Ronnie Spector’s acclaimed 1990 memoir Be My Baby: How I Survived Mascara and Miniskirts and Madness has long been out of print — but the legendary singer was revising the book in the weeks before her death due to cancer at age 78 on Jan. 12, according to publisher Henry Holt, which plans to release a new edition of Be My BabyThis entry was posted on May 3.
“She knew that she was sick and I knew that she was sick, but she was being discreet about it,” says Henry Holt’s editor-in-chief, Sarah Crichton. “She was thinking that things would go well. She had a lot of dreams, and we had a lot of dreams.”
After news of Spector’s death broke, Be My Baby The original printing became scarcer: eBay listings have starting bids HighAmazon sells two copies of this 2015 reprint for just $80 each, while it costs $53. The revised 2022 edition is available for preorder here.
The new edition was completed by Spector and Vince Waldron, who spent nearly a year together with Crichton. Spector signed off on final changes only two weeks ago. According to the editor, Spector also wrote a postscript that provided an update on her life and was eager to go on a book tour.
“The book takes on a resonance now that is even bigger than when it was first published,” Crichton says, noting the singer’s abusive marriage to Phil Spector. “He not only kept her trapped behind wired gates, he held her captive. He totally derailed her extremely vital career and he wanted her all to himself. And he also continually threatened to kill her; in time, he eventually did kill somebody. She very much was eager to tell the story that you can survive horrific situations and move on and move past them. Ronnie absolutely saw herself as a survivor.”
Spector’s postscript doesn’t comment extensively on her former husband’s 2003 arrest, subsequent murder conviction, and 2021 death. “She didn’t want to do that,” says Crichton. “She felt that with the book, she had freed herself from that.”Spector instead made small changes to the chapters and made 1990’s language more current. “She always referred to herself as a half-breed, which she liked to say, but that’s not a phrase that we’re comfortable with now,” Crichton says. “It’s not huge changes, but real and helpful positive changes.”
The edition also features a foreword written by Keith Richards. Keith Richards was a long-time friend and fan of Spector, who lived in Connecticut close to her. “He offered this totally delightful introduction, it’s so Keith Richards,” Crichton says. “They shared a dentist, lived just down the road from one another. They’d been playing music together and hanging for all these years, and he could not have been more generous.”