O.J., Ap And Me Trial Correspondent Deutsch Covers Most ‘Entertaining’ Theater In The World

O.J. Simpson will not let Linda Deutsch rest.

If he’s not riding down a freeway with a gun to his head, he’s tracking her down in New Jersey to say she does good work.

The last time Deutsch tried to take a vacation from her work at the Associated Press, she flew to the East Coast, got off the plane, went to a friend’s house and watched O.J. and A.C. on the world’s most famous parade since Macy’s.

“I’d just gone through William Kennedy Smith, the Menendez brothers, Rodney King and the riots,” Deutsch says. “So in June of ‘94, I thought, ‘Finally, it’s all over.”’

But the coming-out of Linda Deutsch, accidental celebrity, was just beginning.

“I got on the phone to my editor and he said, quite wisely, ‘If he kills himself, you’re not going to have much to cover. But if not, you’re going to be busy for a long time.”’

Seventeen months, a few hundred stories, steady television appearances and a book later, Deutsch headed back for Jersey earlier this month and arrived at that same friend’s house to see her friend come running to greet her with: “O.J. Simpson wants to talk to you.”

“Oh, sure,” Deutsch said, sensing a joke.

“No, really,” the friend said. “Your editor just called looking for you.”

The most reviled not-guilty man in America was calling to say he appreciated Deutsch’s fairness in the way she reported his double-murder trial. And to ask Deutsch to ask the media to give him a break.

And because O.J. called, “Good Morning America” called. “The Today Show” called, Larry King called, and as of the afternoon of Friday, Nov. 17, Linda Deutsch had had one hour of sleep on her first vacation since the O.J. story ruined the last one.

Instead of visiting her mother and friends, Deutsch headed for the New York AP bureau to hammer out dailies and a special feature for the weekend.

“It was easy talking to him,” Deutsch said, “because we had been in the same room together for so long. And he knows that I was not an advocate.”

Still, the phone call was another episode that has taken Deutsch’s profile to an unexpected level.

As she waited for her Friday to end on national television, Deutsch said she was eager to “sink back into oblivion.”

But first there will be a book tour to promote “Verdict: The Chronicle of the O.J. Simpson Trial” (Andrews and McMeel) scheduled for release Monday.

Deutsch writes in the introduction:

“The courtroom was the arena where reputations were skewered, friendships broken, secrets unearthed and lives altered.”

Especially, lives altered. Hers is the proof of her own point.

Linda Deutsch has been the name above stories bringing high-profile trials into homes long before Court TV.

Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan, Angela Davis, Patty Hearst, Daniel Ellsberg, John DeLorean, the “Twilight Zone” trial …

“That’s how I gauge my life,” Deutsch says, “by whatever trial I was covering at the time.”

And her ability to cover trials is gauged by a wall full of awards at her Hollywood home, which she moved into two years ago but has hardly seen.

“For almost 30 years of outstanding work as one of journalism’s preeminent trial specialists,” says her favorite, the Distinguished Service in Journalism Award from the University of Missouri.

The Associated Press has nearly 2,000 reporters worldwide. Only seven, including Deutsch, are “special correspondents.”

In an arm of the media known for its quick and prolific coverage, Deutch has become legend, not just for her endurance but also for her analytical skills.

“She has a keen ability to observe physiognomy,” says Steve Loper, who has edited her work for 20 years. “She notices details in the court setting and can sense the mood of a courtroom. A lot of those details are getting lost in these days of electronic media.”

But Loper says that with the adverse fallout against television in courtrooms resulting from the Simpson trial, Deutsch’s experienced observation will receive renewed appreciation.

Her mother says Linda Deutsch is “married to the AP.”

Of her personal life in that regard, Deutsch - at age 52, an AP reporter for 28 years - says “there have been some men in my life, but I just got distracted.”

Courthouse characters and beat reporters have become her family, of sorts.

Her best friend also is her mentor.

Before there was Deutsch, there was Theo Wilson, a New York Daily News reporter - the grande dame of trial coverage.

They met at the Manson trial, where a bond was formed among reporters that still exists. Wilson, Deutsch and others still get together periodically to “talk about Charlie and the girls.”

“I had no idea I was being a mentor,” Wilson says. “I just knew I was having a good time covering trials.”

Wilson says Deutsch’s success is a result of her ability to take good notes and to be a good listener.

“If she hadn’t been good,” Wilson says, “she couldn’t have been running around with us.”

All she wanted to do was write.

She wrote for her high school paper and for two newspapers while attending Monmouth College.

In her first year at AP, she was working the overnight shift when Bobby Kennedy was shot. The next year she was backup reporter on the Manson trial, but she soon became lead reporter.

“I was so young, they sent out a seasoned trial reporter from New York,” Deutsch says. “After he had seen one too many people dragged from the courtroom, one day he quietly said, ‘You know, I think I have some vacation coming.’ He left and never came back.”

Deutsch called the Manson and Simpson trials “the bookends of my career.”

“The only truly important words are what the jury hears,” Wilson told her protege.

And so it was that on the day the Simpson jury heard a tape of Mark Fuhrman sounding like a man quite capable of a frame-up, Linda Deutsch passed a note to author Dominick Dunne that said: “This trial is over.”

Dunne sent back a note that said: “Party at Rockingham.”

“I call myself a one-woman hung jury,” Deutsch says of the Simpson verdict. “If you look at the physical evidence, you have to say he probably did it. But ‘probably’ isn’t good enough.”

It is not her job, Deutsch says, to be an advocate for either side of any trial. She is friendly with prosecutors and defense attorneys alike.

“I try to put myself in the position of a juror,” Deutsch says. “I’ve always believed that if you told the public what came out in court, they could make their own decisions.”

But the Simpson trial was conducted so publicly, with so many peripheral distractions and so many subtexts, that even Deutsch, a disciple of professional restraint, was not immune from the bigger picture.

She appeared frequently on CNN, on “Larry King Live,” on “Nightline” with Ted Koppel.

Recovering from a trial in which the media became part of the story, Linda Deutsch knows her place and is happy with it.

“We (journalists) are the eyes and ears of the public,” Deutsch says. “We should not forget that that’s our role.”

But being the eyes and ears is not always enough. Not anymore. Not when a lustful public wants to see all, hear all. And not when sound-bites largely have replaced substance as to what the public has time or concentration for. Not for a public that seemingly wants to be told what to believe.

Still, Deutsch’s finest moment in the trial that blurred the line between fame and infamy came where it usually does, in the Los Angeles County Courthouse.

As Deutsch - the only print journalist given a full-time seat in the courtroom - offered a daily wrap-up to the media pool, her reasoned and matter-of-fact account of that day’s events was interrupted abruptly by Simpson attorney Robert Shapiro, who accused Deutsch of being “too objective.”

It was a great compliment for the reigning doyenne of old-school journalism, a thriving throwback - part craftswoman, part civil servant.

“People have said to me, ‘You should be a lawyer,”’ Deutsch says. “But lawyers have to do wills and probates. I get the cream of what lawyers see, besides the fact that they have people’s lives in their hands.”

And lawyers don’t get to write (new multimillionaire Marcia Clark excepted).

“That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do,” Deutsch says. “I came to Hollywood because I wanted to write about entertainment. At some point, I realized that (covering trials) was the greatest theater in the world. This was the true theater, the morality play for our times.

“And it is the one story (in journalism) that has a beginning, a middle and an end.”

If not always a vacation.