, so to say, or to remember, the infant uncle the Gestapo killed when they entered her mother's house not so very long ago...
...They're cheering the run of the fox that must inevitably be torn to pieces by the hounds...
...My father has his sharpshooter's medal, his certificates of good conduct, his promotion records from private to corporal and then to sergeant, then his mustering-out papers and his recommendation for future employment...
...How come O.J., the putative murderer, is getting all the pleading and soothing...
...Saturday A reunion in Washington, D.C...
...And sure enough, by the grace of God, there were fireflies floating luminously around the small fountain and pond...
...He wanted to enlist in World War II when he was 55 years old...
...The mother's family was seized by the Gestapo in the small town in Germany where they had been cattle merchants for hundreds of years...
...had been beating his wife for years, how the police have been called about ten times and never did anything, about bloody ski masks and blood in the driveway of what they always call O.J.'s "mansion...
...Dirt cheap...
...My cousin Alayne has made a family tree...
...What a world...
...Seven hundred dollars...
...I have the ultrastrongfeeling he did not write that little beauty...
...The Mom was self-effacing and stolid, and had an amazing sangfroid about the entire matter...
...No sooner did I come back from a swim at the Shoreham Towers than there was another news flash on the radio, the best one yet: the LAPD has tracked down The Juice...
...There is story after story about how O.J...
...If you put in "Jew," it says "offensive...
...Simpson...
...O.J., multi-millionaire, sports star, god of physical ability, spokesman for Hertz, is in the back seat holding a gun to his head while an old pal drives around—and half of L.A...
...I would stake a lot that this is one...
...On my way this afternoon to do a commercial—which requires me to say "Duh-uhh" in that maddening way today's young people have of saying it, a way that's supposed to imply that everyone else is stupid and the kids are effortlessly smart—I stopped at a liquor store al^^•^•1111111 SARKES TARZIAN INC Sarkes Tarzian Television Sarkes Tarzian Radio Broadcasters Making a Difference The American Spectator September 1994 51 to buy some throat lozenges...
...Anyway, I had the great pleasure of meeting Hilda in Journey into Self-Obsession a few years ago when I used to go regularly to that bizarre group...
...For some reason having to do with Indian rights, the reservation sells much more powerful fireworks than the rest of America is allowed to...
...This evening, we had a dinner at the Cosmos Club...
...But I do remember she always looked nervous...
...I know he's smart from the time a good friend accidentally killed someone in a car accident not long ago...
...Think what his life was like: money pouring in from commercials and from commenting on sports...
...I love children," she said...
...I hate unnecessary noise even more...
...I hope you're kidding," I said...
...I don't believe you," she said...
Vol. 27 • September 1994 • No. 9
