Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (47 page)

Spector would talk for hours about his life and his music, the people he'd known, the people he'd worked with, the friends and the enemies. He would treat her to his impersonations of Ahmet—whom Karen surmised he revered as a father figure—John Lennon and Bob Dylan—“that nasal whine, where you couldn't understand anything. I think Dylan was one of his pet peeves.” He proudly told her how he had once thrown Warren Beatty out of a recording session.

Sometimes his conversation would drift back to a subject that had preoccupied him for much of his professional life: being immortalized in film. Over dinner one night he outlined his wish list to Lerner: Tom Wolfe should write the script, and it would be a story in three parts. The first part should be directed by Dennis Hopper; the second part by Stanley Kubrick and the concluding part by Martin Scorsese. Scorsese had used “Be My Baby” in his film
Mean Streets,
and Spector grumbled to Lerner how the director had “ripped me off.” But he revered him nonetheless. And, of course, Al Pacino would play the role of Spector.

Spector, Karen thought, liked to give the impression of being powerful and in control, but it was a front that could quickly crumple. On March 14, 1991, his old friend Doc Pomus passed away. As was always the case with Spector, the death of a friend seemed to cut to the heart of his insecurities and left him deeply shaken. A memorial service was held for Pomus at the Riverside Memorial Chapel, where Spector delivered a eulogy. “I remember him writing it,” Karen says. “He was afraid he was going to cry; he didn't, but after the service he was a total wreck.” Spector did not usually observe Jewish customs, but when Pomus's family invited him to sit Shiva with them, Spector, honored to be asked, agreed, and sat for the customary seven days.

         

Incredibly, perhaps, for all its historic significance there had never been a compilation of Spector's work on record. Roy Carr had proposed the idea as far back as 1976 but, afraid that it would be seen as an exercise in nostalgia, Spector had decided against it. In 1989 he was approached by another company, Rhino, with a view to licensing his work for a box set, but it was Allen Klein—characteristically alive to the value of the Spector canon—who finally brought the project to fruition.

Spector would play little part in pulling the record together. It was left to Allen Klein to do most of the work. Larry Levine was invited to supervise the remastering of the recordings for release on CD. In recent years Levine had dropped out of the music business and attempted to start a new career, selling condominiums for a builder in Beverly Hills, but his equable nature was ill-suited to the world of real estate. “I ended up getting fired. My boss told me I was too nice a person. He said that one of the people I'd sold a condo to had told him I was more interested in his welfare than my boss's welfare.” He had not seen Spector since succumbing to a heart attack during the sessions for the Ramones' album. “I think he felt guilty,” Levine says. “But I always felt close to Phil regardless.”

The original master tapes that Levine was given to work with were on the point of disintegrating. “They looked like a two-thousand-year-old book,” he remembers. Levine and an assistant spent weeks painstakingly transferring the tapes from analog to digital and then remixing them. In an earlier age, Spector would never have left Levine's side, but now he visited the studio only occasionally to critique the engineer's work.

The results were released in a box set of four CDs,
Back to Mono,
which ran the gamut of Spector's career from “To Know Him Is to Love Him” to his 1969 recordings for the Checkmates. One CD was given over in its entirety to the Christmas album. None of Spector's post-1969 productions—for Lennon, Harrison, Dion, Cohen or the Ramones—were included. The final product—in mono, of course—was lavishly presented and beautifully produced. But something was lost in the translation from vinyl to CD, the raw, thrilling impact of the original 45s diluted in their journey to a gleaming collector's artifact. The past could be saluted, but it could never be brought back. Spector dedicated the album to his father, Ben.

When
Back to Mono
was released in October 1991, Allen Klein gave a rare interview to this writer to talk about the project. The record, he insisted, was Spector's vision, “and no one else's, because no one else could do it. I mean, it's not like he's dead. If you wanted to restore the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo was still around, would you ask some other painter to do it?”

For the past ten years, Klein said, Spector had been doing things “he'd rather not talk about. You know, Phil took a lot of knocks. Lenny Bruce died, Presley died, John Lennon died: these were all people he loved and respected. It points up everyone's mortality, and I think Phil was aware of that.” In the meantime, the myths surrounding Spector had been allowed to multiply because “he never stood up and said, ‘That's not so.'” Spector, Klein went on, “gets on airplanes and travels by himself. He goes to clubs, listens to music and talks to people”—as if these commonplace pastimes were somehow remarkable. Asked what Spector now wanted from his life, Klein, a man not known for his sentimentality, gave the question a moment's thought. “He's given his music, his heart,” Klein said. “He deserves kindness.”

         

On Christmas Day 1991, Spector's son nine-year-old Phillip Jr. passed away after a short struggle with leukemia. It was the day before Spector's fifty-second birthday. Whatever residual belief Spector might have entertained in God was now obliterated. Everybody he had ever loved—his father, Lenny Bruce, John Lennon, and now his son—had been taken from him. There could be no God. As he would put it later, “The most vulgar and obscene four-letter word in this language is ‘dead.' It is indecent. It has no redeeming social value.”

“The death of Phillip was devastating, and he has never recovered from that,” David Kessel says. “Something was lost that will never come back—a piece of his heart, a piece of his soul.”

Spector and Janis Zavala had separated shortly before Phillip Jr.'s death. The Pasadena home was now nothing more than a repository of painful memories, and Spector could no longer bear to stay there alone. Early in 1992, in the words of one friend “aimlessly delirious with grief,” he left Los Angeles for New York. For a short while he moved into an apartment on Central Park South, where Dennis Hopper remembers visiting one night. Deeply distraught as he talked about the loss of his son, Spector showed Hopper to a room that he said was “Phillip's bedroom” and told Hopper that he was welcome to stay there whenever he wished. Hopper was deeply moved. But the story is a curious one. It appears that little Phillip had never been to New York.

“Between grief and nothing,” William Faulkner wrote, “I will take grief.” And for Spector the loss of Phillip became the single abiding fact of his existence. He left the apartment, and moved into the presidential suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where he was to remain for the best part of a year. In his suite he fabricated a small shrine to Phillip Jr., a photograph of his son with candles. He would bring people to the suite and sob. He was paying tens of thousands of dollars a month for the suite, but he seemed indifferent to the cost.

In his conversations with Karen Lerner, Spector told her about the death of his son, but he would never dwell on it. “You knew it was a terrible thing in his life, as terrible as his father dying,” she remembers, “but Phillip was so secretive about it, secretive about everything in his personal life. I don't think he minded being thought of as neurotic, but he didn't want to show he was vulnerable.” If he had moved to New York in an attempt to escape the grief of his loss, Karen sensed the city offered no respite or consolation. “It seemed to me that he didn't much like New York and he was scared to be here. He was afraid of flying, afraid of a lot of things. He wanted his security and his bodyguards that he had in Beverly Hills and his Rolls-Royce and all those things, and he didn't have those things here.”

Spector's idiosyncratic behavior and his unpredictable hours had begun to put a strain on their friendship. To Karen, it seemed that she was always waiting around for Spector for one reason or another. She held a responsible position and had to be in the office early each morning. His day would invariably be just beginning as hers was coming to an end. When they were alone he would be sweet and considerate, but in public another persona would emerge. “I remember one night we were having dinner in Elaine's. We didn't even get there till eleven. And around midnight, Pia Zadora came over and she was fawning all over Phil. He invited her to join our table. After an hour and a half of this I couldn't stand any more—I thought, I'm not a rock and roll groupie, I'm not interested in anything that's being talked about, and he looks as if he's really enjoying it. So I just left.”

Elaine's, which for three decades had tenaciously defended its place as New York's premier celebrity hangout, had become Spector's home away from home, and he struck up an improbable friendship with another of the restaurant's regulars, Jack Maple, New York's deputy commissioner of police. Maple, who died in 2001 at the age of forty-nine, was an ebullient, dandified character who often sported spats, bow ties and a Homburg hat—a sartorial nod to his close physical resemblance to Edward G. Robinson. Maple was a vivid raconteur, and he and Spector loved trading stories. Maple was also a man who could look after himself, and in lieu of Spector's bodyguards sometimes found himself stepping in to handle trouble.

The “kinetic” quality that Larry Levine had noticed when he first met Spector thirty years earlier now manifested itself with increasing frequency. His temper seemingly set on a permanent hair-trigger, Spector would flare up at any slight, real or imagined. Dining in Elaine's one night with Jack Maple, Spector spotted Shannah Goldner, the daughter of his old friend George Goldner. Shannah, who was working as a producer on the television program
A Current Affair,
was dining with the program's reporter Steve Dunleavy. Spector invited Goldner to join his table, but when Dunleavy walked over and sat down, Spector immediately rounded on him; reaching inside his jacket, he told Dunleavy he had a gun and threatened to kill him. Maple quickly stepped in to separate the men, but in the ensuing scuffle Dunleavy landed a punch which caused Spector to bleed profusely. Later that night, Goldner returned home to find a series of bizarre messages on her answering machine, which were subsequently reproduced in the
New York Post.

“We've got your f——ing number—c——! You're dead f——ing meat. I'll break your f——ing legs and your f——ing fingers! I'll break your f———ing mother's legs! And tell that gray-haired f———he's dead.” Goldner was convinced that it was Spector who had left the messages.

Even Spector's longest-standing friends could be bemused by his volatile temperament and sudden mood swings. Ahmet Ertegun told me of an incident from around this time when he and Spector were doing the round of Manhattan jazz clubs.

“There were two girls with us, we were in two cars, and Phil and I were waiting at the door of this club for the girls to join us. And as we're waiting, two couples came out. The men were over six foot tall, late twenties, very athletic-looking, very chic sports clothes. I think they were Canadians, tourists. One of them looked at Phil, and Phil was wearing this button, ‘Back to Mono.' The guy said, ‘Excuse me, but what is that?' And Phil says, ‘You touch that and you're dead!' Now these are perfectly nice people! I said, ‘Excuse me, sir, please don't ask questions; it's better just to leave.' I thought, if we have to fight these guys, here we are, two old schmucks…their girlfriends could have beaten us up!

“Phil would do things like that. But it was all bravado—this little shrimp going around saying ‘Don't touch me or you're dead' to people who are six foot seven. He'd put on a tough-guy thing, but it's all bullshit. I never felt in any danger from him. The only danger came from being with him, not from him. But that's part of the mystique of the man. Phil is not like other people.”

25

“I Honestly Thought He Was Kidding”

I
n the autumn of 1992, after a year spent mostly in New York, Spector returned to Los Angeles. For a while, unable to face returning to the Pasadena home, he took up residence in the Bel Air and Beverly Hills Hotels, occasionally returning to the house to collect clothes and mail. At length, he steeled himself to go back.

Although he and Janis were now separated, she continued to work for him, handling his phone calls and business arrangements. And now Paulette Brandt, who had briefly worked for Spector around the time of the John Lennon album, returned as his personal assistant. In the years since she last worked for Spector, Brandt had been involved in the legal case against another of her former employers, and the man who was currently Spector's business manager, Allen Klein. In 1979, Klein served two months in prison for income tax evasion, after illegally selling $216,000 worth of promotional copies of George Harrison's album,
The Concert for Bangla Desh.
Brandt, who had been working for Apple in New York at the time of the offense, was one of those who gave evidence against Klein.

Spector seemed to take a quiet amusement from employing one of the people who had been responsible for sending his partner to prison. He insisted that Paulette use a different name in any correspondence or contact with Klein, instead calling herself “Beverly.” Klein, fully aware of the deceit, nonetheless played along with it, sending Christmas gifts to “Beverly” each year, while lamenting to friends, “Does Phil really think I don't know?”

Spector and Paulette had enjoyed a brief affair when she had worked for him in the '70s. But this time it was strictly business. Throughout his life, the one thing Spector had been unable to stand was solitude, and at those times when he had been unable to find companionship, he had hired it. The succession of bodyguards—Emile Farkas, Mac Mashourian, George Brand—had all served as much as companions as hired hands. David Kessel had observed the contradictions in Spector. “Phil likes to be alone in silence; the problem is that when he's alone he starts to think about things he doesn't want to think about, so it's ‘Let's go out.' He prefers not to be around people. But then he has to get out and around people because he can't stand being by himself. Everything that was brilliant about Phil, his artistic drive, his genius, was based on an inner torture. It's the agony and ecstasy. That's Phil.”

Now in a mansion inhabited only by memories and ghosts, Spector was racked by anxiety and chronic insomnia. “It had always been that Phil would stay up all night, but at least he was fairly consistent with his schedule,” Dan Kessel says. “But after Phillip Jr. died, he became a total insomniac. Up at all hours, asleep at all hours; no consistent lifestyle. It went on like that for a couple of years. We'd go visit him and the atmosphere was devastating. It was beyond depressing. After years, Phil still couldn't shake his unbearable grief. He'd lost every ounce of joy in his being.”

He became obsessive about his privacy and his solitude. The mansion was divided into two areas which Paulette called “the red” and “the green.” The “green area” comprised the family rooms; the “red area” was Spector's private domain, with crimson carpeting and wallpaper, which put Brandt in mind of “a bordello.” There was a small office beside the swimming pool, but Spector preferred Brandt to work from her own home, a thirty-minute drive away in Hollywood.

Each day he would fax her a list of duties, “everything from taking care of dog grooming to doctor's appointments. Scheduling and unscheduling. Setting up any meeting would take ten phone calls when it could have been done in one. When I learned how Phil worked, I would call people up and say ‘Unless you hear from me differently, this is the deal…'”

To protect Spector's privacy, Brandt would schedule the necessary domestic chores for two days of the week, driving over from her home in Hollywood to let in the garbage man, or the gas company to read the meter. Often Spector would not go to bed until 4:00 or 5:00 a.m., and Paulette would schedule the visit for around 8:00 a.m., while he was sleeping, “so he could be comfortable around his own house.”

In the period in which they had been lovers, Spector had exercised an obsessively proprietary hold over Paulette. “I learned how to make jewelry, because then I could sit by the telephone and always be there, because if he called and you weren't there, there'd be trouble. Phil loves women, but he doesn't know what to do with them. Because putting them in a cage doesn't work. Even with people who might like cages once in a while.”

While the relationship was now platonic, professional, Spector's possessiveness seemed as strong as it ever had been. Sometimes Paulette would see a limousine parked on the street outside her apartment. In the modest, working-class area of Hollywood where she lived, “it looked kind of obvious. He knew everybody who came to my house, and would get very upset if I was dating anybody else. If he knew I was going out, I'd tell him where I was going; he would page me to call my home phone; he wouldn't tell me what it was about, and he'd have a fax there for me, so I'd have to go home to find out what he wanted. He used to call me on Saturday nights to have me come over and light the pilot light on his boiler. It was just to see if I'd do it. I'd think, Okay—he needs to be reassured, so I'd get up and go. It just made me a little sad that he still needed that.

“I don't think Phil liked himself as much as other people liked him. He'd wonder sometimes why people liked to hang out with him, and why they took the way he behaved. But he'd push the limit as far as he could.”

Whatever Spector's eccentricities, however unreasonable or demanding he could be, Paulette remained unfailingly loyal. “Most of the crazy stories you hear about Phil are from people who know of somebody else who had the experience. I've never known of anybody who's actually had those experiences. And I think Phil did his utmost to perpetuate those stories. I think he kind of liked it because they're interesting and amusing. Phil keeps his friends for life, and that says something about a person. I care for him and I always will. He's been my rock. When things got pretty bad, people would say, ‘Why are you still around?' Well, it's because you remember how special he is. Phil is so truly remarkable that you'd forgive him anything. But I always thought, Phil thinks he's not supposed to be happy, and if he thinks he's not going to be happy, he won't be.”

         

Spector had not been near a recording studio in more than ten years; his only musical activity had been to work on a couple of songs. One of them was called “My Goodbye Song.” Spector had begun it long before the death of his son, but that tragedy had brought the song an unintended, and more deeply poignant, meaning.

In Elaine's one night he met a songwriter named Charles Kipps, who had written the hit “Walk Away from Love” for David Ruffin, and worked with Van McCoy, producing Ruffin, Gladys Knight and Aretha Franklin. In his suite at the Waldorf, Spector and Kipps worked on a couple of songs, including “My Goodbye Song,” but in the end nothing came of the partnership.

“My Goodbye Song” continued to haunt Spector. In search of a collaborator who could bring the song to fruition he asked Allen Klein to contact the lyricist Hal David, famous for his collaborations with Burt Bacharach. Spector arranged to meet David in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, and the pair then spent a day or two at David's Beverly Hills home, working on what David would remember as “a very lovely melody.” (Spector complained to Karen Lerner that David's house was always being vacuumed and they could never find a good period of time to work in.) David provided some lyrics, and Spector talked vaguely of trying to place the song with a couple of artists, but David heard nothing more, and the next time they happened to meet, at a Lakers game, it was not even mentioned.

In October 1992 Spector finally roused himself to go back into the studio. He had been told that Linda Ronstadt had expressed an interest in working with him, and decided to record a handful of demos to act as a calling card. Among the material was “My Goodbye Song.”

Spector instructed Paulette Brandt to call up a gathering of his old musicians from the Wrecking Crew and to contact Larry Levine. In search of a singer, Spector turned to a vocalist named Mercy Bermudez—who had once sung with a Los Angeles group called the Heaters—whom Spector had met a few years earlier with a view to producing. That collaboration had come to nothing, but Bermudez had left an impression. Furthermore, she sang in the same key as Ronstadt; the perfect vocalist for the sessions.

In need of an arranger, he turned back to his old friend Jack Nitzsche. Nitzsche was not in the best of spirits. His marriage to Buffy Sainte-Marie had recently come to an end, and a disconsolate Nitzsche was drinking too much, taking too many drugs. But he made it a point of principle to answer Spector's call whenever he was needed.

In a meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Spector presented Nitzsche with a tape of two songs, simply labeled “A” and “B,” and asked him to provide arrangements. Nitzsche left the meeting utterly confused.

“The tape that Phil gave him was just some dumb melody played on an electric piano,” a friend of Nitzsche remembers. “Phil wouldn't even tell him who the sessions were supposed to be for. Jack said, ‘This is not how Phil and I used to work.' It used to be they'd play the song, work on it together; he'd know who the performer was going to be, what the song was about. There was never anything on tape, ever. Jack thought Phil was keeping it secret from him. He said, ‘I can't work with this.' He was so frustrated.”

The recording session, in a small Hollywood studio, had the air of a reunion of battle-scarred veterans; there was Steve Douglas, Jim Horn, Hal Blaine, Jim Keltner, Jay Migliori, Don Randi, even the guitarist Tommy Tedesco, who had recently recovered from a stroke. The keyboard player Al DeLory, who had not played on a Spector session in almost thirty years, flew in from Nashville. Backs were slapped, hugs exchanged, old jokes traded and comic routines rehashed. But when it came to the recording, everything went to hell. Seemingly bemused by Spector's requirements and, according to Don Randi, “not in good shape,” Jack Nitzsche had arrived with arrangements that nobody could make sense of. Spector tried to get Nitzsche to correct the charts, but he was unable to do so and finally left the studio in disgrace. The sessions broke up after two hours with nothing committed to tape. “Phil was angry at Jack,” Larry Levine remembers. “But he loved having the guys there. In fact, I think that was the only reason he'd organized the session in the first place. You talk about Phil being emotional, there's no doubt…”

The emotion did not, however, stretch to forgiveness. Furious with Nitzsche, Spector demanded that his old friend pay the studio costs for the session. Mortified at letting down Spector, Nitzsche readily paid up.

         

Spector seemed to have few close friends. The Kessels remained as devoted as ever, but the “Three Musketeers” days had passed; with Spector now in a torpor of inactivity the brothers were busily pursuing their own careers. Perhaps Spector's most constant companion was Marvin Mitchelson, the attorney famous for introducing the concept of “palimony” into the American divorce courts.

Mitchelson was a big, booming man with a manner of jovial bonhomie. He had first come to fame in 1978 when representing the singer Michelle Triola Marvin in her claim for support against the actor Lee Marvin, with whom she had lived for six years but never married. Mitchelson lost the case, but his proposal of “palimony” quickly caught on, and he found himself much in demand as a hired gunslinger in the frenetic world of Hollywood celebrity divorces. His clients included Tony Curtis, Bianca Jagger, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Joan Collins. But exposure to the Himalayan sums of money that he would habitually demand on behalf of his clients quickly went to Mitchelson's head. He spent lavishly on Rolls-Royces, Concorde flights and a Hollywood mansion. In 1987 he was accused by a former secretary of using her to ferry cocaine, of which, she alleged, he used “lots and lots.” At the same time, he was investigated on two separate allegations of rape by female clients. Mitchelson was not charged, but both women were awarded more than $50,000 by a state crimes-compensation panel. In 1993 Mitchelson was sentenced to thirty months for tax evasion and ordered to pay $2,158,796 in restitution. He wept openly in court when the verdict was passed, telling the judge “This is the second saddest day of my life. My mother's death was the first.”

Spector was introduced to Mitchelson at a Hollywood party, and the two men quickly became firm friends. Spector would sometimes take Mitchelson to watch the Lakers, and Mitchelson reciprocated by introducing Spector to the Beverly Hills party circuit. “Marvin got a kick out of Phil,” remembers Sy Presten, Mitchelson's friend and press agent, “and Spector loved going to those parties with Marvin and meeting all these celebrities, many of whom Marvin had represented.”

On one occasion Spector turned up at his daughter Nicole's school fathers' night in a stretch limousine along with Mitchelson and the Kessel brothers. Whatever mortification Nicole might have felt was assuaged when Spector instructed his driver to give limo rides to all Nicole's classmates. Mitchelson was now barred from practicing law, and his extravagant lifestyle disguised money troubles. It was not unusual at the end of an evening together for Spector to write out a check as a “loan” to keep his friend in fine wine and Brioni suits. Spector's staff knew that when Mitchelson called, it usually meant he needed money. “I don't know whether you could say that Phil was buying the friendship,” says Sy Presten. “They enjoyed each other's company. Whether Marvin would have enjoyed it if they ate in a soup kitchen, I don't think so.”