The Svengali And The Starlet

An eccentric, rich has-been tycoon. A buxom, blond B-movie actress. A call to the cops by the chauffeur. A shooting death in a hilltop mansion. It's a 1940s L.A. noir movie--about all it needs is the shadow of Venetian blinds--but it happened last week. The legendary producer Phil Spector and the struggling ex-starlet Lana Clarkson crossed paths at the House of Blues, on Sunset Strip, in the early hours of last Monday morning; shortly after 5 a.m. police found the six-foot-tall actress lying in a pool of blood in the foyer of Spector's 33-room mansion, the Pyrenees Castle. She'd reportedly been shot in the head. And they found Spector standing there. According to police, he struggled, was restrained and led away, disheveled and sweaty, in handcuffs; he was booked on suspicion of murder, and released on a $1 mil-lion bond. After a search of the mansion, Capt. Frank Merriman, head of the L.A. County sheriff's homicide unit, told NEWSWEEK, "We recovered a gun that we believe was the weapon involved."

If this is indeed a case of murder, it may even top the arrest of Robert Blake in terms of sheer L.A. weirdness. Clarkson, 40, was an exceptionally beautiful woman; the news photo of Spector, 62, slouching in the back of the police van makes him look like Gollum. They may have hooked up in the House of Blues's VIP lounge, an upstairs space with Buddhist artifacts, Indian tapestries and music-industry types in graying ponytails. Even the crowd there is slightly younger than that at Dan Tana's, a celebrity steakhouse where Spector was seen just hours before Clarkson's death, with a date--a different woman, said to be a waitress. He requested his usual spot away from the door, table No. 4, and dropped a $500 tip on a $55 bill. This is "a little higher than usual," according to Mike Miljkovic, Dan Tana's general manager. "Normal is about $400."

He showed up at the House of Blues around last call, probably about the time that Clarkson--newly employed as a hostess at the club--was getting off work. The two left together about 2:30 a.m., and drove east to Spector's mansion atop a hill in the unglamorous suburb of Alhambra. Clarkson must have thought the 30-minute ride, past ranch houses and minimalls, was unremarkable. Spector's driver waited out in the black Mercedes while the two were in the house. Eventually the driver called 911 to report the sound of a gunshot.

Phil Spector and Lana Clarkson had more in common than they were likely to have discovered in what's assumed to be their three-hour acquaintance. Each was an exile from L.A.'s elusive center of glamour and power. Spector had been there; Clarkson would never get there. Spector was one of pop music's pioneering geniuses: while still in his 20s, he was the Svengali behind such '60s hits as the Crystals' "He's a Rebel," the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" and the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'." His "wall of sound" productions layered instrument over instrument behind the singers, making each song a densely textured mini-opera. He was a touchy perfectionist; after the commercial failure of Ike and Tina Turner's critically admired "River Deep--Mountain High" in 1969, he closed his record label and began to retreat from the music scene.

He worked on the Beatles' "Let It Be" and John Lennon's "Imagine," but his reputation for bizarre behavior--especially drinking and brandishing guns at people--seemed to outlast his will to create. He fired a bullet into the studio ceiling when recording with Lennon in the early '70s. He pulled a gun on the Ramones while working on their 1980 "End of the Century." Last October, Spector did his first production in 20 years, after his daughter turned him on to the British group Starsailor; he was gone in a month and the band finished the album with an engineer. When last week's news came out, his ex-wife Ronnie Spector (the Ronettes' lead singer) released this statement: "I can only say that when I left him in the early '70s, I knew that if I didn't leave at the time, I was going to die there."

Lana Clarkson had acted in such '80s chixploitation flicks as "Amazon Women on the Moon" and cult director Roger Corman's "Barbarian Queen." She later made a decent living modeling for Playtex and Kmart and making appearances at comic-book conventions. Last year things began to go downhill after she broke her wrist and couldn't work. She started her own company, Living Doll Productions, which offered autographed copies of her photos, movies and DVDs; it had a fancy suite address, but it was actually a post-office box in a mini-mall around the corner from her Venice Beach bungalow. Last month she had to take her first day job in 20 years. Hostessing at the House of Blues seemed to be a new low, but she was characteristically cheerful about it. According to her modeling agent, Nick Terzian, she jokingly referred to her new occupation as senior vice president/door hostess. "She said, 'I'm out all the time with my friends in Hollywood anyway--I might as well hang out with them and get paid'." Her biggest complaint was sore feet from all those hours in heels.

The resilient Clarkson seemed to have a smile for the geekiest comics conventioneer. Spector, on the other hand, seemed so insecure that he obsessively checked his image in the mirror. Friends say that he'd become more social lately, and hadn't had a drink for three years. "He's not a recluse," says one old friend, musician David Kessel, son of the jazz great Barney Kessel. "I see him. We e-mail. I go to the bowling party he has on Labor Day every year. His dentist even comes." Yet in a recent interview, Spector told London's Daily Telegraph that he was "probably insane. I probably have devils inside." He said he'd been taking medication for schizophrenia, "but I wouldn't say I'm schizophrenic."

Why would Clarkson leave a club with this brilliant, famous, but notoriously strange man whom, as far as we know now, she'd met only an hour or so before? And what exactly happened in the foyer of his hilltop mansion? So far Spector refuses to talk to police investigators, let alone the press, and has hired lawyer Robert Shapiro, of O. J. Simpson's defense team. The Los Angeles County coroner's office has performed an autopsy on Clarkson's body, but it has declined to reveal the findings at the request of investigators. As of now, it's not even a murder case. Prosecutors must wait to decide exactly what charges may be filed against Spector, and they'll need the results of forensic testing--blood and ballistics--before taking any case to the district attorney. If the case is strong enough, the D.A. will file charges shortly before Spector's scheduled hearing on March 3, and he'll be required to plead guilty or not guilty. And somewhere, somebody's probably already writing the movie.