High On Arrival

by Mackenzie Phillips

  Possibly the first time Christian did acid—he was really tripping hard—Jeffrey and I found some sparkly gold powder in Genevieve’s paint supplies. Jeffrey and I put the gold dust on our fingers and waved our hands in front of hapless Christian’s face, saying, “We’ve been to Pluto.” We told him that we had Pluto dust on our hands, and that if he followed us, then he too could visit Pluto. When we tired of taunting Christian, we all tried to ride the wheelchairs down St. Pierre Road.

  St. Pierre Road goes down to Beverly Glen in a long, steep, blind curb. Riding down it in wheelchairs proved beyond even our daring, so we got the Big Wheels out of the empty pool and rode them instead. The steering was superior to the wheelchairs and we could skid the front wheels against the curb to slow down our descent. We flew down the road, tripping, in Big Wheels. If we’d learned anything from our parents, it was how to have a good time.

  Years later, when Christian’s life would take a terrible turn, when he was convicted for shooting his half sister Cheyenne’s boyfriend and Cheyenne subsequently committed suicide, I felt heartbreak for the whole family. I was thinking, That’s my old friend. Those boys were like us. We were kids of privilege who could have anything we desired except what we really wanted—a connection with our parents. Broken kids being broken together, trying to have fun in our broken Bel Air mansions.

  I was supposed to go to school, but sometimes I had to hitchhike because nobody was awake or willing to drive me. I was allowed to go to school on acid if I wanted, and Dad signed a ream of blank sheets of paper on which I could write notes like “Please excuse Laura from class at noon today as she must see the doctor,” or “Please excuse Laura from physical education today. She has a family obligation.” I always wanted but never dared to write “Please excuse Laura from school as everyone is just too fucked up.”

  Stealing drugs from Dad became my not-so-secret habit. I’d sneak into his bedroom and help myself. One time I found a pretty purple pill in a small glass container. I didn’t know what it was, but I figured it was acid, so I took it. Little did I know that the pill I had swallowed was in fact a legendary, legendarily scarce Purple Owsley. Owsley Stanley was a pioneer LSD cook, and the Purple Owsley pill from his now-defunct lab was Dad’s prized possession, a rare, potent, druggie collector’s item, the alleged inspiration for the Hendrix song “Purple Haze.” It may have been one of the last hits of Purple Owsley on this planet. I’d really fucked up this time. When Dad discovered what I’d done, his face filled with a rage I’d never seen before. The father who had no rules was as angry as I’d ever seen him. It was as if I’d crashed some normal rich dad’s Porsche. He said, “You took my last hit of Owsley. You’re grounded.” I think it was the only time Dad ever grounded me. And I don’t even know if the acid had any special effect on me. I probably just went to school and tripped out in social studies.

  What do you expect to happen if you teach your child to roll joints at the age of ten? How will she turn out if she is free to pilfer the lesser of your personal pharmacy? Who will she be if she is left to find her way among adults who are lost or hellbent on losing themselves? My father didn’t think about the consequences. He thought he was having fun, but to call it fun is to oversimplify the hunger and loss and anger that drove his relentless commitment to oblivion. And that muddle of emotions was passed from father to daughter. As I grew up there was something more powerful and formative at play than the irresponsible example my father set. I desperately wanted to be close to him. I needed him. I did what he did and said what he said. Of myself I wasn’t enough. I couldn’t just … be.

  4

  That summer my father and Genevieve decided to send me away to summer school. It all had to do with American Graffiti, a movie I’d shot the year before. How I got the part started with my seventh-grade band.

  Dad did drugs, but he still made music. Like father, like daughter: being on acid for school didn’t stop me from putting together a band in seventh grade. It was Chris, Laura (me), Adam, and Scott, and we called ourselves “Class.” Mondays we played the open-mike nights for amateurs at the Troubadour in Hollywood. We’d written rock ’n’ roll songs about being in prison, eating cold soup, and drinking beer. No one had yet told us, “Write what you know.” I was the lead singer. For our first gig I wore a cool sweater with birds on it: navy blue, low-cut Landlubber jeans, a purple belt, and Wallaby shoes. I had long hair with bangs. My dad was in the audience. One of the other kids in the band had a father who was a big executive at Elektra Records. Another band member’s father was an entertainment lawyer. There was rampant nepotism among us hipster kids of power-hippie parents, so nobody was surprised that Fred Roos, a film producer, was in the audience. He would later say that he saw me as a spunky kid with a good look and an instantly recognizable desire to act older than I was. Fred asked me if I’d like to be in a movie. I was a total Valley girl. I said, “That would be so cool!”

  American Graffiti was the first audition I went to. I was up against 250 girls for the part of Carol, a bratty preteen—the youngest character in the movie—who gloms on to John Milner, a hotrodding teen, on a summer night in the 1950s. It was a low-budget film that George Lucas, pre–Star Wars, wrote and directed.

  I was still living at my mom’s house when I found out I got the job. We were jumping up and down and screaming, but I didn’t really know what the movie was exactly. Was it an educational movie? An after-school special? I’d played Santa Claus in the school play at Summerhill. Would it be like that? It just didn’t occur to me that I would be filming a major motion picture.

  Apparently, my parents didn’t fully process that idea either. I remembered that when I worked on the movie I lived with the producer, Gary Kurtz, and his wife, who were very nice Quakers. But it wasn’t until thirty years later, at an American Film Institute celebration of American Graffiti, that Gary said to me, “Remember when you arrived in San Francisco all alone?” I didn’t know what he was talking about. He said, “Yeah, we met you at the plane and you were all by yourself. We asked where your guardian was, but you didn’t have one.” I assumed that I lived with Gary and his wife because that was the arrangement, but it turns out there was no arrangement. When I showed up alone they had to scramble around to get temporary guardianship.

  I was the youngest in the cast by far. Most of the movie took place in the course of a single night, so we’d shoot from dusk to dawn. There were no dressing rooms and no trailers. We just hung out between takes at Mel’s Diner, where a lot of the movie was shot. I was the little mascot. I was only twelve, but I knew my home life was good fodder. I’d tell stories about the Stones and other people who hung out at my father’s. Sitting around late into the night, I learned to drink coffee.

  Paul Le Mat played John Milner. For much of the movie he and I are driving around in his car, and the car was rigged with cameras facing in each window. We couldn’t get out of the car between takes or during set changes because the cameras were in the way, so my memory of shooting the movie is mostly of being stuck in that car for hours and hours on end.

  For a scene where John and Carol cover a car with shaving cream, Lucas set up the cameras and said, “Just do whatever you want.” That scene does a pretty good job of capturing what I was like then—I mean, I wasn’t a screaming banshee, I was always respectful and well mannered, but I was wild and full of life. I never need a lot to be happy. I’m not a happy idiot, but I’m easily entertained. You can see it on the screen. I like it on this planet.

  Apparently, there were comic and serious troubles on the set of American Graffiti. Rumor has it that people were arrested for pot, hospitalized for allergies, busted for arson. The usual drill. True or not, I was oblivious to the scandals. When our nighttime shoots ended, I went home to the Kurtzes’ pleasant house and slept, as a teenager should. All I remember was that Paul Le Mat made a habit of climbing to the top of tall trees—I guess that was his way of getting high. I came to set one day and heard that Paul had climbed to the top of a
Holiday Inn sign and refused to come down. He was a strange man. Years later, when I was eighteen (barely legal), shooting More American Graffiti, Paul and I would have a fling. He was married, instantly regretful, and distant for the rest of the filming.

  After I shot the movie, I moved in with my dad and started running around L.A., hanging out in nightclubs, drinking, taking drugs. Then it was the summer of 1973, I was thirteen years old, and the movie American Graffiti was finally scheduled to be released on August 11. But at the beginning of the summer, before the film premiered, my stepmother, Genevieve, said, “Laura, I don’t want to throw you to the lions.” I think that was her way of saying she thought a young girl shouldn’t be swept up in the notoriety whirlwind of a movie release, and maybe that was right, but it’s just as likely that she was tired of having me around. I was a pain in the ass. Genevieve went on, “We’re going to send you to a boarding school in Switzerland for the summer. Pretend you’re an alien and your mission on this new planet is to learn French.” Genevieve says stuff like that.

  The boarding school, La Chatelainie, was a beautiful place. I was a crazy glitter kid, a David Bowie wannabe from Hollywood. And although I was in a foreign school where everyone spoke a foreign language, I didn’t stop being a handful, to say the least. During lunch I’d jump on tables and do imitations of Donny Osmond. I sang loudly, called teachers names, and was generally obnoxious. At night my roommates and I would sneak out the windows, go into the little town nearby, and drink beer at the local pub.

  My father’s play Space Cowboy was now being developed as a Broadway musical called Man on the Moon. Andy Warhol was producing. Perhaps to facilitate his dealings with Andy, my father had a telex machine, the precursor to the fax, connected in the library of his Bel Air mansion. This was a time when ordinary people didn’t have telex machines in their homes. But my dad was no ordinary mortal, as he proved regularly. One school day the headmaster came up to me and said, “I received this telex.” He handed me a page. It was addressed to “Max,” which was my father’s nickname for me.

  Dear Max,

  My name is Can and I am the king

  and I can do most anything

  ’cause it gives life a simple swing.

  Some may say that being a king

  Can be more fun and easier

  than being a knape or a knave.

  Who wants to be a slave?

  If King Can shall, who shan’t?

  If King Can will, who won’t?

  If King Can do, who don’t?

  And if King Can can, who can’t?

  Love, Dad.

  The headmaster looked pained. “What is this?” he asked. “It says it’s from your father. What does it mean?”

  I shrugged and said, “Oh, that’s just Dad.”

  A few days later another telex came:

  Dear Max,

  Wee funky little bats have never played out in the sunshine. Hang by your heels in a cave and you will find truth to be blinding.

  Love, Dad.

  And Genevieve had told me to pretend to be an alien. Who needed to pretend?

  When American Graffiti premiered in the States, Dad started telexing me reviews and telling me that I was a star and how proud he was of me. Nobody at school believed that I was in a movie, much less the biggest movie of the year. I had gone from anonymity to movie star overnight, but—as Genevieve had planned—for better or worse I missed the hoopla.

  So I went to my classes, mocked the house mother, who had the unfortunate combination of long armpit hair and short-sleeved shirts, and was a regular, but not exceptional, nuisance, until the day the headmaster came up to me, this time with no incomprehensible telex in hand. He said, “Your father has not paid. We can’t reach him. You have no ticket home. You can stay here, but you cannot participate in any more classes or activities.” I was upset, but not unduly shocked. This was a new manifestation of the same old Dad—a barrage of endearing nonsense, some pride, then … silence. But abandoning me in a foreign country was a new extreme. In my own country I was now famous, but I was stuck in Switzerland. I couldn’t do anything or go anywhere. If Dad was so proud of me, then why wouldn’t he pay the bill—or get me the fuck out of there? One minute I was a spoiled, newly famous Hollywood brat. The next I was stranded in Switzerland while my new friends attended classes, went horseback riding, and left for daylong field trips. I wandered around the school all day embarrassed and depressed, abandoned. I waited for my MIA father as I had before and would many times again. Weeks went by.

  Finally, Dad sent a plane ticket with a note promising to pick me up at the airport in L.A. The school put me on a bus from Neuchâtel to Zurich … or Geneva. What did I know from Swiss cities? I was fourteen and traveling alone. I just climbed aboard whichever bus they put me on, feeling like Paddington with his “Please look after this bear” tag. When I arrived at the Swiss airport, I tried to find my flight, but something had happened. The flight was delayed, or canceled, I couldn’t tell exactly. I’d missed most of the classes, so my French wasn’t great. I knew how to order oxtail soup at a small-town pub at midnight, but it was unclear to me how I’d ever get home. I sat on my suitcase in the airport and cried.

  Eventually there was a plane. I made it back to the States, but I still had a layover at JFK before I flew the last leg home to L.A. As I disembarked the international flight at JFK, one of the heels on my huge, ugly, white plastic platform shoes broke. My many-hours-long layover had just begun. I had a full day of travel ahead of me, and all my shoes were in my suitcase, checked through to Los Angeles. I limped through the airport, one leg a good six inches longer than the other. People were glancing at me with recognition for the first time in my life. So it was true, I was a movie star. But I walked around JFK as alone as a girl can possibly be, in gimpy limbo—lost in an untethered nowhereland that was already familiar to me at fourteen.

  At last I arrived at LAX. In a rare show of timeliness and reliability, my dad was actually there in the flesh to pick me up. He stood at the gate, always taller than I expected, with his long hair and beard, chamois suede pants and top, and a rhinestone belt. Alongside him were his best friend, Michael Sarne, and my cousin Patty. I was relieved and happy to see my father and overjoyed to see Patty. She was twenty, six years older than I was. We’d been little girls together in Virginia, living in the same apartment building and having family dinners at our grandmother Dini’s every Sunday. While I was away, my aunt Rosie and her two daughters, Patty and Nancy, had moved to Los Angeles. When Patty met me at the airport she said, “Now I’m going to be your big sister.” Then she gave me a Quaalude. Welcome home, kid.

  5

  Not long after I made it home from my ill-fated summer at boarding school in Switzerland, I went to see American Graffiti for the first time with my dad and Genevieve. It was a private screening for the cast, producers, and their invitees. I wore an amazing 1940s red-and-white polka-dot dress of Genevieve’s, white patent leather six-inch platform heels, and short, spiky hair. I’d shaved off my eyebrows and painted on glitter lightning bolts. Dad wore hand-stitched suede pants, and Genevieve looked like a movie star, as always. Mom and Lenny were there too. It was my big night.

  It seemed like ages since I’d first landed the part. Nearly two years had passed since I’d shot the movie, during which time I’d moved from the shadow of Lenny’s scary dictatorship to the trippy glow of my father’s hedonism. When I think of that night, it’s as if I’m watching it on a TV screen. I can see myself stepping out of the Rolls in my teetery heels and walking into the theater, but I see it from a distance. I remember a lot of the major events in my life like this, as though I watched the moment instead of experiencing it. Maybe it’s a side effect from years of drug use, maybe I disassociate because it’s easier for me to digest my life from a distance, maybe I create memories from stories I’ve been told, or maybe I’m just insane.

  Regardless, we walked down the red carpet and took our seats in the theater. My dad gave me
a couple Quaaludes and I popped them all at once. All I remember of that first viewing is the opening credits, which started before the ludes kicked in. As they rolled, my name came up on the screen. The people in front of us said, “Mackenzie Phillips, who’s that?” I practically had the same reaction—I’d been Laura Phillips my whole life.

  When I got the part in American Graffiti my manager, Pat McQueeney, whom I’d met through Fred Roos, didn’t like “Laura Phillips” and asked me what my middle name was. I told her it was Mackenzie. People have always thought I was named after Scott McKenzie, my dad’s lifelong friend and one of my favorite people on this planet. Scott sang Dad’s song “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)” to promote the Monterey Pop Festival, launching the Summer of Love. But the truth is that when I was born Scott McKenzie was still known as Philip Scott Blondheim. I was actually named after my great-grandmother on my mother’s side, Sarah Mackenzie. When I told Pat my middle name was Mackenzie, she said, “Oh my God, that’s it.”

  Now, as the people whose heads bobbled disruptively between my fourteen-year-old eyes and the screen wondered who Mackenzie Phillips was, Dad leaned forward and said, “You’ll see.” And after that the night is a blur. I was stoned off my ass. Maybe Dad felt guilty about the Quaaludes. He kept passing me little silver spoonfuls of coke to help me wake up.

  No one expected American Graffiti to be a huge success, but it was an instant classic. The critics loved it and it was nominated for multiple Academy Awards that year. I was suddenly frighteningly famous. I already had some level of recognition as John Phillips’s daughter, but after American Graffiti was released, I was a familiar face. And it wasn’t just my face that was familiar. Suddenly everyone also knew me by the name Mackenzie Phillips. I thought of Mackenzie as my stage name, and for a while I continued to think of myself as Laura. People would say, “I know who you are, you’re Mackenzie Phillips.” I’d say, “Yeah, I’m Mackenzie, but everybody calls me Laura.” But I’m so not a Laura. People were confused. It was too complicated. So I just decided, Fuck it, I’m Mack.