by Mick Brown
17
The Lonely Bird in the Gilded Cage
Nik Cohn had much in common with Spector. The son of an academic, Cohn had been born in London but grew up in Ireland—an outsider, Jewish in a country of Catholics—the smallest and youngest boy in class, like Spector, disdained and put upon. As soon as he could, Cohn packed his bags for London and started writing. In 1965, at the age of eighteen, he published his first book, Market, a series of studies of street-market characters. The Daily Telegraph wrote that it begged comparison with Zola. Cohn went on to write a novel, I Am Still the Greatest Says Johnny Angelo, about a pop’s star meteoric rise and fall, and in 1968 he published Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom—the first serious literary appraisal of rock and roll’s short history. Written in an exhilarating and effusive firecracker prose, it was both paean of praise and epitaph to a golden age that Cohn considered was already at an end.
Phil Spector was the only figure in popular music who continued to exercise a fascination for Cohn—the music’s last authentic genius, he believed, a man who “superseded rock and roll.” Cohn duly approached him, expressing his desire to write his biography. Spector suggested he fly to Los Angeles to talk about it. Arriving at the Chateau Marmont, Cohn contacted Spector’s office and was told he would be collected from his hotel. A week later, George Brand turned up in Spector’s Rolls-Royce to ferry him to La Collina Drive.
In what was now an established ritual for any visitor to the mansion, Cohn was ushered into the sitting room and asked to wait—“a very long time.” Placed on a coffee table were three copies of an anthology of Tom Wolfe’s writing, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, each with a marker at Wolfe’s 1965 essay on Spector. The long wait, the carefully placed reference material—Cohn felt it was all designed to tell him something. “It was letting me know that I was not important. The placing of the Tom Wolfe piece was showing me that a better-known and greater man had trodden this path before me and I was bloody lucky to be there. Tom Wolfe had waited for an hour and a half. I could wait for two and a half…”
At length, Spector appeared, “a tiny, wispy figure, impenetrable shades…The whole idea was obviously intimidation, but what I felt from him was a terrified little boy. But I was something of an expert on terrified little boys, because I’d grown up as one myself.”
Over the course of the next four weeks, Cohn would make regular pilgrimage to La Collina Drive, to sit in the arctic semidarkness and talk. The mansion appeared all but deserted. Once he heard a woman singing in another room, a few bars of “Black Pearl.” He assumed it was Ronnie. Arriving on another day he glanced up to see a face looking down from an upstairs window, “like the first Mrs. Rochester.”
Spector regaled Cohn with stories of his childhood, his school days and how he had revolutionized and conquered the record industry. He sang old songs, showed Cohn trick shots at pool, and almost beat him at pinball (at which Cohn was expert). One day, “like a Jewish mother rampant,” Spector prepared a feast of lox and cream cheese on rye. But behind the effusive manner, Cohn sensed a man fearful that his time had passed.
“He would go into long, long monologues, about Lenny Bruce, and Easy Rider, which he seemed to think was the greatest film ever made,” Cohn remembers. But what he really liked was martyrdom—osmotic martyrdom, as it were; in other words, people being crucified in a way that he saw himself as having been crucified by the industry. As far as he was concerned, people had turned their backs on him and he was in Siberia. Philles was gone. The Checkmates didn’t seem to greatly excite him.
“At that time, Los Angeles was awash in kaftans; a whole generation with a new explanation, and your head is in a beautiful bag, man—which somebody actually said to me. As well as beautiful young people, there were a lot of the older school of Jewish record industry people—fat, fifty and over the hill—suddenly reinventing themselves in kaftans and beads. On one level Phil Spector was on their side—Easy Rider and so on; Lenny Bruce, civil rights—the whole counterculture thing. But on the other hand, peace and love didn’t temperamentally sit well with him.
“He could see what was going on around him, that the music and the attitude behind it was changing; that he needed to adjust, but seeing that and actually acting on it was not something he could really do.
“I don’t think it was lack of nous that undermined him. I think it was temperament, because he was an exceptionally angry person. I think there was a terrific war going on within Phil Spector between the conscious side that said, this is what’s going on—love is all we need—and the real spring of his creativity, which was anger—or even more specifically, revenge.”
One day, when Spector grew tired of talking, he suggested they take a drive. They drove along Sunset Boulevard and past the Aquarius Theatre, where the organizers of the hippy musical Hair were throwing a party in the parking lot. Spector told George to slow down, and rolled down his window to appraise the scene. Somebody in the crowd recognized him, called his name and the car was immediately engulfed in a crowd of capering and cavorting freaks, banging on the roof and blowing him kisses. When a hand came snaking through the window, attempting to touch him, Cohn remembers, Spector recoiled in fear and disgust, and shouted to George, “Get me out of here!”
Shaking, he turned to Cohn. “Who were they?” he asked, as the car headed back to the safety of the mansion. “I mean, who were those animals? My God…sweet Lord, what have I done?”
At length, Cohn decided he could stand no more. His appetite for writing a book had deserted him. He had come to write a life; but now he realized that whatever he wrote “would have been an obituary,” he says. The heat and fury and vision that had driven Phil Spector had all but gone. All that was left, Cohn concluded, were the “motions of mystique”—the mansion, the bodyguards, the gold-rimmed shades, none of it able to disguise a terrible “blankness.”
“It seemed that he had no more great pleasures, no passions, not even all-consuming hatreds,” Cohn would later write. “Sometimes he would say he was happy, and he smiled. At other times he shook his head and looked tragic. But mostly he simply sat, and survived, and let time pass.”
One evening, Cohn asked the question that had been exercising him from the first moment he had walked through the doors of the mansion. Was Spector entirely exhausted? Could anything important lie ahead? Or was his life, in essence, already over? Spector, Cohn wrote, “looked surprised, a mite baffled. Playing for time, he removed his shades and peered past my ear, off into infinity, to signal profound thought. He pondered, reconsidered, delayed. In the end, however, the question must have defeated him, outstripped his range, for he only shrugged his shoulders and put his shades back on. ‘I guess it is,’ he said offhand, and we talked about pool instead.”
Cohn left Los Angeles shortly afterward. He did not write the book. However, he did write an article about his encounter with Spector, which appeared in an English rock magazine Cream. It dwelt on Spector’s troubled childhood, lauded his early accomplishments and lamented the death of early promise. A portrait of a man lost to the world, estranged even from himself, it was precisely the obituary Cohn feared that his book would have become.
In 1976, Cohn’s piece was reproduced in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock Roll. By then Cohn’s own career had taken another, yet more improbable, twist. An article that he had written for New York magazine in the early ’70s about the disco craze had been turned into the film Saturday Night Fever. Cohn was living in New York, enjoying his unexpected windfall, his meeting with Phil Spector long since pushed to the back of his mind. He was astonished then to one day receive a telephone call from a woman announcing herself as Phil Spector’s sister, Shirley. She had read the article, she told Cohn; how, she demanded to know, could he have written those terrible things about her mother? Cohn was taken aback. Whatever he had written, he said, was based on what Spector had told him; indeed, if he remembered correctly, Spector had actually told him a great deal more than he’d
actually used in the piece. He had erred on the side of kindness.
Brushing his explanations aside, Shirley went on: she wanted Cohn to know that her mother had also read the article and been so shocked that she had suffered a heart attack and was now in the hospital in critical condition.
A shaken Cohn barely had time to stammer his apologies and sympathies before Shirley hung up.
Cohn left his apartment for a meeting, asking a friend who was staying to take any messages. A couple of hours later Cohn telephoned his apartment. There had been a message. Shirley Spector, Cohn’s friend told him, had called again. She wanted Cohn to know that her mother had died of the heart attack, and she hoped that Cohn would “rot in hell.”
It would be almost thirty years before Cohn would discover that Bertha Spector had not suffered a heart attack at all, and that, in fact, she did not die until 1995.
Motherhood had not proved the panacea that Ronnie Spector had hoped. Depressed over the failure of “You Came, You Saw, You Conquered” and resigned to the fact that her career was now all but over, she began drinking more heavily. On August 10, her twenty-sixth birthday, she and Spector flew to Las Vegas to see Elvis Presley perform. After the show, they went backstage. According to Ronnie, Spector left her stranded while he pushed his way through to meet Elvis on his own. It was only when Elvis’s young wife Priscilla—“the only girl there wearing even more mascara than I was”—took her hand, that Ronnie was able to enter the inner sanctum. Spector stayed on, and sent Ronnie back to the hotel, returning a few hours later to find her passed out, drunk, in front of the TV.
The next day, Spector and Ronnie returned to a Los Angeles enshrouded in fear. In the early hours of August 9 a group of misfits and runaways acting under the orders of a habitual criminal and self-styled cult leader named Charles Manson broke into a house on Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills, murdering five people, including the actress Sharon Tate, the wife of Roman Polanski, and the celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring. The following day, a wealthy supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary were found murdered in their home in Los Feliz. Scrawled on the walls in the victims’ blood were the words “Death to Pigs,” “Rise” and “Healter Skealter”—a misspelling of the Beatles’ song “Helter Skelter.”
The Manson murders struck a mortal terror into the heart of the Los Angeles music community. Manson had designs on being a singer and a songwriter. He had become acquainted with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys after Wilson picked up two of the Manson “family” hitchhiking; Wilson had allowed Manson and his followers to stay at his house before becoming rattled by their behavior and throwing them out. (The Beach Boys actually recorded one of Manson’s songs, “Cease to Exist,” retitled as “Never Learn Not to Love.”) Wilson introduced Manson to the record producer Terry Melcher, who at the time was living in the house on Cielo Drive where Sharon Tate would be murdered, and where Manson was a frequent visitor. At one point, Melcher actually considered offering Manson a recording contract but then thought better of it. Melcher was convinced that he had been Manson’s intended target.
In the wealthy enclaves of Bel Air and Beverly Hills, the shutters came down. Infected with the paranoia, Spector now took steps to turn his mansion into a fortified redoubt. The house was already secluded behind a high wall and an electric gate, but he now had a new chain-link fence erected inside the grounds, and within a few feet of the house itself. Barbed wire was strung around the courtyard with warning signs indicating that the wire was electrified and high-voltage. He acquired two attack dogs, which he named Duke and King, who roamed the property, terrifying visitors and snapping and barking at passersby from behind the wall. (He was eventually obliged to get rid of them after complaints from the neighbors.)
“Phil was paranoid to begin with,” Peter Fonda remembers. “And the Manson killings were the proof of the pudding. After that he just shut down. You had the fence, and the fence within the fence. Even as he was withdrawing and withdrawing, he was never a freak. But after that it seemed like he became really freaky and really scared.”
Watching through the bottom of a glass, Ronnie was apparently convinced that the new precautions were simply another step to make her a prisoner in her own home. Spector’s desire to keep her from the world had now become a pathological obsession. By Ronnie’s account, the doors to the house were always locked. If she wanted to go out, she would have to ask George Brand or George Johnson to unlock them, and they would only do so with permission from Spector. Whenever visitors came, she would be sent upstairs to her room. Occasionally, Spector would bring her down, as if to show her off to his guests—his prize possession—before banishing her upstairs again.
Ronnie’s tales of her imprisonment—the lonely, broken bird in the gilded cage—would come to assume the dimensions of myth. In later years she would claim that she would only be allowed to leave the house on her wedding anniversary. In fact, she would return periodically to New York to be with her mother, and Beatrice would often come to Los Angeles, staying in her own quarters in the guest room above the garage. Nedra Talley found herself being drawn into the marriage as a confidante and counselor.
“Phil would call and say, ‘Ronnie’s doing this, Ronnie’s doing that.’ Then Ronnie would get on the phone and say, ‘No, Phil is doing all these things to me.’ She was going crazy in that house. If she wanted to go out, he would send George with her to watch her, always to watch her. Or his mother would be there—like, babysitting; if you want to go out, then let my mother go with you. And it was driving Ronnie insane.”
One day, Don Kirshner came to call. Despite the millions each had made for the other, Kirshner and Spector had maintained a deeply equivocal relationship over the years. But their shared publishing interests required a show of at least cordiality between the two men.
“We had a mutual respect,” Kirshner says, “but we never really liked each other. With Phil it was always about Phil Spector winning and being number one. It was never Darlene Love had a great voice, or Mann and Weil wrote a great song, or it’s Donny Kirshner did that. You’d think nobody else ever contributed. There’s a word Phil lacked, and the word is gracious.”
According to Kirshner, he and Spector were shooting pool when Kirshner became aware of a persistent “thumping noise” upstairs. “I said, ‘Phil, what’s that?’” Kirshner remembers. “And he said, ‘I locked Ronnie in the closet.’ I said, ‘You what? Are you nuts?’ I went upstairs, opened the door to the closet and there she was, cowering inside. He said they’d had a falling-out, this and that. I was furious. I got her out of the house right away.”
It would be some years before Kirshner would see Spector again.
“I’ll never forget it. I was in my office in New York and Phil just walked in. Phil was always walking around with bodyguards. I never knew why. And he had a guy with him now. I was sitting behind my desk, and for some reason which I still don’t understand, I walked around and leaned back on the edge of the desk. Phil was sitting maybe three or four yards away; the guy was maybe five yards away. And Philly turned to the guy and said, ‘Do it!’ And the guy does a Chuck Norris/Bruce Lee triple-kick thing. You remember the boots with the pointed toe, like a cowboy boot? He winds himself up and lunges at me with his foot and the toe ends up about a quarter of an inch from my nose. I could feel the breeze, the vibration. I can tell you this: if I’d sneezed or moved my head, I’d have been permanently disfigured. Forget terrifying—if I’d coughed, he would have killed me. I shouldn’t say this, but the guy was brilliant. And thank God he was, otherwise I’d be dead.
“I can take pretty good care of myself, but not with this guy. I must have turned white. And when I composed myself I said, ‘What did you do that for?’ And Phil said, ‘Oh, Donny, I’m just kidding around.’ I said, ‘You get your ass out of here,’ and I kicked them out of the place. He’d obviously planned this as a practical joke. I felt it was a case of I’m going to show that big shot, that authority figure, that I can shake him up
a little. But that was way above what Phil had ever done before.”
Kirshner never saw Spector again.
Toward the end of 1969 Ronnie was involved in a car accident, drunk at the wheel of the Camaro. Spector now insisted she see a psychiatrist to try and get her drinking under control. The psychiatrist suggested that Spector should join in her group therapy, but according to Ronnie, he refused. In an attempt to stop her drinking, Spector put a padlock on the liquor cabinet. Ronnie forced it open with a screwdriver. “When he found the lock broken, he’d replace it with a bigger one. Then I’d find a bigger screwdriver.” After Ronnie had been drunk for three days straight, Beatrice was summoned from New York to intervene. Nedra Talley and her husband Scott had moved to a small Christian community in upstate New York, and in an attempt to save Ronnie from her marriage and herself, they invited her to stay. “She came up and I was telling her, you need something to happen in your own heart so that you can stand on your own two feet; you need something that is bigger than you to make this work. I knew what Ronnie had grown up with, because when Ronnie stood up to be baptized as a child, I stood up to be baptized with her. So I really tried to pull her back to some of our foundation and truths that I thought would help her. And she prayed with me for the Lord really to come into her life and help her. But my personal feeling is she couldn’t lay Ronnie Spector down in order to come to that place.”