by Mick Brown
For years, Spector had been a chimera, viewed largely through the distorting lens of his own legend, but seldom seen in public. He was a person whom others traded stories about, each more lurid and fantastic than the last, and in the wake of the killing the stories were exhumed and retold with a vampiric relish; stories of his control-freakery and his drinking jags, his tempestuous marriage to Ronnie Bennett, the lead singer of the Ronettes, the temper tantrums, the bodyguards, and, of course, the guns. There was the story of how he had once pulled a gun on John Lennon, and on Leonard Cohen. Johnny Ramone, of the punk group the Ramones, whom Spector produced in 1979, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times, recounting a story of how Spector had once held them captive at gunpoint in his home. Gary and Donte Spector, two of the three sons Spector adopted in the ’70s but from whom he had been estranged for years, regaled the tabloid press and celebrity TV programs with lurid tales of the abuse they had allegedly suffered during childhood. “While we don’t know if Dad killed this lady,” Donte was quoted as saying, “he should be locked up. He’s a sick man.”
The fact that in the few years before the shooting Spector had actually been leading a quiet and sober life, that his worst problems were seemingly behind him—“I want to be a reasonable man”—and that he had recently returned to the studio for the first time in years, was lost to most people. It was more convenient for all concerned for Phil Spector to be crazy.
There had been record producers before Phil Spector, of course; men with the artistic sensibility and vision to discover and nurture extraordinary talent, like John Hammond at Columbia Records, who discovered Billie Holiday; or with the enterprise, determination and business savvy to build their own record labels, like Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic, the Chess brothers in Chicago, and Sam Phillips, whose Sun recordings with Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others laid one of the principal foundation stones for rock and roll in the 1950s. All of these men were talented and smart. But none were to leave quite the indelible mark on popular music that Phil Spector did. Not only did Spector create records in a wholly original style that would influence a succession of artists from Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys to Bruce Springsteen; and not only were they hits. But Spector challenged the very order of the record business at the time, insisting that everything be done on his terms and nobody else’s.
He controlled everything himself: finding the artists, co-writing the songs, production, publicity, quality control. Because he made the sound, and the sound was what sold, he became, uniquely for a producer, bigger than his artists—a tiny, strutting tyrant in dandy rags and Cuban heels. “He was the first of the anarchists/pop-music millionaires,” the writer Nik Cohn observed. “At last, in him, odium equaled money.”
The critic Kenneth Tynan once wrote that, the gift of talent apart, what enables one to exercise that talent is the ability to impose oneself (s’imposer). Roman Polanski, Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles and Marlon Brando were among those whom Tynan named as possessing this gift. “Definition of an imposer,” he wrote in his diaries: “one about whom one worries whether his response to one’s next remark will be a smile or a snarl.”
Spector was an imposer. Physically small and unprepossessing, he was nonetheless a monumentally commanding figure, who by dint of charm, magnetism, genius or sheer force of personality was able to persuade others to follow his vision, inspiring in them a need for his approval and a fear of his disapprobation—the desire, as Tynan would have put it, for a smile rather than a snarl.
When I first started to approach the friends and associates who had known and worked with Spector over the years, I was struck by how forcefully he imprinted himself on people’s memories and feelings, and how strongly he divided opinion.
Recalling his first meeting with Spector in the early 1960s, on the threshold of his greatest success, the recording engineer Larry Levine talked vividly of his “kinetic” quality—an abrasive, unsettling aura so palpable that Spector could change the atmosphere in a room simply by walking into it. “It’s like the Bermuda Triangle—there’s no explanation for what happens in a place, and yet with Phil things happened.”
Levine had disliked him on sight, but came to hold a quite different view. He quoted the song that had given Spector his first million-selling record in 1958, when he was just eighteen years of age, its title borrowed from the epitaph on his father’s gravestone, to know him was to love him. “You need to get to know Phil to love him. I didn’t then,” Levine told me. “But I grew to love him. And I do now.”
Several people quoted this song to me, in tones of affection, reverence, or heavy irony—a recurring punctuation mark to their stories about Spector’s brilliance, or his perversity, his kindness, or his duplicity. A successful career woman, sophisticated, beautiful and highly intelligent, whom one suspected had known many fascinating men in her life, described Spector as the most fascinating of all—“completely mesmerizing.”
Some refused to believe that Spector could have been responsible for the death of Lana Clarkson. Others saw it as the inevitable fulfillment of a character who had been at best eccentric and at worst dangerously unstable. Don Kirshner, the music publisher who provided many of the songs that Spector alchemized into hits, told me that from the moment he first met Spector in 1961 he had believed he was “a candidate for doing himself or other people harm. You thought he would be someone who would go down in flames to be known, who’d make a statement in a headline.” For some, it was as if Spector, in writing the final chapter on his downfall, had himself been the instrument of a revenge that they had been silently wishing on him for years.
Some refused outright to talk to me at all, either out of loyalty to Spector, or, it seemed, out of fear that they would incur his displeasure. Spector not only produced but also co-wrote many of his greatest hits. And while it is more than forty years since his astonishing run of chart success, he continues to control the copyrights of his songs and, by implication, the royalties his co-writers could expect to receive from them.
“You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” the song which Spector co-wrote and produced for the Righteous Brothers, holds the distinction of having the most radio plays of any pop single in history. But when I contacted the Righteous Brothers, Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield, I was told they had no interest in discussing Spector. I persisted and eventually received a letter from Bobby Hatfield. Producing “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” Spector decided to forgo the duo’s usual practice of sharing the lead vocals, instead giving almost the whole song to Bill Medley and leaving Hatfield to sing only a minor part. Spector had told me the story of how a peeved Hatfield asked what he was supposed to do while Medley was singing. “You can take the money to the bank,” Spector joked back. But Hatfield offered another twist. His letter was capitalized and written in an eerily neat hand, giving the impression of bitterness clenched tightly in an iron fist.
DEAR MICK,
RATHER THAN GOING INTO SEVERAL REASONS, I THINK THIS ONE BRIEF REASON WILL SUFFICE. WE NEEDED A “B” SIDE FOR “LOVIN’ FEELING” FAST. BILL AND I WROTE A TWO CHORD PIECE OF SHIT CALLED “THERE’S A WOMAN” IN ABOUT 20 MINUTES. WE RECORDED IT WITH PIANO, BASS AND DRUMS. WE LET PHIL PUBLISH IT ALONE. WILL NEVER FORGET THE FIRST TIME I SAW THE SINGLE. WRITERS…HATFIELD, MEDLEY AND SPECTOR.
RIGHTEOUSLY, BOBBY HATFIELD.
Two months after I received his letter, Bobby Hatfield was found dead in a hotel room in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a few hours before he was due to perform a show. He was sixty-three.
Spector the control freak. That was one side of the story, for sure. But there was more to it than that. Over fifty years, Spector has so compartmentalized his life that it seems that few have truly known him at all. Few people were aware that in the years when he was out of the public eye, Phil Spector was leading an approximation of a normal, domestic life. Ahmet Ertegun, the great elder statesman of the American music business, had known Spector for more than forty years, but expressed surprise when I told him that
in the 1980s Spector had been happily married to a woman with whom he had two children. “Phil was married? I had no idea.” Spector, Ertegun said, had been a “very good friend to me. But it’s hard if you don’t communicate. Phil had a lot of acolytes, but I don’t think he would really open up to any of them. Maybe he didn’t trust anybody enough to do that.”
And what about the death of Lana Clarkson? Ertegun sadly shook his head. Sure, Phil was eccentric and things could sometimes get out of hand. But killing somebody? “I can’t believe that. Phil doesn’t have any meanness in him to kill anybody.” He thought for a moment, and then asked, “Was he alone with this girl? He should never have been left alone…”
Seated in the living room of his Alhambra castle, Phil Spector told me, “I don’t like to talk, and I can’t stand to be talked about. I can’t stand to be looked at. I can’t stand to be photographed. I can’t stand the attention. But at the same time I want the recognition.” And after four hours’ talking he told me that all he wanted was to be “a reasonable man.” It was a phrase that came up with everybody I would talk with, and the reaction was always the same. Reasonable! When had Phil Spector ever been reasonable?
2
“It Was Phillip Who Was Moving Fastest”
Seated in the living room of his Alhambra castle, hand trembling at his glass, Phil Spector looked for some clue to the mental difficulties that had assailed him throughout his life. His parents, Ben and Bertha, had been first cousins, he told me. “I don’t know genetically whether or not that had something to do with what I am or who I became. But to all intents and purposes I would say I’m probably relatively insane, to an extent. To an extent…”
Both Bertha’s and Benjamin’s families were from the Ukraine, part of the great diaspora of Russian Jews who arrived in America in the early part of the twentieth century. It was a journey to a new world, a new life and, very often, a new identity. Arriving at Ellis Island, after a voyage that usually entailed extreme discomfort and hardship, new arrivals would mount a staircase to the registration hall, where medical examiners would cast an appraising eye over them, separating the halt and lame from the apparently able-bodied. Long lines would bring them at last to the immigration officials who would check their name against the ship’s manifest. There, the new arrivals would often find their European names transformed at a stroke to an Anglicized spelling.
Apparently, such was the fate of Bertha’s father, whom American naturalization records would name as both “George Spektar” and “George Spektor,” and who was born in the province of Podolia in southwest Ukraine in 1883.
Clara, the woman whom George took as his wife, was also born in Russia, although it is not known when they met or married. But by the time of the birth of their first child, Doraine, in 1906, they were living in France. Bertha was their second daughter, born in Paris on July 15,1911. She was barely four months old when her father left to make a new home for the family in America. George traveled first to England, and on November 17 set sail from the port of Liverpool on a steamship of the White Star line, the Adriatic, docking in New York ten days later. His immigration forms listed his occupation as tailor.
In April the following year he was joined by Clara and their two young daughters, who had sailed on the liner La Touraine from Le Havre. George and Clara would go on to have two more children. By 1923, when George signed the last forms of his petition for naturalization—swearing like all new immigrants that he was neither “an anarchist, a polygamist nor a believer in the practice of polygamy”—George Spektor or Spektar had finally settled on the name “Spector.”
The family of Phil Spector’s father, Benjamin, would replicate this same journey to a new life, and a new identity, a few years later. Immigration records show that “Gedajle Spektus” or “Gedajk Spektres,” was born in 1871 in Odessa, Russia—Ukraine’s main port city—and arrived in America in June 1913, having sailed, third class, on the steamship Cleveland from the port of Hamburg in Germany. He brought with him his wife Bessie, five sons and a daughter, all of whom had been born in Russia. (A second daughter would be born three years after the family’s arrival in America.)
Benjamin was the third son, but there is some discrepancy in the official records as to his exact date of birth. The coroner’s report on his death in 1949 records his birth date as January 10, 1903. However, the petition for naturalization signed by his father records Benjamin’s birthdate as June 4, 1902. This certificate shows that the transformation of Benjamin’s father to American citizen was completed with his acquisition of a new name: Gedajle Spektus or Gedajk Spektres now signed himself “George Spector.” His occupation was recorded as “dry-goods merchant.”
In later years, Spector family legend would have it that Benjamin enlisted in the armed forces when America entered World War I in 1917, and served overseas. But as he would have been at most sixteen years of age at the time of the war’s end, this seems unlikely. However, census records show a Benjamin Spector, born in 1903, enlisted in the U.S. Navy at St. Louis in 1920, and was assigned to a destroyer-minesweeper, USS Eagle, based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Why Benjamin should have enlisted in St. Louis is not known; nor is it known for how long he served in the navy. But it seems that by the late 1920s he had made his way to California, where he found work in the construction industry. By the early 1930s he had returned to New York, and it was there, in 1934, that he married Bertha Spector.
Were Ben and Bertha first cousins? For this to be the case at least one of their respective parents would have needed to be the brother or sister of one of the other set. We can assume that the two Georges were not brothers. This means either that Benjamin’s father, George, must have been the brother of Bertha’s mother, Clara; Bertha’s father, George, the brother of Benjamin’s mother, Bessie; or that Bessie and Clara were sisters. Quite which, if any, of these permutations is the correct one is now lost to time. But an intriguing clue to how closely related the two Spector families were lies in the petitions for naturalization filed by both heads of family. The petition for George, father of Bertha, is dated June 2, 1923, and witnessed by one Isidore Spector, a tailor, noted as residing at 102 East 105th Street, New York.
The petition for George, father of Benjamin, is dated four years later—June 1, 1927. This too was witnessed by the same Isidore Spector. There is also the name of a second witness: Clara Spector. Could this have been Bertha’s mother, and Bessie’s sister?
Benjamin and Bertha settled in the South Bronx, and their first child, a daughter, Shirley, was born in 1935. Then came tragedy. Bertha gave birth to a son who died when he was just two days old. The birth of a second son, then, was a cause of particular joy. According to his birth certificate, Harvey Philip Spector was born in the Prospect Hospital in the borough of the Bronx on December 26, 1939—a birthday he shared with Mao Tse-tung and Henry Miller. But the birth was sufficiently close to midnight of the previous day for Bertha to tell friends that the certificate was wrong, that her son had actually been born on December 25 and, as she would joke, that she had “given birth to the second Jesus.”
This confusion over Spector’s birthdate would be compounded in later years, when the year of his birth was misreported as 1940—an error that was perpetuated thereafter. For reasons that are unclear, he would also decide to add a second l to the name Philip.
Spector’s birth certificate lists his father Ben as being “age 36. Birthplace: Russia. Occupation: Ironworker. Place of work: Factory.”
Bertha is recorded as being “age 28. Birthplace: Paris, France. Occupation: Housewife. Place of business: Own home.”
The family’s place of residence was listed as 1029 Elder Avenue, in the Bronx. But shortly after Harvey’s birth the Spectors moved a short distance to a new home in the Soundview district. In later life, Spector would romanticize his childhood home, saying that he’d grown up “in a ghetto…that’s how I came to write ‘Spanish Harlem’.” But Soundview was hardly that; a respectable working-class residentia
l area, in the early part of the century it had been an Irish neighborhood, although by the time the Spectors arrived, its population was predominantly Jewish.
The family home, at 1027 Manor Avenue, stood in a row of modest, jerry-built, two-storey gray-brick houses, each of which would usually be occupied by two families—one on each floor. The house’s crenellated fascia lent it the appearance of a miniature castle; a short flight of steps led up to the front door. In the heat of summer, the steps of the houses along Manor Avenue—the stoops—would become the social thoroughfare as parents pulled their chairs outside in the hope of catching a breeze, and children played on the street.
A hundred yards north of the Spectors’ home, an elevated train clattered along the length of the area’s main shopping thoroughfare, Westchester Avenue, in those days lined with mom-’n’-pop stores, kosher delis, dress shops, tailors and family restaurants. A movie house, Loew’s—or “Lowees,” as it was known locally—showed films three or four weeks after they had opened in Manhattan—a few miles but a world away from the teeming streets of the Bronx. At the bottom of Manor Avenue was another broad thoroughfare, Bruckner Boulevard—now widened and fenced off as the Bruckner Expressway—and beyond that a leafy public park and the shoreline of the Long Island Sound.
Ben Spector worked long hours as an ironworker. He would leave the house early each morning, often arriving home after the children were in bed. But he was apparently a reliable provider. The family lived modestly but comfortably and was sufficiently well off to own their own car at a time when private car ownership in the city was comparatively rare, and to sometimes take winter vacations in Florida.
Both Ben and Bertha loved music. Ben played the guitar, and the radio in the small family home always seemed to be on, broadcasting dance music, show tunes and the latest hits of the day—fuel to Shirley’s ambitions to be a star of Broadway musicals or Hollywood movies.