by Mick Brown
In July, Spector took the completed tracks to New York, to add string arrangements. Lennon would later point out that while many of the songs shared similar themes to those explored on the John Lennon/ Plastic Ono Band album, Imagine had “chocolate on it for public consumption.” But Spector did much more than simply sweeten. Rather, he crafted a series of perfect settings and caught a mood that would make Imagine the most perfectly realized and most commercially successful album that Lennon would ever record, and in the title track provide a song that would endure as a globally acknowledged anthem for peace. If a work is to be measured by its enduring impact, the hearts it touches, the hope it inspires, then, in a sense, Imagine was Spector’s finest accomplishment as a producer. Even if his name was only in small type.
In search of new stimulation, and in a bid to escape the constant sniping at Yoko by the British media, the Lennons had now decamped to New York, taking up residence in a suite at the St. Regis Hotel. Exalting that New York was “the modern Rome,” Lennon threw himself into a new life—indulging every avant-garde and radical diversion the city had to offer. He posed for the obligatory portrait by Andy Warhol, jammed with Frank Zappa at the Fillmore East, and found himself being courted by the self-proclaimed revolutionaries Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, eager to recruit Lennon to their sundry causes. Putting his own career to one side, Lennon threw his energies into supporting and promoting Yoko in her calling as avant-garde filmmaker and artist, bankrolling her films Up Your Legs Forever and Fly. In October 1971, an extensive exhibition of Yoko’s work, This Is Not Here, opened at Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, upstate New York. Spector, now an inseparable part of the Lennon circus, flew up from New York with a group of friends including Klaus Voormann. Drinking to anesthetize his fear of flying, Spector passed the flight in a state of inebriated agitation, shouting across the crowded seats to Voormann, who was sitting at the rear of the plane, “Klaus Voormann! We know you’re the son of Martin Bormann”—“so that was nice,” Voormann notes wryly. At the press conference that opened the exhibition, Spector—still somewhat worse for wear—spotted a journalist who had written an article about Lenny Bruce that Spector had taken exception to, and harangued him from the stage. “The journalist just wanted to die,” Voormann remembers.
The opening of the exhibition coincided with Lennon’s thirty-first birthday, and a group of friends, including Ringo Starr and Allen Ginsberg, celebrated in the Lennons’ hotel room. As Ginsberg sang William Blake’s “Nurse’s Song,” Spector insisted on holding his hand, while Ringo beat out percussion on an upturned wastepaper basket. Then a raucous Spector drowned out everybody else on sing-alongs of “Yellow Submarine,” “Twist and Shout” and “My Sweet Lord.”
The caravan moved back to New York, where at the end of October Spector produced Lennon’s peace anthem “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” As a gesture of proletarian solidarity, the Lennons now quit the St. Regis and moved into a dank basement flat in Bank Street in Greenwich Village that had previously been occupied by Joe Butler of the Lovin’ Spoonful, and took up every passing revolutionary cause, appearing at a benefit for John Sinclair, the Yippie leader who had been imprisoned for possession of a single joint of marijuana, speaking out on behalf of the Attica Prison rioters and against the jailing of the black radical Angela Davis. By January 1972, the FBI had opened a file on Lennon with the expressed intention of finding grounds to deport him.
Lennon recruited a local band, Elephant’s Memory, and with Spector as co-producer began work on another album, Some Time in New York City—a collection of agitprop songs including “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “Attica State.” Spector’s role was purely as a facilitator. Sympathetic as he was to the Lennons’ plight, writing letters to the media and congressmen on their behalf, he was less animated by the fate of John Sinclair or the cause of the IRA. The album was a perfunctory favor. Nor did it capture the imagination of Lennon’s audience when it was released in June 1972, rising only as far as number 48 in the charts before sinking from view. Devastated by its commercial failure, Lennon would not record any music for almost a year. Phil Spector’s Beatle sojourn was over.
19
“These Are Pretty Wild Sessions, They Get Pretty Out There”
Late in 1971 Spector returned to Los Angeles. He had spent most of the previous two years away in London and New York, at a safe remove from Ronnie and the unhappiness of his marriage. But any expectations that matters might have improved were to be quickly dashed.
Only an incurable romantic could have conjured the records that Spector had made with Ronnie—idealized fables of a love that was too perfect to be true. And his possessiveness too was a sort of love, a symptom not so much of how little he trusted her, but of how little he trusted himself to be able to keep her. Control was Spector’s way of guarding against the thing he feared most—being abandoned. But instead of security, marriage had brought only disillusionment, bitterness and recrimination. “The whole bottom line of Phil’s life was pain,” one friend says. “He had spent his whole life trying to understand that, and deal with that, and never getting it right. But Ronnie was just not sensitive enough to see that. For her the marriage was just some kind of fantasy of the big-shot producer making her a star. She didn’t understand Phil at all.”
The couple quickly fell into the familiar ritual of arguments, most of them to do with Phil’s possessiveness and Ronnie’s continued drinking. When, after one particularly horrendous drinking binge, she had a seizure and collapsed, Spector, at his wits’ end, had her admitted to a sanatorium. She was apparently so taken with the facilities—the agreeable company of fellow patients, the volleyball games—that she came to regard it as “a vacation playground.” Visiting the sanatorium “became my habit,” she wrote in Be My Baby. “When things got bad at home, I’d get raging drunk, pass out, and then spend ten days in rehab.”
Nedra Talley, who had come to regard Spector with a mixture of distrust and disdain, saw his eagerness to push Ronnie for treatment less as a mark of his concern than just another way of controlling her. “The way Ronnie was approaching it was like the clinic was the in-place to go,” Nedra remembers. “But I was telling her, Phil is going to use this against you; when he decides to put it to you, there’s going to be a list which he’ll hold against you. And it’s not going to be ‘the clinic was a cool place to be’ it’s going to be ‘you were sick and you can’t have your child.’
“Ronnie thought she was smart marrying Phil, but she had someone smarter than her, playing her. He played her in separating her from her sister and her cousin; he played her in cutting her off so that she didn’t have any friends; he played her by putting her in hospital. She had a drinking issue of her own; but it was like, if you’re with a crazy person for long enough and you have your own crazy side, then you’ll go really crazy.”
Driven to distraction by her drinking, and in a desperate attempt to salvage the wreckage of their marriage, in December 1971 Spector turned to precisely the course of action that Ronnie had employed two years earlier—adoption. By Ronnie’s account, the first she heard of the idea was when Spector collected her from the sanatorium after one of her drying-out bouts and drove her to a playground, where he pointed to a pair of fair-haired little boys playing on the swings and told her he was considering adopting them. By the time they had returned to the mansion, the boys and officials from the adoption agency were apparently waiting to greet them.
The adoption of six-year-old twins Gary and Louis was a measure not only of Spector’s desperation, but of just how divorced he had become from the reality of his marriage. Adopting Donte two years earlier had done nothing to bring him and Ronnie closer together; the arrival of two more children could only make matters worse. To Ronnie it was merely another example of what she perceived as Spector’s desire to curtail her freedom. Within just three years of marriage, she’d acquired “three kids, five dogs and twenty-three rooms,” she wrote.
&nbs
p; While acknowledging that they were “adorable,” she wanted little to do with the twins, although at Spector’s instigation she did begin to attend AA meetings in an attempt to bring her drinking under control. Spector was seemingly in no better a state to assume the duties of parenthood, and it quickly fell to the ever-obliging George Brand to assume the role of surrogate father to the children.
Spector had now begun behaving with conspicuous carelessness. At the end of January, Spector was arrested in the Daisy club in Beverly Hills, after police received an anonymous call from a woman claiming that a man wearing a “maroon jacket with a karate emblem” had pointed a gun at her. Officers arriving at the club located Spector, noticed a bulge under his jacket, searched him and found a loaded handgun in his waistband. He was charged with the misdemeanors of carrying a concealed weapon and carrying a loaded firearm in a public place, ordered to pay a $200 fine and placed on one-year summary probation, with the condition that he not possess any dangerous or deadly weapons.
In May, he wrote to Jerry Wexler. During Spector’s brief sojourn at Atlantic in the early ’60s, the two men had regarded each other with mutual suspicion, but both shared an enormous affection for Lenny Bruce, and the death of the comedian had served to bring them closer together, mourning his loss. Albert Goldman’s biography of Lenny Bruce, Ladies and Gentlemen—Lenny Bruce!, had just been published. Goldman had approached Spector to talk about his friendship with Bruce, but when it came to Lenny, Spector explained to Wexler, he claimed the right to remain silent. Lenny, he wrote, had told his own story brilliantly and eloquently in his autobiography and his recordings, and Spector would not read or see a single book, movie or play about his old friend, much less contribute to one. As for himself, he wrote, he was “up to my pippin” in the fight against John and Yoko being deported and the primary campaign for Democratic candidate George McGovern. “Roughly translated, that means I’m living in frenzied despair, which is a little hamlet on the outskirts of Desolation Row.” He urged Wexler to come visit sometime. “We can pick up some sandwiches and tiptoe through the tar pits together.”
On June 16, 1972, at approximately 11:00 a.m., William Valantine, an employee of the Speedy Attorney Service, arrived at the house on La Collina to serve divorce papers on Phil Spector. According to an affidavit filed to the Superior Court, County of Los Angeles, Valantine approached the front-gate entrance of the property, where he was confronted with “numerous signs warning all persons not to enter the property, that there were guard dogs and armed guards on duty. There was approximately a three to four-paragraph sign posted adjacent to the front gate warning any person entering beyond that point would be in violation of certain sections of California Penal Code (I did not write down the sections), and that there were sentry dogs and armed guards on duty and that if I entered I would be risking my life and I should leave immediately.”
Undaunted, the intrepid Mr. Valantine drove through the open gate. In the courtyard he noted “several chain-link fences blocking all entrance way to the front door or access. Also, barbed wire was strung loosely around the courtyard with warning signs indicating that the wire was electrified and high voltage, I also noticed several more signs warning against the sentry dogs, no trespassing et cetera. I also observed large floodlights mounted in several upstairs windows of the residence aimed into the courtyard area which, obviously, would be turned on at night if anyone entered. I saw absolutely no sign of life on the property.”
After sounding his car horn for five to ten minutes and receiving no response, Valantine left the property. When he telephoned the house a few minutes later, a “female voice” answered, asking him to state his name and business and telling him to call back in five minutes. When he did so the same female answered the telephone, this time identifying herself as Veronica Spector.
According to Valantine, “Mrs. Spector stated that she did not want her husband served today.” It would be another couple of days before the papers were actually served.
The four-year marriage between Spector and Ronnie had finally reached a climactic end four days before Valantine’s visit, on June 12. In her autobiography, Ronnie offered a graphically lurid account of the events of that evening, recounting how she had returned from an AA meeting to find the door of the mansion locked. Eventually, Beatrice, who was staying at the house, let Ronnie in through the servants’ entrance. According to Ronnie, a drunken Spector confronted her in the hall, accusing her of having a boyfriend at the AA group. He then wrestled her to the floor, snatching her shoes, and shouted, “Don’t even dream about divorcing me.” After a further scuffle, Ronnie spent the night in her mother’s room, and they both left the next morning. Ronnie’s book suggests that she never returned to the mansion again. However, affidavits sworn for the ensuing court proceedings tell a slightly different story.
In an affidavit sworn on June 23 Ronnie stated that on the night of June 12 Spector “came to my mother’s room, told me I should get a lawyer to get a divorce, and he hit me in the face while I was sitting down, my cigarette falling to the floor”—an account that appears to contradict her later claim that he had warned her “Don’t even dream about divorcing me.”
According to her affidavit, Ronnie ran downstairs, pursued by Spector, who “then pushed me out of the house through the kitchen door. When I left the house, I had no funds or assets of any kind.”
After spending the night of June 12 in a hotel, Ronnie returned to the mansion, where she spent the next three nights in her mother’s room. On June 16—the day Mr. Valantine called—Ronnie’s Beverly Hills lawyers, Jay Stein and Daniel Jaffe, informed Spector that an action for dissolution of the marriage had been filed. Ronnie apparently left the mansion that same day. “Thereafter,” she stated, “I was afraid to return to my home for fear my husband would harm me, and my mother and I have since been living in a hotel. In a telephone conversation with me Friday evening, June 16, 1972, my husband told me that he had thrown all my clothes in a garbage can on La Cienega Boulevard.”
Ronnie and Beatrice were to continue living in the Beverly Crest Hotel for the remainder of the summer, as the affidavits and the insults flew back and forth. Donte and the twins Gary and Louis continued to live with Spector in the mansion. On July 6 Ronnie filed a motion to obtain sole custody of Donte (she appeared to have no interest in the twins), designed to demonstrate Spector’s unsuitability as a parent. Stating that “my husband has a very suspicious nature,” she elaborated on the security arrangements that had been described by Mr. Valantine, adding that there were “on the premises, more or less continuously, five dogs, including two German shepherd dogs, which are trained to attack on command, and one Irish wolfhound…One George Brand is employed by my husband (or one of his companies); he resides on the premises and acts as a bodyguard.” (In a later motion she would add that “moreover, respondent [Spector] keeps and displays a number of weapons.”) Ronnie requested that Spector should be ordered to pay sufficient support for her to rent a house or apartment in Beverly Hills, “comparable in furnishings, decor and comfort to the family residence,” and adequate for the children (together with their governess) to be able to stay. She also suggested that she was willing to have a court-ordered psychiatric examination of all concerned to press her case.
In late July, Spector’s lawyer Godfrey Isaac retaliated by filing an opposition to the proposed psychiatric examination, arguing that everyone involved, including Gary and Louis, had already been seen by psychiatrists before the divorce proceedings began. Moreover, Isaac maintained, he had evidence that Ronnie had had “repeated commitments to psychiatric wards,” and that while Spector had been commuting between New York and London, she had “sustained an emotional breakdown.” Spector, Isaac added, was willing to pay for Ronnie’s lawyers to go to New York to interview the psychiatrists who had treated her if the court needed any more evidence. Ronnie’s lawyers fired back, alleging that Spector had been swamping the switchboard at the Beverly Crest Hotel with calls, and “verba
lly abusing, threatening, harassing and intimidating staff,” when Ronnie instructed them not to put the calls through.
At the end of July, the court ordered Spector to start paying Ronnie’s hotel bills, and to allow her visitation rights to see Donte. Before long, Ronnie was filing another deposition accusing Spector of refusing to pay in full the bill for her stay, refusing to absent himself from the house when she exercised visitation rights to see the children and of refusing to return her “full-length mink coat, wallet and driver’s license.”
In August both sides began taking depositions from each other at the Santa Monica courthouse. When Spector’s lawyers belabored Ronnie for her drinking, she responded that she had “partaken of alcohol” only since her marriage, “usually only with her husband,” and that she drank to “shut out the continuous stream of shrieking by the respondent.” At his own deposition, on August 21, Spector arrived with a stenographer’s machine, which sat unused on the desk beside him as the deposition progressed. When Ronnie’s lawyer Stein asked him why he was not taking anything down, Spector supposedly replied, “I’m waiting for you to say something important.”
Stein and Jaffe would later attest that, leaving the courtroom, they were “made the objects of a ten-minute string of vehemence, obscene epithets and screaming” by Spector, “who was literally foaming at the mouth.”
When the court ordered Spector to pay his wife interim support payments, he wrote out a check for the first $1,250 in court. A month later, three employees of Brink’s—“two being armed guards and one holding a shotgun”—arrived at Jay Stein’s offices to deliver the second payment of $1,250—in nickels.
In the meantime, in search of “community property,” Ronnie’s lawyers had ordered a certified public accountant, Arthur Linsk, to make an examination of the books of accounts of Spector and his company Phil Spector Enterprises.