Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (54 page)

His wristwatch spoke: “
It's six o'clock.
”

“I don't know what to say anymore,” he said. He was tired of talking about himself. “I'm scared of interviews because I don't have the answers to a lot of questions.”

None of us do, I said.

“I mean, I don't know the answers to why…I keep asking myself, What will he ask that I don't know the answers to? I can't even tell you about some of the things from the past because…” He fell silent. Then leaned forward intently. “Listen. People tell me they idolize me, want to be like me, but I tell them, ‘Trust me, you don't want my life.' Because it hasn't been a very pleasant life. I've been a very tortured soul. I have not been at peace with myself. I have not been happy.”

But then, what is happiness? It's not a good woman, Phil Spector said, or a good man. It's not money. It's not hit records. “Happiness is when you feel pretty fucking good and you've no bad shit on your mind.” He closed his eyes. “A memory is a curse. Good health, bad memory, that's about as happy as you're going to fucking get, buddy…”

         

Spector was still not drinking. But shortly before Christmas, he was involved in an accident that was to change things.

He was driving himself to visit a friend at her home in Beverly Hills, according to one source. Near his destination, Spector ran off the road and hit a fire hydrant. The car was undriveable. Shaken, Spector walked the rest of the way to the friend's house, where he poured himself a drink. By the time his driver arrived to collect him, Spector had to be helped to the car.

In January, Starsailor began giving interviews to plug the release of
Silence Is Easy.
Asked about Phil Spector's participation in the record, the bass player James Stelfox was quoted as saying that Spector showed Starsailor “how records used to be made” and they had shown him how recordings were made today. How that must have hurt.

At the same time word began to leak out that Paul McCartney would shortly be releasing a remixed version of
Let It Be,
shorn of all Spector's additions and embellishments, and entitled
Let It Be…Naked.
After thirty-five years McCartney had finally gotten his revenge.

On February 1, 2003, my interview with Phil Spector was published in the
Telegraph
magazine. The cover line read “Found! Rock's Lost Genius.” Thirty-six hours later, Phil Spector walked into the House of Blues and met Lana Clarkson.

30

“I Think I Killed Somebody…”

I
t's an old axiom that actresses die twice in Hollywood, the first time around their mid-thirties, when they can no longer pretend to play young. At the age of forty, Lana Clarkson, an actress who had appeared in some fifteen movies and countless TV shows, had hit a lean time in her career, and was trying to get back on her feet.

For Lana, 2002 had been a particularly difficult year. The movie and television roles that had made her a minor cult star in her twenties, and sustained her through her early thirties, had all but dried up, and her attempts to forge a new career as a comedienne had been sorely hampered by an accident that had resulted in her breaking both of her wrists. By Christmas 2002, in search of employment that would both pay the rent and, she hoped, turn her career around, she had taken a job as the hostess in the VIP room of the Hollywood nightclub, the House of Blues.

She had been named after the Hollywood movie star Lana Turner, a fact that seemed to set her destiny in stone. As a child growing up in the Napa Valley in Northern California she dreamed of being an entertainer, and when the family moved to Los Angeles in 1978, when Lana was sixteen, she began a career in modeling and acting. At the age of twenty she made her film debut in
Fast Times at Ridgemont High,
playing the role of a geekish schoolteacher's improbably beautiful wife. She had one line of dialogue. “Hi.”

Her big break came in 1985, in
Barbarian Queen,
a sword-and-sorcery movie produced by Roger Corman, the king of the Hollywood B-movie. Clarkson played the lead role of Amethea, a warrior in a fur leotard, leading an uprising of slaves. It was a part that the statuesque, six-foot-tall Lana seemed to be made for. Corman would later claim that the film—“loaded,” according to one approving review, “with action and gratuitous nudity”—was the inspiration for the highly successful television show
Xena: Warrior Princess.

For Clarkson, the role was the passport to a succession of similarly low-budget, and low-concept, films:
Amazon Women on the Moon, Death-stalker, Barbarian Queen II: The Empress Strikes Back—
spoofy sword-and-sorcery films and formulaic serial-killer pictures, shot on low budgets in Argentina, Mexico and France. She also featured in modest roles in TV dramas and serials. Nobody could pretend these films were art—in her last major role, in Roger Corman's
Vice Girls
(“three beauteous vice cops go undercover as porno actresses to catch a killer”), Clarkson was obliged to utter the timeless line “You're obedient, Russo. I like that in a sex slave”—but in the peculiar parallel universe of schlock movies they made Clarkson a star, bringing her a large and devoted fan base.

Semi-nudity was an almost obligatory requirement of such films, but Clarkson was never comfortable with it. One story tells of her being furious after discovering that some nude publicity stills had been reproduced in a San Francisco paper, and confronting Roger Corman, demanding to know who was responsible. Denying all knowledge, Corman marched Clarkson to the publicity department, where he proceeded to tear a strip off the hapless publicist. When Clarkson was safely out of the door, Corman is said to have turned to the publicist and told him: “Don't send the nudes to California. East Coast and Europe only.”

According to her friend Eric Root, Lana “wanted to be a superstar. And she was gorgeous enough.”

The self-proclaimed “hairstylist to the stars,” Root ran a salon in Beverly Hills and used Lana as a model when she was first starting out. Root was also the longtime hairdresser and confidant of Lana Turner (he would later write a book,
The Private Diary of My Life with Lana
), and he made a point of introducing the veteran Hollywood star to the young ingenue.

“Lana Turner was very dignified and very sophisticated. Lana Clarkson also was very, very elegant. She never acted slutty; she'd cross her legs and the way she would sit…Even Lana Turner said to me, ‘What a magnificent lady!' And she said, ‘What is she doing, Eric?' I said, ‘Well, she's trying to be…' And Lana Turner said, ‘One day I'm sure a movie will be made of me after I'm gone, but Lana Clarkson would be too tall to play me.' When I told Lana Clarkson that, she laughed and said, ‘Couldn't I kneel?'”

Clarkson's dream of fame is the oldest story in Hollywood, of course. She worshiped the twin doomed deities of Elvis and Marilyn, and collected Monroe memorabilia, covering her walls with pictures of the star. “This is not to imply that I wish to live the sort of lonely and narcotics-shrouded existence she did,” she wrote on her website. “What I love about her is her essence, her work and her commitment to it. She was an ACTRESS with a capital ‘A.'” In another posting she added, “We as humans at our deepest level are pure love…[Marilyn] through all of her difficulties gave LOVE!”

That's how Lana befriended A. J. Benza. A gossip columnist and the author of a book called
Fame: Ain't It a Bitch,
Benza first met Clarkson in 1998 at a music club called the Backstage in Beverly Hills. He had recently arrived from New York to host a celebrity cable TV show and had moved into an apartment at Normandie Towers in Hollywood where Monroe had once lived. “Lana loved that,” Benza says. “She told me she wanted to wake up looking up at the same ceiling that Marilyn had.”

Lana took Benza under her wing; got him backstage passes, introduced him around, told him who was important and “who was an asshole.” Hollywood, says Benza, is filled with beautiful blondes. “They're like orange trees. But Lana had class. She wasn't a bimbo; she wasn't stupid. She'd been through ups and downs. She knew about life. And she was a good listener; you'd want her at your table.”

Another friend, Bill Craig, who ran the MIDEM music festival in Cannes, would call on Clarkson whenever he came to Los Angeles, to help him work the room at music events. “She was polite, intelligent, very smart,” he remembers. “Everybody loved her.”

Lana knew everybody. She was said to have dated Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty; and to have partied at film producer Robert Evans's house; she was good friends with Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, and hung out with musicians like Bonnie Raitt and Don Henley. “A guy-girl” is how Benza describes it. “The kind of girl who could sit down and watch the ball game with you, curse with you and drink with you. She was always up for a good time. Lana was intrigued by people with power, people who'd made it—but in this town, who isn't? You can't be here twenty years, when your career is made up of being a six foot tall, blonde, buxom woman, and not have the men come around you. So it was not unusual for Lana to have known Jack, Warren, Bob Evans—those were all her friends.”

Answering fans' queries on her website, Lana was careful not to give too much of herself away: “I prefer to keep my love life private!” she wrote in one posting, then hinted teasingly at revelations to come. “As far as past relationships, there have been some great loves (some of them famous), but you'll have to read about them in my book. That won't be completed for a couple of years yet.”

She was the kind of girl whom men showered with gifts, flew to parties in Mexico and on the French Riviera. But while there was never a shortage of admirers, one way or another none of these relationships stuck.

“The last time I spoke to her,” Eric Root remembers, “I asked her, ‘You got a boyfriend?' She said, ‘I've got several.' I said, ‘Anybody famous?' She said, ‘No, but they're trying to be, like me…'”

Lana, according to another friend, “really didn't want a significant other stopping her getting what she dreamed of. She was not short of men giving her offers to whisk her away; oil tycoons, this, that and the other. She had no interest. She didn't want to be somebody's arm-piece.”

“The thing about Lana,” says A. J. Benza, “when she reached her level of fame she was just having too much fun; and all of a sudden she turned around and maybe she was thirty-five or whatever, and in this town that's not the age where a man pins you down and says, ‘Let's get out of here, you're mine.'”

By the mid-'90s, Clarkson's film and television career was on the wane. Too old to play warrior queens, she continued to do television commercials and modeling jobs, and she was still in demand at science-fiction and comic conventions, dutifully signing autographs and talking to fans. (“She could have been the head of protocol for the Queen, she was so good with people,” says one friend.) But to anybody who asked, she would say that nowadays she considered herself a comedienne.

She devised a stand-up routine, developing a range of comic characters, along the lines of Lily Tomlin or Tracey Ullman, and started working small comedy clubs—the kind of places that book a performer on the condition that they can guarantee an audience of forty or more friends to boost the bar takings. Lana's shows were always full.

In the autumn of 2001 she enrolled for lessons with a Hollywood voice coach, Patrick Fraley, who taught character and cartoon voices, primarily for animation films or TV commercials. Fraley had no idea that Clarkson had had any sort of movie career. “She never mentioned it. She looked good. She didn't look like she was faded and scary. And she was no more needy than most actors.”

Lana took two workshops at $350 each and a couple of private sessions at $100—an investment that to Fraley showed serious intent. He thought she had the talent to make a career in cartoon voices, but Lana was more interested in “fine-tuning” the characters and impressions she had worked up for her one-woman show.

“I teach seven hundred students a year,” Fraley says, “and I have a sense of who is motivated and who is ambitious—and she was highly ambitious. And one aspect of that was that she was willing to open up even the smallest or most difficult area of performance to get into.”

         

“Most people who come into this city,” says one friend, “they chase the dream, it doesn't happen, they give up. But Lana just kept chasing. It was always, ‘We're going to be huge, darling; we're going to be huge.' It was always bigger than life.”

“She was definitely someone who always saw the glass as half full rather than half empty,” says Courtney Kanner. “Someone who always saw the good in things rather than the bad.”

Kanner, an aspiring fashion designer, had met Clarkson in a Brentwood hair salon. Kanner was designing cell phone covers sprinkled with diamanté Clarkson loved them, and according to Kanner immediately threw herself into helping the young designer's career, handing out business cards and featuring Kanner's designs on her website. Lana, she says, “was everyone's best friend,” someone who always saw the best in people, sometimes to an almost naïve degree.

As her forties approached, she started taking more care of herself. She had developed an interest in spirituality and started attending the Self-Realization Fellowship Temple in Santa Monica, founded in the 1940s by the Indian swami Paramahansa Yogananda. Set in two acres of woodland around a large lake, the center is an oasis of tranquillity close to the busy Sunset Boulevard. Clarkson would attend regularly for meditation and yoga classes. It was where her funeral service would be held. She also did voluntary work for a charity called Project Angel Food, delivering food to AIDS patients.

Bill Craig remembers arriving in Los Angeles and taking her to “the nicest sushi bar in Hollywood, expensive, the best. She wouldn't touch a piece of fish—she's eating seaweed, she's eating soup, she's eating rice. No alcohol. She never smoked cigarettes. I said, ‘What's going on?' And she said, ‘I'm really focusing on my career, I really need to get this together.' She knew she had to change her life and her style in order to be taken seriously.”

It was shortly after that, in December 2001, that she suffered a freak accident at a family party. As Lana was dancing with some children, a rug slipped under her feet on the wooden floor, and she fell, breaking both her wrists. Medical bills were high, and she was unable to work. But she put on a brave face. Two months after the accident she attended the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles with Bill Craig and his girlfriend. Lana wore an outfit that had been made for her by Courtney Kanner, one arm in a leopard-skin print sling, with her name picked out in rhinestones on the strap. Stepping into her limousine she made sure that Courtney was beside her for the paparazzi pictures. “The Grammys are a big deal for anyone,” says Kanner, “but all she did was talk about me and my designs. She didn't take that moment up for herself ever.”

         

On her website, Clarkson maintained a message board, where she would answer questions about her life and career—fans' stuff (“The torture scene in
Barbarian Queen I
is intense and stimulating, you demonstrate great bravery and unwavering courage. How long did the scene take you to shoot?”). Her replies were always sassy, smart and resolutely upbeat.