Magical Mystery Tours

by Tony Bramwell

  I don’t know exactly how much I lost because the accountant had all the figures. I believe it was in the region of £50,000 to £100,000. In today’s buying power you would have to multiply it by ten, so it hurt. It wasn’t particularly to start some exotic lifestyle with, it was to invest and build a company with. But when it vanished that all went out of the window. What he stole was the work that had gone in, plus the future. The others lost millions. We had done very well from all the music and publishing—even Elvis had recorded one of our songs: “I’ve Got a Thing About You, Baby.” Harry had to sell his entire rights to his share of Bond, to MGM, I think. Afterward, he went to work for H. M. Tennant’s, the theater people. He even had to sell his flat on the corner of Grosvenor Square and South Audley Street. Frank Sinatra stayed there so many times people thought it was his. Frank loved it because it overlooked the American Embassy, and he liked that. He felt safe because he could park his car behind the embassy, where the U.S. marines kept an eye on it. It wasn’t a great flat by any means. In fact it was very ordinary but it saw some great parties. Saltzman sold it to Martin “Marty” Machat, an influential New York music industry lawyer who became a close friend of mine, the parties continued and Sinatra continued to stay there when he was in town.

  Sean had lost all his Bond money, his retirement nest egg, as well as numerous other investments. He had to start over, accepting many roles just for the money, I’m sure. Sean was more vocal than any of us, threatening serious Bond-type death and destruction if he ever got ahold of Richards. Years later someone working for Sean got “a sighting,” so to speak, and Sean started lawsuits to recover, but Richards slipped through the net again and nothing ever came of it.

  37

  A couple of years after the famous Christmas album that Apple had put out while I still worked there, Marty Machat—who was Phil Spector’s longtime lawyer—telephoned me. Marty, who was well connected in New York, represented among others, Freddy Bienstock of Carlin Music, a publisher who had a lot of songs that Elvis cut. In fact, Marty was also Elvis’ lawyer. He managed Leonard Cohen and—God help us—he was Allen Klein’s lawyer too. But Marty and I got on very well. I went out of my way to be as much help as I could be in London on various projects. We became good friends. He was like my godfather.

  “Phil sends his love and wants you personally to set up a new record company for him, based in London, and re-release every record he’s ever made,” Marty said genially, talking fast in case I smelled a rat. “Phil speaks very highly of you. He thinks you’re great, remembers all those great talks you had.”

  “What exactly do you mean?” I asked.

  “His entire catalogue. A lifetime’s work,” Marty explained, as if it were an everyday event.

  I should have smelled a rat. I probably did, but didn’t admit it, which sums the record business up pretty neatly. Off I went to see Warner—a phrase that also summed up the music business in those days. They were more than keen on the proposal, and hoping that Phil wouldn’t take affront at the credit sequence, we set up a unique situation, called Warner/Spector. Then I flew to Los Angeles to have a word with Phil. I checked into the hotel and I took a cab up to his home.

  In the front hall were two complete suits of armor that Phil was especially proud of. The next thing that struck me were the placards and posters lining the walls in the hallways and up the sweeping staircases, many with strange mottoes, including a strangely prescient one: IT’S BETTER TO HAVE A GUN AND NOT NEED IT, THAN TO NEED A GUN AND NOT HAVE ONE. There was also a huge wanted poster of Nixon depicted as a crook and another of Phil, armed to the teeth. He had an obsession with Nixon, whom he believed to be the devil. Once he had famously called the ex-president up and told him he wanted to make an album of the Watergate Tapes.

  Getting down to business, I said, “What’s the concept, Phil?” All very innocent.

  “Concept! You moron!” he screamed. “I hate him! That’s the concept!” I didn’t realize that he was still on about Nixon.

  Then he calmed down and said, “It’ll be a great album. You’ve heard of my Wall of Sound, this will be the Sound of the same Walls. Closing in on the bastard! Ha ha!”

  Phil’s paranoia, I believe, was there all his life. He was still, simply, the little Jewish orphan geek on the tough block in New York, getting constantly ridiculed and slapped around. Sammy Davis once said that his own whole success had been due to a “must make it, can’t fail” syndrome. He was thrust onward because, as far as he knew, he was the only black, redheaded, one-eyed singer turned Jew who could dance and act. Equally, what Phil went through early may have been character building, but the character it built was a little genius monster with deep fears and life-long psychoses.

  It didn’t help that even when Phil was hugely successful, big record companies still screwed him. He made great records, original, innovative, multimillion selling, with all his black girl groups, way ahead of his time, records that inspired generations of musicians, guys like John Lennon. He created other record companies and whole industries employing thousands, but he had no personal peace. He was the enfant Mozart of his time. Virtually single-handedly, he invented the role of record producer, as we now understand it. Before Phil Spector there were non-music-loving, arrogant, ex-army boffins in white coats, tut-tutting at the behavior of the “’orrible little musicians” or “punk kids” they were forced to deal with in the studio. All they usually did was turn on the recording machine or change a dusty valve here and there. Quite simply, there were no totally original record producers before Phil—apart from Sam Phillips at Sun Studios in Memphis, who produced Elvis—and Sam was pretty basic.

  There would have been no Tamla Motown without Spector, no black record industry. He did it all because he could do it all. He could take a three-girl black singing group like the Crystals and record a kids’ song like “Frosty the Snowman,” or “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” and put them on his Christmas album, and sell it over and over again.

  When I arrived Phil was sans the usual cape I fully expected to see him wearing. He led me to his pantry, where, incredibly, he kept his life’s work. All the master tapes were stacked there, everything he’d ever recorded from the days at his Goldstar Studios onward. Gold dust in fact. I wondered where he kept his food. I should have remembered that Americans keep everything in the fridge, including cigarettes.

  “Better get it all crated up, huh?” he said.

  Bear in mind that this was a guy who in his own words did not trust nobody with nothing. Despite the deeply paranoid wobblers on a par with a King George when he had just lost America; or a Hunter Thompson who had just misplaced his entire stash, his Wild Turkey, his Ballentine Ale and his grapefruits, Phil let me crate up his life’s work while he lurked in the shadows, watching every move I made. He would twirl loaded pistols and have panic attacks that would deposit most people in the funeral parlor. But, much to my amazement—and it was a mammoth task, insuring, logging and crating them all up—he let them go.

  In London, we ran oxidization checks and numerous other diagnostic tests on the tapes in order to work out how to preserve them and keep them in perfect condition. Then we started putting it all out on the market. Naturally, that’s when Phil suggested that we put out his Christmas Album first, but we pointed out that it was only March. Instead, we kicked off with the Phil Spector Real Masters Series volumes 1 and 2 and 3. The Best of the Ronettes; the Best of the Crystals; unreleased Masters volumes 1–50. . . . It was a lavish cornucopia of brilliant, legendary sound seemingly without end. This was a show that was going to run and run and I started to think about tempting the fates. Studied those magazines that offer islands in the sun for sale and private yachts and planes.

  At first, things proceeded well. Periodically, Phil wanted me to go on over to L.A. where I would report to Camp Dracula to give him an update. There was the album with Leonard Cohen. We survived. Phil and Len; ego versus ego; lunacy to the power of two—one in his fortress, the other in h
is monastery. But then the real madness set in once again. John Lennon was experiencing what is called in La La Land: “big problems, baby” with Phil on his seminal Rock ’N’ Roll album.

  John once famously sang a song about “mind games.” I don’t know who John was really referring to in this acid lyric but Phil Spector, who went to New York in 1972 to produce the Rock ’N’ Roll album, was a master at them. Marty told me that Phil and Yoko almost shorted out when they confronted each other again, because they were both control freaks, used to having their own way at whatever the cost. What’s more, they both knew it.

  I was having big problems, too, a really bad time. Wobblers and tantrums at Camp Dracula of mega proportions where Phil would wave his arms like a deranged Kermit, screaming, “It’s all mine!” and “Who are you? Who brought you in? You’re a fucking Nazi spy!” All that and more. Eventually, it went from great art back to a kindergarten, and Phil took the tapes away.

  It was an absolute nightmare. It was straitjacket time. Except, when you’re rich, it’s everybody else who is crackers, not you. Marty Machat tried again and again to sort unsortable things out and succeeded to some extent, but it must have been a big strain on him. I continued working, but in my heart I knew it was hopeless. Eventually, I went home.

  38

  Everyone hopped in and out of bed like rabbits in the seventies. It didn’t seem a big deal and most people had fun. One woman who I will never forget—and with whom I had a very pleasant four-day affair—was the vivacious Welsh actress, Rachel Roberts. I met her at one of Nancy Holmes’s famous soirees. Nancy was a very beautiful Texan in her mid-fifties who cultivated me because she thought I was a sort of “West End swinger,” and knew a lot of people. I did. She had a flat just around the corner from San Lorenzo (a very in restaurant later beloved by Princess Diana), where she would entertain the strangest group of people, and Rachel was one of them. Nancy’s friends went right across the social spectrum and she asked only two things of them: that they were interesting and amusing. They were people like Lady Warwick and old Lord Warwick who owned Warwick Films and also of course, a wonderful Gothic pile, Warwick Castle. The diarist, Hawk Allan, was another. And to complete the gossip-column set were the young Nigel Dempster, then Hawk’s apprentice on the Daily Mail, before Nigel married the Duke of Leeds’ daughter; also star columnist, Jack Tinker, from the Daily Express; and Jack Martin, who was with the Hollywood Reporter and National Enquirer. It was an assorted group, big on gossip and big on G & Ts.

  At the time I first met Rachel, she was having an off-on relationship with her boyfriend, Darren Ramirez, a Mexican-American window dresser who worked for one of the stores on Rodeo Drive. She wasn’t very happy because he irritated the hell out of her; besides which, she didn’t really want him. She wanted her former husband, the love of her life, Rex Harrison—the trouble was, Rex didn’t want her. Rex had had enough.

  One night when I walked into Nancy’s flat, Rachel spotted me and sashayed over. She was full of fun and madness, red hair, green eyes. I couldn’t say that she was beautiful, but she was vital and vibrant. I knew she must have had something special about her or Rex Harrison—professor Higgins in My Fair Lady personified—wouldn’t have married her. He was known as the most dicriminatory man in town. Rachel was exciting, no doubt about that. I found her irresistible. It wasn’t long before she said, her green eyes glinting with a sense of mischief, “I think I’ve fallen in love with you, Tony darling.” It would have been nice to have believed her, but since I wasn’t Rex, I knew it was all very ephemeral, which it proved to be.

  I wasn’t aware that Rachel carried the reputation around as a world-class nymphomaniac. To me, she was a lot of fun, a woman I’d seen around the film parties I was now going to more frequently, thanks to Harry Saltzman. The first three days of our affair consisted of complete and utter lunacy, sex and drink. I was twenty-seven at the time, and Rachel was forty-five. She had recently split from Rex. “My darling sexy Rexy,” she used to call him. I found out later that she would call Rex several times a night, for nine years, driving him and his new wives crazy.

  When they were still married, fueled by booze and prescription drugs, she used to walk out of a dinner with Rex to seduce the chauffeur in Rex’s Rolls Royce. And then she’d return to the table, lipstick smudged, stockings torn, and announce to everyone, “I’ve just fucked the chauffeur.” Rex—straight out of My Fair Lady—would continue to coolly eat, not batting an eyelid, which drove Rachel wild. She only wanted his attention and some reaction. I have seen Rachel crawl across tables full of glasses in pubs, no underwear on, to grab total strangers, begging them for sex, offering blowjobs. At parties, she would disappear outside with almost anyone, and come back grinning like a cat, only to repeat her knee trembler in the cloakroom five minutes later with someone else. Yes, she had quite a reputation, but I liked her. She was entertaining, very amusing, a brilliant actress, a very giving and generous friend and great fun to be with. I soon realized that she was also very lonely, deeply insecure and quite impossible.

  I was living two lives: on the one hand was the young music crowd, all the rock and pop stars I had always been close to—and on the other was the faster-living, very wealthy, old-money set. As time progressed, of course, the two sets merged and rock stars became the new aristocracy. Sometimes I dropped in at Paul Getty’s place in Cheyne Walk. That is, Jean Paul Getty II, later to be made Sir Paul because he was such an amazing philanthropist, giving away something like £200 million to good causes, much of it anonymously. It was his son, John Paul Getty III who was kidnapped in Rome and had his ear cut off before his crabby old miser of a grandfather paid the million-dollar ransom. Jean Paul III lost his inheritance because he married too young. He ended up paralyzed and blind due to an overdose of heroin. But then, members from every generation, and many of their wives, were addicts. It was a terrible burden and curse.

  At the time, Paul II loved to party and was always completely bombed, or out of it on heroin. Pale and hollow-eyed, stumbling about like something from an old Hammer horror flick. This creepy effect was added to because it was always dark and gloomy at his place in Cheyne Walk. To me it was like being inside that Rolling Stone song, about going down to the Chelsea drugstore and getting your scrip filled, which is in effect, Mick and Keef doing their version of St. James’s Infirmary. “I went down to St. James’s Infirmary, to see my baby there. She was lying on a long white table, so young, so cold, so fair.” Speaking of which, Paul II’s Polynesian Dutch wife, Talitha Pol, was very beautiful. A model, she got a few small roles in films such as Barbarella. Unfortunately, like Rachel, she was known not so much for her beauty as for being a “slag,” as we say in Liverpool: a sex maniac. But, unlike Rachel, she had no sense of humour, no spark, probably because of her heroin addiction. I have to confess that I went to bed with Talitha, but then, so did half of London. I had her, or she had me. It wasn’t an affair as much as a happening that had the timing of inevitability about it. I mean, it was not a case of who has been to bed with Talitha, but who hasn’t? She was an awfully pathetic human being.

  For people like Mick Jagger, Talitha was yet another scalp. At Cheyne Walk I was always bumping into people like Mick and Keith (Richards), David Geffen and Lord Lambton, who was involved in the Norma Levy scandal that involved police bribery, prostitutes and Lord Jellicoe, leader of the House of Lords. I met Tony Lambton down at Paul Getty Senior’s great gothic pile in Surrey, Sutton Place. I got to know Getty Senior well, and never revised my opinion: that he was really bizarre—even more bizarre than Bette Davis, who was a fellow guest at dinner parties in that circle. She was enjoying a modest revival of her career in her twilight years, and had some incredible stories to tell. She took a shine to me and would hold out her hand, heavily laden with huge jewelled rings, and say, “Young man, come and sit by me.” Her face was always deathly white, her lips a vermilion square, her hooded eyes set deep into her skull. Evening after evening, she appeared always wearing t
he same black frock.

  Paul II also had massive estates in the country and in Italy. His villa in Rome was like a Roman palace, where they held orgies which would have impressed Caligula. When Talitha died of an overdose in their beautiful pool, surrounded by orange trees, cypresses and palm trees and with a view of the Roman Hills, the whisper that went around London was that Paul II had given her the overdose because she was such a slut, such an addict, and he yearned to break free of drugs and clean himself up—which of course you can’t do when your partner is a junkie, heading for that long table. So young, so cold, so fair.

  So there I was the following year, in 1973, walking down Broadway in New York and on my way to see Allen Klein on Apple business when I bumped into Engelbert Humperdinck.

  “Hello, Tone, what are you doing?” he asked.

  When I said nothing much, Engelbert told me he was staying at the Mayfair, and asked me to give him a call. I did that same night.

  “Do you have your tux?” he asked. I did. I always took a tux because I never knew when I would need it. In those days, a dinner jacket was de rigeur for many events. “Okay,” Engelbert said. “Put your tux on and we’ll have a night out.”

  Later that evening I left the Drake, where I was staying, and caught a cab over to the Mayfair, to meet up with Engelbert, Mickey Green (who was a guitar hero of mine way back when he was one of Johnny Kidd’s Pirates on those old Liverpool riverboat shuffles) and Tony Cartwright, Engelbert’s roadie. We went to all the cabaret rooms in town including the Wonderbar and the Coconut Grove, where we saw the Supremes, Fifth Dimension, and Bobby Darin. I’d seen Bobby when he’d come to Liverpool when I was a kid and thought he was a god.