Lana Clarkson and Phil Spector: The hostess and the hitmaker

When Phil Spector left his castle on the night of 3 February, 2003, he did not have his usual driver. If Phil had had his usual driver, his friends say, nothing would have happened. Oh no, they say. None of this. The usual driver would have said, "No, Phil, you promised," when he ordered a drink at the Grill early that evening; he would have said, "Come on, Phil, no drinking," when he ordered another one at Dan Tana's; he would have said, "Phil, you know how you get," and taken the next one away from him when they went to Trader Vic's. And later, when Phil reportedly downed two Bacardi 150s and some champagne at the House of Blues, the driver would have said, "OK, buddy, I'm taking you home now," and then later that night, when Phil finally did return to his 1930s Moorish castle on the eastern fringes of LA with a beautiful actress named Lana Clarkson and a gun went off, the driver would have said, "No problem, I'll take care of it".

But now we are getting ahead of ourselves, because the actual driver called 911 when Spector came out of his castle, gun in hand, and said, "I think I just killed someone," and we don't really know at what point the gun was produced, who produced it, or why. But we do know that Lana Clarkson was shot in the face at the strange rock'n'roll Xanadu that Spector calls home and that when the cops got there, Lana was dead, lying in a pool of blood in the marble foyer and now, four years later, Phil Spector is about to stand trial for her murder.

At the beginning of 2003, Lana Clarkson was hired as Senior VIP hostess for the Foundation Room at the House of Blues on Sunset Boulevard. Another 41-year-old actress down on her luck would have been mortified at the prospect of having such a high-visibility job, of letting the world know that she was back at square one - a restaurant gig - even though she was in the power vortex of the club. But Clarkson was characteristically cheerful, throwing herself into it as if it were the part of a lifetime.

In fact, it was a first of sorts - Clarkson was the first female in this role; like a lot of semi-important gatekeeping jobs around town, the VIP hosting slot was generally filled by men. Given Clarkson's looks, it wasn't strange that she broke this particular job barrier. She was a six-foot blonde stunner with high spirits and a great sense of humour; in the words of her friend Glenn Hughes, former Deep Purple frontman, she was "beautiful inside and out".

Clarkson wasted no time in spreading the news. She emailed friends, joked about how the job might help her career ("I'm out every night anyway, I might as well make the most of it") and asked if anyone had any black scarves or other accessories she could borrow - the job required black clothing and she couldn't afford to spring for such items, although she had bought a pair of expensive black loafers. She was looking forward to introducing her wide-ranging crowd to a new round of people; she was "everyone's PR agent", as her friend, the actress Martha Smith said. "Call me if you want to be put on the list," she wrote to Robert Amstler, her bodybuilder ex-boyfriend, on 10 January. "I start next week... After being severely injured last year, fracturing both wrists in 22 places, having four surgeries and not working for seven months, I have no choice but to take a 'day' job, only it's at night! Plus, they are willing to work around my acting schedule. Thursdays and Fridays are fun nights called 'Nigel's Back' [referring to one of the owners, Nigel Shanley]. He used to manage the room and throws really nice evenings with lots of interesting people."

The injury Clarkson referred to was nearly incapacitating. And it seemed to be the most recent in a catalogue of accidents. A few years before, while horseback riding in Jamaica with Chris Blackwell of Island Records and ex-boyfriend Dickie Jobson, director of the reggae film Countryman, Clarkson fell and hurt her back. She had to be taken by helicopter to a hospital in Miami. "She was already in pain from an old injury," Blackwell recalled, "and was having headaches." Clarkson's wrist injury happened when she was trying to do the jig from Riverdance at a Christmas party. While dancing with two kids, she slipped on a loose rug and fell, requiring months of physical therapy during which her mother, Donna, her sister, Fawn, and her masseuse took turns feeding and washing her at her small cottage on the Venice canals.

"She was still healing," her masseuse Milena Popovich said a few months after her death, in thickly accented English. "While she was healing, she broke her left wrist again." According to Popovich, Lana's wrists - on the night she died, two years after the injury - were so weak that she had trouble gripping a steering wheel. "Lana was very fragile," Popovich said, "very easily hurt." This applied to her emotional state as well. "Sometimes if you disagreed with her," Popovich remembered, "she would burst into tears. She was like a little girl sometimes."

Lana Clarkson was born in Long Beach, California in 1962 and at eight, moved north to Cloverdale with her mother and sister. Cloverdale was a company town where most people worked at the local lumber mill. But Clarkson's mother was a reflexologist - at a time when rubbing feet and talking about chakras for a living translated into nutty divorcee. "The Clarksons were the town hippies," said Lana's classmate Tracy Ford. By all accounts, they were a quintessential California family, the kind people used to write songs about. They had a Volkswagen van. They were vegetarians. Clarkson and her mother wore patchouli oil. Clarkson's mother was breast-feeding her daughter. Clarkson's mother was beautiful. "She looked like Twiggy," Ford recalled. Clarkson was beautiful too - and tall, her friends said. "She said she got her height from her father," Ford remembered. "He died of cancer when we were in 7th or 8th grade. Clarkson said they were trying to get him on a holistic diet."

In junior high, Clarkson played on the school basketball team. She loved to ride her horse and spend time with its foal, Pegasus. But the flickering images on television promised something else, some vague destiny that called pretty girls who could carry a tune and stand out in school plays. "We used to watch Wonder Woman," said Ford. "Lana made me measure her to see if she came close to Lynda Carter. Her role-models were buxom actresses with tiny waists and round hips. She would hold her lips a certain way when being photographed. She was very aware of the camera."

A few years later, her old classmates were tracking her career in the movies. Clarkson was landing small roles in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and several TV series, and then acquired a cult following as the superheroine in an assortment of Roger Corman movies in which she was tortured and took revenge. In the years just prior to her death, legions of fans regularly attended sci-fi conventions to meet Clarkson, aka the Barbarian Queen, perhaps her most well-known character. Clarkson always had the most autograph hounds, with fans queuing up for hours to meet the ebullient actress. The hippie girl had become part of the vast legion of hard-working folk who make up the Hollywood proletariat. This includes the actors who appear in the assembly line of straight-to-video or DVD movies, and all the people who depend on them and their more famous counterparts for work - hairdressers, manicurists, masseurs and masseuses, body waxers, car waxers, personal trainers who take calls in their tanning beds in case someone phones with an acting gig, body doubles who get implants in order to look more like the actors they're doubling for, acting teachers, voice coaches, the sound guy who gives backrubs to everyone on the set.

These are the people who keep the entertainment industry greased. And they also keep each other psyched, pumped, and looking good. Talent is rarely a topic of discussion among them, not because they are not talented - some are - but because they are often preoccupied with what they think are the mechanics of success, a time-honoured American belief system fed by a peculiar brand of goofy optimism and a cottage industry of toothy Southern Californian salesmen like Tony Robbins who proclaim that success can be had by following certain steadfast rules. "Lana worked harder than anyone I've ever met," her friends are quick to say. "Lana was the most driven person I have ever met. She loved the word 'gotta'. I gotta do this. I gotta do that." She was the first to appear at fan conventions and the last to leave. She worked the mail. She exchanged cards so often that she was a textbook case for a psychiatric disorder endemic to Hollywood - call it compulsive networking.

"Lana was focused on becoming a star," said Dickie Jobson. By the time she turned 40, the California girl known more for her stamina than her talent was a creature of the relentless good news preached every day by the warm sunny climate with the fabulous scenery. Yes, the message was clear; with every chirpy programmed ring of the cell phone came the day's blessings: "Turn here for a new life," "Don't worry, it's all good," "There's a part for you and it's perfect!" It's no accident that towards the end, Clarkson's website was eerily evocative of Nathanael West's tales of Hollywood's hopeless dreamers, peppered with words like "breakthrough" and mantras like "I've assembled a team".

Two months before she was killed, after a long drought in which she had appeared only in downmarket TV commercials, she had landed a part in a play called Brentwood Babes by John Barons. It was about famous dead blondes, including Sharon Tate and Nicole Brown Simpson. She had been cast as her idol, Marilyn Monroe. Many actresses and models idolise Marilyn - Anna Nicole Smith, for instance, who reportedly told friends that she wanted to be buried next to Monroe in Westwood, not realising that Hugh Hefner had already bought the plot.

While Clarkson's fascination didn't involve following her idol into the afterlife, it does seem to have gone way beyond the usual. Former gossip columnist A J Benza recalls a night spent in bed with Clarkson - staring at pictures of Marilyn on her ceiling, in Monroe's old apartment in the Normandie Towers which Lana had rented. "I LOVE Marilyn," Clarkson wrote on her website. "I would love to carry on the legacy by becoming the 'Marilyn' for the New Millennium."

In a way, the beginning of the end for Clarkson started with Tom Wolfe. In 1965,Wolfe wrote a piece for New York Magazine in which he gave Phil Spector the title "The First Tycoon of Teen". Mesmerised by this Pied Piper of Pop, Wolfe was uncritical and adoring, failing to discern or point out the folly of Spector's behaviour, instead luxuriating giddily in his budding power. The article breezed through Spector's troubled childhood and early career escapades, and went on to serve as the keystone in the Spector mythology, the barrels of ink that have rendered him a "mad genius," rather than possibly - as some see it - just "mad."

Among other things, Wolfe recounted an incident in which Spector and an entourage were on a commercial flight from New York to LA. While the plane was waiting to take off, Spector had visions of an imminent crash and ordered the plane back to the gate. It went, and Spector immediately got off, followed by his posse. "He would make strange noises all the time," the songwriter Ellie Greenwich told me a few months after Clarkson died. "A propos of nothing. I was on that plane and I remember he was making those noises. He said he couldn't breathe and then suddenly it was like, 'Oh there's this crazy person on board'."

So here we have Wolfe, the man who became that era's premier American cultural observer, penning the first major public record of Phil Spector, with no examination of the reasons or the consequences of his meltdown. Was Spector schizophrenic? Was he worried about not being in control? Did anyone in his entourage say, "Calm down, Phil" or offer some other form of help? Who paid for the runway jam, if there was one? Were there other flights that were delayed as a result of Phil's sudden onset of fear?

In this hollow and misleading chronicle, these and other major questions about Spector's life were neither asked nor answered, particularly the big, screaming question: how had the eight-year-old Phil been affected by his father's suicide, an awful incident in which Benjamin Spector reportedly sat in his car in broad daylight in front of the family house and sucked carbon monoxide fumes from a hose until he died while apparently no one noticed. It sounds like a bad joke: "Hey, I'm dying over here. Yoo-hoo! Anyone listening?"

Apparently not; and thus was the only son of Bertha and Benjamin Spector thrust into the world, doomed perhaps to spend his life dealing with this weird legacy, frozen forever at the age of eight, forever angry, selfish, impulsive, manipulative, indulged, appeased, self-centred, playful, gifted, grandiose, and hurt, trying to keep people from leaving or getting too close, walling people up, in, or out and making sure everyone got the message.

Consequently, Spector has never been held publicly accountable for anything, until now, and his fortune - the result of owning the rights to the many hits that he wrote (rare in his era) - has allowed him the luxury of not having to work regularly for the past 30 years. His highly prized signature was "the Wall of Sound", a phrase of mysterious origin that refers to an iconic style of recording coined by Spector, his one-time arranger, the late Jack Nitzche, and Larry Levine, his engineer, and delivered by the fabled Wrecking Crew, a group of musicians who populated the early Spector sessions. It was characterised by the sound a lot of instruments made when played in a small studio into a few microphones during the pre-Beatles age of no-tech, and then repeatedly overdubbed and echoed until there arose a huge greasy Wagnerian pop tidal wave that wailed big and fat on primitive record players and cheap transistor radios. But not everybody sees the famous sound as carefully calculated coinage or the product of an explosive and brilliant mind. "The Wall of Sound was an accident," says one former Spector colleague. "It happened because Phil was too cheap to rent a bigger space."

And there are others who experienced something darker than music milestones behind the Wall of Sound, including members of Spector's family. For them, to paraphrase the title of Spector's first big hit, "to know him to is be really pissed off." After the death of Clarkson, Spector's adopted sons Donte, 39, and Gary, 41, appeared on various television shows, a pair of rock'n'roll Menendez brothers ambushing the old man on the airwaves.

Gary said that when he was 10, his father made him have simulated sex with one of his girlfriends. When I called him on the phone in Colorado after Clarkson's death, he elaborated on (omega) this sad tale. Spector wasn't much of a father, he said, and in fact the two boys were really raised by George Brand, Spector's late right-hand man. But there were many times when Brand could not run interference. "Sometimes, we'd stay outside for two hours waiting to be let in," Gary said. "After meals, we were locked in our rooms. There were phones in our rooms but we couldn't use them. Dad buzzed us on the phone to come down." But Gary still wanted to be like his father and become a rock'n'roll star. Spector discouraged his son. "He told me I couldn't sing," he said. At the time of Clarkson's death, Gary was living paycheck to paycheck in a small town, belting out karaoke songs - often ones produced by his father - in local bars. "I'm a ghost in my family," he told me. "That's why I spell Specter with an 'e.' "

Donte Spector told me another harrowing story. "Look at me," he said when I visited him months after his father had been arrested and taken downtown. Living hand-to-mouth in a scrappy neighbourhood in the shadows of his father's castle, he displayed track marks up and down his scrawny arms. "I'm a mess," he said, and then spoke of his boyhood with Phil and his rock-star mum, Ronnie Spector. "I ran away from home 13 times. I have been addicted to everything. I've been in the joint." Thumbing through a family photo album, he stops at a picture of Ronnie. "I act just like my father but look just like my mother. I don't think I was adopted, even though my mother says I was in her book." Donte Spector does bear a striking resemblance to his mother. In her autobiography, Be My Baby, she wrote that although Donte was adopted, Phil wanted people to think he was their actual son, forced her to wear a pillow under her clothes so she would look pregnant, and then, nine months after he told everyone a baby was on the way, sent out a birth announcement. "I don't care what they say," Donte stated. "I know I am their son."

Ronnie Spector's own story of being married to Spector is just as grim. He would rarely let her out of his sight, she said in her book. If she had to drive somewhere alone, he placed an inflated replica of himself in the passenger seat. He picked fights with men who flirted with her, she wrote, then stepped aside as his bodyguards finished off the job. Once, he took her mother down to the basement and pointed to a coffin. It was waiting for Ronnie, he said, if she did something wrong. Finally, Ronnie escaped from Spector and his Beverly Hills mansion, by cooking up a story about going for a walk with her mother and then fleeing the property, barefoot and broke.

Over the years, other women have also weighed in with their own disturbing stories, including LaToya Jackson who wrote in her 1991 memoir that she was imprisoned in Spector's living room. The Philadelphia rock photographer Stephanie Jennings told me that Spector made her carry his gun, once threatened her at gunpoint, and another time, locked her inside his house for 48 hours behind a front door deadbolted from the outside.

In 1998, Phil Spector bought the white castle with the red-laced turrets atop a hill in the town of Alhambra on the east side of Los Angeles. Built by a Basque entrepreneur, the castle is surrounded by a thick, funky jungle of palms and agave and vines, a hideaway that from below, as you wind skyward through the narrow streets of the Hispanic and Asian working-class enclave that sprawls in its shadows, looks almost medieval. Many of his music-biz homies were more surprised to hear that Spector was living in the un-chic Alhambra than that he might have possibly killed someone. They knew of his history of violent eruptions, including such pieces of rock legend as "the time Phil Spector pulled a gun on John Lennon", "the time Phil Spector pulled a gun on Leonard Cohen", "the time Phil Spector pulled a gun on DeeDee Ramone", and "the time Phil Spector pulled a gun on Stevie Wonder" - a blind man! "I always knew he was weird," went the buzz, "but what's he doing on that side of town?"

At 58, Spector was starting over, taking advantage of the endless possibility that is Los Angeles. By all accounts, he had cleaned up his act after years of partying, living and faring well for the few years prior to Clarkson's death, possibly even approaching - for a man who had battled depression, asthma, diabetes, baldness, and being short (he's 5ft 7in) for decades - the outer fringes of occasional happiness. He was dating Nancy Sinatra and others, held weekly salons for a group of old friends including writers, legendary disc jockeys from the 1950s, and aging R&B characters, was back in the studio, started having his famous bowling parties again, to which he invited everyone from famous producers to dental assistants. "I am the black guy saying OJ did not do this crime," Spector's old friend Denny Bruce told me shortly after it happened. "He just could not have done it."

A few weeks before Clarkson was killed, Spector started drinking again. And as he told an interviewer a few days before the murder, he had stopped taking medication for schizophrenia. On the night of the murder, Spector hit various restaurants with several different women, and then arrived at the House of Blues just as it was closing, about two in the morning.

Inside the VIP Room, Judas Priest's Rob Halford - just a year or two out of the closet - was screaming. He was always screaming. Was he louder now? Some people thought so. Spector had been enjoying a bit of a renaissance as a producer, thanks to his then 20-year-old daughter Nicole, who had hooked him up with Starsailor, the Vines, and Coldplay. But here was the former Judas Priest frontman belting out big-time noise, a living rebuke to Spector, a one-man wall of sound. "Christ," Spector may have thought, "I was done before and now I'm really done."

As best he could under the high-wattage noise, he chatted with Clarkson. As the evening came to a close, Spector headed for the men's room and Clarkson for the elevator where she waited for Spector - not because they had a plan, apparently, but because it was part of her job. Seeing that Clarkson was waiting in the elevator, Spector skipped his visit to the can and joined her. "I'll walk you to your car, Mr Spector," she reportedly said as the doors closed and the pair descended to the parking lot. They must have made a strange sight, towering beauty and diminutive beast, Lana Clarkson who wanted more than anything to be famous, and Phil Spector, who was, a long time ago. And so they headed for his castle on the far side of town, each wanting something from the other, perhaps pretending not to be lonely.

A likely scenario is this: once Clarkson and Spector had entered his castle, Spector might have done what he's done a thousand other times - show off the guitar that John Lennon gave him. And Clarkson - after 20 years of acting in Hollywood - would have had the right reaction, and it would also be safe to say that Spector might have offered her a drink, that he wanted to keep the party going, because he hated it when people left. "Mr Spector," Clarkson might have joked, lapsing into Marilynspeak, "I mean Phil... would you like to see my impression of Little Richard?" For that was the new arrow in her quiver. Now this may not have been what the aging Tycoon of Teen had desired, but "Sure," he might have said, no doubt amused, perhaps even baffled - this bombshell is going to do 'Tutti Frutti'? What the hell. Now maybe I can say I have seen everything.

And then it was his turn to have the right reaction and - after a lifetime of people cramming tapes into his pocket and saying, "Mr Spector, this is the best demo you've ever heard, Mr Spector" - and so he listened until they both stumbled drunk and laughing to the bar where all the famous people posing with Spector were framed on the wall and maybe they had another drink... Yes, it would be safe to say that this nocturnal Hollywood pair, together after the bars had closed and all creatures great and small had retreated together or alone to their respective corners, connected in some weird way and then it was time for beauty to go, because "Mr Spector, I'm sure you understand, I've got a lot of work to do, I'm meeting with my assistant, and I have a yoga class, and then there's my infomercial," and Spector might have said, "Sure you do," and then we can assume that beauty's kiss did not calm beast's demons, only roused them, and we can imagine how he segued quickly into a rage triggered by another person trying to leave, another echo perhaps of his father's suicide, we can even see him getting a gun and pointing it because he's done it before and "Nobody walks out on Phil Spector, don't you know Phil Spector can't be alone?"

And then the gun goes off - perhaps accidentally, too fast for any struggle; in any case, Clarkson wouldn't hurt a bug, her friends say - and then blood and teeth on the marble floor, a pretty girl in requisite hostess clothing - black dress, black nylons, and black shoes - slumped in a chair with a fatal shot to the mouth, a leopard-print purse with a black strap slung over her right shoulder, a two-inch blue-steel Colt with five live rounds and a spent .38 cartridge under her left leg - and then the driver - not the usual one - calling the cops and then there they were, subduing the Tycoon of Teen with a taser gun and taking him downtown.

On 10 January 2003, Lana Clarkson was fired from the cast of Brentwood Blondes. "She kept coming in with more demands," John Barons told me. " 'No, Lana, I cannot get you a $7,000 gold-lamé gown. And we cannot drive to the Valley to rent one.' She looked at me and said, 'Do you want to replace me? No problem.' I felt bad because she said she was helping her mother and sister and they were not doing well financially. Over Christmas she said that she had a rotten time with her dysfunctional family. I got the impression she was turning to older men for help."

A few days after she died, Barons received a note from Clarkson on a card with a drawing of palm trees. "Thank you, John, for bringing Marilyn to life for me in such a beautiful way. All the best of luck with the show... your dreams! Love, Lana." Now, she has been written into the play as herself - another famous dead blonde.

And Spector has been through three lawyers; his current defender is Bruce Cutler, who represented "The Dapper Don," John Gotti, until he was kicked off the case for a conflict of interest. Gotti, a guy who cruised on myth until the truth got louder, went down in the end. As they have a way of doing, things have now caught up with Spector - at the very least, no longer are people amused by his violent past; the judge has pulled the curtain on "the Tycoon of Teen" and all the equally giddy coverage that it continues to spawn, ruling that the stuff of legend - the guns, the threats - can be used as evidence against him. But when beast dragged beauty back to his lair on that winter night in 2003, little did she know that perhaps beast could not abide one more door closing, one more pair of footsteps skittering away, that there was much to fear.