by Mick Brown
To protect Spector’s privacy, Brandt would schedule the necessary domestic chores for two days of the week, driving over from her home in Hollywood to let in the garbage man, or the gas company to read the meter. Often Spector would not go to bed until 4:00 or 5:00 a.m., and Paulette would schedule the visit for around 8:00 a.m., while he was sleeping, “so he could be comfortable around his own house.”
In the period in which they had been lovers, Spector had exercised an obsessively proprietary hold over Paulette. “I learned how to make jewelry, because then I could sit by the telephone and always be there, because if he called and you weren’t there, there’d be trouble. Phil loves women, but he doesn’t know what to do with them. Because putting them in a cage doesn’t work. Even with people who might like cages once in a while.”
While the relationship was now platonic, professional, Spector’s possessiveness seemed as strong as it ever had been. Sometimes Paulette would see a limousine parked on the street outside her apartment. In the modest, working-class area of Hollywood where she lived, “it looked kind of obvious. He knew everybody who came to my house, and would get very upset if I was dating anybody else. If he knew I was going out, I’d tell him where I was going; he would page me to call my home phone; he wouldn’t tell me what it was about, and he’d have a fax there for me, so I’d have to go home to find out what he wanted. He used to call me on Saturday nights to have me come over and light the pilot light on his boiler. It was just to see if I’d do it. I’d think, Okay—he needs to be reassured, so I’d get up and go. It just made me a little sad that he still needed that.
“I don’t think Phil liked himself as much as other people liked him. He’d wonder sometimes why people liked to hang out with him, and why they took the way he behaved. But he’d push the limit as far as he could.”
Whatever Spector’s eccentricities, however unreasonable or demanding he could be, Paulette remained unfailingly loyal. “Most of the crazy stories you hear about Phil are from people who know of somebody else who had the experience. I’ve never known of anybody who’s actually had those experiences. And I think Phil did his utmost to perpetuate those stories. I think he kind of liked it because they’re interesting and amusing. Phil keeps his friends for life, and that says something about a person. I care for him and I always will. He’s been my rock. When things got pretty bad, people would say, ‘Why are you still around?’ Well, it’s because you remember how special he is. Phil is so truly remarkable that you’d forgive him anything. But I always thought, Phil thinks he’s not supposed to be happy, and if he thinks he’s not going to be happy, he won’t be.”
Spector had not been near a recording studio in more than ten years; his only musical activity had been to work on a couple of songs. One of them was called “My Goodbye Song.” Spector had begun it long before the death of his son, but that tragedy had brought the song an unintended, and more deeply poignant, meaning.
In Elaine’s one night he met a songwriter named Charles Kipps, who had written the hit “Walk Away from Love” for David Ruffin, and worked with Van McCoy, producing Ruffin, Gladys Knight and Aretha Franklin. In his suite at the Waldorf, Spector and Kipps worked on a couple of songs, including “My Goodbye Song,” but in the end nothing came of the partnership.
“My Goodbye Song” continued to haunt Spector. In search of a collaborator who could bring the song to fruition he asked Allen Klein to contact the lyricist Hal David, famous for his collaborations with Burt Bacharach. Spector arranged to meet David in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, and the pair then spent a day or two at David’s Beverly Hills home, working on what David would remember as “a very lovely melody.” (Spector complained to Karen Lerner that David’s house was always being vacuumed and they could never find a good period of time to work in.) David provided some lyrics, and Spector talked vaguely of trying to place the song with a couple of artists, but David heard nothing more, and the next time they happened to meet, at a Lakers game, it was not even mentioned.
In October 1992 Spector finally roused himself to go back into the studio. He had been told that Linda Ronstadt had expressed an interest in working with him, and decided to record a handful of demos to act as a calling card. Among the material was “My Goodbye Song.”
Spector instructed Paulette Brandt to call up a gathering of his old musicians from the Wrecking Crew and to contact Larry Levine. In search of a singer, Spector turned to a vocalist named Mercy Bermudez—who had once sung with a Los Angeles group called the Heaters—whom Spector had met a few years earlier with a view to producing. That collaboration had come to nothing, but Bermudez had left an impression. Furthermore, she sang in the same key as Ronstadt; the perfect vocalist for the sessions.
In need of an arranger, he turned back to his old friend Jack Nitzsche. Nitzsche was not in the best of spirits. His marriage to Buffy Sainte-Marie had recently come to an end, and a disconsolate Nitzsche was drinking too much, taking too many drugs. But he made it a point of principle to answer Spector’s call whenever he was needed.
In a meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Spector presented Nitzsche with a tape of two songs, simply labeled “A” and “B,” and asked him to provide arrangements. Nitzsche left the meeting utterly confused.
“The tape that Phil gave him was just some dumb melody played on an electric piano,” a friend of Nitzsche remembers. “Phil wouldn’t even tell him who the sessions were supposed to be for. Jack said, ‘This is not how Phil and I used to work.’ It used to be they’d play the song, work on it together; he’d know who the performer was going to be, what the song was about. There was never anything on tape, ever. Jack thought Phil was keeping it secret from him. He said, ‘I can’t work with this.’ He was so frustrated.”
The recording session, in a small Hollywood studio, had the air of a reunion of battle-scarred veterans; there was Steve Douglas, Jim Horn, Hal Blaine, Jim Keltner, Jay Migliori, Don Randi, even the guitarist Tommy Tedesco, who had recently recovered from a stroke. The keyboard player Al DeLory, who had not played on a Spector session in almost thirty years, flew in from Nashville. Backs were slapped, hugs exchanged, old jokes traded and comic routines rehashed. But when it came to the recording, everything went to hell. Seemingly bemused by Spector’s requirements and, according to Don Randi, “not in good shape,” Jack Nitzsche had arrived with arrangements that nobody could make sense of. Spector tried to get Nitzsche to correct the charts, but he was unable to do so and finally left the studio in disgrace. The sessions broke up after two hours with nothing committed to tape. “Phil was angry at Jack,” Larry Levine remembers. “But he loved having the guys there. In fact, I think that was the only reason he’d organized the session in the first place. You talk about Phil being emotional, there’s no doubt…”
The emotion did not, however, stretch to forgiveness. Furious with Nitzsche, Spector demanded that his old friend pay the studio costs for the session. Mortified at letting down Spector, Nitzsche readily paid up.
Spector seemed to have few close friends. The Kessels remained as devoted as ever, but the “Three Musketeers” days had passed; with Spector now in a torpor of inactivity the brothers were busily pursuing their own careers. Perhaps Spector’s most constant companion was Marvin Mitchelson, the attorney famous for introducing the concept of “palimony” into the American divorce courts.
Mitchelson was a big, booming man with a manner of jovial bonhomie. He had first come to fame in 1978 when representing the singer Michelle Triola Marvin in her claim for support against the actor Lee Marvin, with whom she had lived for six years but never married. Mitchelson lost the case, but his proposal of “palimony” quickly caught on, and he found himself much in demand as a hired gunslinger in the frenetic world of Hollywood celebrity divorces. His clients included Tony Curtis, Bianca Jagger, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Joan Collins. But exposure to the Himalayan sums of money that he would habitually demand on behalf of his clients quickly went to Mitchelson’s head. He spent lavishly on R
olls-Royces, Concorde flights and a Hollywood mansion. In 1987 he was accused by a former secretary of using her to ferry cocaine, of which, she alleged, he used “lots and lots.” At the same time, he was investigated on two separate allegations of rape by female clients. Mitchelson was not charged, but both women were awarded more than $50,000 by a state crimes-compensation panel. In 1993 Mitchelson was sentenced to thirty months for tax evasion and ordered to pay $2,158,796 in restitution. He wept openly in court when the verdict was passed, telling the judge “This is the second saddest day of my life. My mother’s death was the first.”
Spector was introduced to Mitchelson at a Hollywood party, and the two men quickly became firm friends. Spector would sometimes take Mitchelson to watch the Lakers, and Mitchelson reciprocated by introducing Spector to the Beverly Hills party circuit. “Marvin got a kick out of Phil,” remembers Sy Presten, Mitchelson’s friend and press agent, “and Spector loved going to those parties with Marvin and meeting all these celebrities, many of whom Marvin had represented.”
On one occasion Spector turned up at his daughter Nicole’s school fathers’ night in a stretch limousine along with Mitchelson and the Kessel brothers. Whatever mortification Nicole might have felt was assuaged when Spector instructed his driver to give limo rides to all Nicole’s classmates. Mitchelson was now barred from practicing law, and his extravagant lifestyle disguised money troubles. It was not unusual at the end of an evening together for Spector to write out a check as a “loan” to keep his friend in fine wine and Brioni suits. Spector’s staff knew that when Mitchelson called, it usually meant he needed money. “I don’t know whether you could say that Phil was buying the friendship,” says Sy Presten. “They enjoyed each other’s company. Whether Marvin would have enjoyed it if they ate in a soup kitchen, I don’t think so.”
Spector’s generosity to Mitchelson displayed a side of him that was seldom appreciated by others. The music business revolved around favors, and while Spector would never forgive those whom he believed had turned against him, he always remembered those who had helped him out. He gave financial support to Alan Freed when the disc jockey was down on his luck in the last years of his life. When Ike Turner was imprisoned in 1990 on charges of possessing and transporting cocaine, Spector visited him in jail and helped him out financially on his release. (Spector was on the board of the Rhythm and Blues Foundation, which had been set up to assist veteran performers who found themselves in dire financial straits. The Motown singer Mary Wells was one of the artists the Foundation had helped, paying for her medical bills when Wells was being treated for the cancer that eventually killed her. Spector tried to persuade the Foundation to support Turner, arguing that cocaine addiction was a serious illness, but his request was turned down.) In the late ’70s, when Darlene Love was at the lowest point of her life, working as a domestic and unable to make ends meet, she had steeled herself and contacted Spector to ask if he could help her out with her rent. He paid it for a year.
Spector could be recklessly extravagant one minute, nitpickingly parsimonious the next. At home, the big spender who always flew first class and would think nothing of tipping a waiter $200, would clip supermarket coupons from the newspaper and watch household spending like a hawk. When his local liquor store raised the price of his favorite drink by twenty-five cents a bottle, he instructed Paulette to boycott them. “He had a fit…” she remembers. “Somebody he didn’t know would get a six-hundred-dollar bouquet of flowers. I guess he wanted to impress them. People who knew him and cared about him would get a card. I guess he figured they were already impressed.”
Ann Marshall had been a friend of Spector’s since the Teddy Bears, and was well accustomed to his eccentricities. On one occasion in the ’70s, Marshall visited the La Collina mansion with her friend Michelle Phillips, the singer with the Mamas and Papas. At one point, Michelle announced that she had to leave, to meet another friend who was supposed to be joining them. Spector told her “if you leave this house, you are not coming back in.” “I honestly thought he was kidding.”
Michelle left, and returned a short while later after collecting her friend. Unable to get an answer at the door, Michelle left her friend at the gate, climbed over the wall and knocked on the French windows. Spector let her in and then locked the door behind her.
“He had a gun in his hand,” Michelle remembers, “and then he says, ‘Now no one is leaving.’ He was as drunk as a sailor. I looked at Ann and she was totally cool. She said, ‘Don’t worry about it—he does this all the time.’ I said, ‘He does this all the time?’ I didn’t have the feeling that he was going to pull the trigger, and Ann was certainly so calm, but it was a very disquieting feeling him having a gun and for it to be waved around in the room.”
At length, two officers from the Bel Air police arrived at the house, alerted by Phillips’s friend. “They came into the living room and Phil was standing there with the gun. And they said, ‘Mr. Spector, put the gun down.’ So he rather reluctantly put the gun down. And they said, ‘Is anybody here being held against their will?’ And Ann and I put up our hands. They said, ‘Would you two come with us, please.’ And then they turned to him and they said, ‘Mr. Spector, we have warned you about this over and over and over again…’”
In the ’90s Ann Marshall suffered an aneurysm which almost killed her. Taking leave from her job, she retired to Aspen. “I was on the phone to Phil,” she remembers, “and I’m talking about how I’m on disability, and he said, ‘How much do you need—a hundred thousand dollars?’ I said, ‘Phillip, I don’t want your money.’ But he went on and on. In the end I said, ‘The most you can send me is ten thousand dollars.’ He was very magnanimous. The next day, Saturday, a FedEx check arrives for ten thousand dollars. On Monday I went to deposit it and he’d stopped the payment. I hadn’t asked him for it in the first place. It was all so strange.” Marshall never spoke to Spector again.
The more Karen Lerner grew to know Spector, she thought, the less she understood him. He never talked about his life in Los Angeles. She had no idea of his domestic circumstances. He could be entertaining, funny, smart—“mesmerizing” he could talk knowledgeably and interestingly about music, film, politics, but whenever a conversation became serious or personal, he would change the subject, deflate it with one-liners. He reveled in nonsensical, childlike humor, comic postcards, funny answering machine messages, corny jokes. For a while he carried around in his pocket a little electronic toy that would issue a stream of insults at the touch of a button—fuck you, eat shit, go to hell—which Spector delighted in setting off at the most inappropriate moments. He gave Lerner one of her own.
In March each year, Lerner would fly to Los Angeles for the Academy Awards, and she and Spector would meet. Lerner sensed that for all his outward wit and bravado, it required an effort of will and preparation on Spector’s part to go out among people. “Even one person. And whenever we saw each other it was usually with more than one person.”
Spector would usually collect her from the Beverly Hills Hotel, asking her to wait outside so that he would not have to go into the lobby. On one occasion, Karen was delayed, keeping Spector waiting for almost an hour. When she finally appeared, she was surprised to see him in the driver’s seat of his Rolls-Royce. The valet later told her that rather than parking the car and coming to the hotel to find her, as anyone else would do, he had been driving the car around and around, waiting for her. “I think it took him a lot of courage to muster the ability to go out.”
As fond as she was of Spector, it seemed to Karen that everything about their friendship was unnecessarily complicated. When she invited him to be her guest at Irving and Mary Lazar’s Academy Award party at Spago, he agreed, but said it was impossible for him to be there for the start of the party at six, because “I’m not even awake then.” Nor was he sure he could get there by nine. He eventually turned up at eleven, flanked by two bodyguards. The governor of California, Pete Wilson, arrived at the same time with his bodyguards
, and was turned away. But Spector somehow managed to inveigle himself inside. He spent the evening in rapt conversation with Gloria Jones, the widow of James Jones, the author of From Here to Eternity, discussing her husband’s work. “The bodyguards didn’t tell Gloria to stay away,” Karen says laconically. “They were just Phil’s ego props.”
In the end, Karen says, she began to take everything Spector said “with a pinch of salt. I should have cared more, but there was always something to make me not care, to make me annoyed with him. He’d always keep me waiting, or want to know who I was with and why I was with them; and every time I was with him, it was always too late; I’d be exhausted, desperate to go and it would be: ‘No, stay…’ That’s the talk of someone who doesn’t want to be alone.”
One night, he dropped her off at the Beverly Hills Hotel, pleading to come in “just for a minute” and stayed for three hours, the night ending in “a horrendous screaming match, just horrible. It wasn’t about anything. It was about some flowers that he’d sent that weren’t delivered, and I didn’t care, but why didn’t I thank him for them…and it just went on and on. The most terrible fight.”
After Karen got back to New York, the fight was forgotten and the stream of jokey letters and postcards continued to arrive from Los Angeles. One was posted from the Beverly Hills Hotel and addressed to her dog. “Dear Ollie, this is where your mum comes to play when she has you locked up in the kennel. Should we report her to the ASPCA?”
Sometimes Spector would call in the early hours of the morning, and want to talk for hours, about nothing at all. Just to stave off the loneliness, Karen thought. In the end, she could stand it no more and would turn off her phone.
Spector’s relations with Janis Zavala had also reached the breaking point. For reasons that are unclear, she stopped working for him. For more than twenty years Janis had been the person closest to Spector, the mother of his two children. It was more than two years since she had moved out of their Pasadena home. But he now instigated a series of small-claims cases against her, for the return of a computer and a television set and VCR, all of which he claimed she had taken from his home. The cases were all dismissed after Janis was able to prove that Spector had in fact given her the items. After that, Spector and Janis would barely talk for the next five years. “You weren’t allowed to mention Janis’s name,” Paulette Brandt remembers. “If you mentioned her name, you could be fired.”