Be My Baby: How I Survived Mascara, Miniskirts, and Madness, or, My Life as a Fabulous Ronette

"Ronnie Spector is this very sexy, very young leader of The Ronettes, the others were her sister and her cousin. There might be a little bit of faux naivety in the book, but it is the most extraordinary story. I read it because someone tipped me off that she had some sort of romance, which didn’t go all the way, with John Lennon, very early on, when The Beatles were already big in the UK, but hadn’t cracked America. It was just before they were leaving for America. She went to a party and John tried to get off with her. She went some of the way, but not all the way. But, at the same time, her boyfriend was Phil Spector, who was also her producer and who wrote great songs like ‘Be My Baby’. They later got married. “Spector was such a jealous husband that he wouldn’t let her drive by herself without this plastic mannequin next to her” As I pointed out, when we were talking about Nik Cohn, Phil Spector was obviously a really odd man. In another Beatles book it says that he flew with them to America, but never sat down during the whole flight. He was pacing up and down. He was so nervous and highly strung. There’s a bit in her book, after they get married, where she says: “In all the years I knew Phil, I didn’t think I was ever quite as amazed as when he reached into the trunk of my brand new car and pulled out a life-sized inflatable plastic mannequin… The thing looked exactly like Phil in every way, except that its knees were bent in the permanent sitting position.” He gave it to her because he was such a jealous husband that he wouldn’t let her go out driving in a car by herself without putting this fake Phil Spector next to her so that people would realise that she was taken. The best things in this book are about living with this crazy man, who locks her in cupboards for days on end and things like that. I mean he was maniacally jealous. Yes. And, in a way, it’s what people want in a rock biography. It’s complete madness. But she’s a survivor and Phil is rotting in prison somewhere. There’s also a really good biography of Phil Spector by Mick Brown , which is a straightforward biography. He was always pulling guns on people. Before Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret , I wrote One on One , about lots of different meetings between people. In one of those Leonard Cohen, who was an easy-going kind of character, had a gun pulled on him by Phil Spector in the recording studio. It had early roots. His father had committed suicide. It was quite a mad household. He wrote a song, ‘To Know Him is to Love Him’—those were the words on his father’s gravestone. He took them and turned them into a kind of girly song. He wasn’t like the pop stars that he produced, in that he was a little, runty kind of character. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter One of the great things about this book is that she doesn’t hold back. So, there’s no sense of, ‘I’d better not go there.’ For example, there’s this passage: “Phil first started losing his hair around the time we met”—so that’s 1963—“after we’d do our foreplay he’d get up from the bed and make sure all the lights were out. That way I couldn’t watch him when he took his hair off. Then he’d stumble into the bathroom in the dark, so he could rub this acetone solvent all over his head. It was the smelliest stuff in the world, but I guess it was the only thing he could use to get the toupée glue off his scalp. When he came to back to bed the smell of that acetone could’ve killed a horse, but Phil tried to pretend it wasn’t there. Only it was impossible to hide, like rubbing alcohol or marijuana. It was a smell that wouldn’t go away.” She’s very po-faced, in a way. She goes on: “That old game of hiding the toupée was one thing I knew I’d have trouble with in our relationship.” The book’s both consciously and unconsciously funny. Everyone would enjoy it."