The L.A. Times today has a recounting of the death of Lana Clarkson, who was shot in Phil Spector’s home here in L.A., quite possibly by Spector in a drunken fit of sexual frustration. It’s quite a read; the product of multiple reporters, it reads in part like a detective novel:

An hour before sunrise at the end of a very long night, Officer Michael Page was struggling to pin Phil Spector as the famed music producer wrestled with Alhambra police in the foyer of his hilltop mansion.

Page pressed his knee into Spector’s back and held down his arms. The officer had discarded his Taser after two shots from the stun gun failed to drop Spector, and now Page’s submachine gun was slipping off his back. Another officer grabbed the weapon before it fell within Spector’s reach.

Page turned to make sure his Taser wasn’t lying close by, and that’s when he saw the woman in the chair.

She was blond, tall, freckled. She slumped, half in, half out of the seat, her long legs extended in front of her. Her head lolled to the left, and a great deal of blood had flowed from her face down to her chest.

In the struggle, she had escaped Page’s notice. But on first sight the officer knew she was dead.

It was a depressing read for me; a recounting of two sad people, one blessed with success in the world and one not.

Biggest Guy is in town for a week, and I’m home, and so we’ve been sitting and talking a fair amount. I realized this morning that my whole objective as a parent is to keep my children from becoming either Phil Spector or Lana Clarkson, each victims in a way of their belief that a hit movie or record, a Mercedes, and a big house will make you whole or happy.

Reading about Spector, I was reminded so much of Harlan Ellison’s great book ‘Spider Kiss‘; I know it’s about Elvis, but in truth it’s about our worship of the “bitch goddess success,” and the lives we throw away at her feet.