It was like Through the Keyhole meets America’s Most Wanted. But in this peculiar episode of celebrity justice, the accused star, arm-in-arm with his glamorous young wife, greeted the snoopers at the door to his palatial home.
Once again, Phil Spector was where he likes to be, at the centre of attention. The next morning his face and his mansion graced the front pages. But the occasion was not the sort of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame event that the legendary 1960s record producer used to frequent. Instead, Spector opened the door of his home to the jury in his trial on charges of second degree murder.
The 12 members of the jury, plus six alternates, prosecution and defence teams, Judge Larry Fidler, numerous officers from various law enforcement agencies and one reporter had come to visit the scene of the death of Lana Clarkson. The 40-year-old actor was found dead with a single gunshot wound to the mouth in February 2003, her body slumped in an ornate Louis XIV chair in the vestibule to ”Phil Spector’s Pyrenees Castle”, as the sign outside the hilltop estate so proudly declares.
Once inside, the jurors wasted little time in experiencing the grandeur of Spector’s home. They asked to go upstairs — a request denied by the judge — they admired the Picasso etching, and then four of them plonked themselves down in a reproduction of the chair in which Clarkson died and mimicked the late actor’s death pose.
Spector, dressed in long-sleeved T-shirt, sweatpants and sandals, watched the visitors enter his home. The realisation will once again have dawned that his renown has fallen a long way since the days when Wall of Sound was a universally understood term and he was rock ‘n’ roll royalty.
Despite a murder trial featuring a glamorous blonde alleged victim, colourful experts deploying bizarre accents and a parade of witnesses who seem to have been summoned from a noir casting agency, Spector’s trial has failed to take off. Tragically, in very different ways for both the dead woman and the accused, nobody seems to care.
”This case has been like the B-movies that Lana Clarkson starred in,” said Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson. ”It’s a celebrity case because it’s the only one around right now but there’s just not that much interest. Spector can’t get attention even at the centre of a murder case. He’s not OJ or Michael Jackson, he’s not even Robert Blake.”
The nadir in Spector’s trial came in another courtroom in another building in downtown Los Angeles. That was the incarceration, release and re-incarceration of Paris Hilton. The media storm surrounding Hilton’s case pushed the already peripheral Spector trial into darkness.
As the early days of the prosecution case, which saw a succession of faded beauties relate how Spector had once threatened them with a gun, gave way to the defence and an obsession with blood spatter evidence, so public interest dwindled. Court TV stopped broadcasting the trial live, and instead offered streamed video on its website.
Through it all, Spector has sat largely impassive in courtroom 9-313. A study in eccentric genius, he has been immaculately dressed each day, sporting a variety of frock coats and pocket handkerchiefs, his hands shaking, his lizard gaze observing proceedings. Like some of the jurors and many of the spectators, Spector has found much of the proceedings tedious, and accordingly has nodded off.
At times the proceedings, once they stray from the key defence thesis that the blood spatter found on Spector’s jacket demonstrates that he was standing too far away from Clarkson to have pulled the trigger, can turn lively.
Take Punkin Pie and Babydoll Gibson, groupie and madam respectively, who came to court at the request of the defence to profess their great friendship for Clarkson while simultaneously sullying her memory by association.
Then there was the great forensic expert Henry Lee, who had his reputation sullied when Judge Fidler agreed with the prosecution that Lee had removed a potentially crucial piece of evidence from the crime scene, and had never disclosed its existence to prosecutors. Dr Lee, who found fame like so many others in the Los Angeles legal community at the OJ Simpson trial, may now not appear for the defence.
Another player who was expected to help determine the outcome of the trial, defence attorney Bruce Cutler, has also disappeared from sight. The New York lawyer was sidelined by Spector following a disastrous opening statement that merely served to show his lack of familiarity with both the case and the California legal system.
In the last two weeks, however, things have started to perk up. The court saw Clarkson’s show reel, Lana Unleashed. A dispiriting array of impersonations and routines — including a blacked-up Clarkson performing a skit about Little Richard — Lana Unleashed demonstrated not only that Clarkson would never be A-list but also served to articulate the sad optimism of someone who believed in the Hollywood dream.
After Lana Unleashed, the jury met a real slice of A-list Hollywood when Transformers director Michael Bay took the stand for the prosecution to deny an allegation that Clarkson was depressed because he had snubbed her at a party. He hadn’t seen her, he said. Just to remind anyone which town this was, one of the jurors, an executive for a Hollywood production company, was later questioned by Judge Fidler about his friendship with the director. He was allowed to stay on the panel.
Next week the prosecution promises to end with another former lover and colleague, an Englishwoman named Devra Robitaille, who says Spector once held a gun to her head.
The trial now goes into what are predicted to be its final two weeks. If found guilty, Spector faces 15 years to life in prison.
Backstory
Jurors are being asked to decide if Phil Spector was responsible for the death of Lana Clarkson (40) who was found by police slumped dead in a chair, her teeth blown out by a single gunshot to her mouth. Clarkson, who was best known as the star of Roger Corman’s cult film Barbarian Queen, was working as a hostess at the House of Blues in Los Angeles, when she went home with Spector (67) the night she died. A chauffeur, who drove them to Spector’s mansion, has told of hearing a gunshot and seeing Spector emerge from the house holding a gun and declaring: ”I think I killed somebody.” In an email to friends, Spector called the death ”an accidental suicide”. It took eight months of investigation before authorities charged him. – Guardian Unlimited Â