Sebbene famoso quasi quanto i Beatles e i Beach Boys, e meritatamente, per tutto il periodo che va dal 1966 al 1969, John Phillips non ha contribuito a crearsi una fama corrispondente all'immagine dei Mamas & Papas, né in tono con i testi e musiche delle sue trasognanti canzoni.
Comportamenti sessuali sempre più disinibiti e intrecciati, non solo nel suo gruppo ma anche con altre donne, crescente uso di droghe pesanti, caduta della vena creativa, fino all'arresto per traffico di droga, 4 mogli, una relazione incestuosa, sia pure consensuale, dichiarata dalla seconda figlia, (in occasione del lancio del suo libro autobiografico da Ophra), bevitore smodato, famoso per i suoi party a base di alcol, droghe, sesso promiscuo, non si è fatto mancare nemmeno una serie di spese folli e inutili.
Eppure, la sua genialità, sia pure a sprazzi, è riemersa anche durante gli anni '80, con un nuovo hit proprio per i Beach Boys e altri piccole ma luccicanti perle.
E' morto nel 2001, a seguito delle complicanze cardiache dovute al trapianto di fegato di mesi prima.
The recent revelations by Mackenzie Phillips that she had an incestuous relationship with her father, Mamas and Papas singer John Phillips, aren't really so surprising given the hothouse climate of sexual mores then. It does, however, remind one, if indeed one needed reminding, that the hippy era was not without casualties. She may forgive her father. I'm not sure that I would. Of course, he was out of his mind on drugs for most of the 10 years, but she was still his daughter.
At least she was semi-grown-up, not a young child, but he was 44, more than 20 years her senior. John Phillips is dead so we can't ask him what he thought he was doing. The fact that their first encounter took place the night before she was due to marry Jeff Sessler, a member of the Rolling Stones entourage, suggested that Daddy was determined that he would have his little girl before Jeff did, though history or rather the newspaper cuttings doesn't relate whether
Jeff had already slept with his bride-to-be.
By 1975, I was living in London after a turbulent and promiscuous spell at Edinburgh University, followed by an equally rackety period living in Oxford and working as a waitress. I was 23 and my parents had bought me a flat near Ladbroke Grove. I had a sort of job (which I was soon to lose) and I had a boyfriend. He was a tall, rangy Australian called Andrew Fisher, 17 years older than me.
Sadly he is now dead, having succumbed in 2008 to galloping Alzheimer's. Andrew once told me that his mother said: "Women will lie down in gutters for you." I don't know whether any ever did, but the list of his sexual conquests was very long. Andrew had been part of that quintessential Sixties and Seventies group that included Richard Neville, Felix Dennis and Germaine Greer. This was in the days of Oz, the underground magazine that once published a spread of
Greer's vagina and subsequently got into legal trouble under Britain's obscenity laws for publishing a highly sexualised Rupert Bear parody.
As founder and editor of Oz, Neville was the linchpin of the underground press and could be said to have shaped the hearts and minds of at least two generations his own and the one that came after it. A large part of the responsibility for all the tuning in, dropping out, freaking out, chilling out, hanging out, getting high,
giving up, giving it away and cooling it, man, that went on, can be
laid at Neville's door. As the poet Hugo Williams put it: "Post-1966 was all long hair and psychedelia."
They were older than me, by some 15 or more years, and Oz had ceased publication by the time I met Andrew while I was working briefly as a nanny in the boiling summer of 1976 for Richard's sister, the novelist Jill Neville, and her then husband, journalist David Leitch (both now also dead). But its spirit lived on.
Jill and David maintained what could be described politely as a bohemian household, the former perhaps more than the latter. Jill, a beautiful, tricky, manipulative woman, had many admirers. David was fighting a losing battle with alcoholism, but the atmosphere in their Little Venice house was infused with a kind of dangerous fun. You could always be sure of meeting interesting people it was there that I first met Christopher Hitchens and Jeffrey Bernard (Jill was having a fling with the latter, but he took a liking to me and offered to make me the fourth or was it fifth Mrs Bernard; Jill was not pleased).
More than for any pleasure that it might bring him, Andrew, I think, really believed in sexual freedom as a way of life or a philosophy. I don't believe he was the only one. After all, Neville in his memoir of the period, Hippie Hippie Shake, quotes Greer as saying, "The group fuck is the highest ritual expression of our faith but it must happen as a special sort of grace."
Andrew used to attend orgies, or group-sex parties, in a house in Notting Hill Gate, owned by a painter and his actress wife and was very keen that I should go with him. I would never agree to go, though I once went and spent the afternoon in bed with a friend of his, an actor who lived in a flat in Mayfair. I can't remember why I did this: curiosity, daredevilry, a desire to please or impress Andrew. I didn't enjoy the experience and I hated the actor, whom I blamed for the whole sordid business, rather than Andrew. In the obituary that Neville wrote of Andrew for the Sydney Morning Herald, he said: "Even amid the sexual extroversion of the 1970s he pushed the boundaries with his staging of intimate erotic scenarios in London and Paris." Perhaps he was thinking of these parties.
Andrew was never pushy or predatory he didn't need to be: women were queuing up, if not actually lying down in gutters but many men were. The advent of the so-called sexual revolution permitted predatory men to force themselves on girls too inexperienced, shy, nervous, or even too ambitious to say "No".
More than once (or even twice), I ended up in bed with men who had bullied and bored (a lethally effective combination) me there. I still shudder to remember a night with a well-known art dealer who wouldn't take "No" for an answer and complained when I wouldn't give him a blow job.
He snored so loudly that I went to sleep in the other bedroom. I sometimes think he might be the reason I left London to avoid bumping into him. Or a man who went on and on till I gave in, then said "You see, you wanted to all along." No, no, I didn't, but, having agreed, I thought I might as well try to enjoy it.
The fear of being labelled a prick-teaser played its part too. The contraceptive pill undoubtedly made some things easier and, in some ways, better. But it also made many things more difficult. Free love was never free you just paid in different ways. I don't think any of my female contemporaries would consider that they had been happy then, when we were supposedly young and free. There was something rather frightening about this freedom it meant freedom not to call
(I lost my virginity when I was 17 to a boy whom I was mad about, and he never telephoned me again; it took me years to recover); freedom to be unfaithful; freedom to steal your friend's boyfriend (which I am ashamed to say I did in my gap year).
Men definitely got a better deal from free love. Whatever women said and did, they were always more vulnerable. At least when women could say, "We can't. I might get pregnant", it was a reasonable excuse. With the advent of the Pill, all that went out of the window. There were no more restraints.
In the past teenagers had always tended to be replicas of their parents. That all changed to produce a hugely confident and conceited generation. The next crop was total anarchy. Suddenly you were 17 or 18 and, for the first time, you could decide what to wear, how to do your hair, when to get up, when to sleep, whatever. There was no one supervising you. If you had money and looks, you had everything. And you could sleep with who you wanted.
Except you couldn't. There was just as much anguish and unrequited love around then as there always was. And sex only made it worse.
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John Phillips: a lifetime of debauched and reckless behaviour
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/6228133/John-Phillips-a-lifetime-of-debauched-and-reckless-behaviour.html
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
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?"
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'I had sex with Mick Jagger in Jerry Hall's bed,' says daughter of
Mamas and Papas singer John Phillips
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1216134/I-sex-Mick-Jagger-Jerry Halls-bed-says-daughter-Mamas-Papas-singer-John-Phillips.html
By Paul Scott
26th September 2009
The lead singer's daughter, actress Mackenzie Phillips, has accused her father of forcing her into an incestuous affair. But that was just the tip of the iceberg for the sex-obsessed Mamas and Papas. Just ask Mick Jagger...
During the late 1970s, the mink-wearing grand dames of an exquisite Beaux Arts apartment building overlooking New York's Central Park often found themselves sharing its magnificent marble lobby with a variety of beautiful models and groupies.
The destination of the latter contingent was a suite of rooms on one of the lower floors which had become the Manhattan home of Mick Jagger and his supermodel lover, Jerry Hall.
When Jerry was away on photo shoots, the most beautiful girls the city had to offer - hand-picked by Mick, who approached the selection of female conquests with an almost military zeal - queued up to take her place in his bed.
The next morning, the Rolling Stones frontman would wrap the girl in a fluffy white towelling robe, make her tea and toast, and ensure she was long gone by the time his blonde Texan girlfriend returned home.
One evening in January 1978, when Jerry was working in South America, Mick attended a party in the building thrown by one of his wealthy neighbours.
A fellow guest was his old friend John Phillips, ex-leader of hippy pop group The Mamas And The Papas, who had arrived at the soiree with his teenage daughter, Mackenzie.
As the party wore on, Mick suddenly announced he wanted a tuna salad sandwich. So Jagger, Phillips and the long-limbed Mackenzie took the lift down to Mick's apartment in search of food.
But as they prepared the snack in the vast kitchen of his elegant home, Mick announced he was out of mayonnaise - and dispatched Phillips back to the party to find some. With the girl's father gone, he moved quickly. By the time Phillips returned a few minutes later, the priapic Jagger had bolted the door and was already in bed with the 18-year-old Mackenzie. Miss Phillips recalls that night in her controversial memoirs, published in a blaze of publicity in the U.S. this week.
'We went into Jerry Hall's bedroom and had sex in their bed. My dad came back and started knocking on the door, yelling: "You've got my daughter in there!"
All of which might seem to be the perfectly reasonable reaction of a
protective father faced with the nightmare scenario of his impressionable young daughter in the clutches of a notoriously lascivious rock star. But if claims made by self-confessed former drug addict Miss Phillips in her book are to be believed, this was far from a classic case of understandable parental concern.
Because in a chilling testimony, Miss Phillips claims her famous father also had designs on her - and within a year of that night, they would begin an incestuous relationship.
It is a claim that has shocked a generation of fans who idolised Phillips - the composer of seminal Sixties anthems such as California Dreamin' and Monday, Monday - as one of the founding fathers of the hippy 'Flower Power' movement.
It has also provoked a backlash from two of Phillips' four ex-wives. His second wife Michelle Gilliam, who was also a member of The Mamas And The Papas, has branded Mackenzie a fantasist. Mackenzie has a lot of mental illness,' Michelle said this week. 'She's had a needle stuck up her arm for 35 years. John was a bad parent and a drug addict. But doing this to his daughter? No.'
But to add to the controversy, Mackenzie's half-sister, singer Chynna Phillips, has also stepped into the row, saying she believes the claims. Whatever the truth, Mackenzie's revelations about her father have overshadowed her painting of Jagger as a sleazy sexual opportunist with a taste for young girls (though Miss Phillips is quick to point out that the singer was insistent that he considered making a play for her only when she had passed the age of consent).
More importantly, her disclosures serve to reveal the squalid underbelly of drugs and sexual decadence that lurked below the surface of the Sixties' hippy movement.
Certainly, the chequered story of The Mamas And The Papas, who were once lauded as 'The American Beatles' and sold 40 million records in a little over two years in the middle of that decade, can be seen as parable of the age. Theirs is a classic tale of drug addiction, wild sexual experimentation, wasted talent and the untimely deaths of three of the group's four original members.
The principal player in all this conspicuous excess was John Phillips, chief songwriter and creative genius behind the group, whose close harmonies and preaching of love and tolerance made them huge stars with lavish fortunes to match.
Phillips was the 6ft 4in son of a U.S. Marines officer, who had himself briefly flirted with a career in the military. He formed The Mamas And The Papas in 1965 with wife Michelle, a Californian model, singer Denny Doherty and 22-stone Cass Elliot, 'Mama Cass'. They found international fame a year later with California Dreamin' - the song Phillips wrote in New York to soothe his wife's homesickness - and went on to have 11 consecutive Top Ten singles in the American charts. The following year, Phillips wrote the ultimate flower power anthem, San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair) - a British
No 1 for Scott McKenzie. But behind the scenes, the group was already riven with feuds caused by drug-taking, jealousy and their highly complicated personal lives.
Even as they topped the charts, Phillips was already cheating on Michelle, and soon began a clandestine affair with actress Mia Farrow, who at the time was married to Frank Sinatra.
When a furious Sinatra, who famously had links to Sam Giancana, the Chicago Mafia boss, discovered that Phillips had been sleeping with Farrow in their marital bed while he was away on tour, he sent a bunch of heavies to warn him off. Undaunted, Phillips, who was already insisting on being addressed by his stage name, Papa John, went out and bought a small armoury of weapons to protect himself from Sinatra's Mob cronies.
He was also rumoured to have become close to Princess Margaret, whom he visited at the private Caribbean island of Mustique, where she would play piano and join him in singing bawdy versions of Chattanooga Choo Choo.
She would also secretly smuggle Phillips into her private quarters at Kensington Palace.
By way of retaliation, his blonde and angelic-looking wife Michelle embarked on her own series of adulterous relationships with a string of Hollywood leading men, including Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and film director Roman Polanski.
The couple bought a mock Tudor estate on a hilltop in upmarket Bel Air, where the Rolling Stones and The Beatles were regular guests. At debauched parties, guests were handed bowls of cocaine and LSD tablets as they entered the house.
By then, Phillips was already an addict, and his gilded life was fast unravelling. He was once so out of his head on drugs that he let his pet golden retriever, Trelawny, munch its way through a bag of the psychedelic drug mescaline.
The poor creature ran in circles for three days without stopping, then stared at himself in the mirror for 12 hours.
Later, after being arrested for his part in a pill-pushing ring, Phillips dyed the dog black as part of a botched plan to go on the run. But his drug-taking would also inadvertently save his life. In August 1969, he was so stoned that he failed to turn up to a party in Cielo Drive, Hollywood. That night, the inhabitants of the house, including film director vcRoman Polanski's pregnant wife Sharon Tate, were murdered by disciples of the psychotic Charles Manson. Meanwhile, the sexual carousel continued as Phillips made conquests of a string of willing women, and Michelle began an affair with the other male singer in the group, Denny Doherty.
When Phillips discovered what was going on, he sacked his wife, telling her: 'You can do a lot of things to me Michelle, but you don't f*** my tenor.'
Meanwhile, the vastly overweight Mama Cass Elliot was secretly in love with Doherty and later proposed to him. He turned her down, though he subsequently admitted to being so drugged up he could not remember her asking.
In 1974, three years after The Mamas And The Papas split up, 32-year-old Cass was found dead at her flat in London's Mayfair after suffering a heart attack in her sleep. (She did not choke on a ham sandwich, as urban myth has claimed.)
In the mid-1970s, Phillips, who by now had developed an addiction to heroin, was reunited with his children Jeffrey and Mackenzie (two of the five children he'd had by three different women), with whom he been in intermittent contact since his divorce from their socialite mother, Susan Adams, his first wife, in 1962. The teenagers moved into his Los Angeles mansion, but it was no place
for impressionable youngsters. When she was just ten, Phillips had taught his daughter how to roll a joint. In her new book, High On Arrival, Mackenzie, now 49, tells how her father would also leave 'little surprises' hidden around the house for his daughter to find - tabs of the morphine-like painkiller, Dilaudid.
Not surprisingly, actress Mackenzie, who appeared in the hit movie American Graffiti at the age of 12 and went on to star in the long-running U.S. sitcom One Day At A Time, soon developed a habit to match her father's.
She claims that her father first injected her with drugs when she was 17. It was the start of a descent into addiction that saw her sacked from her £30,000-an-episode role in the TV show and would see her check into rehab on no fewer than nine occasions - the most recent being in November last year after she was caught with cocaine and heroin at bLos Angeles airport. vBut it is her insistence that she had an incestuous relationship with her father that is most shocking.
Mackenzie claims her father raped her for the first time in 1979, on the eve of her wedding to first husband Jeff Sessler, who worked for the Rolling Stones. For the next several years, Miss Phillips shockingly claims, she and her father conducted a 'consensual' sexual relationship in the haze of their joint addictions.
Phillips, who wrote his own tell-all autobiography when his career had faded in the mid-1980s, is not in a position to defend himself from her allegations.
He died, aged 65, in 2001 of complications caused by a liver transplant. Band mate Denny Doherty died two years ago of a heart attack in his native Canada.
So with her family bitterly divided over the salacious claims, it seems we may never know the full truth. What is undoubtedly the case is that these revelations have already done much to destroy the reputation of one of the true icons of the Sixties.
http://sixties-l.blogspot.com/2009/10/dark-side-of-free-love-john-phillips.html
http://sixties-l.blogspot.com/2009/10/dark-side-of-free-love-john-phillips.html
