by Craig Brown
Sinatra’s ire appears to increase with their every encounter. Last year, Dunne was having dinner at the Bistro in Los Angeles when Sinatra, clearly drunk, abused him loudly from a neighbouring table. Sinatra then turned his venom on Lenny, before continuing around the table, going for Lauren Bacall, Maureen O’Sullivan and Swifty Lazar, in rapid succession. Finally, he grabbed the tablecloth and pulled it from beneath all their plates and glasses, threw a plate of food over Lazar, and stomped out.
This year, Sinatra has been involved in any number of fights. In June, for instance, a businessman called Frank Weissman asked him and his party in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel if they wouldn’t mind piping down. Weissman ended the night in a coma at the emergency hospital.
Tonight, Dominick Dunne is out for dinner at the Daisy with his wife and a small group of friends after attending a wedding. He often eats here, and knows the staff. By chance, Frank Sinatra is sitting at the next table, along with his two daughters, Nancy and Tina, and his new wife, Mia Farrow, who at twenty-one years old is younger than each of them. Over the past months, Sinatra has come in for a good deal of ribbing about his child bride, which perhaps explains his bad mood. ‘Frank soaks his dentures and Mia brushes her braces ...’ one of his most vocal tormentors, the comedian Jackie Mason, joked in his stage act a few months ago, ‘then she takes off her roller skates and puts them next to his cane ... he peels off his toupee and she braids her hair ...’
It probably wasn’t a wise move. The next day, Mason received an anonymous call telling him that if he valued his life, he should consider changing his material. When he failed to follow this advice, three shots were fired through the glass door of his Las Vegas hotel room. But the police saw no reason to pursue an investigation. ‘I knew that Sinatra owned Las Vegas when the detectives there made me the prime suspect and asked that I take a lie detector test,’ said Mason, adding, ‘I have no idea who it was who tried to shoot me. After the shots were fired, all I heard was someone singing, “Doobie, doobie, doo”.’ Over the following year, Mason will have his nose and cheekbones broken, again by a complete stranger.
But, in the meantime, we must return to Dunne and his party as they sit there enjoying their dinner. All of a sudden, Dunne feels a tap on his shoulder. He looks up. The maître d’ of the Daisy is looking down at him, ‘very nice guy called George, Italian, we all knew him, gave him Christmas presents, wonderful man’.
George says, ‘Oh, Mr Dunne, I’m so sorry about this, but Mr Sinatra made me do it.’ So saying, he leans back, clenches his fist, and hits Dunne smack in the face. ‘It wasn’t a hit to knock me out, but it was embarrassing,’ recalls Dunne. The crowded restaurant falls silent.
Dunne looks across at Sinatra, who is looking back at him with a smile on his face. Dunne and his wife leave the restaurant. As they wait for their car to be brought around by the concierge, George runs out. He is sobbing, and afraid.
‘I’m sorry, so sorry. Mr Sinatra made me do it,’ he says. He tells the Dunnes that Sinatra tipped him $50. ‘It was the social talk of the town,’ Dunne recalls. ‘I was the amusement for Sinatra. My humiliation was his fun.’
Sinatra’s reputation for violence follows him not only to his own grave, but to the graves of others. On two occasions, he sets his men onto the same newspaper columnist, Lee Mortimer, because Mortimer has written unflattering remarks about him. After Mortimer’s death, Sinatra is travelling with his friend Brad Dexter when he insists they drive to his grave. As he stands on the grave, Sinatra unzips his trousers and urinates on it. When Dexter asks him why, he replies, ‘This cocksucker made my life miserable. He talked against me, wrote articles, caused me a lot of grief. I got back at him.’
‘Frank always had to settle the score,’ explains Dexter.
But Jackie Mason refuses to be silenced. ‘I love Frank Sinatra. You love Frank Sinatra. We all love Frank Sinatra,’ he says in his stage act for many years to come. ‘And why do we love Frank Sinatra? Because he’d kill us if we didn’t.’
Like Mason, Dominick Dunne outlives Sinatra, enjoying a highly successful second career as a newspaper columnist and author with a particular interest in seeing that the guilty are brought to book. He never forgives Sinatra for his behaviour that night. ‘It showed the kind of power Sinatra had, to make a decent man do an indecent act. And you know, I am aware totally that his voice is one of the great voices of his era, if not the greatest. And to this day, I can’t stand the sound of it.’
DOMINICK DUNNE
URINATES WITH
PHIL SPECTOR
The Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, Los Angeles
April 2007
Forty-one years later, Vanity Fair magazine’s star columnist Dominick Dunne is covering the trial of Phil Spector, who is charged with the murder of the actress Lana Clarkson.
Short of acting jobs, Clarkson had been working as a hostess in the VIP room of the House of Blues, a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard. She hadn’t recognised Spector when he entered, even addressing him as ‘Miss’, perhaps misled by his size – he is only five feet five inches – and by his voluminous candy-floss wig, only marginally smaller. ‘Mister,’ he had corrected her.
This man, a fellow waitress had told her, was the famous 1960s record producer, ‘the tycoon of teen,’ as Tom Wolfe once called him. He was known, she added, for his generous tips.
After a drink (he left $450 for a $13.50 bar bill), Spector persuaded the reluctant Lana back to his Castle. ‘Just for one drink,’ she insisted. Travelling back in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes, they watched a James Cagney movie called Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.
They had only been in the Castle a short time before Spector’s chauffeur, waiting outside in the car, heard a gunshot. After some delay, Spector came out and said, ‘I think I killed somebody.’ The chauffeur called the police, who discovered Clarkson’s corpse on a white French bergère chair.
‘The gun went off accidentally! She works at the House of Blues! It was a mistake! I don’t understand what the fuck is wrong with you people! I don’t know how it happened. It scared the shit out of me!’ Spector screamed, as a policeman held him down. Later, he claimed Clarkson had picked up one of his guns and shot herself in the face.
Ever since the man who murdered his daughter Dominique was given what he describes as ‘a slap on the wrist’, Dunne has had an abiding interest in reporting the murder trials of the rich and famous, among them O.J. Simpson, Claus von Bulow and the Menendez brothers. He is fuelled by outrage at the idea that money may buy an acquittal.
He is already convinced of Spector’s guilt,47 and listens impatiently as Spector’s defence attorney complains, ‘The police had murder on their minds!’ He is unimpressed. ‘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.’
The trial has been going for just a few days when the court takes a break, and Dunne heads for the men’s room. It is empty but for a single man standing at the central urinal, which is lower than the other two, as though designed for little boys.
Spector is wearing the Edwardian frock-coat in which he arrived at the court this morning. He has opened it wide to urinate, so that it billows out and blocks the remaining two urinals, one on either side. Dunne doesn’t quite know what to do, but decides to remain where he is. ‘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.’
After he has finished peeing, Spector, who is today sporting a blond pageboy toupee, goes over to the basins, carefully rolls up his sleeves and elaborately soaps and sc
rubs his hands in hot water. Dunne is reminded of the way germophobes wash obsessively after shaking hands.
As he dries his hands with a paper towel, Spector turns and notices Dunne. ‘Hi, Dominick,’ he says.
‘Hi, Phil,’ says Dunne. The last time the two men met was after Spector asked their mutual friend Ahmet Ertegun to arrange a get-together so he could pick Dunne’s brains about the O.J. Simpson murder trial, by which, like so many people, he was riveted.
Dunne is not sure what to say next, particularly as Spector must know that he is not on his side: he is, in his own words, ‘a longtime victims’ advocate’. Yet Dunne still feels there is something likeable about Spector. Finally, it occurs to him what to say.
‘I went to Ahmet’s memorial service in New York at Lincoln Center last week.’
‘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!’
Spector wants to know everything about it. Dunne runs through the famous names present: Eric Clapton, Bette Midler, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Oscar de la Renta, Henry Kissinger. ‘Mick Jagger mentioned you in his eulogy.’
‘Mick mentioned me?’
‘Nothing about this. It was about you and Ahmet and your friendship.’
The two men return to the courtroom, Dunne to the public gallery, Spector to the accused’s chair. From their different vantage points, they watch as a woman testifies about how Spector held her at gunpoint; she is the first of four such witnesses.
The two men never speak again, but a few days later, Dunne is handed a note thanking him for the programme from Ertegun’s memorial service. ‘Dear Dominick ... I did so enjoy reading the words about our dear friend; and the pictures were a treasure. Thanks for thinking of me. Love, Phillip.’
The trial comes to an end five months later, with the jury unable to agree on a verdict.
At the retrial, Spector is found guilty and sentenced to a minimum of nineteen years in prison. He is sixty-nine years old. Three months later, Dominick Dunne dies of cancer, at home in Manhattan, at the age of eighty-three.
PHIL SPECTOR
PULLS A GUN ON
LEONARD COHEN
Whitney Recording Studios, Los Angeles
June 1977
It has been three years since Leonard Cohen’s last album, New Skin for the Old Ceremony. His record company is getting twitchy. He is forty-two years old, and his career has hit the doldrums. When he made his first album ten years ago, there was quite a vogue for his mellow, introspective, wordy songs, but now the circus has moved on. The music scene no longer has a use for him; it prefers things brash, youthful, rhythmic, punky.
Cohen’s home life is not going all that well either. He is drinking heavily, interspersing his binges with visits to a Zen retreat in California. His sharp-suited manager, Marty Machat, who used to represent the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, tells Cohen he has come up with a brilliant way to revitalise his career. How about he puts him together with another of his clients who has been bypassed by fashion: the legendary Phil Spector?
Machat drives the sceptical Cohen to a party at Spector’s mansion on La Collina, Los Angeles. Attached to the front gates are numerous ‘No Entry’ signs, drawing attention to a medley of guard dogs and armed guards, and warning trespassers that they will be putting their lives at risk. In the courtyard, chain-link fences and barbed wire block the entrance. Further warning signs point out that the wire is high-voltage.
Cohen finds the party tedious, and the mansion dark and dreary. He dislikes the way Spector shouts at his servants. But he makes the mistake of not leaving. When the other guests have gone, Spector locks the front door and informs Cohen that he is not allowed to leave. Spector hates being by himself even more than he hates being with people.
To lighten the atmosphere, and with a view to his eventual release, Cohen suggests they try writing songs together. Spector is primarily known as a producer,48 but he has also written many popular songs. Oddly enough, his first, ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him’, a hit made famous by the Teddy Bears, comes from the inscription on the grave of his father, who committed suicide when Spector was nine years old. Phil’s mother, Bertha, used to scream, ‘Your father killed himself because you were a bad child,’ as she chased him around the kitchen with a carving knife, but Cohen does not know this.
The two men sit at the piano. Their session goes unexpectedly well. Over the course of the next three weeks, they write fifteen songs together. They also drink a great deal of alcohol. They are, says one observer, ‘like two drunks staggerin’ around’.
In June 1977 they enter the studio. Spector is more moody than ever, by turns batey and matey. ‘Somebody would say something and he’d just get in a mood and stalk off ...’ says Cohen’s former girlfriend Devra Tobitaille. ‘He’d disappear into the bathroom for hours at a time, fixing his hair.’
As time goes by, Cohen finds that he and Spector disagree on virtually everything. ‘I was flipped out at the time and he certainly was flipped out. For me, the expression was withdrawal and melancholy, and for him megalomania and insanity and devotion to armaments that was really intolerable. In the state that he found himself, which was post-Wagnerian, I would say Hitlerian, the atmosphere was one of guns. I mean that’s what was really going on, guns. The music was subsidiary, an enterprise. People were armed to the teeth, all his friends, his bodyguards, and everybody was drunk, or intoxicated on other items, so you were slipping over bullets, and you were biting into revolvers in your hamburger. There were guns everywhere.’
One evening, Phil Spector enters the studio and approaches Leonard Cohen with a bottle of his favourite Manischewitz sweet white wine in one hand and a pistol in the other. He puts an arm around Cohen, thrusts the pistol to his neck, and says, ‘Leonard, I love you.’
Cohen reacts in his most mellow fashion, calmly pushing away the pistol. ‘I hope you do, Phil,’ he says, tentatively.
The recording goes from bad to worse. At one point, Phil pulls out his pistol again, this time on a violin player. ‘Phil, I know you don’t mean anything, but accidents happen,’ says the engineer, who threatens to go home. Eventually, Cohen and Spector stop speaking to one another. Spector refuses to allow Cohen to be present at the mixes, or even to hear the album before it is released.
The album, Death of a Ladies’ Man, comes out the following year to disastrous reviews. Spector’s overblown, soupy arrangements drown out Cohen’s poetic murmurings. The cranky musical marriage proves a mess, and it is Cohen’s worst-selling record ever. ‘He couldn’t resist annihilating me,’ concludes Cohen. ‘I don’t think he can tolerate any other shadows in his own darkness.’
When Spector is found guilty of murder some thirty years later, the roster of those on whom he has pulled a gun seems to increase by the day. It includes Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, Ronnie Spector, Dee Dee Ramone and even Twiggy.
But at least Phil Spector has learned his lesson about taking greater care when choosing his collaborators. In July 2009, the New York Post reports that Charles Manson, Spector’s fellow inmate at Corcoran State Prison, has dispatched a guard to Spector with a note suggesting that the two of them start writing songs together. It seems that Spector has failed to get back to him. ‘Phil’s like, “I used to pick up the phone and it was John Lennon or Celine Dion or Tina Turner, and now Charles Manson is trying to get hold of me!”’ reports his publicist, Hal Lifson. Manson’s only recorded composition is the B-side to the Beach Boys’ ‘Bluebirds Over the Mountain’ (1968). Originally it was called ‘Cease to Exist’, but the group thought this too bleak, changed the key phrase to ‘cease to resist’, and issued it under the more upbeat title ‘Never Learn Not to Love’.
LEONARD COHEN
SHARES A LIFT WITH
JANIS JOPLIN
The Chelsea Hotel, 222 West 23rd Street, New York
Winter 1967
At the age of thirty-three, the Canadian singer-songwrit
er Leonard Cohen has just released his first album. He is in New York, staying in the Chelsea Hotel, which is his kind of place. ‘I love hotels to which, at 4 a.m., you can bring along a midget, a bear and four ladies, drag them to your room and no one cares about it at all.’
At three in the morning, Cohen returns to the Chelsea. So far, it has been a dismal evening. He ate a cheeseburger at the Bronco Burger, but found it ‘no help at all’. Then he wasted time in the White Horse Tavern.
He presses the button to summon the unusually small lift, and gets in. But before he has had time to pull the door closed, a young lady with wild hair has entered.
It is Janis Joplin, who is resident in Suite 411. Aged twenty-four, she too has just released her first album, and her career is taking off. ‘I never ever thought things could be so wonderful!’ she wrote to her mother some months ago, adding, ‘... Guess who was in town last week – Paul McCartney!!! (he’s a Beatle). And he came to see us!!!! SIGH ... Gawd, I was so thrilled – I still am! Imagine – Paul!!! ... Why, if I’d known that he was out there, I would have jumped right off the stage and made a fool of myself.’
In fact, the naïve tone she reserves for her mother belies her wild lifestyle: so far this autumn she has enjoyed a range of one-night stands, some with stars like Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison (who she hit over the head with a whisky bottle), but others with lesser-known figures. ‘Before she was famous, people didn’t think Janis was attractive,’ observes Peggy Caserta, one of her long-time lovers. ‘She could barely get laid, and now she had all these admirers.’
Travelling up in the lift with Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen asks her if she is looking for someone.
‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘I am looking for Kris Kristofferson.’
