Funny, entertaining and also chilling: my encounter with Phil Spector

I had two images of Phil Spector. First, the fabled musical revolutionary whose 'Wall of Sound' production style changed rock 'n' roll into art, with an unstoppable string of hits from 1958 through 1964 - Da-Doo-Ron-Ron, Be My Baby, You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'. Put out of business briefly by the Beatles invasion, he came roaring back in 1969, producing the Fab Four's goodbye album Let It Be and later John Lennon's solo work. In short, he was the world's greatest record producer.
 
Second, the legendary monster, who cheated his artists out of their royalties, a wig fetishist in five-inch heels, and a gun nut who once fired a handgun just past John Lennon's head; a paranoid, reclusive millionaire who lived, surrounded by bodyguards, in a 30-room castle outside Los Angeles. Now he was on trial for the murder of a washed-up Hollywood starlet, Lana Clarkson, found slumped in a chair in the hallway of his home, dead from a gunshot inside her mouth. It was pure Hollywood Babylon.
 
In 50 years he had never let a filmmaker into his life. But in March 2007, with his musical legacy likely to be eclipsed by what was to be his first murder trial, he was willing to let me and producer Anthony Wall in to make a BBC Arena documentary.
 
The first time I went up to the Castle, with its series of gates opening for my car and shutting behind it, I was half expecting a scary experience, given Spector's reputation. I drew some comfort from the probability that his 30 or so guns had all been confiscated by the police. 

But Spector couldn't have been more welcoming, and courteous. It rapidly became clear that he was a hilarious storyteller with a mischievous wit. I noticed how badly his hands were shaking, as if he had Parkinson's, and he told me he was being treated for something with a medication which, as it turns out, is something I also take. If I take more than a minimum dose, it gives me slight tremors, so Spector's dose must be bigger than mine, I mused.
 
He answered with a twinkle in his eye that, with his hands shaking like that, maybe the jurors wouldn't be able to believe he could hold a gun steadily enough to shoot someone. Talk about gallows humour! I think this often gets him into trouble.

Spector couldn’t have been more welcoming... he was a hilarious storyteller with a mischievous witReturning to the subject of music, I suggested that he was seen as part of the big three who changed rock 'n' roll, along with The Beatles and Bob Dylan.

He looked at me indulgently and said: "Robert Zimmerman?  You'd think that after 40 years he'd have learnt to play the harmonica by now." As it turned out, he always referred to Dylan as Zimmerman, his original name. Except, strangely, when the camera was running.

Still, the atmosphere could change at the drop of a hat. In our hours of conversation, there were two such moments. The first after I'd left him a copy of a previous documentary I had made. It was about the writer James Ellroy and his search for the murderer of his mother. The next day when I went back to the Castle he was cold with rage and wouldn't look at me.

"If I'd known you were friends with those fucking homicide detectives, I would never have let you into my home. Those bastards Ellroy hangs out with are the same cops who're trying to get me put away."
 
It turned out that a couple of the homicide squad cops in the Ellroy film were also involved in the Spector investigation. What the hell was I thinking, giving Phil the film to watch? I scrambled to turn things around.

I pointed out that in the long set-piece of their 'feast of death' dinner with Ellroy, I focused on them chewing on bloody steak and guzzling red wine while they talked trash about murdered women. Actually, I'd also rather enjoyed their company and the excitement of getting their unvarnished takes on things. But Phil accepted my explanation, and we moved on.

The atmosphere could change at the drop of a hat. In our hours of conversation, there were two such moments...  

The second chilling moment, in terms of our relationship, came a few days later, once we were in the swing of things. Phil had told me a story about how he came close to stopping the young Martin Scorsese from releasing his first movie, Mean Streets - also Robert de Niro's and Harvey Keitel's first film.

Apparently Scorsese had used Spector's seminal song Be My Baby without paying for it or even asking permission. As I was discussing things to shoot with Phil, I suddenly thought of a great way to open the film, based on this story.
 
I told him that I'd like to recreate the opening sequence of Mean Streets in which the restless, anguished young hood played by Harvey Keitel wakes up with a jolt, staggers over to the mirror and then falls back onto his bed, as the opening drumbeats of Be My Baby punch in and Keitel's head hits the pillow. I proposed shooting it shot by shot the same, but with Spector playing the part in Keitel's place. All for the purpose of when Spector gets to the mirror, he'd turn and look into the camera, and say: "Those fuckers stole my song!", and then Be My Baby would kick in.
 
He loved the idea. Laughed out loud. Said he'd do it. The next time I was at the Castle, he said he'd told his dentist about it and his dentist loved the idea too. 
 
That emboldened me. I laid out my next big laugh idea. "How about we lock the camera in position, and you keep crossing frame, from left to right, then right to left, each time wearing a different wig, and stopping to look straight into the camera. Then I can cut the sequence into a sort of time-lapse parade of hairstyles. Take the fight right back to the people who make fun of your wigs!"
 
The air between us went frigid and suddenly full of menace. Even his bodyguards, sitting by the drawing room doors, were silent as Phil went cold, and said, dangerously: "What wigs? Who's been talking about wigs to you?"

“Who told you I had wigs? I don’t have any wigs. It's my own hair.” And then he fixed me with a death stare. 
I couldn't believe the change. "Phil, it's all over the internet, all your different hair styles. Especially that giant Afro ­ well, Jew-fro, I guess - that you appeared in court with once. Your wigs are part of your legend."
 
"Who told you I had wigs? I don't have any wigs. It's my own hair." And then he fixed me with a death stare. It was a while before the conversation picked up again. And it wasn't long before he wandered back upstairs and our meeting was over.

The more I think about it now, the more I think that's his sense of humour for you. So deep you don't realise he's joking. Like the big sign in front of the house reading 'Phil Spector's Pyrenees Castle':  some might see it as narcissistic and self-important, I prefer to think of it as puckish humour. But at the time, I suddenly thought I saw the scary Spector of legend.

Of course, just when you think you'll give Phil the benefit of the doubt, he overplays his hand. As I was leaving the Castle that day, I heard him calling my name and turned to see him running after me, his hands full of snapshots of him over the last few years, all his hairstyles.

Scrabbling through them, he kept saying, "See, see?" Some fell to the ground. I said, "I see, I see." He looked relieved, hugged me goodbye, went back into the house. As one of the bodyguards walked me to my car, he said with enormous compassion, "Mr Spector is very tired today, Vikram."
 
More than a month after we shot our interview, the trial started.  I attended court several days a week, and usually sat with Team Spector. As the weeks went by my views began to evolve. At lunch breaks with Phil and his wife Rachelle and the bodyguards, sometimes sitting humiliatingly in the lonely corridors of the court house, we would eat junk food out of coin-operated snack dispensers as his team of lawyers scrambled to address the latest perceived outrage. Phil alternated between shrilly denouncing the proceedings as unfair, in great detail, and sitting in a glum fugue-like daze, certain of his inevitable doom.
 
The more I observed the process, the more I found myself shifting realities. The prosecution team began to seem hell-bent on a conviction at all costs, the defence team more like beleaguered good friends of Spector's. It seemed to me that some of the most contested material was precisely aspects of evidence which could possibly buttress the defense's claim that the dead woman, Lana Clarkson, shot herself, in a spasm of alcohol and prescription drug-fuelled depression. I'd been thinking that Phil's argument that she had committed suicide was completely crazy. But now his insistence on it, against all reason, made me wonder if he might conceivably be telling the truth. 

The collective knee-jerk response to assume Phil’s guilt began to feel like the worst form of prejudice. Like everyone else I knew, the moment I heard the news that a woman had died of a gunshot in Spector's Castle, I assumed he had shot her. It seemed to fit with all the anecdotal rumours that have swirled around him for decades. Yet as I hung out with him in the courthouse, I began to see things through his eyes. His rants about how this poor woman had for some reason chosen to come to his house and kill herself, thus ruining his life, began to seem almost reasonable to me. And the collective knee-jerk response to assume Phil's guilt - a response I had originally shared -­ began to feel like the worst form of prejudice. What happened to 'Innocent until proven guilty?'
 
After all, one of my cop friends had confided to me that this time they really had to nail their celebrity suspect: OJ Simpson had walked, Michael Jackson had walked, Robert Blake had walked. But Phil, they'd nail. And unlike the others, Spector didn't have any friends. Except me, I thought.

Well, that could just be Stockholm Syndrome kicking in. That's the risk a documentary-maker runs, getting so close to his subject. That doesn't mean that Spector is guilty, though.

Anyway, I kept these highly subjective thoughts out of the film, though I tried to use the trial footage (which I edited to the music of Spector's most famous songs) to show what the basic drift of the prosecution and defense arguments was. That trial ended last September with a hung jury, unable to come to a unanimous verdict. Now, as Spector's retrial gets under way, there may be a different result. Until then, I'm going to continue to assume his innocence. ·