‘When I was with Phil, I couldn’t get out’
Ronnie Spector tells Chris Harvey about her brilliant, abusive husband, shopping with John Lennon and missing Amy Winehouse
‘All those years I went through hell only made me stronger,” says Ronnie Spector. The lead singer of The Ronettes, who lived through a frightening, controlling marriage to producer Phil Spector and came out the other side, is now 75. When she steps out on stage in the UK this month to sing their classic hits, it will be 55 years since she first performed here, in January 1964. Back then, The Ronettes were an overnight sensation. “The crowds went crazy,” she says. “It felt like I was in a dream.”
One song she will surely play is her cover of Amy Winehouse’s Back
to Black. Winehouse acknowledged a huge stylistic debt to Ronnie, in both her voice and her look. “I was devastated when she passed,” Ronnie says. Winehouse died of alcohol poisoning in 2011. “I wish, I wish I could have talked to Amy about [her relationship to drink], but sometimes it’s too late.” She points out that Winehouse was 27 and married – her husband Blake Fielder-civil told a tabloid in 2008 that he introduced the singer to crack cocaine and heroin. “I can’t blame her mother, but I can blame that husband,” she adds.
“When I was with Phil, I couldn’t get out, but you have to find a way, and you have to find a person you trust and unfortunately Amy didn’t have that. All the artists I’ve seen who’ve gone down the drain, they didn’t have anyone who loved them for them, not their money or glory or glamour.”
The situation with Spector was complex. He turned The Ronettes into stars; later he would deliberately ruin Ronnie’s career. The very first time the teenaged Veronica Bennett had auditioned for him, she had only sung one line when he jumped up and shouted: “Stop! That is the voice I’ve been looking for!” It was the beginning of a love affair between the girl from Spanish Harlem and the 23-year-old millionaire producer (now serving 19 years to life for the 2003 murder of actress Lana Clarkson). Their love would give us one of the greatest pop singles of all time and become a living nightmare for Ronnie.
Spector told her he would write a million-seller for her and the group she had formed with her sister Estelle and their cousin Nedra Talley. It was Be
My Baby (by Spector, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry) and it went straight to number one. Its famous bass-drum opening is the doorway into Spector’s “Wall of Sound”, an echo chamber of multiple guitars, drums, pianos and orchestral instruments all playing at once. But when Ronnie’s voice enters, with that New York sidewalk accent – “and if I had the chance, I’d nevuh letyoo go” – it is melting with sex and tenderness. The girls looked and danced that way, too. Big hair, tight skirts, “bad girl” attitude.
Later, the track would have a second lease of life when it was used in the soundtrack of Dirty Dancing. In its recording, though, was a harbinger of doom. Spector flew Ronnie out to LA’S Gold Star studios, where they would also make the classic singles (The Best
Part of ) Breakin’ Up and Walking in the
Rain. Then Spector bought a house in Beverly Hills. “Now I know why,” Ronnie tells me over the phone from the US. “He got me away from my family and all my friends.”
On April 14 1968, Ronnie spent her wedding night on the bathroom floor of their LA mansion, shivering in a sheer nightgown, with the door locked in fear of her new husband, who had driven over to see his mother, and returned, slamming doors and screaming, “You b----! You just want my money.”
He would keep his new wife a virtual prisoner for years, dangling a dream of a solo career – until she had to literally run away from him, in 1972.
Ronnie is a survivor, but her voice is warm when we speak, and the relief of her escape from Spector is still real, still vivid. I’ve been told not to ask her about him, but she talks about him anyway.
There had been warning signs with Spector. One of Ronnie’s closest friends at the time was Cher, who sang backing vocals on Be My Baby.
She was the girlfriend of Sonny Bono, who was Spector’s assistant.
“When I first saw this skinny young kid with her long black hair and thick mascara,” Ronnie wrote in her autobiography, “I just assumed she was a call girl from the hotel.”
“I did think that,” she laughs to me, “she was, like, 17. I wasn’t used to a girl that age living with a guy. But she was the sweetest girl. She was the one who would tell me, ‘Ronnie, Phil is a little crazy.’ I said, ‘Wait, Sonny is no dreamboat,’ but what she was really saying was how possessive Phil was.”
Ronnie’s forthcoming return to the UK brings up memories of the British bands she spent time with. On the 1964 tour, she reminds me, The Rolling Stones were their opening act. But it was The Beatles who were besotted with The Ronettes. When they met at a party, Ronnie admits: “They knew us, but we didn’t know them.”
She and John Lennon became close, although she was already dating Spector and Lennon was still married to Cynthia. (Spector was married, too, but was hiding it from her.) “There was no hanky-panky,” she says. “Maybe a little kissing. He took me around London to see all the shops and to buy boots, but it was very innocent.” Ronnie by then was 20, but still chaperoned by her mother.
Later, when Beatlemania hit after the Fab Four flew to the US, Ronnie would take them out for ribs in Harlem. They had barely been able to leave their suite at the Plaza hotel for their own safety. When she visited them there, though, Lennon took Ronnie into a room where a crowd watched a member of the band’s entourage have sex with a young woman. “That scene was shocking even then,” she says. As he had in London, Lennon would try to seduce her. As she had in London, she resisted. “John called me the next day because he wanted to apologise. They were really nice guys, but they got huge so fast.”
In 1966, The Beatles would invite The Ronettes to open for them on what would turn out to be the last-ever Beatles tour. Spector told her he was planning to record her at the same time and it was either “them or me”. She chose the man she loved, and her cousin stood in for her on the tour. The recording sessions, though, were a mirage.
“I regretted it,” she says, “because I gave up my career at its peak, not knowing I was giving it up.”
Ronnie’s mother was half African-american, half Cherokee, her father Irish. When the group played on
American Bandstand in 1963, presenter Dick Clark introduced them as “Native American music” and seemed surprised they could speak English. “He thought we were Cherokee because he saw my mother standing there and she had the high cheekbones,” Ronnie says. She remembers her grandmother “cooking up Native American food”.
Her parents separated in her teens because of her father’s alcoholism. Ronnie, too, began drinking during the dark days of her marriage. “I would hold my nose and drink it down, so I could go to sleep and get away from his yelling. When I came back to New York, I got right back into singing, I never thought about drinking.”
Ronnie’s escape from her marriage in June 1972 happened after she and her mother had a physical fight with Spector. He told her he had a gold, glass-topped coffin ready for her so he could “keep an eye on her after she’s dead”. She snuck away from the house barefoot, after saying goodbye to their two-year-old adopted son, Donte, and left Spector behind forever. “My mother got me out of there,” she says.
Her career never scaled the heights it once had, but Ronnie began performing with a reconfigured Ronettes – minus her cousin and her sister, who would later develop schizophrenia (she died in 2009). She released a number of singles during the Seventies, and in 1980, her first solo album, Siren. In the same year, she met her future husband Jonathan Greenfield, who at 21 to her 36, was 15 years her junior. They’ve now been married for 35 years and have two grown-up sons.
“You have to have someone in your life who is an enabler,” she says. Greenfield would become Ronnie’s manager, and she has continued to release solo albums, including 2016’s English Heart.
Ronnie Spector has the long view. I ask her if it is harder for older women than it is for men in the music industry? “I think it’s always been harder for women than it is for men. Back in the Fifties all you had were men, men producers, men writers, men composers,” she says.
“I did a lot of writing [on the songs] that I never got credit for and I didn’t know that I was supposed to get credit. The Metoo movement is now but I’ve felt that way all my life.” Ronnie Spector and the Ronettes play the Roundhouse, London NW1, on Jan 27. Details: 0300 6789 222; roundhouse.org.uk
‘All these artists, like Amy, I’ve seen go down the drain, they didn’t have anyone who loved them for them, not their money or glory or glamour’