The entertainment industry has always attracted a high proportion of eccentrics, misfits, and oddballs. This is, in itself, unsurprising: The making of movies or music requires artists, and where there are artists, quirkiness often follows.
Sometimes, the trend manifests itself in relatively benign ways, but at others, it results in genuinely disturbed people acquiring enormous wealth and influence.
In the latter category is the case of the trailblazing “Wall of Sound” record producer Phil Spector, who died on Jan. 16 at the age of 81 — nearly a dozen years into his prison term for killing actress Lana Clarkson in 2003. Even after the murder charge brought into sharp relief the defects in character and morality that had long been present for those who cared to look, Spector seemed inclined to thread the needle: He pleaded not guilty to the crime, but he was perfectly willing to admit that he was mentally unstable, a status that, to him, was merely a side effect of his brilliance.
During a 2006 deposition, Spector was asked whether he agreed that he wasn’t “there all the time” — in other words, that he wasn’t completely sane. “Yeah, because I’ve been called a genius, and I think a genius is not there all the time and has borderline insanity,” Spector said, inadvertently summarizing his industry’s long-held tolerance for bad behavior and red flags as long as the people in question had great gifts or generated lots of money.
Born in the Bronx, Spector from an early age showed a willingness to commingle tragedy and entertainment. In 1958, as a member of the pop group the Teddy Bears, Spector concocted the hit song “To Know Him Is to Love Him” by adjusting similar phrasing used on the tombstone for his father, who had committed suicide. “At first glance, the lyric of the new song appeared to be just another lament of unrequited teenage love and devotion, but for Spector its inspiration cut far deeper than that, to the abiding source of all his pain and unhappiness,” wrote journalist Mick Brown in the book Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector.
The Teddy Bears were not long for this world: Following the group’s disbanding in 1960, Spector reinvented himself as a hit-maker savant. Finding a partner in record executive Lester Sill, Spector co-founded Philles Records, which pumped out hits that reflected the peppiness of the era’s pop while augmenting it with deeper, richer tones. “Then He Kissed Me” by the Crystals and “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes are in some ways very simple songs, but in their musical bric-a-brac, they are the opposite of minimalistic: In Spector’s “Wall of Sound” method of making records, pop tunes were goosed by complex orchestration and layering.
Philles Records’s 1963 album A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector, featuring “Frosty the Snowman” by the Ronettes, “A Marshmallow World” by Darlene Love, and the like, is an almost preposterously good-natured masterpiece concocted by the most troubled of men. By then, that much was obvious: His second wife, former Ronettes lead singer Ronnie Spector, testified in a 1998 royalty dispute that she had only agreed to an unfair contract because of threats from her increasingly possessive, unhinged ex-husband: “He told me, ‘I’ll kill you’ and ‘I’ll have a hit man kill you,’” she said, according to a story in the New York Daily News. He was said to display eagerly the guns he owned.
As Spector grew more vocal in his madness, the “Wall of Sound” grew faint: Spector had some productive collaborations, including with George Harrison in 1970 on All Things Must Pass, but subsequent efforts were few and far between. That didn’t deter Hollywood from continuing to mythologize a man who had become elusive and weird: For years, Cameron Crowe and Tom Cruise had wanted to make a movie about the producer’s life.
Then, the roof fell in. On Feb. 3, 2003, Spector invited Clarkson, a 40-year-old actress working part-time at the House of Blues, to his mansion, where she was shot dead. Spector advised that it was a suicide. He said Clarkson had “kissed the gun,” though he made incriminating statements, too. Two murder trials, both attended by Spector while donning outfits and wigs that suggested he was a lost Beatle, followed. The first resulted in a mistrial, and the second, in 2009, resulted in a second-degree murder conviction.
Spector’s tale is not of genius wasted but of genius overrated and, for too long, forgiven. Had Spector not thought himself so, and had others not thought him so, perhaps he would not have been in a position to take a life.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
