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videos Lerman has provided, Rodney King is li,·ing a
strange. and completely American, paradox. The most hellish
moment of his life has presented him, through no initiative
of his own, with greater prospects than he'd ever
imagined possible, and from which he is almost completely
excluded.
His words make the cover of Time magazine. his name is
attached to the rising-or crashing-careers of the sort of
people he'd never be in the same room with, he gets private
messages of sympathy from the president of the United
States. Lawyers, agents, filmmakers have hustled to get a
piece of him." The onslaught has provoked his family to bickering
over merchandising and story rights. And now he
couldn't help them if he wanted to, because someone else
owns his name.
Rodney King has become a mythic symbol of denied justice,
with much commerce and national debate and a riot
being conducted in his name, but he can't sleep at night, or
go home to the 'hood for some beers and a barbecue.
To say that Lerman has put a tight rein on Rodney King
does not begin to describe the control he exerts over his
famous client. "Svengali" is a word that arises more than
once. Lerman hired Tom Owens, the former L.A.P.D. officer,
to supervise a security force which ensures that ·his "operation"
is not penetrated, as well as a psychiatrist to
monitor King's psyche and administer antidepressants and
other medications.
"I just want to be a normal family again, and peaceful,
like we used to do," says Aunt Angela. "Where does he go
in Ventura? Nowhere. Every time I call, he's at home.
... They've increased his medicine because of this incident
right now [the acquittal and the riots]. He was to where he
was Rodney again-lively and just outgoing .... Now he's
back on that medicine. And way out there. You gotta go
across three freeways to get to him."
"The way Lerman's got Rodney," says one colleague of
Lerman's, "is sort of like wh~· Patty Hearst joined the Symbionese
Liberation Army.''
odney King spent more than a year
sprawled on that L.A. street, hunched
against the blows of the police batons,
as that videotape replayed
itself on an endless loop
in American living rooms, searing
that image deep into the
American eye. In a way, the
eighty-one-second tape erased
King's life before and after the
beating. It was all we knew,
and, it seemed, all we needed to
know: he was the national definition
of victim. Then came the acquittal and the rioting and
King's halting. affecting plea for peace. The image expanded:
he became an emblematic figure. Time longed for national
leaders who could be so eloquent; a New York columnist
equated him with Rosa Parks. the brave mother of the modem
civil-rights movement, who refused to sit in tl1e back of
an Alabama bus. Others have placed him on a par with Martin
Luther King Jr.
But Rodney King is not Rosa Parks, he is not Martin
Luther King Jr., and, for that matter, he is not even Rodney
King. He's always been known as "Glen," his middle
name. and ~he fact that he became ."Rodney" after the event
summarizes the transformation imposed upon him by that
videotape. He had a life before those eighty-one seconds-a
life at least as revealing of the nature of our separating society
as the hollow debate over which failed policies should be
blamed for "the rage of the urban underc1ass," as the handwringers
like to call the burning down of cities. It is a life in
some ways more difficult to confront-than the brutality on
that tape.
Rodney Glen King was born in Sacramento in 1965, the
year that Los Angeles was last inflamed, to a family that fell
somewhere in the iniddle of the black American spectrumnot
quite middle-class, but a toehold above tire hopeless
poor. As Aunt Angela tells the family history, his father,
Ronald King, was from Kentucky, the son of an air-force
sergeant who was often absent and a mother who left Ronald
and Angela when they were toddlers. When she e:ventually
came back for them, she'd had two other children by another
man, and Ronald and Angela were each assigned one of their
infant sisters to help raise.
They landed in Sacramento, where Ronald went to high
school. Then he married Angela's best friend, Odessa, and
the three of them mo.ved south to Pasadena'. Ronald was a
sometime construction worker, but there weren't many jobs,
and he drank, and so he mostly settled for daywork as a
maintenance man. Odessa and he had a baby, Ronald junior,
and then Rodney Glen, and kept going until they had five
children.
It was a rough life. ''They didn't have enough .food,'' says
Angela. "I was a nurse's aide, and then I had this little
lady-I was taking care of .her kids, like a nanny-over in
Glendale. And Ronnie, he didn't want me to know, but I'd
go over there to visit, and they didn't have no food, and their
kids were walking around with T-shirts for diapers." Angela
moved in with her brother and sister-in-Jaw, putting her rent
money into the household, but the life-style remained borderline
at best. As Glen and his brothers and sister grew, their
father drank more heavily; their mother sought solace in the
Jehovah's Witnesses church.
There was love in the family, but trouble too, enough to
smother hope. Ronald King sank deeper into alcoholism, and
died at forty-two. Angela says one of their sisters moved in
with a man who beat her, requiring Glen's regular intervention.
Another sister, Juanita, simply vanished one day and
hasn't been heard from since; Angela thinks she may have
died with Jim Jones at Jonestown. Glen's younger brother
J':an got caught up in the beating of a policeman and spent
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