Strange Days For Marcia Clark -- O.J. Simpson's Former Prosecutor Travels From Frustration To Fortune

On her hell-ride toward losing the bizarre O.J. Simpson murder trial, Marcia Clark would occasionally look to a four-foot-high poster of dead rock star Jim Morrison on the wall of her office and repeat one his best-known lines, "This is the strangest life I've ever known."

It is still strange.

It is strange that Clark, once so frustrated by the role of Simpson's celebrity in his acquittal and so appropriately outraged by the tabloids' fixation with her life, has found herself on the Oprah Winfrey-Larry King-Jay Leno circuit.

It is strange that she had spent all that time trying to convince jurors they didn't know Simpson just because he was on TV, and now millions think they know her because she was on TV.

It is strange that she is a star and looking at a potential future in television after losing a case she says had "a Mount Everest of evidence" pointing to guilt. She has left her civil-servant job - her fame would be an issue in any trial.

It also seems strange that her 486-page book, "Without a Doubt" (Viking, $25.95), netted her a $4.2-million advance and is selling so briskly (No. 1 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list) when it is the 68th Simpson book to hit the market in the three years since the killings.

She laughed about it all when visiting The Times during the middle of her month-long book tour. But it seemed an uneasy laugh.

"As a kid I had wanted to be an actress, but never a famous one, if that makes sense," she said. "I gave up on it because of the superficiality of it. And then for that to happen, to be out out there in a way I never wanted to be, even when I wanted to act, is so . . . strange. I think about that Morrison line all the time . . .

"I have had women come up to me and say, `You're my role model. I want my daughter to be just like you.' But they don't know me. You want your daughter to be twice married and divorced and a single mother, who smokes and talks like a sailor?"

But to many, Clark was the feminist who held her own in a courtroom full of men. She was a civil servant waging war against a phalanx of $1,000 Dream Team suits. She was a single mom dealing with a double homicide and a custody suit involving her two young children.

America watched her do a slow, painfully steady burnout, the rings below her eyes growing like a ripples in a pond.

Before jury selection even began in October of 1994, she began rambling about her feelings into a microcassette recorder as she drove to and from the courthouse.

"The stress has been building and building and building . . . the stress of the trial . . . and, of course, the going through a divorce and everything . . . I always feel like I'm being pounded."

Then a few days later, on Oct. 2, 1994:

". . . Constant anxiety . . . I feel like I can't breathe thinking about all the work I have to do, and I don't have the time for it. I'm so tired. Tired of seeing my face in the magazines and . . . tired of everything. Just plain tired."

That she lost doesn't seem to matter, because most Americans, the polls say, were on her side.

Her book reads like one last, desperate closing argument, a rebuttal to the critics who said she was in over her head. She wrote it, she says, to answer the inaccuracies, to reach a catharsis, and yes, to make money like everyone else.

And, like every other lawyer in the case, she finds fault elsewhere.

According to Clark:

-- Judge Lance Ito was spineless and star-struck, played like a puppet by race-baiting defense attorney Johnnie Cochran and unfairly against the prosecution.

-- Detective Mark Fuhrman did fine police work but was a racist jerk who should have come forward early on about his infamous tapes.

-- The mostly African-American jury was blinded by race and celebrity. "The bedrock issue here was not race - but race coupled with celebrity," she says. "It was not so much that Simpson was a black man, but a famous black man. And a well-loved famous black man."

-- The main detectives, Phil Vannatter and Tom Lange, botched their critical interview with Simpson.

-- LAPD criminalist Dennis Fung, in charge of picking up evidence, was "a dunce."

-- And co-prosecutor Chris Darden, whom Clark likes, was on a "testosterone high" when he was pressured by defense attorneys into having Simpson try on the bloody gloves. Darden also couldn't get along with other key members of the prosecution team.

She has a quick mind and quick tongue. The words come pouring out at a rat-ta-tat pace, flitting across familiar names and evidence, like the old Marcia Clark, that embattled courtroom fighter. But it's not. Her stress rings are long gone and she wears a pendant that says, "Faith," which she says essentially means, "patience."

Clark won 19 of 20 homicide cases before Simpson came along, and had a reputation for being smart, tough and profane.

Her book describes bits of her childhood, including how her family moved from state to state constantly. Her first husband was a professional backgammon hustler whom she says she never loved. She got a quick divorce to marry again and filed for divorce from her second husband three days before the murders.

She was only vaguely aware of who Simpson was when the murders occurred. "Wasn't he in `Naked Gun' or something?" she asked Vannatter.

When she walked to the lectern during her initial press conference to announce the Simpson charges, she began thinking, "All my life I'd felt sure something would happen to me that would make my life bigger, more profound . . . this is it. You were meant to do this."

Clark, 43, now says she would not do it over again.

She still believes in the justice system, saying the Simpson case was an anomaly in every sense. But she also believes that Cochran's appeal toward racial bias may have caused a backlash that helped along the passage of California Proposition 209, which prohibits certain affirmative-action programs.

She still must go through the custody case involving her two young children, which will make headlines. She's also got an agent and is looking for an issue-oriented talk show.

Thankfully, she and Darden turned down an offer from a fast-food company to utter the line, "Run for the border!"

Yes, it is all very strange, she says, before heading to Costco to sign books and then to Denver and elsewhere.

Chances are that if Jim Morrison were watching, he would find it most strange of all that three years after two people were killed and left in a heap outside an L.A. condo, the Simpson tour is still plugging along.