Starting Over

NEW YORK — Sometimes life imitates therapy and losing a battle is the only way to find yourself. If this sounds like a 12-step homily, Marcia Clark couldn’t care less.

While millions of viewers watched her fail to win a conviction in the People vs. O.J. Simpson, few could have known that she was quietly waging a private war to emancipate herself once and for all--to stand on her own as a working woman, a mother and a professional. Indeed, Clark walked away from the wreckage with something more important than a courtroom victory.

“Looking back, I gained a sense of self that was lacking in me before. I became a much more centered person,” says Clark, curling up on a sofa in a Manhattan hotel. “There was a huge difference in who I was before and after O.J. Simpson crashed into my life. But how could anyone have possibly known that? How could someone just watching a TV begin to see this?”

In the aftermath of the verdict, Clark has written a book and begun casting about for a new career, having made it clear that she will never practice law again. Although the former prosecutor has had ample time to rebuild her life and catch her breath, she looks smaller and more exhausted in person than one might expect--someone who desperately needs a long nap.

“It’s jet lag,” she says politely. “Plus they’ve got me talking about the book nonstop.”

For those who still can’t get enough of the Brentwood murder case, Clark’s “Without a Doubt” (Viking) shines a revealing light--not only on the trial and the players behind the scenes, but on a person whose real identity is surprisingly elusive, even though she has been overexposed and scrutinized as few women in our time.

After three years of media overkill, Americans may think they know Clark: She’s one tough cookie, the topless girl on an Italian beach, a chain-smoking lifer in the district attorney’s office who can hold her own with the big boys. She’s also a single woman whose hairdo and hemlines ignited fierce debate, an inspiring symbol for working mothers and a Voice of Justice.

Here’s what we don’t know: Long after Judge Lance Ito banged the gavel and adjourned the court sessions, Clark wrestled each night with personal guilt and the impossibility of 18-hour workdays that left her barely enough time to take care of two young sons. While TV pundits debated the significance of domestic violence, the lead prosecutor lived day to day with painful memories of her first marriage to a selfish, controlling man.

When defense attorneys tried to minimize Simpson’s battering of his wife, Clark couldn’t help but remember the man who raped her on a European vacation when she was 17. While some skeptics charged she was “using” a child-care emergency to delay the trial, Clark was traumatized by fears that her second husband might win full custody of their two children.

But most important, the simple act of going home each night to an empty bed--a period that spanned two years--enabled Clark to grow personally and spiritually. Having lived much of her adult years in the shadow of men, she suddenly had to take full responsibility for the details of everyday life, ranging from broken water heaters and leaky roofs to the fact that there was no shoulder to cry on--even though there were times she craved it.

“I don’t ordinarily present myself as a damsel in distress, but, boy, I sure felt like it,” says Clark, 43, on the first day of a national tour to promote her book. “I knew that as far as being on my own was concerned, I just had to do it. I’d put it off way too long.

“So those two years were very empowering for me. And that’s what I’ve learned: You need to spend time by yourself. To center yourself. You have to not only know how to be by yourself, you have to get to the point where you savor it. Only then can you share with someone else.”

Today, there’s another man in Clark’s life. Blues musician Mitch Kashmar moved in with her earlier this year, but only after a 12-month courtship in which the relationship grew and developed at a slower pace than Clark had ever experienced. It’s been a source of strength and pride for her, something that enabled her to write “Without a Doubt” with confidence.

That’s good news for readers, who finally have a first-person look at the O.J. Simpson melodrama that pulses with life and conviction. But it’s bad news for those who clashed with Clark--especially Ito and the Dream Team attorneys--because she spares no one. Written in a brash, cheerfully profane voice with co-author Teresa Carpenter, the nearly 500-page book will win praise from some readers and outrage others. And that’s just the way Clark wants it.

“I wasn’t going to write some mealy-mouthed account of what happened,” she says. “When you tell it straight, you’re bound to offend some people. If I offended some people, I’m sorry. I’m entitled to my opinion and you’re entitled to yours. But I had to tell the truth.”

*

Sometimes, truth means venting. In a series of tapes dictated while commuting to the trial, Clark exploded with anger at media voyeurs, defense attorneys and at a jury pool that seemed predisposed to believe Simpson, no matter what criminal evidence was put before it.

“I’d like to see us abolish the jury system,” she snapped on one tape made during jury selection. “Why leave the fate of our nation in the hands of these moon rocks?”

Asked to define the term, Clark gives a characteristically deep laugh, furrows her brow for a moment and then smiles mischievously: “By that I mean ‘weightless.’ ”

Laughter aside, the comment reflects a bitter truth that Clark and her colleagues understood from the beginning--and which many viewers realized only at the end of Simpson’s trial. The downtown Los Angeles jury seemed determined to acquit him, and both sides knew it.

The lesson, Clark says, is clear: “After all we’ve been through in Los Angeles, the issue of minority disenfranchisement has to be dealt with. Criminal justice has to be the same for everyone, or you’re going to keep having verdicts like this. The racial gulf is so huge.”

Long before the trial even began, Clark encountered difficulties with African American women, who made up three-fourths of the jury pool. In focus groups, two black women derided her as a “bitch.” One woman defended Simpson, calling him “My man, O.J.”

“ ‘My man’ ?” Clark thought to herself. “The only way he’d be your man is if you were white, 25 and built like a centerfold.”

During the trial, prosecutors hoped that Denise Brown’s testimony about her brother-in-law’s physical cruelty might sway jurors. Clark watched their faces as Brown spoke, however, and saw only hostility. At that point, she decided, the case was truly lost.

“The bedrock issue here was not race, but race coupled with celebrity,” she writes. “If [Simpson] had been some black sanitation worker who had killed his white wife in a fit of rage, a jury of 12 middle-aged black women would have convicted the jerk in a heartbeat.”

*

The trial was stressful enough, yet Clark also had to fend off media inquiries that crossed the line of propriety. Was she involved with co-prosecutor Christopher Darden? Had she been a “wild girl” in her youth? Was she an alcoholic, headed for rehab after the verdict?

“No’s to all of that stuff,” she says ruefully, adding that courtroom embarrassments were even worse. In one tape, she erupted at Ito’s treatment of her compared to male attorneys:

“His sexism . . . has gotten so irritating. It’s funny, you know. I never, never used to cry sexism. But this case is rampant with it. The judge makes these cute little corrections to me about ‘person power’ instead of ‘manpower.’ That’s just a change of a word, Judge. How about your f---ing attitude? And Cochran is so condescending and patronizing. We got to sidebar and I’m arguing and he starts calling me ‘hysterical.’ I mean, Jesus. I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s absolutely frightening. I don’t think we have come a very long way, baby.”

Personal growth is another matter. Although she’s weary from interviews--on the first day of her tour--Clark is hopeful about the future. It’s not clear whether she’ll appear on a much-rumored TV show, “Ladylaw,” so she’s considering other options, including work as a legal commentator or as an advocate for issues such as domestic violence.

Once a career civil servant, Clark is adjusting to her new life with the considerable help of a $4.2 million book advance. It’s enabled her to move out of a Glendale home that had a leaky roof and to broaden her shopping habits beyond Price / Costco. Yet celebrity has also cramped her style. Nowadays, Clark says she goes out less often and has to watch what she says and does in public. She doesn’t feel comfortable going to pool halls at night like before, and she’s reluctant to resume jazz dancing, a lifelong passion.

“People are very nice much of the time, they come up to you and say wonderful things, like I’m their role model or something. And I say, how could anyone be more imperfect than I am?”

You have to put things in perspective, Clark says, and the memory of a Hollywood celebrity party she went to at producer Ray Stark’s house during the Simpson trial serves nicely.

“I mean, the oddness, the hilarity of being invited to this party at a palatial home in the Hills of Beverly, with hot and cold running butlers and maids,” Clark recalls. “And then I drive home in a car where rain comes pouring in a window that’s broken. It was so bizarre.

“It all reminds me of a line from a Doors song: ‘This is the strangest life I’ve ever known.’ Because I’m just me, Marcia Clark, you know? People need to remember that.”