Obsession

More Than a year ago, on the night of October 25, a flat-voiced female police dispatcher in Los Angeles tried, and failed, to grasp the special nature of O.J. Simpson's relationship with his exwife Nicole. After listening to Nicole's frantic warnings that O.J. was "fucking going nuts," that he was "going to beat the shit out of me," that he had already broken down the back door to get into Nicole's house, stormed off, come back, almost broken down the bedroom door and was screaming at her and her roommate, the 911 dispatcher asked, with practiced calm and perfect obtuseness: "OK, so basically you guys have just been arguing?"

In fairness, the dispatcher put out a domestic-violence call to all patrol cars (one of which eventually showed up), and she had a lot of information to process in a few minutes. The rest of us have had months to follow the case (or be pursued by it), and we're still trying to get our minds around it. One thing is clear, though. O.J.'s relationship with Nicole Brown Simpson, before and after their divorce, has earned him a place in the Obsessives Hall of Fame.

Obsession shrink-wraps the soul. To be obsessed is to reduce one's life to a set of compulsions: Track her (or him) down, keep her in sight, win her over and win her back. These compulsions are meant to gain or regain control, to stabilize a life in chaos and to create a sense of being desired. But they almost always achieve the opposite results.

A forensic psychiatrist in Beverly Hills describes obsession as a psychological equivalent of physical inflammation, which is the body's way of stabilizing itself in the face of insult, and which can also go horribly wrong; when the lungs fill with fluid, the patient can't breathe. One section of the current California Criminal Code, dealing with malice aforethought, contains a poetic phrase left over from English law that aptly describes obsession's source: "an abandoned and malignant heart."

Poets have always been enthralled by the obsessed. "Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned," wrote English dramatist William Congreve in 1697, "nor hell a fury like a woman scorned." Women represent only half the story, to be sure, but what a half: tormented and tormenting avengers such as Carolyn Warmus, who pistol-whipped her lover's wife before shooting her to death; Jean Harris, the private school headmistress who was convicted of killing her lover, Scarsdale Diet doctor Herman Tarnower, in a jealous rage; Adele Hugo, Victor's demented daughter and the heroine of François Truffaut's superb The Story of Adele H. ("Love," she proclaims, "is my religion"); and, on a much lower rung of high concept, Alex Forrest, the slasher harpy of Fatal Attraction. As for the men, the ranks of the fatefully obsessed include Sol Wachtler, chief judge of New York State, who terrorized his ex-lover and her daughter; John Thomas Sweeney, the up-and-coming chef at Ma Maison in Los Angeles, who choked the life out of Dominique Dunne; and, of course, Shakespeare's Othello, a tragic hero of once-commanding talents. When Iago deviously urges him to be patient with his wife, Desdemona—"Your mind perhaps may change"—Othello dismisses the possibility out of hand. "Never, Iago," he replies, comparing himself to the Black Sea's "icy current and compulsive course."

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For anyone who has ever read or seen Othello, it's hard to ignore the play's new resonance. The obvious parallels with the Simpson case are the most troubling. Both Othello and O.J. are black, and both had younger, white wives who were murdered. (That's where the legal resemblance ends, of course. Othello was guilty and O.J. is not, unless a jury finds him to be so.) Both men were beloved by the public, both were physical prodigies in their primes: Othello as a fearless warrior, O.J. as a peerless running back. (In the greatest, and most politically incorrect, modern performance of Othello, Sir Laurence Olivier played the Moor with an athlete's sinuous grace.)

Each is painfully aware of being past his prime: Othello "declin'd into the vale of years," O.J. developed arthritis and nursed damaged knees. Both had worshipful wives. For most of the 18 years she knew him, Nicole adored O.J.—"She was totally, totally devoted to this man," said her older sister—just as Desdemona adored Othello: "My heart's subdued," she proclaims, "even to the very quality of my lord."

Yet the two dramas also differ sharply, just as obsessives themselves differ in kind as well as degree. No one we know of in O.J. Simpson's life corresponds to Iago, the malevolent subaltern who puts the whole intricate plot of Othello into motion. Othello's jealousy—the "green-eyed monster"—is terrible to behold, but understandable in the context of Iago's lies. When Othello starts to obsess about that damned handkerchief—"The worms were hallow'd that did breed the silk"—it's easy to deplore his gullibility. But we know perfectly well that we, too, could fall victim to the same sort of baseless doubts. When Iago swings into action, we're confronted by a level of paranoid obsession that's almost impossible to comprehend. Iago's stratagems leave Machiavelli's in the dust. To befuddle Othello and bring him down, this bent mastermind creates whole worlds within illusory worlds.

Iago could serve as a literary—and psychological—model for Judge Sol Wachtler, whose machinations reminded one writer of a "chess grandmaster," or for Carolyn Warmus, who insinuated herself so deeply into her lover's life (he once had to invite her out to dinner with his wife and daughter) that a psychologist called her behavior "emotional cannibalism."

In the Wachtler case, which ended in a plea bargain last fall, the most powerful judge in New York State, a married man of great charm and considerable wealth, was stripped of his office and served 15 months in federal prison for threatening to kidnap the daughter of his former lover, a Republican fundraiser named Joy Silverman. The crime of which he was convicted was only one of several with which he might have been charged. The 62-year-old Wachtler made threatening phone calls to Silverman in an electronically altered voice, sent her and her daughter harassing letters and launched a surreal extortion plot in which he created, on the spur of the moment during one call, the role of a Texas private eye named David Purdy—"I'm wearing a diaper now," the wiretap transcript has him telling her, "I've lost my teeth, I weigh over 200 pounds, I'm a dying man"—and then went on to stalk Silverman in a cowboy hat and facial disguise.

Warmus also invented a new identity—a policewoman from Puerto Rico—in her obsessive pursuit of her ex-lover, a fellow teacher named Paul Solomon. Warmus was born into a Michigan family whose wealth has been estimated at $150 million. She came by her compulsive behavior honestly, or at least naturally: Her insurance executive father would give his employees written instructions on the proper position of the window blinds in his office, or tell them where to place his favorite brand of soda on his desk. Although she was only 23 years old in 1987, when she first met the 40-year-old Paul Solomon, Warmus had already gone through several other tortured relationships in which she seduced, manipulated, stalked, cajoled and relentlessly threatened men who proved unavailable to her. On occasion, she went after the women in their lives as well. She's now serving a 25-year-to-life sentence for the murder of Betty Jeanne Solomon.

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What lies behind such a propensity for torture? Why do outwardly normal people with seemingly solid connections to the world around them become scourges, stalkers and killers?

"One factor that causes people to cross the line is humiliation," says Dr. Ronald Markman, the forensic psychiatrist in Beverly Hills. "Not everyone who's been humiliated kills, but everyone who kills in this way has been humiliated."

As Dr. Markman explains it, obsession starts as a way of coping with anxiety. "In psychology, as in physical medicine, an invading force attacks the well-being of the person. That force can be a gun to one's head, or it can be rejection. The force leads to the development of anxiety, which at first is freefloating. The psyche can't tolerate that, so it converts the anxiety to other symptomatology—maybe obsessions, maybe panic, depression or phobias—in an effort to eradicate the underlying anxiety. Obsessions are not primarily available to everyone—their manifestation depends on both the upbringing and the genetic inheritance. But obsession is one of many ways of attempting to re-create a stability that doesn't exist. When it results in murder, the victim doesn't have to be the person who humiliated you, since both control and resurrecting one's self-esteem are the underlying issues. Violent action gives the illusion of regaining control."

For those with obsessive personalities, minor humiliations can have major consequences. In Coral Springs, Florida in the fall of 1990, a high school honor student named Jason Haffizulla brought a butcher knife into class and stabbed the physics teacher who had given him his first B. (A judge found him not guilty on the grounds that his obsession with academic excellence had rendered him temporarily insane. Less than two years later, Haffizulla, having transferred to a nearby private school, graduated at the top of his class. "There's nothing wrong with reaching for the stars," he advised his classmates in his valedictory speech, "but it takes slow and careful preparation.")

When the humiliation is not minor but results from a loved one's flat rejection, the consequences can range from terrifying to catastrophic.

The yearlong reign of terror that Sol Wachtler inflicted on Joy Silverman and her daughter began shortly after he and Silverman broke off their relationship. He was stunned by how quickly she took up with a younger, wealthier man. Soon his family and friends noticed that he seemed depressed, though they never suspected the Byzantine nature of his secret life, and that his usually eloquent speeches on the court of appeals were becoming disorganized and repetitive. In court, Wachtler read a three-page statement in which he acknowledged that he had destroyed his life and apologized for (continued on page 94)Obsession(continued from page 84) what he had done. But he also characterized his behavior as "foreign to my 62 years on earth." That was probably because Wachtler, with his good looks, talent and political connections, had never before faced such personal failure in his 62 years on earth.

In the ghastly affair of Dominique Dunne, the daughter of novelist Dominick Dunne, and John Thomas Sweeney, the chef who received a mere five years in jail for strangling her to death, there is ample evidence of Dunne's frantic desire to be free of her obsessed lover. "Don't live for me," she wrote him. "Live for yourself. You do not love me. You are obsessed with me. The person you think you love is not me at all. It is someone you have made up in your head. I think we fight only when images of me fade away and you are faced with the real me. The only man I am interested in is you, but we are not compatible. When we are good, we are great. But when we are bad, we are horrendous." But she never sent that letter, and by the time she made the break it was too late.

"For the nonafflicted," says Markman, "obsession is a bizarre phenomenon. However, we all experience such events. We hallucinate—it's called dreaming. We all have obsessive rudiments in our lives: brushing the bottom teeth before the top, putting the left leg into the trousers before the right. We don't see minor things as obsessions, but those with obsessive personalities don't see anything wrong with their behavior, either. The things they do seem to be part of a carefully worked-out system of logic. And homicide is a crime unlike all others in that perpetrators represent a cross section of humanity. This isn't true of rape or child molestation, but everyone is capable of killing."

No more vivid evidence of Markman's point can be found than with Jean Harris. She was headmistress of a Virginia girls' school before the shooting death of her lover, Dr. Herman Tarnower. This cultivated, articulate woman claimed at her trial that she and Tarnower had never before argued "over anything except the use of a subjunctive." Yet Harris, too, had been rejected in favor of someone younger, and on the day she killed Tarnower she sent him a ten-page letter that revealed, in its eloquence and its many obscenities, her wild hatred for the same man she had loved for 15 years. "Your phone call to say that you prefer the company of a vicious, adulterous, psychotic whore has kept me awake almost 36 hours," Harris wrote. "This letter will ramble, but I had to do something besides shriek with pain."

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The most bizarre instances of obsessive murder are those in which the only relationship between victim and killer is in the killer's mind. These people usually suffer from schizophrenia or some other personality disorder, but those conditions don't lead, in themselves, to homicidal behavior. But obsession on top of the craziness produces ruthless predators such as John Hinckley, who stalked Jodie Foster and Jimmy Carter and caught up with Ronald Reagan; Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon; and Robert Bardo, who murdered actress Rebecca Schaeffer.

Markman has recently had a book published about another such case. Obsessed: The Stalking of Theresa Saldana, which he co-authored with Ron LaBrecque, chronicles in chilling detail the mad odyssey of Arthur Jackson from his native Scotland to the streets of Hollywood. Jackson fastened on Saldana after seeing one of her movies, building a labyrinthine system of schizophrenic symbolism—a "psychotic jigsaw puzzle," Markman calls it, "with pictures on both sides of the pieces." Thus the names of the actors in the movie and the names of their characters became associated with real events and abiding fantasies in Jackson's life. As Jackson saw it, the murder of Saldana (who survived his brutal knife attack) would be followed by a "state-administered execution" that he looked forward to as a sort of spiritual purification. This outcome would allow him to achieve "eternal bliss of cosmic proportions" through his soul mating with Saldana's in heaven. What's in a name? Violence or death, if the name has the wrong significance in the wrong lunatic's brain.

The full-blown madness of these monsters sets them apart from most of humanity. There's little hope of deflecting them from the evil they intend to do. They can't tell good from evil to begin with, and no rational observer, whether a relative, friend or psychiatrist, could ever imagine, let alone chart, the secret pathways between their addled thoughts and awful deeds. By comparison, the thought processes of the ordinarily obsessed—those who have genuine social or emotional connections with their victims—seem almost straightforward. But only by comparison, for nothing is simple when obsession rules.

The less complex situations are those in which the object of obsessive attention wants no part of it, and does nothing, at least consciously, to feed it. Most often such relationships involve parents and children. Stage mothers, for example, may turn their children into symbols of success, then threaten or abuse them if they don't measure up. A weird variation on this theme turned up recently in the person of a crazed "tennis father." Last year the 18-year-old tennis pro Mary Pierce, who was ranked 14th in the world, had to hire bodyguards, live in hotels under assumed names and file two restraining orders to protect herself from her 57-year-old father, Jim Pierce. In one of those filings, Mary declared that her father had made "terroristic threats" against her life and had told her, "If you think there was a nut in Waco, Texas, you haven't seen anything yet."

As frightening as her predicament was, Mary Pierce knew she needed restraining orders and she got them, along with help from the Women's Tennis Council in barring her father from her matches. Things become much more complicated and dangerous when obsession colors the behavior of both partners.

"That is commonly a man-woman dynamic," says Julie Carlstrom, as Los Angeles family therapist who frequently deals with obsessive behavior in her practive. "Very often both members of a couple have a strong unconscious need to feel infinitely desirable." Such relationships can be about control, Carlstrom says, but need is at their root: a need to be validated by love, desire or admiration, a need to be needed. "Many people with this dynamic have insufficient emotional development or come from childhoods in which they were seriously deprived in some significant way. Often they are people with a level of intelligence, talent, charisma or looks that allows them to detach from the unmet needs of their childhood. They then try to compensate with an endless search for success as adults. And even though there appears to be one clearly identified object in the relationship, the dynamic is usually present to different degrees on both sides."

But doesn't that smack of blaming (continued on page 187)Obsession(continued from page 94) the victim for the crime? Carlstrom acknowledges the concern but rejects the parallel. "Blame should be a legal or political issue. The therapeutic issue should be health and safety. It may seem terribly unfair to take someone who's truly being victimized and say, 'You have to look at your own part in this.' Yet it's the only way to protect the person, and to help her protect herself. At the least, you have to resolve the reason why someone continues to tolerate or excuse dangerous behavior, or they'll very likely be sucked right back into the same dynamic."

In the self-help books that give readers catchy names for their screwy behavior, this pattern currently comes under the rubric of co-obsession. Co-obsessives have "an insatiable need to find a love that can fill their inner emotional emptiness," according to Obsessive Love: When Passion Holds You Prisoner, co-written by Craig Buck and psychologist Susan Forward, who found herself in hot water with her peers when she went to the media with information about one of her former patients. Nicole Brown Simpson. Self-help books rarely help the problem at all, for the very nature of obsessive behavior, whether solo or co, makes it opaque to introspection.

"It's grim stuff," says Carlstrom. "Once the dynamic is in play it's extremely persistent. These cases are workable, but they take patience, discipline and a steady hand. The patient says, 'Yeah, yeah, it's over,' then I'll get a call saying, 'You're going to be mad, I did a bad thing. I drove by his house,' or 'I went to the restaurant where he works.' Usually these patients have done something to reestablish the connection. They see the other person, make sure they've been seen by them, or call a mutual friend and boast that they have a new boyfriend.

"Jealousy is a primary tool here, along with sympathy and insatiable need. While there's tremendous possessiveness and paranoia about the object—the partner—being faithful and not cheating, there is also a need for the object to be desired by other people. You can see how this almost always explodes in the ugliest possible way, because these things cannot co-exist. You can't have a need for someone you can trust in a committed relationship, yet want them to be desired by other people at the same time.

"The only safe and lasting way to extinguish the obsessive connection is, over time, by a lack of emotion-laden contact. A total lack of contact is preferable, but it may not be an option for people with children."

One therapist, who declined to be identified, sees obsessive behavior as so persistent that discouraging contact between partners may not work. "Obviously, if my patient has been hit, of there's any threat of violent behavior, I'll insist that she get out right away. But otherwise I would rather deal clinically with a known and consistent quantity than with a different guy every week. What's generally accepted in such cases is that if you have a bad relationship, you leave it. It's not that simple, though. Leaving puts people at risk. It usually escalates the obsession, and the risk is often increased when people leave without disengaging from the dynamic."

When it comes time to make the break, how is it done definitively and safely? "You start with that basic respect for the danger of what you're dealing with," suggests Carlstrom. "You leave in a nonprovocative way. You work to avoid playing the game. You don't respond to provocation, whether it's in the form of need, insults or seduction. You don't dress seductively, don't make the other person jealous. You understand that they have a problem and try to disengage rather than point out that problem. Obsessives often devalue or destroy what they can't have, so remember that it's better to be devalued than destroyed. Walk away from the game and let the other person win. And if that makes you look like a slut, an illiterate, a bad mother or a gold digger—if it means that you—it's well worth the price, because it means he didn't kill you."

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Many years ago, in a specialty number by the Soviet Union's Moiseyev Ballet, two bears would come dancing out onstage, locked together in a bear hug of unyielding strength. Everyone knew the animals were fake; the fun was in watching a pair of dancers in bear costumes struggling desperately to break away from each other. After the wild, orgiastic climax, however, came a wilder revelation that left audiences gasping with astonishment: It wasn't two dancers at all, but only one, on all fours, in a trick costume.

Oneness is what the deadly dance of obsession is about. It may begin in a semblance of partnership and lurch along with clinging needs on both sides, but in the end it comes down to a single lover with an abandoned and malignant heart. "He was always infatuated with Nicole," one of O.J. Simpson's longtime friends was quoted as saying in The New York Times. "Even after the divorce, he would talk about Nicole for hours at a time. You could put the phone down, take a shower, come back, pick up the phone and he still would be talking about her."

Infatuation is one word for it; obsession is another—obsession tinged with violence that may have gone beyond the door-kicking of the 911 calls, or O.J.'s attack on Nicole's car with a baseball bat. A source close to the family was quoted by the Los Angeles Times as saying there were times during their marriage when O.J. would throw Nicole out of the house, tossing her clothes after her: "Then she would go home to her parents in Monarch Bay. But within days a contrite Simpson would call and apologize, she would return and for a time they would be loving again."

Following the divorce, according to David Bursin, a friend of Nicole's who tended bar at a Beverly Hills restaurant, O.J. followed Nicole around town. "He would show up at places," Bursin told a New York Times reporter. "She would have to calm him down. It wasn't like he was in a tirade. She just didn't want it to escalate. She would go off for a few minutes and then come back." Two months before the killings, said a friend of Ron Goldman's, O.J. showed up at a Starbucks coffeehouse on San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood, where a group of men was sitting with his former wife. He stopped his black Bentley in the street and scowled at them, as if issuing a warning to stay away. And, in the most startling revelation of the grand jury testimony, one of Nicole's friends, Keithe Zlomsowitch, said O.J. had admitted to spying on them through a window in her house as Keith and Nicole made love.

When O.J. was a young man growing up in the projects of Potrero Hill in San Francisco, he was someone, in his own words, "who didn't care about anything." Half a lifetime later he cared too much. The case of O.J. Simpson is more gripping than most tragedies of obsessive love because of his status as a sports legend. Yet it seems baffling for the same reason. Yes, of course Nicole was lovely, and yes, of course he adored her. But her decision to reject O.J. hardly-left him alone in an uncaring world. He was wellliked and admired. Why couldn't he move on?

The answer has nothing to do with legend, and everything to do with the nature of obsession, which is a sickness unlike any other. O.J. Simpson was a sports hero, to be sure, but those reports of the stalking, the spying and the ominous warnings bespeak a hole at the center of his soul that could never be filled by a woman's love or a nation's adulation, let alone by his Bentley, his cavernous mansion or all the perks and appurtenances of the good life.

In another time, when those around him were running interference and everything was falling his way, O.J. probably believed he could have anyone his heart desired. At first Nicole proved him right. Then, much later, she proved him wrong. She may have had her own obsessions to contend with, and she may, like poor Dominique Dunne, have come to clarity too late. But she did try to disengage from him in the end—on those 911 tapes one can hear traces of disdain or outright disgust in her voice along with the fear—and she dramatized her decision by handing back to him a platinum bracelet, studded with sapphires, rubies and diamonds, that he had given her on her birthday. Such a rejection and humiliation would have devastated any man. For O.J. Simpson, a man whose great and shining world of possibilities had dwindled down to a single impossibility, such a rejection may have been deadly beyond compare.

"What's in a name? Violence, if the name has the wrong significance in the wrong lunatic's brain."