Shot On Location

By Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

The heavy-metal concert had already ended at West Hollywood's House of Blues. But upstairs, in the nightclub's Foundation Room, the party rocked on. The VIP area, decked out in opium-den chic, is where show-biz types go to guzzle champagne in roped-off security. Unfortunately, by the time rock-music pioneer Phil Spector met B-movie actress Lana Clarkson there, the careers of both had seen better days: he was a legendary has-been; she had been a wannabe for way too long. The encounter would prove fatal.

Spector arrived at the club after a late dinner-and-Daiquiri date with another woman. The first superstar record producer and a millionaire at 21, Spector, now 62, was the mad genius who perfected the pop single with his lavishly textured "wall of sound" studio technique, crafting hits for the Ronettes, the Beatles, Ike and Tina Turner and the Righteous Brothers, among others. But drugs, booze and paranoia ended the chart-topping reign of the man Tom Wolfe called the "first tycoon of teen." Spector went into seclusion for years and took to running around his hilltop mansion in a Batman costume. Recently he was said to have cleaned up his act. Few were aware, however, that late last summer Spector fired the bodyguard tasked with keeping him off alcohol. At the House of Blues, Spector was drinking.

Clarkson gravitated toward him by nature and by duty. She'd just been hired as a hostess in the VIP area, and she was also a nonstop networker. "She was hyper--30 decibels loud, 90 miles a minute, always trying to get something going," says ex-boyfriend Robert Hall. "Lana wanted to be 'in the scene' so she could meet someone to help her along." Her website exhibits photos of her with soap-opera actors as well as with older stars like Kirk Douglas and Paul Newman. But her screen credits (Barbarian Queen) were not up to that level. Friends described her as always ready to serve as "arm candy"--that is, a pretty date--to industry players, in hopes of landing a role, selling a screenplay idea or hustling a job on a commercial. Says Hall: "She was positive on the outside, but in the past few years she struggled to make car payments." And she had entered her 40s.

The meeting at the House of Blues was brief. At around 2:30 a.m., Clarkson accompanied Spector to his car to drive off to his $1.1 million castle-like mansion in the Los Angeles suburb of Alhambra. Less than three hours later, she was dead, shot in the head, her body lying in a pool of blood in his castle's foyer, a cavernous, wood-paneled, red-carpeted hallway with two suits of medieval armor standing sentry. Spector's driver called the police, who arrived in minutes. The producer's attorney, Robert Shapiro, of O.J. Simpson fame, declined to comment on the case. Charged with murder, Spector was released on $1 million bail.

In a recent interview with a British journalist, Spector disclosed that he has been taking medication for "schizophrenia" and often battled the "devils inside [my] tortured soul." Still, the arrest was a shock to many who felt Spector had mellowed. "The last three years, he's been as straight as any guy could be," says his friend Marvin Mitchelson, the divorce attorney. Adds a music exec who knows Spector: "I would have expected this 20 or 30 years ago, but not now."

Spector threatened people with guns throughout the 1970s and '80s. Sessions with artists from John Lennon to Leonard Cohen to the Ramones were interrupted by Spector's menacing gunplay. "He would change clothes four times a day," the late songwriter Doc Pomus told Spector biographer Mark Ribowsky, "and each time he'd have a different gun to match the outfit." After marrying Ronnie Bennett of the Ronettes, one of the biggest stars he created, Spector showed her mother a glass coffin in his basement and said if Ronnie ever left him, he would kill her and display her body like Snow White's. They divorced in 1974.

Spector's life was so bizarre that Tom Cruise once optioned it for a movie. But the project was dropped after director-writer Cameron Crowe couldn't come up with a satisfying ending. --By Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles