by Mick Brown
It was some weeks before he got a call from Spector’s office, inviting him to meet at the studio. “I went in and Phil said, ‘No notes in the mail from you recently…’ The Kessels were there, and David said, ‘We had a real good time at the Cock ’n Bull. Phil wanted to get you big-time…’”
The erratic hours that Devra kept, working for Spector, had exacted a toll on her marriage to Robert Robitaille. They argued more frequently. “I was beginning to think there must be more to life than this.” Late one night at Gold Star, toward the end of the Dion sessions, Spector walked Devra to her car, and took her in his arms and kissed her. “I know I should have been thinking, ‘This is not right; it’s not an ethical thing to be thinking of doing to my husband.’ But I wasn’t thinking that. I was twenty-four years old, and I’d been transported.”
The next day, when Devra arrived at the house with some papers to sign, Spector led her upstairs.
The transition from being Spector’s employee to being his lover seemed only to exaggerate the extremes of their existing relationship. It was unlike any love affair she had ever had. Where once he had been kind, Spector now became loving; where once cold, he now became cruel.
“I really, really loved him. But I still don’t know if I was in love with him, or just incredibly enamored of him as a fascinating and amazing person. There would be times when I’d go up there, and we’d talk for hours about everything under the sun. That seemed to fulfill a need he had at the time. Other times I would arrive and he would literally launch himself at me and pull me upstairs and then afterward we’d come down and have tea, and he’d give me some notes and things to be done; and then all of a sudden he’d lose his temper and start screaming at me and order me out. And then next time I’d come up he wouldn’t be there, or he’d shove a package through the door and not let me in at all. I’d go back to my car and open the envelope and it was handwritten instructions. Call this person, check the liner notes, whatever. I couldn’t understand why he was being so horrible to me. And then the following day he’d be all sweetness and light, ushering me in and there’d be a little gift—a wallet, flowers…I always felt he was toying with me. Cat and mouse. It’s not something one would like to admit, that you would allow yourself to be mesmerized by someone’s strong will, but that’s what it felt like. Often I found myself doing things that I never would stand for from another human being. But at the same time, I went along with it, because for me, nobody was ever as fascinating as Phil.”
His paradoxes were constantly bemusing. She had never met anybody more arrogant, more convinced of his own genius, nor more insecure—constantly stealing glances at himself in the mirror and primping his hair, thrown into rage or apoplexy by any criticism or slight, real or imagined. He could be intelligent, sensitive, unerring in his capacity to spot bullshit in other people, yet at the same time would swagger around with a gun under his shoulder or tucked into his boot—an affectation that Devra thought was simply “silly. I wanted to sit him down and just say, ‘Stop this nonsense; it doesn’t make you a big man, it just makes you a big idiot.’”
To Devra it sometimes seemed the one thing Spector could stand least of all was an even keel. The eccentricities, the insults, the arguments, and the quixotic flights of temper—all were simply a way of provoking a reaction, any reaction. “He was like one of those beings that lands on planet Earth from another world, and was flicking the little earthlings to see what they would do. He couldn’t stand for things to be boring. So he’d pull the rug out to shake things up.”
His temper could be volcanic. He would shout and scream until the veins on his forehead bulged and it seemed as if his eyes would pop out of his head, but he never once struck or slapped her.
One night, in Ah Fong’s after a squabble over the bill, he reached for a bowl of noodles and upturned it over her head. “I got up and stalked out and had to take a taxi home. I quit. And then two or three days later tons of roses turned up. But that was a pattern—me quitting, followed by roses.”
His fear of abandonment could be almost pathological. “There were times when he would drag me around Beverly Hills, to restaurants or whatever, and I’d be so exhausted I could hardly keep my eyes open and I’d be pleading, ‘Please just let me go home, I want to go to sleep,’ and never be allowed to.”
But Spector, she says, was “indefatigable. He’d get really drunk, and the more drunk he got, the more he needed someone to talk to. And at that point it almost didn’t matter who you were. It was like a plug in the wall; he needed someone to get the electricity from. And as the night wore on, you’d get more and more tired of it all. And eventually it would be four a.m. and you’d have to put your foot down.”
One night at the mansion she was desperate to leave and voices were raised. “And he locked the door, and then he got out a shotgun and he put it to my temple and he said, ‘If you try to leave I’ll pull the trigger.’ I remember being quite calm. I wasn’t frightened. I just wanted to go home. I said to him, ‘Phillip, just stop being silly, put it down and open the door.’ And eventually he did. I remember stumbling out and getting in the car and driving away like a bat out of hell. I don’t think I ever thought he’d kill me, but I was terrified he could have by accident. But the really extraordinary thing was the next day I came back to work…”
Not all such confrontations were resolved so privately. In November 1975 Spector was involved in an incident at the Beverly Hills Hotel with a parking valet named Kevin Brown. According to evidence submitted in September 2004 for the grand jury hearings in the Lana Clarkson case, Brown was at work outside the hotel when he heard a woman scream “Get away from me” and looked over to see Spector and Marty Machat arguing with a woman near the front door. When Brown approached and asked what was happening, Spector allegedly pointed a revolver in his face and told the valet to “Get the fuck away from me,” before climbing into a silver Cadillac with Machat and driving away. Spector subsequently pleaded guilty to one count of misdemeanor brandishing of a firearm. He was placed on two years’ formal probation, with the condition that he not use or possess any dangerous or deadly weapons.
By the end of 1976 the deal with Warner Bros. had petered to a close, leaving Joe Smith with a feeling of lingering disappointment. “We were never looking to Phillip to sign Elton John or whatever, but we were looking to him to sign somebody and make a signature record, and that never really worked out. It wasn’t a good deal. The biggest thing I got out of it was going to the studios and watching Phil work. But the problem with Phil was that he was carrying a big monkey on his back. He’s Phil Spector and people expect whatever he does to be a Phil Spector record. And he couldn’t do the same record, because people will just say he’s repeating himself, but he couldn’t come up with anything else either.”
But Smith was philosophical. “With rock and roll artists you have to assume the human brain is like a computer with chips that govern its behavior. Well, these people can take blank sheets of paper, put markings on it and take that into the studio, make music out of it that pleases millions of people. They can do things we can’t do. They’ve got chips we don’t have. But to make room for those chips, out falls sanity, reason, logic, gratitude…”
Spector had not been in the studio in almost a year, and in an attempt to keep some momentum going in his career, Marty Machat now proposed that he should produce another of his clients—Leonard Cohen. On paper, it seemed the most unlikely of partnerships. Cohen was a Canadian poet and author who had become a singer almost as an afterthought—he was thirty-three when he released his debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, in 1967. His reputation rested on a body of thoughtful, introspective and highly literary songs—bleak and melancholic meditations on love, sex and mortality, leavened with a dry, fatalistic humor. He sang in a flat, nasal monotone, framed either by his own acoustic guitar or discreet chamber arrangements. Nobody seemed more surprised by his success than Cohen himself.
But Cohen’s life and career were now in ne
ed of restoration. It had been almost three years since his last album, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, and his record company, Columbia, had taken the step of issuing a Best of album—a sure sign that their patience was wearing thin. His family was breaking up and he was drinking heavily; in an attempt to find some equilibrium in his life he had been cultivating an interest in Zen Buddhism and spending time at a Zen retreat, Mount Baldy, in California.
One night Machat brought Cohen to a small gathering at the mansion. Cohen would later recall that he found the occasion “tedious,” the mansion “dark, cold and dreary.” When the other guests departed, and Spector locked the door and refused to let Cohen leave, Cohen was nonplussed. “To salvage the evening, I said, ‘Rather than watch you shout at your servants, let’s do something more interesting,’” he later recalled. “And so we sat down at the piano and started writing songs.”
Over the next three weeks, they composed fifteen numbers, the writing sessions fueled by copious amounts of wine and liquor. Doc Pomus, who was visiting from New York, would remember them as “like two drunks staggerin’ around.” Alarmed, Cohen’s friends tried to warn him off the project. Joni Mitchell was particularly insistent; she had been recording her album Court and Spark at AM studios at the time Spector had been recording the rock and roll album with Lennon and was aware of the turbulence around those sessions. Spector, she warned Cohen, was past his prime and “difficult.” Her words were to prove prophetic in a way no one could imagine.
In June 1977 recording began at the Whitney Studios in Glendale. Larry Levine was now back in the fold, engineering the sessions. The studio had a pipe organ that Spector wanted to use on a couple of songs, but on the playbacks Spector had the volume so loud that he blew out the studio’s speakers. The recording moved to Gold Star.
After eighteen months, Spector’s sporadic love affair with Devra Robitaille had finally come to an end in an abrupt fashion, but she continued to work as his personal assistant. “There was never a discussion. We just were lovers, and then we weren’t. But I think he still trusted me, still relied on me, and we still had a rapport. And I was still very loyal, always did what I was supposed to do with his best interests at heart.”
But the Cohen sessions were trying even Devra’s patience and loyalty. Going into the studio with Spector was “like a crapshoot. He could be in a great mood, or he could be a raving lunatic. He could go and make magic, or he’d be throwing things around and it would just be this debacle. A lot of it was the drinking. Someone would say something, or he’d just get in a mood and stalk off. Everybody would be hanging around, and then tempers would start to build, and I’d be the pivot point; people would be coming up saying, ‘What’s going on with Phil? Jesus Christ, when are we going to get out of here, when are we going to get a take?’ And Phil would be joking around, getting drunk, walking up and down in the hall, disappearing into the bathroom for hours at a time, fixing his hair. Just prevarication. And it’s five o’clock in the morning and everyone’s exhausted and our prospective wives and husbands are furious with us, and he hasn’t gotten a take yet. And you’d just want to shake him. ‘Get on with it!’ There were a couple of times when he’d pass out drunk, and Larry and I would have to haul him back into his chair and revive him. And sometimes he’d somehow rally and that would be the brilliant take, the moment of genius.”
The boozy camaraderie between Spector and Cohen had quickly degenerated into fractious arguments—about song tempos, structures, arrangements, everything. “They didn’t see eye-to-eye at all,” Devra says, “and there were a lot of creative differences. It was always very tense, very uncomfortable.”
Effectively relegated to the role of sideman, Cohen was doing his best to keep an even temper in the midst of the growing chaos. “Phil was pretty wacky on those sessions—animated,” David Kessel remembers. “But what I dug about that was that you had Phil with all of his stuff going on, and then Leonard being like Dean Martin—just cool. It gave Leonard a chance to perfect his Shaolin priesthood stuff and become one with the universe.”
Cohen recognized what Spector himself, and few around him, were prepared to acknowledge or admit—that Spector was not simply eccentric but seriously disturbed. “In the state that he found himself, which was post-Wagnerian, I would say Hitlerian, the atmosphere was one of guns,” Cohen would later reflect. “I mean, that’s what was really going on, guns. The music was subsidiary, an enterprise. People were armed to the teeth, [and] everybody was drunk, or intoxicated on other items, so you were slipping over bullets, and you were biting into revolvers in your hamburger. There were guns everywhere.”
Cohen would later recall how on one occasion in the studio Spector approached him with a bottle of Manischewitz in one hand and a pistol in the other, placed his arm around Cohen’s shoulder, shoved the gun in his neck and said, “Leonard, I love you.” Cohen, with admirable aplomb, simply moved the barrel away, saying, “I hope you do, Phil.”
On another evening Spector pulled a gun on the violin player Bobby Bruce and held it to his head, after Bruce had made some remarks to which Spector took exception. Larry Levine quickly stepped in to quiet things down. “Phil wasn’t angry at Bobby; he was just showing off. But Bobby’s gotta be scared shitless. And I said, ‘Phil, I know you don’t mean anything, but accidents happen. Put it down.’ And he wasn’t willing to do that. It was like ‘Hey, I can handle my life.’ So finally I said, ‘I’m turning off the equipment and going home unless you put that down right now.’ And that’s when he finally realized I was serious and put the gun away. I loved Phil, and when you love somebody, you do what you can do to bring it back to the rational. I’d seen him both ways, so I knew that wasn’t the real Phil.”
The sessions finally ground to a conclusion in a bitter mood, with Spector refusing to allow Cohen to be present for the mixes, or to hear the finished album. Cohen would later claim Spector did not even properly complete his vocals, instead using ‘guide vocals’ which Cohen had intended to redo later.
Spector was equivocal about the result, scribbling a note to Larry Levine on the master tapes: “I’ll tell you something, Larry—we’ve done worse with better, and better with worse!” For Devra Robitaille, the album was to prove the last straw. Spector would thank her on the album’s liner notes for her “grave concern in the face of overwhelming odds.” But her sympathies had been exhausted. “I came to the conclusion that I had no business putting myself in a position where I was behaving like a groupie. I disrespected myself. I was an accomplished musician; I was bright and able, and I let myself get trashed.” She resigned from her job, and went back to working for Warner Bros.
On its release in 1978, the critics savaged Death of a Ladies’ Man. Spector was accused of assassinating Cohen’s poetic sensitivity with grotesquely inappropriate arrangements and an overwrought production. But the critics were wrong. Out of the fog of alcohol and recrimination, Spector had somehow fashioned a series of almost vaudevillian settings that were perfectly pitched to Cohen’s unsparing depiction of himself as a weary boulevardier, desperately seeking spiritual consolation in the pleasures of the flesh, in the face of advancing years and diminishing opportunities. A melancholy waltz for “True Love Leaves No Traces” bump-and-grind burlesque for “Iodine.” “Paper Thin Hotel,” a minor-key, bittersweet rumination on infidelity, was dressed with choirs, pedal steel guitars and pianos, with a melody that recalled the work of Jimmy Webb at his most wistfully romantic. In this context even the hokey country hoedown arrangement of “Fingerprints” made a bizarre kind of sense.
Death of a Ladies’ Man may not have been Phil Spector’s greatest production, but it was certainly the oddest, and in many ways the most compelling.
Cohen attempted to distance himself from the record, describing it to Rolling Stone as “an experiment that failed,” while acknowledging it had “real energizing capacities.” In the final moment, he said, Spector “couldn’t resist annihilating me. I don’t think he can tolerate any other sha
dows in his own darkness. I say these things not to hurt him. Incidentally, beyond all this, I liked him. Just man to man he’s delightful, and with children he’s very kind.”
The album would be the worst-selling of Cohen’s career. Spector laconically told a friend that he had “got hate mail from all eight of Leonard’s fans” and would never miss an opportunity thereafter to make a joke at the poet’s expense. In 1993 he was approached by an academic seeking a contribution for a proposed volume of tributes to mark Cohen’s sixtieth birthday.
Spector replied by sending a copy of a letter he had recently written to another correspondent, who had seemingly written to Spector seeking his opinion of—of all things—the Partridge Family. While Spector made clear that he regarded the Partridge Family as “an obscene joke,” there was one distinguished artist of his acquaintance, he wrote, who had confessed to being “extremely influenced” by them. “And that artist is Leonard Cohen. Underneath that brooding, moody, depressed soul which Leonard possesses lies an out-and-out Partridge Family freak.” Spector suggested that his correspondent might even wish to contact Cohen to discuss the Partridge Family further.
Signing the letter, “Cordially, Phil Spector,” he helpfully appended Cohen’s telephone and fax numbers, just in case his correspondent wanted to get in touch.
22
“Thank You, Folks—Have a Good Life”
Life had not been easy for Ronnie Spector in the years since leaving Phil Spector. She continued to receive her alimony payments (“Fuck off”), and four times a year she would fly to California to see Donte under the terms of her visitation rights. Ronnie would check into a hotel where Donte would be delivered to her in the back of Spector’s Rolls-Royce, stepping out, Ronnie would recall, “like some midget prince.”