Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (38 page)

         

In the meantime, in search of “community property,” Ronnie's lawyers had ordered a certified public accountant, Arthur Linsk, to make an examination of the books of accounts of Spector and his company Phil Spector Enterprises.

In his affidavit, Linsk noted that the financial picture relating to Spector was “a diverse and complicated one.” Spector, he noted, “does business under the fictitious name of Phil Spector Productions,” and had created at least three trusts in 1970: “Phil Spector Family Trust” “Phil Spector 1970 Short-Term Trust” and “Phil Spector 1970 Insurance Trust.” The Family Trust was funded with securities; the Short-Term Trust funded with copyrights of any interests in “musical compositions.”

Spector's income, Linsk noted, was derived from numerous sources. Payments by “Phil Spector Enterprises Inc.” included a personal salary as well as “substantial personal expenses,” which Linsk noted “appear to be improperly charged as expenses of such corporation.”

Itemizing Spector's income for the year of 1971, Linsk stated that Spector had paid himself a salary of $56,000 (approximately $266,000 in today's money). The Family Trust had rendered him $15,818, and the Short-Term Trust $40,897. Factoring in interest and other miscellaneous income, Spector had received a total of $120,223. To that was added personal expenses paid by Phil Spector Enterprises of approximately $75,000. Spector's gross income therefore was approximately $195,000.

Against that figure, Linsk calculated the living expenses of Spector and Ronnie at $44,000, plus the $75,000 personal expenses “improperly charged” to Phil Spector Enterprises—a total of $119,000 for the year.

Among the assets available for liquidation and use by Spector was $15,000 in savings accounts in the Chase Manhattan and Chemical Bank; securities of $372,000 in the Family Trust; and a salary of $3,000 per month for the months of June, July and August due from Phil Spector Enterprises, that Spector had not yet paid himself.

Further investigation revealed that in the period from 1970 to March 1972 Spector had earned producer royalties from Apple Records (for his work with Lennon, the Beatles and Harrison) of $375,366.88, of which $354,015.01 had been advanced or paid—leaving a balance due of $21,351.87. According to Linsk, it was with money from these royalties that Spector had purchased securities worth around $200,000 that had been paid into the Family Trust, and this money should be regarded as “community property,” which Ronnie's lawyers calculated at no less than $225,000. Spector and his counsel insisted there was no community property.

At the beginning of August, after recommendations by Dr. Henry Luster, a psychiatrist hired by her counsel, and in an apparent bid to shape up for the custody battle, Ronnie checked into a psychiatric ward of the St. Francis Hospital, where she remained on and off for six weeks, before returning to the Beverly Crest Hotel. On September 14 her lawyers were called to the hotel by the manager, where they found her in “an intoxicated condition.” A few days later, her lawyers were called again, this time to be informed that Ronnie had “accidentally set herself afire in bed.” (By Ronnie's own account she had drunk a fifth of vodka and “drifted off faster than expected” leaving a cigarette burning. She was rushed to the UCLA Emergency Clinic, where she was found to be unharmed.)

Beatrice had left for New York, apparently telling Ronnie that she had to help Ronnie's sister Estelle with her new baby. And on September 21 Ronnie followed her there. Four days later, in a bizarre twist of events, she wrote to Stein and Jaffe, firing them as her lawyers, and canceling any fee agreements with them. Convinced that Spector had somehow got to Ronnie, Stein replied, expressing his concern that in light of her mental and emotional problems Ronnie “might be acting under the influence and dominance of others who do not have your best interests at heart.” Warning her that a delay in going to court might jeopardize her claim to half of all the community funds that Linsk had unearthed (the approximately $225,000), Stein told her that until he and Jaffe had met with her personally, “to determine if you are acting on your own,” they would continue to regard themselves as her lawyers.

Ronnie responded with a lengthy sworn affidavit sent directly to the court. In this she alleged that Stein and Jaffe had taken unfair advantage of her “emotional and mental” problems, had hospitalized her against her wishes, and kept her “through doctors and hospitals, incoherent so much of the time with medication and drugs [that] I was in no emotional condition to cope with that type of situation.” Stein and Jaffe's motives, she claimed, had been solely to obtain “a large sum of money for themselves, and for their friends and associates, from Mr. Phillip Spector and myself, which was certainly not my intention at all.

“I definitely feel and have always felt that I can settle the divorce matter between Mr. Spector and myself very amicably and I in no way want to fight. In fact I really do not want nor did I ever want anything at all from Mr. Spector.”

In November, Stein responded to Ronnie's affidavit, with one of his own, making clear his belief that Spector had “put the words” of the discharge letter and the affidavit in Ronnie's mouth. Declarations signed by Ronnie in the past, Stein maintained, reflected her “complete domination” by her husband. She had stated that Spector had a “violent temper and is domineering,” and that in the past he had “physically abused and injured” her, and “imposed his will” on her “by the use of force, threats and violence.”

Stein went on: “We believe the fact that we have ascertained…substantial community property constitutes a threat to the respondent [Spector], causing him to renew his effort to reach [Ronnie] and by reason of his domination and control over her, to get her…to discharge us.”

Responding to her allegations that they had acted on her behalf without authorization, Stein stated that the fact that Ronnie “was and is a disturbed human being and is in need of psychiatric help is without question.” It was in light of her past history of psychiatric treatment, he went on, that he and Jaffe had felt it necessary to call in Dr. Henry Luster, who had stated that Ronnie “reminded him of a recently orphaned child, whose mental state fluctuated from suicide and withdrawal to desperate clutching and clinging to anyone who offered her some assistance.”

Everything they had done for Ronnie, Stein maintained, had been done with her full agreement, and at no time prior to her departure for New York had she expressed any dissatisfaction with their services. According to Stein, Ronnie had been repeatedly advised in the past that she was free to effect reconciliation with her husband, and on one occasion Dr. Luster had arranged a meeting with all parties in his office. Spector had failed to turn up, calling to explain that he was “unable to attend because of the children's purported illness and that he could talk for only a few minutes, whereupon he proceeded to harangue Dr. Luster for a considerable period of time.”

Stein's riposte seems to have thrown cold water on Ronnie's application. By the end of November she had changed her mind yet again and decided to press on with the divorce case, with Stein and Jaffe continuing to represent her. It would be a further eighteen months before the case was finally settled. Spector was in London when he learned of Ronnie's decision. He dispatched her a note, neatly typed on Apple notepaper—his version of the last two verses of Bob Dylan's song “Positively 4th Street”: ending that if she could look from in his eyes “then you'd know what a drag it is / To see you.”

         

One day toward the end of November 1972 Joe Boyd, who was then working as the executive in charge of music for Warner Bros. films, received a phone call from Phil Spector's personal assistant. Spector had seen the film
Deliverance
and wanted to book “Lonny,” the inbred and mentally retarded Appalachian boy who played the theme “Dueling Banjos” in the film, to perform at his birthday party. Boyd explained that the boy in question—a sixteen-year-old named Billy Redden—did not actually play the banjo, and that the tune had been performed by Eric Weissberg. (In fact, Redden—who was neither inbred nor mentally retarded—was unable even to mime playing the banjo; director John Boorman had another child, wearing Redden's shirt, finger the chord changes.) “I tried to explain this to the assistant,” Boyd recalls. “I could hear her talking to Spector with her hand over the phone. Then she said, ‘Phil says he saw the movie, and the kid does play the banjo.' I said, ‘Eric Weissberg plays the banjo. I was there, I recorded the track.' ‘Phil says he doesn't believe you.' He was determined to book the weird, demented kid who played the banjo and he wouldn't get off the phone.”

         

Another woman was beginning to play an increasingly important role in Spector's life. He had first met Janis Zavala in the mid-'60s when she was a high-school student working part-time in the Hollywood clothes shop Beau Gentry, where Spector was a regular customer.

Janis was petite and strikingly attractive; she wore her brunette hair to her waist and dressed in a bohemian style. She and Spector developed a platonic relationship; they would often talk on the telephone and in time he became something of a mentor to her, taking an active interest in helping with her studies. “Phil was very proper with Janis, like a Victorian gentleman, very respectful,” says Dan Kessel, who attended L.A. City College at the same time as Janis. “Even though she was ensconced in the midst of the hip, Hollywood milieu, he discerned that she was a special young lady of quality and didn't regard her as a typical Hollywood chick. But they were just friends back then.”

After working in publishing, Janis gravitated toward the music business, taking a job, quite by chance, with Spector's old partner Lester Sill at Screen Gems. As Spector's marriage drew to an agonizing and acrimonious end, he turned more and more to Janis for comfort. When Ronnie finally departed, Spector and Janis began dating. Their relationship would prove to be the closest and most enduring of Spector's life.

         

In June 1973 Tim Blackmore, a BBC radio producer, visited the La Collina mansion to interview Spector for a documentary series,
The Story of Pop.
Spector was in an expansive mood, treating Blackmore and his assistant Jane Lucas to bad impersonations of a Liverpudlian accent, regaling them with stories about his triumphs and accomplishments, spinning yarns, claiming to have played guitar on Big Mama Thornton records, to have produced the Drifters' “Save the Last Dance for Me,” to have made hit records before “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” “but it's not important to talk about them…”

His entire career, he said, he had “just tried to do artistically what was best. Artistically you can do better than anybody else, if you really believe in it. And I really believed in what was going on. And I did try to change the music. It was a painful experience; it was hard, basically because there were not many people to do it with. There was not much help. It really rested upon my ability to do things with my music and sounds.” Was there any music, Blackmore asked, that owed a direct allegiance to Spector and what he had done?

“Everything. Including the Beatles. I don't know whether it pays to be a humble moron or a belligerent wiseguy. I don't know what's the difference…”

And then the declarative statement of intent. “I can make great records today. I made great records a year ago. Nothing can stop me.”

Blackmore was alarmed when, at one stage, Spector suddenly asked, “Are you guys scared of guns…?” He left the room, reappearing a few minutes later, dressed in a blue serge uniform with security-guard epaulettes, wearing a yellow straw hat, and brandishing a pistol. Why the outfit? asked Blackmore. Spector explained that paparazzi sometimes stood outside the gate; he liked to go out in disguise and shoo them away. He presented Blackmore with a shirt, handed the yellow straw hat to Lucas as a souvenir, and then led them on a tour of the house. Pausing at a closet, he opened the door; inside was a box full of yellow straw hats, identical to the one he had just given Lucas. According to Blackmore he took the hat off Lucas's head and put it back into the box, saying “Phil Spector needs all the hats he can get.” He then led the bemused couple upstairs to the bedroom of the twins, Gary and Louis, waking the boys to “say hello to my visitors from England.” Back downstairs, he entertained his visitors by playing a succession of acetates of unreleased Philles recordings by Darlene Love and the Ronettes. It was growing late, and Blackmore and Lucas were anxious to leave, but Spector showed no sign of wanting the evening to end. “You could be in here for twenty-six days,” he told them, “and nobody would even know you were here.” They passed the next two hours uneasily, as Spector continued to play music and regale them with stories. It was past two in the morning before they were finally able to make good their escape.