The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson - страница 8
Real estate agents in Brentwood speak about the extraordinary intimacy of their relationships with their clients. The brokers are often women who have entered the business as a new career in midlife. According to an experienced agent, “People are so wrapped up in their houses here that you become their confessors. It’s amazing what I hear. People think nothing of telling their brokers that they were raped by their fathers.” Nicole Simpson quickly developed a close friendship with Jeane McKenna, who had been a broker in Brentwood since 1978. They had much in common: Both had been married to prominent athletes in Los Angeles. McKenna’s ex-husband is Jim Lefebvre, the former Dodger infielder, whom she had met when she was a flight attendant. When the two women met in October 1993, McKenna learned that Nicole had been divorced for about a year. After a period of on-and-off reconciliations with O.J., she was finally ready to buy her own place.
Nicole needed to move quickly on a purchase. She had sold the rental property in San Francisco, and to avoid taxes on the sale, she was required to invest the proceeds promptly in another rent-producing property. According to Jeane McKenna, “She was paying five thousand a month at Gretna Green, which had a pool and a guest house, so when she bought a new place, she wasn’t going to get everything she had before, but this would be her own.” As it turned out, McKenna had just what Nicole wanted.
In exasperation, Jeane McKenna used to refer to 875 South Bundy Drive as her “career listing”-the house she couldn’t sell. Bundy Drive is the main north-south artery of Brentwood, a noisy, busy, traffic-filled thoroughfare. McKenna’s property was the north side of a two-family condominium building in an area real estate agents refer to as the Brentwood flats or, sometimes, the poor man’s Brentwood. McKenna had had her name on a FOR SALE sign in front of that property for more than six months when she received a call from Nicole in October 1993. According to McKenna, “It’s not exactly an ace area of Brentwood, south of Sunset. The windows were double-paned so you couldn’t hear the noise on the street, and when I marketed the property, I told potential buyers, including Nicole, ‘You’re not going to be doing any outdoor entertaining, with all the buses and sirens screaming by.’ ” But the three-story condominium did have its advantages. It was modern, built in 1991, and it had a two-story living room, several skylights, and an assortment of high-end accoutrements, including a Jacuzzi, a Sub-Zero refrigerator, and a kitchen full of marble countertops. But McKenna couldn’t sell it until Nicole came along.
Nicole liked the Bundy condo, in part because of its location near a school. Nicole wanted to be close to a playground because her children would no longer have a yard. McKenna negotiated a deal for Nicole to buy the house for $625,000, but she wound up paying an additional $30,000. “The seller was this television producer who was in financial trouble, so Nicole had to pay all the seller’s closing costs, too,” McKenna explained. “She just really wanted that place.”
In January 1994, when Nicole moved into the Bundy condominium, her relationship with O.J. oscillated between reconciliation and a final breach, and the financial tensions between them escalated. The first point of conflict revolved around a man named Kato Kaelin. Although the Simpson affair made the name Kato synonymous with houseguest, his original relationship to Nicole was the more familiar one of tenant to landlord. Kaelin had rented her guest house at Gretna Green for five hundred dollars a month, a figure he could reduce somewhat by baby-sitting for her children. (During this period Sydney and Justin grew so fond of Kato that they named their pet Akita after him.) When Nicole moved to Bundy, she and Kaelin planned to continue the deal, with Kato paying to stay in a small guest suite wedged between the garage and kitchen. Shortly before the move, however, O.J. told Kaelin that although he had had no objections to his living in a separate guest house at Gretna Green, he didn’t want him living under the same roof as his ex-wife. Simpson’s solution was to give Kaelin a rent-free guest house at his home on Rockingham. O.J.’s offer thus simultaneously removed a potential rival for Nicole’s affections and took money out of his ex-wife’s pocket. It also led ultimately to Kaelin’s prominent place in the history of freeloading.
