Looking Forward To Being Nicole.

She was swept up in O.J.’s life before she could really start her own. Born in Germany, Nicole grew up a suburban kid in Orange County, Calif. She clicked with southern California teendom: in high school she bummed the beaches clocking time with college guys. When she met O.J., the superstar quickly became the dominant fact of her existence – and she molded herself to his. “She looked like a Barbie doll, drop-dead gorgeous, but could wait on him hand and foot and have his children,” said Patricia Rose, later a close friend. Her family had early misgivings about the interracial relationship, but O.J. charmed them, too, and eventually gave her father a job. With O.J., Nicole entered a dazzling world of wealth, travel and partying in the uberculture of celebrities, though the price was putting up with his wandering eye, his rancorous jealousy and his violence.

Most of her friends didn’t know the seriousness of the abuse, but they recognized that she was under pressure. “Nicole had to be perfect, and even when she was perfect, she wasn’t perfect enough,” said Rose, who told Nicole that her own husband had an “anger-management problem.” Nicole also feared that O.J. was too critical of their daughter, Sydney, 8. Sometimes the strain broke through. Several years ago Nicole pounced from a Mercedes as O.J. window-shopped with two women on Rodeo Drive. “She was just ballistic. We were scared to death,” says Jennifer Young, one of the women. Early last year Nicole and Rose started seeing the same West Hollywood therapist; he suggested that Nicole was inviting O.J.’s jealous abuse with her body language. She dropped out of the group – but only after 14 expensive sessions. In 1992, she had turned for help to battered-women specialist Susan Forward. But she quit after their second meeting. Forward had urged her to cut off all contact with O.J., and Nicole couldn’t bear to.

Friends can’t be sure whether it was the violence or the women that finally prompted her to divorce him. But even when she left, she didn’t go far – her Brentwood town house was two miles away, and there were still more reconciliation attempts. In the weeks before her death, Nicole seemed determined to halt even those. But O.J. wasn’t going to make it easy. He threatened to report her to the IRS for not paying capital gains on last year’s sale of her San Francisco condo, Newsweek has learned; thinking it would solve her tax problems, she put her Brentwood place up for rent in early June – three days before her death. “Look at this guy. He wants his kids’ mother to go to jail,” she fumed to wpCorawp Fischman, her jogging buddy. She was building a new life – jogging up to 25 miles a week and enjoying being noticed as Nicole, not Mrs. O. J. Simpson, said Fischman. Nicole scaled back her shopping, joked about her “budget” and dated other men. Though the tabloids have screamed about “handsome hunks” since her death, those were passing flings. “It was a testing of the waters,” said Hardy. “She was looking foward to being Nicole.” She never got the chance.