60s girl group icon married her svengali, then escaped as he became her nemesis

The best thing Ronnie Spector ever did was to record with Phil Spector. The worst thing she ever did was to marry him. In the studio they made sweet music together, as Phil produced Ronnie and her group the Ronettes singing some of the most enduring hits in 1960s pop, cloaking her voice in his celebrated ‘‘wall of sound’’ on hits such as Be My Baby, Baby I Love You and Walking in the Rain.

Once they married there was only disharmony, physical abuse and mental torment as he became her nemesis. Jealously imprisoning her in his 23-room mansion in Beverly Hills, he surrounded the property with barbed wire fences and guard dogs and confiscated her shoes to prevent her from leaving.

He also halted her singing career and when she protested he pulled a gun on her. In the basement of the mansion he kept a gold coffin with a glass top and told her it was intended as her tomb if she ever left him. ‘‘I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere,’’ she recalled.

She started drinking heavily and volunteered for rehab just to get out of the house. When she drove off to AA meetings, her husband placed a life-size dummy of himself alongside her in the car. By 1972 Ronnie was at the end of her tether and escaped through a broken window. ‘‘I knew that if I didn’t leave I was going to die there.’’

In the divorce settlement that followed she was awarded just US$25,000, a second-hand car and five years of alimony. It was not until 2001, after a 15-year court battle, that the injustice was corrected when Phil Spector was ordered to pay her $1 million in royalties, almost certainly a fraction of what she was due.

For Ronnie it was a journey from wide-eyed innocence into nightmarish experience, for nothing summed up the joyful spirit of 1960s teenage girl-pop better than the records she made with her sister Estelle and cousin Nedra Talley as the Ronettes. ‘‘I’ll make you happy, baby, just wait and see/ For every kiss you give me I’ll give you three,’’ she sang in Be My Baby.

Despite everything she had been through, the song’s magic never faded for her. ‘‘I was so much in love,’’ she recalled in 2013, on the 50th anniversary of the day in 1963 that she recorded the song with Spector in a Hollywood studio. ‘‘That energy comes back to me every time when I’m singing Be My Baby.’’

The song was later used in the opening sequence of the movies Dirty Dancing and Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, while Brian Wilson nominated Be My Baby as his favourite song of all time and wrote Don’t Worry Baby for the Ronettes to sing as a follow-up. Phil Spector jealously turned it down and Wilson recorded the songs instead with the Beach Boys.

Until Spector decided to shutter her career, Ronnie was riding the crest of a wave with the Ronettes. When the group made their first UK tour in 1963, they were the headliners and the Rolling Stones were the support group.

It was the start of a long friendship with Keith Richards, who positively drooled over her long black hair, teased up into a gravity-defying beehive, while her kohlblackened eyes stared out seductively from under her fringe. ‘‘The first time I ever went to heaven was when I awoke with Ronnie asleep with a smile on her face,’’ Richards wrote of their affair in his 2010 memoir Life.

He later sang a duet with her on her 2006 album The Last of the Rock Stars and inducted her into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame, declaring that her voice could penetrate ‘‘right through a wall of sound’’.

The Beatles were equally smitten and she fended off the attentions of John Lennon, who invited her to his room at New York’s Plaza Hotel on the group’s first American tour in 1964. She took the other two Ronettes with her and they sat around playing records. Two years later the Beatles picked the Ronettes as their support act on their final US tour, but Spector refused to allow her to join the tour.

He had become so possessive that he could not bear to think of other men looking at her on stage. ‘‘We weren’t afraid to be hot. That was our gimmick,’’ Ronnie wrote in her 2004 memoir Be My Baby: How I Survived Mascara, Miniskirts, and Madness.

Ronnie found enduring happiness in her second marriage, in 1982, to Jonathan Greenfield. He acted as her manager and survives her, along with their sons, Austin and Jason.

Veronica Yvette Bennett was born in New York’s Spanish Harlem, the younger of two daughters. Her mother, Beatrice, was of Cherokee and African-American heritage and her father, Louis, came from white Irish-American stock.

Inspired by 1950s doo-wop groups such as Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the two Bennett sisters and cousin Nedra sang at school hops and dances before landing a residency at the Peppermint Lounge, a Manhattan nightspot where both the twist and gogo dancing were said to have been invented.

Known initially as Ronnie and the Relatives, the trio’s early singles flopped. Their fortunes looked up after Estelle contacted Spector, who had just produced a No 1 hit with another girl group, the Crystals, and asked for an audition. When the trio began singing Why Do Fools Fall in Love, Spector leapt from his chair, pointed at Ronnie and shouted: ‘‘That’s it! That’s the voice I’ve been looking for!’’

After escaping from Spector, she toured for a while as Ronnie and the Ronettes with two new members but was injuncted from singing her old hits by her ex-husband, who owned the copyrights.

Her 1980 debut solo album Siren failed to chart and it was not until 1986 that she returned to the limelight with Eddie Money’s hit Take Me Home Tonight (Friday), on which she not only sang the refrain but was the subject of the lyric: ‘‘Take me home tonight (Friday)/ Listen honey, just like Ronnie sang, ‘Be my little baby’.’’

In later years she presented an annual Christmas show, based on the Spector-produced versions of songs such as I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, Frosty the Snowman and Sleigh Ride, which she recorded with the Ronettes.

She also covered Back to Black, the signature song of Amy Winehouse, who cited Ronnie as one of her main inspirations and turned up to see her in concert. ‘‘She was in the audience looking just like me while I sang her song. It scared me,’’ Ronnie recalled.

Away from music she enjoyed painting at home in rural Connecticut, where she claimed to lead ‘‘a very bland life, shopping twice a week, running errands and cooking. I don’t even sing in the shower’’.

Yet on stage she was transformed. ‘‘Everything else disappears except the faces in the crowd,’’ she said.