Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (43 page)

Carr put up in the Sunset Marquis hotel, and every few days would make his way to the mansion for meetings. Sometimes his phone would ring at two in the morning, and it would be Spector, telling him a limousine was on its way to collect him.

In the half-darkness and arctic cold, Spector would hold forth long into the night. “It was never what you'd call a conversation,” Carr says. Stories and more stories. He told Carr that he had been in Paris during the student unrest of 1968, working “with an armed undercover unit” in a capacity that was never specified; he would talk about the evenings in the '60s when he would entertain Lenny Bruce, Stan Laurel and Bela Lugosi in the mansion. When Carr mentioned that he was planning a book on the martial arts expert and movie star Bruce Lee, Spector started to cry. Lee, he said, had once worked as his personal bodyguard and lived in the house, and Spector himself had invested money in
Enter the Dragon,
the film that Lee had completed shortly before dying in mysterious circumstances in 1973. Spector told Carr that Lee had been murdered by a martial arts
dim mak
(death touch) and implored him not to write the book, “Because if they can kill Bruce Lee, they can kill you and your family.”

Carr was forthright with an acerbic sense of humor, a man whose long experience as a journalist had inured him to the self-regarding fantasies of pop stars. “I remember talking to John Lennon; he really liked Phil, but he told me ‘Phil's full of bullshit, but you don't have to put up with it. If you stand up to him he respects that.' So I kept that in mind.”

The more Spector talked, the more outrageous his claims became, the harder it became for Carr to tell what was fact and what was fiction. “It got to the point where if he'd told me he was smuggling guns for the contras, I wouldn't have been surprised.”

One night, in mid-conversation, Spector stood up and announced he needed to use the bathroom. Carr sat in the semidarkness, awaiting his return. Ten minutes passed. Thirty. An hour. The house was as silent as a tomb. “And suddenly the doors sprung open, and there he was, stripped to the waist, a revolver in his waistband, playing the accordion. I said to him, ‘You always did go in for wonderful entrances.' He was pissing himself with laughter.”

Carr quickly came to the conclusion that Spector was “a very lonely man. It would get to three o'clock in the morning and I'd say, ‘Phil, I'm really bushed; I've got to go.' And he'd look panic-stricken. ‘No, stick around.' I remember once I left there and walked down to Ben Frank's on the Strip—I hadn't eaten anything—and I looked out of the window and there was Phil's limo. It was almost like he was following me. I walked back to my hotel and the car followed behind. Whether he was just seeing I got back safely or not I don't know, but it was very strange.”

Devra had been assigned to look after Carr, and on another occasion she was summoned to give him a lift back to his hotel. Driving along the Sunset Strip she noticed a Cadillac suddenly looming in her rearview mirror. It was Spector and the Kessel brothers. “They had shotguns poking out of the window,” she remembers. “They chased us all the way down Sunset Boulevard, with Roy holding on and me driving like a maniac to get away from them. We ended up driving all the way up into the Hollywood Hills to shake them off.” The incident was never explained.

Carr recalls another night at the mansion when Spector organized an outing to his favorite Chinese restaurant, Ah Fong's. “Two cars drew up, and they proceeded to fill the boot with pump-guns and shotguns, like a private army. There was me, the Kessels, a couple of mysterious people. We went to Ah Fong's, and half of it was roped off for us. When we came back afterward, Phil just pulled out his revolver and started shooting at the tree—this is in the front courtyard.”

When Carr commented that Spector's security arrangements were “like Fort Knox,” Spector explained that he was taking precautions against his children being kidnapped. “He said if anybody kidnapped them they would know that people like him would pay anything—‘but they also know that if they harmed them, I would hunt them down like dogs and kill them.' There was a side to Phil where he seemed to see himself as some kind of mercenary.”

Spector offered Carr a job and asked what he wanted to do. Philles, Carr told him, was a rich part of rock music's heritage; he suggested going through the entire back catalog and repackaging and presenting it in a historical context, maybe reassembling all of Spector's old artists—the Crystals, Bob B. Soxx, Darlene Love—and producing a Philles show for the stage. But Spector was unenthusiastic. “He was worried he'd be looked on as a nostalgia act.” When Carr also suggested he should produce the Beach Boys, Spector looked appalled. “But I think what he had was a fear of failure. He'd already experienced that with AM. There was this sense of, What happened if there was a big campaign to reestablish Phil Spector as a major player and the public didn't go for it?”

Carr concluded that what Spector really wanted was not an employee but “a playmate. He wanted someone around who knew his history, who loved his music, who would listen to his stories and tell him ‘Phil, you're wonderful.' But there's only so many times you could say that.”

At length, it was time for Carr to return to England. At a small gathering at the mansion Spector announced he wished to make a presentation. “He pulled out this lovely wooden box. I opened it and it was a Magnum, sitting on a velvet cushion. He said, ‘It's for you, Roy.' I said, ‘Phil, I usually use a credit card, and I can't take this through customs.' I told him to keep it in the safe.”

21

“Leonard, I Love You…”

A
Los Angeleno through and through, Harvey Kubernik had grown up steeped in Los Angeles musical history, and Phil Spector's illustrious part in it.

“He's a Rebel,” “Be My Baby” and “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'” had provided the soundtrack for Kubernik's youth. As a child, he would be taken to Canter's by his parents and occasionally see Spector at his corner table, noshing deli. Kubernik began writing for local music papers and then became
Melody Maker
's Los Angeles correspondent, and he would occasionally see Spector around town: at AM Studios, where Spector was producing the “Bangla-Desh” sessions; at a Bobby Bland show at the Whisky a Go Go, when having shouted and screamed throughout the opening act, the Dixie Hummingbirds, an inebriated Spector was escorted out before Bland even appeared onstage. Before long, Kubernik had been admitted to the charmed circle that was allowed to watch Spector at work in the studio. Personable and obliging, Kubernik became “the food runner.” Spector would spring a $100 bill for deli for everyone from Canter's—“and don't forget the receipt…” “The first time, I didn't bring anything back for myself,” Kubernik remembers. “Phil said, ‘What's your mother's name?' I told him and he said, ‘She's doing a good job.'” But when Kubernik asked if he might bring some musician friends to a session, Spector upbraided him with a curt warning: “Nobody does any business off me.”

Kubernik's encyclopedic knowledge of music particularly endeared him to Spector, and made him a natural ally of the Kessels. When Spector invited him to play percussion on the Dion sessions, Kubernik was the only person in the room, including Dion, who could not only name all of the singer's early recordings for Laurie Records, including the B-sides, but also who had published them. Spector was usually suspicious of journalists, but Kubernik was careful not to abuse the friendship, and Spector took an almost paternalistic interest in his career. When Kubernik sent Spector a birthday greeting, typed on his rickety old typewriter, Spector telephoned to say that he had a number of electric typewriters at the house and that Harvey was welcome to use one. The grateful journalist drove over to collect it.

Kubernik used the typewriter for months, always careful to thank Spector for the gift whenever he saw him. One day, he received a call: Spector and the Kessels were having dinner at the Cock 'n Bull, a restaurant on the Sunset Strip. Would he like to join them? Kubernik offered his apologies. For weeks, he had been dating a young actress, and tonight he was on a promise. “I made the mistake of bragging ‘she's coming over to my apartment, and she's never really gone all the way with a guy…' I told him my game plan. We were going to wait till midnight, when she was turning twenty-one. Phil said, ‘What's next, spin the bottle?'”

That evening, at 11:45, with Kubernik and his girlfriend having worked their way through half a bottle of Southern Comfort, clothes scattered over the floor, there was a sharp rap at the door. A furious Kubernik opened it to find George Brand standing there. “You are in possession of Mr. Spector's typewriter,” Brand announced. “He would like it back.” Gun bulging ostentatiously in its holster, Brand walked through the living room into the kitchen, picked up the typewriter, and walked out without saying a word. Kubernik's girlfriend promptly burst into tears. “It was as if the Mob had come over. She wouldn't even let me walk her to her car. It was the end of the relationship.”

For days, Kubernik stewed over the incident. Did Spector really need the typewriter that badly? Couldn't it have been collected during the day? Perhaps, Kubernik thought, he had not been profuse enough in his gratitude: He had written a thank-you note, but perhaps one note wasn't enough—he should have written more. Perhaps it was a mistake to have told Spector that part of his seduction plan was to play the
Motown Christmas
album—a favorite of Kubernik's: he should have told him he would be playing the Philles Christmas album instead. Kubernik finally concluded that Spector was “teaching me something. Phil does these Gurdjieff-type exercises on people. I think he wanted me to learn about ownership, and not being reliant or co-dependent on anything or anybody. Especially a tool that was going to be my future.”

It was some weeks before he got a call from Spector's office, inviting him to meet at the studio. “I went in and Phil said, ‘No notes in the mail from you recently…' The Kessels were there, and David said, ‘We had a real good time at the Cock 'n Bull. Phil wanted to get you big-time…'”

         

The erratic hours that Devra kept, working for Spector, had exacted a toll on her marriage to Robert Robitaille. They argued more frequently. “I was beginning to think there must be more to life than this.” Late one night at Gold Star, toward the end of the Dion sessions, Spector walked Devra to her car, and took her in his arms and kissed her. “I know I should have been thinking, ‘This is not right; it's not an ethical thing to be thinking of doing to my husband.' But I wasn't thinking that. I was twenty-four years old, and I'd been transported.”

The next day, when Devra arrived at the house with some papers to sign, Spector led her upstairs.

The transition from being Spector's employee to being his lover seemed only to exaggerate the extremes of their existing relationship. It was unlike any love affair she had ever had. Where once he had been kind, Spector now became loving; where once cold, he now became cruel.

“I really, really loved him. But I still don't know if I was in love with him, or just incredibly enamored of him as a fascinating and amazing person. There would be times when I'd go up there, and we'd talk for hours about everything under the sun. That seemed to fulfill a need he had at the time. Other times I would arrive and he would literally launch himself at me and pull me upstairs and then afterward we'd come down and have tea, and he'd give me some notes and things to be done; and then all of a sudden he'd lose his temper and start screaming at me and order me out. And then next time I'd come up he wouldn't be there, or he'd shove a package through the door and not let me in at all. I'd go back to my car and open the envelope and it was handwritten instructions. Call this person, check the liner notes, whatever. I couldn't understand why he was being so horrible to me. And then the following day he'd be all sweetness and light, ushering me in and there'd be a little gift—a wallet, flowers…I always felt he was toying with me. Cat and mouse. It's not something one would like to admit, that you would allow yourself to be mesmerized by someone's strong will, but that's what it felt like. Often I found myself doing things that I never would stand for from another human being. But at the same time, I went along with it, because for me, nobody was ever as fascinating as Phil.”

His paradoxes were constantly bemusing. She had never met anybody more arrogant, more convinced of his own genius, nor more insecure—constantly stealing glances at himself in the mirror and primping his hair, thrown into rage or apoplexy by any criticism or slight, real or imagined. He could be intelligent, sensitive, unerring in his capacity to spot bullshit in other people, yet at the same time would swagger around with a gun under his shoulder or tucked into his boot—an affectation that Devra thought was simply “silly. I wanted to sit him down and just say, ‘Stop this nonsense; it doesn't make you a big man, it just makes you a big idiot.'”

To Devra it sometimes seemed the one thing Spector could stand least of all was an even keel. The eccentricities, the insults, the arguments, and the quixotic flights of temper—all were simply a way of provoking a reaction,
any
reaction. “He was like one of those beings that lands on planet Earth from another world, and was flicking the little earthlings to see what they would do. He couldn't stand for things to be boring. So he'd pull the rug out to shake things up.”

His temper could be volcanic. He would shout and scream until the veins on his forehead bulged and it seemed as if his eyes would pop out of his head, but he never once struck or slapped her.

One night, in Ah Fong's after a squabble over the bill, he reached for a bowl of noodles and upturned it over her head. “I got up and stalked out and had to take a taxi home. I quit. And then two or three days later tons of roses turned up. But that was a pattern—me quitting, followed by roses.”

His fear of abandonment could be almost pathological. “There were times when he would drag me around Beverly Hills, to restaurants or whatever, and I'd be so exhausted I could hardly keep my eyes open and I'd be pleading, ‘Please just let me go home, I want to go to sleep,' and never be allowed to.”

But Spector, she says, was “indefatigable. He'd get really drunk, and the more drunk he got, the more he needed someone to talk to. And at that point it almost didn't matter who you were. It was like a plug in the wall; he needed someone to get the electricity from. And as the night wore on, you'd get more and more tired of it all. And eventually it would be four a.m. and you'd have to put your foot down.”

One night at the mansion she was desperate to leave and voices were raised. “And he locked the door, and then he got out a shotgun and he put it to my temple and he said, ‘If you try to leave I'll pull the trigger.' I remember being quite calm. I wasn't frightened. I just wanted to go home. I said to him, ‘Phillip, just stop being silly, put it down and open the door.' And eventually he did. I remember stumbling out and getting in the car and driving away like a bat out of hell. I don't think I ever thought he'd kill me, but I was terrified he could have by accident. But the really extraordinary thing was the next day I came back to work…”

Not all such confrontations were resolved so privately. In November 1975 Spector was involved in an incident at the Beverly Hills Hotel with a parking valet named Kevin Brown. According to evidence submitted in September 2004 for the grand jury hearings in the Lana Clarkson case, Brown was at work outside the hotel when he heard a woman scream “Get away from me” and looked over to see Spector and Marty Machat arguing with a woman near the front door. When Brown approached and asked what was happening, Spector allegedly pointed a revolver in his face and told the valet to “Get the fuck away from me,” before climbing into a silver Cadillac with Machat and driving away. Spector subsequently pleaded guilty to one count of misdemeanor brandishing of a firearm. He was placed on two years' formal probation, with the condition that he not use or possess any dangerous or deadly weapons.

         

By the end of 1976 the deal with Warner Bros. had petered to a close, leaving Joe Smith with a feeling of lingering disappointment. “We were never looking to Phillip to sign Elton John or whatever, but we were looking to him to sign somebody and make a signature record, and that never really worked out. It wasn't a good deal. The biggest thing I got out of it was going to the studios and watching Phil work. But the problem with Phil was that he was carrying a big monkey on his back. He's Phil Spector and people expect whatever he does to be a Phil Spector record. And he couldn't do the same record, because people will just say he's repeating himself, but he couldn't come up with anything else either.”

But Smith was philosophical. “With rock and roll artists you have to assume the human brain is like a computer with chips that govern its behavior. Well, these people can take blank sheets of paper, put markings on it and take that into the studio, make music out of it that pleases millions of people. They can do things we can't do. They've got chips we don't have. But to make room for those chips, out falls sanity, reason, logic, gratitude…”

         

Spector had not been in the studio in almost a year, and in an attempt to keep some momentum going in his career, Marty Machat now proposed that he should produce another of his clients—Leonard Cohen. On paper, it seemed the most unlikely of partnerships. Cohen was a Canadian poet and author who had become a singer almost as an afterthought—he was thirty-three when he released his debut album,
Songs of Leonard Cohen,
in 1967. His reputation rested on a body of thoughtful, introspective and highly literary songs—bleak and melancholic meditations on love, sex and mortality, leavened with a dry, fatalistic humor. He sang in a flat, nasal monotone, framed either by his own acoustic guitar or discreet chamber arrangements. Nobody seemed more surprised by his success than Cohen himself.

But Cohen's life and career were now in need of restoration. It had been almost three years since his last album,
New Skin for the Old Ceremony,
and his record company, Columbia, had taken the step of issuing a
Best of
album—a sure sign that their patience was wearing thin. His family was breaking up and he was drinking heavily; in an attempt to find some equilibrium in his life he had been cultivating an interest in Zen Buddhism and spending time at a Zen retreat, Mount Baldy, in California.

One night Machat brought Cohen to a small gathering at the mansion. Cohen would later recall that he found the occasion “tedious,” the mansion “dark, cold and dreary.” When the other guests departed, and Spector locked the door and refused to let Cohen leave, Cohen was nonplussed. “To salvage the evening, I said, ‘Rather than watch you shout at your servants, let's do something more interesting,'” he later recalled. “And so we sat down at the piano and started writing songs.”

Over the next three weeks, they composed fifteen numbers, the writing sessions fueled by copious amounts of wine and liquor. Doc Pomus, who was visiting from New York, would remember them as “like two drunks staggerin' around.” Alarmed, Cohen's friends tried to warn him off the project. Joni Mitchell was particularly insistent; she had been recording her album
Court and Spark
at AM studios at the time Spector had been recording the rock and roll album with Lennon and was aware of the turbulence around those sessions. Spector, she warned Cohen, was past his prime and “difficult.” Her words were to prove prophetic in a way no one could imagine.