He's a Rebel (7 page)

Inside of a week, orders came in for “To Know Him,” 150 at first, then 300, then 1,000. By mid-September, Bedell and Newman were looking at an order from Minneapolis for 18,000 records.

Spector found out about it when he came in to Bedell's office to ask how the record was moving. “Hey, we got a little order here,” Bedell told him coyly.

The week of September 22, 1958, “To Know Him Is to Love Him” hit the
Billboard
chart at No. 88. But it still had little airplay
outside the Midwest. Bedell then played his biggest card. He knew Dick Clark, and he called him in Philadelphia to ask a favor. He pushed hard, saying he had a peculiar problem—a No. 1 record in Minneapolis that he couldn't get played anywhere else. The first thing Clark wanted to know was if Universal Distributors—a giant distributing depot powerful enough to own its own record labels, and closely linked to “American Bandstand”—was handling the Doré record in Philadelphia. It was, and that bit of good fortune may have led Clark to listen to it.

“He heard it, thought it over, then put it on ‘American Bandstand' and
boom
—we wound up selling 1.4 million copies,” Bedell said.

The nationwide after-school audience of “American Bandstand” could give a song megaton force, and “To Know Him” ran up the charts with frightening speed. Four weeks on the chart, it hit the Top 40 the week of October 11. It was No. 16 a week later, No. 5 two weeks after that. In mid-November, Dick Clark called Lew Bedell to request the Teddy Bears come to Philadelphia to appear on his show. Bedell took the opportunity to send the group on a promotional tour through Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and New York during a four-day whirl around Thanksgiving. Suddenly, almost without time to focus their eyes on what was happening, the clean-nosed Teddy Bears were the hottest item in rock and roll.

Phil Spector was not too breathless, however, to make a hard business move. The victim was Harvey Goldstein.

“When the Dick Clark thing happened, they told me they didn't want me to make the trip,” Goldstein said. “They said Dick Clark was paying expenses and he didn't want to pay for somebody who didn't sing on the record. This was the excuse for acing me out of the group. I knew this, but it was confirmed years later when I ran into Dick Clark. I introduced myself and told him the whole story, and he said he never paid expenses for people to do that show.

“I have a feeling that the greed factor came into it. Phil thought they might only have to split the money between three, not four, since I wasn't on the record. It was probably easy for him to make the decision, because I wasn't really close to Phil in school; it was Marshall who approached me originally about coming in, not Phil.

“I wasn't Phil's idea of a music person. I couldn't read music and they had to teach me my parts, and that was a pain in the ass
because sometimes I caught on, sometimes I didn't. I didn't have the talent they did, so it probably wasn't hard to convince them I should go.”
*

When the Teddy Bears went off to Philadelphia, a hurt and fuming Goldstein consulted an attorney and later filed a lawsuit against the group, claiming he in effect owned 25 percent of the name “The Teddy Bears.” “I'm sure they thought they were smart when they pulled what they did on me,” he said, “but they weren't smart enough.” Ultimately, the group settled with Goldstein: bonds were placed in trust for him, and he continued to draw royalty checks for a decade. In return, Goldstein agreed not to use the group's name in any music venture of his own—a promise that was very easy for him to keep. He went to Cal State to study accounting, never to sing another note, and with acrid memories. “We were eighteen-year-old kids fighting like animals over a few dollars. There's something extremely sad about that.”

The change that came over Phil Spector's personality in the wake of this explosion was vivid. Donna Kass saw a “much more confident” Phil. Lew Bedell and Herb Newman saw a monster. “The kid became so haughty,” Bedell said. “Before the song was a hit, Phil used to come in and say ‘Anything doing today, Mr. Bedell?' He was so obsequious I figured he was half-Japanese, this guy. Then, after it was a hit, he walks in and it's ‘Hey, Lew, baby, we're doin' good.' He starts calling Herb ‘Hey, you.' You never saw such a complete change in a little fuckin' Jewish kid.”

Bertha and Shirley Spector didn't have to change. Always sure of his singularity, they now shared his vanity; anyone who Phil felt was not a proper ally became their immediate enemy. When Harvey Goldstein was cashiered, he felt that the women may have been behind it. “Phil's mother and sister virtually tried to control everything he did, and he tried to control us. I'm sure they had a real impact on my being booted out of the group. Shirley and his mother were like wild people. They wouldn't have hesitated doing it.”

Donna was next to feel their wrath. Not particularly excited by the show-biz glitter being sprinkled on her once-shy and sensitive boyfriend, she was distressed by the upcoming East Coast swing, because it presaged more of the same. Several times she asked him if he had to go—the kind of request any girlfriend might ask of her boyfriend. Bertha and Shirley were livid. “They felt I was trying to hold Phil back,” Kass said. “But what kind of power did I have? I was fifteen, sixteen, I was nothing. I was a lowly little Jewish girl that went to high school and was crazy about him. I'm totally nonmusical, and I kind of . . . if I look back now, I was jealous of it, his career. I tried to get him to stay in school and not to travel because it took him away from me, and yet here he was with my best girlfriend out there somewhere and it was real hard for me.”

Once, at a rare meeting with Phil at his place, Donna was stunned when Bertha and Shirley lit into her, openly accusing her of trying to short-circuit his mission in music. “They attacked me, not physically but yelling and tormenting me for hours.

Phil tried to defend her but, predictably, it became an argument. “It was just ranting and raving for a long time. They accused me of all kinds of things, that I was taking him away and not encouraging him about his music, and he was spending too much time with me and he couldn't write . . . just everything.”

Donna, seemingly paralyzed by the ambush, finally freed herself when her mother called. “I was crying my eyes out to her, and she came and got me. She said, ‘Why are you involved with them?' ”

But for Phil, liberation took a back seat to family loyalty created by the stigma and guilt he felt about Ben's suicide. That he was, and would be, the male legatee under the Spector roof, kept him affixed, stuck in place even as his legs itched to run out the door so he could make his music in peace. Indeed peace could only come from music, and music could only come after paying a toll in anger and frustration. To Bertha, he was still her little boy. Somehow, Phil knew that no matter how far he'd be able to spread his wings, he'd never really clear that roof, at least not in his own mind.

Shirley Spector hurled herself into the whirlwind of the Teddy Bears' ride up the charts. Welding her ambition to family loyalty, she convinced Paul that she should manage the group. The thought of the
Specters' fratricidal bickering interfering in the affairs of the group so horrified Marshall and Annette that they agreed to let her in only on a quasi-official basis, more as a bone thrown to the Spector women for their support of Phil. The real decisions were already being made by seasoned people in the business; an agent named Ned Tanen had put together the appearances on the East Coast trip, and a public relations man in New York, Bud Dollinger, was hired to do promotion. In Philadelphia, Universal's promo man, Harry Finfer, would escort the group to “American Bandstand.” When the Teddy Bears went on the trip, Shirley stayed home.

On the morning they took off, Phil was so terrified about getting on an airplane—an old phobia—that he took his pillow along for security during the flight. That week, the Thanksgiving issue of
Billboard
had “To Know Him Is to Love Him” at No. 3.
Cash Box
, on whose chart the song first appeared on October 11, placed it at No. 2, after an incredible leap from No. 22 to No. 7 four weeks earlier.

Upon landing in New York, his physical and emotional breeding ground, Phil had two pressing pursuits: the first was to see his uncle Sam. The second was to visit the grave of Ben Spector.

After talking Marshall and Annette into coming with him to see Sam Spektor, who with his two sons and daughter had moved to a house across the Hudson River in Clifton, New Jersey, the trio boarded a bus at the Port Authority terminal. They arrived at Sam's house like conquering heroes. Phil, who had sent Sam one of the first few pressed copies of his record, sat with him for hours reminiscing over old photo albums of a family of Spectors and Spektors who once all lived within minutes of each other in the Bronx but now was spread from coast to coast.

Later in the day, Phil went to see the gravestone that was a source of such incredible despair and inspiration. He went alone.

A day later, on November 28, the Teddy Bears went on “American Bandstand,” following by one day Buddy Holly and the Crickets, and lip-synched their sizzling hit song. Phil and Marshall wore powder-blue, V-necked sweaters with their first names embroidered in small script on the chest. Annette wore a red gown. All of them were petrified.

The appearance hastened the inevitable. The following week,
“To Know Him Is to Love Him” had pushed “Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley” out of the No. 1 slot on both pop charts.

Phil talked on the phone with Donna constantly during the trip, but when he and the Teddy Bears came home, the relationship hit the rocks. Tooling down Sunset Boulevard in his new metallic-blue Corvette, bought out of the first rush of royalties, seventeen-year-old Spector met more girls than he once would have thought possible. Behind Donna's back he began seeing a girl named Karen Oster. “I found out he was cheating on me, and it was very painful,” Kass recalled. Suddenly Spector's once-captivating little lies weren't so endearing. When Ritchie Valens's song “Donna” became a big hit in early 1959, Phil told her he had actually written the tune, for her—but said he had sold the song, its rights and writing credit, to Valens, who also recorded at Gold Star. On February 3, while on tour in the Midwest, Valens was killed with Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper in a plane crash. Donna Kass saw the Donna of the song—Donna Ludwig—crying on the newsreels.

Spector's ongoing mendacity was absurd, but Donna could sense it was pathological. “It didn't matter to Phil that he was hot, or that everybody wanted him,” Kass said. “He was very manipulative. He had no good role models. The only good role model he ever had killed himself.”

Plainly, Phil thought he had outgrown not only Donna but everything in her world. Gradually, and mutually, they drifted away from each other—but not before Spector had shaped the direction of her life. So skilled was he in his court reporting that a fascinated Donna began to study it herself. Three decades later, she would still be a working court stenographer in Los Angeles.

Now that Donna was out of the way, Annette, as her best friend, wondered if she would be the next target. Shirley had eased her way more and more into the inner sanctum of the Teddy Bears, and she began reigning with a fist of iron—which Annette thought was aimed at her. “Shirley was really tough on me,” she remembered. “I think she really wanted to be me, in a sense as a singer, someone who had talent and could make it in show business.” Shirley tried to govern Annette's role
as she saw fit, in clothes, makeup, telling her when to smile and what to tell interviewers. Her words of criticism came in torrents, her words of assurance in trickles. Just her presence could unnerve both Annette and Marshall.

“Shirley really was an extension of Phil, but a lot more unpleasant,” Lieb said. “She was a very hyper, very nervous person. She was very loud, very New York. She smoked a lot, and when she would sit with you, it gave you that turn-off feeling.”

Feeling in charge after the headiness of the group's “Bandstand” triumph, Shirley barged into Lew Bedell's Vine Street office late one Friday afternoon to pick up a royalty check for Phil. Bedell, talking business around a conference table with an associate named Danny Gould, was nearly knocked off his chair when she came through the door and announced, “I'm Shirley Spector and I've come for my brother's paycheck!”

“Here . . .  I got it right here,' Bedell said, reaching into a pile of papers on his desk and handing over a check for $38,000 in artist's and writing royalties made out to Phil.

Shirley expected cash. Her response, according to Bedell, was a flood of blue language in between which she said she couldn't cash the check because it was too late in the day. “And Danny Gould, he's lookin' at me. He says, ‘Lew, I didn't know you did that sort of thing.' I said, ‘I don't, I don't . . .' So, anyway, I told her, ‘Listen, the United California Bank is open till six o'clock on Fridays,' and she goes out in a huff and that's the last I saw of the
meshugenah
.”

Bedell had a bigger problem with Phil, about what would be the follow-up to “To Know Him.” Spector had come in with a song called “Oh Why,” a bluesy piece replete with minor chords similar to the kind he used for the bridge in “To Know Him.”

“I don't wanna do it, Phil,” Bedell told him. “I don't like minor songs, very few of 'em make it.”

Spector would not budge. “Then I'm leaving. I'm gonna go somewhere else,” he said.

It was no idle threat either. Spector had by this time gotten feelers from Lou Chudd, the head of Imperial Records, one of the biggest of the L.A. independent labels. Chudd was dangling a real contract, at twice the royalty rate, before Phil's eyes. Bedell knew he was boxed in, that Spector had him at his mercey because Bedell hadn't torn up the original lease of master for four songs with a real,
binding contract delineating responsibilities. In effect, Spector was working on speculation and Bedell had no control over the material. But Bedell held
his
ground as well.