High On Arrival

by Mackenzie Phillips

  I was unabashedly thrilled at my new stardom. A few days after I saw the movie with my parents, I went back for more. My cousins Patty and Nancy, a few of my friends from Highland Hall, and I hitchhiked to the Avco Cinema in Westwood to see it again. At the ticket booth I proudly announced, “I’m in it! I’m in the movie!” They let us all in for free. That was such a coup that we went back over and over again. We must have seen that movie thirty-five times. We’d be reciting all the lines of the movie and people would turn around to say “Would you kids shut up?” But then they’d see that it was me and smile. I guess if it was worth paying to see the rude, precocious kid in the movies, it was worth it to have the rude, precocious kid disrupting the show.

  When I wasn’t cutting school to watch myself on the big screen, I was back at Highland Hall. I’d left school to make American Graffiti, and then I’d spent the summer away. Now I was back and things were different. I was different. I’d been in Europe for a few months. The movie was out. I was famous. Highland Hall had a hippie vibe, but I was in the glitter scene, running around Hollywood, wearing dramatic makeup, and leading what seemed like a sophisticated life. At Highland Hall I had my first taste of how fame changes your regular life. I’d done something— it was just work, really, and had nothing to do with who I really was—but it changed how people saw me and dealt with me. There was an awkwardness, a hesitance. My friends—and family too—started treating me differently, like I had some new value or merit that I didn’t have before. It felt odd and wrong. And it wasn’t all them. I was still a kid, but I didn’t feel like a kid.

  Most of my nights were spent back at my favorite hangouts on the Sunset Strip. My friends and I were glitter kids, followers of British glam or rock acts such as Silverhead, Slade, the New York Dolls, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Sweet, and the Stones. We were young hot girls who wore platform heels, fishnet stockings, and spiked Ziggy Stardust hair. We went to the Whisky, where my cousin Nancy worked as a waitress, the Roxy, Rodney Bingenheimer’s, and the private upstairs club above the Rainbow Room, called Over the Rainbow. Rodney’s was an underage club, but none of the others were. Mario Maglieri, who ran the Whisky and the Rainbow, had a signal. If the Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) came around looking to bust underage drinkers, he gave us the signal and we knew to throw our drinks on the floor.

  I was hanging out with older people, wearing crazy clothes, listening to crazy music. Everyone knew I was Papa John’s daughter, so the people who worked there and the musicians around all made it clear that they had my back. Mario would say, “Keep your hands off the Kid.” There was an invisible barrier around me. Nobody messed with me. I was living it.

  I often brought people back to the house at all hours. My room was gigantic, as was my closet. If I heard my dad coming down the hall, I’d hustle everyone into that closet. When Dad came in he’d just march straight to it, fling open the doors, and say, “Hello, ladies.” I couldn’t hide anything from Dad, but I also couldn’t get in trouble. All the drugs I did, all of them were taken from Dad’s vast supply, and he was not a man to set a double standard.

  I was loved, but I wasn’t protected. It was a carefree and careless youth, which was fantastic and liberating, but things happen. There are reasons for the standards society sets. Nobody was watching out for me, but someone was watching me. One night, leaving Rodney Bingenheimer’s, my friends Billy and Jody and I hitchhiked with a guy we thought we recognized. I don’t know how many times I made a mistake like that, but I was young and irresponsible, and there was no safety net. I climbed into the front seat of this man’s car. Billy and Jody piled into the back. Just above Sunset Boulevard, the driver pulled off on a side street. I said, “This isn’t the way to my house.”

  He said, “I think the gas cap’s loose,” and turned around to Billy and Jody. “Can you guys get out and check?” They hopped out. I started to get out too, but he said, “You stay here.” I saw the glint of metal in his hand and knew in an instant that I was in trouble. I lunged for the door. Billy and Jody must have heard or seen something. Billy was at my door in an instant. He grabbed my arm to pull me out, but my attacker threw his arm around me, catching around my neck. Billy pulled at my arm, fighting to free me. Now I was half out of the car, between the open door and the seat, with the guy’s arm around me and his knife at my throat. The threat of that knife felt like a band of fire, raging and unstoppable. The guy stepped on the gas. As the car pulled away Billy couldn’t hold on any longer. He let go, and I was dragged between the car and the door for several long seconds. Once Billy and Jody were left in the dust, the driver pulled me back in, drove me up into the hills, ripped off my stockings, pushed me down on the front seat, a long bench seat, and raped me.

  I was terrified, but desperate to save myself. I started talking, saying anything I could think of to get him to stop: “You don’t have to do this. You’re a really good-looking guy, a nice guy, you can get any girl you want.” He said, “Shut up. I’m going to fucking kill you, you white bitch.” He was going to kill me.

  I said, “You can’t kill me. You’re going to get caught. I can’t die. This is not going to happen to me. Oh Lord, please don’t let me die.” They were foxhole prayers. I knew as he was raping me that there was nothing to stop him from killing me. I was going to die. But when he finished, he shoved me out of the car and drove away.

  The car pulled away and I stood on the side of the street, stunned. I’d been dragged between the car and its door. My fish-nets were shredded, my legs scraped and bruised. I wobbled on my high platform heels. The straps were loose, maybe broken. I steadied myself, trying to figure out what had happened. He had said he was going to kill me, but then he’d let me go. Was I bleeding? Did he cut my neck? Am I still here? Am I alive? I was. I was alive, and at that moment, no matter what else had happened, that was all that mattered. I don’t know how much time passed, but as soon as I realized I was still in one piece I started running down the street.

  I was wearing a denim miniskirt, a tube top, my torn fishnet stockings, and the high platforms. I stumbled down the hill to Rodney’s—it wasn’t far. The police were already in front of the club, and Billy and Jody were crying. Dad showed up. They took me to the hospital to do a rape kit, then we went to my grandmother’s house. This time, instead of giving me a Coors, she handed me a Valium. The more I saw how upset my friends and family were, the more upset I became.

  My family gathered at Dini’s. Everyone was wailing, and I was crying too. But when I look back on that experience it’s not a lower low. It’s an event in a box. This happened to me, I remember it, I do. But was it before American Graffiti or after? Did Aunt Rosie move into Dad’s house because of the rape, or was she already there when I came home from Switzerland? Or did the rape happen before Switzerland? What is the chronology? What happened to that girl I was? Why does it feel like I watched it happen to her?

  When she was young, my mother went to a finishing school in London called the Club of the Three Wise Monkeys. It was the place my grandmother hoped would purge my father from my mother’s heart. The school emblem was the three wise monkeys—see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. My grandmother worked at a jewelry store and she had a gold charm with three little gold monkeys made for my mother. As a child I always loved that necklace, and when I was in my twenties my mother gave it to me. I became fascinated with the concept and the expressive nature of monkeys, and I’ve been collecting depictions of monkeys ever since.

  I own my memories, but I still sometimes see them from afar. I’m positive, I’m happy, I’m fun, and I can be these things because I refuse to take on the full weight of my experiences. I am the missing monkey, the fourth monkey, the feel no evil monkey. I learned to box up the evil and separate it from the joy of life at an early age, before the rape, before the kidnapping, before losing Patty, before what happened with my father.

  There are many of these boxes. Unprocessed memories, sealed up and set aside. Sometimes they climb out unexpectedly.
A night at Anthony Kiedis’s father’s house when I was thirteen or fourteen. I was with some older friends who instructed me to have sex with a forty-five-year-old actor. He told me what to do and how to do it. I was scared. He seemed like an old man. In the morning he insisted that I make the bed. He said, “Tuck the sheets in tight. I want to bounce a quarter off the bed.” To this day I don’t know why they told me to do it. It is a memory that bears no connection to who I am today, and so it feels like it happened to somebody else. I was there. I watched it happen to me. But I didn’t let myself live the experience.

  Feel no evil. There’s an upside to it and a downside. But in the case of the rape, and similar but lesser ordeals, feeling no evil helped me stay alive. Over time I ran into discomfort with intimacy, wanting people close and keeping them far. But there was a cap on the fear and misery I was willing to experience.

  The day after the rape I went home to my dad’s house. That night Quincy Jones’s daughter, Jolie Jones, was at Ben Frank’s on Sunset, a diner where we’d hang out and ditch the check. Jolie heard two guys talking about how their friend had raped Papa John’s daughter. Jolie told Quincy, and Quincy told my dad. Dad took a shotgun and disappeared for a day and a half. I have no idea what happened, and I never asked. I think, in a way, that I don’t want to know anything more, because I don’t want to learn anything that might change what I found out then: In a moment of crisis, Dad wanted to save me. In some primal way he wanted to protect me, to rescue me. I clung to that as evidence that for all the lax parenting, for all the hitchhiking to school and empty refrigerators, for all the joint-rolling and coke-supplying, I had a father who cared. I packed up and stored away the rape with dispassion, but I cradled that memory—Dad dashing out the door with his shotgun in a rage—as proof of his love.

  PART TWO

  MACKENZIE PHILLIPS

  6

  I was a recognizable face, out on the town, out of control, too close to danger. I was living an unprotected life, and now there was evidence, beyond a doubt, that I wasn’t safe. But nothing could stand in the way of Dad’s unabashed hedonism. He was driven to pursue pleasure—sex, drugs, cars, rock ’n’ roll— and from the moment the Mamas & the Papas had made him a rich man he’d been hell-bent on living as high and fast as a man could live. He was a world-class partier.

  The Mamas & the Papas had broken up after four short years, and Dad was ostensibly working on a play called Space Cowboy. Now I see it as a belabored project that was constantly delayed by Dad’s chemical distractions and/or producers who lost interest when they saw how out there he was. But at the time I didn’t concern myself with my father’s productivity. I’d go hang out with the handsome young actors in the play, and when I say handsome, I mean Don Johnson. Literally. It was an older crowd, but those guys thought of me as my dad’s little girl. The Kid. None of them touched me—until they did.

  In 1974 Dad hosted a party to welcome home the returning veterans of the Vietnam War, although I’m not sure any of the “boys” were actually in attendance to be welcomed home. Like all of Dad’s parties, this one took place in the courtyard of the pink palace and swept down the majestic stairway that led to the pool area. The weather had a magical quality that Dad seemed to order up for his parties—a temperature that matches your skin so exactly that you feel like you are floating. And most of the guests were, on the free-flowing booze or the trays of joints that were passed like hors d’oeuvres, or the audacious mountains of cocaine that were kept inside only to shelter them from the occasional, potentially disastrous breath of wind. There were musicians, artists, industry people, hippies in chamois and rhinestone belts, hippies in caftans with long hair, a Rolling Stone or two in tailored suits, scruffians—everyone from star-fuckers and hangers-on to rock ’n’ roll royalty.

  For this particular party, Dad strapped an ashtray to the head of a dwarf friend of his and called him the Human Ashtray, which is only slightly less offensive when you know that the dwarf called himself Sugar Bear.

  Even when Dad wasn’t having a party, 414 St. Pierre Road was a crazy place to be, especially on acid. The dark, empty pool. The ballroom. The waterfall. The poolside arcade. The tropical gardens. The Hollywood Man looming large in the living room. I’d been tripping at home for years, but with my cousins Patty and Nancy, I rediscovered the house’s secrets and surprises. We walked around saying “Oh my!” in amazement.

  This decadent hipster nirvana was my world, and I assumed it would go on like that forever. Then one Thursday my dad, Genevieve, and their two-year-old son, Tam, took a trip to New York for the weekend, leaving me and Jeffrey in the care of their friends Marsia and Yipi. They were supposed to be back the following Tuesday. But Tuesday rolled around without any sign of them. A few more days passed. Then a week. Then another week. About a month later Dad bothered to call and let us know that he and Genevieve were in New York trying to make his play Space Cowboy happen. Marsia and Yipi didn’t last long. Jeffrey and I were staying out till all hours of the morning, drinking bad wine and taking Tuinals, then calling Marsia to ask her to pick us up. Marsia would trudge out to the driveway only to discover that we’d taken her car. She’d called Dad to complain, and his path-of-least-resistance response was to send tickets to fly her and Yipi to New York.

  And so it was that Aunt Rosie—Dad’s sister—moved into the house in Bel Air. From the get-go Aunt Rosie was very strict compared to Dad. She made rules and expected us to stick to them, and at first we did. Kind of. I mean, when we took downers or acid and stumbled all around that amazing house, we weren’t technically breaking our curfew. Though we hid our drug use from Aunt Rosie, we never really thought of drugs as illicit—we just thought Aunt Rosie wasn’t cool or enlightened. My dad’s friends were glamorous, they had money, they did drugs. Everything they did was worth imitating.

  Aunt Rosie called Dad and Gen with increasingly aggravated reports: Jeffrey stole the car or broke something yet again. At some point Genevieve said, “Make him a milkshake and put ground glass in it.” Aunt Rosie, who never got Genevieve’s bizarre sense of humor, hung up the phone, stunned. “What is wrong with that woman?” she wailed.

  The next time Dad checked in, Aunt Rosie informed him that the landlords were asking about the rent. The tug of obligation must not have appealed to Dad, because after that he stopped calling or even returning calls. As Dad would one day admit, he “sort of forgot about California and the two kids [he] had out there.” Dad, Genevieve, and Tam never came home. They never came back. It’s true that as the head of the household, my father didn’t exactly run a tight ship. Bills went unpaid, kids went unfed. But he was still unquestionably the man of the house; he was the center of our family; he was the center of my world. He went away for the weekend and then never came back. He stopped communicating. He stopped paying bills. He stopped paying rent on the house. I don’t know how to explain it. Dad had a remarkable lack of responsibility. Michelle would later say that when Dad wasn’t using heavy drugs, he felt duty toward us and enjoyed being with us, but that when he got into heavy drugs everything else became secondary. I’m sure she’s right and it is that simple. If Dad’s behavior was because of the drugs, well, it’s hard to say, since I never knew him free of that influence. Blame drugs or blame Dad—it makes no difference, since as far back as I can remember, drugs shared his body and soul.

  When the rent checks stopped coming, the owners of the house were justifiably furious. After some months of nonpayment, they showed up at the house with a report documenting thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to the house and its contents. Everything that could be torn, stained, cracked, broken, or hurled in a drug-addled fit across a room, had been. Hoping to recoup some of the back rent and damages, they confiscated most of our stuff, holding hostage in storage many precious and sentimental items, including my diaries and Aunt Rosie’s slides of the family dating back to the mid-1950s. Aunt Rosie didn’t want me to watch the scene when the owners came to go through the house making their claims, s
o she sent me to my grandma Dini’s house. I came home from school to find the house half empty and in shambles. There followed a period of stress and tension at 414 St. Pierre. The great house had been filled with people and music and bustle and life. Now it was cavernous and scary. It felt like a ghost town.

  My father was incommunicado, and without him we couldn’t remotely afford the three-thousand-dollar monthly rent. Finally, after phone calls and demands on the part of the landlords, pleading and postponing on Rosie’s part, and radio silence from my father, they kicked us out.

  My father had lived in that house for almost two years. Before that he’d lived at 783 Bel Air Road for six years. He had always been a person who had a home. From that point on Dad was ephemeral. He developed a taste for transience, moving from rented penthouse to hotel to mansion without giving notice, without paying bills, without telling anyone his new number. He’d say, “Pay my bill, pack my shit, and meet me there.” Pay, pack, and follow was what he called it, and that is what he named his final album, recorded with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in the seventies, but released after his death. My pay-pack-and-follow father left debt, belongings, family, lovers, and, eventually, thousands of used syringes in his wake.

  For Dad the house may have felt like a burden, but Jeffrey and I lived there. For us 414 St. Pierre Road was home, and home was pulled out from under us.