Tearing Down the Wall of Sound

by Mick Brown

  A few days later, the Erteguns invited Karen and Spector out to their house at the Hamptons for the weekend. They traveled together in a limousine. Karen had brought a small overnight bag, and she was bemused when Spector appeared with four large suitcases, a portable keyboard and three hatboxes—that he would not let out of his grip, and that Karen assumed contained his wigs. At Ertegun’s home, she and Spector were given adjoining rooms. Dressing for dinner, she could hear the sound of Spector’s hair dryer through the wall as he labored interminably to tease his hairpiece into place. That evening, a group of Ertegun’s friends, including Jann Wenner, sat down to dinner, and Spector entertained the throng at the piano with more selections from the Berlin and Porter songbooks. The next morning, everyone set out along the beach in a stiff breeze for a bracing walk. Spector stayed behind. “I don’t think Phil was really a beach person,” Karen says.

  It was the beginning of a platonic relationship that would last for the next four years. They would meet frequently when Spector was in town, and when he returned to the West Coast, they kept in touch with notes and phone calls. Sometimes Lerner would return home, switch on her answering-machine and find that, in her absence, Spector had been talking to her dog. “I’d hear these messages, ‘Oliver, do you want to go out? Do you want to go out?’ That’s what I always said to him, ‘Do you want to go out, Ollie?’ And I could picture this poor dog, hearing this voice playing in the apartment, and running up and down the hall, going mad. It was kind of…sinister. Who would think of doing something like that? But I actually like sick humor, and that’s one reason I was so intrigued by Phil. He had a wild sense of humor, very, very original.”

  When Spector first played Karen his greatest hits, she was taken aback. “What struck me was the volume and the intensity—this little tiny man making such a big, powerful noise. And the lyrics, which were so lovely in many cases. I’d had no idea. I remember him saying once, ‘Your husband wrote music that was on stage and film. But how would you like it if you wrote something and your whole output in life was presented in a 6"×2" box, meaning a car radio. How difficult would it be to write something that would come across in that way?’ I think he was saying, ‘This is the hurdle I’ve had to overcome, and I mastered it.’”

  Spector would talk for hours about his life and his music, the people he’d known, the people he’d worked with, the friends and the enemies. He would treat her to his impersonations of Ahmet—whom Karen surmised he revered as a father figure—John Lennon and Bob Dylan—“that nasal whine, where you couldn’t understand anything. I think Dylan was one of his pet peeves.” He proudly told her how he had once thrown Warren Beatty out of a recording session.

  Sometimes his conversation would drift back to a subject that had preoccupied him for much of his professional life: being immortalized in film. Over dinner one night he outlined his wish list to Lerner: Tom Wolfe should write the script, and it would be a story in three parts. The first part should be directed by Dennis Hopper; the second part by Stanley Kubrick and the concluding part by Martin Scorsese. Scorsese had used “Be My Baby” in his film Mean Streets, and Spector grumbled to Lerner how the director had “ripped me off.” But he revered him nonetheless. And, of course, Al Pacino would play the role of Spector.

  Spector, Karen thought, liked to give the impression of being powerful and in control, but it was a front that could quickly crumple. On March 14, 1991, his old friend Doc Pomus passed away. As was always the case with Spector, the death of a friend seemed to cut to the heart of his insecurities and left him deeply shaken. A memorial service was held for Pomus at the Riverside Memorial Chapel, where Spector delivered a eulogy. “I remember him writing it,” Karen says. “He was afraid he was going to cry; he didn’t, but after the service he was a total wreck.” Spector did not usually observe Jewish customs, but when Pomus’s family invited him to sit Shiva with them, Spector, honored to be asked, agreed, and sat for the customary seven days.

  Incredibly, perhaps, for all its historic significance there had never been a compilation of Spector’s work on record. Roy Carr had proposed the idea as far back as 1976 but, afraid that it would be seen as an exercise in nostalgia, Spector had decided against it. In 1989 he was approached by another company, Rhino, with a view to licensing his work for a box set, but it was Allen Klein—characteristically alive to the value of the Spector canon—who finally brought the project to fruition.

  Spector would play little part in pulling the record together. It was left to Allen Klein to do most of the work. Larry Levine was invited to supervise the remastering of the recordings for release on CD. In recent years Levine had dropped out of the music business and attempted to start a new career, selling condominiums for a builder in Beverly Hills, but his equable nature was ill-suited to the world of real estate. “I ended up getting fired. My boss told me I was too nice a person. He said that one of the people I’d sold a condo to had told him I was more interested in his welfare than my boss’s welfare.” He had not seen Spector since succumbing to a heart attack during the sessions for the Ramones’ album. “I think he felt guilty,” Levine says. “But I always felt close to Phil regardless.”

  The original master tapes that Levine was given to work with were on the point of disintegrating. “They looked like a two-thousand-year-old book,” he remembers. Levine and an assistant spent weeks painstakingly transferring the tapes from analog to digital and then remixing them. In an earlier age, Spector would never have left Levine’s side, but now he visited the studio only occasionally to critique the engineer’s work.

  The results were released in a box set of four CDs, Back to Mono, which ran the gamut of Spector’s career from “To Know Him Is to Love Him” to his 1969 recordings for the Checkmates. One CD was given over in its entirety to the Christmas album. None of Spector’s post-1969 productions—for Lennon, Harrison, Dion, Cohen or the Ramones—were included. The final product—in mono, of course—was lavishly presented and beautifully produced. But something was lost in the translation from vinyl to CD, the raw, thrilling impact of the original 45s diluted in their journey to a gleaming collector’s artifact. The past could be saluted, but it could never be brought back. Spector dedicated the album to his father, Ben.

  When Back to Mono was released in October 1991, Allen Klein gave a rare interview to this writer to talk about the project. The record, he insisted, was Spector’s vision, “and no one else’s, because no one else could do it. I mean, it’s not like he’s dead. If you wanted to restore the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo was still around, would you ask some other painter to do it?”

  For the past ten years, Klein said, Spector had been doing things “he’d rather not talk about. You know, Phil took a lot of knocks. Lenny Bruce died, Presley died, John Lennon died: these were all people he loved and respected. It points up everyone’s mortality, and I think Phil was aware of that.” In the meantime, the myths surrounding Spector had been allowed to multiply because “he never stood up and said, ‘That’s not so.’” Spector, Klein went on, “gets on airplanes and travels by himself. He goes to clubs, listens to music and talks to people”—as if these commonplace pastimes were somehow remarkable. Asked what Spector now wanted from his life, Klein, a man not known for his sentimentality, gave the question a moment’s thought. “He’s given his music, his heart,” Klein said. “He deserves kindness.”

  On Christmas Day 1991, Spector’s son nine-year-old Phillip Jr. passed away after a short struggle with leukemia. It was the day before Spector’s fifty-second birthday. Whatever residual belief Spector might have entertained in God was now obliterated. Everybody he had ever loved—his father, Lenny Bruce, John Lennon, and now his son—had been taken from him. There could be no God. As he would put it later, “The most vulgar and obscene four-letter word in this language is ‘dead.’ It is indecent. It has no redeeming social value.”

  “The death of Phillip was devastating, and he has never recovered from that,” David Kessel says. “Something
was lost that will never come back—a piece of his heart, a piece of his soul.”

  Spector and Janis Zavala had separated shortly before Phillip Jr.’s death. The Pasadena home was now nothing more than a repository of painful memories, and Spector could no longer bear to stay there alone. Early in 1992, in the words of one friend “aimlessly delirious with grief,” he left Los Angeles for New York. For a short while he moved into an apartment on Central Park South, where Dennis Hopper remembers visiting one night. Deeply distraught as he talked about the loss of his son, Spector showed Hopper to a room that he said was “Phillip’s bedroom” and told Hopper that he was welcome to stay there whenever he wished. Hopper was deeply moved. But the story is a curious one. It appears that little Phillip had never been to New York.

  “Between grief and nothing,” William Faulkner wrote, “I will take grief.” And for Spector the loss of Phillip became the single abiding fact of his existence. He left the apartment, and moved into the presidential suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where he was to remain for the best part of a year. In his suite he fabricated a small shrine to Phillip Jr., a photograph of his son with candles. He would bring people to the suite and sob. He was paying tens of thousands of dollars a month for the suite, but he seemed indifferent to the cost.

  In his conversations with Karen Lerner, Spector told her about the death of his son, but he would never dwell on it. “You knew it was a terrible thing in his life, as terrible as his father dying,” she remembers, “but Phillip was so secretive about it, secretive about everything in his personal life. I don’t think he minded being thought of as neurotic, but he didn’t want to show he was vulnerable.” If he had moved to New York in an attempt to escape the grief of his loss, Karen sensed the city offered no respite or consolation. “It seemed to me that he didn’t much like New York and he was scared to be here. He was afraid of flying, afraid of a lot of things. He wanted his security and his bodyguards that he had in Beverly Hills and his Rolls-Royce and all those things, and he didn’t have those things here.”

  Spector’s idiosyncratic behavior and his unpredictable hours had begun to put a strain on their friendship. To Karen, it seemed that she was always waiting around for Spector for one reason or another. She held a responsible position and had to be in the office early each morning. His day would invariably be just beginning as hers was coming to an end. When they were alone he would be sweet and considerate, but in public another persona would emerge. “I remember one night we were having dinner in Elaine’s. We didn’t even get there till eleven. And around midnight, Pia Zadora came over and she was fawning all over Phil. He invited her to join our table. After an hour and a half of this I couldn’t stand any more—I thought, I’m not a rock and roll groupie, I’m not interested in anything that’s being talked about, and he looks as if he’s really enjoying it. So I just left.”

  Elaine’s, which for three decades had tenaciously defended its place as New York’s premier celebrity hangout, had become Spector’s home away from home, and he struck up an improbable friendship with another of the restaurant’s regulars, Jack Maple, New York’s deputy commissioner of police. Maple, who died in 2001 at the age of forty-nine, was an ebullient, dandified character who often sported spats, bow ties and a Homburg hat—a sartorial nod to his close physical resemblance to Edward G. Robinson. Maple was a vivid raconteur, and he and Spector loved trading stories. Maple was also a man who could look after himself, and in lieu of Spector’s bodyguards sometimes found himself stepping in to handle trouble.

  The “kinetic” quality that Larry Levine had noticed when he first met Spector thirty years earlier now manifested itself with increasing frequency. His temper seemingly set on a permanent hair-trigger, Spector would flare up at any slight, real or imagined. Dining in Elaine’s one night with Jack Maple, Spector spotted Shannah Goldner, the daughter of his old friend George Goldner. Shannah, who was working as a producer on the television program A Current Affair, was dining with the program’s reporter Steve Dunleavy. Spector invited Goldner to join his table, but when Dunleavy walked over and sat down, Spector immediately rounded on him; reaching inside his jacket, he told Dunleavy he had a gun and threatened to kill him. Maple quickly stepped in to separate the men, but in the ensuing scuffle Dunleavy landed a punch which caused Spector to bleed profusely. Later that night, Goldner returned home to find a series of bizarre messages on her answering machine, which were subsequently reproduced in the New York Post.

  “We’ve got your f——ing number—c——! You’re dead f——ing meat. I’ll break your f——ing legs and your f——ing fingers! I’ll break your f———ing mother’s legs! And tell that gray-haired f———he’s dead.” Goldner was convinced that it was Spector who had left the messages.

  Even Spector’s longest-standing friends could be bemused by his volatile temperament and sudden mood swings. Ahmet Ertegun told me of an incident from around this time when he and Spector were doing the round of Manhattan jazz clubs.

  “There were two girls with us, we were in two cars, and Phil and I were waiting at the door of this club for the girls to join us. And as we’re waiting, two couples came out. The men were over six foot tall, late twenties, very athletic-looking, very chic sports clothes. I think they were Canadians, tourists. One of them looked at Phil, and Phil was wearing this button, ‘Back to Mono.’ The guy said, ‘Excuse me, but what is that?’ And Phil says, ‘You touch that and you’re dead!’ Now these are perfectly nice people! I said, ‘Excuse me, sir, please don’t ask questions; it’s better just to leave.’ I thought, if we have to fight these guys, here we are, two old schmucks…their girlfriends could have beaten us up!

  “Phil would do things like that. But it was all bravado—this little shrimp going around saying ‘Don’t touch me or you’re dead’ to people who are six foot seven. He’d put on a tough-guy thing, but it’s all bullshit. I never felt in any danger from him. The only danger came from being with him, not from him. But that’s part of the mystique of the man. Phil is not like other people.”

  25

  “I Honestly Thought He Was Kidding”

  In the autumn of 1992, after a year spent mostly in New York, Spector returned to Los Angeles. For a while, unable to face returning to the Pasadena home, he took up residence in the Bel Air and Beverly Hills Hotels, occasionally returning to the house to collect clothes and mail. At length, he steeled himself to go back.

  Although he and Janis were now separated, she continued to work for him, handling his phone calls and business arrangements. And now Paulette Brandt, who had briefly worked for Spector around the time of the John Lennon album, returned as his personal assistant. In the years since she last worked for Spector, Brandt had been involved in the legal case against another of her former employers, and the man who was currently Spector’s business manager, Allen Klein. In 1979, Klein served two months in prison for income tax evasion, after illegally selling $216,000 worth of promotional copies of George Harrison’s album, The Concert for Bangla Desh. Brandt, who had been working for Apple in New York at the time of the offense, was one of those who gave evidence against Klein.

  Spector seemed to take a quiet amusement from employing one of the people who had been responsible for sending his partner to prison. He insisted that Paulette use a different name in any correspondence or contact with Klein, instead calling herself “Beverly.” Klein, fully aware of the deceit, nonetheless played along with it, sending Christmas gifts to “Beverly” each year, while lamenting to friends, “Does Phil really think I don’t know?”

  Spector and Paulette had enjoyed a brief affair when she had worked for him in the ’70s. But this time it was strictly business. Throughout his life, the one thing Spector had been unable to stand was solitude, and at those times when he had been unable to find companionship, he had hired it. The succession of bodyguards—Emile Farkas, Mac Mashourian, George Brand—had all served as much as companions as hired hands. David Kessel had observed the contradictions in Spect
or. “Phil likes to be alone in silence; the problem is that when he’s alone he starts to think about things he doesn’t want to think about, so it’s ‘Let’s go out.’ He prefers not to be around people. But then he has to get out and around people because he can’t stand being by himself. Everything that was brilliant about Phil, his artistic drive, his genius, was based on an inner torture. It’s the agony and ecstasy. That’s Phil.”

  Now in a mansion inhabited only by memories and ghosts, Spector was racked by anxiety and chronic insomnia. “It had always been that Phil would stay up all night, but at least he was fairly consistent with his schedule,” Dan Kessel says. “But after Phillip Jr. died, he became a total insomniac. Up at all hours, asleep at all hours; no consistent lifestyle. It went on like that for a couple of years. We’d go visit him and the atmosphere was devastating. It was beyond depressing. After years, Phil still couldn’t shake his unbearable grief. He’d lost every ounce of joy in his being.”

  He became obsessive about his privacy and his solitude. The mansion was divided into two areas which Paulette called “the red” and “the green.” The “green area” comprised the family rooms; the “red area” was Spector’s private domain, with crimson carpeting and wallpaper, which put Brandt in mind of “a bordello.” There was a small office beside the swimming pool, but Spector preferred Brandt to work from her own home, a thirty-minute drive away in Hollywood.

  Each day he would fax her a list of duties, “everything from taking care of dog grooming to doctor’s appointments. Scheduling and unscheduling. Setting up any meeting would take ten phone calls when it could have been done in one. When I learned how Phil worked, I would call people up and say ‘Unless you hear from me differently, this is the deal…’”