He's a Rebel (45 page)

Only days later, he snapped. Not getting what he wanted during a stormy session, he drew his gun, pointed it over his head, and
fired a shot into the ceiling. John—who had assumed that Spector kept his gun unloaded and on his hip only for effect—was startled. His ears ringing from the shot, he said, “Phil, if you're gonna kill me, kill me. But don't fuck with me ears. I need 'em.”

Said David Kessel: “There was heavy burnout goin' on in there, a lot of raw nerves on edge. In a position like Phil's, he walks in and forty musicians come up and wanna ask questions or talk about the old days or offer advice on how to arrange and mix. And Phil doesn't really need or want to hear any of that. He gets to the point where . . . it's a way of saying ‘Leave me alone! I'm makin' the record!' Granted, shooting a gun is radical, but so is Phil Spector. These aren't your normal sessions when you're in and out in three hours. These people are in there hour after hour after hour.”

Already tainted, the sessions were brought to a halt when Phil, facing a custody hearing, could let nothing else enter his mind. He even got John to come to domestic court with him as a character reference, but as soon as Ronnie came into the courtroom Phil spat streams of obscenities at her. John tried to restrain him but he was a maniac, and when he refused to stop screaming the judge found him in contempt. Phil was so deranged that he did not notice John get up and leave the courtroom. Never again would they be in the same room.

John did not want to deal with the abandoned album, but he was shocked that he could not even get his hands on the tapes—Phil, claiming ownership, took them from the studio and dropped out of sight. Whenever John called him, an underling would give a different reason why Phil was inaccessible. Then, in early February, Phil had another accident in his Rolls. After jamming on the brakes, he went through the windshield and was taken to the emergency room at UCLA Medical Center bleeding from severe facial cuts. Suffering from multiple head and body injuries and burns, he underwent surgery.

The accident, in typical Spector fashion, was cloaked in secrecy and mystery.
Rolling Stone
, failing to run down any details, speculated that Phil might simply be incognito after having a hair transplant. Lennon, calling to get his tapes again, was told, “Mr. Spector died in an accident.” That was when he gave up trying and left it to Capitol to retrieve the tapes. John cut a lightweight album with Harry Nilsson,
Pussycats
, and went back to New York, calling his eight
months in L.A. his “Lost Weekend.” In June 1974 Capitol came to a settlement with Phil and paid him $94,000 for the irksome tapes. They were brought to John in New York, where he looked at the metal cannisters holding the tapes and cringed with memories of L.A. and Spector; unable to force himself to listen to them, he later gave the raw and unmixed tapes to a music publisher as a payoff in a plagiarism lawsuit. John, who had begun to remix and recut the songs for a compensatory album, was mortified when seven untouched Spector tracks were suddenly released along with eight redone ones as a television mail-order album called
Roots
. That led Capitol to issue five unremixed tracks as part of Lennon's
Rock and Roll
album. A myriad of lawsuits ensued, the result of which was that John—in the sweetest of ironies—won $140,000 in damages from both parties over an album he regretted ever doing.

Phil came out of the hospital under medication and his hair spray-colored gold and silver to divert attention from the hideous cuts on his face and scalp. He also wore a gigantic cross around his neck. “He'd just seen
The Exorcist
and he said he wasn't taking any chances,” Dan Kessel said. “We told him he looked like a circus freak but he thought it was normal in Hollywood.” Outside Canter's one night, Phil got into a big argument with a man he did not know was a plainclothes cop. Phil was ready to have a Wyatt Earp showdown until the man pulled out his badge. “This cop had seen Phil's holster,” Kessel said, “and on a guy with gold hair and a cross around his neck, he thought we were a Charles Manson weirdo gang.” The policeman put Phil, Dan, and David up against a car and yelled, “Where are the guns?” Though all three of them were licensed to carry their weapons, they spent that night in the West Hollywood jail.

Guns, in fact, were becoming a major part of Phil's identity, which he seemed to enjoy. Giving cues in the studio to each segment of the orchestra, when he would come to the Kessels he would call out: “Gun section.” When Phil and the Kessels went to Las Vegas to see Elvis Presley in concert and then went backstage so that Phil could meet the King, there was an uneasy moment while the two armed camps checked each other out. Finally, when all seemed cool, everyone took off his holster in a kind of modern showbiz peace ritual.

The growing industry talk about Phil's instability, his guns, and
the horrifying Lennon sessions did not stop Warner Brothers Records Chairman of the board Mo Ostin from signing him to a thee-year deal that included the formation of the custom Warner-Spector label, the logo for which looked like a large crystal ball—a fitting imprint given that no one could even guess what Spector would do for the label. Worked out by Phil's new heavyweight show-biz manager Marty Machat, he received an advance in the high six-figure range. Playing all sides to Phil's advantage, Machat took the rights to Spector's new product from Warners and licensed them to England's Polydor Records under the name of Phil Spector International—letting Phil pocket another chunk of advance money. Under this arrangement, Phil had baronial powers; he cut however many records he had to for Warners but released only what
he
wanted to in the United States.

Ostin willingly accepted these conditions. Phil Spector was the prize moose head on his office wall, and he feted Spector with a round of welcome parties and a media blitz. None of the movie stars in the Warners lots received more attention, and the result of all this fawning was that Phil did not have to move a creative muscle. Ideas and acts were pushed on him, with assurances that whatever he did would be boffo. No one forced him to go into the rock woods and come out with something fresh and profound. Phil had no sooner arrived when Ostin prevailed upon him to produce another of his new superstar signees, Cher, the onetime Spector session singer turned queen of Vegas and television bathos. Cher—whose lone pantsuit from the old days was long gone, replaced by an array of the world's most brazenly immodest and unsightly show gowns—had several solo hits in the early seventies, but now that she was divorcing Sonny Bono their popular variety series was in a ratings dive. Her career in decline, Cher had dropped into the John Lennon sessions as Phil was cutting a cover track of the Motown song “A Love Like Yours (Don't Come Knockin' Every Day)” and in her pushy way tried to talk Phil into using her vocal on it. He had to scream “No!” over and over as she kept bugging him about it. Now, at Ostin's urging, he relented, doing the tune as a duet with Cher and Harry Nilsson. He also cut Cher on “A Woman's Story,” a brooding lament of a prostitute (written by Phil, Nino Tempo, and April Stevens), and a slowed-down cover of “Baby, I Love You.” These sessions did not go smoothly—at one date Phil punched out
Cher's manager, David Geffen, who he thought was badgering him. Looking up from the floor at Phil and his bodyguards and their arsenal of guns, Geffen pulled himself to his feet and silently left the studio, nursing a split lip. At another, an engineer, Steve Katz, became so unnerved by the guns that he refused to do the session, leaving Phil to scrounge around for an engineer.

Ostin then shoved another faded star Phil's way: Dion DiMucci, the former teen idol who like the title of one of his old hits had been a wanderer in the sixties before kicking a heroin habit and attempting a seventies rebirth with Warners. Phil saw Ostin's logic about recording Dion: working with a fellow survivor might be revitalizing and a nice sales gimmick. When he went into the project he was as serious as Lennon had been about finding lost roots. Phil assembled a full orchestra, this time at his old shop, Studio A at Gold Star, and with Stan Ross on the control board for the first time since the Paris Sisters. He cut an album of eight songs called
Born to Be with You
, co-writing one of its songs with Dion and two more with Gerry Goffin; pulling up more roots, he used a song by Mann and Weil, “Make the Woman Love Me,” and both Barry Mann and Jeff Barry were credited as musicians on the album jacket.

Also present at one session was a young Bruce Springsteen—a Spector disciple and legatee whose dense and pounding teen rock operas like “Born to Run” had won him simultaneous, if premature, cover stories on
Time
and
Newsweek
. With an avowed affection for both Spector and Bob Dylan, Springsteen's records were essentially a blue-collar, axle-greased Wall of Sound. Brought to the studio by Robert Hilburn, Phil had the awed Bruce sit alongside him in the booth. At one point Phil opened the intercom and playfully growled for everyone to hear, “If you wanted to steal my sound, you shoulda gotten me to do it!” The facetious remark broke up the room and Springsteen laughed out loud, but it also contained a poignant truth: Bruce Springsteen's records were cast in the image of Spector's music, yet Phil Spector was doing nothing close to their impact and promise.

Although Phil was recording, his personal travails always beckoned outside the studio door. The custody and divorce war was bad enough, but he had to contend with a new legal headache when Barbara Owen brought suit in September 1974 to evict him from the mansion
he loved but could never commit himself to purchasing outright. Owen, now seventy-four years old, widowed and ailing, agreed to sell the house the year before to the Concord Investment Corporation, but when Phil's lease expired in February he did not move out, as requested, claiming a ninety-day right to match the sale price of $255,000. Concord at first tried to ignore that Spector was even there; workmen began to tear down the barbed wire and fencing around the house. Seeing his security barriers torn down, a shaking Spector filed suit against Concord, saying the renovation was “causing me considerable anxiety, nervousness and grief.” Concord then began to amass its own legal ammunition against Phil, calling him a “nuisance” and that his guard dogs' “loud and raucous barking disturbs the surrounding neighbors, and whose vicious demeanor has terrorized neighbors . . . assaulted and attacked by the dogs.” In the end, though, Spector and Jay Cooper fought the sale so long and hard that Concord eventually renewed Phil's lease, at $6,500 per month.

Phil fought Ronnie just as hard as one court motion after another formed a quilt of battle strategies. When Ronnie and her mother came back to L.A. in April for hearings and stayed at the Sunset Marquis, Phil sent George Brand over with Don'té for Ronnie's visitation period—but instructed George not to allow her mother to see the boy, because it had not been specifically stipulated. Seeing Beatrice Bennett in Ronnie's room, Brand yanked Don'té's hand from Ronnie's. When Ronnie and Don'té were together, the intimidating bodyguard would pull up a chair and sit in the doorway. At one point in the drawn-out affair, Phil agreed to pay psychiatric bills for Ronnie, who twice checked into hospitals—and Ronnie agreed to set community property at a mere $50,000.

“Phil is a very smart man and he constantly played mind games with Ronnie,” Nedra Talley said. “Mind games, that was Phil Spector. He allowed her to go into the best hospitals in L.A. and say, oh, this is ‘chic' to go to these exclusive hospitals for a week, and then he turned around and used it against her in court.”

That seemed evident when Phil quickly filed papers saying he was “deeply concerned because of [Ronnie's] alcoholism and drug problems for which she has sustained multiple hospitalizations.” Ronnie, he said, had been “taken by ambulance” to hospitals, had “repeated commitments to psychiatric wards,” and “an emotional
breakdown.” In the end, the case appeared to come down to which of them was in worse shape mentally. Both Phil and Ronnie, as well as Don'té, were examined by psychiatrists. “Trying to be objective about it, it was not all Phil's fault. Phil had his problems and Ronnie had hers too,” Nedra said. “My cousin Ronnie is a trip. She had an ego. She was not in love for love, like it should be with a man. She knew she could not drink and still she drank. Actually, neither of them needed Don'té.”

In December, terms of the divorce were finalized. Phil was ordered to pay $2,500 a month to Ronnie for thirty-six months, in addition to community property that was a tiny fraction of what Jay Stein and Daniel Jaffe once projected. For Phil, who had won around $1 million on the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman fight (betting heavily on the underdog Ali), the money was irrelevant. By far more important, he was given custody of Don'té.

Unshackled, Ronnie dried out at Scott Ross and Nedra Talley's suburban Virginia home. It was many months before she could even think about returning to the business on her own.

“Darlene and I saw Ronnie after the divorce and we were shocked at how she looked,” recalled ex-Blossom Gloria Jones. “She was not the same person. We looked at her like ‘What happened?' Ronnie was like the cheerleader in the old days, happy-go-lucky. Phil took that away from her.”

The divorce was Phil's lone victory of 1974. In November Warner/ Spector issued two singles within two days: Dion's “Make the Woman Love Me” and Cher's “A Woman's Story.” Both ballads, they were swept aside in the middle seventies' disco craze. The Dion redux, which was doubly hurt by the somber and maudlin mood of both artist and producer, was actually doomed weeks before when Phil quarreled with Dion's manager, Zach Glickman. “Zach was wearin' his manager's hat, getting too pushy for Phil's taste,” David Kessel recalled. Among other things, Glickman demanded that Phil turn over the album's tapes—which for Phil Spector, like the tearing down of his barbed wire, was akin to a declaration of war. “Phil doesn't like to be pushed,” Dan Kessel said. “He had it all goin', there was no reason why it couldn't go on the way it was. And Dion was freaked out because of the inability of Zach and Phil to get it goin', but that could've only happened one way—Phil's way. If it's not gonna go
Phil's way, there's nothing in it for him. He does it his way or he doesn't need to do it at all.” Having arranged with Dick Clark for Dion to go on “American Bandstand” and break “Make the Woman Love Me,” Phil spited Glickman and killed the gig. Then, when the record did not sell, he released the lugubrious and depressing
Born to Be with You
only in England rather than risk more rejection at home. If Dion was bewildered and disillusioned by the experience, the fact that the debut Warner/Spector album was to be unavailable in the United States disgusted Mo Ostin and ended his special interest in Spector.