Author-Lawyer Keeps L.A. At Arm’s Length

Don’t hate John Grisham because his legal thrillers have sold enough copies to break the blindfolded lady’s scales.

Don’t hate him because he’s conquered movies and is advancing on TV with CBS’ “The Client,” based on his book-turned-film.

Don’t scorn him on general principle because he is, after all, a lawyer.

That would be wrong.

But you can get just a trifle annoyed with the man for this: He appears to have remained rational about his enormous success and, to a degree, his rabid literary critics.

His M.O.: staying close to his small-town roots in his native Oxford, Miss., population 10,000. Keeping the focus on his wife and two children. And limiting his personal contact with Hollywood.

Grisham, it turns out, knows it’s smart to take the money and run.

“I cannot imagine living here,” he said during a recent visit to promote “The Client,” which debuts at 9 p.m. Sunday on CBS (KREM-Channel 2 from Spokane) before moving to its regular 8 p.m. Tuesday slot next week.

“Last night was my fifth night ever to stay in L.A. … There are no distractions where I live,” he said. “I’m just not cut out for cities.”

He’s also tended to create a buffer zone when it comes to turning his best-selling novels, including “The Firm,” “The Pelican Brief” and “The Client,” into films.

“I’ve always had the attitude with movies that” - small laugh - “I get as much money up front as I can, I kiss it good-bye, and I expect it to be different. And if I don’t like it, I don’t have to sell the film rights.”

He has somewhat closer ties to the TV series, which stars JoBeth Williams as Reggie Love, the bighearted family law attorney played by Susan Sarandon in the film. John Heard and Ossie Davis co-star.

“I’ve been invited with the TV series to do anything I want to do, basically, except show up and tell ‘em how to film it,” he says in his soft Southern drawl.

“Ideally, I would suggest stories. Ideally, I would watch each week, and if I didn’t like something, be able to talk to somebody about it.”

There is another legal drama playing out on television that Grisham is willing to critique: the double-murder trial of O.J. Simpson.

“It’s awful. It makes everybody cynical about the law,” he said.

“It portrays everything in our judicial system in the worst possible light.”

Courtroom cameras are the problem: The Susan Smith murder trial could have been as sensational as the Simpson case but wasn’t, because cameras were barred, he argues.

“I hate cameras in the courtroom because it makes fools out of lawyers and judges and everybody else,” Grisham said.

“Everybody’s a star. You take a sensational case like that, throw it here in Southern California, the center of the celebrity culture, and everybody wants to be a star.”

Yet he admits the trial will be fodder for his writer’s mill.

“In the long run, the Simpson case will be good for me because there’s been so much bizarre behavior in and out of the courtroom,” he says.

Grisham knows the arena firsthand, of course: He spent more than a decade as a criminal defense and personal injury attorney.

His lawyer days are essentially behind him. Why toil in the courtroom with book sales in the neighborhood of 3 million copies for his hardcover novels and 10 million copies for paperbacks, not to mention the movie deals?