High Points                                                                                                           Jealousy

Othello: Hypothesis of a Confession

or

"– Sheila, Thanks for the Pie"

It is easy to imagine Michael McClinton as Iago when you see an actor in costume who looks like him playing Othello.

                Laurence Olivier  and  Maggie Smith  in Othello 1965                      Avery Brooks as Othello 2005

William Shakespeare's Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice can be summed up in the last part of the last scene as a story about a jealous black celebrity who smothers his white wife then stabs himself to death for his crime. If you must have a knife in that murder-confession-self-punishment scene, you get it in Iago stabbing his wife Emilia to death with a dagger. In fact, Iago stabs two people to death with a dagger in the play. The first is man named Rodirego that he tricked into assassinating Michael Cassio (Rodirego botched it so Iago killed him to keep him quiet). Iago's second stabbing victim was Emilia.

  OTHELLO on Stage

Soft you ; a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know't
No more of that, I pray you, in your letters.
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am, nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice then must you speak,
Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought
Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gum. Set you down this;
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him, thus.

1943 -- Football star-turned-actor Paul Robeson is Othello. José Ferrer, father of Miguel Ferrer, is Iago.

Superimposing that story onto O.J. with a gun to his head in the back seat of Al Cowling's white Bronco while Robert Kardashian reads his suicide note on live television is automatic. Of course, you'd be missing the core of Shakespeare's play about "love, jealousy and murder" if you left out the role of Othello's trusted lieutenant "Honest Iago" in contriving that dramatic scene with the oldest version of a ventriloquist act in literature (which is literally how the play begins). 

Ronald Colman comes the closest to Othello without Iago in his role as an actor playing Othello on Broadway. The movie is A Double Life. The actor playing Iago has no lines to speak. You see him only at a distance too great to capture his features and only long enough to see him step backward as a sentence of slow torture is pronounced on him. That's the only way you know who he is in that fragment of the scene where Othello pulls a dagger from his sleeve, makes his, "...loved not wisely but too well," speech over the body of his murdered wife, and stabs himself.

A Double Life is not another interpretation of Shakespeare's Othello. It's more in the mold of Jekyll and Hyde, the Wolf Man, the dummy who begins to control the ventriloquist or the spirit of the dead possessing the mind of the living. It's about an actor, still in love with his ex-wife, who is transformed by the jealousy he feels toward his publicist into the character he's playing on stage.  The character he's playing is Othello. Any story about a love triangle, spun by jealousy and culminating in murder would theoretically do as well to carry the plot. Othello happens the one that most people know enough about to make the connection. Ronald Colman is the actor playing the actor who plays Othello, "not wisely but too well."

He kills a young, blonde waitress (Shelley Winters) who became Desdemona in his mind when she unwittingly utters a line in the play about putting out the flame of a lamp. He realizes what he did much later when he sees the heart-shaped earrings of his young, blonde, waitress, murder victim  on the ears of another young, blonde waitress. He plays the last act of his last performance in Othello by stabbing himself with a real dagger. This bleeding killer expires on the scene. (A Double Life, Continued...)

Othello with Iago delivers to you this familiar Fuhrman pattern of putting his words in someone else's mouth:

OTHELLO

Give me a living reason she's disloyal.

IAGO

I do not like the office:
But, sith I am enter'd in this cause so far,
Prick'd to't by foolish honesty and love,
I will go on. I lay with Cassio lately;
And, being troubled with a raging tooth,
I could not sleep.
There are a kind of men so loose of soul,
That in their sleeps will mutter their affairs:
One of this kind is Cassio:
In sleep I heard him say 'Sweet Desdemona,
Let us be wary, let us hide our loves;'
And then, sir, would he gripe and wring my hand,
Cry 'O sweet creature!' and then kiss me hard,
As if he pluck'd up kisses by the roots
That grew upon my lips: then laid his leg
Over my thigh, and sigh'd, and kiss'd; and then
Cried 'Cursed fate that gave thee to the Moor!'

OTHELLO

O monstrous! monstrous!

IAGO

Nay, this was but his dream.

 

 

"His dream?" Nay! Nay! Nay! Iago was but a ventriloquist of sorts who created his sleep-talking dummy with a lie.

—Jasper

How I Helped O.J. Get Away With Murder, by Mike Gilbert, 2009

Chapter 11 – He Did It

Mike Gilbert as Iago... Page 124

"O.J. showed no emotion. I pressed further.

'O.J., you told A.C. that Nicole opened the door with a knife in her hand.'

'Yeah, I didn't take a knife over there, Nicole opened the door with a knife in her hand.'

He sat quietly.

I waited. A few seconds passed, and then he continued, in a very soft and low mumble, almost as if he were sleep talking.

'If she hadn't opened that door with a knife in her hand, Mike, she'd still be alive.'

We didn't say any more.

Nothing more needed to be said.

O.J. had confessed to me. There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever."

How could there be any doubt? If O.J. confessed to Al Cowlings and Mike Gilbert that he went to Bundy where Nicole confronted him with a knife, he had to be lying about not bringing a knife with him. The logic is inescapable. Her knife was accounted for on her kitchen counter. We know from Mark Fuhrman's Murder in Brentwood that one of O.J.'s knives was missing, the one that matched the wounds on the bodies of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. 

Page 125

"I went into the kitchen to get some fruit – a couple of apples – and a knife to cut them with. I brought the fruit and the knife with me to my room ... I placed a chair and my suitcase near the door, and placed the knife on the bedside table ... What if O.J. decided that he had said too much? I knew my mind was playing tricks on me and that I was being paranoid. I also wondered what I would do if O.J. knocked on my door. Would I open the door with a knife in my hand?"

That chunk of gossip in Sheila Weller's Raging Heart puts a new spin on the Sheila Green Gossip Game in The Last of Sheila and Fuhrman's Murder in Greenwich Acknowledgment, "--Sheila, thanks for the pie." The pie in Raging Heart can be a pizza (page 251): "He [O.J.] took Ron [Shipp] to the California Pizza Kitchen... " The pie could be shorthand for O.J. Simpson's birthday (page 123): "Mike [Militello] would fly out every July for O.J.'s birthday--July 9--and give his pal twenty-four-hours of pranks and pie-throwing..."

The pie could also evoke Weller's quotations from a 1976 Lawrence Linderman interview in Playboy (page 66): "'Mostly I remember the adventures we had. There was a pollywog pond, railroad tracks, a lumber yard, and lots of factories nearby, and in the summer, when there wasn't anything to do, somebody would say, 'Hey, lets go hit the pie factory! ..So we'd go down there, sneak around the fence and set up what looked like a little bucket brigade, and we'd steel maybe fifty pies. My favorite was blackberry.'"

Wait a minute...

This is starting to look a whole lot like The First of Sheila, even more so when you add the next sentence in the paragraph after, "blackberry. Man that was good. Or we'd hit the Hostess Bakery or the milk factory."

Sheila Weller's picture of O.J. is heavily shaded by unsubstantiated stories (gossip) told to her by  Mark Fuhrman's old buddy Ron Shipp. Keep that in mind as you contemplate the fact that the pie stories in Raging Heart and The First of Sheila are held together only by a six-syllable line in Fuhrman's Murder in Greenwich, "--Sheila, thanks for the pie."

–Jasper