On a recent morning at Norma’s, the Midtown power breakfast spot, Rachelle Spector, a 30-year-old blonde with gleaming white teeth and the physique of an aerobics instructor, smiles perkily over a plate of pancakes. All around her, impassive New Yorkers sip coffee and tap away on their BlackBerrys. A few heads turn in her direction, while one onlooker shrugs and whispers to the woman next to him: “I think she’s on ‘American Idol.’ ”
Rachelle Spector is an aspiring pop songstress, but she’s better known from paparazzi shots taken during six years of legal wrangling and two trials of her husband, the 70-year-old music producer Phil Spector. In May of 2009, Spector was convicted of murdering actress Lana Clarkson, who died at his 30-room Alhambra, Calif., mansion in 2003 of a gunshot wound to the head. Spector maintains his innocence and is appealing his conviction.
SEE THE PHOTOS OF RACHELLE AND PHIL
For a woman whose husband sits in the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison in Corcoran, Rachelle Spector seems to be having a good day.
And indeed, why shouldn’t she be? While Spector was battling through his trials and then adjusting to prison life, he was also hard at work on molding his young wife, a former waitress in West Hollywood, into the next Britney Spears.
Rachelle Spector’s debut album, the painfully named “Out of My Chelle,” hits stores July 20. The album cover, which bears the stamp “A Phil Spector Production,” pictures the music legend’s wife, clad in a bubble-gum pink shirt and jeans, breaking through a panel of glass with an enthusiastic grin.
The sound and styling seem more 1990 than 2010, and the album is a far cry from vintage Phil Spector productions like John Lennon’s “Imagine” or Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High.”
The album’s 10 tracks include numbers like the peppy “Here in My Heart,” which features the lyrics “No matter where you are, you’re here in my heart.”
In the video, Rachelle Spector croons for the camera in front of backdrops including a burbling fountain and a star-filled night sky. She says the song is especially meaningful for her since her husband, “my best friend, my lover, my mentor,” is in prison.
“The words ‘Even when you’re far away I can feel you,’ I mean, it’s just about how you have that connection with someone, and Phil is still my everything,” she says. When she speaks of her husband, hardly a shadow crosses her face, and it’s difficult to gauge whether Mrs. Spector is truly, wildly devoted or simply very shrewd.
When she met Spector at the age of 23, the then Rachelle Short was an aspiring musician whose photo once appeared in Playboy. “I arrived in Los Angeles at 20, from Beaver Falls, Pa., you know, off the bus, with like $150 in my pocket,” she says. “I was like, ‘OK, I’m here, everything can start now.’ Of course it’s never like that.”
She played music gigs around Los Angeles and ultimately met Spector at Hollywood restaurant Dan Tana’s, where a mutual acquaintance introduced them. Though Spector was already embroiled in legal troubles following Clarkson’s death, Rachelle had only a vague idea of who he was and that he was the prime suspect in the death. She married Spector in 2006, three years after their meeting, and endured days in the courtroom supporting her husband, seemingly impervious to his wild hair and often erratic behavior.
Spector says that her fledgling music career was never about opportunism; it’s something she’s always hoped for and that her husband never would have supported if “he didn’t think that it could stand up to the legends he’s worked with . . . I’ve been playing the trombone for 20 years,” says Spector. “I was the little girl singing in the mirror.”
In the early days of their unlikely romance, Rachelle was watching a videotape of herself playing in a high school performance of the musical “Working” when her husband-to-be walked into the room and began to listen. “He had no idea I could sing,” says Spector, who likens her style to that of Alanis Morissette. She hopes her album will make it big in markets like Sweden and South Korea, where she feels the genre will play well.
Though she speaks wistfully about missing her famously eccentric husband, she remains resolutely sunny about the odds that his conviction will be overturned.
“2010 is our year,” she announces in an upbeat tone.
“This is the first album my husband has released in 30 years, and with our appeal, this is the year we’re going to bring him home, I just know it.”
Spector says that the title “Out of My Chelle” came to her because “my husband just really wanted to put me into the light. I’m his lifeline, he’s living vicariously through me, so this breakout, it’s really about both of us.” The album was produced during Spector’s trial and before he was sentenced to 19 years behind bars.
In addition to launching a music career, Spector manages her husband’s business dealings, including the potential sale of Pyrenees Castle, the house where Lana Clarkson died and where Rachelle Spector now lives in “four or five rooms.” She is now licensed as a private investigator in California and divides her time between her music and repairing the Phil Spector legacy, endeavors that force her to work “14 hours a day.” It’s apparently lonely work. “It’s so depressing and so sad to be there,” says Spector of the mansion. But she hasn’t been spending much time there lately, as she’s been traveling to promote her album.
“People have this image that I’m living it up in this mansion. Let me tell you, I drive two and a half hours to see my husband in jail. I have been through all of it, the whole grueling thing. I read through 40,000 pages of court documents during the trial, I know this story inside and out. People say, ‘She’s a gold digger.’ There’s nothing I haven’t heard, but I’m not whatever people say I am. If I were … I’d be sitting by a pool somewhere. My husband knows I’m a good person.”
Instead of living the high life, Spector says she drives a Smart car, shops at Marshalls, and prefers “normal food” to the meal she ate the night before at Thomas Keller’s Per Se.
It’s a simple philosophy that seems to enable Spector to remain married without a shadow of a doubt her husband could be guilty of murder. “I certainly didn’t get married to be alone,” she says. “But what gets me through is the conviction that he just doesn’t belong in jail. Not for one second.” Beaming, Spector says her debut as a “recording artist” is “a major changing point in the Phil Spector legacy.”
“I talked to my husband yesterday, and he said he’s more excited about this project than he was about The Beatles or Tina Turner,” she says. “He is so, so proud, and he really believes in me.” In addition to pushing for her husband’s release from jail in 2010, Rachelle Spector faces another challenge. “It’s a battle in this industry. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hoping that people will take me more seriously.”