He's a Rebel

by Mark Ribowsky

  On that day, the Teddy Bears returned with a new addition, a drummer—Sammy Nelson, of Union High’s Sleepwalkers, which had evolved into a band called Kip Tyler and the Flips, with a contract on Challenge Records. Up until now, Phil and Marshall had kept the backbeat by hitting a telephone book with a drum brush. Now they required a real drummer. Unfortunately, Sammy Nelson was the only one they knew.

  “He was not a great drummer, he couldn’t keep time real well,” Lieb said, and adding a drum overdub on the session ate up a huge chunk of time. “We’d made the demo with tempo, our tempo, and it fluctuated. Sammy had to play at that exact tempo, and no one could have done that. So we wound up giving him the beat, pointing at him, like ‘Now!’ ”

  Bedell, who was paying Nelson $15 an hour as an outside musician, was spitting mad. “He stinks, Stan!” he yelled to Ross, who instructed Nelson to use only a brush stick scraped across a snare drum. Still, for over an hour Nelson played alone in the studio, and Bedell and Newman were so frustrated that they left. “They told me, ‘Look, give ’em the two hours, then cut ’em off,’ ” Ross related. “They split because they didn’t want to be around Phil. They couldn’t stand him, they thought he was crazy. But he wasn’t. He was ambitious, not crazy.”

  With minutes left, Phil asked Stan if he could squeeze in one more song. Now Ross was generous; he let them go for an extra half hour.

  In that half hour, Phil Spector produced “To Know Him Is to Love Him.”

  With little time to get tricky, Phil was forced to keep things simple. But even after Annette had done her lead and Nelson overdubbed his drum, Phil and Marshall wrang every second they could out of Ross’s generosity, adding more background vocals and a guitar and piano track. The record they took from Gold Star was reminiscent of the great L.A. demo hits such as Patience and Prudence’s “Tonight You Belong to Me” in 1956 and Tab Hunter’s cover of “Young Love” in 1957; even with overdubbing it sounded as if it could have been recorded in a garage between two parked cars. But there was an odd wonder in its grooves. Minus Goldstein’s bass part, the feel was less studied and cliche-ish, not so much a West Coast kiddie version of doo-wop as sincere white R&B.

  Annette’s lead was remarkable, a little girl hurting with real pain. She was the glue of a record on which instruments can barely be heard—though, as Lieb told it, the whole thing was deceptively sparse. “It sounds real simple but it’s very complicated. In the real Spector tradition, it was very planned. Even though we had a short time we knew exactly what we wanted to do, the nuances, everything.”

  “To Know Him Is to Love Him” was an epiphany of yearning in the placid Eisenhower years. For all its innocence, the song had an undercurrent of sadness and alienation. It swayed back and forth in a hammocklike lull, sounding like a mantra, then given a sudden urgency by a ninth chord that was dark and melancholy in itself. In its inscrutability, the title regained its original implication.

  But while Lew Bedell thought it had “a magic sound” when he heard it, and decided to use it as the slow-tempo song on the first Teddy Bears record, he was unsure which side to plug. Although Bedell would later say he put the play on “To Know Him,” Lieb and Annette Kleinbard recalled otherwise. “Herb and Lew didn’t love it, they liked it . . . I don’t remember them loving it until it became a hit,” she said.

  “First of all, to do a ballad at that time was absurd. ‘To Know Him’ was the first girl ballad of its time. There was no girl, innocent, white-type voice on songs like that.”

  Bedell, at least, thought he might have had a two-sided hit on his hands when the disc—on Era’s brand-new rock-and-roll label, named after Bedell’s son—was pressed and released as Doré #503, both tunes copyrighted to Bedell and Newman’s publishing company, Warman Music. On August 1, Era sent out a cautious run of five hundred copies through a distributor named George Jay.

  And then, for the next month, not a thing happened.

  Harvey Goldstein, returning home from boot camp, rehearsed “To Know Him” with the group, but they rarely got to sing it anywhere. In September he and Lieb began their second semester at L.A. City College. Annette and Donna Kass began twelfth grade at Fairfax High School. And Phil Spector, unconvinced of musical stardom, primed his court reporting skills at a business school in Los Angeles. The Teddy Bears did sing their two songs on a local television show hosted by deejay Art Laboe, but there was only sporadic airplay in L.A. B. Mitchell Reid, on KFWB, spun it—but he played “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” not the A side. “We heard that deejays were flipping the record over,” Lieb remembered. “In L.A., we heard the song for a couple of days, then the station dropped it.”

  The Teddy Bears were almost an afterthought at thriving Era Records, but the trend to flip over its rock-and-roll entry did not go unnoticed by Lew Bedell. With “Don’t You Worry My Little Pet” dead in the water, George Jay put the play on “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” Invariably, the response from distributors was “It sounds too much like a demo.”

  Finally, early in September, a deejay in Fargo, North Dakota, Charlie Boone, was the first non-L.A. deejay to break the record, and he put it in regular rotation. Then Bedell got word from his Midwest distributor: Lou Riegert, the program director at Minneapolis station KDWB—a sister station of KFWB—had said he had fallen in love with Annette’s voice and put it on the air. The response was fantastic.

  Inside of a week, orders came in for “To Know Him,” 150 at first, then 300, then 1,000. By mid-September, Bedell and Newman were looking at an order from Minneapolis for 18,000 records.

  Spector found out about it when he came in to Bedell’s office to ask how the record was moving. “Hey, we got a little order here,” Bedell told him coyly.

  The week of September 22, 1958, “To Know Him Is to Love Him” hit the Billboard chart at No. 88. But it still had little airplay outside the Midwest. Bedell then played his biggest card. He knew Dick Clark, and he called him in Philadelphia to ask a favor. He pushed hard, saying he had a peculiar problem—a No. 1 record in Minneapolis that he couldn’t get played anywhere else. The first thing Clark wanted to know was if Universal Distributors—a giant distributing depot powerful enough to own its own record labels, and closely linked to “American Bandstand”—was handling the Doré record in Philadelphia. It was, and that bit of good fortune may have led Clark to listen to it.

  “He heard it, thought it over, then put it on ‘American Bandstand’ and boom—we wound up selling 1.4 million copies,” Bedell said.

  The nationwide after-school audience of “American Bandstand” could give a song megaton force, and “To Know Him” ran up the charts with frightening speed. Four weeks on the chart, it hit the Top 40 the week of October 11. It was No. 16 a week later, No. 5 two weeks after that. In mid-November, Dick Clark called Lew Bedell to request the Teddy Bears come to Philadelphia to appear on his show. Bedell took the opportunity to send the group on a promotional tour through Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and New York during a four-day whirl around Thanksgiving. Suddenly, almost without time to focus their eyes on what was happening, the clean-nosed Teddy Bears were the hottest item in rock and roll.

  Phil Spector was not too breathless, however, to make a hard business move. The victim was Harvey Goldstein.

  “When the Dick Clark thing happened, they told me they didn’t want me to make the trip,” Goldstein said. “They said Dick Clark was paying expenses and he didn’t want to pay for somebody who didn’t sing on the record. This was the excuse for acing me out of the group. I knew this, but it was confirmed years later when I ran into Dick Clark. I introduced myself and told him the whole story, and he said he never paid expenses for people to do that show.

  “I have a feeling that the greed factor came into it. Phil thought they might only have to split the money between three, not four, since I wasn’t on the record. It was probably easy for him to make the decision, because I wasn’t really close to Phil in school; it was Marshall who approached me originally about coming
in, not Phil.

  “I wasn’t Phil’s idea of a music person. I couldn’t read music and they had to teach me my parts, and that was a pain in the ass because sometimes I caught on, sometimes I didn’t. I didn’t have the talent they did, so it probably wasn’t hard to convince them I should go.”*

  When the Teddy Bears went off to Philadelphia, a hurt and fuming Goldstein consulted an attorney and later filed a lawsuit against the group, claiming he in effect owned 25 percent of the name “The Teddy Bears.” “I’m sure they thought they were smart when they pulled what they did on me,” he said, “but they weren’t smart enough.” Ultimately, the group settled with Goldstein: bonds were placed in trust for him, and he continued to draw royalty checks for a decade. In return, Goldstein agreed not to use the group’s name in any music venture of his own—a promise that was very easy for him to keep. He went to Cal State to study accounting, never to sing another note, and with acrid memories. “We were eighteen-year-old kids fighting like animals over a few dollars. There’s something extremely sad about that.”

  The change that came over Phil Spector’s personality in the wake of this explosion was vivid. Donna Kass saw a “much more confident” Phil. Lew Bedell and Herb Newman saw a monster. “The kid became so haughty,” Bedell said. “Before the song was a hit, Phil used to come in and say ‘Anything doing today, Mr. Bedell?’ He was so obsequious I figured he was half-Japanese, this guy. Then, after it was a hit, he walks in and it’s ‘Hey, Lew, baby, we’re doin’ good.’ He starts calling Herb ‘Hey, you.’ You never saw such a complete change in a little fuckin’ Jewish kid.”

  Bertha and Shirley Spector didn’t have to change. Always sure of his singularity, they now shared his vanity; anyone who Phil felt was not a proper ally became their immediate enemy. When Harvey Goldstein was cashiered, he felt that the women may have been behind it. “Phil’s mother and sister virtually tried to control everything he did, and he tried to control us. I’m sure they had a real impact on my being booted out of the group. Shirley and his mother were like wild people. They wouldn’t have hesitated doing it.”

  Donna was next to feel their wrath. Not particularly excited by the show-biz glitter being sprinkled on her once-shy and sensitive boyfriend, she was distressed by the upcoming East Coast swing, because it presaged more of the same. Several times she asked him if he had to go—the kind of request any girlfriend might ask of her boyfriend. Bertha and Shirley were livid. “They felt I was trying to hold Phil back,” Kass said. “But what kind of power did I have? I was fifteen, sixteen, I was nothing. I was a lowly little Jewish girl that went to high school and was crazy about him. I’m totally nonmusical, and I kind of . . . if I look back now, I was jealous of it, his career. I tried to get him to stay in school and not to travel because it took him away from me, and yet here he was with my best girlfriend out there somewhere and it was real hard for me.”

  Once, at a rare meeting with Phil at his place, Donna was stunned when Bertha and Shirley lit into her, openly accusing her of trying to short-circuit his mission in music. “They attacked me, not physically but yelling and tormenting me for hours.

  Phil tried to defend her but, predictably, it became an argument. “It was just ranting and raving for a long time. They accused me of all kinds of things, that I was taking him away and not encouraging him about his music, and he was spending too much time with me and he couldn’t write . . . just everything.”

  Donna, seemingly paralyzed by the ambush, finally freed herself when her mother called. “I was crying my eyes out to her, and she came and got me. She said, ‘Why are you involved with them?’ ”

  But for Phil, liberation took a back seat to family loyalty created by the stigma and guilt he felt about Ben’s suicide. That he was, and would be, the male legatee under the Spector roof, kept him affixed, stuck in place even as his legs itched to run out the door so he could make his music in peace. Indeed peace could only come from music, and music could only come after paying a toll in anger and frustration. To Bertha, he was still her little boy. Somehow, Phil knew that no matter how far he’d be able to spread his wings, he’d never really clear that roof, at least not in his own mind.

  Shirley Spector hurled herself into the whirlwind of the Teddy Bears’ ride up the charts. Welding her ambition to family loyalty, she convinced Paul that she should manage the group. The thought of the Specters’ fratricidal bickering interfering in the affairs of the group so horrified Marshall and Annette that they agreed to let her in only on a quasi-official basis, more as a bone thrown to the Spector women for their support of Phil. The real decisions were already being made by seasoned people in the business; an agent named Ned Tanen had put together the appearances on the East Coast trip, and a public relations man in New York, Bud Dollinger, was hired to do promotion. In Philadelphia, Universal’s promo man, Harry Finfer, would escort the group to “American Bandstand.” When the Teddy Bears went on the trip, Shirley stayed home.

  On the morning they took off, Phil was so terrified about getting on an airplane—an old phobia—that he took his pillow along for security during the flight. That week, the Thanksgiving issue of Billboard had “To Know Him Is to Love Him” at No. 3. Cash Box, on whose chart the song first appeared on October 11, placed it at No. 2, after an incredible leap from No. 22 to No. 7 four weeks earlier.

  Upon landing in New York, his physical and emotional breeding ground, Phil had two pressing pursuits: the first was to see his uncle Sam. The second was to visit the grave of Ben Spector.

  After talking Marshall and Annette into coming with him to see Sam Spektor, who with his two sons and daughter had moved to a house across the Hudson River in Clifton, New Jersey, the trio boarded a bus at the Port Authority terminal. They arrived at Sam’s house like conquering heroes. Phil, who had sent Sam one of the first few pressed copies of his record, sat with him for hours reminiscing over old photo albums of a family of Spectors and Spektors who once all lived within minutes of each other in the Bronx but now was spread from coast to coast.

  Later in the day, Phil went to see the gravestone that was a source of such incredible despair and inspiration. He went alone.

  A day later, on November 28, the Teddy Bears went on “American Bandstand,” following by one day Buddy Holly and the Crickets, and lip-synched their sizzling hit song. Phil and Marshall wore powder-blue, V-necked sweaters with their first names embroidered in small script on the chest. Annette wore a red gown. All of them were petrified.

  The appearance hastened the inevitable. The following week, “To Know Him Is to Love Him” had pushed “Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley” out of the No. 1 slot on both pop charts.

  Phil talked on the phone with Donna constantly during the trip, but when he and the Teddy Bears came home, the relationship hit the rocks. Tooling down Sunset Boulevard in his new metallic-blue Corvette, bought out of the first rush of royalties, seventeen-year-old Spector met more girls than he once would have thought possible. Behind Donna’s back he began seeing a girl named Karen Oster. “I found out he was cheating on me, and it was very painful,” Kass recalled. Suddenly Spector’s once-captivating little lies weren’t so endearing. When Ritchie Valens’s song “Donna” became a big hit in early 1959, Phil told her he had actually written the tune, for her—but said he had sold the song, its rights and writing credit, to Valens, who also recorded at Gold Star. On February 3, while on tour in the Midwest, Valens was killed with Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper in a plane crash. Donna Kass saw the Donna of the song—Donna Ludwig—crying on the newsreels.

  Spector’s ongoing mendacity was absurd, but Donna could sense it was pathological. “It didn’t matter to Phil that he was hot, or that everybody wanted him,” Kass said. “He was very manipulative. He had no good role models. The only good role model he ever had killed himself.”

  Plainly, Phil thought he had outgrown not only Donna but everything in her world. Gradually, and mutually, they drifted away from each other—but not before Spector had shaped th
e direction of her life. So skilled was he in his court reporting that a fascinated Donna began to study it herself. Three decades later, she would still be a working court stenographer in Los Angeles.

  Now that Donna was out of the way, Annette, as her best friend, wondered if she would be the next target. Shirley had eased her way more and more into the inner sanctum of the Teddy Bears, and she began reigning with a fist of iron—which Annette thought was aimed at her. “Shirley was really tough on me,” she remembered. “I think she really wanted to be me, in a sense as a singer, someone who had talent and could make it in show business.” Shirley tried to govern Annette’s role as she saw fit, in clothes, makeup, telling her when to smile and what to tell interviewers. Her words of criticism came in torrents, her words of assurance in trickles. Just her presence could unnerve both Annette and Marshall.

  “Shirley really was an extension of Phil, but a lot more unpleasant,” Lieb said. “She was a very hyper, very nervous person. She was very loud, very New York. She smoked a lot, and when she would sit with you, it gave you that turn-off feeling.”

  Feeling in charge after the headiness of the group’s “Bandstand” triumph, Shirley barged into Lew Bedell’s Vine Street office late one Friday afternoon to pick up a royalty check for Phil. Bedell, talking business around a conference table with an associate named Danny Gould, was nearly knocked off his chair when she came through the door and announced, “I’m Shirley Spector and I’ve come for my brother’s paycheck!”

  “Here . . . I got it right here,’ Bedell said, reaching into a pile of papers on his desk and handing over a check for $38,000 in artist’s and writing royalties made out to Phil.