1960s girl-group singer who struggled with mental illness dies

The intro to an article in The New York Times memorializing Estelle Bennett of the 1960s group, The Ronettes:

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.”

Those who knew Ms. Bennett in her healthier days portray her as gentle and intelligent, and as playing a critical part in the development of the Ronettes’ style. The eldest of the group, she worked at Macy’s and attended the Fashion Institute of Technology, and the look she helped devise for the group was all superlatives: bigger, badder and sexier than anybody. Racial ambiguity lent an exotic element: the Bennett sisters had black, American Indian and Irish blood; Ms. Talley was black, Indian and Puerto Rican.

“We called them the bad girls of the ’60s,” said the singer Darlene Love, who met the Ronettes in 1962, a year before they became famous with “Be My Baby.” “They had the really, really short skirts and they had big, big, big hair. Most of the black entertainers of the ’60s didn’t look like that, but they wanted to be separate from everybody else.”