The Demons that Drove Don Simpson

Don Simpson, his friends said, would have personally selected the poster-sized picture of himself resting on an easel at the entrance to Morton's. As the crowd of studio executives, talent agents, stars and hangers-on trooped into the West Hollywood hangout for Simpson's memorial, the first image they saw was the photo of Don—sleek and tanned, his Levi's tight, his shirt wrapped snugly around his chest, a sly, cocky, bad-boy grin on his face.

It was, of course, Don in the old days, eight or nine years back, when he was one of Hollywood's top producers, before the personal demons and scandals consumed him, before his depressions left him so paralyzed that he couldn't leave his Bel Air mansion, before he began gorging on pizzas and junk food and became so painfully ashamed of his ballooning weight that he refused to see friends, before the plastic surgery made him look pathetic and before the pills and cocaine left him dazed.

The crowd filed past the photo and quickly settled into an hour of cocktails and shmoozing about deals—this was, after all, a Hollywood-style memorial, and all that money doesn't buy taste in Hollywood. Finally the group was called to silence. A tightly wound Jerry Bruckheimer, who was Simpson's producing partner on such huge hits as Flashdance, Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop, and who had disbanded the partnership weeks earlier, made some terse remarks about his "brother by choice."

Then a video of Simpson's life and work, culled from old interviews, began playing on the nine television screens. And the top players in the crowd—moguls Michael Eisner, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg, stars Michelle Pfeiffer and Will Smith, studio chiefs Sherry Lansing, Joe Roth and Mark Canton—stood and watched Simpson speak about himself in that same brash and mocking style that had stamped his extraordinary career.

"Love's elusive, love is not something I understand. It's something that in my experience has always seemed distant and fleeting," Simpson said, smiling. "My instinct tells me there's no such thing as always. My instinct tells me there's no such thing as forever. It's just now."

In a corner, quietly watching the video, was Susan Lentini, a dark-haired actress who was Don's girlfriend off and on for a decade, one of only two women with whom he had a semblance of a relationship. The other woman was Priscilla Nedd-Friendly, a film editor, who met him in the mid-Seventies when she was in college. Don encouraged her to go to the American Film Institute to pursue a film career. ("I dated him off and on and I was crazy about him," she said. "The Don he became is not the Don I knew. He was funny and had an incredibly creative mind. My heart is broken because I know he was a good guy down to his soul.")

Lentini said later, "Don always told me he struggled with the demons of depression and the thought of maybe checking out. He struggled with it every day. Once he said to me, 'None of us get out of here alive anyway.' "

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Simpson didn't commit suicide, but he may as well have. His death at the age of 52, in an upstairs bathroom of his elegant home on Stone Canyon Road in Bel Air, hardly came as a shock. The autopsy revealed heart failure brought on by a massive dose of cocaine and various other drugs, including Unisom, Atarax, Vistaril, Librium, Valium, Compazine, Xanax, Desyrel and Tigan. (When Simpson's lawyer, Jake Bloom, telephoned Michael Eisner to inform him of the news, the Disney chairman said, "I've been waiting for this call for 20 years.")

The police (continued on page 158) Don Simpson (continued from page 102) found 2200 pills at Simpson's home. "There were things like Xanax, Librium and Carafate, and some others I can't pronounce," said Detective David Miller, a narcotics supervisor at the Los Angeles Police Department. Although no hard drugs were visible at the Simpson house, friends related privately that Simpson had serious problems with cocaine and morphine.

Physically, he brutalized his body. A compulsive eater, he consistently gained 50 or 75 pounds, then went on extended crash diets at Canyon Ranch, an expensive spa in Arizona. He often prowled his mansion through the night and fell asleep at daybreak. He stopped working out. "To some of us, he became Howard Hughes," said one friend.

Beyond this, Simpson's life seemed to have spun out of control in the months before his death. One of his physicians and friends, Dr. Stephen Ammerman, who had been under care himself for a prescription drug problem, was found naked and dead of a drug overdose in the shower of the pool house behind Simpson's home in August. An autopsy found cocaine, morphine, Valium and the antidepressant Venlafaxine in his system.

Already emotionally shaky, Simpson was shocked at Dr. Ammerman's death. The arrival of squad cars and reporters terrified him. "Don was a very frightened fellow," said James Wiatt, president of International Creative Management and one of Simpson's most loyal friends, "and he was at such a low ebb I was afraid he'd do something he'd regret." Another friend said simply, "Don never recovered after that."

As a direct result of the death of Ammerman—whose family remains unhappy about what it calls unclear and suspicious circumstances surrounding the doctor's death—Jerry Bruckheimer, Simpson's closest friend, dissolved their longtime partnership, prodded by his wife, Linda. "It got to be, OK, we're not going down with him," said one friend of the Bruckheimers. "They had had it, but it was also their idea of tough love."

Simpson's friends Wiatt, producer Steve Tisch and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was once an assistant to Simpson, sought to intervene. They spoke to a psychiatrist who had been treating him for depression. They urged Simpson, in vain, to enter a rehab program or hospitalize himself. "He was very sad," said Katzenberg, "sad and depressed."

Dawn Steel, who worked as a producer with Simpson at Paramount in the early Eighties, often phoned him to ask if he wanted to go to a movie. "He was in some dark underworld," she said. "None of the rehabs worked. We had long phone conversations. He didn't want to see me because of the way he looked. He got really heavy. I'd say, 'Come on over,' and he'd say, 'I don't feel good.' "

But other movie executives and writers who worked with Simpson, and witnessed his temper tantrums firsthand, scoffed at the nice words said about him by Hollywood's elite, who tend to circle the wagons and protect their own.

"There was enormous self-loathing in Don," said an executive who worked for him. "Anybody who came into our office environment was fair game for abuse. He had these explosive rages and everyone was terrified of him, including Jerry. What kind of emotional or moral legacy has Don really left?"

One former Paramount executive recalled screaming at Simpson in his office when Simpson was riding high as the studio's president of production in 1980 and 1981. The executive said that Simpson had just slapped a secretary. "You can't do this, it's completely unacceptable behavior," the executive yelled. Simpson's response? "Don just looked at me and said nothing," the executive said. Of course, Simpson's reputation for the way he treated secretaries was already well known.

For a number of reasons, Simpson's death still jolted and saddened Hollywood. The films produced by Simpson–Bruckheimer had grossed an extraordinary $1.2 billion in the U.S. and double that worldwide. (From Top Gun alone, the partners earned $10 million each.) His outsize personality and excesses—the cocaine, the boasting about high-priced prostitutes, the reports of sexual kinks and sadomasochism—were of a Hollywood that exists largely in trash novels.

"There was this mystery about Don, this fascination with him," said Steve Tisch, the producer who gave Simpson his earliest breaks in Hollywood. "Don lived with very little concern about what other people thought of him. He lived a life we read about. He socialized with people most of us don't socialize with, and that made him special."

What made Simpson special, too, was that, despite the wreckage of his personal life, his success kept him in "the club," the group of executives, agents and moguls that controls the film and television industries. (The club's cardinal sin is failure, not aberrant behavior—not slapping around women, not vicious temper tantrums that would be scorned outside Hollywood.)

It wasn't simply that Simpson, as a member of the club, could still get the best table at Eclipse or Cicada or that Michael Eisner or Barry Diller or David Geffen would answer his phone calls at once. There was another reason. Simpson was a great producer, a man whose films dominated Hollywood in the Eighties, a showman from a dirt-poor fundamentalist background in Alaska who had an unerring sense of popular culture.

Such huge hits as An Officer and a Gentleman (which Simpson fought to make as an executive at Paramount over the objections of his bosses), Flashdance (which gave a major boost to a fledging MTV), Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop may have been formulaic. But Simpson sexed up the movies, added hip music and jazzy editing and, most important, gave them Cinderella endings and surprisingly personal overtones. Don's relationships with writers may have been abusive, but his skills at script doctoring were impressive. Under Simpson, Beverly Hills Cop went through 37 script drafts; Top Gun, 19 drafts.

Like Simpson, the key characters came from poverty and struggled defiantly to break into an unfriendly and hostile world. Unlike Simpson's life, of course, the movies ended happily.

"We updated the formula, we made it a formula that fit a generation of people who came out of the Sixties and were obsessed with success and moving forward in their lives," said Craig Baumgarten, an executive who worked with Simpson at Paramount. "Those movies reflected the culture of the period. People make fun of Flashdance, with its dancer-welder, and it is funny on one level. But that movie was such a hit because no one had made a movie before that felt real to those women. Not Harvard-educated women but other women."

At the peak of the Simpson–Bruckheimer partnership, Jerry oversaw the day-to-day production of the films while Don dealt with scripts.

Robert Towne, a top scriptwriter (he wrote Chinatown), worked with Simpson on Days of Thunder and Crimson Tide. "Don had specific ideas on what an audience wanted to feel, when they wanted to feel it and what would be transporting for them," he says. "He prided himself on being a member of the audience. He always said, 'I buy my popcorn and watch a movie and want to feel something.' "

Towne was one of the few writers invited by Bruckheimer to a private memorial of about 100 people at Simpson's home. It was an A-list gathering, and included many of the men Simpson had partied hard with in the Seventies and Eighties, men who had now traded in their Porsches for Volvo station wagons, men who were now spending Saturday mornings at their children's soccer matches instead of recovering from the night before.

There were buddies Bruckheimer, Towne, Wiatt, Tisch and Baumgarten, producer Larry Gordon, the agents Bob Bookman of Creative Artists and Jim Berkus of United Talent, actors such as Warren Beatty, Don Johnson and Nick Nolte, filmmakers Michael Mann and Tony Yerkovich (Miami Vice), and James Toback (a writer of Bugsy), who may have been the last person to speak to Don before he died. Even Simpson's idol, Beatty—"Don wanted to be Warren," said To-back—now had a family.

In a corner stood Don's parents, June and Russ Simpson, whom he had cruelly ridiculed as religious zealots in numerous interviews, as well as his brother, Larry, a Los Angeles lawyer, whom Don had supported through law school.

"I looked around the room, and most everyone was dressed in Armani or Donna Karan or you name it. They were all slender and they were all drinking Perrier and I didn't see one cigarette and they were going to be home by ten and it was absolutely eerie," Larry Simpson said. "This was a house that had been filled with cigarette smoke and wine and high living. I realized the thing that set Don apart was his willingness to expend his life. He didn't do it wisely and he didn't do it well, but that's the way he lived. In the end, he was at odds with the town."

Simpson was, in fact, not only at odds with Hollywood but also at odds with his roots, which he despised. "The word family is the equivalent of Devil's Island," he once said.

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Simpson was raised in Anchorage, Alaska, the oldest son of a deeply religious, Southern Baptist couple. By ten, Simpson was attending church four or five times a week. His father was a hunting guide and airplane mechanic. "By the time I was 12 I was a star Bible student. I led classes in Sunday school. I could speak well and they expected me to be Billy Graham," Simpson once said.

In interviews, Simpson often trashed his background. In 1990 he told Smart magazine that his father "used to pick me up and throw me against the wall, and as I hit the ground, he'd kick me." He also said his mother was the boss of the family, "very manipulative and very narrow-minded."

Simpson tended to overdramatize and even lie about his past, and it's unclear if he told the truth about his parents or, for that matter, anything else. ("There was always the Don Simpson discount factor," said Wiatt.) Several of Simpson's Hollywood friends who first met his parents at the Bel Air memorial were pleasantly surprised when they seemed to be perfectly nice people who were proud of their son. "She was a darling woman," said Susan Lentini.

As a child Simpson saw Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth, and the sad ending devastated him. "When the lights went up," Simpson told this reporter several years ago, "I started to cry and they had to take me to the manager's office and spank me hard to get me to leave. I said he had to change the end of the movie.

"Finally I had discovered what I wanted to do for a living," he said. "If a movie could have this kind of effect on me, I wanted to do it."

He also discovered girls. Simpson often said that once he discovered sex as a young teenager, he rebelled with a vengeance and committed various minor crimes—writing bad checks and driving a Volkswagen through the halls of his high school. Upon graduation he fled Alaska to attend the University of Oregon in Eugene, where he majored in journalism. Although Simpson has said he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1969, a university spokesman said there was no record of the honor.

"All of a sudden my mind opened up, all of a sudden school became fun," Simpson told Old Oregon, the university's alumni magazine, in 1989. "The years I spent in Eugene were without a doubt the best of my life." Simpson, in fact, enjoyed his school days so much he stayed on campus even over Christmas.

After graduation Simpson moved to San Francisco to hang out with friends and study acting and writing. Through a friend who was working on movie-business advertising, Simpson was hired to work on some Warner Bros, films, including Performance, the Mick Jagger melodrama. Simpson recalled later that he rented a screening room, bought two pounds of marijuana, got 20 cases of cheap red wine and began showing the film.

"The movie became the talk of the town," he said. "Why not? Everybody was loaded."

He came to Hollywood in 1971, hired by Warner as a kind of house hippie to do marketing work for the studio's edgier films.

While Simpson's counterparts carefully tailored their own opinions, he was unafraid. Simpson read the yet-to-be-made film The Sting during a publicity trip to New York. According to Julia Phillips' book You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, Simpson made an impression in Manhattan. At Robert Redford's Fifth Avenue apartment, the star asked the young publicist what he thought about the script. Simpson replied it was the perfect American movie.

"What do you mean?" asked Redford.

"A dick love story," said Simpson.

Redford laughed.

The early Seventies turned out to be difficult for Simpson. He left his job at Warner—it's unclear whether he quit or was laid off. He was broke, living on unemployment, giving tennis lessons in West Hollywood and devouring as many scripts as possible to learn the techniques of screenwriting.

Around this time he went to a screening of the Jamaican film The Harder They Come and was introduced to a young producer, Jerry Bruckheimer. The introduction was made by Jerry's then wife, Bonnie, who now runs Bette Midler's production company.

Bruckheimer was, in many ways, the mirror opposite of Simpson. The son of Jewish German immigrants, Bruckheimer grew up in a large and closely knit family. As a boy he worked in the family's meatpacking business. After attending the University of Arizona, he worked in advertising and made television commercials in New York and Detroit before moving to Los Angeles in the early Seventies.

As flamboyant and blunt as Don was, Jerry was dour and controlled. He began his Hollywood career as a line producer—the figure who oversees a film set every day, dealing with sets, schedules and problems. "Don is outgoing, and I'm a lot shier than he is," Jerry told me in 1994. "He has an incredibly logical mind and the ability to analyze material better than anyone I know. My ability is organizing, putting something together and making it work.

"My talent is knowing talent," said Bruckheimer. "That's what my skill is. Who do you team with whom? What writer do you team with what director and what actor? What actor is about to happen and what director is about to be hot?"

Shortly after the two met, Bruckheimer's marriage dissolved and Simpson moved into Bruckheimer's bachelor pad, a small house in Laurel Canyon.

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As close as Simpson was to Bruckheimer, the pivotal figure in his life was Steve Tisch, a young producer who met him in New York in 1971. Tisch later helped support him and helped get him his first job at Paramount.

A member of New York's wealthy Tisch family (which owned or controlled Loew's Theaters and CBS at various times), Steve went to Hollywood at the end of 1971 to work as Peter Guber's assistant at Columbia Pictures. He phoned Simpson, who was unemployed and was struggling to write screenplays.

"Don was so excited that he knew somebody who was actually a studio executive who attended meetings with directors, writers, agents," recalled Tisch, who was one of the producers of Forrest Gump. "Almost on a daily basis I would get home from work and Don would either come to my house or call me and ask, 'Who did you meet today? What writers did you meet? What directors?'

In 1976 Tisch got a phone call from Richard Sylbert, head of production at Paramount, asking him to work at the studio as an executive. Tisch turned down the offer but implored Sylbert to meet Simpson.

"I told him, 'You've got to do me a favor, because he does not have a résumé and I can't describe his academic or professional background, but he's the brightest, most interesting guy I've met here and he knows everything about Hollywood,' " recalled Tisch. "Sylbert reluctantly agreed to meet Don.

"Jerry loaned him some clothes, we got him a haircut, we cleaned him up and got some gas in his car," said Tisch. "And Don went in and got the job."

It was typical of Simpson that he would later say in interviews that his screenwriting career had been flourishing and he was "blindsided by a job offer from Paramount, where I spent ten years in management."

Paramount, under Barry Diller and Michael Eisner, was the town's most formidable studio: Its output included Saturday Night Fever, Ordinary People, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Terms of Endearment, American Gigolo, Urban Cowboy, An Officer and a Gentleman and 48 Hours. And Simpson was consumed with the job, working with a ferocity that startled his bosses.

"This was a man who had no private life," said Thomas Pollock, his first lawyer, who later ran Universal Pictures. "Everything was the movies, it was always the movies. That's what his passions were about. And even that he did excessively."

In 1978 Simpson met Susan Lentini, who was part of a small circle of agents, actors and filmmakers. The relationship lasted off and on for ten years. "I liked him because he wasn't a regular guy. He was complex, remote, smart, funny and a bit of a shit," she said. "Now I look back and wonder if I was ever in love with him and I suppose I was. I was tortured by Don. I just don't think he was capable of having a normal relationship."

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By 1980 Simpson was named president of production at Paramount. He had purchased a small home on Coldwater Canyon but failed to furnish it because he spent so much time at work or partying. In the process he developed a drug habit that clung to him for the rest of his life. Sometimes he wore a spoon around his neck.

"By four in the afternoon he was pretty much gone," said an executive who worked for him. Another executive, new in the job, said, "Drugs were everywhere at Paramount. When I first got there I noticed everyone was running into the bathroom. I thought they just had weak kidneys."

By 1982 Simpson's drug habits and erratic behavior had become too much for the Diller–Eisner hierarchy. They eased Simpson out, but asked him to stay on as a producer and handed him Flashdance. Simpson asked Bruckheimer to join him. The film, which cost $8 million, grossed $270 million worldwide, including soundtrack and videocassette sales.

The hits that followed Flashdance were also modestly budgeted and turned huge profits: Top Gun (cost: $12 million), Beverly Hills Cop ($14 million) and its 1987 sequel ($25 million). The four films grossed about $1.4 billion worldwide.

In a remarkably brief period of time, Simpson and Bruckheimer became very rich. As the hits grew, their deals became more lucrative. The scale of Simpson's wealth is unclear, but one prominent lawyer who knew him estimated his estate is probably worth $50 million.

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By the late Eighties the swaggering Simpson–Bruckheimer duo was almost waiting for a fall. They had made stars out of Tom Cruise and Eddie Murphy and directors Martin Brest (Beverly Hills Cop) and Tony Scott (Top Gun). The pair bought mansions, drove matching jet-black Ferraris and wore matching jet-black outfits. Simpson made a point of wearing Levi's 501 jeans—and throwing them out after two washings because they were no longer black enough.

They signed an unprecedented deal in 1988 with Paramount, calling it a "visionary alliance." Ludicrously, the studio bought ads announcing the deal in the Hollywood trade papers. The deal promised more than $300 million in spending money for five films of their choice as well as a substantial cut of gross receipts from the first dollar earned, a reward that was at the time given only to a few movie stars.

Then came Days of Thunder, the Tom Cruise film about race-car drivers. The studio wanted Top Gun on wheels. Rushed into production without a finished script, the film was budgeted at $49.5 million and cost somewhere between $63 million and $70 million. There were reports of lavish spending by the producers, including a $1 million private gym. (Both of them angrily denied it.) Adding complications to the film, Simpson decided he wanted to become an actor and, after auditioning for director Tony Scott, was cast in a small role as race-car driver Aldo Benedetti.

At the same time Paramount was becoming alarmed at the production's escalating costs, Simpson and Bruckheimer were hit with a highly publicized $5 million suit by a former secretary, Monica Harmon, for emotional distress. She charged that Simpson verbally abused her, calling her "dumb shit" and "garbage brain," asked her to clean up traces of cocaine in his office, played pornographic videos in her view and had her schedule appointments with prostitutes for him. After withering questioning of Harmon by Bert Fields, one of Hollywood's top lawyers, the court decided Harmon's case had no merit and dismissed the suit. But the publicity damaged the team.

The release of Days of Thunder proved disappointing. Grossing about $165 million worldwide, the film was hardly a disaster. But Paramount's chairman, Frank Mancuso, demanded that the team renegotiate its profit participation, which guaranteed them millions even on a weak film. Angry, Simpson and Bruckheimer demanded that they be let out of their five-year contract less than a year after signing.

They promptly moved to Disney, under far less lucrative terms. And somehow the two lost their way for a number of reasons. Studios, especially Disney, were obsessed with cutting costs, which was anathema to the team's lavish style. The Eighties, the decade in Hollywood when producers were kings—not just Simpson–Bruckheimer, but Peter Guber and Jon Peters, Joel Silver and others—were over. All of them stumbled in the Nineties. Beyond this, the formula Simpson–Bruckheimer films had become tired. Younger audiences wanted edgier work from filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino and actors such as Brad Pitt.

Don retreated into his green-shuttered home in Bel Air, while Jerry worked the phones and ran the team's offices at Disney. Projects sputtered. And Don's personal problems consumed him. He was nearing 50 and panicked. His plastic surgery became a sad joke in Hollywood: He had had several facelifts, a chin implant, placenta injections and God-knows-what to make his chest firm. Many friends drifted away, though he periodically spoke over the phone to Dawn Steel, Alana Stewart and Nancy Sinatra.

He gorged himself on pizzas and submarine sandwiches at night until his weight left him humiliated, then he flew to Canyon Ranch for weeks, sometimes two months. He refused to enter rehab, denying that he had an addictive personality. And there were the prostitutes. He was friendly with two well-known madams: Elizabeth (Madame Alex) Adams, who often showed off vases of flowers he sent her, and Heidi Fleiss. After Simpson died, Fleiss told the Los Angeles Times: "I loved him dearly. I used to call him my little Eskimo."

His apparent sexual habits were detailed in a best-seller released in February, You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again, in which several Hollywood prostitutes discuss their well-known clients. One section, "Don Simpson: An Education in Pain," cites various sexual practices including sadomasochism, bondage and humiliation. A close friend of Simpson's said simply, "His sexual-maturity chip was somehow deformed."

The book says Simpson secretly videotaped his sexual encounters, including one involving so-called "toilet sex." One episode recounted involves an innocent-looking girl who is paid $1000 and beaten up. "Don had an evil smile on his face," recalls one of the authors, who says she was at his home at the time. "He told us he had 'turned her out'—beaten her, screwed her and introduced her to S&M for the first time. It gave Don a good deal of pleasure to take a naive young girl and do this to her."

Screenwriter James Toback, who often discussed sexual issues with Simpson, said, "I really think he participated very little. What he did was have them come up, talk, act things out, witness it and that was it. I think he was very much a talker rather than a doer in that area."

According to Toback, Simpson's attitude toward prostitutes—at least some of them—was more clinical than sexual. "He always tried to make an intellectual connection with the girls," said Toback. "He would never call them hookers or call girls. It was always, 'I met this brilliant girl who came up at two in the morning.' I mean, it was obvious they'd been sent up. But Don would call them brilliant. He'd start investigating them. That was the real excitement, to psychoanalyze some new girl."

Friends of Simpson's have even wondered if his often nasty treatment of women—and his failure to connect emotionally to one—hid homosexual impulses. Tova Laiter, president of production at Cinergi, briefly dated Simpson in the Eighties. She once asked Don if he was gay. "He laughed and said, 'If I were gay I wouldn't hide it.' "

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By last year the team finally seemed back on track. A low-budget comedy, The Ref, failed to make a commercial dent. But then came the successful submarine thriller Crimson Tide, starring Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington.

Bruckheimer was the hands-on producer, on the set daily. Simpson never visited the set but was involved in casting the submarine crew members. He seemed to bounce back, though, with two other successful films, Bad Boys, an action comedy, and, more important, Dangerous Minds, a movie in which Simpson showed his old flair as a producer.

Originally given the awkward tide My Posse Don't Do Homework, the movie stars Michelle Pfeiffer as an English teacher facing a group of tough high school students. The early previews were disastrous. Simpson took over and changed the title. Through rewrites, reshoots and heavy editing, Simpson altered the script so that Pfeiffer's love interest, Andy Garcia, was cut out entirely from the film.

The Simpson–Bruckheimer team seemed on a roll once again. But Jerry Bruckheimer and his wife, Linda, were increasingly bewildered and frustrated by Don's unpredictability. Jerry was deeply indebted to Don for creating a partnership that made him enormously rich. But Simpson's constant state of denial about his drug use and his refusal to enter serious therapy or rehab exhausted Jerry.

By the time Ammerman was found dead, the Bruckheimers had reached the breaking point with Simpson. The specter of a tabloid scandal and cover-up alarmed them. Alexander Lampone, the Ammerman family lawyer and a doctor himself, said the physician died under suspicious circumstances.

"We want to know why there wasn't any vial or container of morphine found near his body," said Lampone. "The autopsy report said that Dr. Ammerman died of a morphine overdose. Dr. Ammerman died of two to four times the lethal dose of free morphine. How did it get there? No morphine was found in his stomach, so it would have had to have been pharmaceutical morphine, and it would have had to have been injected. Yet there were no injection marks or tracks." The questions will probably remain unanswered.

Friends of Simpson's said the Ammerman death jolted the producer and left him scared. He flew to the Menninger Clinic in Kansas for psychiatric care, stayed for a while and then returned to Los Angeles for treatment with a psychiatrist suggested by the clinic. Depressed and overweight, Simpson was left shaken when Bruckheimer told him the inevitable: The partnership was dissolving.

On the day before his death, Simpson held a meeting at his home with his lawyer, Jake Bloom, his agent, Jim Wiatt, and his brother, Larry, who works with Bloom. Simpson discussed setting up his own production company at Disney. "For the first time in months I saw Don really excited," recalled Wiatt.

But another close friend said, "He just couldn't get it up for the same drill anymore. Getting psyched up, reconstructing his career, getting a deal at Disney, making four more pictures. It's just very sad."

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Hours before Simpson died, Jim To-back called Simpson to tell him of his new script, The Harvard, Man, about a guard on the Harvard basketball team who is carrying on affairs with a philosophy teacher and the daughter of a Mafia leader. Toback had worked as an uncredited writer on the Simpson-Bruckheimer hit Bad Boys and wanted to work again with Simpson. They spent nearly three hours on the phone, and Toback read Don the entire script.

"He sounded exuberant, excited," said Toback. "At the end of the conversation he sounded tired. He used to drink wine late at night and I could feel him fading a bit." Shortly after the phone call, Simpson walked upstairs to a bathroom, sat on the toilet and died.

Weeks later, Craig Baumgarten, who knew Don since the old days at Paramount, said with a shrug, "You know something? I think we'll all analyze Don for the rest of our lives."

"It was always the movies. That's what his passions were about. And even that he did excessively."