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Mar 27, 2024

The Ronettes: The Story Behind the Birth of the ’60s Group

Before they became the Ronettes, Ronnie Spector, Nedra Talley-Ross, and Estelle Bennett were just three family members from Harlem singing in front of a group of encouraging relatives. “They would

Before they became the Ronettes, Ronnie Spector, Nedra Talley-Ross, and Estelle Bennett were just three family members from Harlem singing in front of a group of encouraging relatives. “They would make you think you were really good and then they’d give us money. So we started getting paid at 5,” recalls Talley-Ross in But Will You Love Me Tomorrow?: An Oral History of the ’60s Girl Groups. The forthcoming book from authors Laura Flam and Emily Sieu Liebowitz weaves together an inside look at how the “Be My Baby” trio — not to mention the Shirelles, the Supremes, the Vandellas, and more — got their start and changed music history, as told by those who witnessed it all firsthand. For the Ronettes, it began in midtown when they snuck into the Peppermint Lounge thanks to the sharp instincts of Spector and Bennett’s mother, who encouraged the young performers to look the part. What happened next, as Flam and Sieu Liebowitz detail in the following chapter, is the stuff of legend.

An Excerpt From ‘But Will You Love Me Tomorrow?: An Oral History of the ’60s Girl Groups’

Billy Vera, musician: If you weren’t there, you cannot understand the impact of the Twist. It was like what the Charleston was in the 1920s. It defined the pre-Beatles ’60s.

Billy Joel, musician: There was a lot of dancing going on in those days. And it seems like every other week there was a new dance — the Twist, the Watusi, the Hully Gully, the Swim, the Frug, the Jerk. Just a lot, a lot, of dance crazes.

Jerry Blavat, disc jockey: The Twist was a dance which was created by the kids, and as Chubby Checker says, it’s like being in the shower and you’ve got the towel and you’re wiping your back to get the water off your back or your tush — that’s the Twist.

Joey Dee, Joey Dee and the Starliters (the Peppermint Lounge’s house band): We were doing a version of the Twist that we saw at Ben’s Cotton Club in Newark, New Jersey. We started dancing and then a couple of the kids in the audience would get up and actually try to mimic what we were doing. And the thing is … it became super-popular with our audience. And then we had some people come into the Peppermint Lounge and see these kids dancing — What the heck are they doing?

Blavat: It was the newest dancing creation, the newest club.

Vera: The Peppermint Lounge was literally a hooker-and-sailor joint before the Twist came along.

Dee: It was a dump, really. You walked in the front door, there was an L-shaped room. It was a long bar, maybe 60 feet long on the right-hand side, and a paneled wall on the left-hand side. Then there was a stage the size of a postage stamp. And then to the left — the L part of it — there would be a little dance floor and tables and chairs. It had a fire capacity of, like, 237 people, and they used to put 600 people in there. There was a wrought-iron railing around the stage.

Vera: And the phenomenon of the Twist — I mean every little hooker-and-sailor joint in Times Square was suddenly a Twist lounge.

Blavat: We’re talking about this phenomenon where Zsa Zsa Gabor is dancing, Cary Grant is dancing.

Dee: Well, you can’t get any bigger. Marilyn Monroe was there. Jackie Kennedy was there. John Wayne was there. Nat King Cole was there. I mean — anybody who was anybody was in the Peppermint Lounge dancing this phenomenon. These major stars are doing this new dance — old people! Jackie O. was learning the Twist!

Vera: Suddenly, you had the swells from the Upper East Side in their gowns and tuxedos coming to do the Twist. [Laughs.]

Nedra Talley-Ross, the Ronettes: The Peppermint Lounge was on 45th Street off Broadway, and we went down dressed the same — which we always did. There were lines with the ropes, and so the bouncer-type guy, at the front there, he’s, like, making a way, he’s going to other people, “Move, come on, come on, come through.” We’re like, “Is he talking to us?” [Laughs.] They thought that we were the people that were going to perform because we were all dressed alike.

Ronnie Spector, the Ronettes: Our mother said, “You gotta put stuff here and have a cigarette in your hand to look older to get in.”

Dee: They came into the Peppermint Lounge, I would say in November, maybe December, of 1961. The place was already super-famous, and they got in because of their looks — the doorman at the front thought they were dancers and part of the show, so he let them in. They were all dressed up, but they were only, like, 15 or 16 years old at the time — Ronnie, Estelle, and Nedra, two sisters and a cousin.

Talley-Ross: And we went in, we were like, “Okay, we’re in the door. What are we doing now?”

Spector: The management was waiting for another girl group; we never found out what group. He says, “Girls, you’re late!” I told the girls, “Don’t say a word.” And they took us in there and they said, “Get up onstage. Hurry up!”

Dee: So they came up to the stage on my break and they said, “Can we sing with you?” I say, “Can you dance?” And they said, “Oh yeah, we can dance.” So I said, “Yeah, in the next set, I want you to come up on one of the songs that we do.”

Talley-Ross: Joey Dee and them were performing — they were like, “Come on up!” And they were singing, so we went up, we did a few steps, and then it was like, Okay, see if we can dance on the railing, and we did it.

Dee: The song happened to be “What’d I Say.” So we were in the middle of it and Dave Brigati, one of the Starliters, handed Ronnie the mic, the girls got around it, and they tore the house down.

Talley-Ross: We gave it all we had because we were like, We got in here. Let’s just show them what we’re working with!

Spector: They hired us that night. They gave us $10 per girl per night.

Dee: I said, “Would you like to work for me?” And they said, “We would love to, but you have to come to our house and talk to our parents about it and get their approval.” So I took a ride up to Harlem the next day, and I met the parents. They checked me out and they said, “You sure you’re going to take care of our girls, right?” And I said, “Of course.” They said, “No hanky-panky.” I said, “Nope.” And they said, “Well, just to make sure — guarantee that — we’re going to send their Aunt Helen with them as a chaperone.” So Aunt Helen became the chaperone.

Spector: I’m still in school and my mother was a little upset because she said, “Now, how are you going to get your homework done?” And I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll get my homework!”

Talley-Ross: People will say, “Oh, if you’re Black, you must’ve been raised singing in the church.” We were not; we were singing for our family and making money. [Laughs.] We were raised with Sidney Poitier as a friend of the family, and my grandmother was like, “They were just here two weeks ago, and now they’re on TV.” That’s when she said, “Do something with your daughter.”

Spector: Weekends at my grandma’s house were the best. That’s when all my aunts and uncles would come over, and there would be nothing but food and singing the whole time.

Talley-Ross: Ronnie and Estelle are my first cousins. My Aunt BeBe, Beatrice, is Ronnie and Estelle’s mother; my mother is her younger sister, Susie Talley. My grandmother and grandfather had 14 kids and everybody went to Mama’s house. Mama was the core of who we were, and our base was 477 West 140th Street — that’s where our family home was. That’s where our grandmother had lived, which was Sugar Hill. I mean, people know Sugarhill Gang and stuff like that, but it was called Sugar Hill because it was a high point in Manhattan and we lived on the seventh floor. When you opened the windows on the West Side, there was a breeze from the Hudson and on the right side was the East River, which was where Yankee Stadium was. You could hear the balls hit. And Ronnie and Estelle at one point lived on 152nd. It was tough, but we loved where we lived.

Spector: I had, like, seven girl cousins.

Talley-Ross: It was really just our family. There were so many of us that we didn’t need to really have friends over.

Spector: My uncles would be harmonizing like the Mills Brothers in one corner, while three aunts worked up an Andrews Sisters number in the other. Another aunt would be throwing her leg up in ballet movements in the kitchen while someone else practiced an accordion in the bedroom.

Talley-Ross: One would get up and do this thing, and one would sing, and one would recite something, and do different … tap dance, stand on your head, whatever you wanted to do — you just had to do something. And my family was so supportive of you; they would make you think you were really good. [Laughs.] And then they’d give us money. So we started getting paid at 5, you know? “Give her a quarter” — you could buy a lot of candy back then with a quarter.

Spector: By the time I was 8, I was already working up whole numbers for our family’s little weekend shows.

Talley-Ross: You know, we were very influenced by the McGuire Sisters and the Andrews Sisters, all those things. Because being family, you tend to have a family sound. Ronnie did “Jambalaya.” There was a song: “Jambalaya, coffee, pie, fillet, gumbo.” She would scream it.

Spector: I sang, with no idea what the words meant or even had them right.

Talley-Ross: Ronnie was honestly my breath growing up — my life. If I could be with Ronnie, I was okay. We were such close cousins. We shared the toilet together. How many people can say they sat on the toilet butt to butt, cheek to cheek — that’s how we did it. Because if she went, I needed to go. I loved Ronnie so much. My mother would say, “Ronnie took every bottle Nedra had.” [Laughs.] She’s two and a half years older than me. So it started early days. It’s like, Oh, Nedra’s got a bottle — let me pull it out of her mouth.

Spector: The cousin who I was closest to was my Aunt SuSu’s daughter, Nedra. Her father was a Spanish man, which made her a half-breed like me. Even though she was two years younger, we were inseparable.

Talley-Ross: Ronnie and I were just having fun, but Estelle was very book-smart; she was easy to get along with. She was soft-spoken, but if you listen to some of the interviews, when they would ask her name, when she was whispering “Estelle,” it was like she lost her breath getting the whole “Estelle” out. Ronnie used to be in the middle. Ronnie needed to be in the middle.

Talley-Ross: Aunt BeBe worked at a little donut shop, sort of attached to the side of the Apollo Theater.

Spector: She said, “I’m going to put you at the Apollo. And then we’ll see how good you are.”

Talley-Ross: We did amateur night at the Apollo … and won. Ronnie, Estelle … it ended up being the three of us with my cousin Ira, but he got stage fright. He didn’t have his belt — he forgot it — so he was like, “I can’t go onstage. I don’t have my belt.”

Spector: That was my key — I knew I was good.

Talley-Ross: That was the beginning, and my mom had no fear of going downtown, knocking on doors, and saying, “There are these three pretty young girls, they can sing, and we’d like something to happen with them.” And they were saying, “You know what? Boy groups are good; girls will want to get married. They’ll want to have children.” So a lot of people said, “No, it’s not going to work.” She worked hard for us to be who we were — and my mother could turn heads — that’s part of why she got in doors, too.

My Aunt BeBe, which is Ronnie and Estelle’s mother, she was tiny — she was only about five-foot-three, but she was very quiet. We came from such a big family, there were so many of us, and that volume could get very high, so Aunt BeBe didn’t really try and compete in the conversation. My mom didn’t play. She held the other girls tight too.

Spector: The three of us were determined, especially me.

Talley-Ross: We started doing the Brooklyn Fox with Murray the K. We did it on our breaks. And that would be on Labor Day, Christmas, and Easter. And we would do these big rock-and-roll shows. We didn’t have a hit, but Murray the K was like, “These are my dancing girls.” You know, da, da, da. It would say on the poster on the marquee “And Others.” So we used to all laugh and go, “We’re ‘And Others.’”

Darlene Love, the Blossoms: That’s where I first met them and we became friends with everybody that was on the show. ’Cause we were together from, like, ten o’clock in the morning to ten o’clock at night for 12 days. We got to meet the Shirelles on that show too.

Talley-Ross: We did our own dance routines. I’d say, I was probably, for me — I’m not boasting — was more the dancer. I just loved to dance. Ronnie would say, “Come on, Ned, you pick up the dancing!” Estelle, you know, didn’t ruffle her hair. Her hair came offstage looking exactly the same. I was sweating — my bangs were going up my face, my hair getting curlier and curlier …

Vera: I remember seeing the Ronettes there and, of course, they were the sex symbols for kids my age — three gorgeous girls with the big hair piled up way high on their head, tight dresses, and the sexy dance moves.

Talley-Ross: Our heels and our makeup was for the audience to see us way off. So our eye makeup was exaggerated, our hair was exaggerated because it was like, See me in the balcony. You had to project your voice, but you had to project your look, too. So that’s how we performed and went onstage going, Try and see us, try and remember us, and hopefully you’ll see a look that you like that you’ll try for school. [Laughs.] So that’s sort of the early days of the Ronettes.

Paul Shaffer, musician: Of course the Ronettes had an image. They were the “bad girls” of rock and roll, and they were dressed with high bouffant hair and tight dresses and, you know — they were a teenage fantasy, the way they were marketed.

Talley-Ross: Estelle loved fashion — she went to the Fashion Institute of Technology. So she was the one going, “Well, let’s wear this and wear that.” She liked Brigitte Bardot and had a picture in her room. Estelle was always very soft-spoken, but she was so sophisticated.

Spector: A lot of Puerto Rican girls in my neighborhood, they wore the eyeliner, and the Black girls had the tight dresses on and the street look and everything.

La La Brooks, the Crystals: They were original with that. And the bouffant hair. Everything was very original.

Talley-Ross: You had to find something to make you stand out from the other girl groups. So then all of a sudden — because of how we dressed — we brought attention to ourselves. It’s so easy for New Yorkers not to see you because they’re just on their way. But if you’re coming in threes, looking alike, you know.

Spector: My mother always told us to look for a gimmick that would make us stand out from all the other groups.

Talley-Ross: My mother was a cosmetologist, so she believed in the teasing and doing the buns and all that. But we always did that — we had extremely long and thick hair. So I did the beehives, the buns, and had hair left over to pull down the side and all that.

Spector: My mother is Cherokee Indian and Black, and my father’s Irish.

Talley-Ross: My grandmother was dark, she had a very cute shape and all those things, and her husband was the Indian affair. She understood what being dark meant. She knew that there was a difference — if you’re dark, things are not going to be at your door so very easy. With having all the kids that they did, they had a variety from redheads, to freckles, to this, to that, and my mother just happened to be one of the darkest kids that was born.

Spector: Being half-breeds, we were born different, so we figured the thing that set us apart from the other groups was our look.

Talley-Ross: We wore high collars with Asian-looking tops. We did slits in our dresses because they were tight, but we danced, so you needed room for your knees to move. If you’re going to wear something formfitting, you had to have the place where your knee went out. We didn’t do the flare little dresses with bows — that’s not who we were. We were New Yorkers. And I think when people saw that, they said, “Yeah, this is sort of it. This is New York.” Nobody was doing that — the girls were all flare, ’50s with the crinolines underneath. It’s like, What’s a crinoline? I think we got the bad-girl image because we would do the shake and we had fringe dresses, so the fringe would really accent your hips.

Spector: So when we turned our backs to the audience and shook … the crowd would go nuts.

Talley-Ross: We were special to the family. We felt the security of all of our family. You could only walk a few blocks without running into an aunt, an uncle, cousins, and all of that. We did the Apollo Theater. And when we did it, I mean, we went with not one dad or aunt or uncle — we went with multiple people to protect us. The aunts would take turns traveling with us, and the uncles were there as the chaperones.

Brooks: It was like the Partridge Family. I mean, so many people of family in a dressing room. It was like, “Oh my God.” It was crazy — uncles, cousins. They took everybody in — and those halls had echoes at the Apollo — the halls was lit up.

Talley-Ross: But it was like, “We can do this. We’ve got the strength of each other.” Because we were a trio, you know, and family. And we knew our family was someplace in that building supporting us and rooting us on. And we had a big, big following of different parts of the people in the community.

Vera: Estelle was the great beauty of the three. I mean, she was like, you know, a folk model. She was just a breathtakingly beautiful woman.

Talley-Ross: So the whole thing about us being sex symbols, I didn’t think about us being sex symbols at all — we were sexy, but not being overtly. So, yeah, there was a lot of guys that wanted to be with us and then there was a lot of girls that wanted to look like us.

Brooks: Ronnie would say, “La La, I’m ready to go,” and she was, like, lifting up her dress.

Talley-Ross: After a while, we were known for that. Ronnie got a little bit wild. She was always the one to say, “Okay, I can go a few steps, hike my skirt a little higher,” or whatever. How many times did I say, “Get the dress down. Pull it further down”?

Brooks: I was shocked. I was like, “Oh my God, Ronnie.” And she took it with a grain of salt, because she wanted the attention. Ronnie loves attention — she’d sing to a pineapple.

Talley-Ross: And when we wanted to change the name, everybody pitched in on what they thought the name could be. My mother’s maiden name was Mobley, and she was like, “Moblettes … that doesn’t sound good.” Everybody was yelling to give their opinion. And then Ronnie — you gotta understand Ronnie’s personality — Ronnie did need to be that person that was very out front. So the name came from “RO,” for Ronnie, “NE,” Nedra, and “ES,” for Estelle. We put it together, Ronettes. But when we got down to just the three of us, we were very, very, very, very close. We always held each other’s hands before we went onstage. Just this feeling of, “Okay, let’s squeeze hands, say a little prayer, go out there, and hit it. I’ve got high-heel shoes on. I got my hair tall, and we’re going to go out and we’re going to do the best show we could do.” Anyway, life was good, and things just came our way. Colpix Records, I was 15 — first contract. Signing a contract, you know, to be with a major company … that was major for us. When we had stuff pressed, we could start doing sock hops. You were legitimate when you had a record with a label on it.

Spector: We were the most popular girl group ever for bar mitzvahs — people wanted the Ronettes.

Talley-Ross: Honi Coles was a friend of ours — he’s the Black guy in Dirty Dancing, but he really did those clubs, the country clubs, back in the day, and we performed there in real life. It was a couple of places, predominantly Jewish, that we played — Grossinger’s was a big country-club-type thing right in upstate New York, which I didn’t think about because when you’re a New Yorker, there’s nowhere else except New York.

Patrick Swayze was not there, which saddens me, but Honi Coles did our choreography for the clubs. Laurels was another — Laurels and Grossinger’s. We felt very accepted there. We would go up there and get spoiled because they would bring you a white tablecloth, blueberries and cream. They put you up in your own little cabin and you were eating good … getting paid for not doing that many shows.

Spector: One day Estelle called Philles Records, which was run by Phil Spector. He was probably the hottest producer in America, but he answered the phone himself.

Talley-Ross: The big lie. No, it didn’t happen that way. He came to the Brooklyn Fox Theatre and came backstage and said, basically, “You know, you’re very good. You got a look.”

Love: Ronnie had told me, when we first met her at the Brooklyn Fox, she was going to marry Phil Spector, and I was like, “Child, you don’t want to marry him. He already married.”

Talley-Ross: I think from the beginning with Phil, he had eyes for Ronnie. She was 18, so she wasn’t illegal.

Spector: We met Phil at a place called Mira Sound in New York on 57th Street. And the first night we walked in, it was just him sitting at the piano, and he looked at me and I looked at him — like, eye contact. And he says, “Well, sing me some songs.” And I said, “Well, all I know is, like, Frankie Lymon and Little Anthony.” And he said, “Well, let me hear it.” And I started singing, “Why do birds sing so gay” … and Phil said, “That’s the voice I’ve been looking for!”

Ellie Greenwich, songwriter: Phil always had a mad, wild crush on Ronnie and thought she was an exceptional-looking girl, which she was, and had a very strange and unique sound.

Talley-Ross: He did the audition in the apartment building that he lived in. He had the office there and lived down the hall from it. So we went there and just went to the piano. You know, I even heard … Ronnie said he heard a voice and he said, “Oh my God, this is the voice I’ve been waiting for!” It didn’t happen that way.

Spector: Phil knew if he approached Colpix and offered to buy out our contract, they’d never let us go, thinking that if Phil Spector wanted us, we must be better than they thought …

Talley-Ross: We had a contract with Colpix. And so it was like, Okay, we got a contract. What? How do we get out of this, you know?

Spector: My mother prepared a whole story about how the three of us wanted to leave the business and go back to school. She told them that Nedra and Estelle wanted to go to secretarial school and that I planned on going into nursing. It sounded right since that’s probably what we would have done if Phil hadn’t come along when he did.

Talley-Ross: By the time we got around to Phil, I was 17, so Mommy had to sign for me. So then all of a sudden, we had pictures being done professionally, and you begin to open some doors that way because those things are very expensive to do, especially if you’re going to get somebody that’s been with the top stars.

Spector: The story worked, and Colpix let us out of our contract within a week. Phil finally signed us in March of 1963.

Excerpted from But Will You Love Me Tomorrow?: An Oral History of the ’60s Girl Groups, by Laura Flam and Emily Sieu Liebowitz. Copyright © 2023. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.