He's a Rebel (38 page)

Phil knew he was living on the edge of the blade. As he'd staked so much on this one record, he'd left no room to escape from failure. He was prepared to live with that, because he was too tired and too hostile to compromise any more. Still, the vicious personal backlash kicked him in the groin. That he should stand
in the way
of his record was not an irony to him; it was an injustice he could not live with. Angry at first, his insecurities made him think that maybe it
was
a bad and useless record. Paralyzed by the notion, he didn't just walk away from the business. He ran and hid. “He just couldn't
bear the shame,” Davis said. “He was absolutely, thoroughly crushed by the rejection.”

If there was salvation, it came from his friends in England. Tony Hall knew “River Deep” would be radical for the BBC and took the record to the ring of “pirate” radio stations that broadcast illegally from boats offshore in the channel. Begun as a protest against the conservative BBC playlists, these stations were run by young people with a sense of daring, and many of them were Spector buffs. “They were fantastic,” Hall said. “I got them to love the record, and without any help from the BBC I think we took four weeks to get that to No. 1.” Actually, “River Deep” went to No. 3 in Britain in mid-July. Sitting on his other Tina records up to then, Phil readied her cover of the old Motown song “A Love Like Yours (Don't Come Knockin' Every Day)” for British release. He did not think about releasing it in the U.S. That “River Deep” was a smash abroad only tied his stomach in knots. Speaking with Tony Hall about the fiasco at home, he was inconsolable. “It fucked his head completely,” Hall said. “I could hear it in his voice over the phone. He was angry and hurt. He knew it was a fantastic bloody record. He thought, and rightly so, that it was the best record he ever made.”

Cushioning himself, Phil did not wait for the “River Deep” verdict. Having caught the same bug that bit Don Kirshner, he was already looking to movies as a logical and estimable career turn. Phil had become friendly with actor Dennis Hopper, a coarse, hard-drinking man who offended almost every producer and director in Hollywood—and, as such, was yet another hip pariah with whom Phil could walk in step. When Hopper could not find movie work, Phil hired him as a photographer, and a Hopper collage was the front cover of the 1967
River Deep—Mountain High
album that was released in England. But their big plan was to make an independent movie starring Dennis and his friend Peter Fonda—directed by Dennis, produced and financed by Phil—that they could sell to a studio. Poring over treatments, Hopper liked one by writer Steven Stern. Titled
The Last Movie,
it was an abstract parable as seen through the eyes of an American film crew shooting a Western movie in a Mexican village. On May 18, 1966, Phil made an oral agreement with Stern to option the treatment for $71,000 and to have Stern write the screenplay. The arrangement was for Stern to receive
$10,000 on completion of a script, $36,000 by December 31, and $25,000 or
percent from the proceeds of the movie. Phil and Dennis began to scout Mexican locations and eventually settled on the rock-strewn landscape of Mazatlán. Phil guaranteed monies to Cherabusco Studios to use their facilities. Sets were built, crews assembled, and cinematographer Haskell Wexler hired as chief cameraman.

While they occupied themselves with this project, and “River Deep” became Spector's sacrificial lamb, Philles Records was dormant. “He told me after ‘River Deep' that he was gonna close up the whole place,” Danny Davis recalled. “He said: ‘We're gonna go out of the business, we're gonna do other things.' It was comparable to what Kirshner told me on the ride to Penn Station; he was gonna go into the movie business. So I went through another crisis in that regard, waiting for the end to come.”

But Phil did not close up. Instead, he sat around the office most days with Hopper and Fonda. The music hustings of Philles Records degenerated into a farcical amateur hour. “We had some beauts comin' in to see him, boy.” Davis shuddered. “Oh, God, we had some guys who would walk in off the street and want to do a record. Phil would go to record studios or the clubs around town and people would give him records, and then they would follow up and he had no intention of doin' anything with anybody. But he would give 'em the sign that everything was good and the next day you would get these guys calling and it would fall to me to bob and weave and tell 'em no, because I'm good at that.

“Sometimes it looked like he was ready to go. He'd say, ‘I want you to go in tomorrow and fire so-and-so,' whether it was the comptroller or whoever he had on the payroll at the time. But then he'd say, ‘Oh, we still got product out, we're still waitin'. We'll keep him.' He was so fuckin' indecisive.”

If Phil was getting off on his self-imposed asylum of idleness and loathing, he was given a fresh motive to wallow on August 2. That was the day that Lenny Bruce died.

The terrible irony was that things seemed to be looking up for Lenny. In the past months he had won all of his remaining obscenity cases and he waltzed through his lone outstanding narcotics charge with a small fine and probation. With the winds of change catching
up to the laws of free expression, he could have gone back to work. And yet, stripped of the crutch of persecution, Lenny saw no reason to live. Now $400,000 in debt, he gained an alarming amount of weight and shot more heroin. As another token of solidarity with Lenny, Phil released an album of his stand-up material,
Lenny Bruce Is Out Again
. But Lenny went unrevived.

In the early evening of that Tuesday in August, Phil heard the morbid news on the radio: Lenny Bruce was found in his bathroom, a needle in his arm, dead of an apparent overdose. Hauling Danny Davis with him, Phil slid behind the wheel of his white Cadillac and, with Danny too scared to move or say a word, the car tore rubber all the way down the slinky roads to Lenny's house. After arriving in a great screech of brakes, Phil blew past the policemen at the door and scrambled upstairs to the bathroom death theater. In a showy outburst of grief, he threw himself to the floor next to where Lenny's body lay facedown next to the toilet, his jeans down at his ankles, a bathrobe sash tied around the arm from which the needle jutted. Looking up at the policemen all around, Phil screamed, “You killed him! All of you killed him!”

Leaving moments later with Danny, the Cadillac sped back down the same winding turns, which now were only vague outlines in the dark. Danny concluded that this was the end, that if Harold Kaplan was right about Phil, this was the time he had chosen to kill himself. But then Phil eased up and hit Sunset. And although Phil did a lot of mournful wailing about Lenny that night, this crisis had been a short one. Although he was madder at the world for it, there would be no suicide watch this time.

The very next morning, Danny was in the office when a strange man came by. “A nice-looking man in a gray suit,” Davis recalled all too well. He gave Danny a card that identified him as a lieutenant in the LAPD, homicide. Telling Danny he had something to show him, he pulled out a proof sheet of pictures—the police photos of a dead Lenny Bruce, needle in his arm and sprawled on the floor. Taken aback by the gruesome pictures, Danny could only ask, “What'll I do with 'em?” With straight-faced sarcasm, the cop replied, “I thought you could use 'em for an album cover.”

“I'll never forget it as long as I live,” Davis said. “I looked at him and I thought the man was absolutely demented. I thought he had lost his mind.”

When the lieutenant began talking price, a horrified Danny called Phil at home and informed him of the grotesque offer.

“How much does he want?” Phil wanted to know.

“Five thousand dollars. I told him we would have no interest in them.”

Without pause, the phone was nearly blasted out of Danny's hand by Phil's bellowing voice.
“Buy 'em!”
he ordered.

Danny, though, would not draw out the money. “I sent the guy's card up to the house and Phil took care of it,” he said. “I didn't want a thing to do with it. I thought it was one of the sickest things I'd ever heard of.”

Danny preferred to believe that Phil wanted to hoard those ghastly negatives to keep them out of the hands of others who might exploit them. A decade later, when the movie
Lenny
was made, the death scene was re-created with Dustin Hoffman, vérité-style, in the manner of the photos. “The picture that came up on screen just before the end title was the superimposition of the real picture of Lenny Bruce,” Davis said. “Phil sold that picture to the movie company and made maybe three times what he had purchased 'em for.”

Phil paid for Lenny's funeral and gave the eulogy. In true Spectorian style, it was an ostentatious affair and almost all of Hollywood was invited—except many famous comedians who paid lip service to Lenny after his death. Fresh in Phil's mind was the night he took Lenny to The Trip and Bill Cosby and the Smothers Brothers avoided their table. “The Mort Sahls, Bill Cosbys, Buddy Hacketts—those are the people that really let Lenny down,” Spector told
Rolling Stone
. “They're the ones who all said, when Lenny died, that they wanted to bury him—only they wanted to bury him when he was living, because none of them were there.”

Danny Davis was not at the funeral either, by his own choice, turned off by what he perceived to be rites of feigned sorrow. Phil upbraided him for it. “He left me a note that ripped me a new asshole. He said that Lenny was our friend, we should pay him respect . . . but the respect he wanted to pay to Lenny was circus in nature.”

By the end of 1966, Phil had released only two more records. One was the old Righteous Brothers' album cut, “White Cliffs of Dover.” The other was the Ronettes' “I Can Hear Music,” which came out
of the Spector-Barry-Greenwich writing sessions for Tina Turner and was actually produced by Jeff Barry. Except for the early Lester Sill records, it was the only single ever issued on the Philles label not produced by Phil, and it taunted the Spector legend by tickling the chart at No. 100 in late October. Phil did cut one new record, Tina's “I'll Never Need You More Than This,” also from the Spector-Barry-Greenwich pool. A slushy facsimile of “River Deep,” it went unreleased.

“He started to show me signs of questioning his talent, and whether he really knew or cared what was happening in music,” Davis recalled. “The things he said, the way he said it. About his records. He'd say: ‘Jeez, Danny, I just don't know.' ”

“He came down from that lofty perch where he truly thought he could make a hit record with anybody. All of a sudden he was down to reality,” Vinnie Poncia reflected. “It started with Tina. That was the groundwork. Tina was the straw that broke the back.”

The few hours Phil was in the studio were unpleasant. His head was not into music and his mood was truculent. “One time we got into a screaming thing,” Larry Levine said, “because somebody had a pizza sent over and I said, ‘You gotta give the kid a tip.' He said he didn't and out of that grew this thing where I was never gonna work with Phil again. So Phil wanted to take his tapes and I wouldn't give him his tapes until he paid his bill. So he's siccing the bodyguards on me, telling' 'em to beat me up. They didn't know what to do, they knew we'd been working with each other so long. I said, ‘Have 'em do something and I'll sue you for everything.' It just got real ugly.”

As always, things were smoothed out between them, but for Larry it was a sad time. He knew that the age of Phil Spector was over.

Phil was a very normal person at the beginning of his career
 . . . 
but as time went on, they started writing about him being a genius and then he said, yeah, I'm a genius. And then they would say he was a mad genius, so he became the mad genius. I mean it was anything they wrote about him: he's a recluse, so he became a recluse. I think if Phil hadn't read anything about himself he would still be the same. But that sort of destroyed him because he became a replica of everything he read about himself. . . . I wouldn't say he's mad. I think a lot of time he's pretending to be, because I've seen him straight and I've seen him act that weird way of his. So a lot of it is intentional, to let people wonder: what is this guy all about? [Because] I think he's always wanted attention
.