Mackenzie Phillips may have been born into rock-star royalty,
but her life has been far from charmed. She found fame at a young age, but that
couldn't stave off the darkness that awaited her. This is her tragic real-life story.
Mackenzie Phillips grew up in the late 60s in the household of one of pop music's biggest stars,
so it's safe to say that she didn't exactly have a conventional childhood.
Her father was John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas,
who was notorious for his rock star excess, which included plenty of drug use. Furthermore,
he wasn't the kind of parent who bothered to hide his hard-partying antics from his children.
When Mackenzie was 10, her dad taught her the finer points of rolling a joint.
By 11, she'd already experimented with cocaine, her misguided childhood mind
believing that drug use was a rite of passage that was just part of growing up. There were
also other factors at play. As she told Oprah Winfrey on an episode of Where Are They Now?,
"I come from a long line of undiagnosed mental illness,
rampant addiction and alcoholism, so there's the genetic component.
And then there's the introduction to these types of behaviors at a very young age."
"You become desensitized to seeing,
you know, all kinds of out-of-control behavior and inappropriate things from a very young age."
By the age of 17, Phillips was living life in the Hollywood fast lane as a highly paid star
of the hit sitcom One Day at a Time. Having loads of money and no boundaries caused her childhood
experimentation with drugs to escalate. An early indication of trouble to come happened in November
1977, around the time of her 18th birthday, when she was arrested and charged with disorderly
conduct. As reported by People Magazine, police found her "semiconscious" on a street
in West Hollywood, while officers also found a straw containing a trace amount of cocaine.
At the time, Phillips insisted the whole thing was a misunderstanding, claiming that someone
at a party gave her a pill, which turned out to be a Quaalude. As she told People,
"I'd never taken one before. My knees were like jelly. I asked the guy to take me to a
coffee shop, but I fell over just when a deputy came by. So they took me in."
She was placed on six months' probation that required her to continue treatment
from a psychotherapist she'd already been seeing. As she put it to People,
"It's called diversion therapy. And I'm happily diverted."
By November of 1979, it had become impossible for the cast and producers of One Day at a Time
to ignore the escalation of Mackenzie Phillips' drug use. As reported by People Magazine in 1980,
her colleagues concluded that her newly hoarse voice, extreme weight loss, and chronic exhaustion
were the result of cocaine abuse. She was told to take six weeks off to, quote, "rest and put
on some weight," with the understanding that she would use the time to pull herself together.
But when Phillips returned to the set, the situation hadn't improved. So two weeks later,
she was given a choice: either she could voluntarily leave the show "for personal reasons"
or she could be publicly fired. She eventually agreed to a statement declaring that her exit was
by, quote, "mutual agreement." Phillips' manager downplayed the actress' drug use to People,
but those who worked on the show told a far different story.
As Barbara Brogliatti, head publicist for series creator Norman Lear, put it,
"She just can't work. I consider this firing a step toward saving
a child's life. The kid's in real trouble."
Shortly before exiting One Day at a Time in 1979, a then-19-year-old Mackenzie Phillips
wed music producer Jeff Sessler. The marriage didn't last very long, though, as they were
separated by March of 1980, and then their divorce was finalized the following year. In an interview
with People Magazine in 1981, Phillips revealed that she'd met Sessler through a mutual friend:
Anita Pallenberg, who was then the girlfriend of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards.
Both Pallenberg and Richards had well-publicized issues with narcotics. As Phillips told People,
"I should have known right from there it was a bad move [...] I thought I was
in love. I was stoned. We were all stoned. It was the drugs talking."
Although the interview with People was published a full year after Phillips and Sessler separated,
she remained bitter. As she explained,
"Everybody knew he was a climber but me. He put $800 in the marriage the whole time,
and we spent $300,000. Now he wants this
and that and half my residuals from the 15 shows I did while married. It's a ripoff."
In 1981, Mackenzie Phillips and her father had both gotten sober,
although that wouldn't last long for either of them. During the year that she was
fired from One Day at a Time, she'd spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on drugs.
Her father, meanwhile, admitted to spending $1 million a year on heroin
and cocaine for himself and his third wife Genevieve. As Mackenzie told People Magazine,
"I don't know where it went, but $300,000 to $400,000 is gone,
mostly for drugs. I mean, half a million in cash is gone!"
One time when Phillips was a young mother, she locked herself in the bathroom so that she could
inject herself with heroin when her young son began banging on the door. She then experienced
a moment of clarity that led her to rehab and a decade of sobriety. But it wouldn't last.
After undergoing surgery, she received a prescription for painkillers.
Her doctor eventually cut her off from those pain pills,
so she got in touch with her old drug dealers, who were happy to supply her with cocaine and heroin.
This relapse led her to what she's described as the darkest time in her life.
By 2014, Phillips had been to rehab 11 times. Her final time came when she realized that she'd
hit rock bottom and that the path that lay ahead did not have a happy ending.
That rock bottom moment happened in August 2008 when she was arrested in an airport and
charged with drug possession. As she recalled to People Magazine in 2014,
"I thought, How many more times does the universe have to knock
on the door of my consciousness and say, 'Hey Phillips, wake up?'"
In 2009, Mackenzie Phillips shared a jaw-dropping revelation.
During an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, she read an excerpt from her memoir
High on Arrival about a specific memory of being in a hotel room in the late 70s:
"I woke up that night from a blackout to find myself having sex with my own father.
I don't remember how it started or, thankfully,
how it ended. [...] Was it the first time? Had this happened before? I didn't know
and I still don't. All I can say is that it was the first time I was aware of it.
For a moment I was in my body, in that horrible truth, and then I slid back into a blackout."
"Your father is supposed to protect you. Your father is supposed to protect you. Not ---- you."
At the time, Phillips had recently been fired from One Day at a Time,
and she'd joined her father on tour as part of the New Mamas & the Papas.
It was during this time that what she initially described as "rape" became, quote, "a consensual
relationship" as both father and daughter slipped deeper into drug addiction. As Phillips recalled,
"It didn't happen every day. It didn't happen every week, but it certainly happened."
According to Phillips, her incestuous relationship with her father lasted for a decade,
an experience she described to Oprah Winfrey as, quote,
"sort of the Stockholm Syndrome,
where you begin to love your captor. And I felt great love for my father."
This arrangement finally came to an end when Phillips discovered that she was pregnant and that
her father was potentially responsible. He paid for her to have an abortion, which led to a big
dose of reality hitting her over the head. As she explained during an appearance on the Today show,
"I was horrified. It brought me smack-dab into present time. The implications of it were just
so intensely disturbing to me that I had an abortion. I never let him touch me again."
And as Phillips described it in her interview with Oprah,
"It was one of those moments where you're either going to live or die,
I don't mean death. I mean, wake up dead. Dead to feeling. Dead to reality."
When Phillips' memoir was published in 2009, her family responded to the allegations of
incest in various ways. Her former stepmother Michelle Phillips told Showbiz 411 that she
didn't believe the claims and suggested that it was just a hook to increase sales.
Mackenzie's half-sister Chynna, meanwhile, had a very different reaction, as she told ABC News,
"Many people were repulsed, horrified, for her to come out and talk about something
no one wants to hear about, she had the courage. I'm proud of my sister."
She added,
"I do know there was a consensual relationship between my father and
sister. I've known that for about 12 years."
"The news of the book was news to you."
"Yes."
"The news of the incident was not new."
"Correct."
"You had known about this."
"Yeah, I knew."
Time hasn't done much to heal the wounds in the Phillips family.
In 2017, Mackenzie wrote about the ongoing fallout in another book,
Hopeful Healing: Essays on Managing Recovery and Surviving Addiction. She described being
"uninvited" from a family birthday party because of another family member, saying,
"I was told she was just not willing to forgive me yet. She wouldn't forgive
me! For abuses perpetrated against me as a child, or for exposing those abuses perhaps."
The 2001 death of John Phillips from heart failure spurred his daughter to write her
memoir and reveal the taboo secrets of their relationship. When he took ill,
Mackenzie experienced a range of emotions. She visited him every day in the hospital,
even though he wasn't conscious. As she recalled in an interview with Erica Diamond,
"I could tell from his eyes that he could hear what I was saying. I held his hand as he died.
And when he passed away, I thought, 'Crap. Now what?' He had never told me why.
Why did you do this to me, Dad? How could you have?"
Phillips also described the relationship as "consensual," but she eventually came to
understand that she'd actually been groomed into believing that it was consensual.
She ultimately realized, as she put it in the interview with Erica Diamond,
"There is no such thing as consensual incest. There is no such thing as consensual sex between
a father and a daughter. There's not. And I'll leave it at that."
The 2016 death of Mackenzie Phillips' mother Susan Adams was a very different
experience from the loss of her father, as Adams had been suffering
from dementia when she passed away. As Phillips wrote in Hopeful Healing,
"Was it appropriate for me to say to my 80-year-old mother who had dementia and
wore diapers, 'I'm so disappointed that you're not who you used to be.
I need my mommy?' No, saying that wasn't going to help.
This is something for which I must find the power within myself to self-forgive,
because it's okay to be scared. It's okay to want to run away. It's okay to feel helpless."
On the day Adams passed, her cat jumped on the bed with her, and as her daughter recalled,
"My mom said, 'You know, I never liked that f---ing cat. The one thing I like
about that cat — that cat knows this is bulls---.' What better last words?"
And as for Phillips herself, after decades of drug-fuelled darkness, she's remained sober
as she now guides other addicts down the road to recovery while working as a rehab counselor. She
talked with the Los Angeles Times in 2017 about why she moved into counseling, as she shared,
"All my life I’ve been interested in why people do the things they do [...] But the
acting train pulled into town and off I went. I recently started realizing:
I’m not going to be alive as long as I have been. What do I want to do with the rest of my life?"
"And I thought that I could be of service to people who were struggling."
If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, please call the Substance Abuse
and Mental Health Administration's 24/7 National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP. That's 1-800-662-4357.