AND so the trial of the year kicks off. "The actions of the Hitler-like DA and his storm trooper henchmen are reprehensible, unconscionable and despicable," Phil Spector told reporters on Monday night, after being charged with the murder of actress/bar hostess Lana Clarkson. Comparing your prosecuting district attorney to a mass-murdering dictator is quite an opening gambit. It is, one suspects, far from the most melodramatic thing we will hear before the verdict is reached.
Have no doubt; this trial - which will begin properly no earlier than December - will be as big, gripping and over-the-top as the trial of OJ Simpson, although for different reasons. That trial was, in the eyes of some, about racial politics. This on
e has the potential to be all about ego, ambition and the dark side of fame.
In the language of Hollywood pitching, he is the legendary but deeply troubled 1960s pop producer who had lost it spectacularly; she was a wannabe who never really had it and (it has been suggested) thought he could help her career. It’s terribly ironic that, actually, he sort of has. Whatever the verdict, someone will surely find a way to turn this into a movie, and Lana Clarkson - whose film CV consisted of a motley collection of B movies with titles such as Barbarian Queen and tiny roles as "woman at fashion show" in the sequel to Nine and a Half Weeks - will finally be a leading lady.
One of the most intriguing questions is: what on earth did they talk about that night? There were no witnesses, so no-one will ever really know, but in the Hollywood version it will surely be a conversation about ambition, obsession and disappointment. Clarkson, it is reasonably safe to assume, wasn’t 100 per cent happy with her lot. At the age of 40, she had made 14 films but never become famous and was working in a bar called - rather poetically - the House of Blues. Spector is so unpredictable - he was quoted in a British broadsheet as saying he was mentally ill and taking medication - that it’s hard to know what his state of mind was, but here is what we have heard so far. According to friends, Spector hadn’t touched alcohol in years, but the night of Clarkson’s death - her body was found around 5am on 3 February 2003, at Spector’s house, along with at least one gun - he was drinking rum. He had recently given a rare newspaper interview (published just before he was arrested) in which he talked of having been "crippled inside". "People tell me they idolise me, want to be like me, but I tell them, trust me, you don’t want my life. It hasn’t been a very pleasant life ... I’m not going to ever be happy." (He did add, however, that thanks to the medication he was "a completely different person than I was three months ago, six months ago, nine months ago".)
He had always been troubled. His father committed suicide when Spector was only nine years old; he was seeing a psychiatrist by the time he was a teenager, and suffered from chronic insomnia, usually working throughout the night. His life is a catalogue of eccentric behaviour. In late 2002, though, he seemed to be in a positive frame of mind, to the point where he was no longer accompanied by bodyguards (they were there, friends have said, to protect him from himself). In September, he had embarked on the second of two recording sessions in London, producing an album by the British band Starsailor. Spector was a big Starsailor fan and apparently saw in them an opportunity to make a musical comeback after years of inactivity (his previous attempt, a 1990s album with Celine Dion, remains unreleased).
Starsailor were equally big fans of Spector, although they were wary, having heard the infamous stories of his previous studio exploits - he had, according to legend, fired a gun at the ceiling while recording with John Lennon and, during a previous "comeback" two decades previously, forced the Ramones to play the opening chord of their song Rock’n’Roll High School for eight hours straight. ("It was a positive learning experience," Joey Ramone later said, philosophically. "And that chord does sound really good.")
Spector was enjoying himself in London, and even went to see Coldplay with Starsailor, telling them: "This is great. I haven’t been in London for 30 years." But while the first session was a success, the second was not. "It was like working with a completely different person, day by day," singer James Walsh later said. Spector could be a control freak one day, then acted "like he wasn’t there" another. Eventually, the band reluctantly sacked him, and only two of the tracks on the resulting album include Spector’s contributions. It wasn’t an amicable split and for a man who had worked with superstars such as The Beatles and Cher (his work with Cher in the mid-1970s had been an early comeback in itself), it must have felt like a bit of an insult. It can’t have helped that only a few months later, Sir Paul McCartney announced he was going to release a new version of the Beatles album, Let It Be, with Spector’s production work removed. Spector produced Let It Be in 1970, after it had been abandoned by the Beatles. Infamously, Lennon gave him the master tapes without telling McCartney. According to Starsailor, Spector’s opinion of McCartney, who always hated what he had done to Let it Be, changed from day to day, from: "F****** McCartney, f*** him" to: "I had great times with Paul."
NONE OF THIS, OF COURSE, points to Spector’s guilt. Nor do stories about Spector and guns that have accumulated over the years, but Spector’s "Hitler-like" prosecutor, Steve Cooley, will surely have a field-day with such details, to the point where the trial is likely to become an anthology of mad Spector anecdotes. Shortly after Spector’s arrest, for example, Johnny Ramone described how the producer once used a gun to keep the band prisoners in his house. "Dee Dee [Ramone] said something and he pulled out a gun and started waving it around. He kept saying, ‘You’re not leaving, nobody’s leaving’."
There’s a story of Spector waving a gun during an interview, pointing it at a journalist when he was making an emphatic point. Guns also appear in his adopted son Donte’s accounts of what he describes as a childhood of psychological abuse.
"Dad ruled by fear," Donte told a journalist earlier this year. "He always had a gun and if we were bad he’d let his robe fall open so you could see the holster. He’d put his hand on it and say, ‘Just behave.’"
The most damning descriptions of Spector come from his ex-wife, Ronnie - of the Ronettes, the girl group Spector helped make famous in the 1960s. Her biography, Be My Baby, is a catalogue of paranoia and abuse at the hands of her former husband. When they met in New York in 1963, she was a 19-year-old virgin, he was a 22-year-old millionaire, who’d had his first hit while still at school (To Know Him is to Love Him, by his band the Teddy Bears) and gone on to produce a string of hit singles, developing his trademark Wall of Sound along the way. They became lovers, and recorded what is arguably Spector’s greatest record together, the Ronettes’ Be My Baby. But Spector, Ronnie wrote, became obsessively jealous, forbidding her to talk to the Rolling Stones in case she cheated on him, then holding back the release of Ronettes’ records in case she became too successful. Later, when the Ronettes supported The Beatles on an American tour, Ronnie stayed at home (Spector, she said, believed she would leave him for Lennon). When the producer became a virtual recluse in his mansion in 1968, Ronnie became a recluse with him. Even then his jealous behaviour continued. She wasn’t, she claimed, allowed to wear a bikini by the pool in case the servants saw her. In the house, Ronnie wrote, the servants weren’t allowed to unlock a door without consulting Spector, meaning that Ronnie was effectively locked in the house when the servants went home.
In February 1974, Ronnie finally divorced Spector. In response, she wrote, he threatened to have her killed. At this point, the story is taken up by Donte, who was six when Ronnie left her husband, who was granted custody. He, too, was locked in his room, he claimed this year, with a pot in the corner so he could go to the toilet. He had no friends and sometimes he was so afraid of his father he would wet himself.
FOR ALL THIS, NEITHER DONTE nor Ronnie accuse Spector of physical violence, and while there are many accounts of the producer brandishing guns over the years, there are none of him hurting someone with one. Donte even turned up at his father’s first court hearing, telling a reporter: "I feel anger because of everything he has done to hurt me. But I also feel pity because he is my dad and part of me still loves him. I know this public trial is the ultimate humiliation for him."
If Spector could be cruel and paranoid, there are also many accounts of his charm and wit. "He’s a unique character," said Bob Merlis, a music industry publicist, last year. "I’ve never met anyone like him. You know how they say you shouldn’t meet your heroes because they will disappoint you? Phil didn’t disappoint." And while Donte is bitter towards his stepfather, Spector’s daughter Nicole was instrumental in his attempted comeback, arranging his meeting with Starsailor.
Whatever verdict is reached in the coming months, the story at the moment feels more tragic and pathetic than sinister. It’s a very Hollywood story, though, about a woman who wanted fame and success, and a man who had achieved it and was still miserable. Oddly enough, a movie script does exist of The Phil Spector Story, which currently ends with his triumphant musical comeback. It needs updated.
