ON THE SCENE / PATT MORRISON : A Searing Focus on Ponderous Proceedings

Hundreds of reporters, scores of hours of video, thousands of words expended to convey the tedium and the lunacy of Thursday in Los Angeles--and the mood of the day was best captured by the behavior of a copying machine in the fifth-floor county clerk’s office.

Turning out document replicas to satisfy all the reporters who wanted them, it simply overloaded and stopped.

It was a day so crazy that O.J. Simpson’s lawyer-friends Robert Kardashian and Leroy Taft, pursued into the street by reporters, took a bus--a bus!--to a Downtown restaurant for lunch and hitched a ride back to court in a police car . . . and a day so routine that in cars mired in dense traffic a mere block from the courthouse, radios were blaring everything but O.J.

The first day of O.J. Simpson’s preliminary hearing could fit anyplace in L.A.’s kaleidoscope:

Variety would call it a plodding legal sequel that couldn’t hold the audience, compared to the original blockbuster, the slow-mo twilight freeway chase of two weeks ago.

Caltech could plot the course of Thursday’s newsquake, from the courtroom epicenter, across town, across the country; to a gym in Long Beach, where people stayed aboard the Stairmasters so they could watch TV; to a Crenshaw district store, where a saleswoman’s 5-year-old daughter said as the TV came on, “Oh no, not O.J. again!”; to a noontime Chicago bar where no one wondered who he was when the waitress asked, “Do you think he did it?” . . . to the Peachtree Street Macy’s in Atlanta where, of the 66 color TVs in the electronics department, all but two were turned to CNN and Simpson.

And the radio shrinks could say that we have had it up to here with O.J. . . . or that we’re so avid for every scrap about the case that the Boston Globe can trill on for a dozen rapt paragraphs about the prosecutor’s “head of tight curls” and the defense attorney’s “deep, deep tan.”

The day, frame by frame:

At 7:30 a.m., an hour when even the homeless have just begun to populate Downtown streets, Nicole Brown Simpson’s sisters, parents and friends were sitting in the back booth of a scruffy Downtown coffee shop, waiting to attend the hearing.

The hearing that had gotten as much buildup as the opening of a new Steven Spielberg movie began with promising drama, when the helicopters hove into sound and view at 8:40 a.m., tracking the police van bringing Simpson to court. (Unlike what one young man assured another on a Downtown street, there is no tunnel from the jail to the courthouse.)

The courtroom pace moved ponderously, disappointing many who had expected incendiary TV-movie lawyering. But not everyone.

At Jefferson Boulevard and Crenshaw Avenue, where “Pray for O.J.” T-shirts rippled like flags in the late June wind, Jay Akeem paid $10 for an extra-large and said: “We grew up on ‘Perry Mason’ and ‘Matlock’. . . . It’s tedious going through the proceedings though. I was watching this morning, the forensics, the LAPD woman--(it was) getting real technical, but it’s important.”

At the Legends sports bar in Santa Monica, Steve Grospitz was late for lunch with his sister because he had been watching the case. “I actually was kind of wanting for this to get started; we heard so much hearsay. I was interested in what the court was going to do. Michael Jackson, the Menendez thing.” But the city’s energy, he figures, “is kind of exhausted.”

With only 80 seats in the courtroom, news stations and the curious found more engrossing events out on the courthouse sidewalks. See-saw debates went on between Simpson supporters and people such as Jewish Defense League leader Irv Rubin, who demanded via bullhorn that defense attorney Robert L. Shapiro not forget his “Jewish brother, Ronald Goldman,” one of the victims. Perennial candidate Melrose Larry Green told a Simpson supporter, “Stand up and smell the bagels!”

Nearby, artist Rodney Vanworth created an instant mural when he spread a six-foot canvas on the sidewalk and invited people to write on it with markers. He had already drawn the figure of a red-smeared woman with knives sticking out of her body, a shoe, a jail cell, a sink and a toilet and a trophy with the words “hero” and “pity the victims” written on it.

In Brentwood, as police searched an empty lot for more evidence, it was like old times--two weeks ago when it was the center of the action.

A delivery man from A Votre Sante restaurant, who had fed the media mob then, lost no time in returning Thursday and passing out menus for fare like whole wheat chapatis filled with hummus. “This is Brentwood,” Sean McFarland said. “Nobody eats anything with fat in it.”

Commerce has been part of big legal cases since fast-buck artists sold toy monkeys on the sidewalks outside the Scopes evolution trial in 1925.

Outside the courthouse, shirt-seller K.T. had virtually cleared out all 20 dozen shirts--”Don’t Squeeze the Juice” and “Pray for O.J.”--in two days. One woman fingered a shirt, sniffed and said to K.T., “Do you have any with the opposite point of view, like ‘Fry O.J.’?”

City Hall sidewalks served as little more than a parking lot for TV vans--and they all got parking tickets.

In one city councilman’s office, the receptionist admitted that “there’s a TV in back that no one’s supposed to know about.” Mayor Richard Riordan’s aides held their breath lest their boss be bumped yet again from an oft-delayed morning news appearance. And standing with the smokers on the west steps, Vivian Sarpong complained that she had gone to a drugstore Thursday morning to buy “one of those little TVs, and they were all sold out!” She will buy one this weekend. At her desk, she prepared “a little spot for my TV. Got a little piece of cardboard in case anybody comes by, I can flop it down, cover it up.”

If people watched or listened at work, most tried to do so unobtrusively.

On the floor of a huge Downtown bank, a woman at a desk murmured that there was a TV around somewhere, but “the bank doesn’t pay me for that, unfortunately.”

At the Radio Shack in the bowels of the Arco towers, a TV showed the Simpson case--but partly because the reception was too bad to get soccer.

And at Mezzaluna, the bright, prow-shaped Brentwood restaurant where Nicole Simpson last ate and Goldman last worked, waiters sliding the luncheon specials into the menus looked up at the television suspended from the cloud-painted ceiling, and murmured about with the day’s legal doings in overheard snips like “special circumstances” and “and then he walks.”

The start of the hearing coincided with lunch hour in much of the country.

In the back room of Mother Hubbard’s in Chicago, claims adjuster Alona Sanders got to monitor the case at work the first day--but today is another matter. “They came in and told us today that as of tomorrow, they were cutting off the radios during work hours,” Sanders said. “They think it’s interfering with our work.”

Although it’s soccer, not Simpson, that’s disrupting the Russian parliament by keeping people up until 2 a.m., in Boston bookish circles, the mention of the case is enough to divert conversation from more arcane topics. A Boston woman’s regular two-hour Saturday phone conversation with her mother in Ohio has been devoted exclusively to Simpson, and now runs three hours.

Back in Los Angeles, only one moment seemed to vary from the script.

A tall man in a suit walked into the heavily secured court wearing one of the rare, coveted white badges identifying him as a member of the defense or prosecution team. He said he was “a good friend of O.J.’s and Shapiro’s.”

When deputies asked Shapiro about that, the defense attorney said: “I’ve never seen him in my life,” and the man was hustled out.

Searching for Clues

A Portion of the search warrant obtained by Los Angeles police to search the home of O.J. Simpson after the deaths of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman.

Here are the items listed in the LAPD property report:

1. Cloth swatch used to transfer red stain

Found: Driver door exterior of White Bronco

2. Wood stick

Found: On grass

3. Cigarette butt

On street at residence

4. Cloth swatch used to transfer red stain

Found: On curb

5. Cloth swatch used to transfer red stain

Found: On driveway

6. Cloth swatch used to transfer red stain

Found: On curb

7. Cloth swatch used to transfer red stain

Found: On driveway

8. Cloth swatch used to transfer red stain

Found: On driveway

9. Brown leather glove, with red stains

Found: On walkway

10. Blue plastic bag

Found: on ground, on south side of chain-link fence

11. Cloth swatch used to transfer red stain

Found: On wire

12. Cloth swatch used to transfer red stain

Found: Foyer

13. Two Navy blue socks

Found: Master bedroom

14. Cloth swatch used to transfer red stain

Found: Master bedroom floor

15. Airline ticket receipt

Found: Bathroom

16. Baggage tag

Found: Bench outside front door

17. Vial of blood labeled “O.J. Simpson 6-13-94”

Received: From LAPD detectives

18. White athletic shoes

Received: From LAPD detectives

19. Hair and fibers

Found: Recovered from leather glove

20. Cloth swatch used to transfer red stain

Found: Exterior passenger door of Bronco

21. Cloth swatch used to transfer red stain

Found: Interior of driver door

22. Cloth swatch used to transfer red stain

Found: Interior of driver door

23. Cloth swatch used to transfer red stain

Found: Interior of driver door

24. Cloth swatch used to transfer red stain

Found: Instrument panel, left edge of dashboard

25. Brown carpet fibers with red stains

Found: Driver door, adjacent to left door edge

26. Cloth swatch used to transfer red stain

Found: Driver floor, on rubber portion

27. Plain cap

Found: Driver floor

28. Cloth swatch used to transfer red stain

Found: Driver seat

29. Cloth swatch used to transfer red stain

Found: Steering wheel

30. Cloth swatch used to transfer red stain

Found: Center console

31. Cloth swatch used to transfer red stain

Found: Center console

32. Cloth swatch used to transfer red stain

Found: Front passenger backrest

33. Brown carpet with red stain resembling partial shoe print

Found: Bronco

34. Cloth swatch used to transfer red stain

Found: Driver wall