Legendary record producer and notorious self-made freak Phil Spector was convicted yesterday of second-degree murder in the shooting death of actress Lana Clarkson in 2003. The jury had the option of convicting Spector of a lesser charge but went with the maximum option, which carries with it a mandatory life sentence. The 69-year-old Spector, whose lawyers insist they will appeal the verdict, will remain free on $1 million bail until he is due to be sentenced on May 29. As Los Angeles Times reporter Harriet Ryan noted, his conviction, which "came six years and two trials after police found Lana Clarkson, a statuesque blond actress, shot to death in a chair in Spector's 30-room Alhambra mansion", makes him "the first celebrity found guilty of murder on Hollywood's home turf in at least 40 years." "Celebrity" almost seems a soft word for Spector, whose recording triumphs with his fabled "Wall of Sound" earned him a place in pop culture history that dwarfs the likes of O. J. Simpson and Robert Blake. Unlike them. however, Spector was never accused of having a lovable side. In his biography of Spector, He's a Rebel, Mark Ribowsky quoted Nedra Talley, a member of the Ronettes and a cousin of the group's focal point, Ronnie Bennett, who became Ronnie Spector when Phil married her in 1968: "[Ronnie] would say, 'Oh, I'm not really getting involved, he's just cute'--but let's be real. Phil is not cute."
In the early 1960s, Spector turned out what Ribowsky called "a lava flow of vinyl", including enduring hits by the Ronettes, the Crystals, Darlene Love, and the Righteous Brothers. (When some complained that the Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" was, at three minutes, fifty seconds, too long for radio airplay, Spector left the song alone and simply sent it out to disc jockeys with a label that read "3:05.") He also crafted the various-artists holiday album A Christmas Gift for You, a commercial disappointment when it was dropped on the public in the wake of President Kennedy's assassination but since then regarded as a seasonal classic. Later, Spector gave Tina Turner the name-above-the-title treatment with the 1966 "River Deep--Mountain High", vacuumed up the shards of the Beatles' last sessions for release as Let It Be, and produced successful solo projects for both John Lennon (Plastic Ono Band, Imagine) and George Harrison (All Things Must Pass). He was also immortalized in print by such writers as Nik Cohn and Tom Wolfe, and was said to have served as the basis for the character of the sword-wielding hermaphrodite "Z-Man" in Russ Meyer's 1970 Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Roger Ebert, who wrote the screenplay for Beyond the Valley, once chortled in print that despite the rumors, neither he nor Russ Meyer had ever met Spector, but then Robert Graves never met Caligula, either.
Spector appeared as himself in an episode of I Dream of Jeannie in 1967. (His acting ability can be measured by the fact that, even though he was supposed to be himself, he was listed in the credits under a pseudonym.) In 1969, he appeared in the first reel of Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider in the wordless role of the connection in the white Rolls-Royce who finances the heroes' road trip by buying their cocaine. According to Danny Davis, a record promoter who had worked with Spector, "The real point" of this piece of stunt casting "was that Dennis Hopper could put Phil Spector in a movie and not let him talk. That was Dennis shutting up Phil Spector, which of course was something nobody could ever do." Spector's on-screen appearances confirmed that reclusive was a good look for him, and he began to make fewer and fewer trips outside his mansion. As his work became stiffer and he got into the habit of taking high profile jobs that were a bad fit for him--with Lennon on his later solo records, with Dion on the comeback trail, with Leonard Cohen on the 1977 Death of a Ladies' Man, and especially with the Ramones on their 1980 End of the Century--there began to be less and less call for him to leave the house.
At the same time, his legend as a scary nut job was only growing. Firearms figured in his collaboration with the Ramones, who claimed that he'd held them hostage in his posh digs, and hastened the end of his professional association with Lennon, who was taken aback when Spector tried to assert his authority at a recording session by firing a shot into the ceiling of the tight studio. "Phil," Lennon is supposed to have told Tommy Two-Gun, "if you're gonna kill me, kill me. But don't fuck with me ears." At the time, Spector's marriage to Ronnie Spector, which had degenerated into a whirlwind of head games and physical abuse, was ending, and it wound up taking Spector's professional and personal relationship with Lennon with it: during divorce proceedings, Spector persuaded Lennon to come to court with him as a character witness, only to have Lennon stagger away from him in dismay when Spector began screaming obscenities at Ronnie in front of the judge.
Spector was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, the same year the Ribowsky book and Spector's own as-told-to memoir, Be My Baby, How I Survived Mascara, Miniskirts, and Madness ("co-written" with Vince Maldron), hit the shelves. His old hits would be repackaged for the digital age, and every so often Spector would make a half-hearted gesture in the direction of a comeback, but he definitely made his biggest headlines in twenty-five years with the death of Clarkson, the beautiful, much-liked actress who made her screen debut in 1982 as Vincent Schiavelli's wife in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and who became best known as an Amazonian B-picture heroine in such films as Deathstalker and Barbarian Queen. In 2003, she was still trying to jump-start her film career while holding down a regular job as a hostess at the House of Blues, which is where she met Spector; he persuaded her to come back with him to his house for a drink, and soon after the two of them vanished inside, Spector reappeared to inform his driver, "I think I shot somebody."
Spector's subsequent attempts to spin the case to his advantage included a 2003 Esquire interview with Scott Raab in which, in contradiction of all other available evidence, he claimed to not have been drunk on the nigh in question, insisted that Clarkson was drunk and out of control when he gallantly agreed to her request for a midnight tour of his digs, and then tried to sell the story that her death had been a "suicide"--that, as Spector put it, in what sounded like a hard-boiled rewrite of "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)", the title of a Goffin-King song that he recorded with the Crystals in 1962, "She kissed the gun." The idea that Clarkson, who had sought treatment for depression in years past, was suddenly overcome with suicidal despair while in Spector's presence and wrestled his gun away from him so that she could ruin his clean and sober night out by killing herself in his home turned out to be a centerpiece of his legal defense; it was countered by prosecution testimony from a seemingly endless supply of women who had been invited by Spector to take a look deep inside the barrel of his peacemaker while the trigger-happy music legend was three sheets to the wind. The admissibility of that testimony will reportedly factor into the defense's plans to appeal. In the meantime, Spector's lawyers insist that he was fully expecting to be convicted this time out. "Mr. Spector is a realistic man," said his lawyer Doron Weinberg, which is the second judgement delivered yesterday and connected to this trial that few people could have seen coming