by Mick Brown
“Since the marriage of the plaintiff and defendant,” the complaint read, “the defendant has treated plaintiff in an extremely cruel manner and has inflicted upon her great and grievous mental and physical suffering, and said conduct on the part of the defendant has defeated the object of matrimony.
“The defendant has a mean and ungovernable temper and has grabbed plaintiff violently and has threatened to stick his fingers in her eyes and he has stated to her that he could not permit her to get a divorce from him.”
Ronnie, the complaint went on, was “currently under a doctor’s care for nerves,” and it requested that Spector be enjoined from “annoying, molesting, or harming [her] in any way whatsoever.”
Spector responded to his wife’s petition by promptly filing one of his own. In answer to Caruso’s claim that all of Spector’s assets were community property, Spector’s lawyer Jay Cooper asserted that “there exists no community property of the parties herein.” Cooper’s complaint also charged Ronnie with “extreme cruelty” against her husband, but without specifying its exact nature.
Evidently, the dispute was quickly put to rest, however. Ronnie continued to live at the mansion, and by April 1969 both suits had been dismissed by the lawyers who filed them.
Bored and frustrated, Ronnie now started to drink more heavily, smuggling the booze into the house on her occasional expeditions to the outside world. In desperate need of a life for herself, her thoughts began to turn toward motherhood. “I knew I’d make a great mom,” she wrote in Be My Baby. “All I needed was a kid.” It seems appropriate that the solution should have been suggested to her by her most constant companion: the television. Watching a program about unwanted babies, she was immediately struck by the idea that she should adopt a child. That same afternoon, she drove to an adoption agency and selected a mixed-race baby boy, named Donte. Within four weeks, Donte was hers. As odd as this spontaneous gesture may have been, Spector’s response was odder still. Apparently delighted at the prospect of fatherhood, he immediately set about preparing cards announcing the happy event—“Presenting the smash-hit production of Donte Phillip Spector”—that cast Donte’s arrival as a three-act play, in which Ronnie appeared to be playing the part of the child’s natural mother.
When Ronnie expressed her doubts about the implication that she’d given birth to Donte herself, Spector replied, “If I say you were pregnant, who’s going to say any different?” Ronnie, he suggested, should stick a pillow under her shirt when anybody visited the house. She apparently went along with the plan without demur.
Nedra Talley had recently given birth to her first child, a daughter Christina, and when she learned that Ronnie too had “given birth,” her first reaction was one of incredulity. “It was so confusing. I’d only been with her like a couple of months before, and suddenly—‘We just had a baby!’ I was trying to figure it out. She said it was premature; I said, ‘Well, maybe you were two or three months pregnant and you didn’t know it.’” When Nedra discovered that Donte was actually adopted she began to think it was just another, albeit extreme, example of Ronnie’s old competitive instincts. “Ronnie had always had this thing that if I did something, she had to do it, too; if I was getting married, she had to be married; if I had a baby, she had to have a baby. It just couldn’t be that I was beating her.”
When Donte first arrived in the house, Spector played the role of doting parent, suspending his customary nocturnal hours to help to feed and bathe him. But the novelty quickly palled. Not quite trusting Ronnie to do the job herself, he appointed a nurse to look after Donte and turned his thoughts back to his career.
16
“Out There, but in a Beautiful Way”
The two years he had been away from the music business had left Phil Spector feeling estranged, bitter and afraid. The possibility that his career was over, that the world had already written him off as a spent force, exercised him endlessly. Just twenty-nine, he was terrified that his best years were already behind him.
In his 1969 interview with Jann Wenner, Spector would admit how he felt he could no longer communicate with anybody in the record business. “I can’t really bullshit with them; I don’t have friends in the record industry. I don’t talk with them. We don’t jell; we don’t communicate; because I’m too bitter I think. I’m still involved with why ‘River Deep’ wasn’t a hit and what the fuck was…and am I that hated? Am I too paranoid? You know, you can antagonize people if they think you’re not human, if you say, ‘Aw fuck, I ain’t afraid.’ A lot of people will get very angry at that, disc jockeys in particular…”
Talking with Wenner, Spector sounded as sour and reactionary as the “straights” who had mocked his music four or five years earlier—in his own words, “an old-timer wishin’ for the groovy young days.” Nothing was as good as it used to be. Black music had gone, the “group on the corner” turned into “a white psychedelic or a guitar group.” The charts were full of acts that are “going to bore everybody to death.” Artists of today, he lamented, “just sing. They don’t really interpret anything.” Even the Stones were “just makin’ hit records now. There was a time when the Stones were really writing contributions. See, that’s a big word to me—‘contributions!’” He talked of how he felt he could bring something to Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin and Dylan. “I’d do a Dylan opera with him…You see, he’s never been produced. He’s always gone into the studio on the strength of his lyrics, and they have sold enough records to cover up everything—all the honesty of his records. But he’s never really made a production. He doesn’t really have to.”
Then there were the Beatles. “I would like to record them a certain way because, again, other than what they do themselves—there’s nobody. I don’t know how influential their producer is, and I am sure they have a great deal of respect for him and he’s the fifth Beatle and all that, but I don’t think he thinks the way I would think…”
But then nobody, in Spector’s opinion, thought the way he did, no producer could hold a candle to what he’d done. “I’m not interested in knocking everybody’s brain ’cause I’ll always make a good record, and it’ll be better than all that shit out there today. ’Cause they really don’t know how to record. They don’t know anything about depth, about sound, about technique, about slowing down.”
But Jagger, Dylan, the Beatles…none of them had called.
Retirement bored him. The studio was Spector’s home, his world, the milieu where he was most in command of everything, including himself. Adrift in the echoing rooms of the La Collina mansion, he was nothing but a ghost. Philles was dead, and Spector did not have the appetite either to revive it or to start afresh. But in the summer of 1968 an opportunity presented itself through a flourishing independent Los Angeles label, AM. The initials stood for the labels’ owners, the trumpet player Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss. Alpert was a former student at Fairfax High, who had gone on to work as an AR man at Dore Records, around the time when the Teddy Bears recorded “To Know Him Is to Love Him” for the label. Moss was an independent promotions man who had prowled the corridors of the Brill Building before moving to Los Angeles in 1960. In 1962, Alpert and Moss formed their own label, releasing “The Lonely Bull”—a mournful trumpet instrumental by Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, inspired by a visit to a bullfight in Tijuana, and recorded in the studio he had built in his garage. The record became a Top 10 hit. This early success was consolidated with middle-of-the-road acts like Sergio Mendes, the Sandpipers and Chris Montez. But by 1968 the label had broadened its roster, licensing releases by British acts such as Procol Harum, Joe Cocker and Free.
Spector was acquainted with both Alpert and Moss, but it was Larry Levine who was most instrumental in bringing him to AM. Levine had left Gold Star in 1967, when Alpert (whose records Levine had engineered at Gold Star) offered him the job of chief engineer at AM’s new recording studios in the old Charlie Chaplin film studio on La Brea Avenue. In the five years they had spent together working shoulder-to-shoul
der at Gold Star, Levine had come to develop an almost filial affection for Spector, regarding himself as something of an elder brother figure. But even Levine had never quite come to terms with the contradictions in Spector’s behavior.
“I had a strange experience with Phil that kind of illustrates that. The first year I was at AM, I got a really nice Christmas bonus. I was already getting a good salary, plus profit-sharing. And when I got the bonus I said to my engineers and the people working for me, ‘The drinks are on me—I just realized that if things stay like this until I’m eighty, I’m going to be worth eighty million dollars!’ And Phil happened to be there, and he really wasn’t happy about that. It was a ridiculous thing. I got the sense that he didn’t want me to be independent of him, or be on a par with him money-wise or any other way. It was as if it was threatening to him. It wasn’t a question of me being happy. He saw this eighty million dollars as a realistic attainment. I’d meant it as a joke. Everybody laughed except Phil. But Phil needs to be in charge.
“But at the same time there could be this enormous generosity, too. I remember another time at AM when something went awry somewhere and I got a note from someone berating me. Phil read the note, and he ended up writing three pages to this guy, giving him hell for having the effrontery to do that to me. I mean, three pages! And it was beautifully phrased. Phil would do that kind of thing.”
For Jerry Moss, the fact that Spector had not been in a studio in more than a year, and had not had a hit record in more than three years, was an irrelevance. “Our view was that Herb and I just wanted to work with great people,” Moss remembers. “It didn’t matter to us if somebody was in fashion or out of fashion—as far as we were concerned, this guy was the tops and he made great records. He was intriguing and wouldn’t it be fun.” Learning of the new partnership, Spector’s old partner Lester Sill could not disguise his skepticism. Phil, he told friends, was “roaming and using,” just as he always had.
Given carte blanche by AM to record anyone he liked, Spector returned to first principles, choosing a relatively unknown act that embodied the medium he understood best and loved most—the black voice. He had found a group that were neither “a white psychedelic or a guitar group.” Checkmates Ltd. were a mixed-race soul group featuring two strong black singers, Bobby Stevens and Sonny Charles, who alternated on lead vocals in a manner reminiscent of David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks of the Temptations. “Discovered” by Nancy Wilson, they had been working the circuit of nightclubs and Las Vegas lounges for a number of years; signed to Capitol, they had released a series of singles and an album, Live at Caesar’s Palace, which included a showstopping version of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin,’” with Stevens and Charles trading the Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield lines. Spector could hardly have failed to notice the similarity when he saw the group perform, and he was excited with the prospect of working with a soul vocal group that he could fashion in his preferred image.
In search of material, in the last months of 1968 he traveled to New York. The old contacts he had relied on in earlier days had scattered to the winds. Don Kirshner had gone on to enjoy great success as executive producer for the Monkees and was now occupied with the TV cartoon group the Archies; the songwriting teams of Goffin and King and Greenwich and Barry were no more (Barry was working for Kirshner on the Archies). But in a Chinese restaurant on Broadway Spector happened to run into Toni Wine, an acquaintance from the Brill Building days. Wine had signed to Kirshner’s Aldon Music when she was just fifteen, writing songs and sometimes recording demos for Goffin and King and Mann and Weil. From time to time Kirshner had even suggested that she and Spector should write together. “But at that time,” Wine says, “I wasn’t even allowed out at night.” She had gone on to pursue a career that combined singing and writing, recording a handful of singles for Kirshner’s Colpix label, enjoying a huge hit in 1966 with her composition “Groovy Kind of Love,” recorded by the British group Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, and composing advertising jingles. At the time she met Spector she was working with a songwriting partner, Irwin Levine.
Within a few days of their meeting, Spector joined the pair at Wine’s apartment on Eighth Avenue to begin writing together. Their first collaboration was a song called “Black Pearl,” a sweet, plaintive soul ballad inspired by the Sidney Poitier film, For Love of Ivy, about a black maid who decides to leave the white family she has served for many years to return to school. The lyric contained a deliciously double-edged trope—the black pearl, it ran, might never have been pretty enough to win a beauty show, “But you’re my Miss America, and I love you.”
“The original lyric was ‘you’re my Miss America, from Lenox Avenue’—Lenox Avenue being the street in Harlem,” Wine recalls. “We all thought, That’s so real, so perfect, so wonderful. But then Phillip made the ‘executive decision’ to change it, because how many people are going to know where Lenox Avenue is? But even to this day, when I sing it, I sing it with the original line.”
Satisfied with the outcome, at the beginning of 1969 Spector invited Wine and Levine out to California to work on more songs. Enthused at the fact of working again, Spector was at his most charming and endearing, in “a wonderful frame of mind,” Wine remembers, a solicitous and generous host, who plied his guests with deli brought in from Green-blatt’s and kept them amused with a stream of practical jokes. The two enormous wolfhounds that roamed the grounds, he warned them, were trained to “kill on command” (“lick you to death, maybe,” says Wine). On one occasion he called Doc Pomus in New York, spoofing Pomus by conducting the entire conversation in an uncanny impersonation of Pomus’s own rasping hipster-speak—“What’s up, babe?” On another, he casually handed Wine a packet of chewing gum, then watched in mounting amusement as she worked through the pack, discovering that Spector had removed every stick of gum and carefully rewrapped the empty package.
“We’d sit at the piano, walk around the room, sing, write, talk about our mothers…” Wine remembers. “Phil has incredible pitch, and I do too, and sometimes he and I would sit at the piano and sing purposely off-key. It drove Irwin nuts. And Phil would just burst out laughing and say, ‘What’s wrong, Irwin?’ People would say, ‘Oh, Phil’s crazy, he’s nuts,’ but I saw no side of that other than he was just hilarious. He was eccentric and pixilated. He was out there, but in a beautiful way, not in a scary way.”
In the two weeks they worked at Spector’s house they saw nobody other than Spector and his bodyguard. If Ronnie was there, they never saw her. “Years later, when all this came out, Irwin and I would say, ‘Jesus, maybe she was locked in a room upstairs…’”
With “Black Pearl” in his pocket for the Checkmates, Spector now decided to hold fire with the group. Instead, to raise the curtain on the AM deal, he turned back to a long-running project, one that had already brought him success, failure and no little heartache—his wife. Was it a residual belief in the talismanic properties of the group’s name? A gesture of love and appeasement to Ronnie? Or did he genuinely believe it was an inspired idea? Whatever his reasoning, in February 1969 Spector took Ronnie back into the studio for the first time in almost three years, recording another of the songs from his collaboration with Wine and Irwin—“You Came, You Saw, You Conquered”—and releasing it a month later under the name of “The Ronettes, Featuring the Voice of Veronica.” Ronnie was exultant at the prospect of being back in the studio and resurrecting her career. But her hopes were quickly dashed. Uncomfortable in AM’s spanking new studios, Spector struggled to replicate faithfully the old Gold Star Wall of Sound with massed strings and choirs, but the effect fell curiously flat, and the record sounded merely dated. Whatever cachet the Ronettes name once had had long since evaporated, and “You Came, You Saw, You Conquered” vanished without trace.
Spector now turned his attention to the Checkmates, recording their first single, “Love Is All I Have to Give,” a melodramatic throwback to the mid-’60s testifying soul ballad, written by Spector and Bo
bby Stevens, and showcasing Stevens’s gruff, rasping, preachy style. But not even Spector appeared confident about the record’s prospects; within a matter of weeks he was rushing out a second single, the first song he had written with Wine and Levine in New York, “Black Pearl.” Beautifully sung by Sonny Charles, wrapped in a lavish and irresistibly warm production, and with a string arrangement that might have been borrowed from a Temptations record (even Irwin Levine would describe it as “a Detroit record”), it was Spector’s most affecting piece of work since “Walking in the Rain.”
Released under the name of Sonny Charles and the Checkmates, the record gave Spector his first Top 40 hit in more than three years. He now turned his thoughts to an album. But he quickly seemed to grow bored with the project. Irwin Levine would remember him whiling away the time in the studio on the pinball machine. Nor were matters helped by the growing rivalry between Bobby Stevens and Sonny Charles over the solo billing that Charles had received on “Black Pearl.” Envisaging a reprise of the problems that had undermined the Righteous Brothers, Spector withdrew from the project, leaving the arranger Perry Botkin Jr. to complete the album, which would eventually be released under the title Love Is All We Have to Give.
Even more distressing to Spector was the sudden death of Mac Mashourian during the recording of the album. Spector marked the passing of his old friend with a dedication in the album’s liner notes—“…to the memory of a very dear friend of mine, Mac Mashourian. Though he has left his mortal coil, he will live forever. For as my friend, he showed me that love is really mental attraction in the presence of emotional security and for that reason I will love him forever—for after all—‘Love is all we have to give.’”
Spector now took on a new bodyguard and factotum, a retired sheriff’s marshal named George Brand. Spector would usually call on his bodyguards as and when he needed them. But Brand actually took up residence in the mansion, in a basement apartment. A man of quiet, avuncular authority, Brand was of a different order to the martial arts experts that Spector usually liked to surround himself with, and he had one qualification that Spector particularly liked—Brand was licensed to carry a gun. Spector already kept a gun around the house as a security measure, but having a bodyguard who packed heat in the holster under his jacket seemed to add a certain frisson to the whole business of being Phil Spector.