Ronnie Spector's New Memoir

May 06, 2022

Ronnie Spector's New Memoir

Of the 3,000 or so celebrities I've interviewed over the past 12 years, Ronnie Spector remains among the sweetest and kindest. I interviewed her three times—twice for Wall Street Journal pieces and once for my Rock Concert book. Each time we spoke, she was honest, revealing and generous. As a kid growing up in Manhattan's Washington Heights in the early 1960s, I came to identify the Ronettes with the sound of summer. Her New York accent was my New York accent (Ronnie grew up in Washington Heights, too) and I knew older sisters of friends who looked just like her.

Today, I hide my accent, but it was fun to slip into it when speaking with her. When I interviewed Ronnie last year, she had just finished writing her memoir, Be My Baby. Now, four months after her death in January, her book has just been published by Henry Holt. Keith Richards wrote the introduction and Vince Waldron, a superb writer and actor, co-wrote it with her. The book reads fast, is smartly organized and retains her voice. For me, that voice was stickball, Pensie Pinkies, Bonomo Turkish Taffy smashed on the sidewalk, Kappy's Record World, the neighborhood pizza shop, standing under a sprinkler in July, Nok Hocky, black-and-white cookies, rolls of caps, comics, the Bungalow Bar ice cream truck, Disney films at the RKO Colosseum, and so on.

Before Beatlemania, the adolescent world lived largely in an annex of the 1950s. Most men still wore hats and ties, even on the weekends, women's dresses came down to the shins, jeans didn't exist yet except on farms, families bought a cake for the week at the local bakery, soda bottle caps had cork under the lid, cars made noise and stores were closed on Sundays. Ronnie, for me, was the sound of that period. She also was the embodiment of integration. Her mother was Black and Cherokee, and her father was Irish. [Photo above of the stairs on 187th Street leading from Overlook Terrace, where I lived, to Fort Washington Avenue that were climbed and descended each day and sometimes twice to get to public school]

When the Ronettes came out on stage at local movie theater revues, they baffled audiences. Audiences back in the early 1960s couldn't figure out if they were Black, Hispanic or white. Puzzlement was quickly replaced with elation once they started singing. Kids stopped wondering and just fell in love with the songs and Ronnie's familiar voice. [Publicity still above, from left, Ronnie Spector, Estelle Bennett and Nedra Talley, courtesy of Encyclopedia Britannica]

Ronnie sang of puppy love, when girls in their early teens in grade school dreamed of getting married and boys spent down time flipping baseball cards and ignoring them. Ronnie sang of the streets, where most kids in my neighborhood hung out back then—on corners and outside candy stores and delis, and in parks. Her hit songs were about walking in the rain, pleading with a love interest to be her baby, pledging fidelity to a boy and why the best part of breaking up was making up. Ronnie's songs were about high drama, and arranger Jack Nitzsche always knew how to get the most out of the instrumentation. [Photo above, the hang today on 187th Street, including the candy store, Gideon's bakery, the pizza shop and, at the bottom, Fort Washington Avenue, where I was hit by a cab in fourth grade dashing across the street, with no injury]

In her new book, Ronnie writes about her tortured relationship with producer and songwriter-wunderkind Phil Spector, which began cute but became a living hell for her. The details of the abuse and her escape remain harrowing. How anyone could treat Ronnie so badly was beyond comprehension. As I read the galleys last week, I thought that cruelty to someone as angelic as she was would be suicidal. You're just asking fate to even the score. And eventually, that's exactly what happened to Phil. A miserable end.

Read the book. It's funny, it's sad, it reads fast and it will give you tremendous insight into an era when music flipped on imaginations, turned teen singers into overnight sensations and captured a generation's heart. When the Rolling Stones opened for the Ronettes during the girls' tour of England in January 1964, Keith understood immediately that Ronnie was special, the epitome of relaxed cool. Her lingo, her manner and her fast street humor were all natural. She didn't have to work at it one bit. It's who she was and would always be. Ronnie and Keith became lifelong friends, and he inducted the Ronettes into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. [Publicity still above of Ronnie Spector by James J. Kriegsmann, whose son, James J. Kriegsmann Jr., now runs the family head-shot business here.]