LOOK WHO'S TALKING

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

BY NOW SO MANY BOOKS HAVE BEEN written about the O.J. Simpson case that it is time to start piling them into separate little stacks. There are the quickie tell-alls from peripheral characters (Kato Kaelin, Faye Resnick). There are the tell-alls from major players who have little to say and mediocre co-writers (Madam Foreman, by several jurors, belongs here, as does O.J.'s own I Want to Tell You). There are the joke books (O.J.'s Legal Pad being one of the better entries in this category). And now all the previous works can be tossed aside with the arrival, a mere five months after the verdict, of the post-trial memoirs by those true insiders, the lawyers.

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz was first off the mark with Reasonable Doubts, a discussion of the legal issues of the case with very little real drama. That missing ingredient, however, has been whipped up in generous gobs in both prosecutor Christopher Darden's In Contempt (ReganBooks; $26), written with Jess Walter, and this week's offering, defense attorney Robert Shapiro's The Search for Justice (Warner Books; $24.95), written with Larkin Warren. There are no bombshells here, but both lawyers take the reader on a breathless you-are-there ride, evoking once again all the emotions of that fevered epoch in this country's history. Which emotions, of course, depends on whose Rashomon-like tale you are reading at the time.

The books reflect their authors' public personas. Darden's autobiographical memoir is brooding, complex, ambitious and at times emotionally overwrought. He has a habit, for instance, of referring to Simpson with an unprintable epithet. Shapiro takes a more measured, if Hollywoody, approach. But in both works, details of the lawyers' behind-the-scenes machinations remain strangely compelling. Darden describes a jaunt to the Bahamas, where he unsuccessfully pursued a tip that Simpson was planning to flee there the day of the Bronco chase, and both writers float rumors that juror Francine Florio-Bunten was dismissed under suspicious circumstances. Shapiro also reveals that the defense team offered to have Simpson take a lie detector test at the outset, knowing full well that the prosecution would never agree to admit the results, whatever they were, into evidence. And he describes the moment when he realized that Simpson, due to turn himself in to the police, had vanished: "I don't think there was anyone in that room who didn't believe ... that O.J. had gone off to kill himself." (Noting that Simpson signed his farewell note with a happy face drawn inside the O, Darden writes, "A suicide note with a happy face. Right.")

As the lawyers geared up for their opening arguments, even the casual Court TV viewer could see that the defense lawyers were locked in a tense standoff. Lucky Shapiro gets to be the first to offer a narrative of the power grabbing and camera hogging by the unruly Dream Teamers, a narrative in which he manages convincingly to describe his frustration at being edged out by Johnnie Cochran while also insisting that his diminished role had been planned all along. Shapiro is skilled, in fact, at doling out praise that is either damning or faint, sometimes both: Marcia Clark was an "honorable adversary," he notes before launching into an embarrassing tale about Clark's ex-husband, the professional backgammon player. Darden, he writes in a sly twofer, "hadn't mastered (if indeed he wanted to) Johnnie Cochran's self-proclaimed adeptness at not ever letting people know what he was thinking and feeling."

Shapiro reserves his harshest criticism for his colleagues, however. In classic Shapiro-speak, the author notes that F. Lee Bailey's "reputation for hard drinking was still alive and well," then describes Bailey rambling one night after a few drinks. He continues to suggest that Bailey was the defense-team sieve, responsible for leaking stories to the New York Daily News and Simpson's original police interview to the tabloid Star, an interview in which, according to the Darden book, a disoriented Simpson was unable to explain his cut hand and unwilling to take a lie detector test. "I'm sure eventually I'll do it," Simpson tells detectives Philip Vannatter and Tom Lange. "But it's like, hey, I've got some weird thoughts now. And I've had some weird thoughts--you know, you've been with a person for 17 years, you think everything."

Shapiro will never speak to Bailey again, and he has said he will never work with Cochran again. He blames Cochran and Carl Douglas for violating the rules of reciprocal discovery in the defense's opening statement, when Cochran sprang new witnesses upon the prosecution. And he shows a Cochran determined to play the race card. "A defense built on race will never help us," Shapiro told Cochran. "Never say never, Bob," Cochran replied.

On the inflammatory issue of race, Shapiro has an ally in Darden. While Shapiro places the credit for the team's success mostly on his own shoulders, Darden blames the prosecution's failures on, alternately, the jurors, "12 people lined up at the grinder with big axes," and Cochran, who made it "clear that there were going to be two sides in this case, not prosecution and defense, but black and white."

And Darden blames himself. One of the more wrenching sections of In Contempt involves Darden's description of the glove demonstration, which was his idea. Vannatter's "sausage fingers," he writes, slid easily into the glove, but after Simpson struggled before the jury to put it on, Darden was frozen out of the case. "People ask me now would I do it again," Darden writes. "No. Of course not."

Such 20/20 hindsight is still to come from the pens of Clark and Cochran. And those books, like Darden's and Shapiro's, will no doubt have one thing in common: each writer will work hard to drum up support for his team, even if doing so means dumping a little more dirt on the other guy.