COCHRAN OF THE WALK

And here’s the topper: last week’s Olender Foundation “Advocate for Justice” award at the Kennedy Center, sponsored by Jack Olender, Washington’s medical- malpractice king, who’s won over 70 million-dollar judgments, figures among Marion Barry’s best non-drug connections (Barry once declared a Jack Olender Day), and is the Ahura Mazda of ambulance chasers (he’s taken out ads seeking “brain dead babies”).

Standing on the shoulders of Olender winners past, like Heather Whitestone (honored for being deaf) and Paul Prudhomme (they may have thought they were lauding Dom DeLuise, but who can tell?), Johnnie accepted his plaque and a $ 50,000 grant split between two local law schools. He was “deeply humbled,” he said, and pledged to “continue laboring in the vineyard on what I call ‘my journey to justice,'” which he’ll also call his $ 4.2 million forthcoming autobiography.

He’s the Great Conciliator now, more interested in taking bows than in offering race-baiting rhetorical flourishes. These days he laces his speech with references to Dr. King, Booker T. Washington, South Africa, and the Kerner report. Old ladies and emcee Larry King swoon at the sight of him, young ladies drink in his smoky savoir-faire like a tall glass of Don Cornelius.

The evening provided a Cochran photofest: Johnnie having his hands raised by presenters as a jazz ensemble played the Rocky theme; Johnnie being presented with a gavel bigger even than the lump in Larry King’s throat; Johnnie swaying as the Duke Ellington School choir sang “So Many Heroes”; Johnnie eating filet of salmon with roasted fennel sauce; Johnnie wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.

Religious overtones were recurrent, as Cochran shared with us “The Advocate’s Prayer,” which contains the line, “my duty to my client will not allow me to seek obscurity.” When I asked Cochran about an ornate multicolored cross on his lapel, he said, “It was given to me, it signifies something about Jesus Loves You.” And indeed, if you believe He does, as Johnnie and I do, then you also embrace the redemption of sinners both small (me drinking six Chardonnays and asking him if he cuffed the old lady around, as she alleges in her new book) and not so small (him getting a guy acquitted who, evidence suggests, nearly cut off the heads of two people).

But Cochran wants us to look beyond the Simpson verdict. “The real joy of my practice comes from representing not the O.J.’s but the No J’s,” he says. The high ground is his alone — seeking celebrity acquittal is not a fast buck or status cementer, but a moral imperative, the Lord’s work. And he is in fact a champion of the underdog indigent (Todd Bridges, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Jim Brown, Michael Jackson), accused of everything from rape and manslaughter to child molestation, but railroaded all.

Cochran is now in that rarefied sphere inhabited by those who perpetually command the public’s gaze. Mere celebrity verges on sainthood here, and too much scrutiny of how one arrived is considered both unnecessary and a breach of etiquette. If Americans are still reluctant to embrace unadulterated scum (O.J. has been shunned in most quarters), they show no such aversion for scum once-removed.

Throughout the regalement, I kept asking Cochran’s admirers and fellow lawyers: “If justice was delivered in the person of Cochran, who then was the real killer?” What an annoying afterthought. It brought menacing stares and stumbling equivocations.

When asked what Simpson’s doing to apprehend the killer, Cochran replied, with a straight face, “He’s got a full-time investigator, he’s working every day, tracking down every lead he can.” And who was I to suggest differently? Colombian drug lords are fanatic golfers, and Simpson has made it his life’s mission to canvass every blasted back-nine club pro for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the actual murderer.

So perhaps rightly, my question was snitted off by a television reporter who just had to know, “Johnnie, has the O.J. Simpson trial affected your life in any way?” As if we were all there to fete Cochran’s stellar work on behalf of Geronimo Pratt. More of the same on the after-dinner panel, as crow’s-footed atrophied socialites hunkered over apple-cranberry cobbler with pecan crusts and French vanilla sauce to hear gladiators’ tales. Olender took the stage with Keith Watters of the National Bar Association, “of which Johnnie is our foremost and finest member,” with the same betuxed sweaty obsequiousness of Felt Forum fight announcers. “We’re gonna grill Johnnie Cochran,” Oleader promised. And boy, did they rip the clackers off him.

Olender: “Do you think you could have effectively tried that case singlehandedly?” Ouch.

Cochran: “Great question, Jack. . . . ”

Watters: “I was in Shreveport, and I want to know if it’s true that you like sweet potato pie, succotash, and gumbo?”

Cochran: “It’s true.”

Watters: “Is this true? . . . I’m told that your favorite color is red, that you love receiving cards and letters, and that you’ve run out of gas in a Rolls Royce?”

Have you no decency, man?

I used the ensuing autograph session to ask a few of my own. “Johnnie, can you sign my program, ‘To Matt, Just between me and you, he’s guilty.'” Cochran nearly lost his fire-roasted winter vegetables with grapeseed vinaigrette, a narrow escape for his African print tie. “Are you kidding? Absolutely not.”

“Your ex-wife’s allegations [of abuse and bigamy] — true or false?” The crowd turned, as did Cochran and the security guard. “Ahh, now he’s getting rude,” Cochran said. “Man, you’re rude — get out of here with that,” said security. Apparently this is not the kind of question one asks in polite society, not of an “American role model with a cross on his $ 2,000 lapel, not of “a great man,” in the words of Larry King, who’s “handsome and charming,” in the words of a local newscaster, because, as Keith Watters testified, “Johnnie, you are my hero, our hero. You are already our man of the year.”

by Matt Labash