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Phil Spector told me he had ‘devils inside’. One month later, he murdered Lana Clarkson

At a court hearing in February 2004 - Getty
At a court hearing in February 2004 - Getty

Watching the new documentary series Spector, about the life of Phil Spector, the man who produced some of the most memorable songs in pop music, and who in 2007 stood trial for the murder of the actress Lana Clarkson, it seems bizarre to reflect that the first business of the court was to rule whether or not I should be admitted to the courtroom.

Four years earlier – the amount of time it had taken to bring him to trial – I had interviewed Spector in his faux-Spanish castle in the unlikely working-class suburb of Alhambra, Los Angeles.

In the 1960s, Spector had ruled the pop music charts. The inventor of the ‘Wall of Sound’, bigger than the artists he produced, he was behind such hits as Be My Baby and You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling; he had produced the Beatles’ last album Let It Be, John Lennon’s Imagine and George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord, before effectively vanishing from view.

My interview was the first he had given in more than 20 years. He struck me then as a charming, funny, but deeply troubled man. He talked at considerable length, and with astonishing candour, about the mental and emotional troubles that had assailed him over the years. ‘I’ve been a very tortured soul,’ he said. He had ‘devils inside that fight me’, and was ‘probably relatively insane… I’m my own worst enemy.’ But the worst, he said, was behind him. He had struggled with his demons and conquered them. He was trying to be a ‘reasonable man’. It was a phrase he returned to constantly throughout our conversation.

Five weeks later my interview appeared in The Telegraph Magazine with the cover line: ‘Found: Pop Music’s Lost Genius’. Two days after that, Lana Clarkson died in the house where I had met him – from a single gunshot through the mouth.

I was interviewed by the Los Angeles police about my meeting with him, and subsequently put on the witness list for the prosecution, which is why Spector’s defence team applied to have me barred from the court. The judge overruled their application and I was allowed to attend the trial. (And was not called as a witness.)

That trial is the climax of the new four-part documentary series,  examining the life of the man once dubbed the ‘Tycoon of Teen’, and watching it brought me back with a jolt to the surreal spectacle that unfolded in the LA courtroom.

Phil Spector photographed for The Telegraph Magazine in January 2003 - Michael Kelley
Phil Spector photographed for The Telegraph Magazine in January 2003 - Michael Kelley

It was criminal trial as circus, Spector, 5ft 7in in Cuban heels, arriving at court each morning in a variety of increasingly improbable wigs, pushing through a heaving media throng, supported by his 27-year-old wife Rachelle, whom he had married while awaiting trial. Then there was the entourage of sumo-sized bodyguards; the ‘legal clown car’, as one observer put it, of high-powered and even more highly priced attorneys arrayed in his defence; and the grisly deliberations about blood spatter and neural damage that would play out over the next five months.

Directed by Don Argott and Sheena M Joyce, whose previous documentaries include Framing John DeLorean, about the auto-maker whose company spectacularly failed in the 1970s, the series draws on extensive interviews with Lana Clarkson’s friends and her mother Donna, Spector’s musical collaborators, his daughter Nicole, LAPD detectives and lawyers for the prosecution and the defence, along with archive footage and a soundtrack of Spector’s indelible music, painting the definitive portrait of Spector’s mercurial and ultimately tragic life. (I should declare an interest; I acted as a consultant on the series.)

Crucially, it brings to vivid life the one person who has been most overlooked in the retellings of Spector’s story – his victim, Lana Clarkson. Clarkson was not afforded much dignity at the time of her murder, nor in the months afterwards. The coverage of her death reduced her to a cipher: she was routinely described as a ‘B-movie’ actress, a faded sex bomb, down on her luck and scuffling in the shadows of the rich and famous – the quintessential Hollywood has-been story.

Lana Clarkson - Kpa/Zuma/Shutterstock
Lana Clarkson - Kpa/Zuma/Shutterstock

It was a narrative driven to a shocking degree by Spector’s defence, which in its attempts to prove that Clarkson had killed herself effectively put her on trial in what amounted to a sustained exercise in character assassination.

‘She was branded as this washed-up B-movie actress, on the wrong side of 40, as if she somehow had it coming to her,’ says Joyce. ‘There was this undertone of, she was asking for it. And that’s something we hear all the time about women who have been victimised.

‘It’s staggeringly unfair – she couldn’t win in life, the way she was being portrayed, and she certainly couldn’t win in death. And I really wanted to show her as she was: a working actress, a great daughter and an amazing friend.’

Donna Clarkson attended virtually every day of the trial of her daughter’s murderer, sitting a couple of rows behind the reporters with Lana’s sister Fawn, and Lana’s friend and entertainment lawyer Rod Lindblom. She struck me then as a figure of immense dignity and restraint.

‘There were a lot of things that were said about Lana that would hit you in the gut,’ she tells me, speaking from her home in Los Angeles. ‘But I had to learn to just [hold] back my emotions and collect myself. The judge was very strict because he didn’t want anybody to be crying or carrying on in the courtroom.’

Donna Clarkson addressing the court during Spector’s sentencing in 2009 - Jae C Hong-Pool/Getty Images
Donna Clarkson addressing the court during Spector’s sentencing in 2009 - Jae C Hong-Pool/Getty Images

On the first day, she and Lana’s friends wore leopard ribbons that Fawn had made in memory of her. ‘The judge said we had to take them off because we looked like a cheerleading team.

‘Sometimes the tears would trickle down my cheeks and I just couldn’t help it. I would try to just let the tears flow slowly and dab my cheeks so nobody would see.

‘It wasn’t easy, that’s for sure, but I just felt I had to always be there and keep it together for Lana. This was my baby, this was my girl. I had to be strong for her.’

Lana grew up in Cloverdale, northern California, the eldest of three children. She loved horse-riding and played basketball. ‘She was just a happy girl,’ Donna says.

When she was a teenager, her father died in a mining accident; Donna was studying nursing and took the family to Los Angeles to finish her course. When Donna and Lana’s brother and sister returned to northern California, Lana – who was just 16 – stayed on, living with a family friend, wanting to build a career in modelling and film-extra work. ‘I remember, when she was two she said, “I’m independent,”’ Donna says with a laugh. ‘I said, “What does that mean?” She said, “I want to do it myself.”’

She travelled to Europe, working on a number of big modelling campaigns before returning to America to concentrate on acting. In the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High, playing the role of a geekish schoolteacher’s improbably beautiful wife, she had her first line of dialogue – ‘Hi!’ – securing a Screen Actors Guild card.

Her big break came in 1985, in the film Barbarian Queen, produced by Roger Corman, the king of the Hollywood B-movie. Lana played the lead role of Amathea, a warrior in a fur leotard leading a slave uprising. A number of similar sword-and-sorcery films followed, which brought her a cult following; as well as modest roles in television dramas and serials.

But on Christmas Eve 2001, at a family party, she fell while dancing with some children, breaking both her wrists and effectively derailing her career for a year.

In the absence of acting roles she needed something else. In January 2003 she started work at the House of Blues, a West Hollywood nightclub and music venue owned by the actor Dan Aykroyd, greeting guests at the club’s VIP lounge. It was a way to tide herself over, but also a chance to connect with the film, TV and music industry high-rollers who passed through the doors.

She had been in the job just three weeks on the Sunday afternoon when she went shopping with her mother for shoes. ‘She said, “Mom, I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to do the job, because I need to focus on other things,”’ Donna remembers. ‘She didn’t have any qualms that suddenly she’s 40 and there’s nothing left. That wasn’t Lana. She totally believed in herself. Even with her broken wrists she was getting on with things. It was, “OK, what else is ahead?’”

Two days earlier she appeared at a comic book convention – Lana, the Barbarian Queen – and she had been booked for a commercial for the following Friday. The morning after her shopping expedition with Donna, Lana’s agent was trying to get hold of her to arrange a fitting for clothes, but her phone went unanswered. ‘He didn’t know what had happened…’ Donna says.

Lana did not recognise Phil Spector when he walked into the House of Blues shortly before closing time. He was wearing the same shoulder-length, permed wig he had been wearing when I met him, and a long white jacket. She mistook him for a woman. A colleague took her aside and told her he was a famous producer  and should be ‘treated like gold’.

She’d have recognised the name, of course. But it’s doubtful she would have known of Spector’s troubled history; that his father died by suicide when Spector was nine, leaving him to be brought up by an oppressive mother and a mentally disturbed elder sister; that Spector himself had been diagnosed as bipolar, and had suffered years of mental torment following the death of his son at the age of 10; that, having suffered a drink problem for many years and then stopped, he had recently started drinking again and that night had been on a round of bars and restaurants drinking heavily.

Nor would she have known of his reputation in music circles for playing around with guns – behaviour explained away over the years as ‘that’s just Phil’ – and that he had a history, which would be revealed in the course of the trial, of threatening women with guns.

The Telegraph’s Mick Brown - Heathcliff O’Malley/Telegraph
The Telegraph’s Mick Brown - Heathcliff O’Malley/Telegraph

All of this, perhaps, goes some way to explaining why, as the club was closing, she accepted his offer to go home with him.

‘Based on conversations we had with people who were there, she was going out of her way to make up for the fact that she had insulted a famous person in this new job,’ director Joyce says. ‘She was giving him extra attention.

‘As a woman, I can say we have been conditioned to apologise for perceived slights, almost for turning men down. She was taking steps that indicated that she [was] righting a wrong and then getting home. She was a strong, athletic woman, he was a small old man. Why would she feel threatened?’

CCTV footage shows Lana escorting Spector to his car in the parking lot behind the club. According to the testimony of his chauffeur Adriano De Souza (he had driven me to Spector’s home for my interview, explaining it was his first day on the job), Lana initially refused Spector’s invitation to go back to the castle. But he persisted. Getting into the car she told De Souza, it’s just for one drink. ‘You don’t talk to the driver,’ Spector told her.

He slotted a film into a portable video player to watch on the journey. It was the 1950 James Cagney film Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.

Two hours later, Lana was shot dead.

When the police, alerted by De Souza, arrived at the castle, they found Lana’s body slumped in a chair by the back door, 20 feet from where De Souza had sat outside in the car, waiting to take her home. Her purse was over her shoulder. In a bureau beside the chair was a holster which matched the murder weapon.

The prosecution case was straightforward: Lana was trying to leave. Spector, angry at the prospect of being left, had forced the gun into her mouth, and it had gone off. De Souza testified that while waiting in the car he had heard a shot, and a few minutes later Spector emerged from the house, a gun in his hand, and said, ‘I think I killed somebody.’

The defence was that Lana had died by what they called ‘accidental suicide’.

In order to argue this, their strategy was to paint her as a woman so desperate and depressed about her career she would go into a stranger’s house, search for a gun and take her own life. It was, on the face of it, an absurd proposition.

Unlike British courts, in America the defence can call upon expert witnesses who are paid substantial sums of money to provide ostensibly impartial evidence. One of these experts, Michael Baden, was actually the husband of Spector’s lead defence lawyer Linda Kenney Baden.

In the film, we see another expert witness, forensic pathologist Vincent Di Maio – who had been paid $26,400 for his services  – describing Lana as a depressed, financially pressed woman with ‘no skills’ and diminishing prospects in Hollywood. ‘She was an actress who was 40 years of age,’ he said with a shrug, as if to suggest that nothing could be more normal than any actress over the age of 39 killing themselves.

‘Putting the victim on trial is an age-old tactic,’ Joyce says. ‘But I was surprised by the aggression with which that was presented. Everything was framed in terms of diminishing her. There’s this perception that there’s no such thing as a working actress, you’re either a star or a failure, and she was categorised that way.’

At one point, the defence screened a showreel of Lana performing comic skits, mockingly implying that her attempts to recast herself as a comedian were inevitably doomed. The tactic failed. As the foreman of the jury explains in Spector, watching the showreel, ‘She was funny, she was alive. She was a person. For that moment, I knew her, and I missed her and I grieved for her.’

In the courtroom, Donna says she deliberately averted her eyes whenever pictures of Lana’s dead body were projected on a screen. And she would avoid looking at the man who had murdered her daughter, sitting just feet away.

But I made a point of watching his reactions as the trial unfolded. His hands trembled, at times uncontrollably. He looked alternately bored, irritated, incredulous – ‘What am I doing here?’ – and lost, almost as if in a fugue state. When five women testified about his prior acts of violence he regarded them with undisguised malevolence.

Only once did he look truly frightened, and it was one of the most extraordinary moments in the trial. One day, before proceedings began, bailiffs instructed everybody, including Spector, to move to one side of the room as they were ‘quarantining’ the well of the court for a brief appearance of the defendant in the judge’s next case.

A man in orange prison fatigues was brought in, flanked by seven armed sheriff’s deputies. He was chained to a wheelchair, handcuffed and wearing a mesh hood, like a bee-keeper’s bonnet. His name was Benjamin Pedro Gonzales, aka ‘the Savage’, and he was serving time for the murder of at least three women and two fellow prison inmates. Gonzales was HIV positive and liable to spit blood and saliva at anybody who came near him. He was in the court for no more than five minutes while the judge scheduled a mental competency hearing, before being wheeled out, leaving a stunned silence in his wake. No one looked more stunned than Spector, who regarded ‘the Savage’ with a look of naked terror, as if this wretched figure was some dark presentiment of his own future.

I had not spoken to Spector since the interview. At his request, I had dispatched early copies of The Telegraph Magazine to arrive at his home on the Saturday the article was published. Lana Clarkson died two days later. I felt somehow complicit. (In his 2013 film Phil Spector, David Mamet used my article as an introductory device, with one of his lawyers suggesting Spector had read the piece on the day of Lana’s murder and it had ‘set him off’. In fact, he hadn’t read it at all: the issues arrived at his home a couple of days late.)

I’d later read in court filings by his original lawyer Robert Shapiro, whom Spector fired, that Spector had referred to being interviewed by ‘a gentleman from London’, but had apparently forgotten it had taken place before the killing.

‘Did you ever tell the reporter that you were borderline insane?’ Shapiro asked.

‘I don’t recall saying that,’ Spector replied. ‘I don’t know what insanity is.’

‘What does the term mean to you?’ Shapiro said.

‘Somebody who’s not there all the time.’

‘And would you describe yourself as not being there all the time?’

‘Yeah, because I’ve been called a genius, and I think a genius is not there all the time and has borderline insanity.’

‘And would you say that would be the description of yourself on the day of Lana Clarkson’s death?’

‘No.’

Spector does not set out to demonise its subject, rather in measured tones it helps to explain him – his personal tragedies, his dysfunctional background, the corrosive effects of early fame – and the paradox of how someone who created music that touched millions of people could have found himself a convicted murderer.

‘What strikes me now is how full of hope his music was,’ Joyce says. ‘Those songs are so full of love and dreams and happiness; and how heartbreaking it is that the man himself never got that himself.’

Everything in life, Spector told me when I interviewed him, is about timing. ‘For some reason,’ Spector said, ‘if you say “lucky” about people, people say, “Oh, you’re demeaning their talent.” No – there’s an element of luck in everything, But I call it timing. That is the key to everything.’

It’s a theme Spector returns to, exploring the undercurrents of dark fate that brought him and Lana Clarkson together on that night, the faded Tycoon of Teen, the actress bent on rebuilding her career. ‘There are so many “what if?” moments,’ Joyce says. ‘What if Lana hadn’t slipped and broken her wrists; what if Phil hadn’t gone to the House of Blues that night. What if she’d gone home early…’ What if.

Spector waived his right to testify, denying the court, and Donna Clarkson, the opportunity to hear his account of what had happened that night, instead relying on his attorneys to make his defence. Remarkably, after a trial that had lasted five gruelling months, the jury were unable to reach a unanimous verdict, with 10 members finding him guilty, two not guilty.

In a retrial in 2009, Spector was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to 19 years to life. He died last year, aged 81, of complications from Covid.

‘His music was beautiful, but he was a very troubled person, and it’s just really sad that his troubles came in contact with our Lana,’ Donna Clarkson says in Spector, with remarkable equanimity.

‘I don’t know if Mr Spector meant to do this, or if what happened was an accident,’ she tells me now. ‘It all happened so sadly.

‘Lana just filled you with laughter and joy, that’s who she was.’ She pauses. ‘At least now people can see who she really was, and there’s some justice for Lana in that.’


Spector is available to watch on Sky Documentaries and streaming service Now from Sunday January 8