Photo: Nick Ut/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The “Let It Be” producer reportedly wants out of his marriage.

Rochelle Spector – ” gold diggers don’t stick around for 10 years”

Here Rochelle speaks on the making of a movie based on her husband’s legacy

Photo: Reed Saxon/AP
Rachelle Spector, 35, married Phil Spector in 2006.

While Phil Spector  is in the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison at Corcoran for 19 years to life, and Mrs. Spector lives alone in the Castle, the Alhambra house where Clarkson died. “I come home and I think I hear him call my name,” she says. “It’s weird, it really is.”
But though Mrs. Spector, a night person like her husband, says it’s scary to be a woman alone there, the vast mansion itself is “far from” weird and spooky, as the film depicts it.
She deplores the film’s “wacky stuff” about Mr. Spector as a “gun nut.” That legendary episode of Phil firing bullets into a studio ceiling while recording a John Lennon album? “It didn’t happen,” she says. “What’s kind of disturbing is the closeness of the relationship between Al and Helen Mirren [who plays Spector’s attorney]. Because that relationship was not that close. So that was kind of a fail. I don’t know why they started out with her thinking he was guilty, because she always thought he was innocent beyond a reasonable doubt.”
But Mrs. Spector applauds the scene that suggests Mr. Spector would have been far more splattered with gore if he’d really fired the gun in Clarkson’s mouth. “What they were trying to do is build it up to show the forensic demonstrations that actually weren’t admitted to the courtroom, which was great.” (The trial did feature evidence of blood mist near his lapel.) Still, she adds, “they really could’ve taken it to the next level if they’d just met with him. They should have focused on the music.”
That’s what Mrs. Spector is doing. “I’ve been VP and CFO of his companies for nine years, and manage the estate, and have my own record label and publishing company. He’s one of the few people who still owns his song rights and his masters. We deal directly with Sony Legacy in New York, vice president Rob Santos. We’re releasing a new box set this fall and also like his early Philles label stuff, and a smaller compilation that’ll be sold in Target and Wal-Mart.”
“I’m actually working on a Broadway musical that’s going to showcase my husband and his life’s work. It’s in the beginning stages now, but we’re writing the book, the screenplay. I have a confidentiality agreement about it, so I can’t really talk about it yet, but it’s going really well. I do run everything. I hold the cards, so nothing can happen without me approving it. It’s going to show a whole different side of my husband. My main focus is going to be on his career and how he changed music.”

 

She’s not sure she will permit scenes of his troubled childhood or work on Beatles albums and others. “It just depends on how far back I want to go, and getting rights for some of the John Lennon songs. There are a lot of people who, as you know, don’t like my husband, so the music is really going to dictate the direction I go for the musical.”