He's a Rebel (25 page)

“The things Phil was doing were crazy and exhausting, but that's not the sign of a nut, that's genius,” Levine said. “I mean, if something was remotely possible, he was gonna do it, and we just went ahead without a second thought. There were no rock-and-roll rules for Phil, because he was making them up as he went along.”

Softly couched by acoustic guitars chewing an unbroken line of repetitive notes, the steady three-beat drum accent and a dramatic entry of horns, Ronnie Bennett's gushy, seductive voice, with a vibrato that fluttered like bird wings, burst onto the rock-and-roll landscape. The Ronettes were not polished singers—“They sang flat,” Bobby Sheen noted—and Estelle Bennett and Nedra Talley's backing vocal tracks had to be overdubbed several times and buffered with other voices. But Ronnie sang the way she looked—it was possible to fall in love with just her voice, and the ‘whoa, ho-ho-ho-ho” riff she sang was a come-on that needed no words.

Phil was to become fixated with her, more so than with the group as a whole. Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry were charged with writing a whole series of plaintive, first-person love declarations that Phil would regard as the longings of his own heart.

“Be My Baby” was on the chart by the end of summer. By then Phil knew he had Ronnie Bennett right where he wanted her.

The records are built like a Wagnerian opera. They start simply and they end with dynamic force, meaning and purpose. . . . It's in the mind. I dreamed it up. It's like art movies. I aimed to get the record industry forward a little bit, make a sound that was universal
.

—
PHIL SPECTOR
,
London Evening Standard
, January 24, 1964

Phil began work on one other project during that fateful summer of 1963. It was an album of traditional Christmas music done in the untraditional idiom of rock and roll. Spector and Jack Nitzsche laid out arrangements for twelve carols and one original song—a teary, bittersweet Greenwich-Barry-Spector ballad, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”—in the same manner as rock songs, with hip R&B styling, copious strings, and a big band kick to the age-old hooks of pieces like “Frosty the Snowman,” “Sleigh Ride,” and “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.”

“He thought it was good music, he respected it,” Annette said
of Phil's motivation. “It was like ‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.' God knows why these things came into his head, but if a song was good, Phil had creative input with it.”

“He probably saw the novelty and absurdity of the idea,” Larry Levine said, “but I don't think there's any way for anyone to know where he got it any more than any other idea. I can't overstate that Phil was just different. When I was with Phil, things happened to me that wouldn't happen to me with anybody else. Phil was a magnet for unexplained behavior, his kinetic energy was so . . . I mean, people would get into arguments, fights, and not necessarily with him. When you're part of Phil's entourage, strange things happen because his mind doesn't work the way other people's minds do. You don't know why they happen, but you know they will.”

And once Phil began on this anomaly, his commitment grew to a level bordering on insane. Day after day for six weeks, sessions ran almost without seams. The artists—Darlene Love, La La Brooks, the Ronettes, and a shoal of background singers—and the musicians did not know what day it was, whether it was light or dark outside, and cots were set up in the studio.

If the album had been done without genuine care and sincerity, there would have been no audience for it. Instead, when it was finally completed, it was a feast of cool and mawkish, a hipster's way of appreciating the seasonal standards that had become stale and depressing for a burgeoning generation of young adults.

But when Larry Levine heard Spector's
coup de grace
, an effulgent soliloquy spoken by Phil himself over the final cut, “Silent Night,” he thought he had figured out the motive for the project. This was not only to be Phil's message of good tidings to his record-buying public, but, as he went on and on in unrelieved vanity about his privilege to make such an album, Larry cringed. If Phil could not sing on his records, now he would at last be the presence that verified his endowment.

“He started on this thing, and it was 1 want to say how fortunate I am at twenty-three to do this . . .' and what he was doing was extolling his virtue, how great he was, while trying to sound humble with ‘Silent Night' in the background,” Levine said. “I'm only sorry I didn't save it for posterity, but I did make him cut it down because it was unbelievable. It got past funny, after five minutes it wasn't funny at all.”

The version that remained barely skirted bad taste. “Of course, the biggest thanks goes to you,” Spector told his public, many of whom still did not know who he was, “for giving me the opportunity to relate my feelings of Christmas through the music I love.” The album, titled with similar presumption—
A Christmas Gift to You from Phil Spector
—was released in November with a jacket designed by Phil; the front cover showed his four acts popping out of gift packages, and on the back were pictures of him and a longer, signed message from “Phil Spector, Producer.”

For Levine, making the album was six weeks spent in hell. “I told him after we did the album that I didn't want to work with him anymore. Because it was too hard for me. When you engineer for Phil you have to work every second, you're always mixing and remixing and it's physically excruciating. I told Phil, ‘Look, you're great, you don't need me' and I walked away. He went back to New York for a long time and I thought that was it for us.”

Starting with “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” the inner groove of each Philles record had been etched with the words “Phil & Annette.” But by fall of 1963, it was an empty love symbol. Phil's adultery with Ronnie was now an open secret, and it was causing trouble between Ronnie and her cousin. Nedra Talley had been aware of the illicit romance for months, ever since Phil began calling her house in a snit demanding to know where Ronnie was. Nedra, who was firmly against Ronnie seeing a married man, tried to dissuade her.

“It's wrong,” she told Ronnie. “Weren't we brought up to know it's wrong?”

As much as the marriage issue, Nedra worried about Phil himself. She warned Ronnie that he was weird, a man with problems. Ronnie thought Phil's jealous calls were “cute,” but Nedra insisted that it was a harbinger of insanity, that later on he would be horrible to her. “If a man cheats on his wife,” Nedra said, “he'll cheat on you.”

But whatever Nedra said, Ronnie would not listen. “She would just say, ‘Oh, I'm not really getting involved, he's just cute'—but let's be real. Phil is not cute. Ronnie fell in love with power,” Nedra believed. “Phil talked funny, he looked funny, and he was married. But he was successful and he turned her head with who he was. Ronnie was young and he could give her the world.”

All through the winter and spring of 1963, the union got hotter. Ronnie, left fatherless as a young girl when her parents divorced, clung to the security and social ladder Phil offered. Her mother, Beatrice, mindful of her daughter's interests, did not seem to object. “I think my aunt was going along with what Ronnie was doing,” Nedra said, “and saying ‘Well, you know, she's got a catch.' ”

Phil and Ronnie took their affair coast to coast. They lived together while recording in L.A., and in New York, Phil gave nerve new meaning by coupling with her in his office, eighteen floors below where his wife sat in their apartment. Phil thought he was safe there; he could carry on with Ronnie under the cover of rehearsing and other record business. And, for a long time, he was right. Annette Spector knew nothing of the romance. Then Annette visited a girlfriend of hers named Lindy Michaels, who ran in music circles.

“Have you heard about your husband and the Ronettes?” Lindy asked.

“What are you talking about?” Annette said.

“He's working with this group, the Ronettes, and there's a rumor he's having an affair with one of them.”

Annette wanted to believe it was a lie, but something told her it was not. Before she'd left the apartment, Phil had told her he would be in the studio recording that night. When Annette got back, she had to know the truth. Calling Mira Sound, she asked for Phil and was told he wasn't there, nor scheduled to be. Next she got on the intercom that connected the apartment and the office. When Phil answered, her heart sank. Saying nothing to him, she raced into the elevator and went to the office, to bang on the door. Knowing he had been caught, Phil wouldn't open it, but when Annette got back upstairs the intercom was buzzing.

Answering it, Annette screamed, “Who are you with down there? Get your whore out of my building!”

At this point, Annette suspected that he was cheating with Nedra. “She's the one who bothered me most, Nedra was the prettiest,” Annette recalled. “I said to him, ‘Which one is it, Nedra?' and he said, ‘I'm rehearsing, and I'm not with Nedra'—he thought that was his out. He made me come down so he could show me it wasn't Nedra.”

When Annette went down and the elevator doors opened, she saw Phil and Ronnie, in dark silhouette, standing in the rear of the
lobby face to face, their noses almost touching. Annette let the doors close and rode back up. “I just about died,” she said. “I was too young to accept that kind of thing.” When Phil got in later that night, he flew into a rage.

“What the hell are you doing to me, what is this bullshit?” he screamed at her. “What are you doing spying on me? Who the hell do you think you are?”

“Goddammit, Phil,” she said through tears. “If you're having an affair, I wanna know!”

Phil's response was to storm out the door. “You know something? He never admitted it—and he never to this day has admitted it,” Annette related. When he was gone, Annette slumped on the living-room sofa. On a table next to her was a picture of Phil. “I looked at it and it seemed as if he was shaking his head back and forth. I kind of hallucinated and it freaked me out. I called a girlfriend who came and took care of me.” Much later that night, Phil came home, and for a week they went through the motions of living together. Then, nothing resolved, Annette told him to move out, and he found an apartment two blocks away at York Avenue and E. 64th Street.

“I just couldn't take it anymore,” she said. “I was in the middle of finals when that happened and I could not sleep or eat or work. I think I had a walking nervous breakdown. Even today, I still can't take it at age forty-four. I'm very much a moral person. I never cheated on him.”

Some weeks later, Phil asked her if they could reconcile. “I'll drop the Ronettes from their contract, I'll just forget about 'em,” he insisted—a promise Annette did not believe.

“I can't, Phil,” she told him. “It's too devastating to me. You tore me in half.”

For the next several months they remained apart, with Phil speaking civilly with Annette and never writing off the marriage. “I believe—no, I know—that I was the only real love of his life,” Annette said years later. “Phil dug Ronnie physically, and he dug controlling her and creating an image of a Svengali with her singing. When Phil talked about Ronnie, it was as a slut, a whore, and he thought she was illiterate and ignorant. With me, he had something he could not find with anyone else.”

And yet, by late 1963, Phil was deliriously hung up on Ronnie. “Be My Baby” had gone to No. 2, and Dick Clark invited the Ronettes to appear on a barnstorming tour of the East and Midwest called the Dick Clark Cavalcade of Stars. Worried about Ronnie seeing other men once she was away from him, Phil forbade her to go.

“Phil wants me to stay in New York with him,” Ronnie told Nedra.

“He's playing one of his stunts,” Nedra said. “He's playing emotional games with you, and you know who's gonna win in the end.”