by Mick Brown
The abundance of relatives in the city meant that weekends were invariably given over to visiting or entertaining. The young Harvey grew particularly close to Bertha’s sister, his aunt Doraine, who for twenty years shared an apartment with her brother Louis without either talking to the other, although nobody in the family could remember why.
Ben Spector was a short, heavily built man with a cheerful, gregarious manner. Harvey idolized him, and his happiest childhood memories would be of being taken by his father to Coney Island and Radio City, which Harvey thought was “like heaven.” Bertha was also short and compact, an intensely house-proud woman, much concerned with appearances, who wore her hair in a tight perm and always made a point of dressing in her best. If Ben—to outward appearances at least—radiated the sense of being at ease in the world, Bertha seemed forever at odds with it. She made high demands of her husband; no matter what Ben did, how much he earned, it was never quite enough.
Harvey, the longed-for son, was doted on by his mother and adored by his elder sister. But he was a sickly child. From an early age, he suffered from bouts of asthma, and his skin was allergic to strong sunlight, which increased Bertha’s sense of motherly protectiveness. He was also overweight and often teased at school; he found it hard to make friends—a fact not helped by Bertha’s wariness of other children. She discouraged him from inviting his friends into their home, or visiting theirs. Throughout his childhood, Bertha would instill in Harvey the sense that the world was a dangerous, threatening place and that people were, on the whole, not to be trusted.
Many years later, Harvey would tell a story designed to suggest both how “very different” he felt himself to be from other children, and how this difference intimated an authority that would serve him in later life. “I always liked to do different things than everybody else; preferred being in the background. It was always a joke in New York. There was a game called pitcher, batter, catcher, which you’d play with a stick and a ball on the streets. And when I was a kid it was a joke that ‘Joe, you’ll pitch; Jack, you’ll catch; Jim, you’ll hit; and Phil, you’ll produce the game.’ That was how I achieved my success, because I was smarter than most.” The story has the ring of fable. Nobody would ever have talked about stickball games being “produced” and nor would any of his friends have had an inkling of what life held in store for Harvey Philip Spector. But the moral is clear. He always believed he was destined for greatness.
There is a photograph of the Spector family, taken when Harvey was around eight years of age. It shows the family seated at a restaurant table, apparently for a celebration—a birthday or an anniversary, perhaps. Ben Spector is smartly dressed in a wide-lapel suit and patterned tie, grinning into the camera, the proud head of the family. Harvey sits to his right, chubby-cheeked, hair neatly spruced and smiling shyly. To Ben’s left sits Bertha, as neat as a pin; and beside her, Shirley, lips heavily rouged, eyes devouring the camera with the relish of the movie or singing star she dreamed of becoming.
There is nothing in Ben Spector’s expression that hints at despair, but Ben was evidently a deeply troubled man—troubled enough to take his own life. Early on the morning of April 20, 1949, his dead body was found slumped in the front seat of his car, parked outside premises at 1042 Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn, some five miles from the Spector family home in Soundview. Ben had apparently run a length of tubing from the car’s exhaust pipe into the front seat, turned on the ignition, wound up the window and waited to die.
The coroner’s report would rule the time of death at 8:05 a.m., and the cause of death as “Carbon Monoxide Poisoning—Asphyxia. Toxicology report notes 0.65 CO in his blood. Death ruled as suicide.” No details were recorded as to who had found the body, or at what time.
The body was taken to the Kings County Hospital morgue, and on April 22, Ben Spector was laid to rest in the Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, New York. A year later, an imposing granite headstone was placed on the grave, engraved with a Star of David and the epitaph to know him was to love him.
Exactly why Ben Spector should have decided to take his own life is not known. There were stories that he was experiencing chronic financial difficulties, although there is no evidence to support this. There is a suggestion too that Ben had health worries, brought on by increasingly worsening diabetes. But given the mental troubles that would afflict both his son and daughter in years to come, it is not unreasonable to assume that he too suffered from depression, a depression so acute that he was driven to kill himself. Whatever the reasons, it is impossible to imagine the effect of Ben’s death on the nine-year-old son who idolized him. Suicide was regarded as a cause for shame, a stigma. Shirley and Harvey were told only that their father had met with an accident. It would be some time before they were to discover that Ben had taken his own life. For the bereaved child the suicide of a parent often gives rise to deep feelings not only of pain and abandonment, but also of guilt and responsibility. In the solipsistic view of a child, the world revolves around their actions; if my father killed himself it can only be because I drove him to it. For Harvey, Ben’s suicide would be a cause of pain, confusion and recrimination for years to come, something he would talk about only to his closest intimates, and then only with the greatest difficulty. Fifty-two years later, Phil Spector would sit on the sofa in his Alhambra castle, hand trembling at his glass, reflecting on the “something I’d either not accepted, or I’m not prepared to accept or live with in my life, that I don’t know about perhaps, that I’m facing now.” That something was surely the suicide of Ben Spector.
The loss of Ben cast an immovable pall over the house on Manor Avenue. Harvey, the chubby boy who had been teased about his weight, grew sallow and thin, as if the very life was being squeezed out of him. In Bertha it left a legacy compounded of shame, sadness and a deep bitterness that would stay with her for the rest of her life. “Whenever Bertha talked about Ben, she would describe him as ‘my lovely husband,’ and in the next breath call him a son-of-a-bitch,” remembers one friend. “She’d loved him, and he’d abandoned her.” Bertha and Shirley argued constantly, and at the age of seventeen, in a bid to escape the growing tensions in the family home, Shirley made a hasty and improvident marriage to a serviceman. But the union quickly faltered in the face of Bertha’s disapproval, and Shirley returned home. In 1953 Bertha decided to make a new life for herself and the children away from Manor Avenue and all the memories it held. She had relatives living in Los Angeles, and she decided to join them there. Her father, George, who was by now a widower, moved with them.
California. A new beginning. The cold darkness of the Bronx, and all its bad memories, fading in the cloudless California sky. The family settled in a small apartment at 6021/2 Spaulding Avenue, a quiet residential side street south of Melrose Avenue in the Fairfax district, the hub of the Jewish population in Los Angeles. Fifty years on, the area remains largely unchanged. The main thoroughfare, Fairfax Avenue, is a broad avenue lined with palm trees, consisting largely of one-storey buildings built in the ’30s, lined with dressmakers, grocery stores, small family restaurants, a synagogue. Then as now, its social center was Canter’s, a cavernous and noisy delicatessen, perpetually filled with families and students from the nearby Fairfax High School. Bertha took a job as a seamstress, leaving early each morning to take the bus downtown. Shirley took a job as a secretary. Harvey became a latchkey kid. For a year, he attended John Burroughs Junior High School, a twenty-minute walk from his home, on the junction of Wilshire Boulevard and McFadden, in the Miracle Mile district. In 1954, at the age of fourteen, he transferred to Fairfax High School (motto: “Never Say Die, Say Do”), located on the junction of Melrose and Fairfax avenues, just four blocks from the Spector home.
The student body of Fairfax was overwhelmingly Jewish. “On Jewish holidays they’d hold school in a telephone booth. There were about six kids there,” remembers one old boy. The school had a high reputation for academic achievement and for producing students who would go on to excel in
the law, medicine and business. The standing joke was that Fairfax students had more chance of owning a football team than playing for one. Pupils at neighboring high schools called it “Fairy-fax.” Harvey felt out of place from the first day he stepped through the school gates.
Although he had left the East Coast when he was twelve years old, Spector would always remain, in his own mind, a New Yorker, romanticizing his childhood in the Bronx and intimating an umbilical connection to the urban sensibility of rhythm and blues and street-corner doo-wop that would come to play such an important part in his music.
He had no disposition toward California life. He hated the beach, the big skies, the perpetual sunshine, and anything to do with “outdoors.” The heat made him uncomfortable, strong sunlight irritated his skin. As well as suffering from asthma, he had inherited his father’s condition and was borderline diabetic. While he would never need insulin pills or injections, he would religiously watch his sugar intake, and in later life become an avid reader of food labels.
California was a land of giants, bronzed, healthy, vitamin-enriched. Spector was small, pale and scrawny, with watery eyes, a receding chin and a whining, adenoidal voice: the outsider, “always different.” He disliked everything about himself, even his name. “Harvey” was the sound of his mother whining, the painful memory of his father’s voice. By his mid-teens he was insisting that he be called Phillip. Bertha refused, and to Spector’s intense chagrin would continue to address him as Harvey throughout his life. In later years, whenever she wrote letters addressed to “Harvey Spector” he would return them unopened.
Phil’s physical frailty and the trauma of his father’s death had inculcated a suffocatingly protective attitude toward him in Bertha and Shirley. “They were like a tag team,” remembers one friend. “Two very driven, bossy Jewish women, fighting for him, driving him and smothering him.”
He would seldom invite friends to the small apartment on Spaulding Avenue, and Bertha always seemed to have an excuse for why he shouldn’t visit others. “Bertha wouldn’t let Phil cross the street on his own. She didn’t trust the world. Phil wasn’t allowed to do anything without her.”
In later life, Spector would tell friends that he always believed his mother favored Shirley, and for Bertha nothing he ever did was good enough. The chiding that had once been directed toward her husband, she now directed toward her son. “Bertha was the kind of woman who’s always on your ass,” says another family friend. “She was not a nurturing woman. She didn’t give love. She just didn’t have that in her.”
Hanging like a shroud over the family home was the memory of Ben. “There was a lot of shame around the issue. Bertha told him, you will not discuss the specifics of this, ever. Because that’s the kind of stuff that spreads on the school yard for months.” His father’s suicide remained the young Phil’s dark secret, too painful for him to bear alone, but impossible to share with anyone else.
Quiet and introverted, he found it hard to make friends. In the jungle hierarchy of Fairfax—as in any other high school—the criteria for popularity were either good looks or sporting prowess, and Spector had neither. While he loved sports—in later life he would own a courtside season ticket for the Los Angeles Lakers—and more than anything would have loved to have been a baseball player, he was too small and weak ever to make the team.
He was a bright child who loved reading. He took a particular interest in American history and developed a fascination with Abraham Lincoln that would last all his life. In later years, one of his favorite conversational jokes was to parrot the line, “Apart from that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” But lacking in either sporting prowess or academic brilliance, to many of his peers he remained almost invisible. “He wasn’t a cool guy, he wasn’t a smart guy and he wasn’t a funny guy,” says Burt Prelutsky, who was in the same year as Spector. “Had there been such a thing as ‘least likely to succeed,’ Phil would have been it.”
To earn extra pocket money, for a year he stacked books after hours in the school library alongside a boy named Cary Cooper. New to the neighborhood, Cooper had few friends and felt some affinity with Phil. When Phil told Cary that his father had died (without explaining how) and talked about his unhappy home life, Cary experienced “this overwhelming feeling that he was a sad character. I felt sorry for him. I wanted to support him and didn’t want to be one of these other people that rejected him. He felt rejected, I know that. His peer group rejected him.”
Most Fairfax students were enrolled in social clubs, not unlike college fraternities. Members would be voted in, the most popular students joining the most elite clubs. Those who were not members of any club were known as “bennies.”
“It meant that you were not a popular person, a social isolate,” Cooper says. “Phil was in that category. It wasn’t just that he wasn’t a sports person or good-looking. He didn’t seem to have the interpersonal skills to compensate.”
For a while Spector served as the school’s “town crier”—a role that entailed him standing up in front of the school during assembly in a white letterman sweater, reading out announcements and then leading the assembly in the school song. The town crier also acted as chief cheerleader at the football and baseball games. “It was kind of a prestigious position in some people’s eyes,” remembers Ron Milstein, who took over as crier from Spector, “but one where most people thought you were a complete and total jerk for wanting to do it.”
Spector and Milstein became friends. “Kids who couldn’t compete academically would hang out in horticulture, or auto shop, and Phil befriended some of those people. I think he felt compassionate; he felt for those people who were down-and-out or not popular. And there were people who felt for Phil. He was a sensitive person, but he was mixed up. He could be very witty and sharp; he used humor to get through things. It’s a good ploy. But I don’t think he felt very comfortable in himself.”
Milstein believes that Spector also felt “somewhat embarrassed” by his Jewishness, in a time when anti-Semitic feeling often coursed just below the surface of daily life. “We got an invitation to a party out in Burbank, that we knew was going to be predominantly Gentile. Phil decided that because our names were so obviously Jewish we would go under assumed names. He said, ‘I’ll be Phil Harvey,’ and I was going to be Ron Mills. So we get there and we’re meeting people and all of a sudden I hear Phil’s voice: ‘Hey, Milstein, get over here!’ He basically blew our cover and we had to talk our way out of the whole thing.”
While Spector might have failed to make his mark in any other subject on the Fairfax curriculum, in one, at least, he was outstanding. Growing up in a household where the radio was on constantly, he had developed an early love for dance music, show tunes and the popular hits of the day. He learned to play the accordion and would occasionally perform at weddings and bar mitzvahs for pocket money. Fairfax had a strong reputation for music—alumni would include the songwriter Jerry Leiber, the producer and trumpeter Herb Alpert and, some years later, the singer Natalie Cole. Spector played French horn in the school orchestra, but he could find his way around almost any instrument and had a natural gift for sight-reading and improvisation. In later years, his music teacher, Dr. Homer Hummel, would tell his pupils that he had learned more from Spector in music classes than Spector had learned from him. Phil adored Dr. Hummel, and when he retired some years later, made a point of turning up at his farewell party, to tell his old mentor how important his teachings on harmony had been in crafting the Teddy Bears records.
Bertha encouraged her son’s passion, buying him a guitar as a bar mitzvah present on his thirteenth birthday.
The record producer and scene maker Kim Fowley once described pop as “music for lonely people, made by other lonely people.” And for Spector, his small bedroom on Spaulding Avenue became his sanctuary. Returning home from school, he would go straight to his room, shut the door behind him, pick up his guitar and turn on the radio.
The music that by the mid-�
�50s had come to be known as rock and roll had been woven from myriad different strands, but its essence was the appropriation of black musical styles by white performers, and the adopting of what was held to be a black sensibility—visceral, uninhibited, hedonistic—by a teenage audience. Bill Haley’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” which in 1954 became the first rock and roll record to make the Top 10, had earlier been recorded by the rhythm and blues singer Big Joe Turner. Haley’s version diluted the lascivious suggestiveness of the original sufficiently to be played widely on the radio, but to its teenage audience its meaning was clear—shake, rattle and roll was sex. In the same year, at the Sun Studios in Memphis, Elvis Presley recorded his first single, “That’s Alright, Mama”—a blues song originally recorded by Arthur Crudup, infusing it with a country inflection to create a hybrid that came to be known as rockabilly.
This music came in a variety of regional guises. There was the rolling, piano-driven style of New Orleans, embodied in the recordings of Fats Domino and Little Richard (respectively, relaxed and frenetic—and both of whose songs were traduced in anodyne cover versions by the white ballad singer Pat Boone). There was the Chicago rhythm and blues of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley; the Memphis rockabilly of Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins; and the doo-wop and vocal group sound that flourished primarily in the urban centers of Los Angeles and New York through such groups as the Crows, the Chords, the Platters, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers.
But as much as rock and roll, in all its variants, galvanized the teenage audience, its impact on the charts was slow to be felt. The best-selling artists on the Billboard charts in 1955 were not Fats Domino and Elvis Presley but crooners, balladeers and close-harmony groups—Frank Sinatra, the Fontane Sisters, Mitch Miller—who already seemed to belong to a passing era.