Where else to meet Ronnie Spector, the Sixties girl-group icon, but in the ladies loos? The woman who once boasted
the Rolling Stones as her opening act is primping her hair in the mirror, an
enormous and fragrant mane bigger than her torso. A telltale pack of
Marlboro cigarettes rests on the windowsill.
She’s 70 years old and the sexiest person I’ve ever interviewed, an
irrepressible wiggle in her hips, throaty
giggles bubbling out of her. There’s so much vivacity to her that it seems impossible that she could have been shut away in one of the most nightmarish marriages in the history of showbusiness as Phil Spector’s wife.
giggles bubbling out of her. There’s so much vivacity to her that it seems impossible that she could have been shut away in one of the most nightmarish marriages in the history of showbusiness as Phil Spector’s wife.
Having divorced, remarried, and endured a 15-year legal battle against her
ex-husband over unpaid royalties which she finally won, she’s now as adored
for her chutzpah as for her hits. Beyond the Beehive, which has its British
premiere in London this weekend, is her life story on stage – a mix of songs
and stories from her career – and she seems as thrilled as a teenager to be
performing again.
“People are very interested in all my ins and outs and ups and downs and
Beatles and Stones,” she says, settling into a sofa in a Manhattan rehearsal
studio on a snowy Thursday night. “The first time we went to the UK it meant
everything to us because we knew we had made it.”
When the Ronettes landed in London in 1964 with their tight harmonies and even
tighter dresses, there was hysteria and the 20-year-old lead singer with the
remarkable voice, who was already dating Phil Spector, had Keith Richards
and John Lennon chasing after her.
“It was very scary, because I really liked John Lennon and I was saying, ‘Oh my god I’ve got to think about Phil’. John really had a big crush on me. I’ll never forget sitting on the windowsill, looking out on the lights and I said, ‘London is so beautiful’. And he said, ‘you sure are’, because he was looking at me. It made me want to cry, because I really felt such a star then. That moment, I knew I’d made
But as she began to realise her potential, so did her possessive boyfriend and he was as horrified as she was elated. Incensed not just by the attention of the Stones and the Beatles, but by the hordes of adoring young men the Ronettes drew wherever they went, after their marriage in 1968, Phil Spector pulled her from the limelight and imprisoned her in his California mansion. The only time Spector allowed her to leave was once a month, “to go get my feminine stuff, if you catch my drift”. If she was gone longer than 20 minutes he’d send a bodyguard.
He’d scream at her so violently, she says, that she eventually became mute: “The last year of my marriage I didn’t talk at all. Because if I said anything he’d yell at me, so why say anything. I was a scared little girl from Spanish Harlem living in this mansion with five servants, not knowing what to do with any of it. I cried every night I was married.”
Of all the privations he subjected her to, not singing was the hardest: “I’d
think, ‘Why aren’t I on that stage, where’s the audience?’ I was craving
it.” Her voice crumples with emotion and I make a gesture of sympathy. “It’s
OK,” she says, “I go through it every night when I do my show. I get
emotional, I can’t help it.”
Finally, in the summer of 1972, her worried mother paid a visit. “She said, ‘honey, you’re going to die here’. She knew.” The two of them stayed up for three days and nights meticulously planning her escape. Spector often hid her shoes so she left barefoot in order to not to arouse his suspicions. His parting words (not that he knew it) were directed to her mother: “Now Mrs Bennett don’t let Veronica step on anything sharp.”
Veronica Yvette Bennett was born in Spanish Harlem in 1943 to an Irish father and half African-American, half Cherokee mother with an enormous extended family.
She remembers being eight and singing in the lobby of her grandmother’s building, whose high ceilings produced a gratifying echo. More gratifying, though, was the response from her cousins.
“They were going insane – ‘Ronnie, Ronnie, you’re the one, you’ve got it!’ And I did have it. But my parents couldn’t afford to send me to singing lessons.”
it.” nstead, she’d go home from school and play records – Frankie Lymon, Frankie Valli, The Schoolboys – and learn them in their entirety. When her parents realised she was doing this every night rather than any homework her mother struck a deal.
“She said, ‘I’m going to put you at the Apollo. And then we’ll see how good you are.’ ”
The legendary Harlem music hall was owned by Frank Schiffman, whose son, Bobby, happened to have a crush on her mother who worked as a waitress in a café next door. Through him, she was able to get Ronnie, her sister Estelle and her cousin Nedra a slot.
Apollo audiences were notoriously unforgiving – egg hurling was de rigueur. Not that night, though. They loved Ronnie’s voice and, as she says: “That was my key – I knew I was good.”
Eventually, they were signed to Colpix Records in 1961 as the Darling Sisters. An aunt made their first outfits – dresses fringed on the back, “so when we turned our backs to the audience and shook like that”, she wiggles in her seat, “the crowd would go nuts”.
A radio hit, however, eluded them. That changed when, with one audacious phone call to his office, Estelle got them signed to Phil Spector’s Philles label in 1963.
There are some songs that sound as though they’ve been dispatched, fully formed and perfect from some higher place. Be My Baby, the Ronettes’ first hit that year – a song that Brian Wilson claims to have listened to 100 times every day – remains indelible.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” she says, “I never get sick of singing,” – and the music bursts out of her – “be my little baby!” “I mean, that’s me!”
“It was very scary, because I really liked John Lennon and I was saying, ‘Oh my god I’ve got to think about Phil’. John really had a big crush on me. I’ll never forget sitting on the windowsill, looking out on the lights and I said, ‘London is so beautiful’. And he said, ‘you sure are’, because he was looking at me. It made me want to cry, because I really felt such a star then. That moment, I knew I’d made
But as she began to realise her potential, so did her possessive boyfriend and he was as horrified as she was elated. Incensed not just by the attention of the Stones and the Beatles, but by the hordes of adoring young men the Ronettes drew wherever they went, after their marriage in 1968, Phil Spector pulled her from the limelight and imprisoned her in his California mansion. The only time Spector allowed her to leave was once a month, “to go get my feminine stuff, if you catch my drift”. If she was gone longer than 20 minutes he’d send a bodyguard.
He’d scream at her so violently, she says, that she eventually became mute: “The last year of my marriage I didn’t talk at all. Because if I said anything he’d yell at me, so why say anything. I was a scared little girl from Spanish Harlem living in this mansion with five servants, not knowing what to do with any of it. I cried every night I was married.”
Finally, in the summer of 1972, her worried mother paid a visit. “She said, ‘honey, you’re going to die here’. She knew.” The two of them stayed up for three days and nights meticulously planning her escape. Spector often hid her shoes so she left barefoot in order to not to arouse his suspicions. His parting words (not that he knew it) were directed to her mother: “Now Mrs Bennett don’t let Veronica step on anything sharp.”
Veronica Yvette Bennett was born in Spanish Harlem in 1943 to an Irish father and half African-American, half Cherokee mother with an enormous extended family.
She remembers being eight and singing in the lobby of her grandmother’s building, whose high ceilings produced a gratifying echo. More gratifying, though, was the response from her cousins.
“They were going insane – ‘Ronnie, Ronnie, you’re the one, you’ve got it!’ And I did have it. But my parents couldn’t afford to send me to singing lessons.”
it.” nstead, she’d go home from school and play records – Frankie Lymon, Frankie Valli, The Schoolboys – and learn them in their entirety. When her parents realised she was doing this every night rather than any homework her mother struck a deal.
“She said, ‘I’m going to put you at the Apollo. And then we’ll see how good you are.’ ”
The legendary Harlem music hall was owned by Frank Schiffman, whose son, Bobby, happened to have a crush on her mother who worked as a waitress in a café next door. Through him, she was able to get Ronnie, her sister Estelle and her cousin Nedra a slot.
Apollo audiences were notoriously unforgiving – egg hurling was de rigueur. Not that night, though. They loved Ronnie’s voice and, as she says: “That was my key – I knew I was good.”
Eventually, they were signed to Colpix Records in 1961 as the Darling Sisters. An aunt made their first outfits – dresses fringed on the back, “so when we turned our backs to the audience and shook like that”, she wiggles in her seat, “the crowd would go nuts”.
A radio hit, however, eluded them. That changed when, with one audacious phone call to his office, Estelle got them signed to Phil Spector’s Philles label in 1963.
There are some songs that sound as though they’ve been dispatched, fully formed and perfect from some higher place. Be My Baby, the Ronettes’ first hit that year – a song that Brian Wilson claims to have listened to 100 times every day – remains indelible.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” she says, “I never get sick of singing,” – and the music bursts out of her – “be my little baby!” “I mean, that’s me!”
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