He's a Rebel

by Mark Ribowsky

  “But that was the last time I saw Phil and nothing more was said about it. Now Donté’s a big boy, he can do whatever he wants, and you just hope he’s okay. But I think with Phil and Ronnie, they were more afraid that it would look like a failure on their part if Donté lived with me. And Phil never liked to admit failure.”

  At forty years of age, Phil Spector was retired from rock and roll. Either the distilled techno-pop of the eighties was not worth his time or he was too insecure about being able to find a place in it on his psychopathic terms and would rather deny that he had to try. His only active involvement over the first half of the decade, with Yoko Ono in 1981, seemed like yet another postscript. This was after the murder of John Lennon, when Phil could not bear to live with the karmic demerit that John went to his grave with the bitterness of 1973 unresolved between them. Right up until his death, John had not forgiven him. Only weeks before, when Doc Pomus mentioned Phil’s name to him in idle conversation, John tensed and said, “I don’t wanna talk about him.” Following John’s assassination, Yoko became locked in litigation with the producer of the Grammy-winning Lennon-Ono Double Fantasy LP, Jack Douglas. Phil, who still had a financial stake in the Lennons’ account books, flew to New York to testify on Yoko’s behalf. If he could not make up with John, this at least broke down the barrier with Yoko, who had never liked Phil and had spoken unkindly of him in a recent Soho News interview. When she went into the studio to commemorate John with her Season of Glass LP—which featured John’s shattered and bloodstained glasses on the front cover—she hired Phil to produce. Yoko, however, needed to have unstinted authority to express and dictate the deepness of her personal loss, and she told Phil he could go home after about half the record was complete. The parting was in no way acrimonious, and she later gave Phil one of John’s guitars. For Phil it was like a conciliatory hand reaching to him from the beyond.

  One recompense of Spector’s seemingly permanent seclusion was that, with no other comparative work, his classic hits crystallized as his only legacy. The body of that work, so daring, so inscrutable, and so listenable two decades later, was intrinsic to the man who made a new rock and roll and then vanished into a dusky netherlife. Spector’s hits enjoyed tremendous rediscovery in the eighties, and a 1983 BBC documentary ran on many public television stations. This sixty-minute film by producer Binia Tymieniecka, done without Spector’s cooperation and employing a where-have-you-gone theme, was a surreal knife that both sculpted his art and cut his heart out. Probably the most indelible scenes belonged to Dee Dee and Johnny Ramone, who had their revenge for an eight-month sentence with Spector. “He seemed more positive and able,” Dee Dee said. “When I got to the studio, I found him to be a helpless little boy, like a helpless person. . . . He seemed like a man walkin’ his last mile.” Though End of the Century had outsold all the Ramones’ eighties’ albums, Johnny said: “Phil seemed to be frustrated with us, but I think he’s frustrated with himself really. Times have changed and most producers from the mid-sixties haven’t really grown. There’s a new sound and he doesn’t have it. His time has passed.”

  Now Phil lent credence to that assumption himself. He evidently considered his role in music mostly as a conservator of a bankable legend—the Spector sixties’ catalogue. While almost no one could reach him directly, only go through intermediaries, the use of his old songs in movies, television, and commercials—with Spector himself choosing who should have these rights—made up a thriving business. “His organization says he will decide what is best for the ‘Spector situation,’ ” Dan Kessel said. “He runs his business like a general runs an army. Phil had had a whole lot of different incarnations, but he is completely in control of his rock and roll.”

  To his amazement, Danny Davis, whose relationship with Phil wavered through the years but never broke, found that he was deputized as an emissary to Spector simply by virtue of their long-ago association. “It’s unbelievable; every day I started getting calls from people wanting to get to him,” Davis said. “He makes a point to tell people, ‘You would have never gotten in here if it wasn’t for Danny Davis’—he once told people in my company that he only talks to Danny Davis and Nino Tempo. I mean, I felt like a golden oldie myself when he said that. But the fact is, he added to my luster in the business. He has been a great door-opener, even after I left him. Everyone says to me, ‘Jesus, you worked for Phil Spector, tell me about this and that.’ He’s been an experience in my life money couldn’t buy, but at the same time, through all of the years, the only people he knew he could count on and who really cared about him was me and my family.”

  By the middle eighties, Danny, doing promotion for Private Eye Records, saw that the Spector legend would prove profitable to him. He hooked Phil up with pleople pitching screenplays and Broadway shows based on his life, with the understanding that Danny would be executive producer, but while Phil initially consented to these projects, nothing ever developed. Trying again in late 1986, Danny thought he could talk Phil into producing LaToya Jackson for the Private Eye label. The oldest of Michael Jackson’s singing siblings, and prettier even than Michael, LaToya had not gotten anywhere on her own. With the Jackson name as the lure, Danny approached Phil with the idea. “She can’t sing and needs somebody to really do her in the studio,” Davis said. “He said ‘Jeez, yeah. I like her. When can you bring her over?’ ”

  The next night, Danny drove LaToya to 1200 La Collina, trying somehow to explain to her on the way about Phil Spector—“because she doesn’t have a clue. She’s heard about him but she didn’t know how he is.” Entering the house, winding past the bodyguards and into the mausoleumlike living room, Danny could see that LaToya did not know what to make of the dementia all around her. After making them wait for half an hour, Phil made his appearance. Seeing LaToya, “he was absolutely mesmerized by this woman,” recalled Davis. “He was completely taken with her. And he goes into a thing I know is indigenous to his insecurity. He is extremely shy and it is obvious he doesn’t know how to talk to LaToya. So he starts with all kinds of . . . he says, 1 got Barry and Cynthia doin’ songs just for you’—which I know is an absolute lie. Barry Mann doesn’t wanna talk to him and Cynthia doesn’t like him. But he’s desperately tryin’ to tell her things. Then she wants him to go to the piano so she could hear what he’s got, and he says, ‘No, no, no,’ he did all kinds of bobbin’. I thought he was Dan Dailey tryin’ to get out of it. He didn’t play anything ’cause he didn’t have anything to play So he says, ‘Well, listen, we’ll meet again. I got a lot of ideas.’

  “So now we’re driving back and LaToya says, ‘Jeez, Danny, I don’t think so. He’s a little too weird.’ And I said, ‘Let me tell you something, Toya. He’s weird, he’s unique, he’s bizarre, he’s off the wall. But, believe me, you work with him and he will give you the hit record you’re seeking.”

  Two days later, urgent messages were waiting for Danny all over town, to call LaToya Jackson. Ringing her up, a terribly distraught LaToya related a horror story about her return visit to Phil’s house the night before. As she told it, Phil came into the room, sat down uncomfortably close to her, pressed a key into her hand, and murmured, “Would you like to go there with me?” Looking at the key, LaToya saw the words “Bates Motel” scrawled on it. “LaToya is a Jehovah’s Witness,” said Davis. “She doesn’t go to the movies or drink or do anything untoward. She didn’t know what it meant.”

  Getting no reaction, Phil asked her, “Don’t you know what that is? That’s the motel in Psycho where they killed all the pretty young girls.”

  Phil was apparently drunk, and LaToya did not know if he was trying to make her laugh or freak her out. “She became absolutely frantic,” Davis said. “She spent the next four hours trying to get out of his clutches. And he is now doing all kinds of outrageous conversation. He’s doin’ lines like 1 don’t need your fuckin’ brother,’ things that had nothin’ to do with what she was there for. He goes into these tirades every fifteen minutes and he leaves
and comes back each time with a brand-new personality, either one that’s vitriolic or entertaining or up and down. And she tells me he made a couple of moves on her.”

  Several times LaToya made up excuses that she had an early-morning meeting and had to go, but Phil would say, “It’s all right. The people you’re supposed to meet just called and said it’s cancelled.” Finally, on the verge of screaming, LaToya got out. Then, all through the night, Phil kept calling her house in Encino and badgering her, so much so that Joe Jackson, the austere father of the clan, had to get on the phone. Phil supposedly was abusive and insulting to him. For a few tense hours a very real confrontation loomed between the Jackson and Spector compounds.

  “I don’t have to tell you, at the end of this, how bad I was made to look to Joe Jackson,” said Davis.

  Later that morning, Danny got a call from Phil. “Danny, you shoulda protected me,” he said innocently.

  “Phil, you had no business doing that,” Danny told him.

  But Phil had no qualms of conscience about his treatment of LaToya; instead, he made it into a loyalty test for Danny. “He started putting me on the defensive. He said ‘She’s a cunt’ and this and that. I said, ‘Phil, you’re saying things to her she doesn’t know about. She’s a Jehovah’s Witness, they don’t know about that stuff.’ And he goes, ‘Oh no? Well, she was no Jehovah’s Witness when I fucked her.’

  “That’s Phil. There’s no way to explain Phil, no way to understand him. There used to be a time when I really understood why he could say things like that and that kind of hatefulness, when I tolerated it. Now I just can’t fathom it.”

  When Danny would not go along with Phil’s acocunt of the incident nor his attacks on LaToya, Phil tried to placate him. “He ended up telling me he wanted me to go to work for him again. More bullshit. I know him. I know when he’s bullshitting. When he pulls that crap on me I tell him. ‘Hey, Phil, this is Danny, remember?’ ”

  Danny continued to stay in touch with Phil, but never again bothered to take acts over to him. “I don’t think he wants to go ahead on anything,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s insecurity. He didn’t seem afraid to tackle the LaToya project, but it was like he did all that shit to turn her off. He’s so agonizing. That’s why nobody brings him a project anymore, nobody wants him to produce ’em. I think he wanted the LaToya thing more than his right arm. I think he is desperate for work. But he . . . he just turns people off. Who knows why? He is a case history in Psych 1. I could talk from now until next Thursday and I could not explain Phil Spector.”

  Phil broke his drought of inactivity in 1987, but his trips to the studio were fleeting and furtive, the projects immaterial. Seymour Stein at Sire got him to remix tracks by the British band Depeche Mode. As an introduction of eighties’ rock, it might have been the means of another Spector rising. But when Phil consumed more time than the group could stand, they took it out of his hands. “That was another example of people having no conception of what he is,” Dan Kessel said. “They got all excited that they could get him and then expected it to be a oneday thing. That’s one reason Phil doesn’t work. Sure, Phil doesn’t want to come back and have a flop. There’s a little stage fright. But in his mind, he’s been doin’ it for so long that he’s not tied up in knots saying, ‘Can I do it?’ He’s older, he’s mellowed, the business thing is great. He doesn’t need hassles, by monstrosities like Depeche Mode.”

  Staying on safer and more edifying ground. Phil’s other job was to record redheaded teen actress Molly Ringwald singing the lead vocal over an old instrumental track of the Ronettes’ “(The Best Part of) Breakin’ Up” for a movie called The Pickup Artist, a banality that was gone from theaters after one week. This was both a business decision and a reward to Ringwald, whose teenage heartache movies have exposed Spector’s old tunes to another new teen generation.

  Up until the mid-eighties Spector had played hide-and-seek with people to advertise that he was still viable. There would be phone calls at all hours to favored old intimates, to Doc Pomus, to Irwin Levine, to Bobby Sheen, bidding them to be ready to join him on some massive project. He called Gerry Goffin and wanted him to get back with Carole King after a decade, for a project that was going to be that momentous. “He said he was gonna make a big comeback and he was gonna make another $100 million,” Goffin said. “He wanted me and Carole to write with him again.” Gerry went to the trouble of getting Carole’s approval, then never heard another word from Phil. “I remember that he told me, 1 may have to produce Frank Sinatra before I get to produce anybody who can sell records/ I think he felt it was hard for him to be accepted again by important people.”

  But then the calls stopped. Rather than feeling he had to have people at the ready in case he did find a way back—or con them into thinking he would—he apparently decided he would be happier not even trying. His longtime and much overburdened personal secretary, Donna Sekulidis, who was Phil’s voice on these phone forays and in all other aspects of his existence, was fired in 1987 after she and Phil argued over which of them owned the typewriter she used; her stomach free of Maalox after ten years, Sekulidis then concentrated on a rock band she managed but had never told Phil about, fearing he would want to get involved and make them crazy. With Donna gone, Phil’s connections with the business began to dry up. In the past that would have made him panic; now he didn’t care.

  When Marty Machat died in early 1988, Phil hired a new man to handle business matters—and it was none other than Allen Klein. This was a message to the industry that Spector intended to settle old business disputes right away. For years, Spector had been squabbling with Leiber and Stoller’s Trio Music over back royalty splits. Immediately, Klein put Trio on notice that he would get every cent due Phil. Spector had also been close to issuing his old hits in a gigantic compact disc package through Rhino Records. At one point, Klein was said to have gotten Phil to take that potential gold mine away from Rhino so that it could be released on Klein’s ABKCO label.

  For years Phil had lived with a woman named Janice Savala, a thin brunette who once worked as a secretary for Lester Sill at Screen Gems. When she moved in with Phil, her friends were prohibited from calling her because Phil did not want her talking to outsiders; in time, she lost almost all outside contact. She evidently did not mind the sacrifices she had to make in order to be with him. “Janice is positively clonelike,” Danny Davis said. “She is completely devoted to him, an absolute lackey.” The years that she remained loyal and submissive did her well. When Phil reached his mid-forties and felt it was time for a new round of domesticity, he began telling people that he and Janice had married and that she bore him a second set of twins. Hounded again by his landlords, Phil finally moved to another palace of a house, but in the prosaic suburban grotto of Pasadena. There the industry couldn’t touch him.

  “He’s definitely on the progressive Howard Hughes plan,” Dan Kessel said.

  Three decades after “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” the rock-and-roll world had little appreciation for the fact that when Phil Spector invented modern rock he did so when the music industry treated rock and roll as a poor stepchild. While Spector’s bruising confrontations, his ruthlessness, and his bucking of convention helped usher rock to a dominant role in modern pop, even some of those who most closely aided his cause—and theirs—grew to believe that he damaged them. Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, their words and music immortalized by Spector, still bleed from the woulds inflicted over twenty years ago. “There are just too many things I’d rather not talk about, about the collaboration,” Weil said. The industry is still intolerant. No Spector record was ever nominated for a Grammy award, nor does it seem possible that he could be considered for a lifetime award for producing or songwriting.

  “He deserves an award, he really does,” Lester Sill said. “In spite of whatever he is, he’s certainly a genius. I think if he just didn’t let that crazy ego get in his way, he would still be an incredible producer today. It’s a shame too. He
became such a dark, morbid person. That black cloud is all around him.

  “I hurt for him because he’s such a talented guy and he needed help a long time ago. There was a kind side of him that people never saw. I remember the late Paul Case, and how Phil couldn’t do enough for Paul, and how Phil once gave everyone in the office Polaroid cameras that cost him $150 each. There was that side to him. But he never allowed it to flourish and it hurt him.”

  “I’m on the board of the Music Hall of Fame and two of the last six years I’ve brought up Phil’s name for an award of some sort,” said Marshall Lieb, whose long footpath from the Teddy Bears was pocked with his own destructive tendencies and withdrawals before he was reclaimed by motion picture scoring. “But they’ve gone somewhere else. There’s a lot of opposition to Phil on the Grammys too. His name comes up, and it’s nice to know it keeps coming up, but it doesn’t get much further than that. It’s just automatic; mention the name and people just sort of say ‘What a bonebrain.’ It all has to do with the past, and right now it’s not far enough in the past for some people to overlook some of the things Phil has done on a personal level.

  “But, with me, there’s enough time gone by where when I run into somebody who knows him I’ll say, ‘Tell Phil that Marsh said hello, give him my number, tell him to call me.’ The scars and wounds are not there any longer. Like veryone else, there was a time I was bugged at him for something or other. But you put that stuff aside. Life is too dang short.

  “I would really like to put Phil on a picture. I gave a lot of people their first jobs in film, in a new medium other than recording, and that would be great for Phil, get him away from the bullshit and pressures of that industry. I have fought to offer Phil a picture project, but you mention it to movie people and they get scared; you’re not sure that he’s gonna show up and how he’s gonna act—which is also a fear of the awards people. I could make it work, though, I know I could. He would know I wasn’t like the Mo Ostins of the world, that I cared about him as a person.”