Tearing Down the Wall of Sound

by Mick Brown

  Nobody’s gofer, and anxious to make a career elsewhere, Davis eventually walked out, with four months still left on his contract. Spector threatened to sue him for a quarter of a million dollars, but then dropped the case. He closed down Philles Records and the office on the Sunset Strip. It was taken over by the coming record producer Richard Perry, who in turn would pass it to another mogul-on-the-make, named David Geffen.

  Emil Farkas had gone. As his driver and principal bodyguard Spector took on a bearish Armenian named Mac Mashourian, whose fearsome appearance disguised a surprisingly refined and delicate temperament. Unmarried, Mashourian lived with his sister and her family, and his favorite topic of conversation was his mother, of whom he spoke with a rhapsodic sentimentality. “I can’t imagine that she was still living,” one friend remembers, “although Mac was not that old—he just seemed old.” To Spector he became as much a friend as an employee.

  Sometimes Spector would set forth in his Rolls-Royce with Mac at the wheel, immaculate in black suit and tie, to cruise his old watering holes. But the thrill had gone. Not only a new generation but a new species seemed to have descended on the Sunset Strip, decked out in Day-Glo and love beads. Spector was only twenty-seven, but already he seemed to belong to another age. Drugs seemed to have wrought some peculiar metabolic change in the record business. Marijuana was the new martini; LSD, the holy sacrament. Spector hated dope, the sense of time standing still, the woozy introspection, the touchy-feeliness of it all. LSD simply terrified him. He had taken the drug only once, under the supervision of Dr. Kaplan for psychotherapeutic purposes and, according to Danny Davis, it had triggered his most deep-rooted trauma: he had imagined himself watching his father commit suicide.

  “Phil always said he hated his father for what he did, taking the easy way out,” Davis would recall. “The acid went right to the heart of that hatred, to the pain, and it horrified him.”

  He could not bear the thought of losing control.

  In his interview with Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone, Spector would talk of how much he distrusted the growing influence of drugs in music. “A lot of people said they’ve listened to ‘River Deep’ stoned, and they had their earphones on, and they just freaked out, you know, with the sound. Well, you know nobody was stoned when they made the record, I can tell you that…Drugs tend to frighten me a little in an audience because it doesn’t make for good hearing and concentration. Now, I’d hate like hell to have an incoherent jury listening to me when I’m tryin’ to plead a case…just spaced out. I’d get frightened. Just like I hate to bet on a fighter or horse that’s drugged. That’s scary. I don’t give a fuck what they do in their own time, but if a disc jockey is going to review my record, and he’s stoned, well, you know, he can go either way. It depends on how good the stuff he took was, and he’s either gonna love my record or hate my record. But, I mean, you shouldn’t be judged that way. In fact—art can’t and shouldn’t be judged at all! Because it’s all a matter of taste.”

  The Monterey International Pop Festival, held over three days in June 1967 in the small northern California town of that name, was the harbinger of the new cultural order, a gathering of the new aristocracy of rock: Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead. Also appearing on the bill was the soul singer Otis Redding. Already a success on the chitlin’ circuit and the RB charts, Redding was an unknown quantity to most of the hippie audience at Monterey, but his high-octane “gotta, gotta, gotta” performance made him a surprise hit of the festival. Redding recorded for the Stax label, an affiliate of Ahmet Ertegun’s Atlantic Records, and after the concert he traveled down to Los Angeles for a meeting with Ertegun.

  Ertegun took Redding to Spector’s house, where Spector sat at the piano and paid tribute to his old friend and mentor, playing Redding a medley of songs that Ertegun had composed. “Otis was blown away. He knew some of the songs, but he had no idea I’d written them.” Then Ertegun suggested an excursion, to a club in Watts where Esther Phillips was performing. “Otis and Esther sang duets together for hours,” Ertegun remembered. “Phil was playing the piano, and he’d remind them of different songs and play the introduction and sing behind them. We were there until five in the morning. Two of my all-time favorite singers, Otis and Esther, and Phil on the piano. It was one of the greatest evenings of my life.”

  Six months later, on December 10, 1967, Otis Redding died when the small plane he was traveling in crashed into Lake Monona, in Madison, Wisconsin.

  The Last Movie was grinding slowly to a halt. September had come and gone, and by spring 1967 the film was no nearer to beginning production. Spector pulled out. According to Hopper, he encouraged Spector’s withdrawal from the project. “We went around to all the studios and got turned down by all of them. And Phil finally said that he was going to put up the money himself. I said, ‘How much money do you have, Phil?’ He said, ‘I have a million and a half dollars.’ Even though it was something I wanted more than anything else in the world, I told him I wasn’t going to let him do that. So that’s something that he thanked me for for his entire life.”

  Stewart Stern, who had been busy working on the screenplay, remembers it differently. “[Spector] didn’t understand what the situation was, that you have to do research, that you have to spend time alone, that you have to write—all that stuff. He had the itch. But it turned into a terrible business.”

  According to Stern, Spector refused to pay his fee—“not one dollar”—and Stern took legal action. “I hated to do it, but I had no alternative. As I remember it, my lawyer was doing everything in every way to serve him, and Spector was doing anything he could to outfox him and refuse to accept the subpoena.” In the end, the case was settled out of court.

  Hopper himself would eventually complete The Last Movie in 1970. It did not win Cannes, but it did win the Critics Prize at the Venice Film Festival. But American critics hated it, and two weeks after its release in New York the film closed. Dennis Hopper would not direct another film for a decade.

  The collapse of The Last Movie did nothing to impair Spector and Hopper’s friendship. They continued to spend time together at Canter’s or at the La Collina mansion, often in the company of Hopper’s friend, the actor Peter Fonda, with whom Hopper was now busily developing another film project, Easy Rider. The son of Henry Fonda, Peter seemed to be in a state of permanent rebellion against the conservative strictures of his upbringing. After a series of clean-cut film roles, he had become a cult figure acting in two Roger Corman films, The Wild Angels (a biker flick which earned Corman the singular distinction of being sued by the Hells Angels for what they perceived as a negative portrayal of their image), and The Trip, in which Dennis Hopper also appeared. Fonda had given up alcohol for pot and acid, and lived on raw eggs, bananas, milk and vitamin compound, mixed in a blender. He rode around Hollywood on his Harley motorcycle, dressed in a tuxedo and an assortment of military headgear. He wrote terrible poetry. He was close friends with the Byrds and their producer Terry Melcher.

  Spector may have been “bizarre,” Fonda remembers, but he “wasn’t weird yet. There was something wonderful about Phil. He was a gentle person, and somewhat afraid. But I was impressed. There was this diminutive fellow who obviously had all sorts of personal conflicts, but had still been able to make this wonderful music. Most record producers in those days were slightly slimy, slightly shady; you’d get the feeling they’d cook the books on you if they could. But Phil didn’t give that impression at all.”

  Fonda felt a particular kinship with Spector, founded on mutual tragedy. When Fonda was ten, his mother, the socialite Frances Seymour Brokaw Fonda, suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to a sanatorium. It was there, on her forty-second birthday, that she committed suicide, cutting her throat from ear to ear with a razor blade that she had supposedly secreted in a framed photograph of Peter and his sister Jane.

  Incredibly, Peter Fonda was never told the truth of his mother’s death. It was not until 1960, when
he was twenty-one years of age and working in a summer stock theater in upstate New York, that a man in a diner pulled out a yellowing news clipping from the New York Times reporting the suicide. Fonda was completely traumatized and would later tell the story of how he took to wearing a T-shirt with the words of the Beatles’ song “Day Tripper” printed on the front describing how it had taken him so long to find out…and on the back, “but I found out.”

  Spector never discussed his father’s suicide with Fonda, but after Fonda learned of it from a mutual friend he began to understand Spector’s air of vulnerability. “I felt such empathy for him over that; it was a point of acknowledgment of what that abandonment felt like.”

  In February 1968, Hopper and Fonda began work on Easy Rider. The film is an elegy to the counterculture, which tells the story of two bikers who on the proceeds from a cocaine deal set out on a voyage of discovery across America.

  Spector was invited to play the part of the drug dealer. “We wanted Phil because we knew we’d get his Rolls-Royce and Mac for free,” Fonda jokes. “But he also had a great look for the part.”

  The brief scene required Spector to meet with the two biker heroes, Captain America and Billy (played by Fonda and Hopper respectively), test the cocaine with a single snort and complete the transaction. Hopper had scouted a suitably desolate location, a slip road at the end of a runway at Los Angeles International Airport, and the shoot was conducted to the deafening roar of jets coming in to land. “I didn’t realize that Phil didn’t like loud noises, even though he was the Wall of Sound,” Fonda remembers, “and with his fear of flying as well…You see him cowering when a plane comes over; that wasn’t acting. He was scared shitless.”

  With the Ronettes no more, Ronnie had now more or less moved into the mansion on La Collina Drive. Knowing that her mother would not tolerate her “living in sin,” Ronnie told Beatrice that she was staying in hotels, busy with rehearsals and recordings. As Beatrice’s suspicions mounted, Spector proposed a radical solution. According to Ronnie, he telephoned her mother in New York, wildly improvising a story that he and Ronnie had just been married by “two practicing rabbis” in “an obscure Hebraic ceremony.” When Beatrice threatened to come out and see for herself, Spector, apparently convinced that she would accept the situation once she realized the luxury in which her daughter was living, offered to pay the fare himself. Beatrice arrived a couple of days later. Furious to discover that there was no wedding ring on her daughter’s finger and that she had been misled, she ordered Ronnie to pack her clothes and told her she was taking her back to New York. According to Ronnie, as the taxi pulled out of the drive to take them to the airport, Spector pulled a wad of $500 bills from his pocket and threw them on the ground, pleading, “It’s all yours. Just leave my wife here!”

  Back in New York, Beatrice moved her daughter from one relative to the next, in an attempt to avoid Spector’s increasingly desperate phone calls. To kill the boredom of watching television soap operas all day long—and in ominous portent of things to come—Ronnie had discovered a new distraction, drinking. “After two glasses I actually started to enjoy watching As the World Turns,” she would write in Be My Baby. At the same time, according to Ronnie, the financial implications of her affair with Spector were beginning to sink in among her family. “Not once did anyone ever talk about Phil without mentioning money in the same breath.”

  At length Spector himself arrived in New York, tracking down Ronnie to an aunt’s house in Spanish Harlem. The following day they left for California.

  In March 1968, Spector finally proposed that they should marry. Ronnie was giddy with the vista of unbroken happiness spreading before her. “First off, I’d be a star again,” she wrote in her autobiography. “Phil would be so inspired by married life that he’d climb right out of his rut and write half a dozen new songs for me…. We’d be the king and queen of rock and roll, and our life would be one never-ending party. Elvis and the Beatles and all the stars from The Late Late Show would drop by the mansion just to be around us.”

  The wedding day was set for April 14. On April 4 Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. King was one of Spector’s heroes, and just as he had been by the death of Lenny Bruce eighteen months earlier, he seemed to be thrown completely off balance. According to Ronnie, he retreated to his room and locked the door behind him, playing recordings of King’s speeches over and over again, only emerging three days before the wedding.

  The ceremony in the Beverly Hills City Hall was as subdued as Spector’s first wedding had been four years earlier. Beatrice had flown out from New York. She, Mac Mashourian, his brother Serge, who acted as best man, and Serge’s wife were the only guests. To celebrate, Spector took the wedding party to a Mahalia Jackson concert. Spector adored Jackson. Ronnie could not have cared less. After the concert, he told Mac to take his new wife back to the mansion, and instructed Serge to drive him to his mother’s house. He had yet to tell Bertha that he was getting married. The encounter with his mother was evidently fraught; Bertha did not approve. (She would later lament to friends that her son had married “a schwarze,” and complain bitterly that the marriage was “like a thorn in my butt.”)

  According to Ronnie, when Spector returned to the house two hours later, there was a furious fight during which he accused his new bride of only marrying him for his money. She spent her wedding night with her mother, locked in the bathroom with Spector pounding on the door. It was an unhappy omen.

  “Phil and Ronnie getting married was an ego merger,” one friend says. “Phil loved the fact that other men were attracted to her but he was the one who had her. He loved her voice. She was his passion. ‘She’s mine.’ But he didn’t really want to spend time with her. And Ronnie wanted him so he would produce her and only her, so she would be the star, and also to be lavished with his money. They married for all the right reasons in the Gospel of Rock and Roll, and all the wrong ones in terms of having a reasonable relationship, or any kind of relationship at all.”

  Marrying Spector, Ronnie had boasted to friends that she was “the only girl who ever married the boss in the music business. Not even Diana Ross married Berry Gordy.” But whatever dreams of happiness—and self-advancement—she had entertained about being Mrs. Phil Spector quickly began to evaporate.

  Spector now spent most of his time brooding in his study. He seldom left the house, and when he did, it was never with Ronnie. Elvis and the Beatles didn’t come to call. Whatever independence she had once enjoyed quickly faded away. She had no bank account of her own, no cash; if she wanted money, she had to ask Phil. According to Ronnie, he installed intercoms to monitor her movements throughout the house. It was his way of showing he cared.

  He filled the house with symbols of togetherness that mocked the emptiness of the marriage, and the fast-receding memory of her career: napkins, towels and notepaper monogrammed with “The Spectors” photographs of them in the studio together. But Ronnie had not been near a studio in more than two years. Spector appeared to have forgotten that she had once had a career. With no distractions, and no friends, there was nothing for her to do all day but mope around the mansion. As one friend observed, there was “no sign of ‘the little woman’ in a bone of her body. Ronnie was incapable of boiling an egg.” Not that Spector would have allowed her to. He insisted that staff take care of all the household duties. She read movie magazines, watched television soap operas and took up painting-by-numbers.

  At night Spector would sit in darkness, endlessly playing old Hollywood movies. Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, the slapstick heroes Laurel and Hardy and Harold Lloyd. But his favorite film was Citizen Kane. How could he fail to identify with Orson Welles’s parable of ambition, hubris and spiritual desolation? And how could he fail to identify with its creator? Like Spector, Welles was a prodigy—he had made Citizen Kane when he was just twenty-six—a genius who refused to compromise and bent the world to his vision. And as much as Citizen Kane was a study of power and the is
olation it brings—the plutocrat locked in his mansion of Xanadu, surrounded with everything money can buy but unable to find the one thing that would bring him happiness—so it was also a prophecy of Welles’s own future, the inexorable decline of early promise and brilliance. According to Ronnie, Spector would play the film endlessly, weeping at the final scene, in which Rosebud—the sled—the symbol of childhood joy and innocence, is incinerated.

  What on earth did they talk about? Spector with his feelings of betrayal and martyrdom, his collection of vintage Hollywood films, his Lenny Bruce recordings and Martin Luther King speeches; Ronnie with her thwarted ambition, her collection of nail polishes and hair preparations, her painting-by-number sets. In Spector’s own Xanadu, time passed as if in purgatory.

  For Ronnie’s twenty-fifth birthday on August 10, 1968, he presented her with a Camaro sports car, gift-wrapped in white silk ribbon. According to Ronnie, however, her delight was short-lived, when he then presented her with an inflatable life-sized mannequin, dressed in a shirt and pants, to keep on the passenger seat beside her. “Don’t you get it?” he told her. “Now nobody will fuck with you when you’re driving alone.”

  The gift seemed to do little to pour oil on the troubled waters of the marriage. Shortly afterward—and barely four months after their wedding—Ronnie hired a Los Angeles attorney, P. F. Caruso, to begin divorce proceedings. Caruso’s petition claimed that Ronnie and Phil had separated on August 20—just ten days after Spector had presented her with the Camaro and the mannequin.

  Listing Ronnie’s net worth as “nothing” and estimating Spector’s fortune at “5 million,” the petition asserted that everything Spector owned was community property and requested the court to authorize the hiring of a certified public accountant to provide an inventory of all his business records so that Ronnie could see exactly what she was entitled to.