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The headlines have focused on her changing hairdo and short skirts ( prosecutie's sexy look! screamed the New York Post). Focus-group members described her as "pushy" and "a bitch." But the Marcia Clark the real jurors in the O. J. Simpson case will encounter is very different from the tightly wound workaholic the media have portrayed to date. In court, the 41-year-old prosecutor is warm, caring and compassionate, as well as tough, colleagues say, and she can represent murder victims so sympathetically that jurors feel the force of every blow. Clark is sure to evoke the memories of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman during her critical opening statement. As Nicole's friend nbFaye Resnick recounts in her recent book, Clark asked for her testimony, saying, "Nicole can't speak for herself. She needs someone to speak for her."
O.J.'s defense team may be higher-paid and better-dressed, but the prosecution is by no means outclassed. Clark has tried more than 20 homicide cases in her 13 years with the Los Angeles D.A.'s office, and hasn't lost one in almost 10 years. Her co-counsel, Bill Hodgman, has even more trial experience and is particularly adept at weaving complex facts into clear pictures of guilt. In 1991, he won the conviction of Charles Keating Jr. in the Lincoln Savings Bank case, a swindle as complicated as any that came out of the S&L morass. When African-American prosecutor Christopher Darden was added to the team, the defense complained it was blatant racial pandering. But Darden, too, is experienced in trying murder cases, and his value was readily apparent last week when he went head to head with Johnnie Cochran over the admissibility of LAPD Det. Mark Fuhrman's alleged racial epithets.
Each prosecutor brings a distinctive style to court. After a cross-examination by Clark, says former L.A. district attorney Ira Reiner, "you feel as if you've been impaled by a spear in the chest." Clark likes combat; she gave up a better-paying, less stressful administrative job last year to go back into trial work. Hodgman has a more cerebral approach, but he can be devastating, too. Reiner says, "When Bill finishes a cross, it may not have seemed very interesting. Then the witness stands up and you notice that his belt is missing and his pants are falling off."
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All three prosecutors develop intense relationships with the families of murder victims. Five years later, Danna Schaeffer still remembers sitting, in a state of shock, in Wilshire Homicide the day after her daughter, TV actress Rebecca Schaeffer, was fatally shot by an obsessed fan. "I had brought dish towels to cry into," she told Newsweek. "I looked up and there was Marcia." Clark, as the prosecutor assigned to the case, sent stalker Robert Bardo to prison for life and won the Schaeffer family's enduring admiration. "We know a lot of people who have lost their children to homicides and many feel victimized by the murder, and then by the justice system," Schaeffer says. "We did not feel that way. We were in the best possible hands."
It was Clark's compassion for victims that led her to the D.A.'s office in 1981. She began her career doing defense work with a small L.A. law firm. But as good as she was, says senior partner Jeffrey Brodey, she was obviously miscast: "She was born to be a prosecutor. She always came from a very high moral plane."
Clark's personal life has been far from prim, however. The tabs have relished dredging up details of her first marriage, to dashing Israeli backgammon pro Gaby Horowitz. Marcia, then a law student, sometimes accompanied him to tony private clubs. "She was well behaved -- she didn't hustle or cheat or insult people, which is more than I can say for her ex-husband," says former tournament director Danny Kleinman. The couple divorced in 1980, and five months later Marcia married Gordon Clark, a Scientologist five years her junior. (Curiously, Horowitz was accidentally shot in the head nine years later, allegedly by the lay minister who performed Marcia's second marriage.) She filed for divorce last June.
Caring for her two rambunctious sons (ages 2 and 5) while juggling her demanding trial schedule has been stressful, friends say. But Clark's stamina is legendary -- she exists on cigarettes and Caesar salads, and lifts weights at home late at night, after her kids have gone to bed. Her close friend and fellow deputy D.A. Lynn Reed Baragona says Clark can get unnerved, as she did when a camera crew followed her sons and their nanny, though "she is absolutely fearless in court." And to date, at least, Clark hasn't lost her sense of humor, Baragona says. Whenever they discuss the inevitable TV movie of the case, Clark, a onetime actress and dancer, insists she wants to play herself.
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