John Phillips: a lifetime of debauched and reckless behaviour
Matthew Kruk
John Phillips: a lifetime of debauched and reckless behaviour
As the daughter of the Mamas and the Papas' John Phillips reveals she
had an incestuous relationship with her father, Chris Campion looks back
on the rockstar's wild life.
By Chris Campion
Published: 7:00AM BST 25 Sep 2009
Scandalous claims of rape and incest made this week by Mackenzie
Phillips against her father, 60s music icon John Phillips, have put the
spotlight back on a man whose debauched reputation has long overshadowed
his brilliant contributions to music as the erstwhile leader of the
Mamas and the Papas.
While promoting her new memoir, High On Arrival, on the Oprah Winfrey
show, Mackenzie Phillips alleged that at 19 she was raped by her
musician father and subsequently engaged in a 10-year incestuous yet
consensual sexual relationship. Her sensational allegations have served
to split the only showbiz family who are more dysfunctional than the
Jacksons.
Two of John Phillips' ex-wives, Michelle Phillips and Genevieve Waite,
have denounced the story, but what is undisputable is that Phillips has
one of the worst and wildest reputations in rock.
It was a reputation he himself helped foster and promote, most notably
in his 1986 autobiography, Papa John, during which he gleefully and
unrepentantly relates a catalogue of debauched and reckless behaviour
that includes sexual liaisons, infidelities and rampant drug use in
lurid detail.
Phillips, who died in 2001 of complications relating to a liver
transplant, was married four times and sired five children with three of
his wives. He was an extraordinarily charismatic man, a brilliant
musician with an innate talent for songwriting. He was also an
incorrigible rebel, plagued by a fatalism that threatened to engulf all
those closest to him; a man who delighted in living dangerously, even
carrying on an affair with Mia Farrow under the nose of her then-husband
Frank Sinatra.
Despite their genteel music and image as the family-friendly face of
hippie-dom, the Mamas and the Papas - John Phillips, his wife Michelle,
Denny Doherty and Mama Cass Elliot - indulged in all the free love and
chemical intoxication that the 60s had to offer. They were also famously
incestuous as a group, splitting up in 1968 when inter-band relations
had made it all-but-impossible for them to continue recording. While
still married to John, Michelle Phillips had an affair with Denny
Doherty - an affair that only inflamed the ire of fellow Cass Elliot,
who herself harboured an infatuation (albeit unrequited) with Doherty.
The phenomenal wealth and fame John Phillips acquired as the group's
chief songwriter - he was the author of their biggest hits, California
Dreamin' and Monday Monday - gave him access to a fast-living Hollywood
crowd that numbered notorious party hounds such as Jack Nicholson and
Warren Beatty.
He was also friendly with Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate and
claimed in his autobiography to have narrowly escaped death, having been
invited to the house that Polanski and Tate were renting in the
Hollywood Hills on the same August 1969 night that the Manson family
slaughtered its inhabitants.
Shortly after the Manson murders, a grief-stricken Roman Polanksi became
convinced that Phillips had masterminded the murder of his wife and her
friends in retribution for Polanski's own brief affair with Michelle
Phillips and, at one point, the director grabbed a kitchen knife and
held it to the singer's throat in an attempt to force a confession out
of him. Both Phillips and Mama Cass, like much of the LA music scene at
the time, had peripheral connections to the Manson family and were later
called to testify for the prosecution at the 1970 trial of Manson and
his followers.
Following the dissolution of the Mamas and the Papas, Phillips never
managed to attain the same level of commercial success. His attempts to
launch himself as a solo artist failed and his life began to run adrift.
Professional failures weighed heavily on him and exacerbated an
addiction to drugs that had begun to take a much deeper hold on his
life.
By 1976, he and his third wife, the South African model and actress
Genevieve Waite, were hopelessly addicted to cocaine and heroin. They
had been taking the latter while sharing a house in London with Rolling
Stones' guitarist Keith Richards and his then-partner Anita Pallenberg,
both of whom were also at the height of their drug addictions following
the death of their infant child, Tara.
Phillips and Waite carried their habits with them as they jet-setted
around the world, even befriending Princess Margaret while vacationing
at her holiday home on Mustique. "I don't know if John was ever happy in
his own skin," Waite told me last year. "I don't think he was. He tried
to act real happy but I don't know if he was."
A large part of Phillips' discomfort stemmed from his own tumultuous
childhood. He was the youngest of three children born to a retired
Irish-American marine and his Cherokee wife. But his abiding memory of
his own father, an alcoholic manic-depressive, was creeping into the
rank cellar of the family home and seeing him slumped unconscious in a
chair dressed in his military uniform, surrounded by empty bottles and
his pack of snarling American bulldogs. Phillips spent most of his life
trying to escape from that image of his father. Paradoxically, while
doing so, he created a hell of his own that was far, far worse.
An incorrigible rebel with boundless enthusiasm and an indomitable
humanist streak, he was also plagued by a fatalism that threatened to
engulf all those closest to him. Those most affected by Phillips'
chaotic lifestyle were his children. Mackenzie and Jeffrey (both
children from Phillips' first marriage to Susan Adams, a descendant of
U.S. President John Adams) developed drug addictions of their own, aged
13 and 14 respectively, while living with their father at his rented Bel
Air mansion in the early 70s. Cocaine was so plentiful that it was often
laid out in bowls around the house like pot pourri.
Around this time, Mackenzie's career as a child star began to take off.
She made her acting debut aged 12 in the George Lucas film, American
Graffiti. By 16, she had outstripped her father's fame as one of the
stars of an immensely popular U.S. sitcom, One Day At A Time, and was
said to be earning somewhere in the region of $47,000 a week.
Phillips eulogized the antics of his streetwise daughter in a song
called She's Just 14, which was recorded in 1977 during notoriously
druggy sessions in New York with Keith Richards, in which the
hard-living duo reputedly spent more time shooting heroin in the studio
bathroom than laying down tracks. The title of Mackenzie Phillips' new
memoir, High on Arrival, is taken from a line in that song, which also
features a lascivious backing vocal from Mick Jagger, who himself also
bedded Mackenzie (when she was 18).
At the height of his addiction, Phillips claimed to be shooting up every
15 minutes. All that came to an end on July 31, 1980, when Phillips was
arrested. He had been funding his drug habit by trading books of stolen
prescriptions for bottles of pharmaceutical drugs at a Manhattan
pharmacy, then trading those with his drug dealers for cocaine.
Facing a possible 45-year jail term on drug trafficking charges,
Phillips undertook a high-profile publicity tour, visiting schools and
appearing on talk shows accompanied by Mackenzie, who had been fired
from her sitcom role when the extent of her own drug and alcohol
addiction was made public. Although Phillips never took drugs again, he
developed an equally debilitating alcohol addiction.
"He had certain rules. But they were all to be broken. They had no
lasting power, these rules," Phillips' lifelong friend Bill Cleary told
me. "Like, 'everything in moderation, except moderation'. That was one
of his favourites. I mean, he wanted excess. To take it over the line."
Whether Phillips crossed the moral line with his own daughter is another
thing. In a story published in this week's edition of American gossip
magazine U.S. Weekly to promote her upcoming album, Chynna Phillips (the
only child of John and Michelle Phillips) claims that her sister
confessed her sexual relationship with their father in a 1997 phone
call.
But other members of the family disagree. Phillip's third wife Genevieve
Waite maintained her ex-husband was "incapable of having a sexual
relationship with his own child". Even Michelle Phillips, one of her
ex-husband's harshest and most vocal critics, said: "John was a bad
parent, and a drug addict. But doing this to his daughter? Then why
isn't she with a good psychiatrist on a couch?"