by Mick Brown
In his defense, Spector claimed that the original contract obligated Philles to compensate the Ronettes solely on income derived from phonograph records, and that Ronnie Spector had given up her rights to royalties by signing a release agreement as part of her divorce proceedings when the marriage was dissolved in 1974.
Spector appeared each day in court dressed in his now-trademark aviator shades, black suit and black shirt, set off by a red AIDS ribbon and a diamond earring in his left ear. A reporter for the Independent, David Usborne, took note of his “diminished physical appearance—the broken veins streaking vertically down the gray pallor of his cheeks, the beard stubble and his feeble rasping voice. Disconcertingly, he occasionally sips water from a paper cup and makes a loud whistling sound as he sucks it through his teeth.”
The case brought Spector and Ronnie face-to-face for the first time since 1974, providing an opportunity for Ronnie to once again rehearse all of the grisly details of her marriage to Spector. Wearing shades, one reporter noted, “even more nocturnal” than Spector’s, she testified that he had frustrated her singing career and held her as a virtual prisoner in their home, confiscating her shoes and surrounding her with guard dogs.
She had signed their 1974 divorce settlement, including a clause forfeiting all future record profits, she claimed, only because “Phil threatened me several times”—adding, “He told me ‘I’ll kill you’ and said ‘I’ll have a hit man kill you.’”
Taking the stand, Spector denied that he had kept his wife as an involuntary prisoner and rejected the hit-man allegations, adding “I’ve heard them over the last twenty years.” He described their marriage as “a good strong loving relationship,” adding that “Veronica had a lot of problems with drinking and mixing medication.”
One person in the court at least seemed to fall under Spector’s spell. The Independent reporter noted that he seemed to have the judge, Paula Omansky, “in his pocket. ‘Bless you,’ he interrupts one time when she sneezes. Judge Omansky simpers appreciatively.”
But Spector’s charm offensive on Judge Omansky was to prove unsuccessful. In July 2000 the judge ruled in the Ronettes’ favor, awarding the group $3 million. However, Judge Omansky turned down the group’s demand that the masters of the recordings should be handed over to them. “Spector’s contributions to the Ronettes’ success cannot be underestimated,” she ruled, “as composer of their songs, as creator of the sound for which the Ronettes’ recording hits became famous. Rescinding the 1963 recording contract and taking ownership of the masters away from Spector is not warranted.”
Spector appealed against the award for synchronization royalties, and in 2002 a five-judge panel of the New York State Court of Appeals upheld his appeal, ruling that the Ronettes’ 1963 contract contained no provisions for synchronization rights. The judgment was remanded back to the lower court to recalculate damages based on the royalty schedules contained in the original contract. The Ronettes would eventually receive around $900,000, for unpaid royalties.
In the early part of 1998, Spector moved again. The Pasadena house contained too many memories. All his life, Spector had wanted to live in a castle—an echo, perhaps, of the crenellated roof of his childhood home in the Bronx. To help him find one he now turned to the person who had always been the most reliable mainstay in his life. Relations with Janis Zavala had been strained for some years, conducted largely through their daughter Nicole. But Janis agreed to help, and after a search of several months she found the castle that Spector was looking for. Its location was the last place one might have expected to find Phil Spector. Alhambra was a working-class neighborhood, a thirty-minute drive down the 101 Freeway from Hollywood, populated largely by Asian and Hispanic families.
The Pyrenees Castle, as Spector’s new property was called, had been built in 1925 by a wealthy sheep rancher named Sylvester Dupuy, apparently inspired by the memory of the châteaux in the Basque region where he had lived as a child. An imposing property, with ten bedrooms and turrets at each corner, it was set on a hill in three acres of wooded grounds, hidden behind high walls and an electronic gate. At the foot of the hill was Alhambra’s industrial section; behind the property was a railroad track; at night you could hear the sounds of the trains carrying freight to and from the docks at Long Beach. A white elephant, the property had been on the market for almost five years—who, after all, would want a castle in Alhambra? But that was one of the reasons Spector liked it. He liked the fact that it was isolated; that the area was terminally unfashionable; that he was never going to know his neighbors; that he would be left alone.
He quickly settled into a life of seclusion. He lived alone and saw few people. When he ventured out, it was usually in the company of his bodyguard Jay Romaine. A housekeeper came each day to clean and prepare his food, and departed each evening, leaving Spector to face the long hours of night in solitude.
While it was years since they had lived together, Janis, ever loyal, now took the role of his helpmate, looking after Spector’s daily requirements and regularly dropping by the castle to ensure that he was okay.
Paulette Brandt continued to work for him in a secretarial capacity, but nowadays she rarely saw him. She was not given a key to the castle. Instead, she would collect and deposit papers at a mailbox at the gate, usually communicating with Spector only by telephone or fax. On one occasion, she was surprised to receive a telephone call at two in the morning, summoning her to Dan Tana’s, a restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard, and one of Spector’s favorite haunts. Paulette roused herself from her bed and hurried to the restaurant.
“It was past closing time, but they’d stayed open for Phil, because he’d made it worth their while. The streets were empty, but there was a limousine right outside Dan Tana’s. I went inside, and Jay was sitting next to Phil, who was obliterated, he could hardly see. And he said, ‘I just wanted you to know you’re a very special lady; I love you, and you’re in my life.’ I thought, That’s great, Phil. And then he fell off the seat. And that was it.
“He had Jay follow me home, and I was thinking, Oh no. Because we’d done this a couple of times before; Phil would forget that it was just work. So I parked on the next street. Jay came over and said, ‘You okay?’ And he followed me back to my house. Phil couldn’t make it that far. I was so grateful.”
Spector had not been in the studio since the ill-fated Céline Dion sessions, but in 1998 he was approached by his old friend Ahmet Ertegun, asking whether he could help with a new Atlantic signing, Ashley Ballard. Ballard was a teenage prodigy who had emerged from a TV talent contest, sung on the occasion of Bill Clinton’s second inauguration in Washington and been spotted by Ertegun performing at the Blues Foundation Lifetime Achievement Awards ceremony, where she had shared the stage with Ray Charles, Ruth Brown and Bobby “Blue” Bland.
Ertegun signed her to Atlantic, and asked Spector to “prep” her for her recording debut. Unsure who to call on for help, Spector turned back to Jack Nitzsche to see whether he would handle arrangements on the new project. But Nitzsche refused. After all the ups and downs he had endured with Spector over the years, Nitzsche felt unable to steel himself for another round. He told Spector he should find a young kid, fresh out of music school who lived and breathed music “and wasn’t into young chicks,” to do the job.
In March, Spector made his annual pilgrimage to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, this time taking his daughter Nicole with him. Michelle Phillips was attending the ceremonies for the induction of the Mamas and the Papas and ran into Spector at the awards dinner. He greeted her warmly, congratulated her on her induction and invited her to a party at his hotel later that evening.
By the time she arrived, Spector was roaring drunk, launching a tirade of “fuck you”s at anyone who crossed his path. Watching Spector embarrass himself, an executive from Atlantic Records quietly eliminated him from their plans for Ashley Ballard. The genial figure who had greeted Michelle so effusively a couple of hours earlier was now looking d
aggers at her across the room. Unsure what was wrong, she went over to ask Spector if he was all right. Fixing her with a baleful look he said, “You don’t deserve being in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” and pitched forward unconscious on the rug. The party was over.
Chastened, Spector quit drinking—this time, he vowed, for good.
28
“He Wanted to Prove He Really Was Human”
In September 1999, Esquire magazine published a short interview with Spector in its series “What I’ve Learned.”
His answers were the customary mixture of off-the-cuff one-liners, corny jokes and received wisdom.
I wonder how Michael Jackson started out as a black man and ended up as a white girl. But in a world where carpenters get resurrected, anything is possible. [Spector seemed to have a particular liking for this joke. He would repeat it ad infinitum, and still be telling it three years later when I met him.]
Since I’m one of those people who are not happy unless they are not happy, it’s comforting to know that mental health doesn’t always mean being happy. [Otherwise], nobody would qualify.
Only the last aphorism seemed to be spoken from the heart.
Jack Nitzsche’s fortunes had continued to decline. In 1998 he suffered a stroke that effectively ended his career. His thoughts turned more and more to his past successes, and the growing feeling that he had not received his just deserts. Seeing what Chuck Rubin had achieved for Darlene Love, Nitzsche contacted Rubin about trying to retrieve unpaid royalties on his behalf, but he balked at paying Rubin’s 50 percent commission.
In the summer of 2000, Nitzsche organized a reunion with another artist from his past, LaLa Brooks. According to LaLa, Nitzsche was keen on recording her, and had gone so far as to trace her to Europe, where she was living and working. Nitzsche was staying in New York at the Mayflower Hotel, where LaLa visited him. Over the course of the evening they shared their feelings about Spector. “He said to me, ‘LaLa, Phil used to treat you like a piece of shit,’” she remembers. “I thought, Wow, are you going to burst my bubble! He hit me and it felt like a kiss! I was baffled when Jack said that. But he said, ‘All those nights in the studio when we’d be there until two in the morning and Phil wouldn’t even buy you food.’ I said, ‘Boy, I used to wonder why I was so hungry, because all I was fed was peanuts.’ Jack said, ‘Oh, he was so selfish—the motherfucker…’ because Jack felt he was stolen from, too. Then he said he would always argue with Sonny Bono about which one had the better voice, was it Ronnie Spector or me, and he said he would always say LaLa. He said, ‘I always loved your sound’—he gave me all that, but I think he was telling the truth.”
As the evening wore on, Nitzsche began to talk about taking LaLa back into the studio. In a flurry of enthusiasm, he reached for the phone and put in a call to his old friend the singer and songwriter Jackie DeShannon in Los Angeles. “I spoke to Jackie, and I told her, ‘I want to do one of your songs. We were all going to come together.’” LaLa left the hotel excited about the future.
A few weeks later, on August 25, 2000, Jack Nitzsche died of a cardiac arrest in Hollywood’s Queen of Angels Hospital, brought on by a recurring bronchial infection. He was sixty-three.
Some two hundred people attended the memorial service at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, among them Gerry Goffin, the actor Sean Penn, Jackie DeShannon, Nancy Sinatra and a number of Wrecking Crew musicians, including Don Randi, Earl Palmer and Carol Kaye. It fell to Spector to deliver a tearful eulogy to “My beloved Jack Nitzsche” thanking him for “almost forty years of friendship and loyalty.”
Nitzsche, he went on, was a man who left “footprints on your heart,” a source of inspiration who had helped Spector to create “beautiful and historical art. And for that I will forever be indebted to you.
“And, if I may, to paraphrase from my own song, to know you is to love you, Jack, and I always have and I always will. And I would be remiss if I did not mention to you that my little boy, Phillip Jr., whom you met a few times down here, is up there waiting for you. So look for him, Jack, you’ll know him right away. Just look and listen for the loudest little angel and that’s him. I know the two of you will take care of each other.”
Eulogies were becoming something of a habit for Spector. On April 15, 2001, Joey Ramone died of lymphoma. Spector wrote an effusive—and in parts identical—tribute that was read at a memorial party for the singer in New York.
“Losing you like this is so very hard to understand, and there are no words that can truly ease the pain,” he wrote, concluding, “And I would be remiss if I did not mention to you that my little boy Phillip Jr. is up there waiting for you. So look out for him, Joey. And you’ll know him right away. Just look and listen for the loudest little angel and that’s him. I know the two of you will take good care of each other…Your devoted and loving friend, Phil Spector.”
Among the mourners at Nitzsche’s funeral service was Lynn Castle, Spector’s old girlfriend, who had not seen him in more than thirty years. “Phil was so damn great at the funeral,” she remembers. “What he had to say about Jack and the way he felt, it was really great. And afterward he was so happy to see me. It was that same beauty that I’d loved in him all those years ago. I totally saw that, despite his sadness and nightmares and losses. He was very positive. He was absolutely darling. He gave me the sweetest kiss, I was so surprised. He was so damn sweet.” They started exchanging notes and postcards. Spector, who knew of Castle’s interest in Eastern philosophy, sent one notecard picturing a golden Buddha, holding up his hands. The message inside read simply: “Yes! Love Phillip.”
Another mourner was Nancy Sinatra, who had been brought to the service by Don Randi, who sometimes played in her band. Afterward, she and Spector were introduced, and before long they had begun seeing each other regularly.
For Spector, ever in thrall to the Sinatra legend, the relationship carried a particular sweetness. The peerless singing technique, the effortless sense of style, the imperial presence, the palpable aroma of history—Frank was one of his idols, and now he was dating his daughter! According to Paulette Brandt, Nancy was equally enamored of Spector and wanted to marry him.
Spector had turned his back on many of his oldest friends, but now, apparently in better shape than he had been for years, he began to emerge from his self-imposed exile and to rebuild bridges.
In September 2001 Nicole graduated from high school and won a place at a university in New York to study literature. To celebrate, Spector rented a small bowling lane in Montrose, a dormitory town thirty minutes down the freeway from Pasadena, and threw a party. Spector enjoyed it so much that he hosted another the following year. The parties were his way of announcing he was back on the map—“the great Phil Spector show,” as Paulette Brandt remembers. “He wouldn’t get there until everybody was ready to leave—because they were tired and they had to go to work next day. It would get dark, and the bodyguards would come through and then Phil. All you needed was the theme from Rocky. And he’d sit down and everybody would come up and thank him as they left. He’d made his appearance and they’d had a good night. It was always successful, and it wasn’t expensive, so he didn’t mind the cost.”
Old friends such as Larry Levine, Stan Ross, Hal Blaine and Harvey Kubernik were invited back into the fold. Ike Turner was pleased to receive an invitation, although for Turner the evening did not quite go as planned.
“Phil said he’d send a limousine,” he recalls. “I said okay. So there’s five of us, but the limo never showed; so I called up Phil’s secretary, and she said, ‘Take a cab and we’ll pay for it.’ So I called two cabs because three of us would have to ride in one and two in the other, and we rode out to the bowling alley, wherever it was. Why am I going? I’m going because he has asked me to go. So we go inside, I tell the cab driver, ‘Thank you and someone’ll take care of the fare.’ Forty-five minutes later the cab driver is still sitting there, he hasn’t been paid. So I told this girl, ‘Tell Phil to take care
of the cab,’ so she says, “Okay, he will.’ Twenty-five minutes later he still hasn’t paid the cab. So then I go up to Phil and say, ‘Hey, man, this cab is out there and I don’t have the money to pay him. You told me to come, you should pay the cab.’ He said, ‘I’ll take care of it.’ I say to him, ‘When?’ He said, ‘It’s Christmas coming, too.’ Another ten minutes go by and he still ain’t paid the cab. I’ve got everybody with me and I say, ‘Okay, let’s go.’ And as we’re leaving I introduce one of my friends to Phil; I say, ‘This is a friend of mine, and he’s a friend of Hugh Hefner and they used to do business together,’ and Spector said, ‘So fucking what, and what else do you do?’ So this was embarrassing for me. Not to mention that I didn’t have the money to pay for the cab. So we all go out and I tell the cab driver, ‘Take us back where you picked us up at.’ Man, he was livid. We’re ready to pull off when Spector comes out and he says, ‘Ike, where are you going?’ and I say, ‘Man, leave away from all this bullshit, man.’ He said, ‘If you leave, you’re no friend of mine.’ So I told him, ‘You can’t lose something that you never had.’ So we finally get home, and I have to borrow the money to pay for the cab. At that point, I called Phil’s phone and his service answered. And I left a message. I told him, ‘You know I’m never the kind to kiss ass and I never will be.’ I told him, ‘I don’t appreciate the way you talked to my friend,’ and that all he’s got around him are a lot of people who lick ass. I told him, ‘You need to take a long look at yourself; I think you’re a lonely man and I feel really sorry for you. I took that car over there, I did it at your request and then I find myself in an embarrassing position.’ I left this long, long message on his service. And do you know what? The next day a messenger came with twenty-four roses and a check for two thousand dollars and note saying thank you for coming. A lot of people would have called back and said, ‘Screw you—who needs your advice?’ But Spector? He sends twenty-four roses. I just called that acceptance, man.”