A Life of Troubles Followed a Singer’s Burst of Fame

By BEN SISARIO
NYT

She was the quiet Ronette, the one people called the prettiest, the one who was content to remain in the shadow of her younger sister, Ronnie, because even in the shadow there’s still some spotlight.

For a few years in the mid-1960s Estelle Bennett lived a girl-group fairy tale, posing for magazine covers with her fellow Ronettes and dating the likes of George Harrison and Mick Jagger. Along with her sister and their cousin Nedra Talley, she helped redefine rock ’n’ roll femininity.

The Ronettes delivered their songs’ promises of eternal puppy love in the guise of tough vamps from the streets of New York. Their heavy mascara, slit skirts and piles of teased hair suggested both sex and danger, an association revived most recently by Amy Winehouse.

But Ms. Bennett’s death last week at 67 revealed a post-fame life of illness and squalor that was little known even to many of the Ronettes’ biggest fans. In her decades away from the public eye she struggled with anorexia and schizophrenia, and at times she had also been homeless, said her daughter, Toyin Hunter.

“I want to know who my mother was,” Ms. Hunter, 37, said in an interview. “From the time I was born she suffered with mental illness; I never really got to know Estelle in a good mental state.”

(More here.)