Spector, Phil - Sentenced to 19 Years - Vanity ...
Legend with a Bullet
by Vanity Fair
May 29 2009
Phil Spector was sentenced to 19 years to life in prison today for the 2003 murder of actress Lana Clarkson. Contributing editor Dominick Dunne chronicled the trial for the magazine in August 2007, and we couldn’t help mentioning this haunting line from Dunne’s piece about Clarkson’s fateful encounter with the legendary music producer:
“Sitting in the backseat of his Mercedes as they sped along several freeways to Alhambra, they watched the old James Cagney movie Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.”
Where else would the author be but at the murder trial of rock 'n' roll legend Phil Spector, catching the cast of legal stars, meeting with the defendant in the men's room, and listening to some damning testimony from women who say they've faced the barrel of Spector's gun.
by Dominick Dunne
I've covered a lot of trials over the last 25 years, and I've come to realize that some of the best conversations take place in the men's room during breaks. The late Johnnie Cochran, O. J. Simpson's Dream Team lawyer, used to hold quickie meetings in there while his Nation of Islam guards kept the rest of us out. A few of us complained to Judge Ito about that. It's almost always crowded, because all the courtrooms on the floor use the same one. There's usually a lot of chatter about what's going on in the different courtrooms. The murder trial of Phil Spector, the 60s rock 'n' roll genius who produced his first hit when he was 18, is the best show in Los Angeles these days. The trial is a major topic of conversation out here. When people I run into say, "What are you doing out here?" I only have to answer "Spector" and everyone knows what I'm talking about.
Phil Spector Mugshot has to be taken without his wig
I first met Phil in 1987 in New York, at a high-society party in his honor in the private room at Mortimer's given by Ahmet Ertegun, the late rock 'n' roll impresario, and his very chic wife, Mica. Phil captivated the fashionable crowd that night. The socialite Fernanda Niven got so carried away she stood up and sang with him and the band, knowing every lyric of every Phil Spector song. He was hot stuff. He was a celebrity. The crowd cheered.
A few years later everyone in the country was gripped by the televised O. J. Simpson double-murder trial, and Phil Spector was no exception. I was covering it for Vanity Fair and I was on TV constantly, on Larry King's and Geraldo Rivera's shows, talking about what had happened that day in court. As I remember it, Phil asked Ahmet to arrange a meeting so we could talk about O.J. Phil was utterly riveted by the case. He knew every detail of the story and trial. We had three dinners together. I remember him as brilliant, fascinating to talk to, and sometimes scary. It was a well-known fact at that time that he had pulled guns on people; there were many stories to that effect. I personally knew two of the women who claimed they had been held prisoner in his house for several days. He carried a gun when we saw each other, but he never pulled it on me.
On the night before I came out to Los Angeles for this trial, I was at a party in New York, where I ran into Yoko Ono. One of the most enduring stories about Phil Spector involves the time he pulled a gun on John Lennon at a recording session. I told Yoko I was leaving the next day to cover Spector's trial. She smiled sweetly and said, "Oh, Phil," in the most affectionate manner. I said, "What do you mean, 'Oh, Phil'? He pulled a gun on your husband." Yoko said, "Oh, that story has become so exaggerated. He took out the gun and shot it in the ceiling." Oh.
Tom Wolfe once called Spector the first tycoon of teen. He became famous for engineering the girl-group sound of the 1960s. Among the acts he produced were the Ronettes, and he later married the lead singer, Veronica Bennett, who came to be known as Ronnie Spector. But his most significant contribution to music is the "Wall of Sound," the name for his technique of creating a big orchestral sound for his pop songs. He produced dozens of hits, including the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling," Ike and Tina Turner's "River Deep, Mountain High," and the Beatles album Let It Be.
I had not seen Spector for years until I saw him in the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, in downtown Los Angeles, where he is standing trial for the murder of Lana Clarkson, a beautiful 40-year-old actress for whom the Hollywood dream had not come true. Like a character out of Nathanael West's great Hollywood novel, The Day of the Locust, she'd had several good parts in B films, even a lead in the 1985 Roger Corman movie Barbarian Queen, but stardom eluded her. On the last night of her life, she was working at a new $9-an-hour job as the hostess in the V.I.P. room, known as the Foundation Room, at the House of Blues, a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard, seating important people like Phil Spector. Curiously, Lana Clarkson, who knew celebrities and had an eye for people who could help her, didn't know who Spector was when he came in with a female companion for a table shortly before two in the morning. He had made previous stops at the Grill, Dan Tana's, and Trader Vic's. He had been drinking, and appeared heavily medicated. Lana didn't give him a table at first, and by mistake she addressed him as "Miss." He corrected her, saying "Mister." She was quickly tipped off by a waitress, a beauty named Sophia Holguin, that Spector was a very important man, "worth millions," who was known to tip extravagantly. (Later, he would leave $450 for a $13.50 bar bill.) Sophia asked Lana to seat Spector in her section, the Buddha Room. After Spector had his driver take home the lady he had arrived with, who would drink only water, he asked Sophia back to his mansion. Sophia declined. She told Phil she had to be up early. Lana was his second choice.
By all accounts, Lana Clarkson had many friends and a great sense of humor. One night during the trial, I had dinner at a popular restaurant on the Sunset Strip. A very pretty hostess named Crystal Angel took me to my table. A few minutes later, during a lull in her duties, she came and sat down with me. She told me she had been a friend of Lana Clarkson's. She said that Lana had been a regular at the restaurant when it had different owners, four years ago. She was a friend of the chef's, and had given a large 40th-birthday party for herself in the private room. "She was the happiest person I knew," said Crystal, refuting totally the defense's theory that Lana was an unhappy woman down on her luck who committed suicide. E-mails she sent to a friend reveal that she was depressed by the state of her career. She had borrowed $200 from her friend. Still, she was not without hope. She had plans for a comedy act, which was "wonderful," according to Ed Lozzi, her publicist friend, who had seen Lana perform it.
It's hard not to wonder what was on her mind when she got into Phil Spector's chauffeur-driven Mercedes and rode 35 minutes with him to his 1920s mansion, called Pyrenees Castle, in Alhambra. She hadn't leapt at the invitation, but he'd persisted. She'd reluctantly agreed to go for one drink. He assured her that the chauffeur would wait and then return her to her house. My reporter friend from many trials, Michelle Caruso of the New York Daily News, who sits next to me at this trial, thinks Lana hadn't given up on her movie aspirations and was hoping that the onetime important music producer could open some doors for her. Sitting in the backseat of his Mercedes as they sped along several freeways to Alhambra, they watched the old James Cagney movie Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.
Spector has changed a great deal since I last saw him. He's always worn toupees, and he has a new wig for this trial, a blond pageboy cut. I saw him staring at me across the courtroom, but we had not yet acknowledged each other. When he appears every day in court (he's free on a million-dollar bail), with his new, much younger wife, 26-year-old Rachelle, on his arm, they make a very theatrical entrance. They are surrounded by three huge, 300-pound African-American bodyguards, who dress alike. The five of them move in unison, and people in the corridors step back to watch them. Rachelle Short married the 67-year-old Spector after he was accused of murdering Lana Clarkson. I wouldn't have thought that Phil Spector would be a hot marital catch after the murder charges were brought against him, but Rachelle Short must have thought otherwise. In the courtroom, the two chat together the way married couples chat. She even looks happy.
There is a part of me that thinks that, as difficult as this period of Spector's life must be, he is secretly enjoying being back in the center of the story after several decades on the sidelines. He has given great thought to his wardrobe. He has an assortment of suits with Edwardian frock coats reaching midway down his calf, in the style of London's Carnaby Street, which was in fashion at the same time he was. His shoes have high heels. He's a sight you can't stop looking at. His hands constantly shake. The Court TV camera sometimes lingers on his shaking hands folded in front of him. We have been told that his medication causes the shaking.
So back to the men's room. During a break, I made for it. It was empty except for one person standing at the center urinal, which was lower than the other two, as if for kids. It was Spector. He had opened his Edwardian frock coat for the business at hand, and it billowed out on each side, half blocking the other two urinals, rendering them unusable. I didn't have the nerve to ask him to move his coat and free up a urinal, and I also didn't really want to pee next to him, considering that he was on trial for murder just down the hall, and I was there to write about him. So I waited my turn in silence in the back by the sinks.
He took great care in rolling up his sleeves and elaborately soaping and scrubbing his hands in very hot water, the way I have seen germaphobes do after they've shaken hands. When he was drying his hands with a paper towel, he noticed me for the first time.
"Hi, Dominick," he said.
"Hi, Phil," I replied. I didn't know what to say for conversation. As a longtime victims' advocate, I found it strange to be chatting with the man on trial for Lana Clarkson's murder, but there was something about him I still found likable. You're not supposed to have those mixed feelings. Finally it occurred to me what I could say to him. "I went to Ahmet's memorial service in New York at Lincoln Center last week," I said, referring to Ahmet Ertegun.
"You went? Oh, my God, this is the first I've heard about it from someone who went. I owe everything to Ahmet. He started me in the business," said Phil, or words to that effect. He was totally interested in hearing about it.
I rattled off the names of as many of the entertainers as I could remember: Eric Clapton, Bette Midler, Kid Rock, Stevie Nicks. The merely famous, such as Henry Kissinger, Mayor Bloomberg, and Oscar de la Renta. David Geffen and Mick Jagger, who delivered moving and funny eulogies.
"Mick mentioned you in his eulogy," I said.
"Mick mentioned me?" He was stunned and thrilled. "Nothing about this," I said, referring to the murder trial. "It was about you and Ahmet and your friendship." It occurred to me later that he probably hadn't had many conversations in recent times concerning the life he once led.
Then we were back in the courtroom, and I recognized the woman on the witness stand, Dorothy Melvin, whom I used to know when she worked for Joan Rivers as an assistant. She was the first of four women whom superior-court judge Larry Paul Fidler allowed as prosecution witnesses to show Spector's pattern of pulling guns on women. The court listened to her tell about her nightmare experience with Phil at the castle, where she said she had been held prisoner at gunpoint. Finally freed, she called the police.
One of the great characters of the trial is the famed defense attorney Bruce Cutler, who has been imported from New York City for the occasion, and is always referred to as "Mafia lawyer," or John Gotti's lawyer, whenever his name appears in print, which is often. He is Spector's third defense lawyer. His first was Robert Shapiro, the famous O.J. lawyer (who was paid $1 million the night he was hired). His second was the renowned Los Angeles defense attorney Leslie Abramson, who won national fame defending the Menendez brothers. When I saw a television clip in which Phil kept interrupting and correcting Leslie during an impromptu press conference, I knew that legal relationship wasn't going to last.
Cutler is best known for having won three acquittals for John Gotti, the head of the Gambino crime family. People who do not admire Cutler will swear to you that Gotti fixed two of the acquittal juries. I was always touched by the fact that when Gotti finally went to prison, after his fourth trial, Cutler visited him as a friend on a regular basis until his death. He's a guy who's in the columns a lot. His clothes show a real fashion sense for the role he has chosen to play, stylish and flashy. Gotti introduced him to his shirtmaker, "Nadler's of Brooklyn." Cutler's necktie and pocket handkerchief often match. He is a great New York character having a difficult time of it in a city not his own. The tough-guy act that charms New York is laying an egg here. I have never seen a hotshot New York lawyer score big in a Los Angeles courtroom. There's a resentment.
The first sign of trouble in the defense team began with Cutler's opening statement, which was a flop. It went wrong from the start for this master of rhetoric, when Judge Fidler, who is in total command of his courtroom, sharply interrupted him in the first minutes of his statement. Judge Fidler said Cutler could not use Spector's statement to the police after he was taken into custody on the night of the shooting, in which he said that Clarkson had committed suicide, since it had not been introduced by the prosecutor, Deputy District Attorney Alan Jackson, in his opening statement. Cutler wanted a time-out to rethink his statement, and Fidler gave him a half-hour break. From the beginning, though, his timing was off. He made a grand, operatic, open-arms gesture and twice shouted, "The police had murder on their minds," as if the police had made a rush to judgment about Spector. I should hope to God that the police had murder on their minds, with a woman less than an hour dead, shot in the face, bleeding from the mouth, her teeth all over the floor, life over, in a French bergère chair in the foyer of a castle, and an arrogant man in a house full of guns who had to be Tasered by police. I think that's cause for having murder on your mind.
Cutler is used to cross-examining thugs and murderers in a manner that doesn't go over well when nice ladies who claim to have had fearful experiences with Phil Spector are on the stand. Judge Fidler, who's a bit patrician, bawled Cutler out in no uncertain terms on two occasions in front of the jury. There were rumors of dissension on the defense team. I personally witnessed a very heated argument, with gestures, between Cutler and fellow defense attorney Roger Rosen outside the courthouse, but I wasn't near enough to listen. Then Cutler got sick. They said he went to the hospital; then they said he didn't go to the hospital. They said he was going to return to New York, but he stayed, in a lesser position on the team.
One night after court my car didn't show up. Cutler saw I was abandoned and offered me a ride. "I'm not going to leave you here on the street," he said. His driver took us to the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Pasadena, where Cutler had rented a cottage in order to be nearer to Spector's castle, and then his driver took me all the way back to the Chateau Marmont, on the Sunset Strip, where I'm staying. I felt as if I were in a scene from the last episode of The Sopranos, sitting with Cutler in the backseat of his town car as his driver negotiated the freeways. Bruce is a great storyteller and often hilariously funny. We laughed most of the way.
It became obvious that he was being sidelined on the defense team. When we broke for Memorial Day weekend, he said to me in the corridor that he wouldn't be coming back until the end of the trial, to do the closing, but he was back in his chair the day after the holiday.
There's a big new star in the Los Angeles district attorney's office, and he's the 42-year-old prosecutor in the trial, Alan Jackson. His opening statement was a work of art. At an evidentiary hearing, his questioning of the renowned forensic scientist Dr. Henry Lee, who became a household name during the O. J. Simpson trial, was tough and courteous. This guy is so smart and knows the law so well.
He has TV-star looks, he flies planes, and he used to race cars but gave that up. He's also single. I had never met him or seen him before the trial, but we talked on the phone about a year ago when I received a five-page, handwritten letter from a star I know, who wishes not to be named, claiming she had been locked up in Spector's house for two days. She was shy about going to the police, afraid of the publicity. I called the deputy district attorney, introduced myself, had a nice chat with him, and faxed him a copy of the letter. He and the star talked. Every bit of information helps. Jackson's rise to the top ranks has been fostered by the greatly respected deputy D.A. Pat Dixon, head of the Major Crimes Division, who sits beside him in the courtroom.
The most anticipated witness at the trial was Adriano De Souza, the Brazilian substitute driver for Spector, who had driven the odd pair home from the House of Blues. He parked the Mercedes in the courtyard of the castle. His job was to wait to drive Miss Clarkson home after her visit with Spector. It was he who heard the single gunshot, which he described on the stand as a "pow" sound; it was he who called 911; and it was he who told the police that Spector had opened the door, come out of the house with a .38-caliber revolver in his bloody hand, and said, "I think I killed somebody." Those five words are the heart of this trial. In his opening statement, Bruce Cutler, who has a tendency to go too far, tried to minimize their importance by snobbishly saying, "Five words allegedly said to someone taking a siesta."
The defense's strategy has been to destroy the driver's credibility: De Souza was in the country illegally; the windows of the Mercedes were up, the heat in the car was on, the radio was on, and the fountain in the center of the courtyard was making splashing sounds, so he could not possibly have heard what he said he heard. However, the tape of De Souza's 911 call to the Alhambra police within minutes of the shooting is very believable and very understandable to me.
On the stand Adriano De Souza became the surprise of the trial. He was young, upright, recently married, privately educated in Brazil, a college graduate, and a former lieutenant in the Brazilian Army. To me, he seemed disarmingly honest. He did have immigration problems. The defense suggested he told the story of Spector's saying, "I think I killed somebody," in return for the government's help with his immigration problems. A defense lawyer named Bradley Brunon did the long and difficult cross-examination. De Souza never lost his cool; he remained calm and sure of himself. My feeling was that the jury believed him. I certainly did. That night I had dinner at the Grill, a popular restaurant in Beverly Hills, where Adriano De Souza used to be the head parking attendant. My waitress, Jane Kinsey, adored him and had watched him on Court TV that day. They were all proud of Adriano at the Grill.
Acurious diversion took place out of the presence of the jury. A young man named Gregory Diamond, who had been a law student clerking for Robert Shapiro while studying for the bar, was called to the stand. He had accompanied Shapiro to a meeting at Spector's castle the night after Lana Clarkson was shot. The forensic scientists Dr. Henry Lee and Dr. Michael Baden, whom Shapiro had hired for the defense team, were at the meeting that night to investigate the crime scene. Four years later, prior to the beginning of this trial, Diamond, who had since failed the bar exam and begun writing crime scripts for television, phoned Deputy District Attorney Alan Jackson, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times to say that he had witnessed someone on the defense team secrete a bit of crime-scene evidence that had never been turned over to the prosecution. When Judge Fidler called Diamond in to testify, however, he was reluctant to take the stand. He asked if he could take the Fifth, but Fidler denied the request. The purported piece of evidence was said to be an acrylic thumbnail belonging to Lana Clarkson. This was important because if Lana Clarkson lost a thumbnail the night she died it could help the prosecution prove that there was a struggle before the shooting.
Diamond was not the sort of witness you rooted for—you wondered why he had called the newspapers but then was reluctant to testify—but the number-two defense attorney under Shapiro, Sara Caplan, and a private detective, Stanley White, who were also present at the castle that night, essentially verified his story, specifying that it was Dr. Lee who had concealed the evidence. (Subsequently, Caplan was called by the prosecution to testify about the evidence in front of the jury. She came to court but refused to testify against Spector, her former client. Judge Fidler held her in contempt of court, and threatened to send her to jail. It was a moment of high drama.)
Dr. Lee was in China when Diamond, Caplan, and White were questioned about the evidence. When he returned from China, he took the stand and testily defended himself, denying that he had hidden any evidence. Judge Fidler's decision a week later felt like a bolt of lightning striking the courthouse. He ruled against Dr. Lee's version of the story, saying that he believed Sara Caplan. In effect, Judge Fidler called Dr. Lee a liar. It was not a good moment for the defense. It was a disastrous moment for the esteemed Dr. Lee, who by that time was in France.
Leslie Abramson returned to the courtroom as a spectator during the discussion of the missing evidence, as the matter had first come up when she represented Spector. Leslie and I despised each other during the Menendez trial—she didn't like the way I wrote about her in Vanity Fair. But my brother the late writer John Gregory Dunne, who used her as a character in his novel The Red White and Blue, was fond of her, and she and I had a rapprochement at his funeral. When she entered the courtroom, she walked right up to me and gave me a hug before taking her seat in the well.
When Judge Fidler brought up the missing acrylic thumbnail, Abramson shook her head violently, as if to indicate there was no truth to the story. Judge Fidler stopped midsentence. In a harsh voice, he spoke directly to her, saying words to this effect: "Ms. Abramson, you and I have known each other for many years. I have no problem with your disagreeing with me, but you are never, ever to shake your head at me in my courtroom." That sort of public reprimand has never had much effect on Leslie Abramson. She showed no embarrassment. Then the cell phone in her purse played a tune. One of the cardinal sins of every courtroom is to not turn off your cell phone. Most people make that oh-my-God face if their phone goes off. Not Leslie. She answered her phone and talked to her caller as she walked out at a leisurely pace. Judge Fidler rolled his eyes, and there was laughter in the courtroom.
From the beginning I have never believed the defense's story that Lana Clarkson committed suicide on the night she went to Phil's castle. Beautiful women—and Lana was beautiful—don't commit suicide by shooting themselves in the face. A blown-out mouth with teeth all over the floor is not a pretty look. No beautiful woman wants her body to be found that way. And no caring, feeling woman would commit suicide in front of a man she'd known for only a couple of hours. Her purse was hanging by a long strap over her shoulder. It was five o'clock in the morning. The car and driver were waiting for her. Lana was ready to go home to her little cottage in Venice Beach. As the movie in the Mercedes said, kiss tomorrow good-bye.