As we discussed earlier today, FX’s big fancy miniseries American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson premiered last night, and was really quite terrific. The episode had a bunch of notable moments: Marcia Clark chain-smoking cigarettes as she realized what a career-defining case she had on her hands, Johnnie Cochran getting pulled in slowly as the racial elements of the case crystallized, John Travolta doing… whatever exactly it was that John Travolta was doing. All of it, fascinating. But the most notable moment was probably the end, just before O.J. hopped in the infamous white Bronco, when he was running around Robert Kardashian’s house with a gun and threatening to kill himself. And the reason it was the most notable moment was this…
If we take nothing else away from this series — and again, hopefully we take away plenty, because it’s good — let’s all agree to start using the phrase “Do not kill yourself in Kimmy’s bedroom” way more often, delivered exactly the way Schwimmer delivers it. Shout it at a barista tomorrow morning. Start your day with a little fun.
And here’s an interesting note about that line: It wasn’t just the producers trying to shoehorn Kim Kardashian into the show. It really happened. Kind of! Vanity Fair has a great piece explaining the whole history.
Sitting on a four-poster bed very similar to the one seen in the show, [Robert] Kardashian tells [Barbara] Walters that while O.J. had a gun, it was wrapped in a towel, not pressed to his head. Walters quotes Kardashian’s words from the 1996 book American Tragedy: The Uncensored Story of the Simpson Defense by Lawrence Schiller and James Willwerthand that are very similar to the lines Schwimmer speaks in the show. Kardashian confirms that when O.J. threatened to kill himself, he said, ”I could never walk in this room, my daughter couldn’t sleep in this bed. She’d know what happened.“
Not quite “Do not kill yourself in Kimmy’s bedroom!,” but close enough.
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Of course, if we take that as true, then it raises an interesting question. The room we later learned was Kimmy’s was shown earlier in the episode, too, as seen in the image as the top of this post. And in that image, underneath the shrine to JTT and Joey Lawrence, O.J. is lying partially clothed next to his floozy girlfriend, who I think they want us to believe is Paula Barbieri, but couldn’t have been in real life because of this incredible paragraph:
Barbieri had dated O. J. Simpson and was reportedly his last girlfriend before the murder of his ex-wife Nicole on June 12, 1994. She last saw him the night before the murders when they went to a fund-raiser together. On the morning of the murders, Barbieri left Simpson a 30-minute-long message on his answering machine, breaking off their relationship. She indicated that she was flying to Las Vegas to be with singer Michael Bolton.
Bolton!
But anyway, the question I am moseying toward is this: Did… did Robert Kardashian let a drugged-up, pill-popping O.J. Simpson have sex in his teenage daughter’s bed while helping him hide from the rabid Los Angeles press and their questions about the murders they thought he committed? Because if so, man. Not cool, dad.
