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chatterbox: Gossip, speculation, and scuttlebutt about politics.

Blogging SpectorOur revels now are ended.

By Timothy Noah
Updated Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2007, at 6:17 PM ET

(Continued from page 3)

Jackson asks the jury to recall what DeSouza did then. "What anybody would do in an emergency." He called 911. Jackson plays the 911 tape, in which DeSouza clearly tells the dispatcher that Spector told him, "I think he—'I'—killed her."

"What was Phil Spector doing during this same time?" Jackson asks. "Think about it."

Where did the gun end up? Where did his jacket end up? What about that diaper [apparently used by Spector to try to clean up the blood]? What about her face … while Adriana DeSouza was calling for help, to help this woman!

Jackson says that Spector is making "a checkbook defense" whose governing principle is

if you hire enough lawyers who hire enough experts who are paid enough money, you can get 'em to say just about anything. You pay someone enough money you can get 'em to wear a tutu in court!

Bye-Bye Bruce
Aug. 28, 2007, 3:40 p.m. ET

Phil Spector has a hard time hanging on to lawyers.

On Aug. 27, Bruce Cutler, mob lawyer and star of the forthcoming TV show Jury Duty, was fired from Spector's legal team. Cutler is best known for representing John "Teflon Don" Gotti, who despite a remarkable string of legal victories ended up dying in prison in 2002. Cutler took on Spector's defense three years ago, after the departure of Leslie Abramson, who is best known for defending Lyle and Erik Menendez. The Menendez brothers are now serving two life sentences—each—without the possibility of parole for murdering their parents in 1996. Abramson, a mere four months before her departure, had stepped in to replace Robert Shapiro, who is best known for representing O.J. Simpson. The onetime Buffalo Bills running back was put on trial for killing his wife and her friend Ron Goldman in 1994. Miraculously, Simpson beat the criminal rap, but subsequently he was ruled responsible for the deaths in a civil trial, and later he wrote a confessional memoir, titled If I Did It, that will be published in September. (Simpson says the book is merely hypothetical, but that's not what his ghostwriter says.)

It would be logical to speculate that Spector has finally gotten fed up with being defended by lawyers famous for defending known killers.

It would also be wrong. Cutler got the axe because Spector, having already reduced Cutler's role as lead attorney to delivering the summation, decided he didn't want Cutler do that, either. It's probably a wise decision. In his opening remarks, Cutler floated a bizarre "two gun" theory, not heard since, which posited that Lana Clarkson killed herself accidentally when she confused one gun, which she knew to be loaded with blanks, with a second gun, which was loaded with real bullets. This theory was apparently meant to render consistent the various bizarre and seemingly contradictory statements Spector gave to police immediately after the shooting (see "The Defense Rests," below). The prosecution, however, decided not to admit into evidence any of Spector's bizarre and seemingly contradictory statements to the police, leaving Cutler out on a limb with a zany line of defense that flatly contradicted everything the Spector defense has argued ever since. The official Spector defense is that Lana Clarkson shot herself in Spector's foyer because she was despondent over her stalled career and her demonstrable lack of talent. If that is true, then her death wasn't an accident. Cutler also harshed Judge Fidler's mellow early in the trial by yelling at a witness. "I thought [Cutler] would be a target with the judge and prosecutors and that he wouldn't be taken as seriously as he should," Spector told reporters. Also, "with his television show he wasn't here as much as he should have been."

Closing arguments begin Sept. 5. Be there aloha!

The Defense Rests.
Aug. 21, 2007, 9:40 p.m. ET

Devra Robitaille, whose name did not appear on the original witness list, is a onetime employee of Warner-Spector Records. Today she testified (yawn) that Phil Spector twice pulled a shotgun on her, in one instance pressing it against her temple. "He said, 'If you leave, I'll blow your fucking head off,' " she told the jury. That makes her the fifth witness to tell jurors some version of this story at Spector's trial—not counting Walter Cronkite's daughter, who (according to grand jury testimony from comedian Joan Rivers) also experienced this novel courtship ritual—and of course Lana Clarkson herself. Click here for the footage.

Also, Spector's lawyers made it official: His Wall-of-Soundness will not testify at his own murder trial (though he did briefly favor us last week with some forensic pantomime). There are many possible reasons for this:

1) Spector is guilty, and might end up confessing on the stand. Two people are already on record saying they heard Spector, shortly after Clarkson's death, admit that he killed her. Only one of them (Spector's chauffeur for that evening, Adriano DeSouza) testified at the trial. According to DeSouza, Spector walked out of his mansion and said, "I think I killed somebody." The other person who claims to have heard Spector confess is Officer Beatrice Rodriguez of the Alhambra Police Department. In a police report, Rodriguez quoted Spector saying, "I didn't mean to shoot her, it was an accident." Rodriguez testified before the grand jury, but for whatever reason—maybe she was shaky on the stand?—the prosecutors never called her during the trial.
2) Spector is crazy, and might therefore come across as just the sort of weirdo who would put a gun in a woman's mouth and then pull the trigger. A good example of Spector's weirdness is the threatening message he left on the answering machine of Dorothy Melvin, one of the women on whom he pulled a gun. (Click here for the audio):
Sorry I'm late calling, chief, but I had some trouble with my nipple ring. [This is a reference to a New Yorker cartoon by Robert Mankoff.] Um, don't worry about the competition. Let the competition worry about you. All right, I cannot be replaced by a machine, unless it learns to uh, drink, fuck, [inaudible], right. OK, keep smiling Dorothy, uh, but not so much that you begin to wonder if you're mentally fucking unbalanced.
There's also the matter of the man's hair.

3) Spector is incapable of maintaining a civil tone when he is under pressure. For example, when Spector was first arrested and brought to the stationhouse, he called Clarkson "a piece of shit" and said "she certainly had no right to come to my fucking castle, blow her fucking head open, and [transcription missing] a murder. What the fuck is wrong with you people?"
4) Even when Spector claims innocence, his world still sounds depraved. "She kissed the gun," Spector told Esquire in a July 2003 profile. An Alhambra police officer named Derek Gilliam—the nephew, as it happens, of the film director and former Monty Python member Terry Gilliam—recalled in grand jury testimony that Spector told him that Clarkson took the gun, waved it like a lariat around her head, sang "Da Doo Ron Ron" and "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling," then put the gun to her temple and fired. (This last couldn't possibly be true because the autopsy showed the gun was fired inside Clarkson's mouth.)
5) Spector can too easily be caught in a lie. See above.
6) If Spector appears on the witness stand, prosecutors will get the chance to ask why he never dialed 911 after Clarkson was shot. Spector can't possibly have a good answer to this question.

The defense has rested its case, thereby eliminating the possibility that it will flesh out its bizarre "two gun" theory (outlined by attorney Bruce Cutler in his opening statement). According to this theory, Clarkson killed herself accidentally when she mistook a loaded gun for a similar-looking gun that she knew was not loaded. The problem with the two-gun theory is that it contradicts the main thrust of the defense's argument, which is that Clarkson killed herself on purpose because she was unhappy. Perhaps Spector's defense team figured this out. Or perhaps the two-gun theory fell into disfavor after Cutler fell into disfavor. Spector sidelined Cutler, a flamboyant mob lawyer, after the judge scolded Cutler for bullying witnesses. Cutler spent most of the summer taping a new syndicated television series, Jury Duty, which premieres in September. As Mel Brooks explained in his song, "Springtime For Hitler":

It ain't no myst'ry
If it's politics or hist'ry
The thing you gotta know is
Ev'rything is show biz.

Dying Is Easy. Comedy Is Hard.
Aug. 8, 2007, 5:45 p.m. ET.

Show-business legend has it that the dying words of Sir Donald Wolfit (1902-1968), a celebrated Shakespearean actor, were: "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard." Tasteless though this epigram may be in the context of the Phil Spector trial, I couldn't keep it out of my mind as I watched a 30-minute audition video assembled by Lana Clarkson for casting agents in Hollywood. The video was introduced into evidence by the Spector defense, on the theory that anyone trying this hard to show casting agents that she could perform comedy, and failing this completely, had to be suicidal. But if you've ever tuned in to American Idol or So You Think You Can Dance during their cattle-call auditions, you know that this great land is filled with tone-deaf singers and two-left-footed dancers whose capacity for self-delusion no British-accented panel judge can hope to penetrate. There's no reason to believe the same couldn't be true for unfunny comedians, especially when they happen to be drop-dead gorgeous. And in all fairness, Court TV counted "at least three" jurors who laughed at Clarkson's video. (Others were seen to "smile benevolently" or "stare blankly at the screen.")