Tearing Down the Wall of Sound

by Mick Brown

  “And then he giggled, like ‘huh.’ But he said it very quietly and very calmly. He didn’t get excited. This was the calmest I had seen him throughout the time that I sat with him.”

  Spector was then taken for booking, and placed in a holding cell, where he indicated he was ready to talk to detectives. Detective Esther Pineda made her way to the jail, where Spector was still in an apparently agitated state. For some fifteen minutes the conversation between Spector and Pineda rambled inconclusively around Spector’s complaints about not receiving telephone calls, and him asking to see Jay Romaine and Michelle Blaine, who had by now arrived at the police station.

  Then Pineda asked whether he wanted to talk to Romy Davis, who had called to say that she would contact Robert Shapiro. At this point Spector exploded.

  “This is nonsense. You people have had me here for six fucking hours, maybe nine hours. And you have me locked up like some goddamn fucking turd in some fucking piece of shit. And you treat me…and then while this person eats and shits and farts. And you have me jerking around. And when somebody comes over to my house who pretends to be security at the House of Blues and comes over to my house…and remember I own the House of Blues. Where this lady pretended to work, okay? And then just blows her fucking head open in my fucking house and then comes and…and then…and you people come around and…arrest me and bang the shit out of my fucking ass and beat the shit out of me and then you pretend and arrest me and then pretend like you’re fucking Alhambra.

  “And the…the mayor of Alhambra wants me to have Bono come and sing at the anniversary of…bullshit. This is nonsense. This is absolute fucking nonsense. I don’t know what the fucking lady…what her problem is, but she wasn’t a security at the House of Blues and she’s a piece of shit. And I don’t know what her fucking problem was, but she certainly had no right to come to my fucking castle, blow her fucking head open and [indecipherable] a murder. What the fuck is wrong with you people?”

  Pineda tried to interject with “Tell you what I’m going to do.”

  “Yeah, I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do,” said Spector. “I’m gonna be fucking…somebody’s gonna pay for the fucking…I have been locked up for the fucking last twelve hours. And you fucking people come in my house and rummage through my fucking house, and you tie me down like a fucking pig and, you know, while somebody’s dying there. And you know, and…and…and…and it scared the shit out of everybody…while somebody commits suicide.”

  31

  “A Genius Is Not There All the Time”

  At 7:00 p.m. that same day Phil Spector was released from police custody on bail of $1 million. He was allowed to leave the Alhambra police station through a back entrance, to avoid the waiting press. Temporarily unable to return to the castle, he was booked into the Hotel Bel-Air, again through the back entrance.

  A few days later, Spector moved back into the castle. The carpets were cleaned and the chair where Lana Clarkson’s body had been found was removed.

  Meanwhile, a memorial service was held for Clarkson at the Music Box Theatre in Hollywood, where forty years earlier Spector had tried in vain to resurrect the dying career of Lenny Bruce. The service was attended by more than three hundred people, “and there had to be twenty girls,” says one observer, “who stood up and said Lana was their best friend.”

  The man who arrived at Alhambra police station to arrange Spector’s release on bail was his lawyer and friend Robert Shapiro. One of America’s best-known defense attorneys, Shapiro enjoyed a formidable reputation for smoothness and charm; he was a man who, according to another Los Angeles lawyer, “couldn’t find his way out of the box” in a trial but was widely regarded as a peerless negotiator and fixer. It was Shapiro who put together the “dream team,” led by the flamboyant Johnnie Cochran, which in 1995 secured O. J. Simpson’s acquittal over the double murder of his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.

  With the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department apparently in no hurry to formally charge Spector with murder, Shapiro quickly moved to secure expert witnesses for Spector’s defense, including the forensic scientist Dr. Henry Lee and the pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, both of whom had testified in the O. J. Simpson case. Shapiro quietly let it be known to the media that Baden had attended the autopsy on Lana Clarkson, where tests had shown that Clarkson had gunshot residue (GSR) on her hands. The results, Baden had apparently told Shapiro, were “not inconsistent with suicide.”

  In March, two months after Clarkson’s death, Shapiro told the Associated Press that “a thorough and accurate investigation” would prove that Spector was “innocent of any crime.” Shapiro, it seemed, had been bounced into his statement by an e-mail, sent by Spector himself to friends, and apparently leaked to a local radio station by lawyer Marvin Mitchelson, stating that police had no intention of pressing charges against him. “I hate to use the words I told you so,” Spector’s e-mail read. “But I did tell you so. After seven weeks of silence, we can say with certainty this will speak for itself, and boy, does it speak volumes.” The death, Spector said, would be ruled as “accidental suicide.”

  In fact, the sheriff’s department had made no such decision. Spector, it appeared, had jumped to the erroneous conclusion that charges would be dropped after police had returned his computer. The allegation was immediately refuted by Captain Frank Merriman of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, who stated unequivocally that “we believe a crime occurred,” and suggested that the e-mail was being circulated to plant the seeds of doubt in potential jurors.

  In July, Spector went one step further, giving an interview to Esquire magazine in which he described the case as “Anatomy of a Frame-Up.” Written by Scott Raab, and conducted largely on a private plane (“four grand an hour”) flying Spector from Los Angeles to New York, the piece was a fulsome celebration of Spector’s life and genius in which, bizarrely, Lana Clarkson being shot dead in his home was depicted as merely a minor disturbance. Raab dismissed Clarkson as “a chronically aspiring buxom blond B-movie actress/model/comedienne/hostess—a type always common in Hollywood and not unknown in the castle,” grotesquely adding that “Whatever her agenda, and however sunny her memory, the chance that, after twenty years of swimming after stardom in Los Angeles, she didn’t know exactly what she was up to—and who she was riding with, and why—when she left the House of Blues that night is exactly the same chance she had of becoming Marilyn Monroe: zero.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Spector was quoted as saying. “I didn’t do anything. I called the police myself. I called the police…

  “She kissed the gun,” he went on. “I have no idea why—I never knew her, never even saw her before that night. I have no idea who she was or what her agenda was. They have the gun—I don’t know where or how she got the gun. She asked me for a ride home. Then she wanted to see the castle. She was loud—she was loud and drunk even before we left the House of Blues. She grabbed a bottle of tequila from the bar to take with her. I was not drunk. I wasn’t drunk at all. There is no case. She killed herself.”

  Remarkably, it seemed that Spector was not asked to provide a full account of exactly what had occurred in the period leading up to Clarkson’s death, the circumstances in which she had allegedly taken her own life, or what he had been doing at the time. Or if he was asked, he evidently chose not to answer.

  Not only did Spector depict himself as the real victim of events—“it’s ‘Anatomy of a Frame-Up’”—but, the article suggested, he also felt let down by those around him: Marvin Mitchelson, “for speaking with reporters,” Robert Shapiro, “for charging him a huge fee,” and Nancy Sinatra, “for failing to stand by him.”

  “You know what she told me?” Spector was reported as saying. “She says, ‘My mother told me, Omigod—Nancy, it could’ve been you.’”

  In fact, Spector’s relationship with Sinatra seems to have broken up sometime between Christmas 2002 and the Clarkson killing, apparently to the relief of Sinatra’s family
, who had never approved of the friendship.

  Mitchelson had proved a loyal friend, quickly coming to Spector’s defense in the aftermath of the shooting, saying that it was inconceivable that he could have killed anybody. But it seems he had made the mistake of talking too much. A few days after the killing, he was quoted in the Los Angeles Times, commenting on the fact that Spector had let his bodyguard ( Jay Romaine) go. “I can’t help thinking that if he still had a bodyguard, none of this would have happened.” He went on to talk about a film project that he was supposed to be developing with Spector: the original plan, Mitchelson said, was for the film to end with Spector returning to Abbey Road in triumph with Starsailor. “That was the last scene, the happy ending, the comeback. But now, I just don’t know how it’s all going to end.”

  What he clearly did not expect was that it would spell the end of his friendship with Spector. According to Mitchelson’s friend and press agent Sy Presten, Spector, believing that Mitchelson was “capitalizing on the tragedy for personal publicity,” cut Mitchelson off.

  “When news got out about the killing, Marvin was inundated with phone calls from the press, and so was I,” Presten recalls. “And we both agreed that Spector was incapable of doing anything like this. Marvin said, ‘I’ve known him for fifteen years, he would never do this.’ He said the nicest things about Spector. But after that Spector wouldn’t answer his calls, his e-mails or have anything to do with him. And this was the time when Marvin was racked with cancer, which he died of. And Marvin was very hurt by that. He’d never come out and say it. I’d ask, ‘Did you hear from Phil?’ and he’d say, ‘Well, not exactly…’ It was a terrible shame.” (Mitchelson died on September 18, 2004.)

  For Spector, the prospect that he might be charged with murder seemed to have little effect on his activities or his appetite. Through the spring and summer of 2003 he was seen dining out at Elaine’s in New York with Paul Shaffer and the actor Richard Belzer, and, back in Los Angeles, at both Dan Tana’s and the Grill—the restaurants he had visited on the night that Lana Clarkson died—telling anybody who asked that he would soon be exonerated over any blame.

  In the castle, he whiled away the hours sending e-mails to friends. Rather than protestations of innocence or cries of existential despair, these tended to take the form of Spector’s beloved corny jokes and squibs.

  Among them was a sequence of jokes on the theme of “only in America…” “Only in America do drugstores make the sick walk all the way to the back of the store to get their prescriptions while healthy people can buy their cigarettes at the front. Only in America do people order double cheeseburgers, large fries and a Diet Coke. Only in America do banks leave both doors open and then chain the pens to the counters.”

  In September 2003, seven and a half months after the killing, the L.A. County Coroner finally signed off on the autopsy of Lana Clarkson. The report ruled that her death was homicide. Two months later, on November 20, Spector was charged with murder.

  Spector was accused of two separate crimes: murder, defined as the unlawful taking of a human life “with malice aforethought,” which carried a sentence of fifteen years to life; and the use of a gun in the commission of a violent felony. The second charge was a so-called sentence enhancement that could add as much as ten years to the sentence. Were Spector to be convicted and the sentences served concurrently, he would be facing the prospect of a minimum of fifteen years in a state penitentiary. Under California law a defendant has a right to a speedy trial. But Spector would display no apparent urgency to avail himself of this right. There would be another three and a half years of procedural red tape, obfuscations and prevarications before the case of The People vs. Phil Spector would at last come to its conclusion.

  In January 2004—just a few weeks after Spector had been formally charged with murder—he fired Robert Shapiro. The background to the dismissal would be revealed six months later, in July, when Spector filed suit (which he ultimately abandoned) against Shapiro and his firm of Christensen, Miller, Fink, Jacobs, Glaser, Weil and Shapiro, claiming that Shapiro and his colleagues had taken advantage of their friendship with Spector “and used his legal plight as an opportunity to unabashedly line their own pockets.”

  The action claimed that on February 7, 2003, Spector had signed a letter—which the suit described as “vague, ambiguous and confusing”—engaging Shapiro’s professional services, with Spector to pay $1.5 million as a nonrefundable retainer. He had made an immediate down payment of $1 million.

  The suit noted that Spector and Shapiro had been friends for several years, and that Shapiro was aware that Spector “was under the care of a mental health professional and was prescribed medications for the purpose of stabilizing [his] mental condition.” But it claimed that at the time Spector signed the agreement he had not taken his medication for several days and “was laboring under a tremendous amount of mental stress that comes with being arrested for murder.”

  Shapiro and his colleagues, the suit went on, had not devoted “significant time or energy” to Spector’s case; had only a rudimentary understanding of the facts, evidence or issues involved; had “failed to properly store or examine evidence,” and also failed to interview key witnesses.

  “As a result of Shapiro’s representation,” it continued, “the prosecution had a year to prepare, while the defense of the case went nowhere” indeed it was “likely that the ‘services’ provided by [Shapiro] had actually led prosecutors to file the formal criminal charges.”

  A billing statement indicated that Shapiro’s work on the case had generated only $95,407 in billable time, and this figure, it was alleged, was “grossly inflated.” Spector was now seeking the return of the unused portion of the $1 million down payment he had made on the $1.5 million retainer. (According to the suit, Shapiro had asked for the remaining $500,000.) These allegations were vigorously contested by Shapiro. Responding to the suit, Shapiro’s attorneys argued that he had provided “stellar representation” for Spector, including pressuring the police for his immediate release from jail out of sight of the media. Shapiro also maintained that Spector was simply “a friendly acquaintance, I have never considered him a close friend.”

  Changing lawyers is almost de rigueur in California “celebrity trials.” For the defendant, there may be any number of sound strategic reasons, but it also has the happy consequence of slowing things down. Unlike a fine wine, criminal cases tend not to improve with age. Witnesses’ memories fade, or doubt and confusion sets in to their stories; public indignation and interest begin to pall—at least in some cases.

  Michael Jackson had twice changed lawyers before his trial, on charges of molesting a thirteen-year-old boy, began in 2005. Jackson was acquitted. The actor Robert Blake—as Spector would do—changed lawyers no fewer than three times, in the process delaying proceedings for a full two and a half years, before finally going on trial, again in 2005, charged with murdering his wife. He too was acquitted.

  To replace Shapiro, Spector hired another, equally high-profile California attorney, Leslie Abramson. If Shapiro’s reputation was as a smooth negotiator, Abramson was more renowned for her ferocious powers of attack and persuasion in court. One client, a contract killer, is said to have remarked that “Leslie was so good, for a while there she even had me believing I didn’t do it.” But curiously, perhaps, she was probably best known for a case that she lost, defending Erik Menendez, who with his brother Lyle was convicted in 1996 of murdering their wealthy parents in their Beverly Hills home. Both are now serving life sentences without possibility of parole. Abramson had been contemplating retirement when Spector approached her. “No other defendant would get me to give up my freedom,” she remarked at the time. “No other defendant was someone I considered an idol, an icon, and the definition of cool.” Spector, she added, was “fabulous. I could not picture him hurting anyone.” She immediately went on the offensive.

  For almost a year, the coroner’s report into Clarkson’s death had been
kept on “security hold” at the coroner’s office. But in May 2004, a few days before Spector was due to appear in court for a procedural hearing, Abramson leaked a copy of the report to the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times, at the same time releasing a statement that the coroner’s ruling that Clarkson’s death was “homicide” was based not on the findings of the autopsy but on certain unspecified “information” that originated with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. “In other words,” Abramson stated, “the Coroner’s office, without conducting their own follow-up investigation, relied on secondhand hearsay from witnesses of undetermined credibility to make the crucial decision to rule the death a homicide and to reject the obvious implications of the physical examination of the body—that the single gunshot wound suffered by Ms. Clarkson was self-inflicted.”

  Contained in the report was what appeared to be crucial evidence on behalf of the defense, which seemed to confirm Shapiro’s leak of a few months earlier. According to the report, analysis had revealed “several highly specific particles and many consistent particles of gunshot residue on both the right and left hand” (of Clarkson). “Therefore,” the report went on, “the decedent may have discharged a firearm or had his [sic] hands otherwise in an environment of gunshot residue.”

  The DA’s office quickly moved to give its own interpretation of the findings. A spokeswoman, Sandi Gibbons, said that the residue on Clarkson’s hands could be explained because a gunshot releases a cloud of residue within a three-foot radius. “She could have had her hands on her lap when the gunshot went off and residue would still have been on her hands.” Spector, Gibbons went on, also had GSR, and Clarkson’s blood, on him. Furthermore, there was evidence that Spector had wiped the gun and moved it after the shooting. The gun was found under Clarkson’s left leg, and she was right-handed.