Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (29 page)

“You'd come home and sometimes there'd be people on the doorstep, just hoping to meet him, and he'd take them in and give them a drink or whatever. He had that side, especially with women—not to get involved, but just looking after people.

“If he liked you, he could be very nice, no question. He would let his guard down if he felt comfortable. With Phil it was always when he was out there and felt he had to prove himself that this other side, this ugly side, would come out. It was almost like two people. But I don't think he ever enjoyed the position he was in. He was always worried about what other people thought of him, what their attitude to him was. And worried about losing it. And that's a tough way to live.”

Karate, says Farkas, was “a whim,” and when his enthusiasm began to pall, Spector found a new obsession—shooting pool. He took to spending time in pool halls and private clubs around Hollywood. Determined to become the best, he sought out Willie Mosconi, a professional pool player who had won the world championship fourteen times, and paid him to become his personal tutor. Spector had never quite got the hang of karate; he might have worn a black belt tied around his gi, and he might have boasted to journalists that “in case of real trouble I could literally kill a guy,” but according to Emil Farkas “he just play-acted. He'd do a lot of chopping his hands in the air, but he was nowhere near a black belt.” But when it came to pool, he was a hot shot.

“Phil was paying Willie Mosconi $175,000 a year or something and had him staying in the house,” Ahmet Ertegun remembered. “Phil was pretty good, but Willie was unbelievable. They'd go to pool halls and take bets from people who didn't know who Willie was and then he'd make shots like you couldn't believe. Phil loved that.

“I remember I went with them once. I never played pool; the best I could do was not rip up the cloth. People in the hall could see I had no idea what I was doing. But Phil made a bet on me that I could make all the balls go in the pockets with just one shot. It was a dumb bet. I could have even missed the cue ball. So this guy set up the balls and Phil said to me, ‘Just hit it straight ahead'—and it happened! All the balls went in the pockets! I still don't know how. And he and Willie picked up ten thousand dollars. They wanted to give me a couple of thousand. I said, ‘Keep me out of it.'”

         

He told Ronnie he had bought the mansion for them both, but Ronnie came and went. She continued to live at home in New York, keeping her affair with Spector a secret from her mother Beatrice. Whenever she flew out to Los Angeles for recordings or rehearsals, Emil Farkas would be dispatched to the airport in the Rolls-Royce to collect her, a single rose carefully placed on the backseat.

When she left town, Spector would cruise the nightclubs of the Strip in search of approbation and company. Emil noticed what others had observed before, how ill at ease Spector seemed to be in his own skin, how he would do almost anything to avoid being alone. There were often parties at the mansion—scene makers, hangers-on, waifs and strays collected from the Strip. Spector would sometimes vanish for hours on end—a stranger at his own gathering—then reappear, anxious to stave off the moment when the night would end. He did not like to be left, particularly by women.

“Phil would get very upset if women walked out on him,” Farkas says. “He would rant and rave—you'll never work again, I'll get you fired, whatever. But then again, you'd have this thing at parties where you might have twenty girls and each one would try to outlast the other to see who was going to stay the night with him. But the feeling I got was that Phil sort of realized that most of these people were around for the external rather than the internal, and he would have preferred that he wasn't liked for the limousines and the money and all that. Phil would have really liked to be loved for himself. And there were girls who liked him for that. I think the problem was that Phil could never believe that these people could love him for who he was.”

Ahmet Ertegun came to Los Angeles and happened to run into Spector in a club on the Strip. “He said, ‘Come on back to my house,'” Ertegun recalled. “So we go out on Sunset Boulevard. It was across the street from Ben Frank's. It was a Saturday night. The place was jammed with motorcycles, kids. Phil had this big limousine. He said, ‘We'll stop at the Gaiety and get some sandwiches, and let's take some girls.' He said, ‘Which one of those girls do you like?' I said, ‘I don't give a shit.' He had four or five guys with him, so he sends one of his bodyguards—‘Go and get that one, that one and that one.' And these girls were all with guys. But his bodyguards go over and say, ‘Mr. Spector would like to invite you to come up and have a drink at his house.' ‘Oh, we'd love to!' ‘No, not you—just her.' The guys were put aside, and the girls came! And I said, ‘Phil, these girls are just teenagers.' So he says, ‘Oh, let's get a couple of older ones for Ahmet.' So he sends the guys over and they get a couple of girls. So we all get in these limousines. And we stop at the Gaiety, and he orders a whole bunch of sandwiches, but in two groups; one is pastrami on rye…good deli sandwiches; and then he ordered like cheese on white bread, peanut butter and jelly—‘That's for the schmucks that are working for us,' meaning the bodyguards, 'cos all these guys are from the karate school, regular American idiots. So we have two huge bags. And we go back to Phil's. And he gives these guys a bag and says, ‘Go eat your sandwiches and come back in three hours to take everyone home.' Off they go. And we open up our bag and it was all the white-bread sandwiches! And the car's gone. So we were stuck with this junk—except the girls liked those sandwiches. Now that's the kind of fun evening that Phil didn't want to end. And I heard that sometimes he made people stay in spite of their wishes. But with me there, no problem. We all had a good time. We all left. Good night. Everybody safe and sound.”

         

Linda Lawrence had been the girlfriend of Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, and she was the mother of Jones's son, Julian. When they broke up in 1965 Jones gave Linda some money to buy a car. When they were together, whenever he was on tour with the group, Jones would send postcards, telling Linda about the excitements of life on the road. He made California sound like the Promised Land, and Linda wanted to see it for herself. She sold the car and bought an airplane ticket to Los Angeles. “I wanted to go there because the Stones had been there, and I felt that's where Brian had left me.” She was seventeen.

In Los Angeles, Linda stayed with a friend named Catherine (now Catherine Sebastian), who worked as a model in TV commercials. Linda had met Phil Spector in London, on the night when he dropped into the Rolling Stones' recording session, and at a party in Hollywood she introduced herself and they became friends. He invited Linda and Catherine to recording sessions, and they would sometimes visit the house on La Collina. Catherine was astonished at his musical ability and knowledge. “He'd sit down at the piano and he'd take a set of changes—C–G–F, whatever—and he'd just play song after song with those changes, hundreds of them, segueing from one to another. It was absolutely fascinating.”

It was a platonic relationship, as if Spector had adopted the two young girls, taken them under his wing. “People would tell me how evil, crazy and uptight Phil was,” Linda says. “But I never had that feeling at all. To me he was only kind and caring.”

One night, Linda and Catherine dropped acid and went to the Trip nightclub on the Strip.

“We started getting very freaked out by it. We had to leave the club, and I said, ‘Let's go up to Phil's.' We walked up there and got to the gates. It was all locked up. I've no idea how we got in, but somehow we did. We rang on the doorbell, but there was no answer; so we walked around the back, stroked the dogs—that everybody said would eat you alive, but we knew them—and walked into the kitchen. We started playing around, being silly, sliding up and down the banisters, waiting for Phil to come home. Which he did. He was a bit shocked to find us in the house and told us off. ‘You naughty girls, I could have killed you coming in.' But I knew he wouldn't. But he let us hang out there until we'd come down and we were able to go home. So he had that generosity of spirit. Obviously when you're feeling like that, you won't go somewhere you don't think you'll be welcome.”

On another occasion Catherine was taken ill, and Spector invited both girls to stay, his staff taking care of her until she recovered.

Catherine, who came from a privileged Philadelphia family, was struck by the incongruity of the surroundings, the nineteenth-century oil paintings and French provincial bedrooms. “It didn't feel owned. It seemed like Phil was just passing through. The music room was his room. Everything else seemed like a stage set. When my mother came up one day, she said it reminded her of walking into one of her friends' houses on the Main Line in Philadelphia.”

Sometimes Linda would be woken up by Spector calling in the middle of the night, asking if she would come over. His biggest problem, she thought, was loneliness. “But I felt that way myself. I recognized in him a lot of myself. We'd both been wounded by life.”

Just as he had with Beverly Ross in their long, rambling, nocturnal conversations, Spector would confide his feelings of unhappiness and insecurity to Linda. “His father's death had obviously been the big thing in his life, which deep down he'd never dealt with, and which nobody had ever really helped him with. And he was this tiny little guy who'd been bullied at school. He felt insecure and inferior to the other guys who would always get the girl. So these were all the things that would pour out of him. And he'd say, ‘But look at me now!' Like he'd got back at those people in some way. It was revenge in a way, a kind of satisfaction he felt. Phil definitely had a thing about that—this need to prove to everyone that he was cool and that he'd achieved something.”

Sometimes, when restlessness came upon him, they would drive to another of Spector's favorite hangouts, Canter's on Fairfax Avenue. By dint of being one of the few places in Hollywood to remain open twenty-four hours a day, the family restaurant where Spector had whiled away his time after school, and where he'd worked as a busboy, had now become the early-hours gathering place of choice for music business scene makers and night owls. Spector liked to arrive around 2:00 a.m., holding court at a corner table, Emil and the nameless suits stationed in an adjacent booth. Spector, Catherine sensed, was never properly at ease in fancier restaurants where people sniggered and stared, but here, among “the dem and dose guys”—the schmoozers, hustlers and wiseacres—he felt comfortable. “He was a success in that restaurant.”

One of his most frequent companions at Canter's was the comedian Lenny Bruce. Spector had idolized Bruce since his years as a teenager, riffing on the comedian's monologues while traveling with the Teddy Bears, and he had finally been introduced to him by Helen Noga—“Lenny,” says Noga's daughter Beverly, “was another of my mother's little babies.”

Bruce's irreverent shtick about religion, sex, politics—what newspapers called his “sick comedy routines”—had made him the most controversial comedian in America. His unapologetically confrontational style is illustrated in a story told by his former publicist Grover Sales, about an appearance at the San Francisco nightclub, Off Broadway, when the black comedian Dick Gregory happened to be in the audience.

“Spotting Greg, Lenny peered at the audience for an unnerving interval: ‘Are there any niggers here tonight?' Gregory stiffened like a retriever, with the rest of the audience. In 1962, nobody had ever heard that word onstage, not in a white nightclub. Lenny began a mock soliloquy: ‘Ohmygod, did you hear what he said? “Are there any
niggers
here tonight?” Is that rank! Is that cruel! Is that a cheap way to get laughs? Well, I think I see a nigger at the bar talking to two guinea owners, and next to them are a couple of wops, one kike, two greaseballs, a square-head, three gooks, one frog, two limeys, a couple of sheenies, two jiga-boos, one hunkey, fonky boogie—bid 'em up! Bid 'em up! Six more niggers! I pass with two dykes, four kikes, and eight niggers!'”

The once-frozen audience now gave way to hysteria, the sweet laughter of liberation only Lenny could unloose: “Now, why have I done this? Is this only for shock value? Well, if all the niggers started calling each other ‘nigger,' not only among themselves, which they do anyway, but among the ofays. If President Kennedy got on television and said: ‘I'm considering appointing two or three of the top niggers in the country into my cabinet'—if it was nothing but nigger, nigger, nigger—in six months ‘nigger' wouldn't mean any more than ‘good night,' ‘God bless you,' or ‘I promise to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God'—when that beautiful day comes, you'll never see another nigger kid come home from school crying because some ofay motherfucker called him a nigger.”

“Gregory turned to me: ‘This man is the eighth wonder of the world. You have to go back to Mark Twain to find anything remotely like him. And if they don't kill him, or throw him in jail, he's liable to shake up this whole fuckin' country.'”

A year later, Gregory published his book
Nigger,
dedicated to “Dear Momma—Wherever you are, if you ever hear the word ‘nigger' again, remember they are advertising my book.”

Gregory's remark about death or jail was to prove prophetic. Between 1961 and 1964 Bruce was arrested half a dozen times on obscenity and drug charges. He was banned from entering Australia and the U.K., and blacklisted by any number of nightclubs in America that refused to run the risk of prosecution by having him perform. By the time he came into Spector's life, he was bankrupt, terminally depleted by his struggles against the law and a heroin addict—a man who was giving a passable impersonation of someone fighting for his life, and losing.