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Spector threatened people with guns throughout the 1970s and '80s. Sessions with artists from John Lennon to Leonard Cohen to the Ramones were interrupted by Spector's menacing gunplay. "He would change clothes four times a day," the late songwriter Doc Pomus told Spector biographer Mark Ribowsky, "and each time he'd have a different gun to match the outfit." After marrying Ronnie Bennett of the Ronettes, one of the biggest stars he created, Spector showed her mother a glass coffin in his basement and said if Ronnie ever left him, he would kill her and display her body like Snow White's. They divorced in 1974.

Spector's life was so bizarre that Tom Cruise once optioned it for a movie. But the project was dropped after director-writer Cameron Crowe couldn't come up with a satisfying ending. --By Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles