by Mick Brown
As the sessions dragged on, Spector’s worst habits began to reassert themselves, and he began drinking more heavily. Larry Levine, whom Spector had called in to engineer the sessions, had seen it all before. In their long association, Levine had come to think of himself as “pretty much a big brother” figure to Spector, and had developed a fine instinct for knowing when to step in to defuse ugly or awkward situations, and when to leave best alone. But Spector was now more out of control than Levine had ever seen him.
“We would go in sometimes, and Phil had been drinking so much that we would go a whole night without doing a thing, because he wasn’t capable of doing anything; he was just out of it. There were a couple of times where I told him that he was not acting correctly, and we got into some heavy arguments. He was abusive to the Ramones, and I told him that; and then he was abusive to me. It was like you couldn’t get through to Phil at that point. He was gone, into another place. You couldn’t reason with him. And it was all from the drinking. He was never that way not drinking.”
With the sessions completed, Spector dismissed the band and got down to mixing the album. With the exception of “Baby, I Love You,” which he decorated with a faux-jaunty string arrangement completely at odds with the heartstopping drama and poignancy of the original, Spector had done little to tamper with the Ramones’ formula, merely adding texture to the group’s amphetamine rush, with echo and reverb and some additional instrumental flourishes. Yet, apparently beset with anxiety, he would labor for almost six months over the mixing. David Kessel was incredulous. “I remember asking him, ‘Why’s it taking so long? They’re just a guitar, bass and drums band—we’re not talking about a whole lot here.’ And he said, ‘I don’t care; I’ve got to get it right. You want me to do it wrong? No. Then let me do it right.’ I think he knew the Ramones would be the last album he would do for a long time, and he had a lot riding on it. This was a little different attitude from the art pieces he did with Dion and Leonard Cohen. I think he was conscious of leaving a rock and roll legacy.”
For Larry Levine the strain became unbearable. One night he and Spector had a “knock-down, drag-out argument,” and the following day Levine suffered a heart attack. Levine refused to attribute the attack to Spector—he had suffered a first heart attack six years earlier but continued to smoke heavily—but Spector was mortified, and fearing he was to blame could not even bring himself to visit Levine in hospital. They would not speak for another ten years.
End of the Century was finally released in January 1980. It had taken seven months to complete, at a cost of some $200,000—more than three times the cost of any previous Ramones album. It would also prove to be the group’s most successful record, rising to number 44 in the American album charts and number 14 in Britain. Spector’s original contract with the group stipulated that he would produce two albums. But like two boxers who had pummeled each other to a standstill, neither the Ramones nor Spector could face the prospect of going another round.
“Phil was tired, and he needed time to himself,” David Kessel says. “When he finished the Ramones album, it was like: Thank you, folks—have a good life.”
23
“A Case That No One Can Reach”
At the age of forty-one, Phil Spector entered retirement. There had been periods in the past when he had withdrawn from the studio, and from public life. Longueurs when he had been stricken with self-doubt, recalcitrance. He had always come back. But now he would not enter the studio again for another thirteen years. Better than anybody, Spector knew that the craziness had to end. He was exhausted by his own madness.
He started seeing Janis Zavala again. She had left Screen Gems and was now working in another music publishing job.
On the night of December 8, 1980, John Lennon was shot dead outside his home at the Dakota building in New York by an obsessive fan. Spector and Lennon had had an uneasy relationship in the aftermath of the acrimonious conclusion to the Rock ’n’ Roll album sessions. According to Yoko Ono they had talked from time to time on the telephone but never actually seen each other again. Spector would later claim that they had discussed the possibility of working together again, on another Lennon album, and as collaborators producing Elvis Presley—an idea that was never put to Presley himself and was scotched when the singer died in 1977.
Spector seemed to have no inner resources to deal with loss. Just as he had been knocked completely off balance by the death of his friend Lenny Bruce fifteen years earlier, so he was now rendered helpless by the shock of Lennon’s passing. That same night a handful of friends, including the Kessel brothers, gathered at the mansion, to mourn Lennon, but mostly it seemed to comfort Spector. “He was devastated,” Dan Kessel remembers. “I was. Anyone who liked the Beatles or liked John felt the same way. But Phil was particularly close to John; he didn’t take it very well at all. He was talking about John, drinking, talking about what a great artist he was and how much he missed him. It was just such a sad moment.” When the gathering finally broke up at six in the morning, Spector vanished to his room and locked the door behind him, refusing to emerge for several days.
In January, in an attempt to come to terms with her husband’s death, Yoko Ono began recording a solo album, Season of Glass. Affection between Spector and Ono had always been somewhat forced; but now, in a gesture as much of conciliation as need, she invited him to co-produce the record. But the sessions were awash with grief, and Spector withdrew before the album was completed. He returned to California with one of Lennon’s guitars, which Yoko had given him as a keepsake, and which would occupy a cherished place in the music room thereafter. He had lost any interest in working. “I think, after John died, it was: What the fuck now?” Dan Kessel says. “He’d produced the Beatles, and he’d produced the Ramones, who were like the Beatles of punk rock. So who was he going to produce now? Frank Sinatra? It was very apparent he wasn’t all that motivated to create or hustle or anything. It was like the end of an era, and he was going to take a breathing space and just deal with it.”
On October 17, 1982, Phil Spector became a proper father for the first time when Janis gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. Spector was thrilled—and particularly delighted by the fact that they shared a birthday with his hero, Barney Kessel. Horrified at the piped Muzak playing in the ward where the newborn babies were kept, Spector demanded to see the hospital superintendent. “The superintendent came along and Phil was haranguing him,” Dan Kessel remembers. “He was saying, ‘You’ve got to change the music.’ ‘Well, why?’ And Phil was saying, ‘All I can tell you is you’re going to have a serious problem on your hands if you don’t change this music to a jazz station. I can’t have it that this is the first music my children hear.’ And the incredible thing was, they changed it.” A boy and a girl…To Spector it was obvious—the children should be called Ike and Tina, or perhaps Mickey and Sylvia. At length, they were named Nicole and Phillip Jr.
Janis gave up her job in music publishing and became a full-time mother. It seems that the couple also married around this time, although Spector, who remained intensively secretive about his private life, told almost no one: for years afterward even close friends like Ahmet Ertegun and Nino Tempo would be unsure of his exact marital status.
Family life seemed to transform Spector. He stopped drinking. He was the most contented, the most at peace with himself, that he had ever been. He saw few people, devoting all his time to Janis and the children. The loss of his father had left a deep scar that had never healed, and that Spector seldom talked about with anyone. “I remember once when the Kessels were going down to visit their father, Phil said, ‘You’re lucky you have one,’” Harvey Kubernik says. “That was a rare thing for him.”
His own childhood had hardly provided a model of a happy and harmonious family life. But it now seemed that he was determined to lavish on the twins all the love and affection he had never known himself as a child.
“It was like Phil had had this emotional-paperwork pileup
, and he needed to get in touch with himself,” Dan Kessel says. “He wanted to be a good father, and he was a good father. He became a much more private person. He didn’t want to go out, and he didn’t want a lot of people coming over to break the vibe. Here was a guy for whom just putting on a funky sweatshirt, going to the supermarket and buying a quart of milk was good for rehabilitation. That’s the kind of stuff he needed to do.”
When the children were born, he had laid down two conditions to Janis. He would never go to Disneyland, and he would never go to the beach. He was as good as his word, but he delighted in doing other “dad things.”
“Phil was a doting father,” Dan Kessel says. “He spent most of his time at home with Janis, raising the kids and playing with them; he was very involved in every aspect of their lives, their schooling, everything.”
An avid basketball fan, he bought a season ticket to the Lakers, court-side. His seat happened to be directly opposite where Jack Nicholson sat, and Spector enjoyed telling friends that he’d “seen Jack at the game,” as if they were the closest of friends.
Spector’s newfound peace and equilibrium had come too late to save his adopted family. At 10:00 p.m. on the night of January 23, 1980, ten-year-old Donte walked into a West Hollywood police station and told officers that he had run away from home. When police contacted Spector, he refused to come and collect his son. Donte was taken into temporary care, and in April, Ronnie was awarded custody, with the court ordering Spector to pay child support of $850 a month—“by check or money order,” the judge warned Spector, “no pennies, nickels or quarters.” Donte joined Ronnie in the small apartment where she was living in New York. But Donte was unhappy in New York, and the arrangement ended after only a few months, when he flew back to California, to spend a few days with an old school friend. At the end of his stay, according to Be My Baby, Donte refused to return to New York, telling the friend’s mother that Ronnie was an alcoholic and that he was scared to be with her. Instead, he moved in with Bertha. Ronnie would not see her adopted son again for more than ten years. After living for a while with Bertha, Donte moved back into the mansion with Spector, but the relationship was troubled. Donte was going off the rails, and before long he had left home for good.
While Spector had always been devoted to Donte, if incapable of properly playing the part of his father, the twins Gary and Louis had been adopted almost as an afterthought, and for the most part they had been raised by George Brand and a series of nannies and governesses. In 1985, both boys graduated from high school and also left home, Gary to join the air force, Louis to join a Christian community. They would maintain only sporadic contact with Spector.
In 2003, following Spector’s arrest, Donte gave an interview to the Mail on Sunday, claiming that he had been raised in “an atmosphere of fear” and that Spector had “destroyed” his life. “People looked at me when I was a child and thought I was living a fairy-tale existence,” he said. “I lived in a mansion and went to school in a stretch limo. But what people didn’t realize was that when I went home I would be locked in my room for hours. My brothers were locked in one room and I was locked in another. I didn’t even have a proper toilet—I had a small pot in the corner of the room.”
Spector, Donte alleged, “ruled by fear. He always had a gun and if we were bad he’d let his robe fall open so you could see the holster. He would put his hand on it and say, ‘Now, just behave’…Sometimes I’d want to wet myself with fear.” Most shocking were the allegations that after Ronnie had left home, Spector would bring girlfriends back to the mansion and force Donte and his brothers to watch them having sex. “At other times Dad would say, ‘There she is, now be a man,’ and he would force us to simulate sex with the girl. I was only ten or so at the time. I was terrified.”
He went on to describe how, disowned by his adoptive parents, he had slipped into a life on the street, working as a male prostitute in Hollywood to earn money for drugs, eventually becoming HIV-positive. He had last seen Spector, he claimed, two years earlier, when they had gone to a Lakers game. “It was strange—Dad seemed okay to see me, but he didn’t give me a hug. I can’t remember him ever telling me that he loved me.” They had last spoken, he said, in December 2002, two months before Spector’s arrest, when Donte had telephoned and asked his father for money. According to Donte, “He just hung up.”
In 1983 Gold Star Studios, the crucible of Spector’s genius and the scene of his greatest triumphs, was sold when the site where it stood was designated for development as a shopping mall. When the studio burned down the following year, it seemed the final, climactic punctuation mark to the career of the man who, more than anyone, had made Gold Star a legend.
Music had slipped away from Phil Spector’s life. There was no financial requirement for him to work. He could rely on a steady stream of income from his catalogue of hits. He would tell the Kessels that the two most important dates of the year were June 15 and December 15—when record companies paid royalties. But he was intensely protective about the use of his material. He had always been contemptuous of his old rival Berry Gordy’s willingness to allow Motown songs to be used in films and commercials. Gordy, he mocked, was holding “one long fire sale.” And while Spector had occasionally allowed his songs to be used in film soundtracks—Martin Scorsese had used “Be My Baby” for the opening sequence of Mean Streets—he was happy to turn down hundreds of thousands of dollars of potential income rather than prostitute his songs, and would make life inordinately difficult for anyone wanting to license them. In 1984 Steven Spielberg approached him about using the Darlene Love song “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” for his film Gremlins. There was protracted haggling between the two men over the price right up to the last minute, when Spector threatened to pull the song altogether. Spielberg swore he would never again do business with Spector.
His most lucrative licensing opportunity came two years later, when he allowed “Be My Baby” to be used in the film Dirty Dancing, which became one of the highest-grossing films of the time. The soundtrack album spent eighteen weeks at number 1 in America, and went on to sell over 11 million copies. For Spector it was a welcome windfall, but the success of the song would later lead to a lawsuit with the Ronettes that would occupy him for much of the next decade. In the same year, Spector allowed three of his songs to be used in the brat-pack movie The Pick-up Artist: Darlene Love’s “Wait ’til My Bobby Gets Home,” the Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron,” and the Ronettes’ “(The Best Part of ) Breakin’ Up” for the latter, Spector himself was persuaded into the studio to produce the actress Molly Ringwald singing the lead vocal over the original instrumental track. But the film, and the soundtrack album, failed to repeat the success of Dirty Dancing and were quickly forgotten.
While Marty Machat continued to work as Spector’s lawyer, it was Janis who was the emissary for most of his contact with the outside world. Most people had no idea that the woman on the other end of the telephone who handled all of Spector’s business dealings and correspondence was also the mother of his children. But then most people had no idea Spector had children.
“Janis was excellent for Phil,” Dan Kessel says. “She was a real pro, highly intelligent, with sound judgment. She made things run like clockwork.”
Spector seemed to have lost all interest in music. It was as if the fear that had haunted him for twenty-five years—that he would never be able to match, let alone surpass, the standards he had set himself in his twenties, and that he was doomed to live forever in the shadow of his own monumental accomplishments—had now hardened into a kind of paralysis.
Occasionally, old friends like Don Randi and Jack Nitzsche would receive a telephone call out of the blue, hinting at a reunion or a recording date, as if Spector were reassuring himself that if ever he were to return to work his old friends would be there for him, just as they had always been. Even Bobby Sheen, who had not worked with Spector for twenty years, would receive the occasional call.
Since sepa
rating from Spector in the ’60s, Sheen had enjoyed modest success as a solo performer, recording singles for Capitol and Warner Bros., before joining a touring version of the Coasters. While ruing the fact that Spector had allowed his career with Philles to dwindle, Sheen had always felt gratitude and affection for his old producer.
“Everybody else from the Blossoms kind of resented Phil for what he’d done to them, but Bobby would never say anything negative about him,” remembers Sheen’s widow Frances. “Phil carried on sending him stuff—records, a jacket and T-shirt. He would call up Bobby every now and again and say, ‘Hey, we’re going back in the studio; it’s going to be just like the old days.’ But it never happened, of course. He’d call on a Friday, and say, ‘I’ll give you a call back on Monday.’ Bobby would hang up the phone and say, ‘Phil says we’re going in the studio on Monday.’ I’d say, ‘That’s good!’ And Bobby would just laugh and say, ‘No, he doesn’t mean it. He just calls up and says things like that; he’s probably not taking his medicine.’”
On one occasion, Spector insisted that Sheen meet him to discuss a possible recording, suggesting a rendezvous in a parking lot behind a Hollywood restaurant. Sheen thought it was odd, but duly turned up at the appointed place and hour. They had been talking for only a few minutes when a group of toughs materialized out of the darkness. Spector took fright and fled, leaving a bemused and shaken Sheen to make good his own escape. He never heard from Spector again.
In 1986 an American author James Robert Baker published Fuel-Injected Dreams—a classic of contemporary pulp fiction, the book was a blowup caricature of all the myths and legends about the “madness” of Phil Spector. The novel tells the story of Dennis Contrelle, “the original Wagner of vinyl,” the “one-man surfing Luftwaffe of car-crash romance,” who after a stellar burst in the ’60s, creating a series of “epic trash” masterpieces, withdraws to his Malibu mansion, “a drug-damaged Svengali,” making a virtual prisoner of his wife Sharlene, the teenage temptress who once sang with his biggest group, the Stingrays.