He's a Rebel (34 page)

All Phil needed to bring when moving into this palace was a toothbrush, yet for almost a year it sat unoccupied while he put off the move. He told Danny Davis to be ready to go to L.A. in April, and Danny, who lived in Philadelphia with his wife and commuted to New York, sold his house. When April came, Phil still wasn't ready, and Danny had to ask the real-estate agent for an extension. “We were down to one mattress, we'd sold everything else,” he recalled. “So then April came and went and he never moved, and then June and nothing, July and nothing, August, September . . . he put us through some shit that was unbelievable. My wife was crying every night, she can't stand livin' this way.” Realizing what he was doing to Danny, Phil bought him a Mustang automobile. Finally, in October, he made the move.

In L.A., Phil quickly ingratiated himself among the new breed of rock-and-roll crowd. This was not difficult, for it was Spector who showed the way to these young Turks. Phil was a legend, the prototype of weird antisocial behavior that now was the basis of cultural
expression. But because he placed so much emphasis on the material end of his fame, people paid attention to him mainly as a conveyor of cheap thrills and for a free ride. His art now had less to do with his persona than his designer-pricey ruffled shirts and Edwardian suits, his big house (everyone assumed, and Phil made no effort to say otherwise, that he owned it) with Humphrey Bogart's former maid and butler—and his $100,000 white Rolls-Royce. And so, there he was, bounding from the Rolls with a retinue of bodyguards and bodacious bimbos, digging the Sunset scene with Roger McGuinn of the Byrds at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go, the Factory, the Daisy, and the other cabarets of mod rock. In a Hollywood of outlandish slime-balls, leeches, and phony backslappers, Phil was at home because the affected worship felt good and carried no compunction for him to like anyone in return, or to even have to care. “He wanted to be the most outrageous, the most noticed,” Davis said. “He wanted to walk into celebrity parties and be the focal point. The broads that accrued to him were fuckin' knockouts. When he was riding the crest, everybody wanted to be with him. It was celebrity, it was money, and he played all of it very well.

“But at the same time, he would always back off people. He would never come up to people himself and he would like crush you, he would want to crush you with some kind of statement designed to negate any further conversation. He'd give you the
shpritz
and then you'd know to walk away.”

The days and nights of Phil Spector's Hollywood were “a fantasy world,” according to Davis. “Phil has a penchant for embracing certain things at certain times in which he absolutely throws himself whole-body because it's the thing to do. When he became a billiards aficionado, Minnesota Fats and Willie Mosconi and Cowboy Johnny Moore shot with him at the house, betting like $10,000 a game, and Phil couldn't make a shot at the table although he did become a fair player. With Phil, if that's what's current, or has a scent of perverseness, hipness, he will . . . believe me, Phil is the kind of guy who will tell you that Ollie North spent time at the house before he testified in Congress.”

The figure, and cause, that Phil cared most about that fall of 1965 was Lenny Bruce. At the time, the tortured dirty-mouth comedian had been abandoned by his longtime claque of New York liberal
intellectuals who now found him too depressing and self-destructive to get behind as he went from one court case to another on obscenity and narcotics charges. Bruce lived in a house in the Hollywood Hills and spent most of his time there alone, nearly broke and addicted to heroin and Methedrine. In the few stand-up gigs he was allowed to perform, he eschewed comedy for boring readings from his legal papers. Lenny no longer saw himself as a guerrilla for freedom of art but a martyr of social persecution. The problem was, in a time of exploding individual expression within the youth culture, he seemed a prehistoric apparition, a pitiful has-been bent on killing himself.

When Phil began running into him on the Strip, he took to the outlaw blues that spilled off Lenny. Both of them had huge New York Jewish egos, and Phil believed they both were symbols of resistance against the same establishment pincers. The fact that Lenny had few friends only made him more of a
mensch;
neither did Phil have friends. Lenny was a
real
, big-league rebel, with real smack in his veins and an arm's-length arrest record. Phil thought that was hip beyond belief, and if he wanted to outrage the right people, how better to do it than be seen with Lenny Bruce?

Lenny did not identify with Phil or with rock and roll. Forty years old, bred on the Borscht Belt and then in smoke-filled jazz clubs, the rock culture was alien, even a little intimidating to him; these wiggling and jiggling kids with long hair and disappearing skirts were somehow
too
free, definitely too freaky. Lenny would listen to Phil go on about his rock music and pretend to be interested. Lenny knew immediately what he wanted from Phil. He had Phil marked, and every time Lenny said he needed some bread, Phil confirmed it by faithfully going into his pocket. This Ferris wheel went around for many months, with Phil spending thousands of dollars paying Lenny's bills and tending to his needs. Whether it was for a pack of cigarettes or for unspecified “legal expenses,” Danny Davis—who knew Lenny on the Borscht Belt and once had his wife type some of the comic's early legal briefs, a chore she now resumed—would draw it out for him.

This was the price Phil had to pay for riding on and trying to somehow save Lenny's half-dead body, and he complied with the usual Spector zeal. Not only was Lenny taken care of, but so was his nine-year-old daughter, Kitty. With Phil's house a garrison of
electrified gates and guard dogs, Lenny got the idea to install iron and steel barriers in and around his house. Phil, the big idea man, also concocted with Lenny a gig not in a dungeonlike nightclub but at a legitimate theater; that way, Lenny could raise the conscience of the L.A. show-biz colony. The show, a ten-day run bankrolled by Phil and billed as “Phil Spector Presents Lenny Bruce,” premiered at the Music Box Theater in Hollywood—and was a calamity. Despite the fact that Danny Davis pitched the show all over town, only a handful of people showed up, their eyes glazed in boredom as Lenny recited from his legal papers and ranted almost incoherently, his dilated eyeballs bulging. Phil was crushed by this curio of a burnt-out loser and wanted to close the show after one night rather than be tarnished by its bad and costly vibes. But Lenny would not have it. He demanded that the gig run its full course, and it did, each night more lamentable. Phil took a bath on the fiasco, but Lenny had no sympathy. The fault was Phil's, Lenny insisted, because he had “failed to advertise the show.”

Nothing would hold back Lenny's rush to judgment day. One night, trying to surround him with caring people, Phil took Michael Spencer and his wife, who had also moved back to L.A., and Russ Titelman and his sister to Lenny's house. A strung-out Lenny barely noticed the guests. “He was very depressed, very down,” Spencer recalled. “He tried to play tapes and couldn't get them on the machine. We had to put them on.” Phil, almost always the aberrant in any group, was for once put off himself. “He said Lenny was acting weird,” Spencer said.

Worried sick about Lenny and too committed to turn away from him, Phil could only keep plying him with handouts. Meanwhile, he posed in Lenny's scruffy perverse image. The house at La Collina became a hangout for the grungy poet Allen Ginsberg and others of Lenny's Greenwich Village loyalists, and Phil spoke of doing an album of Ginsberg's poetry. At times, Phil's sympathy pains seemed frighteningly real. In the studio, he would cower in a corner and call out, “I need my heroin.” It would scare all but those who really knew him.

“People said he was a junkie, but I never believed it,” Vinnie Poncia said. “You have to know Phil. He would've fainted at the sight of a needle. I never saw him get high, never even saw him with a joint. He was crazy enough as it is. Phil had that chameleon
thing. If he was with smokers he'd say, ‘Gimme a cigarette' and never inhale it. If he was hangin' out with Lenny Bruce he was sufferin' with him. He'd adopt a heroin habit without stickin' a needle in his arm.”

“Phil wore Lenny on his wrist,” Danny Davis said. “He loved Lenny, but it was one of those ‘periods.' Karate, pool . . . Lenny Bruce was one of those.”

Phil had his own explanation of Lenny's purpose. “He was at the time my closest friend,” he told
Rolling Stone
a few years later. “He was like a teacher or a philosopher. He was like a living Socrates.”

Phil transferred the business—now operating under the umbrella name of Phil Spector Productions—from New York to a penthouse suite in a tinted-gray glass office building at 9130 Sunset, mere minutes from his house and punctuating the “happening” juncture of Doheny and the Strip. Joan Berg, who elected not to move west, was replaced in the setup by a sales manager, Bob Kirstein. Danny Davis, as always, was the keeper of the cash drawer, which was now being opened less for music matters and more on rehabilitation cases. There was Lenny Bruce, of course, but no more so than the demands of the Spector family.

Regarding Bertha and Shirley, Davis said, “Phil has the classic love/ hate thing with them; they, of course, think he's the end of the world.”

Working on the love side of the equation, Phil put Bertha up in an apartment that he paid for and he bought her a car. If he hoped that relieved him of the frustrations he had about his family ties, friends doubted it worked for very long, because his mood never seemed to brighten when the subject was family relationships. There was, for one thing, the continuing distress about his sister. Shirley was still seeing doctors up in Palo Alto and Phil had an iron-clad pact with himself to pay for every cent of her care. “I'd have to send money to people at the hospital, the doctors, to keep her in,” Davis recalled. “Once Phil wanted me to go up and get her out when she was bein' discharged. I got out of
that
job fast. No way I wanted to do that.”

At the core of his unease about Shirley, Phil may have worried that he might somehow go over the edge as well. In his concern for Shirley's health, he pondered long and hard trying to come to grips with her descent and learning about her particular demons, as if that could distance
his own. While he could be genuinely sensitive, empathetic, and even optimistic about Shirley's therapy, it still struck others that Phil had left himself unprotected, and in fact had put himself in line for a breakdown by his inability to assimilate into the world around him.

Vinnie Poncia noticed the telling contradiction that Phil could feel other people's pain, while being helpless to ease his own.

Vinnie Poncia said, “My wife killed herself in the seventies and Phil sent me a heartfelt letter that made me understand why it happened. He knew about alienation. Phil couldn't ever make peace with people around him. He always feared he was out there on the fringe looking in.”

By this time, 1965, the West Hollywood boys touched by Phil's art and personal blessing were making
their
move on rock—some abetted, ironically, by Marshall Lieb. Marshall himself had edged upward after the Teddy Bears, as had tiny Annette Kleinbard, who under the name Carol Connors had written the 1964 Rip Chords hit “Hey Little Cobra.” In 1960 Marshall sang in the road version of the Hollywood Argyles—whose big novelty hit “Alley Oop” was produced by old friend Kim Fowley—and then, working with Lee Hazelwood, played guitar on Duane Eddy sessions. He went on to produce songs for Timi Yuro and then the Everly Brothers. “When I got away from Phillip,” Lieb said, “I was able to make some money” By 1965 Marshall's presence was formidable. When the Rolling Stones came to record in L. A. that year, Marshall gave a party for the band at his house. Phil, who did not miss the chance to play host to the Stones in L.A.—and played bass on the session at which “Play with Fire” was cut—nonetheless stayed away, his coolness to Marshall having turned bitter cold now that he was a creative threat.

Marshall, on the other hand, wished they could renew their friendship. In a way, he felt joined to Phil even now—by the Wall of Sound. Even in its evolved form, Marshall believed it was a style of music the two of them had worked out. “The loss of quality in the vocals, background, bass, the big wash of the mix, Phil and I had worked a lot on that: the transparency of music,” Lieb said. “The Wall of Sound was a very transparent wall. People who tried to duplicate it did it wrong. They were always
adding
to make more
sound. But it wasn't a lot of sound, not a lot of people playing a lot of notes. It was more air than sound.

“Phil always knew what he wanted, and the two of us were able to achieve it quickest. He could achieve it with Nitzsche, but it took him forever because he didn't have anyone that he could talk to. Nitzsche was close, but not where we were. The Teddy Bears was its own sound and Phil Spector was its own sound. But ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him' is a classic and it outsold every Philles record.”

When Phil went to New York, Marshall was the man who could make it happen for the next generation of rockers of West Hollywood, who were now out of school. One was Don Peake, the kid who made that green Japanese guitar wail on the Friday night jam sessions at Michael Spencer's house. Through Marshall's recommendation, the eighteen-year-old became lead guitarist for the Everly Brothers. Peake was the hottest L.A. sideman when Phil began inviting him to play on Righteous Brothers dates. There was also Ira Ingber, the younger brother of Elliott, who had played the “Bumbershoot” gig with Phil. Marshall produced a demo on a band that Ira was in. Others in the old neighborhood crowd were forging their own success. After two years in the army, Elliott Ingber was deep into the new scene in West Hollywood, which centered around Canter's Deli. Soon he had a reputation as a guitar fool—although years later he confessed that he still could not play “that be-bop shit Phil did”—and joined Frank Zappa's pop-and-protest band the Mothers, a cult fave on the freak underground circuit. Elliott's guitar partner on the “Bumbershoot” gig, Larry Taylor, was the bass player in Canned Heat, a rising electric boogie band. Kim Fowley's old partner in the Sleepwalkers, Bruce Johnston, was with the Beach Boys. And then there was Russ Titelman, who, playing a Spector-like game, made demos of his own songs that led to an apprentice writing job in New York with Don Kirshner. Back in L.A. now, he was an office rat at Liberty Records. “It was a vital, happening time,” he said.