[ Home ]
From: Kate
T1:
Category 3: Category 1
Remote Name: pm402.isomedia.com
These are some news stories about the 10:17 p.m. phone calls and what Ron's friends had to say about him. Not even close to what his family said about him.
California Kid Pals recall Goldman [THE VICTIMS RONALD GOLDMAN<WANDERING FROM DREAM TO DREAM. B03 NS 07/11/94]
By Carla Hall and Greg Krikorian. LOS ANGELES TIMES
Los Angeles - Maybe it's Hollywood's fault, or maybe our own, but when a murder involves the rich or famous, everyone has a scenario. And we think we recognize the players.
No wonder, then, that so many jumped to conclusions about Ronald Lyle Goldman as soon as the body of the handsome 25-year-old was discovered near that of Nicole Brown Simpson last month outside her Brentwood condominium.
He was a waiter and sometime model. His driver's license photo showed his head cocked back, a bandanna swathed around his head. Now here he was, deep in the night, dead on her walkway.
Images sprang. Rumors spread. In an instant, the world had created its own Ron Goldman - a smooth-talking, golden-skinned gadabout.
But the real story bears no resemblance to the image.
At 25, Goldman was still finding his way through the maze of dreams Los Angeles seems to offer. He longed for a serious girlfriend but didn't have one. He wanted to open his own restaurant, but that was years away from reality. Meanwhile, he waited on tables at Mezzaluna, a casually chic trattoria, a short walk from his $750-a-month Brentwood apartment.
"I think Ron's philosophy was to shoot for the stars," said his friend Michael Davis.
Goldman and his fellow dreamers were the good-looking, weightlifting young men who easily make friends walking through Brentwood Gardens, a local shopping mall, or lingering over coffee at the Starbucks on San Vicente Boulevard. Like them, he embraced the mythologized Los Angeles lifestyle - he played volleyball on the beach, he surfed, he Rollerbladed, he appeared on "Studs," the now-defunct game show that featured saucy young men and women flirting with each other. "Girls will love him," the talent coordinator wrote after his audition.
It was in Brentwood that Goldman met Nicole Simpson a few months ago when his neighbor introduced them at Starbucks, where local residents with their gym-toned bodies, their newspapers and their dogs linger over cafe lattes and fruit muffins.
She was as chatty as his friends, and any encounters between Goldman and Nicole Simpson seemed breezy and innocent. That he was good-looking and disarmingly personable seems undeniable. That he was the other man in Nicole Simpson's life seems unlikely. Plain untrue, his friends insist.
Goldman had a job he found reasonably satisfying, a wide circle of friends and the constant challenge of wrestling Los Angeles into the shape of his dreams. "He was trying to get his life together," said Carly Kostrubanic, a friend who dated him for about a month. "He was working really hard."
He made friends effortlessly. In Brentwood, while working at the California Pizza Kitchen, Goldman forged a friendship with Michael Davis when the young actor came to pick up a takeout order.
In the last months of his life, after finishing work at Mezzaluna, he would drop in on his friend and neighbor Gail Evertz. He would come bearing pasta from the restaurant - or a reminder to lock her windows.
"He would help anyone," Evertz said. "He was the kind of guy who just gave unconditionally."
Asked to describe his personality on his 1991 application to appear on "Studs," Goldman wrote: "outgoing, cocky, adventurous, relaxed and athletic."
He basked in the warm climate and the outdoor lifestyle. He wore jeans, oversized shirts and Doc Martens. "He became a real California kid," Davis said.
But in essence, Goldman seemed not much different from the boy recalled by his childhood neighbors and high school friends in Buffalo Grove, Ill., where he was raised.
Certainly he had changed both in looks and lifestyle. Those who saw the recent photos of a tall, muscled young man who sometimes modeled could hardly believe it was the wiry teenager they knew at Stevenson High. "It's night and day," said Jeffrey James Greenbury, a classmate whose locker was next to Goldman's. "It's like when he crossed the border [to California], he changed."
Many found it hard to believe he had blossomed from a quiet, sweet boy to a sleek, self-assured habitue of L.A.'s trendy Westside. "I would have thought he would have grown up and lived in the suburbs . . . like the rest of us," said Sheryl Steines, 25.
But Goldman's transformation may have been little more than a change of costume and scenery. Friends in Buffalo Grove spoke of him in the same terms as his more recent friends in Brentwood.
"In high school, he was quiet but friendly, the kind of guy you'd like to be around once you got to know him," said Dan Argentar, 23, who grew up around the corner from Goldman.
"He was a really nice guy, down to earth," said Marla Koza, 25, who was Goldman's date for the senior prom. "He was very excited about it. My brother reminded me that after I said I'd go with him, he brought over roses."
Goldman's father and mother divorced in 1974, and after a brief time in his mother's custody, Goldman lived with his father and a younger sister, Kim. His mother, Sharon Rufo of St. Louis, has said she last spoketo him two years ago.
At 18, Goldman left Illinois State University after one year, abandoning a planned major in psychology, to be with his family in Southern California. He plunged into the Los Angeles scene - even though he lived miles away with his family. What he didn't know - surfing - he learned. What he knew - tennis - he taught.
Goldman had a string of waiter jobs. He met Craig Clark when they both worked at a restaurant in Malibu. They played volleyball on sultry afternoons and sampled the clubs at night. "Anywhere that was hot, everywhere that was hot," said Clark, laughing. "We always got in free because he always knew people at the clubs."
At one of those clubs, Clark recalled, Goldman met a woman named Jacqui Bell. In 1992 Bell and Goldman began an intense on-again, off-again relationship. They lived together in her Westside apartment and then in an apartment in Brentwood.
He got a job as a waiter at the California Pizza Kitchen in the Brentwood Gardens mall. His life revolved around Bell and his widening circle of friends in Brentwood.
Goldman, friends remember, very rarely drank, was never seen taking drugs, and consulted Davis - also a trainer at The Gym - for low-fat diets. Women found him warm and affectionate. Far from being a heartbreaker, he seemed the one more likely to have his heart broken.
"It's very hard waking up in the morning knowing one of the few wonderful people in the world is gone," said Bell, who ended their relationship four months ago.
"He wanted a commitment. I'm not very good with commitments. Maybe if I'd given him the commitment he wanted, he'd still be here," said Bell, her voice filled with anguish. "He was a very sweet, honest, faithful guy when we were together."
Last spring Goldman struggled with the breakup and grew miserable at his job. "He wanted his own restaurant. How would you feel about being a waiter? He was frustrated. He wanted his life to go on," Bell said.
He left the restaurant in March and quickly found a job at Mezzaluna, earning better tips and meeting more people. "He was so proud that he'd found a job in only a few days," said Kostrubanic, a sometime model and actress.
The low-key Mezzaluna restaurant buzzes with the chatter of its eclectic Westside crowd. "It was a scene," Kostrubanic said. "He loved that."
Goldman fell into his modeling jobs for Barry Zeldes, owner of the store next to the California Pizza Kitchen in Brentwood Gardens. "My model backed out. I thought he'd be good," Zeldes said.
Goldman quizzed Michael Davis on his acting jobs. "He said, `Man, I really want to do that. I want to be on a show,' " Davis said. But no one can even recall seeing a head shot - the basic calling card of any actor, working or aspiring.
"One philosophy we all spoke of was networking," said Jeff Keller, the roommate of Michael Davis. "We have to meet people."
At that Goldman excelled. In the last few months of his life he worked occasionally as a promoter at dance clubs. But he told Davis he envied his friend's quiet times with his girlfriend: "He would say . . .`I really miss that - having someone to talk to, you don't have to go out, you can avoid all the craziness out there.' "
Still, there was something alluring about the night life epitomized by restaurants such as Mezzaluna, and Goldman imagined details of his own future restaurant. "It was going to have big metal doors," recalled Jeff Keller. "There wouldn't be a name, but a symbol - an ankh." The ancient Egyptian symbol of life matched the tattoo on Goldman's shoulder.
Sometimes, on his way to work, Goldman stopped by the apartment that Keller and Davis shared, and they all went for coffee at Starbucks. It was there they occasionally ran into Nicole Simpson.
Like them, she had once been a waitress, just pondering her goals when she was swept up into O.J. Simpson's world. Like them, she made friends easily. Davis says he met her in passing at Brentwood Gardens.
"I don't even know what transpired," he recalled. "We just got to talking."
Goldman appeared no closer to her than the rest of them - except that he got an occasional chance to drive her white convertible Ferrari.
He looked happy as a boy with a new toy the night that she let him drive her and Keller to a restaurant in Beverly Hills.
Friends say the relationship was innocent and casual. "If he was having a relationship with her, he would have told us," Keller said.
Gail Evertz, with whom he often talked about his relationships, confronted him in early June: "I said, `What's going on?' I was teasing him - only because the guys had said, `Oh, Nicole really likes him.' He said, `Absolutely nothing. She likes all the guys. I'm not special.'
I even asked him if he slept with her. He said, `Absolutely not.' " In fact, Evertz said, Goldman speculated that Simpson was interested in one of their other friends.
The Friday before his death Goldman recounted to a friend that he had gone with Simpson to the Gate, a popular West Hollywood club. He reveled in the moment they pulled up to the entrance and made everyone stare.
I said, `Ron, when you show up at the Gate with O.J. Simpson's wife, driving her Ferrari, you're asking for trouble,' " said the friend, who asked not to be named.
"He said, `Don't worry about it. We're just friends.' "
Copyright 1994, Newsday Inc. Carla Hall, Greg Krikorian, California Kid Pals recall Goldman