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		Been there, DUNNE that - - - - - - - - page 2 of 3 During the trial, Dunne enjoyed a prime, and much-coveted, courtroom seat. Visitors to Judge Lance Ito's fiefdom and viewers around the world could see Dunne every day, leaning forward intently, staring through his signature tortoise-shell glasses, taking copious notes with his Mont Blanc, an angry, elegantly dressed guardian angel for victim's rights. On weeknights, in the early evening, he was always making the media rounds somewhere or other. You could see him insisting on Simpson's guilt with Geraldo Rivera (who was himself accused of having an intensely personal relationship with Denise Brown). Or savaging Simpson with Charles Grodin, whose blatantly false hairline moved when his eyebrows rose to make a point. Or pontificating to an eager Dan Rather in the regular Friday night trial wrap-up. At the end, Dunne's East Coast society whine became as familiar to us as Walter Cronkite's heartland bass had been a few decades before. "I have a tendency to get too personally involved in these trials I cover, even emotionally involved at times," Gus/Dunne warned the CBS producers when they asked him to contribute his weekly impressions of the trial and its participants. Apparently, the producers didn't care (which makes one wonder how the news division got away with it, since news is -- at least in theory -- supposed to be reported impartially, from a journalistic remove), and Dunne proceeded to get as personal as he liked. He commented on how the families were holding up, what strategies the defense and prosecution might be making and how the trials were going. And, of course, on Simpson's guilt. After the early evening media rounds, Dunne spent his nights far removed from the gritty and often grisly details of what happened in the Criminal Courts building. Like the hoi polloi, what passes for L.A.'s haut monde needed a regular fix of trial-related gossip, too. So Dunne was invited to sup with the city's glitteratti and give a brief talk afterwards -- a kind of quid pro quo for the crème brûlée. He began to refer to this singing for his supper as his "floor show." And he loved it. Oscar-winning actors, prominent directors, studio moguls and their ambitious society wives clamored to be seated near him at dinners in Bel-Air and Beverly Hills. He dined with Nancy Reagan, per invitation of ex-U.S. Information Agency chief Charles Z. Wick, to offer her a divertissement from caring for the Alzheimer's-struck former president. He lunched with Elizabeth Taylor, who confessed that she "can't staaaand ... Mr. F. Lee Bailey," as she flashed a sapphire bracelet given to her by another of Johnnie Cochran's clients, Michael Jackson. ("'Michael is not a child molester'" Taylor firmly admonished Gus when he made mention of Jackson's legal woes, "as if she had said the same sentence over and over again in previous conversations.") His Simpson cachet even netted him audiences with royalty: Queen Noor admitted they watched snippets of the trial in Jordan, too, "but we're not caught up in it the way everyone is here." The late Princess of Wales charmed him with her sly humor and, early on, predicted a full acquittal with eerie prescience. Diana's aunt-by-marriage, Princess Margaret, mortified him at brunch before a bunch of local swells and expatriate Brits when she sniffily declared the trial "such a bore" after one of his floor shows. (To which he could quite justifiably have responded: "Takes one to know one, Meg.") He was having a fine time dining out, staying in, exchanging confidences -- which, much to the horror and outrage of his confidants, he consistently and promptly betrayed in his columns and by leaking choice tidbits to simpatico journalists -- and looking forward to the day when Simpson would be publicly certified as the murderer of two people. His only problem was he was talking with people who held the same view that he did and who were telling him what he wanted to hear. If Dunne had bothered to spend any time away from the rarefied cluelessness of the Platinum Triangle that comprises Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills and Bel-Air, he might have gotten a more rounded view of how other parts of Los Angeles saw the trial and its players. It's possible that he hung out in the 'hood and kept a low profile, but I never saw him at any of the community forums, strolling through the Baldwin Hills Plaza (a veritable treasure trove of man-on-the-street opinion working journalists frequently mined) or sitting in the pews of the city's large black churches. In his racially homogenous circles, Dunne was much like the guests at producer Ray Stark's dinner party who interrupted their conversation to demand the opinion of Stark's long-time black butler, Wilbur, "because I'm the closest most of them will ever come to knowing a black man." Wilbur, like many blacks employed in white households, took a pass on voicing his true thoughts ("Oh, I'm not getting into this one"). Later, his employers would discover his opinions anyway when, at Dunne's goodbye dinner, Wilbur and the black catering staff walked off the job after dessert but before the dishes were done: "They didn't like the way you talked about O.J., calling him guilty after the jury found him innocent," Stark's daughter, Wendy, explained. "Oh well, at least we finished dessert and coffee before they left." Nothing like having one's priorities in the right place. "This is going to be the O.J. legacy," Dunne declared to the bemused Stark after Wilbur's exit. "He's divided the races. We're back to where we were before Rosa Parks wouldn't sit in the back of the bus anymore in 1955, and the civil rights movement started." And in this irredeemably flawed analysis, Dunne is typical of much of white Los Angeles, indeed, of white America. The Simpson trial didn't cause a racial divide. It merely illuminated -- in the fashion that those huge lights the INS places at the Mexican border do -- the magnitude of the problem. Black Americans have been aware of the divide's existence for years. White Americans, post-Simpson, are reluctantly concluding the civil rights era didn't fix "the race problem," and are finally starting to measure, with dismay, the depth of that chasm. 1955 and 1995 are, in some very meaningful ways, too close for comfort. Simpson's legacy is their shattered naiveté, their realization that the natives, while generally better off than they were 40 years ago, are still restless. N E X T+P A G E+| What's wrong with Dunne's analysis - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY JOHANNA GOODMAN