The sordid O.J. saga continues

ONE of chemistry’s fundamental laws governs “the conservation of mass,” and it holds that matter can be neither created nor destroyed.

Now, thanks to new media and the 24-hour news cycle, a certain class of story has come to share that material immortality. It’s no longer quite possible, for example, to say how they first appeared in the media universe, and it’s clear that -- however attenuated or grotesque their transformation -- they’re simply going to live on forever. Anything touching on the late Anna Nicole Smith or the inexplicable Paris Hilton falls into that category and so, too, do all things. . . O.J.

“Simpson” the story -- as opposed to O.J. Simpson the person -- stands, in fact, as a kind of founding event in the establishment of the 24-hour news cycle, an event whose significance was established and grew not because of its intrinsic importance, but because news organizations with 24 hours of airtime and newsprint to fill chose to fill their empty minutes and columns with O.J. Now the 24-hour news cycle has to involve a lot more than news; there are hours of analysis and “expert opinion” and features and speculation and comment of every sort. Who, after all, could stomach around-the-clock facts?

Moreover, one of the ways you can recognize one of these immortal stories is that their ultimate appeal to an insatiable public ultimately is based on everything but the event that first was called news. Thus, the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman initially appeared to be brutal homicides rooted in the squalor of domestic violence. Today, the story that is “Simpson” has come to be about race and class and celebrity and equal justice and police misconduct and wealth and privilege and just about everything else but the closing price of oil.

In the meantime, O.J. Simpson’s trial and acquittal on charges that he murdered his ex-wife and Goldman have spawned a small library of books. (Full disclosure: I not only covered the Simpson trial, but helped swell its bibliographic aftermath as the coauthor of the late Johnnie L. Cochran Jr.’s autobiography.)

This week brought perhaps the strangest of all the additions to the Simpson library -- an odd and repellent book called “If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer.” You can search the cover in vain for the author’s name, though making your way through the cast of listed contributors is a bit like sitting through the technical credits at the end of a George Lucas film, something you do purely out of inertia.

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How it started

How this book came to exist is about as instructive a story concerning the interplay between new and traditional media as you’re likely to find.

You may recall that some months ago the HarperCollins publishing house’s ReganBooks imprint -- a highly profitable boutique operation set up to exploit the tabloid instincts of publisher Judith Regan -- announced it would publish a “confession” of sorts in which Simpson recounted to Brentwood-based ghostwriter Pablo F. Fenjves how he might have killed his ex-wife and Goldman, if he had murdered them, which he denies. Moreover, to kick off publicity for the book, Regan taped two nights’ worth of one-on-one interviews with Simpson to be aired on Fox television, which -- like HarperCollins -- is owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Now Murdoch, of course, has a hyena’s taste for informational carrion, but the public opprobrium that rained down on the whole distasteful project was such that the broadcasts were canceled, all 400,000 copies of the book were pulped and Regan ended up fired, albeit for other purported reasons. If you want to gauge the intensity of public outrage, simply consider that Rupert Murdoch not only walked away leaving money on the table but severed his ties with somebody who’d earned him small mountains of the stuff.

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Picked up again

Enter the bereaved family of Ronald Goldman.

As you also may recall, subsequent to his acquittal on the criminal charges, the Goldman and Brown families sued Simpson in civil court for wrongfully causing the death of their loved ones. They won, and the former NFL star was ordered to pay them $33.5 million in compensation. Simpson decamped to the debtor-friendly confines of Florida and the Goldmans have been trying to get their money ever since.

When this odd manuscript suddenly became available, the Goldmans sued and secured ownership of it. As far as anyone can determine, it’s the first instance in the history of American publishing in which an unpublished manuscript has been seized to satisfy a civil judgment. The family secured an agent and reportedly shopped the book back among traditional publishers but found no takers. In today’s entrepreneurial new media climate, however, that wasn’t the barrier to publication it once would have been.

Ultimately, “If I Did It” ended up in the hands of Beaufort Books, which is a new kind of publisher, somewhere between a traditional house -- where they pay you to publish your book -- and a so-called vanity press -- where the author pays the publisher. Beaufort is what’s called a “joint venture press.” The author -- or, in this case, the manuscript’s owner -- pays part of the publishing costs, the publisher pays the rest and both share the profit.

Now it looks like the partnership will pay off. Major bookstore chains, such as Barnes & Noble, initially said they would sell “If I Did It” only online and not in their conventional stores. However, as online orders mounted, they reversed themselves. Beaufort has kicked its initial press run up from 125,000 to 150,000 copies.

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No stopping it

So, as it turns out, the place where all these roiling currents -- race, class, domestic violence, celebrity and equal justice -- meet turns out to be square in the middle of the marketplace, where it’s possible to put a price on every variety of human experience, including death and grief.

In this new media-driven, 24-hour-news-cycle world, no level of professional convention, propriety or even public outrage ultimately can prevent the distribution of anything for which there’s a market and a potential profit. Perhaps that will make us a more free and open society, liberated from the scruples of the media elites. Perhaps it will simply make us a more coarse and prurient country in which the intrinsic right to look away from what is degrading and offensive becomes harder and harder to exercise.

Whatever the Goldman family thought they intended, what they’ve done is to render their son’s death a commodity. “If I Did It” is, indeed, something new under the sun -- a work of pornographic grief.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com