Phil Spector - the Show Business Murderer

by Read Listen Learn

In the early 1960s, there was an exciting new sound in pop music with loud, fast, high-energy records. The new style was called ‘wall of sound’ and it came from just one producer: Phil Spector, who used to be a musician and was still only twenty years old. He stopped playing music because of stage fright. But he started producing records instead. The feeling he gave to a record was so fresh and dynamic that, soon, many of the famous pop groups of those years, like the Beatles or the Walker Brothers, were coming to him, asking him to produce their records.

Soon, he was rich and famous. He married the lead singer of the ‘Ronettes’, a girl group he was managing, bought a huge castle in Los Angeles and went to live there with his beautiful young wife.

He was born in New York, on 26th December, 1939, to a middle-class Jewish family. His grandfather came from Russia. When he was ten, his father killed himself and, perhaps to forget and make a new start, Spector’s mother moved the family out to California when Phil was thirteen. The death of his father and the long-distance move in the middle of his school years left Phil Spector with psychological problems.

As he was finishing high school, Spector joined a pop group called the ‘Teddy Bears’. One or two of their songs did well but there were no number one hits. Also, Spector found that, although he was a good musician, he could not play in public. In a studio, working with machines and just a few people, his musical talent was very great and, before his teenage years were over, he learned a lot about making records from older producers.

Right through the 1960s, the hits and the money kept coming. Spector became rich and famous. He seemed to be the spirit of California: he was very young, he kept his hair long, he wore unusual clothes and very high shoes or boots. He was very strange, definitely eccentric.

He was also a very short, small man who was always aggressive and often carried a gun. If he had an argument with someone, he pulled his gun out very quickly. Soon, the gun came out if people didn’t do what he said. Spector was a very controlling person. He controlled every detail of a new record, from the instruments to the adverts to the volume, but he also needed to control every detail of his life and the people who came into it.

As the 1960s turned into the 70s, Spector got less work. Times changed as they always do and people were looking for new sounds, new faces. He was still very rich and, when the music world began to forget about him, he disappeared into his castle and stayed away from the music press. He began to bully his wife and kept her like a prisoner in his castle. In 1974, she left him.

For nearly thirty years, Spector continued as a Los Angeles legend. Almost all the time, he stayed locked inside his famous castle, shouting at his secretary and planning his comeback. At the weekend, he liked going out to expensive restaurants and bars in Hollywood. The ones where famous people went, people like him. He liked sitting at his favourite table and waiting to hear someone say: “Look! That’s Phil Spector.” It didn’t happen very often anymore. In fact, the pink flowery shirts he wore and his very small size meant that people often thought he was an old woman. He didn’t like that.

In 2003, he was going into one of his favourite Hollywood bars when a new girl there, an out-of-work actress called Lana Clarkson, did not recognise him and called him ‘madam’. Of course, there was a fight and Clarkson said that she was very sorry. Later on, Spector invited Clarkson to his castle for ‘one quick drink’ to make peace and forget the argument earlier in the evening. Clarkson accepted. Spector, already drunk, thought she was interested in him. She was, but only as a contact. Her career in movies and TV was coming to an end. She was forty already and working in a restaurant to pay the rent. Like thousands of others in Hollywood, she hoped that knowing a much more famous person, like Phil Spector, could bring her more acting work.

Around three o’clock that morning, the L.A. police got a phone call from Spector’s driver, Adriano da Souza, to say that he thought his boss had killed someone. Although the driver didn’t see Lana Clarkson die – she was just inside the house, he was just outside, in the car – he told police that there was a dead woman with a bullet in the face and that his boss, Spector, came out of the house with a gun in his hand and said: “I think I just killed somebody!”.

Later, Spector changed his story and said that Lana shot herself. However, everything showed that Spector was the one who fired the gun. It was his gun and he had eight or nine others in his house. Still, he kept saying that Lana shot herself.

The first trial was cancelled because two of the jurors would not say ‘guilty’. They said that, without video of the shooting, they could not be sure. Many people were surprised by this. At the next trial, with exactly the same evidence, all twelve jurors found Spector guilty of an unplanned murder. He was sent to prison for at least nineteen years. Already more than seventy years old, he will almost certainly die there.

One thing Spector often said was that he had no motive for killing Lana. But, in his own strange mind, he did. Spector had two very big needs. He needed to control everything and he hated being left by someone before he was ready. Maybe because Spector’s father killed himself, he felt like he was left alone.

This control and need for people to stay with him until he said they could go got so bad that he would pull a gun on his guests if they said they wanted to go. He would force them, with a pointed gun, to stay. Then, a little bit later, he would tell them that they could go now because that was what he, Phil Spector, wanted.

Lana Clarkson went to Phil Spector’s home for a drink, to get to know him and to help her to get acting work. After one quick, polite drink, she said she wanted to go. Spector, drunk, alone and hoping for sex, did what he always did: he got one of his guns out of a desk and began to frighten and control Lana with it, then there was a loud ‘bang’...