Update: Former Step-mother Michelle Phillips reaction and disbelief
Update: Sister Chynna Phillips reaction to today’s breaking news.
If you thought you knew all about former child star Mackenzie Phillips of the 1970’s television hit One Day at a Time – I would venture to say – you’re wrong. Today Phillips is sitting down for a candid interview with Oprah to frankly discuss her extremely personal and highly revealing memoir, High On Arrival.
Phillips, daughter of John Phillips the founder of the 60’s musical group The Mamas & The Papas, shares with Oprah the shocking details about her relationship with her father. While we are aware the actress has led a public battle with drug addiction, we learn now that this hard partying lifestyle was forged by her own father.
Phillips reveals in her book, “My father shot me up for the first time. It seemed to be the next logical progression. I remember going into my room, I was crouched on the floor…He put the needle in my arm and put the plunger in and he missed. He missed the vein and my whole arm went numb.”
But this is only the beginning of her shocking secrets. While she confirms the rumors that have circulated for years about being bedded at an inappropriately young age by Rolling Stones front man, Mick Jagger, Phillips now shares the most shocking and perverse of sexual encounters. Phillips states, “On the eve of my wedding [to Jeff Sessler] my father showed up, determined to stop it,” Phillips wrote. “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 also claims that their sexual relations became consensual after repeat encounters.
The book description from publisher Simon and Schuster:
Not long before her fiftieth birthday, Mackenzie Phillips walked into Los Angeles International Airport. She was on her way to a reunion of One Day at a Time, the hugely popular 70s sitcom on which she once starred as the lovable rebel Julie Cooper. Within minutes, Mackenzie was in handcuffs, arrested for possession of cocaine and heroin.
Born into rock and roll royalty, Mackenzie grew up in an all-access kingdom of hippy freedom and heroin cool. It was a kingdom over which her father, the legendary John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas, presided, often in absentia, a spellbinding, visionary phantom.
When Mackenzie was a teenager, Hollywood and the world took notice of the charming, talented, precocious child actor after her star-making turn in American Graffiti. As a young woman she joined the nonstop party in the hedonistic pleasure dome her father created for himself and his fellow revelers, and a rapt TV audience watched as Julie Cooper wasted away before their eyes. By the time Mackenzie discovered how deep and dark her father’s trip was going, it was too late. And as an adult, she has paid dearly for a lifetime of excess, working tirelessly to reconcile a wonderful, terrible past in which she succumbed to the power of addiction and the pull of her magnetic father.
As her astounding, outrageous, and often tender life story unfolds, Phillips overcomes seemingly impossible obstacles again and again and journeys toward redemption and peace. By exposing the shadows and secrets of the past to the light of day, the star who turned up High On Arrival has finally come back down to earth — to stay.