Tearing Down the Wall of Sound Read Online Free Page B

away from the teeming streets of the Bronx. At the bottom of Manor Avenue was another broad thoroughfare, Bruckner Boulevard—now widened and fenced off as the Bruckner Expressway—and beyond that a leafy public park and the shoreline of the Long Island Sound.
    Ben Spector worked long hours as an ironworker. He would leave the house early each morning, often arriving home after the children were in bed. But he was apparently a reliable provider. The family lived modestly but comfortably and was sufficiently well off to own their own car at a time when private car ownership in the city was comparatively rare, and to sometimes take winter vacations in Florida.
    Both Ben and Bertha loved music. Ben played the guitar, and the radio in the small family home always seemed to be on, broadcasting dance music, show tunes and the latest hits of the day—fuel to Shirley’s ambitions to be a star of Broadway musicals or Hollywood movies.
    The abundance of relatives in the city meant that weekends were invariably given over to visiting or entertaining. The young Harvey grew particularly close to Bertha’s sister, his aunt Doraine, who for twenty years shared an apartment with her brother Louis without either talking to the other, although nobody in the family could remember why.
    Ben Spector was a short, heavily built man with a cheerful, gregarious manner. Harvey idolized him, and his happiest childhood memories would be of being taken by his father to Coney Island and Radio City, which Harvey thought was “like heaven.” Bertha was also short and compact, an intensely house-proud woman, much concerned with appearances, who wore her hair in a tight perm and always made a point of dressing in her best. If Ben—to outward appearances at least—radiated the sense of being at ease in the world, Bertha seemed forever at odds with it. She made high demands of her husband; no matter what Ben did, how much he earned, it was never quite enough.
    Harvey, the longed-for son, was doted on by his mother and adored by his elder sister. But he was a sickly child. From an early age, he suffered from bouts of asthma, and his skin was allergic to strong sunlight, which increased Bertha’s sense of motherly protectiveness. He was also overweight and often teased at school; he found it hard to make friends—a fact not helped by Bertha’s wariness of other children. She discouraged him from inviting his friends into their home, or visiting theirs. Throughout his childhood, Bertha would instill in Harvey the sense that the world was a dangerous, threatening place and that people were, on the whole, not to be trusted.
    Many years later, Harvey would tell a story designed to suggest both how “very different” he felt himself to be from other children, and how this difference intimated an authority that would serve him in later life. “I always liked to do different things than everybody else; preferred being in the background. It was always a joke in New York. There was a game called pitcher, batter, catcher, which you’d play with a stick and a ball on the streets. And when I was a kid it was a joke that ‘Joe, you’ll pitch; Jack, you’ll catch; Jim, you’ll hit; and Phil, you’ll produce the game.’ That was how I achieved my success, because I was smarter than most.” The story has the ring of fable. Nobody would ever have talked about stickball games being “produced” and nor would any of his friends have had an inkling of what life held in store for Harvey Philip Spector. But the moral is clear. He always believed he was destined for greatness.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
    There is a photograph of the Spector family, taken when Harvey was around eight years of age. It shows the family seated at a restaurant table, apparently for a celebration—a birthday or an anniversary, perhaps. Ben Spector is smartly dressed in a wide-lapel suit and