John Phillips of Mamas and Papas Slept With Daughter Mackenzie Phillips, Says New Book
NEW YORK (CBS) Mackenzie Phillips was the daughter of a music legend, and a child star in her own right, but in her new book "High on Arrival," she writes of having "demons" and "haunted parts" of her life that are "painful and scary."
Photos: Mackenzie Phillips Sex with Dad
"Facing them, revealing them, makes them too real," Phillips writes in the new autobiography, which hits shelves September 23. "I think about my mug shot in the tabloids. And I think of all that happened before, between, and after."
Phillips calls her father, John Phillips, the lead singer of the American pop-quartet The Mamas and the Papas, a "great and terrible sun around which his children, wives, girlfriends, fellow musicians, and drug dealers orbited, relentlessly drawn to his fierce, inspiring, damaging light."
Phillips now says that she had a sexual relationship with her father, often fueled by drugs, that spanned ten years.
Phillips wrote in her book: "I woke up that night from a blackout to find myself having sex with my own father."
The former star of TV's "One Day at a Time," said the sexual relationship with her father ended when she became pregnant and didn't know who had fathered the child. She had an abortion, which her father paid for, "and I never let him touch me again."
"There are loving and painful memories of the f***ed-up family I wouldn't trade for the world. There are lost memories — conversations and chronologies I wish I could remember — and events I know my whole being wants to erase forever," Phillips writes.
The former child star writes that she has had more than her share of highs and lows.
She recalls touring with a reconstituted version of the Mamas and the Papas, "performing in city after city for more than 250 days of the year." At each hotel along the way, she would have a FedEx full of cocaine waiting for her.
"I spent all day every day in my hotel room, shooting up coke, coming out only to appear onstage or the nightly gig," she writes in the book. "Then I'd return to my hotel and do more coke. I was twenty-six years old."
"Using a scarf, I tied off my arm. As I looked for a vein, I felt the familiar rush that accompanied the ritual itself. I knew what was coming. I pushed the needle in. As the coke entered my bloodstream I felt a euphoric onrush of sensation. I was back where I wanted to be."
Photos: Mackenzie Phillips Sex with Dad
Phillips writes of the addiction, but also says that she was able to overcome it, mostly, for more than fifteen years.
But there was a relapse.
Nearly fifty years old, Phillips found herself in a police station in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. "I was sitting in a hallway on a bench," she writes. "My hands were cuffed and the handcuffs were hooked to the bench. All the cops were staring at me: the ¬middle-aged lady, the former child star, who had just been busted at the airport for heroin possession. A low, low moment."
"Sitting on that bench, looking ahead, I knew that in some way I had to go back. I had to go back fifteen years, to all the work I'd done when I got sober, to the surgery that had sent me into remission for so long. I had to see what was left unfinished."
Phillips writes that if the addiction was a cancer that had been carefully excised, she had "missed a spot." "It had grown back, all the more fierce and malignant. Here I was again. Back at the bottom, caught in the arms of a bad-news lover I thought I had dumped for good."
So now with the tell-all book and a tell-more Oprah interview, Mackenzie hopes she can begin to put the past behind her.
"It is time to sort out a life that too often I left blurry, unprocessed, unreal, hoping that in doing so I would be leaving it behind me forever," Mackenzie Phillips writes.
Photos: Mackenzie Phillips Sex with Dad
Read more of "High on Arrival" here.>
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September 20, 2009 - Mackenzie Phillips and John Phillips: Incest and Drugs Bombshell