The televised trial for murder of pop's most famous producer - Phil Spector - begins next week. Patricia Danaherreports from Los Angeles.
HIL Spector, the prodigy who invented the famous "Wall of Sound" musical technique and was hailed as the "Tycoon of Teen" at 21, could be facing a very long stretch behind prison walls when his murder trial concludes later this year. It opens in Los Angeles next Monday, four years after 40-year-old actress Lana Clarkson was found shot dead at his Hollywood home.
The trial itself promises to be a lurid spectacle - a Los Angeles judge ruled last month that it ought to be televised, claiming somewhat bizarrely "we have to get beyond OJ Simpson". So far Spector (67) has gone through three attorneys, including Robert Shapiro who was a member of OJ Simpson's notorious "dream team". Shapiro got him out on $1m bail after he was indicted in late 2003, and Spector is now also suing Shapiro for refusing to return his $1 million retainer. He is currently represented by Bruce Cutler, who was for many years the lawyer for John Gotti, the New York city mafia boss.
"The bigger the media circus surrounding this trial, the better the chance Spector has of getting off," says Bill Grantham, an Irish entertainment lawyer who previously represented one of Michael Jackson's bodyguards.
When he was arrested Spector is alleged to have said "I didn't mean to shoot her" and there has been legal argument about the admissibility of this comment, with one lawyer arguing that it should be thrown out as inadmissible because Spector was suffering from withdrawal symptoms from prescription drugs. Late last year a judge ruled the comment admissible, as well as comments made in an interview a few weeks before Clarkson's murder, where Spector described himself as "relatively insane".
In spite of his musical brilliance and prodigious output and influence on so many great artists, Spector's behaviour has been at the very mildest, unpredictable since 1970, when he became a recluse and began to collect guns.
There is a joke in Hollywood that Phil Spector is the only famous personality whose bodyguards are hired to protect others from him, rather than the other way around.
His ex-wife Ronnie, whom he produced in The Ronettes, claimed that she was kept locked in the house for long periods and that he hid her shoes to prevent her from even walking outside on the grounds. In a book which she wrote after their divorce, she claimed he kept a gold coffin with a glass top in the basement of their house, he said he would kill and display her there if she ever left him. His son has also claimed he was kept locked in a room with just a pot to use as a toilet.
Spector threatened several other artists with whom he worked, at gunpoint. He held a loaded gun to Leonard Cohen's head during the recording of Death of a Ladies Man, which he produced. He fired a gun in the studio while recording John Lennon's album Rock 'n' Roll.
During one notorious recording session with The Ramones, he held a gun to the head of Dee Dee Ramone to persuade him to play bass guitar to a particular Spector specification. The band said he forced them to play Rock and Roll High School for eight hours straight. Johnny Ramone remarked somewhat sanguinely later that "it was a positive learning experience and that chord does sound really good".
The judge in this trial also recently ruled that Spector's previous firearms convictions should be excluded on the grounds that they are too old.
While this might put a dent in some arguments the prosecution had hoped to use, they will be able to use the evidence of four women who are willing to testify that they were each threatened by Spector at gunpoint, after he had been drinking and they had rejected his sexual advances. California courts do not always admit what is called "propensity evidence", as it is argued that its admission can influence juries in their consideration of a current trial.
Hollywood and Los Angeles are much more conservative places today than when Phil Spector was running rampant in the 1960s. But in the lead-up to the trial, Angelenos I spoke to expressed a kind of weary resignation that only now was the trial happening; many had expected that there would just be endless legal arguments and delays, which might allow Spector to die before a trial would be ready to proceed.
"He's an old man now, I suppose you could say, and there has been some pretty strong stuff said about him down through the years," said Jake Kindall (55). "He deserves the chance to state his case, no doubt. I hope the Clarkson family can get some relief from the trial happening," he said.
Phil Spector and Lana Clarkson were the only people in his California mansion when she died. They had met that evening for the first time in the bar where she worked, and she went back home with him. Spector is now claiming it was suicide, and his defence team will be attempting to show on live television how this might have been the case.
