He's a Rebel

by Mark Ribowsky

  “Because that was the only identity he had left. He was the star, as far as he was concerned. He was the music, and he was afraid to go any other way. It was easy, he had it down, it was very comfortable: same engineer, same studio, you don’t have to worry about some kid drummer, because that’s another challenge. All he wanted was what he had.”

  But Phil did go to see the Rascals at The Barge, and the band was so elated that he was there that they performed some of Spector’s hit songs in homage. Phil listened impassively, then turned to Danny and said, “Let’s get the fuck out of here. They don’t do anything original.” Persuaded to stay, he heard the group’s entire set and then went backstage to be introduced to them by Vinnie. “They wanted Phil to produce them,” Poncia said, “but Phil said he wanted me to produce them, for Phi-Dan Records, which immediately turned them off. They liked me but I was new to producing. They didn’t want me, they wanted Phil Spector.” And so the Rascals declined, with the bitter taste of being brushed off by the godlike Spector. A short time later they signed with Atlantic Records, changed their name to the Young Rascals, and by the end of the year had their first hit, “I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore.” Early in 1966, they had a No. 1 record, “Good Lovin’,” followed by nine more Top 20 hits.

  Phil received similar feelers to produce new acts, and Danny believed Phil wanted to widen his purview, not just to change with the times but for his own survival. By mid-1965 the Crystals and Darlene Love were forgotten and on the verge of leaving Philles, and the Ronettes were only a step behind in alienation. Danny certainly knew the risks of the label becoming too dependent on the Righteous Brothers. “We all knew it, the distributors, everybody. A lot of guys said, ‘Jeez, Danny, you gotta break another act.’ And Phil knew it. That’s why people kept bringing ’em to him.”

  One such moment occurred at a party in L.A. given by Lance Revendow, the race-car driver son of heiress Barbara Hutton. A band was performing at the party whose lead vocalist was a little fellow with round glasses, John Sebastian, who played a lute tucked under his chin. Phil heard the band, the Lovin’ Spoonful, and said, “I don’t like their name. They’ll never happen.” But Phil was mildly intrigued with their folk-rock sound, which was played jug-band style. The Lovin’ Spoonful stemmed from the Greenwich Village folk scene, whose influence in rock was growing with the emergence of Bob Dylan; in 1965 the Byrds, an L.A. band, recorded Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” using a loud electric guitar line and soft harmonies, creating a profound new rock form that seemed made for the plaintive, airy L.A. state of mind. The Lovin’ Spoonful were as eager as the Rascals to be produced by Spector, and they sent Phil a demo of a record called “Do You Believe in Magic?” Phil liked it, and played it for Vinnie Poncia one day while strumming a guitar to the melody. But he never did connect with the group, and the Spoonful signed with Kama Sutra-Buddha Records, a label begun by twenty-five-year-old Artie Ripp and on which they had five Top 10 hits over the next three years.

  “Phil was considering them but passed on it,” Poncia said. “He would dabble with new groups, get involved to be associated with something, and then pull out, never commit to it. Which was a big mistake. Phil needed groups like that. Had he taken the Rascals or Lovin’ Spoonful, he would have fulfilled his dreams of expanding. Had he gone through with all those people he was associated with, he would’ve been like Berry Gordy at Motown.”

  The biggest problem for Phil was facing the reality that working with a band that had songs and a sound would mean a reduction in his authority—which, unlike Berry Gordy, was tied directly to his own work. “Every artist wants to have a voice in something,” Poncia said. “The Rascals and Spoonful would have come in with songs so left field and not of his character—or with any of his input in their development—that he would have to be strictly a producer, just to get the shit down on tape. He couldn’t have the same stamp on it, and he didn’t want to do that. It would have required a total revamping and a totally different outlook in the studio, making an entirely different kind of record.

  “Not that Phil was incapable of doing it, because it was so much easier to make a Rascals record. But his ego was involved, it would’ve been too much sharing of the spotlight—which wouldn’t have been the case, it was only in his head. Phil wouldn’t have been any less effective on a Rascals song than a Darlene Love song. Once he got in the studio and made the record, it didn’t matter who wrote the song. He could’ve done 1 Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore’ and made a better record, because nobody makes a record like Phil Spector.

  “But he was just so involved with himself at the time. Again, he never knew it was gonna end, he never knew that something like that was gonna make a difference. He never wanted to change, to adjust. He wanted complete autonomy and control, like he had over Ronnie.”

  As soon as Phil obtained his Mexican divorce, he began openly living with and squiring Ronnie around. Weeks later Ronnie, hoping to ease the family tension, told Nedra and Estelle that she and Phil had run off and gotten married. By then, though, Phil’s obsession with Ronnie was the cause of serious dissension among the Ronettes. The solo Veronica ventures had not sat well with Nedra in particular, and she bridled when Phil released a Ronettes album—which was mostly a compilation of their hit singles—and titled it Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica.

  “The way he used Ronnie, it was divide and conquer,” Nedra said. “Because at that point, he was separating her off, which was understandable. They were involved with each other and she saw it as her way to fame. Anyone would feel that way with someone patting them on the back and promising to make them more special. But I did not feel Ronnie could be objective to what was best for the Ronettes. Sex, love, and business don’t work well together.”

  Most crushing to Nedra was that Phil had succeeded in prying open the ties that had held the Ronettes: family unity and loyalty. When Ronnie said she deserved to get more than the one-third share each Ronette received, Nedra wanted to cry but what came out was anger. “When that happens,” she told Ronnie, “count me out.”

  “My cousin Estelle was more under pressure, because it was her sister,” Nedra recalled. “But my argument was: as long as we were the Ronettes, I started out in a trio and that’s the way I stay. If Phil was getting what he wanted from Ronnie, I can understand him building her up. But he wasn’t going to build her up at my expense. And he couldn’t replace one of us, bring in another girl like with the Crystals, because we were family. So we stayed with thirds.”

  Phil may have been incurably in love, but Ronnie learned how strange and demeaning Phil Spector’s love could be.

  Danny, for one, was never really sure how deeply Phil cared for Ronnie. “He definitely threw himself at Ronnie. He romanced her pretty good,” Davis said. “I remember him telling me at the outset he was crazy nuts about her because she was great sexually. He was very enamored at that, and I know for a fact that they were doin’ ménag-à-trois scenes.” As with Annette, Phil could at times treat Ronnie like his queen, lavishing her with clothes and, now, a three-carat diamond ring. And yet, at other times, he could be extraordinarily spendthrifty with her. “One time Ronnie went out to California with Phil on her own, without Estelle and me,” Nedra recalled. “He brought her out as his girlfriend, or wife, but he put her in the studio just long enough to justify that we had to pay for the session. So her trip was paid for—by us, not him. He had his cake and he ate it too, and we paid for it.”

  But even these sessions were infrequent as Phil became more absorbed with the Righteous Brothers and veered hard away from any kind of Ronettes product. After “Born to Be Together,” there was only one Ronettes record in 1965, the Spector-Goffin-King “Is This What I Get for Loving You?” which died at No. 75 in June. Nedra thought the neglect had as much to do with Phil’s twisted insecurities as it did his musical interests.

  “Ronnie getting involved with Phil caused the destruction of the Ronettes,” she said. “Phil made a lo
t of promises to Ronnie, but the other side was that he couldn’t do those things because if he did, he believed he would lose her. It was like: if you’re special to me, I’m going to make you special and push you forward—but with one hand he’s got strings and he’s pulling her back. He’s saying: ‘I can’t let her go too far off my leash because then I can’t control her.’

  “It was the extreme jealousy. Phil knew that Ronnie was not in love with him as a man. She was in love with who he was. I think he felt that if he made her a success in her own right and she became all that she could be, then maybe someone would come along who was good-looking and a producer and a genius—and then why would she need Phil Spector? So he would only do so much with her, he would give her an inch and take back two inches. And then he took back more than that.”

  The two of them weren’t exceptional talents, but they did have a musical contribution to make. I loved them. I thought they were a tremendous expression for myself. I think they resented being an expression.

  —PHIL SPECTOR on the Righteous Brothers

  Phil had seen the creative weight of rock shifting westward as early as the autumn of 1964—the last important thing he did in New York was playing the funky guitar break for Leiber and Stoller on the Drifters’ “On Broadway” in 1963. To prep himself for resettlement in the hip new L.A. rock community he fully intended to serve as headmaster, he leased an appropriately regal castle. It was one of those ego-assuring Lotus Land fantasies in wood and brick: a five-bedroom, twenty-one-room Italian-style house with a swimming pool, nestled off a hushed side road in Beverly Hills. The house and the leafy grounds at 1200 La Collina Drive, only minutes from the action on Sunset, had once been part of the enormous Woolworth family estate, which was now subdivided into tracts. Other houses on the land had been made from the servants’ quarters and the horse stables. Phil had the prime lot, the Woolworth master house, which was owned by the aging British actor Reginald Owen. Owen’s wife, Barbara, leased it to Phil at the bargain rent of $1,000 a month.

  The house, furnished down to the last napkin ring, greeted a visitor with a Louis XV credenza in carved gilt wood and a green marbletop table in the entrance hall. Louis XV doré-framed armchairs with Aubusson upholstery sat in a hallway lined with Piranesi prints, a Chinese Chippendale frame mirror with carved birds in a gilt finish, an antique French clock, and bronze candelabras. The living room, with its twenty-foot ceilings and gable archways, was a veritable Louvre, offering an ormolu Napoleon round table with miniature medallions, two beige satin sofas, portraits of King Louis XV and Queen Marie Thérèse in gilt frames, a large French clock on the mantel, rose velvet and red satin Louis Philippe armchairs, and a black ebony Steinway concert grand piano. Upstairs, Phil could loll on a blue velvet king-size bed next to a lavender silk chaise longue and a purple velvet antique settee and silver-leafed chests. The library had bookshelves of French and English classics, wing chairs, a Rembrandt print, ceramic Chinese horsemen, antique gravures of military men in uniform, and a red leather wastebasket.

  All Phil needed to bring when moving into this palace was a toothbrush, yet for almost a year it sat unoccupied while he put off the move. He told Danny Davis to be ready to go to L.A. in April, and Danny, who lived in Philadelphia with his wife and commuted to New York, sold his house. When April came, Phil still wasn’t ready, and Danny had to ask the real-estate agent for an extension. “We were down to one mattress, we’d sold everything else,” he recalled. “So then April came and went and he never moved, and then June and nothing, July and nothing, August, September . . . he put us through some shit that was unbelievable. My wife was crying every night, she can’t stand livin’ this way.” Realizing what he was doing to Danny, Phil bought him a Mustang automobile. Finally, in October, he made the move.

  In L.A., Phil quickly ingratiated himself among the new breed of rock-and-roll crowd. This was not difficult, for it was Spector who showed the way to these young Turks. Phil was a legend, the prototype of weird antisocial behavior that now was the basis of cultural expression. But because he placed so much emphasis on the material end of his fame, people paid attention to him mainly as a conveyor of cheap thrills and for a free ride. His art now had less to do with his persona than his designer-pricey ruffled shirts and Edwardian suits, his big house (everyone assumed, and Phil made no effort to say otherwise, that he owned it) with Humphrey Bogart’s former maid and butler—and his $100,000 white Rolls-Royce. And so, there he was, bounding from the Rolls with a retinue of bodyguards and bodacious bimbos, digging the Sunset scene with Roger McGuinn of the Byrds at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go, the Factory, the Daisy, and the other cabarets of mod rock. In a Hollywood of outlandish slime-balls, leeches, and phony backslappers, Phil was at home because the affected worship felt good and carried no compunction for him to like anyone in return, or to even have to care. “He wanted to be the most outrageous, the most noticed,” Davis said. “He wanted to walk into celebrity parties and be the focal point. The broads that accrued to him were fuckin’ knockouts. When he was riding the crest, everybody wanted to be with him. It was celebrity, it was money, and he played all of it very well.

  “But at the same time, he would always back off people. He would never come up to people himself and he would like crush you, he would want to crush you with some kind of statement designed to negate any further conversation. He’d give you the shpritz and then you’d know to walk away.”

  The days and nights of Phil Spector’s Hollywood were “a fantasy world,” according to Davis. “Phil has a penchant for embracing certain things at certain times in which he absolutely throws himself whole-body because it’s the thing to do. When he became a billiards aficionado, Minnesota Fats and Willie Mosconi and Cowboy Johnny Moore shot with him at the house, betting like $10,000 a game, and Phil couldn’t make a shot at the table although he did become a fair player. With Phil, if that’s what’s current, or has a scent of perverseness, hipness, he will . . . believe me, Phil is the kind of guy who will tell you that Ollie North spent time at the house before he testified in Congress.”

  The figure, and cause, that Phil cared most about that fall of 1965 was Lenny Bruce. At the time, the tortured dirty-mouth comedian had been abandoned by his longtime claque of New York liberal intellectuals who now found him too depressing and self-destructive to get behind as he went from one court case to another on obscenity and narcotics charges. Bruce lived in a house in the Hollywood Hills and spent most of his time there alone, nearly broke and addicted to heroin and Methedrine. In the few stand-up gigs he was allowed to perform, he eschewed comedy for boring readings from his legal papers. Lenny no longer saw himself as a guerrilla for freedom of art but a martyr of social persecution. The problem was, in a time of exploding individual expression within the youth culture, he seemed a prehistoric apparition, a pitiful has-been bent on killing himself.

  When Phil began running into him on the Strip, he took to the outlaw blues that spilled off Lenny. Both of them had huge New York Jewish egos, and Phil believed they both were symbols of resistance against the same establishment pincers. The fact that Lenny had few friends only made him more of a mensch; neither did Phil have friends. Lenny was a real, big-league rebel, with real smack in his veins and an arm’s-length arrest record. Phil thought that was hip beyond belief, and if he wanted to outrage the right people, how better to do it than be seen with Lenny Bruce?

  Lenny did not identify with Phil or with rock and roll. Forty years old, bred on the Borscht Belt and then in smoke-filled jazz clubs, the rock culture was alien, even a little intimidating to him; these wiggling and jiggling kids with long hair and disappearing skirts were somehow too free, definitely too freaky. Lenny would listen to Phil go on about his rock music and pretend to be interested. Lenny knew immediately what he wanted from Phil. He had Phil marked, and every time Lenny said he needed some bread, Phil confirmed it by faithfully going into his pocket. This Ferris wheel went around for many months, with Phil spending thousands of dollars payin
g Lenny’s bills and tending to his needs. Whether it was for a pack of cigarettes or for unspecified “legal expenses,” Danny Davis—who knew Lenny on the Borscht Belt and once had his wife type some of the comic’s early legal briefs, a chore she now resumed—would draw it out for him.

  This was the price Phil had to pay for riding on and trying to somehow save Lenny’s half-dead body, and he complied with the usual Spector zeal. Not only was Lenny taken care of, but so was his nine-year-old daughter, Kitty. With Phil’s house a garrison of electrified gates and guard dogs, Lenny got the idea to install iron and steel barriers in and around his house. Phil, the big idea man, also concocted with Lenny a gig not in a dungeonlike nightclub but at a legitimate theater; that way, Lenny could raise the conscience of the L.A. show-biz colony. The show, a ten-day run bankrolled by Phil and billed as “Phil Spector Presents Lenny Bruce,” premiered at the Music Box Theater in Hollywood—and was a calamity. Despite the fact that Danny Davis pitched the show all over town, only a handful of people showed up, their eyes glazed in boredom as Lenny recited from his legal papers and ranted almost incoherently, his dilated eyeballs bulging. Phil was crushed by this curio of a burnt-out loser and wanted to close the show after one night rather than be tarnished by its bad and costly vibes. But Lenny would not have it. He demanded that the gig run its full course, and it did, each night more lamentable. Phil took a bath on the fiasco, but Lenny had no sympathy. The fault was Phil’s, Lenny insisted, because he had “failed to advertise the show.”

  Nothing would hold back Lenny’s rush to judgment day. One night, trying to surround him with caring people, Phil took Michael Spencer and his wife, who had also moved back to L.A., and Russ Titelman and his sister to Lenny’s house. A strung-out Lenny barely noticed the guests. “He was very depressed, very down,” Spencer recalled. “He tried to play tapes and couldn’t get them on the machine. We had to put them on.” Phil, almost always the aberrant in any group, was for once put off himself. “He said Lenny was acting weird,” Spencer said.