Did The Mamas and The Papas’ John Phillips have an incestuous relationship with his daughter?
The Mamas and The Papas were a band who personified the counterculture movement in the 1960s. Amid the highs of peace, love and flower power were the lows of acid excesses, affairs, and an unhealthy penchant for controversy. With this in mind, it seems almost fitting that they failed to outlive the decade and fell apart after the summer of love in 1968. Alas, since then, their legacy has only grown more pitted with peaks and troughs.
A new low came to the fore with the release of a memoir by John Phillips’ daughter, High on Arrival. Phillips was the chief songwriter of the band and rallied the rowdy group together, but the interpersonal relationships were always a struggle. Phillips married Michelle in 1962 – she was 18, and he was 27 – and the group came together three years later.
But in Laurel Canyon, marriages didn’t tend to last long, and the group’s tenor had eyes of desire. Soon enough, two became three as Denny Doherty entered the picture, and as we so often learn, three never works. Four works even less, and although John Phillips had forgiven his wife’s first indiscretion, writing the song ‘I Saw Her Again’ and (perhaps fiendishly) giving Doherty the lead vocal line, he fired Michelle from the band when he found out that she had also slept with Gene Clark from the Byrds. She was later reinstated when fans threatened a boycott, but a rift had formed. And the rift went in every direction.
Michelle recalls Cass Elliot, confiding: “I don’t get it. You could have any man you want. Why would you take mine?” You see, this whole time, Elliot had been in love with Doherty, but it proved tragically unrequited. This would forever be the case as Doherty pursued other Laurel Canyon love interests and tried to turn a blind eye to the open secret of Elliot’s infatuation. Sadly, this ordeal ultimately caused the band to split in 1969, and the Phillips’ marriage ended that same year.
All of this had taken a toll on the collective drug intake of the band. Amid this tempestuous time, John Phillips had flown off the handle to such an extent that Keith Richards even kicked him out of a party for being too wild. The element that seems most incongruous with all the details above – even amid counterculture madness – is that John Phillips was already a father at this stage. In 1957, he married the wealthy Susan Adams and had two children with her—his son Jeffrey and his daughter Mackenzie.
And he wasn’t an absent father either. At one point, he even took his five-year-old daughter to the Virgin Islands with the band and a few friends, with Elliott later arriving with a quart of LSD. Now, a little bit of research places a quart’s worth of LSD at around 1million hits of acid at a standard dosage during that heady, potent era. That sounds like an awful lot of acid for 15 people in what turned out to be only about a five-week stay on the peaceful island with a child present.
Thus, there is no doubt that Phillips was a bohemian parent, but Mackenzie’s allegations in her memoir – which was released when she was 49 years old – painted a far darker picture altogether.
“On the eve of my wedding, my father showed up, determined to stop it,” Mackenzie Phillips writes. At the time, she was 19 years old and about to marry the talent manager Jeff Sessler. “I had tons of pills, and Dad had tons of everything too. Eventually, I passed out on Dad’s bed… My father was not a man with boundaries. He was full of love, and he was sick with drugs. I woke up that night from a blackout to find myself having sex with my own father.”
She continues: “Had this happened before? I didn’t know. All I can say is it was the first time I was aware of it.” Thereafter, Mackenzie’s drug abuse spiralled, and she was fired from her acting role in the TV series One Day at a Time. Shortly after her dismissal, she entered what she troubling describes as a “consensual” relationship with her father, in an affair that ran alongside her marriage to Sessler. This marriage ended in divorce after two years in 1981.
While she would check into rehab with her father during this period, both struggled to kick their drug habits, and the alleged sexual relationship continued. In the early 1980s, they even toured together under the name The New Mamas and the Papas. She would later tell Oprah Winfrey that her relationship at this time was like a “sort of Stockholm syndrome, where you begin to love your captor.” In her memoir, she even writes: “I was a fragment of a person, and my secret isolated me. One night Dad said, ‘We could just run away to a country where no one would look down on us. There are countries where this is an accepted practice. Maybe Fiji.'”
She reports that the incestuous affair continued for almost a decade until she fell pregnant and aborted the baby, fearing it to be her father’s child. Throughout this time, the story went untold. When John died in 2001, he was hailed as a hero and an exquisite songwriter with a troubled drug issue.
His passing makes the claims a mark of contention for his former wife Michelle Phillips, who told Vanity Fair: “I’m so embarrassed—and mad,” she said. “At Oprah, at the publisher, and at Mackenzie, who should be on a psychiatrist’s couch, not on TV. Is this all true? We’ll never know because she waited until John was dead. If you’re going to make these accusations and they don’t hurt anyone living, that’s one thing. But Mackenzie has affected the lives of all her nieces and nephews, who are not going to school today and are staying home sobbing instead.”
She later furthered her rebuttal of the claim telling The Hollywood Reporter: she has “every reason to believe [Mackenzie’s account is] untrue.” Adding: “She told me, then she called me back and said, ‘You know I’m joking.'”
John Phillips’ third wife, Genevieve Waite Phillips, was even more virulent in her defence, publicly stating: “I am stunned by Mackenzie’s terrible allegations about her father. I would often complain to John about her overly familiar attitude towards him, and he would tell me that that was just her way. John was a good man who had the disease of alcoholism and drug addiction. He was incapable, no matter how drunk or drugged he was, of having such a relationship with his own child.”
This is a character witness that many have offered. Her own half-sister Bijou Phillips has also denied the allegations, writing in a since-deleted Tweet that she has “asked the hard questions” and concluded, “I don’t believe my sister. Our father is many things, this is not one of them.”
However, others have claimed that this is victim blaming and that people have a vested interest in supporting John Phillips’ innocence. Chynna Phillips, Michelle Phillips’ daughter, told US Weekly: “I mean, who in their right mind would make such a claim if it wasn’t true?” In fact, she even recalled that twelve years prior to Mackenzie’s book release and a decade on from the alleged affair, she received a phone call from her half-sister where she announced: “I don’t know why, but I just really felt the need to call you and tell you something that I think you need to know. And she went on to tell me that she had had an incestuous relationship with our dad for about ten years”. This claim is also bolstered by Jessica Woods, the daughter of his former bandmate Denny Doherty, who says that her father was “horrified at what John had done.”
Since the claims and counterclaims were first made, little clarity has arisen from the dark issue. But amid this rubble of controversy, with little expectation of resolution in sight, the glimmer of hope is the tale of survival. Whether true or false, a great deal of upheaval followed these claims for everyone involved, and the fact that the families have nursed the wounds of this tempestuous rift is a mark of defiance.
