He's a Rebel Read online

  That said, it might seem contradictory, or even dirty pool, that the pages of this book are replete with examples of Phil Spector’s aberrance, his intimate pain, his manipulation and deception, his greed and his anxieties. However, to understand what went on inside Spectors head, and what put it in there, is to climb inside the very brick and mortar of the Wall of Sound. Spector didn’t just come by genius—he was driven to it by gnawing, growling obsession. Admittedly, this is a presumptuous assumption, yet the weight of evidence in any biography rests on the thoroughness of its research. The conclusions in this biography are those of the people who knew Spector best, and the search for them was maddening, endless, frus-tratingly slow—and in the end as joyously fruitful as putting a Phil Spector record on a turntable. Whether he was good or bad, it is my hope that history will note that America had its own Mozart and his name was Phil Spector.

  JOCASTA: Put this trouble from you.

  OEDIPUS: Those bold words would sound better, were not my mother living. But as it is—I have some grounds for fear; yet you have said it well.

  JOCASTA: Yet your father’s death is a sign that all is well.

  OEDIPUS: I know that: but I fear because of her who lives.

  —SOPHOCLES’ King Oedipus, in the translation

  by W. B. Yeats

  In 1956, when Phil Spector was fifteen years old, he lugged his second-hand guitar to Studio City in the San Fernando Valley once a week for a month to take instruction from a jazz guitarist named Howard Roberts. The young Spector, who was smitten by jazz, had specifically sought out Roberts in the directory of the musicians’ union, and when he got to the jazzman’s house he listened hard as Roberts explained about chord structure and the theory of rhythm guitar.

  But Roberts thought there was something strange about the kid. After each lesson, Spector would leave and go home to West Hollywood without having taken his guitar out of its case. After the final tutoring session, the young man said a polite thank you, shook Roberts’s hand, and was out the door.

  “I never saw a guitar in Phil’s hands, and he never played a note for me,” Roberts would remember over three decades later. “I waited and waited, because that’s the thing kids do when they take lessons: they play for approval and advice. But he never did.”

  Howard Roberts never did know if Spector was skittish about playing in the presence of an expert musician, or if the boy thought he could do whatever was required. Actually, it could have been either, or both, or neither. Spector was a shy boy but also one with rare talent. More crucially, however, in 1956 Spector couldn’t play his guitar for approval. Not yet. This was something that was deep in his gut, playing the guitar. It may have been the only part of his identity that made him feel good, and he wanted it to be real. So Spector wouldn’t play for Howard Roberts. He would play only for the darkness.

  At fifteen, Phil Spector stood barely over five feet tall, not counting the bird’s nest of reedy brown hair he kept piled high atop his forehead. Thin as a matchstick, and with bones as brittle, Spector was sallow and pale, hollow around the eyes and under the cheekbones. When he spoke it was in a high nasal whine and with a lisp. He was also a chronic asthmatic, and when the Santa Ana wind blew in off the Pacific Ocean it carried pollen into his wide nostrils that sent him into great coughing jags that would double him over and frighten his friends. Spector was not popular in the corridors of Fairfax High School, and most of his time was spent by himself. He was fatherless and his mother, Bertha, worked, so Spector had to make do as a latchkey kid, letting himself in after school. He appreciated this web of seclusion, since when his mother and his older sister, Shirley, were at home, they treated him like precious china. Phil’s fragility was a constant worry to them both. If they didn’t know where he was, or if he was out of their line of sight too long, they would flood phone lines to his friends’ homes, trying to track him down. Finding him, they would spew tirades at him. They were hennish, to be sure, but they adored the male of the house, and took his poor health as a sign that he was special and in need of protection from a cruel world.

  Small and stocky, standing under five feet tall in her orthopedic shoes, her salt-and-pepper hair pulled into a bun and her smile exuding warmth, Bertha Spector was the prototype of a Jewish mother. But kind and gracious as she was, she was also an angry hornet of a woman. Her energy and resolve were her son’s lifeline; whatever strength he had was transfused from her. On his own, Phil had a hard time. He hated the way he looked. He hated his long nose and his big ears, and he silently brooded about being a teenage nerd. Though his mother and sister offered him support and encouragement, that he was dominated by two strong and willful women checked his independence. His name was a symbol of his desire to stand on his own. Given the names Harvey Phillip, Spector loathed his real first name and called himself Phil. Bertha wouldn’t go along. Pointedly, acridly at times, she called him by the name she had given him. “Harvey!” her voice would crack the air, embarrassing him when he was with friends.

  Phil Spector was a nervous, hyperactive teenager, for whom the line between day and night had long since vanished. In fact, he welcomed the darkness descending over West Hollywood, because in its calm isolation he could believe that the night belonged only to him. Spector’s guitar-playing filled those hours, stretching sometimes to daybreak inside the family’s top-floor apartment in a two-story, woodframe fourplex located at 602½ Spaulding Avenue. Knowing how much his guitar meant to him, Bertha rarely put her foot down about it, and so Phil would enter a nightly ritual knowing he would not be interrupted. Sitting cross-legged on his bed, he cradled the guitar and played it to the sound of a transistor radio, tuned to a jazz or black music station. Spector didn’t often bother with the rock-and-roll stations. To him, white rock was pimple-cream ads separated by two-minute retreads of black music with half the vitality. The reward for tuning in the low-watt stations was great. On KFOX, for example, Johnny Otis—the bandleader who founded much of the black music scene in Los Angeles—had a show, acquainting a pale Jewish boy with acts like Little Willie John, Jackie Wilson, Hank Ballard, Big Mama Thornton, and Redd Lyte. Spector’s trips to the music shops led to the bargain bins in the back, to the jazz and rhythm and blues, even to the classical music albums. He craved the vicarious feeling of brute force and naked emotion in music. He played his guitar in solitude, and the passion and conviction of jazz, soul music, and the ornate majesty of Bach and Beethoven were his real teachers.

  Seen in the prism of a generation of teenagers discovering rock and roll, Spector was one of scores of kids who were picking up guitars and jiggling like Elvis. But Spector was way ahead of most of the other lemmings in understanding the pain and alienation of rock. Real rock was the state of mind and soul that bled from open wounds. Spector understood. He had his own open wounds.

  A year after taking lessons from Howard Roberts, Spector was ready to play for approval, having learned the rudiments and the essence of the guitar like few others his age. By 1957 he found that his talent had even made people like and gather around him—which had been his original intention when he first considered playing guitar. Confident and ambitious, he was now composing words and music in the new rock language. In the spring, Spector was seasoned in the art of making a record. But it wasn’t until months later, in his room on a late spring night, that he discovered musical truth—in his most painful wound.

  Spector was on the edge of sleep, his eyes shut, his guitar at his side, when a harsh memory cut through his subconscious. He saw the blue shale tombstone of his father’s grave, which was three thousand miles to the east in a Long Island cemetery. In his haze, Spector thought he was at the foot of Ben Spector’s grave, and the epitaph on the stone—“To Know Him Was to Love Him”—was staring at him, assaulting him, taunting him.

  It was a vision that the sixteen-year-old Phil Spector didn’t want to see and never would have consented to seeing had he been fully awake. To recall the father who had died—the only figure of male autho
rity he could have had but didn’t—was almost self-mutilation. Spector hardly ever spoke about his father because that might ease the pain. He was repelled by the apparition of that godforsaken grave, and it jolted him awake. But as in any other time of pain, there was a pacifier. The guitar.

  Spector reached for it, to hit the strings hard. He thought about the terrible dirge of loss and grief—“To Know Him Was to Love Him”—as he played. Hours passed, and the black night and the grief faded. What was left was poetry and the renaissance of Ben Spector in the guise of a song that Phil Spector knew was perfect.

  It was around 7 A.M The sun was shining into his room. Spector picked up the telephone and dialed the number of Marshall Lieb, his best friend and singing partner. “Marsh!” he whispered breathily into the phone. “I got a new song. You gotta hear it.”

  On the other end, Lieb yawned and rubbed his eyes as Spector sang his new lyric. Used to Spector’s apoplectic ways, Lieb humored him. “Yeah, Phillip. Sounds real good,” he mumbled, then hung up and went back to bed.

  For Phil Spector, there would be no sleep; there rarely was. There were plans to be made for this song. That afternoon he and Marshall Lieb were working on it, putting an arrangement together. At that moment, Spector was probably too busy to think that his father had not died in vain, after all.

  Benjamin Spector was swept to America in the great Russian immigration of the early 1900s. Born on January 10, 1903, he was ten years old when his parents, George and Bessie, and their six sons and one daughter stepped onto U.S. soil on Ellis Island, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. There, an immigration officer Americanized their Russian name by spelling it with a c, not a k. The family’s migration ended in the Bronx, in the Soundview section, a district typical of the low- and middle-class Jewish society that dominated the borough. Ben Spector was young enough to adopt his new homeland, and went about trying to realize the American Dream. He studied hard, became a citizen, and fought in World War I as a teenager.

  Bertha Spector’s parents traced almost the same path from Russia to the U.S. Eerily enough, her father was also named George, and his surname was Spektor, the correct Russian spelling of Ben’s family name. George Spektor and his wife, Clara, however, detoured first to France in the early 1900s, and it was there, in Paris, that Bertha Spektor was born in 1911. A few years later, George and Clara came to America, arriving at the same Ellis Island pier, with Bertha and her sister, Doraine, who had also been born in Paris. After they settled on the same Grand Concourse turf as the Spectors, they had a son, Sam, on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918.

  Meeting Bertha Spektor in the middle of this ethnic broth, Ben Spector knew she was meant to be his wife. After a brief courtship, they married in 1934, then had a daughter, Shirley. Five years later, they had a son, Harvey Phillip, on December 26, 1940, a baby with the promise of a bright future.

  The country went to war soon after, but at age thirty-eight, Ben Spector had a wife and family, which he housed in a two-family brick house at 1024 Manor Avenue in the heart of the Soundview section, and he had a secure union job as an ironworker in Brooklyn. Ruddy-faced and handsome—the jovial, fun-loving “Uncle Ben” as his swarm of nieces and nephews knew him—Ben was the picture of American stability. What’s more, his legacy, his children, were two of the most beautiful babies the Spector and Spektor clans had ever seen. Blond and almost WASP-looking, Shirley grew by the yard, sprouting up a head taller than Ben and Bertha, both of whom were built low to the ground. Ben and Bertha’s nieces thought their cousin Shirley was the most gorgeous lady they could imagine, and no one in the family was surprised when Shirley landed some teenage modeling work.

  Then there was Harvey Phillip: a round-faced, wavy-haired infant with searching eyes. Bertha, Doraine, and Sam Spektor had all been musically inclined in their youth, and it seemed that Harvey was the recipient of that bloodline. At family enclaves, Harvey would sing loudly and without a care. Except for bouts of asthma, Harvey was a happy child, and he loved his father with all his being. It was, in fact, a loving, close-knit family, envied by the relatives on both sides as ideal.

  But something went wrong for Ben Spector. He grew dispirited, estranged. The money just wasn’t enough to keep his family as comfortable as he wanted them to be. Sensing his depression, a friend and co-worker of Ben’s named Bernie Weiss became concerned about him. But Bernie knew Ben to be a hardy, proud man. Ben was optimistic, and he bragged about his children and his family, all of whom loved him dearly. At 5 foot 7 inches and 225 pounds, he was a broad chunk of granite, a man who could surely take care of himself. He would work it out, in time.

  But there wasn’t enough time for Ben Spector.

  On the morning of April 20, 1949, Ben awoke as usual at daybreak. He said good-bye to his wife and drove to the steelworks plant. When he was a few blocks away, he pulled up to the curb in front of a deserted building at 1042 Myrtle Avenue. It was a warm, sunny day in New York, but Ben Spector probably felt a chill as he got out of the car and opened the trunk. Methodically, he drew out a water hose and attached one end to the exhaust pipe, then dangled the other end through the open front window.

  Ben got back in the car, rolled up the windows tightly, and restarted the engine as he reclined against the headrest. It must have been a kind of relief when the deadly gas fumes began to drain the air inside the car.

  Half an hour later, at 8:40 A.M, passersby saw the lifeless hulk of Ben Spector slumped in the front seat, the engine still running. They called the police, and within a few minutes officers from Brooklyn’s 79th Precinct arrived, much too late. They took the body to the morgue, where Bernie Weiss, called from the factory, came to identify the body of the friend he had worried about.

  The Brooklyn coroner set the time of death at 8:05 A.M and noted the cause of death as “Carbon Monoxide Poisoning—Asphyxia; Suicidal.” When Ben Spector died, his blood contained 65 percent carbon monoxide. He had left no chance that he would not die on this day.

  On April 22, 1949, Bertha Spector buried her husband in Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, New York. A year later, according to Jewish law, a headstone was unveiled at the grave site. It was magnificent, marked with a Star of David and the heart-rending epitaph of personal loss. If Ben had terrible mental anguish and considered himself a failure, it was to be forgotten, buried with him.

  On both sides of the extended family, the trauma of Ben’s suicide was regarded as a horribly ugly stigma, a perversion and aberration of the hope and promise that the Spector and Spektor families had brought to America. Bertha certainly didn’t deserve to be held as a cause of her husband’s anguished death, and the family heads were protective of propriety and her feelings. They didn’t tell their children how their cherished Uncle Ben had died, only that he’d met with an accident. Some of them wouldn’t find out the truth until they were adults. It is possible that Bertha kept the truth even from her son.

  For now, and hopefully into eternity, Bertha wanted it to be known and accepted that anyone who truly knew her troubled husband would have loved him.

  It fell to Sam Spektor, Bertha’s younger brother, to try to alleviate her sense of loss. An aeronautical engineer, he was now living on 164th Street and Broadway in upper Manhattan, right near the George Washington Bridge, and he made it his business to drop by at 1024 Manor Avenue frequently to provide a male presence, especially for Harvey. Shirley was less of a concern: beautiful and independent as she was, by the time she was fifteen she boldly saw herself as a future movie star.

  Harvey, though, was devastated by the death of the father he revered; he needed a male to lean on, and spent much time with his uncle. The trauma of Ben’s death was so hard for him to bear that when people asked what his father’s name was, he replied “Sam”—as if hiding behind an effigy rather than having to confront the pain of his father’s name. But while Harvey could push the memory of Ben out of his conscious mind, he allowed no one to replace him.

  Neither did the pain ease for Bertha. She d
id not and would not remarry, such was her fealty to Ben’s gripping memory, and living in the Bronx made it impossible for the memory to fade. Reminders of Ben were everywhere along Manor Avenue. This was Ben’s kingdom, and that he was so unhappy here made the area a monument to despair. As if living in a dark cloud, Harvey’s asthma became worse as he grew into a teenager, and his plump cheeks had sunk into a general pallor.

  Four bleak years after Ben’s death, Bertha realized she had to start a new life for herself and her children a long way from the Bronx. Her uncle, George Spektor’s brother, was living in Los Angeles, and he had begged her to come out there; other relatives there made the same plea. The Hollywood of the early 1950s had become a bright, sunny beacon for a human wave of East Coast Jews, and finally Bertha gave in. Her relatives secured an apartment, and her brother Sam drove her, Harvey, and Shirley to the airport. After touching down in Los Angeles, they were taken to their new digs on Spaulding Avenue, in one of West Hollywood’s long rows of squat, turn-of-the-century houses, sequestered by leafy palm trees. With no office skills, Bertha took a job as a seamstress in a stifling back room sweatshop in downtown L.A. Because she couldn’t afford a car, she waited every morning and night for the long bus ride to and from her sewing machine.

  Phil Spector, as he began to insist he be called, went to school first at Laurel Elementary School, then to John Burroughs Junior High. He entered Fairfax High School in 1954. The outgoing child was an introvert now, a voracious reader of books—next to the guitar, which he had taken up while in junior high school, works about American history were his personal refuge. His room was lined with books about Abraham Lincoln, whose life fascinated him to no end.