The Natural

In The Natural (’84), Robert Redford is Roy Hobbs, a baseball player with talent of mythological proportions. As a pitcher in 1923 and a slugger in 1939, after an absence from baseball for the intervening 16 years, he shows that he was born to play the game better than anyone ever has and anyone ever will. 

The legend of Roy Hobbs begins on a Midwestern farm with Hobbs as a boy learning to pitch from his father. Soon after his father falls dead at the foot of a tree, leaving him alone on a stormy night, he sees a bolt of lightning strike the tree and split it in two. From the stump of that tree he fashions a baseball bat by hand and christens it “Wonder Boy” with the name and the emblem of a lightning bolt burned into the barrel.

The Natural takes place in an alternate universe where the New York Nights exist in place of the New York Giants. It has a bigger-than-life character named Whammer in 1924 loosely based on Babe Ruth. It has Hobbs, in his later incarnation as a phenomenal home run hitter in 1939 wearing the number 9. That was Ted Williams’ number.  

Serious students of baseball know that Ruth, famous for his home run-hitting prowess, began his Major League career as an outstanding pitcher and that William began his Major League career in 1939.  Had Williams’ baseball career not been interrupted by his Marine Corps service in World War II, he might have had the stats to crown him the greatest slugger of all time. Detroit Tiger Hall of Famer Al Kaline said that he was – although he would have had a hell of a time beating the stats of Henry Aaron.  

You don’t have to know that much about baseball to appreciate the key role of Barbara Hershey as Harriet Bird in The Natural (she and Aaron share Fuhrman’s birthday). She dresses modestly in black but carries herself like a subtly irresistible seductress. She has recently sought out the very best athletes in football and Olympic sports and killed them when they fell short of her impossible heroic ideal. She shot them with a silver bullet.  

Harriet Bird is drawn to Joe Don Baker’s character “The Whammer” because of his reputation as the greatest baseball player of all time. She seats herself in his line of sight on a train bound for Chicago. If the green stones around her neck are real – and they probably are – she's wearing an emerald necklace. The train also carries Robert Duvall as sports writer/cartoonist Max Mercy, Roy Hobbs and his agent Sam Simpson. Whammer doesn’t know it, but his arrogance and not-so-subtle flashing of a huge diamond ring at Harriet has marked him for death.

Fate intervenes in a stopover at a carnival when Simpson challenges Whammer to a contest with Hobbs in which Hobbs must strike out Whammer on three straight pitches. Standing behind Simpson who catches for Hobbs. Max Mercy umpires the contest while Harriet Bird stands close by as something more than an interested spectator. When Roy Hobbs, the unknown and unassuming farm boy strikes out the great Whammer, her attention shifts to Hobbs.

At this point in the story, you don't know how Harriet Bird thinks. You don't know that she sees Hobbs in mythological terms like the boy who pulled the sword out of the stone and ushered in the age of Camelot and his greatest knight rolled into one. She knows greatness when she sees it and she saw it Roy Hobbs striking out the great Whammer under intense pressure against incredible odds. This is the stuff of which mythological heroes are made. She is well educated in classic mythological literature and undoubtedly knows that Roy is the Old French name for "king."

When Harriet engages Roy in conversation aboard the train about Sir Lancelot, he begins to show cracks in the pedestal upon which her obsession with heroic purity has placed him.  Hobbs knows nothing about the legend of King Arthur and Sir Lancelot. Harriet tries again with Greek Mythology, giving Hobbs many heroes to pock from with the epic poems of Homer. She still doesn’t give up on him when he tells her that the only homer he knows has for bases – a diamond. She then goes to the core of the issue asking him what he hopes to accomplish in baseball. She wants him to say something that lifts his play to a truly heroic level beyond himself and the game.  

He says, “When I walk down the street people will look at me and say, ‘There goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was.’” 

She asks him if that’s all. 

He answers, “What else is there?

She asks, “Don’t you know?” But you can tell that she has determined his unworthiness of immortality and decides to stop him before he lives long enough to reach his potential. If you’ve been paying attention you can hear it in her tone and see it in her face.       

In a final effort to extract from Hobbs her heroic ideal, Harriet Bird asks him if there isn’t something more, “something more glorious.” But the die has been cast. He has pronounced his own death sentence in her mind on the receiving end of a silver bullet.  She shoots him.

Hobbs survives. But the injury puts his baseball career on hold for 16 years and nearly ends his life at the height of his phenomenal comeback while playing baseball for the New York Knights. Hobbs never sees the irony of his heroic role as a Knight and the comparison that the woman who shot him made of him to Sir Lancelot.  .

To you and me this is just a story. To Mark Fuhrman, it appears to be much more than that. Just as Harriet Bird thinks in terms of gods and heroes in books, Fuhrman thinks in terms of characters and actors in movies.

We can get to The Natural from many avenues of approach. I started with Fuhrman’s hairstyle on the witness stand in O.J.’s murder trial. It reminded me of some famous actor's hairstyle. I didn’t know which actor until I saw Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor. I saw him in a neater version that hairstyle when I tracked "Bird" links from Redford's role as Joe Turner, codenamed "Condor," to Barbara Hershey's role as Harriet Bird  in The Natural.

Three Days of the Condor reinforced the Fuhrman factor many times over with brown leather gloves, a blue knit cap, multiple homicides, a Ford Bronco, a kidnapping and a ton of Iago hypothesis etceteras. I looked for Redford in other movies related to Fuhrman bell ringers. I found him as a cowboy in the Electric Horseman, an Army Airborne officer (bird wings) in A Bridge Too Far and the Angel of Death in The Twilight Zone.

In the process I learned to look for actors he appeared with who had something about them peculiar to Fuhrman or out of sync in his words or deeds regarding O.J. Simpson.  That's not, however, how I got on the track of Barbara Hershey, the obsessed stalker and killer of super star athletes in The Natural.

On page 190 of Murder in Brentwood Fuhrman says this about Marcia Clark; “She was obsessed with the idea of Nicole as a victim of domestic violence, and refused to consider the possibility of jealous rage. Here is one possible scenario.....”   The love triangle, stalker, “jealous rage” scenario he proposes sounds plausible until you look at the physical evidence that makes it impossible and his other impossible scenarios that contradict it. In Fuhrman's version of the story, the obsessed stalker killer is a sports superstar, one of the greatest professional football players of all time.

The thing that all of those scenarios have in common are corresponding scenes in movies that are internally consistent but not compatible with Fuhrman's O.J. scenarios or each other. They are compatible with what Robert Duvall’s character  in The Natural says to  Glenn Close as Iris about her, Hobbs and Harriet Bird.  He shows her Chicago police photos of Bird lying dead on a sidewalk and Hobbs lying unconscious on her hotel room floor with a bullet in his stomach. He uses the exact words, "love triangle."

On page 191 of Murder in Brentwood Fuhrman relates a conversation he had with Marcia in which he offers to solve a personal problem by saying “Anytime you want me to stop it, let me know. I’ll just go to the press about Ito and York.” Then he attributes these words to the “obsessed” Marcia Clark: “No, not yet, but it’s nice to know we have a silver bullet.”

Fuhrman’s next explicit reference to obsession comes on page 229. He does it twice in consecutive paragraphs regarding Chris Darden and “His obsession with race....” Fuhrman spends the next two pages elaborating on Darden’s poor preparation of him for his testimony starting with a lengthy passage from page 188 of Darden’s In Contempt. Then, in the first two Murder in Brentwood paragraphs of page 232 he says this: 

“Chris and I got nowhere on my testimony preparation. He asked me questions like, who were my favorite sports stars? (My answer: George Foreman, Michael Jordan, and Larry Bird.) ...One day I was sitting in Chris’s office, and he was doing what he usually did, reading something intently and glancing up at me only for an occasional question. While he was trying his best to forget that I was sitting right across from him. On a hat rack was a black baseball cap with green lettering...” 

Like Harriet Bird’s first murder victim, all three of Fuhrman’s favorite sports stars were Olympians. George Foreman won an individual Gold Metal in boxing. Larry Bird, of course, shares Harriet Bird’s last name. He and Michael Jordan played on the 1992 Olympic basketball “dream team.”  

Jordan, however, is a special case. You might have to go to page 199 of Chris Darden’s In Contempt to see where things start getting especially interesting with him. Darden says this about Fuhrman’s sports stars: “I asked him about his sports heroes and he listed George Foreman, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird.” Maybe Darden got it wrong and Fuhrman did say Jordan (Darden really did have an obsession with race and got many essential facts wrong because of it). That would explain why Fuhrman made the correction in his book especially considering the fact to Johnson and O.J. shared the number 32.   

Naming Michael Jordan, # 21, instead of Magic Johnson gets Fuhrman around the number 32 association problem. It doesn’t explain why he  give any answer to a question he clearly thought was unproductive. Naming Jordan means little to Fuhrman’s story about prep sessions with Darden. It means a great deal to the story of Roy Hobbs in The Natural. In the first place, the January, 1995 timing of Darden’s “sports hero” session with Fuhrman took place when Jordan was playing professional baseball for a Chicago White Sox Minor League team. Moreover, Jordan said that he was doing it for his late father, “...who had always envisioned his son as a Major League Baseball player 

In The Natural, the man reflected in a bathroom mirror in the only scene with a baseball cap on a hat rack obsessed with race is Wilford Brimley as Pop Fisher. He's the manager and part owner of the New York Nights. But it’s a different kind of race, the National League pennant race. The cap is dark blue (the 1939 Giants were black caps) although it looks black in that scene. The “green” comes from what Hobbs tells Pop about winter wheat two seconds after the hat on the rack comes into view. He calls it, “...the greenest stuff you ever saw.” It’s the only explicit reference to the color green in the entire movie. 

In that The Natural is set years before the Major League color barrier was broken, that kind of race is an implicit part of the story. But nobody is obsessed with it. All of the characters just take the all-white Major Leagues for granted. It's an all-white world. Even the shoeshine boy in the movie is white. Fuhrman’s attention to the baseball cap in Darden’s office is, however, another matter. All things considered it looks like he is "playing the race card" to disguise something he wants to say about baseball. He writes: 

“I leaned forward to read what the cap said and I was surprised to see “Black Law... Maybe it was some kind of fraternity gift, or it had sentimental value. Still I thought it was inappropriate to display in the office. It’s not a big deal, just a baseball cap with a little slogan on it. But as a white man, I couldn’t even ask him what it meant.”   

Horse pucky. If you don't go to The Natural, the baseball cap story is meaningless. Fuhrman had plenty of time to find out what Black Law meant from Marcia Clark. That’s assuming the green lettering didn’t actually say “Black’s Law.”

Chris Darden was a lawyer and Black’s Law Dictionary has been the “definitive legal dictionary” used by all lawyers in the United States since its first edition in 1891. It’s hard to believe that Fuhrman never noticed a copy of the dictionary in some lawyer’s office during his time with the LAPD.

Fuhrman had to take a long, wide turn to get baseball into his obsessed black man story. The prosecutors and Fuhrman’s own lawyers would have had the 6^th edition published in 1990. you'll notice that the label is black and the lettering is light olive green. The name comes from the man who compiled it, Henry_Campbell_Black   

Does the name Henry remind you of anyone black associated with baseball? How about “Hammerin’ Hank” Aaron, the most prolific Major League home run hitter of all time? Don't know what that means to Fuhrman or why he would draw attention to the book by the black background-green lettering details he gave about the cap. I suspect that the answer is in Black's Law or a movie where it is put on prominent display. My money is on an episode of Matlock (a high priced Atlanta criminal attorney and an Atlanta Braves baseball fan) with or without a baseball connection... FOUND IT.

Barbara Hershey who plays Harriet Bird shares Hank Aaron's birthday with Fuhrman. Robert Duvall as Max Mercy shares Fuhrman writing and drawing ability. The neat, carefully sized and spaced lettering on Fuhrman’s illustrations in Murder in Brentwood is standard draftsman lettering. It’s the lettering that Max Mercy uses in his cartoons. 

What draws all of these things together is Fuhrman’s 1989 “pattern of abuse” letter about the 1984 baseball bat incident with the Simpsons. In his book he elaborated on the incident and says on page 237, “The statement would have shown that far from having an obsession with either O.J. or Nicole, I treated the visit to Rockingham professionally”  

One last thing about the Simpson character in The Natural... Rarely does a character named Simpson appear in a movie made before 1994 that does not have strong or repeated connections to Fuhrman’s stories about O.J. Simpson. In The Natural, Simpson wears a catcher’s mitt  a brown leather glove behind a man swinging a baseball bat. It has Barbara Hershey in that scene as an obsessed killer named Bird with the recipient of a silver bullet from her revolver in mind. It draws in the 1984 baseball bat incident with Fuhrman and the Simpsons – according to Fuhrman.  

You can find all of it within 40 consecutive numbered pages in the middle of Murder in Brentwood with a patchworkof scenes from a dozen movies besides The Natural stitching them together . –Jasper