Disgraceland
Page 18
Phil Spector was on a rant. His little voice echoed through the vast corridors of his 8,600-square-foot residence, a dwelling with the appointed name of the Pyrenees Castle, overlooking the working-class town of Alhambra, California, like a monster in waiting. The sixty-nine-year-old producer was roaming through the enormous dwelling, alone save for servants tucked away for the night. Phil was keeping company with the dead, talking aloud to the ghost of his old friend, John Lennon. He knew Lennon was there with him as he spoke glowingly about their mutual childhood obsession, the King.
“Elvis’s version wasn’t bad but it wasn’t as good, either. Elvis had that voice, too, John. You knew it. Well, I’m telling you, I KNOW it! Such a voice. He was a great singer. You have no idea how great he really was. I can’t tell you why he was so great, but he was. He was sensational. He could do anything with that voice. I would have loved to have recorded him but the Colonel never would have allowed it. You know, ask some people who knew him, they’ll tell you, when Elvis went in a room with Colonel Parker he was one way, when he came out he was another. The Colonel hypnotized him. That’s the truth, too, I can tell you six or seven people who believe it who are not jive-ass people. I mean, he actually changed. You’d talk to Elvis and he’d be, ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ and then he’d go into that room with the Colonel and when he’d come out he’d be all, ‘No, no, no.’ Now, nobody can con you like that.
“Except the press, John. When the institutions line up against you, they can finish you. The LA County District Attorney’s office; they haven’t convicted anyone since Manson. Not O.J. Not Robert Blake. They’re gunning for me. You know what I’m talking about, right? Because you had it worse off. You had Nixon coming at you. Pissed off that he wasn’t a Kennedy and pissed off that you weren’t an American. Cons. All of them. Nixon, the Kennedys, the institutions, the authorities, and the press. Especially the press! They’re conning the public now. Telling ’em I killed that girl. Bullshit!”
Spittle was gathering at the corners of Phil’s mouth. He sipped his crème de menthe from a chalice and sat down at the white piano, an exact replica of the one he’d recorded John’s “Imagine” on. He plunked a few notes randomly and softly mumbled out a few words from “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’”:
It makes me just feel like cryin’
Cause baby, something beautiful’s dying.
The emotion of the lyrics was too much. He stood up and began pacing again to collect himself, turning his attention again to John.
“John, let me show you something. Look at my hands. I’m an old man. I couldn’t have done it. That girl. Special? No, she wasn’t special. There are thousands like her in LA. She could have been anybody. She was anybody. And what a mouth on her. She was drunk and loud and yeah, she wanted a ride home. Brought a bottle of tequila along with her. Then she wants to see the castle. It’d been a long night, but what do I do? I say, ‘Yeah, come see the castle,’ sure. And I thought I could score a piece of ass like I hadn’t in a while, not that I didn’t have opportunities.”
Phil fell into the plush of one of his many armchairs. Sat and sunk his small, slippered feet into the shag of the burgundy carpet. He poured out more of the syrupy green liqueur, picked up a framed photograph of Lennon, and raised his chalice to toast him.
“To you, my friend.” He sipped and breathed out slowly, loosening the stiffness in his neck.
“You want the truth, John? We get here, me and this girl, and I think, ‘Let’s take things to the next level, baby.’ Did we? Wouldn’t you like to know, John, you horny fuck. Maybe we did, maybe we didn’t. I’ll leave it at that. Anyway, then she’s checking out all of my stuff. My records. My carousel horse. My Lawrence of Arabia digs. Wandering around from room to room. Maybe she gets into my gun room? Maybe she reaches into her purse? All I know is suddenly she’s blown her fucking head off, right in my house. BOOM! In my castle. Right in that chair. She had no fucking right.”
Phil’s head felt light. He set the photo down where he could see it and placed his fingers at his temples, resting his elbows on the desk. The chair where it happened, a Louis XIV pushed up against the mirrored wall, had been replaced with a new one, covered in ivory damask. Clean. Like nothing happened.
Phil continued. He couldn’t help himself. John was a captive audience. “Blood? Sure, there was blood, John. You of all people know about blood. And so I get a little woozy over seeing her like that and go outside and call to my driver. THEY say I said, ‘I think I just killed somebody.’ C’mon…
“‘What, boss?’ My driver wants to know. I tell him, ‘I think I HAVE TO CALL somebody.’ Which I have to repeat three fucking times. Good guy, Adriano, but pretty much zero Inglés. So I yell, ‘I think I have to CALL SOMEBODY!’ And I go back inside, close the door, draw the drapes. I put some records on and wait. It’s maybe four, five in the morning. The sky is getting light when the cops get here. They’re waiting out there for a while and who the fuck knows why? Did they think they’d intimidate me? And then, BAM, they’re in here and they throw me to the ground, John. They break my septum. Would you look at my fucking septum? And I tell them I didn’t kill this stupid bitch and they must think I’m resisting because they Taser the fuck out of me. I pass out. Look at me. I weigh 130 pounds. Do I look like someone who has to be Tasered, and by a dozen giant cops, no less?”
Phil paced about, patted his hand against his wig, a mod cut, combed forward, the color of a new penny.
“Marta? Estas en la cocina? Mi amor? Por favor, tráeme otra botella, for fuck’s sake. I know you love me, baby. Everybody loves me. They want to be me but they lack courage. I can be anything I want. A fucking UN translator. Marta, dónde estás? I know Spanish. I love the Latin beat. I understand the Latin beat. Where the fuck is Marta?”
Phil shuffled over to the piano. Sat down. Exhausted. Distracted. He rubbed the two cigarette burns that he’d imagined Lennon had made with a pair of forgotten Gitanes. Removed his wire-framed, lavender-tinted glasses. Pinched the bridge of his nose. Looked down at the keys, a row of perfect pearly ivory. Teeth. Her top front teeth had been blown clear out of her head. Her face caved in. Phil caved into himself with shame.
“Let me ask you something, John? Why would I shoot her? Why would I, Philip Harvey Spector, shoot that girl? I had no motive. I…Had…No…Motive.
“Even your guy had a motive. That fat Chapman fuck. He thought you were a sellout, and you know what? He was right! And Kennedy’s guys, they had motive, too. But me? No motive. Sin motivo!”
Ronnie Spector driving around town with a dummy version of her jealous, possessive, psychotic husband, Phil.
But Phil Spector did have a motive. Fear. Fear of being left alone. Everyone he loved, it seemed, eventually left him.
First, his good friend Lenny Bruce left him. Dead. Overdosed at forty.
Then there was Ronnie. That one hurt really bad. He fell in love with her while her star was in ascent. She was just in high school when Phil produced her singing “Be My Baby.” Phil didn’t need convincing. He was ready and willing to accept the invitation of the song’s title. That voice: unabashed New York City, baby. And those hips. Ronnie was perfect for Phil, but there was the problem of one Mrs. Annette Spector, Phil’s wife, a singer whom he had also produced in a group called the Spectors Three, which were basically a way less successful version of the Teddy Bears. But Ronnie wasn’t Annette. Ronnie was special. And worth the headache of busting up his marriage for. Phil threw himself into making Ronnie a star. He took her nickname, “Ronnie,” and turned it into a group name: the Ronettes. He threw her sister and her cousin up onstage next to her so it actually looked like a group. Voila. Write a hit. Record the hit. Release the hit. Again, voila. Star. Next? Marry her so she can’t up and leave you. So that’s what Phil did. He and Ronnie hitched up in 1968, the year after he had divorced Annette. Phil was quick to assert control in his second marriage, just like in the recording studio. The next year, the couple adopted a son—which Phil in
sisted Ronnie pretend she had given birth to. In Phil’s estimation, it was more of a sign of success to be biological parents, so they sent out birth announcements, inferring that Ronnie had given birth. Unlike Phil’s controlling nature in the studio, his controlling nature in the marriage did not yield successful results. Phil kept Ronnie locked up in their mansion for months at a time, refusing to let her out of his sight. When he did allow her to leave—for a maximum of twenty minutes at a time—he made her drive around with a life-sized dummy of Phil, complete with his signature cigarette hanging from his lips. Ronnie found an escape via alcohol, but where most habitual alcohol abuse can be a false escape, for Ronnie it was real: Phil put her in a sanitarium after every time she got drunk, which to her was a newfound freedom. She would drink to the depths of drunkenness every other month just to gain extended stays outside of the mansion. One time when Phil came to the sanitarium to collect Ronnie, she told him she wanted a divorce. He persuaded her to reconsider with a surprise gift: a pair of six-year-old twin boys he had adopted. No way was she going to leave him after that kind of pressure, he figured. Just six months later, when Ronnie could no longer take the psychological torture, she escaped barefoot and broke with her mother, under the ruse of “going for a walk” after Phil had shown her mom the coffin he kept in his basement. The one he said her daughter would end up in if she ever tried leaving.
And then there was John Lennon. He left Phil too. But that was different. A gun-crazed lunatic took him away, despite Phil’s early assurances to the contrary.
And those weren’t the only ones who tried leaving Phil Spector. Phil thought about them all, sitting in court on trial for the murder of Lana Clarkson. They brought up Ronnie, sure, but now they were laying it on thick for the jury. Trotting out testimony after testimony from every other wide-eyed cocktail waitress and rock ’n’ roll wannabe who’d crossed paths with Phil in the last twenty years.
First there was the photographer, Stephanie Jennings, who testified that after the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions in New York back in 1994, Phil, who had a suite down the hall from her at the Carlyle Hotel, rang her up in her room and asked her to join him. She refused. Phil insisted. She was adamant. A few minutes later, Phil was outside her room with a gun and a chair. He wedged the chair against her hotel room doorknob, effectively locking her in and repeatedly yelled to her, “You ain’t going nowhere.” Stephanie called 911 and the cops came. Phil talked his way out of it and the incident was squashed.
Then there was the cocktail waitress, Melissa Grosvenor, who went back to Phil’s castle with him after a Beverly Hills dinner. When she later told him she wanted to go home, Phil pulled out his gun, held it hard against her temple, and said, “If you try to leave I’m going to kill you.” She did as she was told and stayed put. The next morning she split. Never to return to Phil despite his constant phone calls. When she failed to call him back, Phil left a message telling her, “I’ve got machine guns and I know where you live.”
Phil Spector was mad. A genius, yes, but mad. The prosecution said so as they deftly strung together a narrative depicting a brilliant mind who had a penchant for violence and a strong dislike for women who tried leaving him. The narrative culminated with the murder of Lana Clarkson, a talented B-movie actress turned cocktail waitress who’d gone home with Phil Spector one night. She died in Phil’s foyer, with her leopard print purse on her shoulder, where she’d been sitting in his Louis XIV chair just moments before her death in the familiar position of someone waiting to leave. The jury wasn’t entirely buying it. They weren’t convinced one way or another. Phil’s high-priced defense team succeeded in planting reasonable doubt in the minds of some of the jurors, resulting in a mistrial. But when he was tried again, Phil would be convicted. Nineteen years to life.
Behind bars, Phil kept company with his ghosts. Sometimes Lenny visited but mostly John. John was loyal like that.
“Look, John. I’m gonna tell you something. She kissed that fucking gun like she was in love with it. I have no idea why. How would I know? I’d only met her that night and I felt kind of sorry for her, but she had a sense of humor and I thought what the hell, John, we all gotta laugh, right?
“But was it worth it? Hell no. She died, John. AT MY HOUSE! She got blood everywhere. Blood on my favorite white coat. John, it was a fucking mess. Then it’s four, five months for the coroner to decide it’s a homicide? So they charge me. Then they send me to jail because this bitch blows herself away in my house?
“There was no case, John. I’m telling you. It was a suicide. Probably an accidental fucking suicide. Maybe an on-fucking-purpose suicide. But a goddamn suicide nonetheless.
“The jury, that first time. Couldn’t come to a consensus. Deadlocked. Mistrial. Then the next jury comes back guilty. You know why? The press! Robert Fucking Blake. FUCKING O. J. SIMPSON, JOHN! They needed their celebrity conviction. Me. I’m him. That’s who. Not some other guy. But really, that original jury had it on the first take. No one gets it on the first take. Not even you. Not even Elvis. But I gotta hand it to them. They got it. You know why? Because it wasn’t a homicide. It was just some depressed washed-up actress, fucked up on Vicodin, drunk, swinging around a bottle of Cuervo, who somehow gets my gun. A gun that turns out to be from Texas. I don’t know how, John, okay? Look, she kissed the gun. She was making a kind of joke about it, like she was giving it fucking head or something and she accidentally fired it. There’s no way I could have fired that gun. Look at that. Look at my hands shake! I can’t even hold my fucking dick, let alone a gun. I wouldn’t have put the gun in her mouth. I didn’t want her gone, John.
“I wanted her to stay. I never want them to leave. But they all leave! All of them. Lenny, you, Ronnie…all of them. My old man, even. That hump couldn’t stick around at least until I was out of short pants? No, he has to suck down on a gas hose. The pain is so bad? Being a father? Being a husband? Being a man? He can’t take it so he takes it out on the arches and just up and leaves. Kills himself. John…John? Where did you go, don’t leave, John. Come back. JOHN. Listen. The guards let me have this little record player. I’ve got some Elvis records we can listen to. John…John! Don’t leave!”
Chapter 11
Skinny Elvis
Elvis Presley didn’t take drugs for recreation. He took drugs for physical self-governance. Elvis didn’t smoke grass, and despite what the interior decoration of the Jungle Room might have suggested, Elvis didn’t stay up late with the boys blasting rails of cocaine. Nor was Elvis on some spiritual quest to break down the walls of perception through hallucinatory exploration. He didn’t take LSD or mushrooms or peyote. Elvis was just trying to get through his day.
Speed to keep up. Downers to come down. Crash. Wake. Repeat.
The more this pattern continued, the more Elvis introduced additional pills into the mix to try and maintain himself physically and mentally. And with more drugs came more side effects.
Ethinamate, methaqualone, codeine, barbiturates, meperidine, morphine, and Valium were all prescribed to Elvis, and all were in his system the day he died. Chronic use of larger-than-recommended doses of (and/or sudden withdrawal from) the regular use of ethinamate can lead to central nervous system complications that manifest through hallucinations, delusions, and disorientation. The overuse of methaqualone can lead to insomnia and delirium marked by vivid nightmares, paranoid delusions, extreme fear, and visual hallucinations. Serious side effects of codeine include mental disturbances and hallucinations. Barbiturates decrease rapid eye movement during sleep—when dreaming happens—so withdrawal from the drug can lead to sleep disruption, including but not limited to the following symptoms: nightmares, vivid dreaming, insomnia, and hallucination.
In short, Elvis couldn’t sleep. Not even in the cozy, heavily curtained confines of his master bedroom at Graceland. He couldn’t tell if it was the pills or his stomach. In all honesty, he had no idea which pills he’d taken or when. He’d taken so many that he gave up keeping track.
Nor could he remember what he had eaten that day, or the previous night, that had his stomach in knots. It was probably the meatloaf. He ate it pretty much daily. Or maybe it was the BBQ pizza. Probably both. His stomach hardly ever felt this bad. He was in poor health. He knew it. But he also knew he’d whip himself back into shape on the next tour, which was scheduled to begin imminently. The Colonel had been eager for Elvis to embark on these dates to help start bringing in cash again and to, of course, help Elvis get back to the business of being Elvis Presley, an idyllic version of himself that he was completely incapable of living up to on the morning of August 16, 1977.
Right now he wasn’t “Elvis Presley.” He was Fat Elvis. A bloated mess of a man. He weighed nearly 350 pounds and was for the most part bedridden save for various trips to the Jungle Room or to his piano or for a couple minutes on his racquetball court where he’d swat weakly at volleys from various members of his entourage and stumble around until finally running out of breath. They’d let him win and he’d never forgive them for it.
Little did his entourage or anyone know that Elvis, at the time, was suffering from an enlarged heart, twice the size of what it should have been, and was presenting signs of advanced cardiovascular disease. The pills didn’t help and neither did the diet of rich, cholesterol-filled Southern cooking he’d been eating his whole life. His bowel was twice the size it was supposed to be and had been housing an impacted stool for the past four months. But to Elvis, the thing that had him most fucked-up at the moment wasn’t the pills or the upset stomach, it was what was on his mind.
That Streisand song would not stop rolling around in his head, “My Heart Belongs to Me.” Elvis knew it well. Hell, everyone knew it well. It had been No. 1 on the charts for the better part of the summer of ’77. But that was not how Elvis came to know the tune. The song was originally slated to be part of Barbra Streisand’s Academy Award–winning movie A Star Is Born, released in December 1976. Elvis was made aware of it when Streisand pitched him to star opposite her as the film’s male lead.