The Boy Genius

Fif­teen years ago Cindy and I were hav­ing break­fast at The Colo­nial Kitchen in San Mari­no when a short bone-thin old­er man with curly brown hair that fell to his shoul­ders and a pasty face stretched tight by too much plas­tic surgery led a stun­ning­ly beau­ti­ful young Asian woman wear­ing skin-tight black leather pants and high-heeled boots across the din­ing room to a booth direct­ly across from us. He sat down and scoot­ed over against the wall. She sat beside him, put her arm around him, nib­bled his ear, and rubbed his sunken chest while he ignored her and looked over the menu.

“Phil Spec­tor just walked in,” I said to Cindy.

Cindy’s pret­ty hazel eyes widened. She turned to look and we both stared at him. 

When you live in LA, you see a lot of celebri­ties. We stood on the side­walk with Jack Palance one night in Han­cock Park and watched a duplex burn to the ground. Lee Mar­vin shopped beside us in a depart­ment store on Wilshire Boule­vard. Elton John sat three tables away at L’Orangerie. The nov­el­ty wears off after a while, and you learn to respect their pri­va­cy. You take a quick look and move on. You nev­er stare. 

That sight­ing of Phil Spec­tor was dif­fer­ent, though. He was a glob­al­ly famous mul­ti-mil­lion­aire music pro­duc­er fac­ing a mur­der tri­al. The indict­ment alleged he shot a young woman late at night at his home, The Pyre­nees Cas­tle, a sprawl­ing man­sion locat­ed on a hill just a stone’s throw from The Colo­nial Kitchen, where we sat that morning.

The news reports said his behav­ior became unpre­dictable and vio­lent decades ear­li­er when his career began to fal­ter. His first song was a mega-hit way back in 1958 when he was only 19. He wrote, arranged, played gui­tar, sang, and pro­duced To Know Him is to Love Him with the group, The Ted­dy Bears. It soared to num­ber one on the charts and remained a top hit for six months, sell­ing over two and a half mil­lion copies. The Ted­dy Bears broke up. Spec­tor moved behind the scenes as a pro­duc­er and released a daz­zling string of hits in the ear­ly 1960’s. Dream Lover, Da Doo Ron Ron, Then He Kissed Me, Be My Baby, I Love the Way You Love Me. By the time he was 26, he had pro­duced more than two dozen songs that made the Bill­board Top 40, most of them char­ac­ter­ized by his sig­na­ture “wall of sound,” legions of musi­cal instru­ments and back­up singers that came togeth­er in a dynam­ic son­ic mass, prob­a­bly best exem­pli­fied by The Right­eous Broth­ers’ You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feel­in’.

But in the late 1960’s his red-hot career sud­den­ly cooled off, and his per­son­al life fell apart. His first mar­riage blew up. His sec­ond wife, Veron­i­ca Ben­nett, lead singer of The Ronettes, said he impris­oned her in The Pyre­nees Cas­tle and abused her. After she divorced him in 1974, he hit the bot­tle hard and devel­oped a fond­ness for firearms. He spec­tac­u­lar­ly crashed his car, fly­ing through the wind­shield and almost dying from the head injuries. Even amidst the tur­moil, he man­aged to pro­duce sev­er­al albums in the 1970’s with John Lennon and George Har­ri­son, but his pro­fes­sion­al behav­ior became errat­ic and volatile. He famous­ly shot up the stu­dio ceil­ing while work­ing on a Lennon album and put a loaded revolver to singer Leonard Cohen’s head dur­ing a taping. 

In the 1980’s and 90’s, he pro­duced almost no music as his life tum­bled steadi­ly down­hill. On the night of Feb­ru­ary 2, 2003, about a month before Cindy and I saw him at The Colo­nial Kitchen, he hit rock bot­tom. He drank his way through Bev­er­ly Hills and Hol­ly­wood, fin­ish­ing up at the House of Blues on Sun­set Strip where he talked Lana Clark­son, a B‑movie actress less than half his age, into going back to the Cas­tle with him. Spector’s chauf­feur, Adri­ano de Souza, drove them there and watched them go inside the house. Sit­ting in the dri­ve­way, he heard a gun­shot, and Spec­tor came out the front door bran­dish­ing a revolver. “I think I killed some­body,” he said. De Souza found Clarkson’s corpse slumped in a chair, a gun­shot wound to the mouth, blood splat­tered on the chair and wall, bits of her teeth on the floor. When the police came, they had to taser Spec­tor to dis­arm him.

The LA Dis­trict Attor­ney charged him with sec­ond-degree mur­der, and he was out of jail on a one mil­lion dol­lar bail bond when Cindy and I saw him that morn­ing in The Colo­nial Kitchen.

So we couldn’t resist star­ing at Phil Spec­tor, but we gawked at him for too long. He looked up and caught us. A hard look came across his face. We turned away and resumed eat­ing break­fast, but he didn’t let it go. Every time I glanced at him, he was still glar­ing at us. This went on for five or ten min­utes. Spec­tor was a lit­tle guy, about five feet five, a hun­dred forty pounds, but he packed more malev­o­lence into his dark scowl than most any­one I’d encoun­tered. I don’t want to make too much of this. He didn’t move toward us or threat­en us in any way, but his men­ac­ing glow­er was unset­tling. We cut our break­fast short and he stared us down all the way out the door.

Years lat­er, his first tri­al end­ed in a hung jury, but the jury in the sec­ond tri­al found him guilty and the judge gave him 19 to life. I hadn’t thought much about him after that until two weeks ago when I learned he died on Jan­u­ary 14 of com­pli­ca­tions from Covid19 while serv­ing out his prison sentence.

When Cindy and I were watch­ing a tele­vi­sion show recap­ping his trou­bled life, I asked her if she remem­bered that day we saw him. “I’ll nev­er for­get it,” she said. She recalled his angry stare as vivid­ly as I did. “The face of evil,” she said.

Spec­tor lament­ed that he strug­gled with the “dev­ils inside me.” Men­tal ill­ness ran in his fam­i­ly. His father com­mit­ted sui­cide when Spec­tor was nine. Telling­ly, the inscrip­tion on his father’s grave­stone reads, “To know him was to love him.” Spec­tor, his moth­er, and sis­ter fought con­stant­ly, blam­ing one anoth­er for the sui­cide. His sis­ter was even­tu­al­ly com­mit­ted to a men­tal insti­tu­tion. In an inter­view a few months before he shot Lana Clark­son, Spec­tor said he was bi-polar and tak­ing med­ica­tion for schiz­o­phre­nia. “I’ve been a very tor­tured soul,” he said. “I have not been at peace. I have not been happy.”

In prepar­ing this post, I pulled up his top hits on the inter­net and lis­tened to them all in one sit­ting. It was an emo­tion­al expe­ri­ence. They take you back to your first slow dance, those sock-hops in the gym, the first big crush, the breakup that felt like the end of the world. Each song is a mag­i­cal mas­ter­piece, the pop music touch­stones of my generation’s ado­les­cence, “lit­tle sym­phonies for the kids,” Spec­tor called them, dec­la­ra­tions of teen love and heartache set to orches­tral explo­sions, drums pound­ing like heart­beats, strings swelling and reced­ing, thun­der­ous hand­claps, clat­ter­ing cas­tanets, blar­ing horns, and boom­ing cho­rus­es. They’re bril­liant and wonderful.

He want­ed this music to be his lega­cy. “I don’t want to be Elvis or Lenny Bruce,” he once said. “Do you think peo­ple will remem­ber their genius or the way they died on the bath­room floor?”

Spec­tor was a boy genius who rose above the mis­ery of his child­hood and shot the moon, but when he lost the mag­ic and couldn’t get it back, dev­ils breached his wall of sound and reclaimed their place inside him. His music will live on, as he hoped, but sad­ly for Spec­tor, most peo­ple will remem­ber the man he became. 

The tor­tured soul. 

The mur­der­er.

The face of evil.