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Johnnie Cochran, meanwhile, along with co-counsel Carl Douglas, is at his Wilshire Boulevard office overlooking Hancock Park late into the night. He too will be working through the weekend, with a brief break to have a session with his personal trainer (``I want to be standing when this is over,'' he says), and to lament the fact that he wasn't able to use his Super Bowl tickets this year. But he admits he's feeling pretty good about his case right now. ``People have been coming up to me and saying, `Before you started talking, I thought this guy was guilty. Now I'm wondering.' Today I went to my barbershop. I walk in, and I get a standing ovation.'' As for the prosecution's cries of foul, Cochran and Douglas are, naturally, having none of it. ``Much ado about nothing,'' insists Douglas, who toils in an adjoining office. Says Cochran: ``You just take the slings and arrows.''
But such highbrow language hardly captures the raw reality of Judge Ito's courtroom last week, where each day brought a new spike in the players' emotional temperatures--and further discomfited the millions of TV viewers who thought they knew what to think about O.J. Over kitchen tables, in restaurants, around office coffee machines, people debated the lawyers' opening statements, critiqued Judge Ito's style, expressed amazement over snapshots of Simpson's body offered up by the defense and photos of Simpson's socks displayed by the prosecution.
Of course, for those Americans who have known since the Night of the White Bronco that the opening of the O.J. Simpson trial would do more to suck up leisure time than all the debates over the balanced-budget amendment and observations about the odd January weather combined, the high courtroom drama was the big payoff. But those who had cynically decided in advance that the so-called trial of the century would be nothing more than an interminable media fest were guilty of, to use Johnnie Cochran's new favorite phrase, ``a rush to judgment.''
Such viewers could only watch, transfixed, the spectacle of surprise witnesses, new details of blood and fibers, a testy Ito and lawyers positively sputtering with outrage. Who could have predicted that among those holding press conferences would be doctors from the California Medical Center, reporting on the condition of deputy district attorney William Hodgman, who was stricken with chest pains at the end of Day Two? Hodgman, ordinarily mild-mannered, got so upset in court that Ito said, ``How do you suggest I deal with the objections of the prosecution after I succeed in peeling them off the ceiling?'' Ito added, ``I have known [Mr. Hodgman] as a colleague and a trial lawyer, and I've never seen the expression on his face that I've seen today.'' As Marcia Clark told the court last Tuesday in a bit of masterful understatement, ``we live in very, very strange times.''