Many know Ronnie Spector as the main vocalist of the Ronettes, the American girl group that released the 1963 hit “Be My Baby,” but what many don’t know is how she set the tone in terms of fashion within the music industry for years to come.
The Ronettes were formed in the late ‘50s, founded and front-run by none other than Ronnie Spector herself, or rather, Veronica Bennett, as at the time, she had yet to meet her future husband Phil Spector and take his last name.
Ronnie Spector was born in East Harlem, New York City, to an African-American and Cherokee mother and an Irish-American father. The other members of the girl group were her older sister Estelle Bennett and their cousin Nedra Talley.
However, before they were the Ronettes, the group was known as The Darling Sisters, having sung with each other since they were teenagers. Originally signed to Colpix Records in 1961, the band moved to Phil Spector’s record label, Philles Records, in 1963, where they went on to change their name to what they’re widely known as today and record their most iconic song.
The Ronettes’ rise in popularity was also in part facilitated by the group’s fashion sense. Ronnie Spector and her bandmates were well known for their cat-eye makeup and tall beehive hairstyles — fashion choices that inspired the late Amy Winehouse during her career.
Mod fashion, popularized in the ‘60s by designers like Mary Quant, is categorized as sleek and minimalistic, tight clothing with geometric patterns and hemlines that couldn’t quit rising. The Ronettes were the embodiment of “bad-girl” fashion and defined the style early on in the decade. With a wardrobe consisting of skin-tight pencil skirts, miniskirts and cut-off sleeves, the girl group made waves within the music industry and within culture itself.
Tragically, behind the dramatic, teased hair and the winged eyeliner, Ronnie Spector became little more than a bird trapped in a cage at the age of 24. Upon getting married to Phil Spector in 1968, the Ronettes disbanded, and marriage between the singer and her producer quickly turned abusive.
At the hands of her husband, Ronnie Spector endured a horror story that one Reddit user likened to a Stephen King-esque plot for a horror movie.
In Ronnie Spector’s 1990 Memoir, “Be My Baby: How I Survived Mascara, Miniskirts, and Madness,” she detailed how she suffered while trapped in Phil Spector’s Californian mansion, as reported by The U.S. Sun.
During her marriage to her producer, Ronnie Spector was rarely allowed to leave the house for longer than 20 minutes. Barbed wire and guard dogs often surrounded the mansion. Phil Spector wouldn’t allow her to wear shoes in the house out of fear that she would escape.
Phil Spector would also often threaten his wife’s life with a golden coffin kept in the basement of their home so he could “keep an eye on her after she’s dead”, according to The New York Post.
Even after being gifted a car for her birthday, Ronnie Spector wasn’t allowed to go on drives alone without an inflatable doll bearing her husband’s likeness sitting in the passenger seat.
Looking for a way to escape, even just for short periods at a time, Ronnie Spector turned to drinking as a coping mechanism and would use her AA meetings as an excuse to leave the house.
The couple couldn’t have children of their own, so they adopted their first son Donté Spector in 1968. He eventually went on to state in a 2003 interview with the Daily Mail that Phil Spector would lock him and his brothers — who all shared the same middle name, Phillip, — in their bedrooms.
On Christmas Day, 1971, Phil Spector gifted his wife 5-year-old twin boys, Louis and Gary Spector, in an attempt to prevent her from leaving him.
This event in the Spectors’ marriage would inspire the band ROAR to release a song titled “Christmas Kids” on their first EP, “I Can’t Handle Change” in 2010.
The song directly references the couple in its lyrics and the abuse Ronnie Spector faced, as well as the adoption of their children being used as a manipulation tactic. The song briefly charted in 2023 after it trended on TikTok, 13 years after its release. The EP cover also features an illustration of the troubled couple.
Despite all of the things keeping Ronnie Spector in her home with her abusive husband, she knew that she had to leave, or else she would die. With the help of her mother, she was finally able to flee the house in 1972 while barefoot.
Their divorce was final in 1974 after six years of marriage. Phil Spector received custody of their children in the divorce settlement after threatening Ronnie Spector with a gun, but that wasn’t the only thing he made sure his ex-wife didn’t get.
He also made sure that Ronnie Spector would never see a dime from future record earnings until 1988 when she sued him for the rights to her masters and the court ruled that she was entitled to royalties.
This didn’t stop Ronnie Spector from continuing to perform. And the abuse she suffered didn’t stop her from finding love again. She married Jonathan Greenfield in 1982 and adopted two sons with him.
She and the other members of the Ronettes even reunited upon being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.
Phil Spector, in the midst of his trial for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson, voiced his disapproval of the band’s induction. He even sent letters to the Hall of Fame’s nomination committee in 1994 asking for the girl group to be barred, according to New Musical Express.
However, Ronnie Spector was the one to come out on top this time. She didn’t allow her former producer’s attempt to control her, decades after their marriage ended, get in the way of her life. She performed until her death in 2022 after a brief battle with cancer.
Ronnie Spector’s story was an inspiration to many musical artists and fashionistas throughout the years, but the singer herself said in an interview that she hoped to inspire women in her same situation to do what she thought was almost impossible: leave.
In an interview with People Magazine, Ronnie Spector said that she hoped to inspire women in her same situation to follow in her footsteps.
“It was so dark back in those days,” she said. “Now I feel free now to be able to tell other women. Maybe not every woman will listen to me, but some will and I [hope] I can get one or two to save their [own] lives or save them from getting abused.”
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