Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (46 page)

On one occasion, Spector insisted that Sheen meet him to discuss a possible recording, suggesting a rendezvous in a parking lot behind a Hollywood restaurant. Sheen thought it was odd, but duly turned up at the appointed place and hour. They had been talking for only a few minutes when a group of toughs materialized out of the darkness. Spector took fright and fled, leaving a bemused and shaken Sheen to make good his own escape. He never heard from Spector again.

In 1986 an American author James Robert Baker published
Fuel-Injected Dreams—
a classic of contemporary pulp fiction, the book was a blowup caricature of all the myths and legends about the “madness” of Phil Spector. The novel tells the story of Dennis Contrelle, “the original Wagner of vinyl,” the “one-man surfing Luftwaffe of car-crash romance,” who after a stellar burst in the '60s, creating a series of “epic trash” masterpieces, withdraws to his Malibu mansion, “a drug-damaged Svengali,” making a virtual prisoner of his wife Sharlene, the teenage temptress who once sang with his biggest group, the Stingrays.

Guns, drugs, derangement…as a Grand Guignol compendium of every myth, rumor and speculation about Spector, as a totem of how deeply his legend had penetrated the collective pop consciousness—and too as a funhouse-mirror, amphetamine-rush evocation of his music—the book was nonpareil. (Trying to write a history of pop in the '60s without Dennis Contrelle, Baker notes, was like “writing the New Testament without mentioning Jesus; a lot of whores and cripples and greedy money-changers wandering around the desert toward no particular end.”) But it could hardly have been further from the truth of Phil Spector's current circumstances. At the time of the publication of
Fuel-Injected Dreams,
Spector was doing little more transgressive than playing with his children on the lawn and making occasional excursions to the supermarket and the car wash.

         

In the summer of 1986, after twenty-one years in the mansion on La Collina Drive, he finally turned his back on Hollywood. The children were coming up to school age; Spector wanted to get away from Hollywood, and Janis wanted to live in a quieter neighborhood, more befitting family life. He purchased a property in Pasadena, half an hour's drive from Hollywood on the Ventura Freeway. It was a symbolic departure from the world of rock and roll. The neighborhood where he settled on Arroyo Boulevard was quiet and elegant, its stately mansions heavy with the aroma of “old money.”

Spector told friends he wanted to downscale, but he ended up acquiring an even larger property than the one he had left—a capacious three-storey mansion, built in the Mediterranean style, set in two acres of land. At the rear of the house was a sweeping lawn, with a huge, tiled fish pond decorated with stone figures of Pan and a cascading waterfall and a circular swimming pool with a Jacuzzi.

He had acquired the house from the actor Robert Reed, who played the role of the father in the television series
The Brady Bunch.
But when Spector arrived to take possession of the house, with the Kessels in tow, Reed refused to leave in a dispute over payment. Eventually the police had to be called; Reed was escorted off the premises and Spector was able to move into his new home.

He left his past behind him. George Brand had effectively retired a year earlier, suffering from severe back pain, but had continued to live at La Collina Drive. With the move to Pasadena, Brand now decided to go and live with one of his daughters. (He would develop Alzheimer's and die in 2002.) Spector now had no need for a bodyguard or factotum.

For a brief period, Devra Robitaille came back to work for him. After leaving Spector nine years earlier, Devra had worked for Warner Bros., and then returned to England, working as a studio and touring musician with Mike Oldfield, Mick Taylor and others. Now she was attempting once more to pick up the threads of her life back in America. Once she had played an important part in Spector's life, liaising with musicians, coordinating sessions and budgets. But those days were past. Now her work consisted of girl-Friday chores, “completely low-level stuff,” for which she was paid only a few dollars an hour. She worked out of her apartment in Hollywood and seldom visited the Pasadena house. Spector was no longer the intimate he had once been. “He was much more distant, uncommunicative, keeping me at arm's length.” She had no idea that he now had a family; it was never mentioned. To Devra, the menial nature of the job began to feel “almost like a perverse joke—as if I was being used.” Bored and unhappy, she left after a few months.

Spector had closed himself off from all but a few of his old friends. Even Nino Tempo, who for years had regarded himself as an intimate, now found his old friend remote, unreachable. To Tempo, as much as Spector's growing reclusiveness appeared to be born of a simple desire for sanctuary and privacy, it also seemed a symptom of some deeper yearning to maintain his status as a music business legend.

“I think Phil believed that if he was just a regular, nice guy who was touchable, accessible, not hiding out and not withdrawing, that somehow the level of his importance wouldn't be as great. I think he believed that the only way to be great is to live a life of a legend. Not appearing in public, having three secretaries you have to get past just to talk to him, the unlisted telephone number—it all creates an image.

“He used to say to me that he was the Howard Hughes of the recording industry. But once you set up that lifestyle, you get caught up in it, you become a case that no one can reach. And with Phil it got out of hand, it overwhelmed him and took over his life to a place where he was no longer in control.”

From time to time, Tempo would talk to Janis on the telephone. “She said to me one day, ‘Whenever Phil and I are talking about the happiest times in his life, he invariably says that he had the most fun when you two were running around together, poor and struggling, doing all the crazy things that young guys do—getting into trouble and laughing about it.' And she would say to Phil, ‘Well, if you had so much fun, why don't you call Nino? Why don't you get together and pal around again?' And I would have loved that. But she told me that Phil said, ‘I can't. I just can't.'”

Not even the woman who had once been closest to him could penetrate the wall of Spector's self-imposed exile. Since their divorce in 1965 Annette Merar had remarried, given birth to a son and moved back to Los Angeles. She and Spector continued to talk occasionally on the phone, and he would sometimes mark her birthday by sending her a cake. In 1986, Annette took a new job, and Spector agreed to meet her and her new boss for dinner. “And it was the old story—‘I'll be there in two hours.' Then somebody calling, ‘Stand by, Phil's going to call you back…' And I got so pissed off. When he came on the line I yelled at him, maybe for the first time; I really let him have it, told him everything I thought. And then I hung up on him.” They would not speak again. For Annette, the incident reawakened all the frustrations, disappointments and lingering anger she had felt over their marriage. “And twenty years on, I can still feel the edge from that. It just brought back exactly what I felt when the marriage ended. I felt absolutely one hundred percent betrayed, lied to, cheated on and never atoned for. Everybody around Phil either made it to the top and had great success in the industry or they were destroyed. And I was one of the casualties, too. And what I always wondered was, Why? Why? Why?

“All I wanted was for Phil to just be regular. I used to wonder, Why does he have to be so eccentric and so bizarre in everything? And then he just got worse and worse. Because he didn't have any awareness of his tendencies, his weaknesses, where he was excessive in the wrong ways. So he ended up just being a victim of himself.” Phil, she concluded, was “not a dark soul. I came to see him as a sick soul.”

24

“Between Grief and Nothing, I Will Take Grief”

I
n 1988 Marty Machat died. It was only some weeks later, while going through his papers, that Spector discovered that for years his lawyer and friend had been siphoning off Spector's money into his own accounts. To handle his affairs, Spector now turned to his old acquaintance, the former manager of the Beatles and the Stones, and the man who had brought him into Apple—Allen Klein. Even before Machat's death, Klein had been courting Spector assiduously, recognizing that the back catalogue of Philles hits constituted a priceless asset that had never been properly exploited. “Phil felt that he'd trusted somebody and got burned, so ‘Now who do I trust?'” says David Kessel. Allen Klein might not have been everybody's first choice. But in 1989 Spector signed a deal giving Klein's company ABKCO the right to manage his catalogue.

The music business has a notoriously short memory span. Spector was nearing fifty, and he had not made a record in ten years. His great hits of the '60s belonged to another age. His reputation now rested largely on his eccentricities, the whispered stories of guns, madness and seclusion. Allen Klein realized that his first task was to raise his new client's profile and remind the world that before he was a legendary recluse, Phil Spector was a musical genius.

For Spector himself it had long been a source of deep rancor that the industry had never properly acknowledged the monumental contribution he had made to the history of rock and roll. The failure of “River Deep—Mountain High” had never been forgotten—never mind that it was twenty-five years ago—nor his belief that that failure had nothing to do with the record, and everything to do with the industry holding a grudge against him. No Phil Spector record had ever been nominated for a Grammy, and nobody had ever suggested that he should be considered for a lifetime award for producing or songwriting. But now Spector at last began to receive the industry recognition he had always craved.

In 1988 he flew to Nashville to receive an award for “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” which had recently been recorded by Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, as the most played country song of the year. And the following year he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame had been founded in 1986 to honor the artists, producers and entrepreneurs who over the previous thirty years had transformed rock music from a bastard offshoot of popular music into a multibillion-dollar industry. Its principal architects were Jann Wenner, the founder and publisher of
Rolling Stone,
and Spector's old friends Ahmet Ertegun, Jerry Wexler and Seymour Stein. In the Hall's first three years Alan Freed, Sam Phillips, Wexler, Ertegun, Leiber and Stoller, Leonard Chess and Spector's old rival Berry Gordy had all been honored in the “nonperformer” category. Thrilled to be welcomed into this company, Spector invited a group of friends to join him for the ceremony in New York, among them the Kessel brothers and Jack Nitzsche.

Unlike Spector, Nitzsche had embraced the changing fashions in rock music, building a career that had earned him an Olympian respect in the music business. In 1967 he forged a relationship with Neil Young, who was then a member of Buffalo Springfield, working on Young's song “Expecting to Fly.” He went on to contribute to numerous Young recordings as a producer and arranger and to record and perform as a sometime member of Young's band Crazy Horse. He had produced Mink DeVille and Graham Parker, and diversified with considerable success into scoring film soundtracks. In 1970 he produced the soundtrack for the Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg film
Performance,
probably the greatest marriage of film and rock music ever. Five years later he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Film Score for
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest;
and in 1982 he provided the score for
An Officer and a Gentleman,
which won an Oscar for Best Original Song for “Up Where We Belong,” which Nitzsche composed with his second wife, the singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, and the lyricist Will Jennings.

Over the years, Spector and Nitzsche had maintained a curious sort of friendship. “All the way through Jack's time with Neil Young and Crazy Horse, he never heard a peep from Phil,” says Denny Bruce, who for a time acted as Nitzsche's manager. “He'd say, ‘I wonder how Phil's doing.' He didn't even know how to reach him. He used to say, ‘It's so weird, we were together a lot…' He just couldn't figure it out.” But the two men continued to maintain an abiding affection for one another. According to another friend, “Jack seemed to have an intuitive understanding of when Phil needed him,” and he had a knack of calling or turning up out of the blue when Spector most needed him—he had been one of those who had gathered around in the La Collina mansion on the day after the murder of John Lennon. Once in a while, like Doc Pomus, Bobby Sheen and other old friends from the past, Nitzsche would receive a call from Spector asking ‘What are you doing in a month?' and suggesting some project or other was in the offing. Nitzsche would simply shrug and tell friends, ‘Like this is going to happen…'”

Nitzsche had experienced his own problems over the years, struggling with alcohol and drugs. His old friend Sonny Bono, for one, had always taken a disapproving view of Nitzsche's enthusiastic embrace of the drug culture. “I realized I couldn't talk to Sonny anymore,” Nitzsche once recalled, “after he sat me down on a couch and gave me a fatherly lecture about dope—‘Jack, are you still taking that…stuff? Because I'm just afraid you're going to end up in a mental hospital.'” Bono was a straight arrow by comparison. When his career as an entertainer faltered, he became a restaurateur, moved to Palm Springs and in 1988 was elected as mayor of the city on a Republican ticket. Shortly afterward, Nitzsche was arrested in the town for being drunk and disorderly. At the police station he demanded that a call be put through to his friend the mayor—“We wrote ‘Needles and Pins' together!” When Bono declined to get involved and order his old friend's release, Nitzsche railed at his guards. “Who the fuck does he think he is? He and Cher used to sleep on my floor!” He was released after a night in the tank. When Bono later called to apologize, Nitzsche screamed down the phone at him and hung up.

Nitzsche held an ambivalent view of how Spector had changed over the years: Phil, he told friends, would have been happier as a jazz guitarist—“and more humble” fame “puts you on a pedestal” and it had done Spector no favors. But Nitzsche continued to cherish their friendship. Among his most treasured possessions was a gold watch, engraved with his name, which Spector had given him in the 1960s. Afraid of losing it, Nitzsche never wore the watch, instead keeping it hidden away in a velvet pouch, along with a beaded Indian bracelet made by his wife, Buffy Sainte-Marie. He would tell friends that the watch meant more to him than the Oscar he had won for “Up Where We Belong,” which had been consigned to a back room, where it sat on a shelf among the household cleaning products gathering dust.

Nitzsche displayed a blithe indifference to the trappings of show business status, and he was nonplussed when he received a call out of the blue from Spector inviting him to join him at the ceremony to induct Spector into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “Jack said, ‘Really?'” Denny Bruce remembers. “He hated award shows and couldn't care less about all that shit; he just assumed it was in L.A. But no—‘We will have a limo picking you up; there will be a tuxedo for you…'”

Nitzsche dutifully took his place with Spector and a small group of friends, including Gerry Goffin and the Kessel brothers, on the MGM Grand jet for the flight to New York. Checking into the Waldorf Hotel, Nitzsche was bemused to receive a telephone call from Spector's secretary in Los Angeles, asking him to meet Spector in the lobby for dinner. Spector was staying in the room immediately above Nitzsche's own, but had apparently felt it more appropriate to fix the appointment through his office.

Spector was so nervous at the prospect of being honored by his peers that he drank heavily before the ceremony. His old friend Michael Spencer happened to be at the ceremony and was shocked to see him “drunk as a skunk.” By the time he appeared onstage to collect his award he was rambling incoherently, making jokes about confusing the induction with President Bush's inauguration.

On the flight back to Los Angeles, Nitzsche turned to Spector with a question. “Jack asked him, ‘Look, I hear all these stories and it's been killing me all these years,'” Denny Bruce remembers. “‘I hear Leonard Cohen, I hear the Ramones, two or three other people—I have to ask you, Did you really pull a gun on all these guys?' And Phil said, ‘You know the problem, Jack? None of these people you mention have the same sense of humor as I do.'”

         

On the evening of January 17, 1991, at the outbreak of the first Gulf War, Karen Lerner was sitting in her New York apartment, watching the missiles land on Baghdad on CNN when she received a telephone call from her friend Ahmet Ertegun, telling her that he and his wife Mica were having dinner that night with someone that Lerner “might find interesting” and inviting her to join them. Lerner made her way to an Italian restaurant in midtown, where Ahmet introduced her for the first time to Phil Spector.

A former TV executive who was now working as the vice president of the Museum of Television and Radio, Lerner was a vibrant, stylish and highly intelligent woman. Between 1966 and 1974 she had been married to the Broadway lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, who with his partner, the composer Frederick Loewe, was responsible for such hit musicals as
My Fair Lady, Camelot
and
Brigadoon.
By her own admission, Karen had “missed the '60s,” knew next to nothing about rock and roll, and had barely heard of Phil Spector. But as he held court over dinner, seizing on the fact that she had been married to Lerner and expounding on his knowledge of classic American song, she began to find him “utterly fascinating.”

“He was teasing me mercilessly about Alan, who I think Phil thought was old and square, and making jokes about his lyrics. And at the same time I was so intrigued because he seemed to know the tunes and lyrics to all two thousand Irving Berlin songs and Cole Porter too. He said, ‘Did you know that Irving Berlin wrote a Cole Porter song, and Cole Porter wrote an Irving Berlin song?' And what it was, was ‘Don't Fence Me In'—which you would think was an Irving Berlin type of song, but was actually written by Cole Porter; and then there was ‘Cheek to Cheek' that Irving Berlin wrote, but that could have been written by Cole Porter.”

Spector, she thought, was “a funny-looking little thing, but he was so smart and charming and funny that he won me over, and I never again thought about what he looked like. Wooing was never really part of our relationship, and there was no physical thing between us, but he was certainly trying to make me adore him.”

She was further charmed when they met for dinner the following evening, and Spector took her home. Karen had a small dog named Oliver, whom Spector immediately seemed to fall in love with. The following day, a package arrived for Oliver from the toy shop FAO Schwarz containing a large fluffy toy. “Phil told me later that he'd said to the sales assistant that he wanted to get a present for a little boy. The assistant asked him, ‘How old is the little boy?' And Phil said, ‘I think he's about three.' He didn't mention it was a dog, and I'm not sure he even remembered. I honestly think at some level he thought he was getting a present for my son. I don't have a son.”

A few days later, the Erteguns invited Karen and Spector out to their house at the Hamptons for the weekend. They traveled together in a limousine. Karen had brought a small overnight bag, and she was bemused when Spector appeared with four large suitcases, a portable keyboard and three hatboxes—that he would not let out of his grip, and that Karen assumed contained his wigs. At Ertegun's home, she and Spector were given adjoining rooms. Dressing for dinner, she could hear the sound of Spector's hair dryer through the wall as he labored interminably to tease his hairpiece into place. That evening, a group of Ertegun's friends, including Jann Wenner, sat down to dinner, and Spector entertained the throng at the piano with more selections from the Berlin and Porter songbooks. The next morning, everyone set out along the beach in a stiff breeze for a bracing walk. Spector stayed behind. “I don't think Phil was really a beach person,” Karen says.

It was the beginning of a platonic relationship that would last for the next four years. They would meet frequently when Spector was in town, and when he returned to the West Coast, they kept in touch with notes and phone calls. Sometimes Lerner would return home, switch on her answering-machine and find that, in her absence, Spector had been talking to her dog. “I'd hear these messages, ‘Oliver, do you want to go out? Do you want to go out?' That's what I always said to him, ‘Do you want to go out, Ollie?' And I could picture this poor dog, hearing this voice playing in the apartment, and running up and down the hall, going mad. It was kind of…sinister. Who would think of doing something like that? But I actually like sick humor, and that's one reason I was so intrigued by Phil. He had a wild sense of humor, very, very original.”

When Spector first played Karen his greatest hits, she was taken aback. “What struck me was the volume and the intensity—this little tiny man making such a big, powerful noise. And the lyrics, which were so lovely in many cases. I'd had no idea. I remember him saying once, ‘Your husband wrote music that was on stage and film. But how would you like it if you wrote something and your whole output in life was presented in a 6"×2" box, meaning a car radio. How difficult would it be to write something that would come across in that way?' I think he was saying, ‘This is the hurdle I've had to overcome, and I mastered it.'”