The rioters trashing Los Angeles weren’t the first or the last to appropriate Rodney King. The police who beat him portrayed him as a hulking beast so violent that he had to be subdued for their own safety. His first team of lawyers depicted him as a pathetic victim who needed shielding from the public eye; the second held him up as a martyr to the cause of civil-rights. Even feuding sides of his family vied for commercial control of his life. The real Rodney King-who grew up in a working-class family in Pasadena, dropped out of school with learning disabilities and lost his father at a young age-has been remade so many times in the last three years that he has become “if not a hero, then a vessel,” as the Rev. Leonard Jackson of First African Methodist Episcopal Church put it. His transformation from man to myth now includes millionaire, after a jury in his civil suit ordered the City of Los Angeles to pay him $3.8 million in damages.
King’s first lawyer was Steven Lerman, a white personal-injury specialist, whose initial strategy was to keep him in seclusion and let the infamous George Holliday video of the beating speak for itself. (Even prosecutors declined to have King testify at the first trial, fearing that his demeanor and past robbery conviction would damage the case.) But keeping King under wraps only exacerbated the public perception of him as a menace, particularly after he slipped his guardians and had further run-ins with police-for allegedly driving drunk, assaulting his wife and consorting with a transvestite prostitute. No charges were filed in those incidents, and as rioting spread after the Simi Valley verdict, Lerman saw an opportunity to portray King as a healer and peacemaker. He wrote a soothing speech for King to deliver, and dressed him in a tie and cardigan to soften his broad shoulders (“a ‘Mr. Rogers’ touch, unthreatening,” Lerman said). On the third day of the riots, he took King out to address 100 reporters. Tom Owens, King’s security man, says King was “totally overwhelmed” by the crowd and never looked at Lerman’s script. instead, he blurted out a better line all his own: “People, I just want to say, you know, can we-can we all get along? . . .”
The stammered appeal quickly transformed King into a voice for calm and racial justice-an image his next attorney eagerly exploited. Five months later King’s in-laws persuaded him to fire Lerman and hire Milton Grimes, a scrappier African-American attorney, who cast King as a symbol of pent-up racial anger. Grimes ran the case out of what he calls “the War Room,” where African art decorates the walls. He made sure that King remembered hearing the cops yell “Nigger!” as they beat him-testimony that had been shaky in his earlier court appearances. Grimes had King appear on a black radio call-in show and give interviews only to black reporters. He formed a justice for King Committee, made up mostly of black professionals, who met late into the night helping raise King’s “black consciousness.” Grimes also hired a tutor, Judy Sampson, to improve King’s marginal literacy and teach him African-American history. “Rodney King may not be a Medgar Evers or a Martin Luther King or a Malcolm X, but symbolically in young African-American minds he couldn’t be more important,” Grimes says. “You can’t talk to a young Afrcan-American male who doesn’t know of Rodney King. And their first comment is, ‘I’m not taking a Rodney King ass-whipping’.”
Since his own “whipping,” King has come a long way. Now 29, he has lost weight, started exercising, undergone psychiatric counseling, attended an alcohol rehab program, patched up his marriage and written some black-pride poetry. Books and movie deals are in the works, and he talks about buying a farm. “What that’s all about,” says his tutor, Sampson, “isn’t a farm, really. It’s about how Glen wants to be left the hell alone.” King was known as Glen until the media copied “Rodney” off police reports, and he recently told Sampson he never wants to hear the name Rodney King again. But shaking that name-and all that it stands for-may be his most difficult reincarnation of all.
