High On Arrival

by Mackenzie Phillips

  With the new band members and their families, the Big House started to feel small. Spanky, her kids, and I moved out and got a pretty house together on a street called Sherwood Forest Lane. From then on her son Matt was Friar Tuck. Dad was the sheriff of Nottingham, and so on. We had all of our furniture shipped across the country from L.A. In the living room we put the imitation deco rattan furniture that had been in the apartment where I lived with my brother during the divorce. In my bedroom I had a deco dark wood bed with matching nightstands and a vanity table with a round mirror. The cheerful communal spirit that we’d discovered in the Big House continued in my house with Spanky. After rehearsing all day, we’d come home to cook dinner and eat with the kids. Every night Dad, Denny, and new neighborhood friends would hang out, singing and tooling with guitars—the mellow happy hippie vibe I remembered and idealized from my Dad’s pre-heroin Los Angeles days.

  I loved having roommates and could have gone on like that for a long time, but the New Mamas & the Papas were raring to go. Dad was on a roll, rearranging old hits, writing new songs, and directing our harmonies. We were starting to sound good, so we went into a studio in New York to start laying down tracks. We recorded demos for an album just as the original Mamas & Papas had—before ever performing. I’d been acting for years, but this was my musical education. I sang four-part harmony, which is no easy trick, for the first time. To be with these talented musicians—in rehearsal, onstage, in the studio—was an incredible learning experience.

  After four months of rehearsing and a warm-up gig at the Bitter End in the West Village, the New Mamas & the Papas had our first big gig in Princeton. Lots of industry people, friends, and media had been invited. I wore an amazing dress that Marsia made, a light green chamois suede halter dress with a Peter Pan zigzag hemline. Over it was a huge jacket covered in dark green rhinestone-studded leaves. I really did the eighties justice with that jacket. I looked like the Jolly Green Giant. I knew I looked fabulous, but before we went on I was so nervous that my knees were shaking. I’d acted in front of a live studio audience for years, but I was too young for stage fright when I started. Now I was starting something new at an age where I was old enough to be self-conscious.

  That first night in Princeton we opened with “Straight Shooter,” the same as the original Mamas & the Papas had, and the same as we would for every show from then on. “Straight Shooter” has a great vamp that the band repeated as we came out onto the stage. The crowd cheered. We played “12:30 (Young Girls Are Coming to the Canyon),” one of the most vocally beautiful songs my dad ever wrote. I started forgetting my anxiety and enjoying the music. Then we played a rockabilly version of the theme song from One Day at a Time, bringing my worlds together. The crowd went wild, and I felt a surge of giddy joy. This was the thrill of live performance.

  We closed with “Monday, Monday” and “California Dreamin’” as encores. I’d first heard these songs in the Virgin Islands as a child, when the Mamas & the Papas were trying out their material at Duffy’s. Often, when Dad put me to bed in the apartment above the club, I’d lie awake for hours, listening to the new songs until I fell asleep. Now here I was, singing my childhood lullabies in front of the first of thousands of people. It felt like a new beginning.

  The New Mamas & the Papas took off. Our booking agents set up gig after gig, first in New York, then across the country, then around the world.

  One reviewer of the band thought that John and Denny looked like artichoke pickers from Salinas, and another one said Dad looked like a woozy Errol Flynn. One said that I was obviously trying way too hard to be a rock star. Whatever. We weren’t perfect. To sing a four-part harmony was such an exact science. If one person was off, we were fucked. Some nights the harmony would be pristine, and some nights it was, Oh my God, I had to live through that? Good or bad, nothing stopped us. There were countless fans dying to hear the Mamas & the Papas, even if in reconstituted form, and we were determined to fulfill that demand.

  We were warriors. Tam and Bijou, Denny’s kids, Spanky’s kids, they all stayed back in New Jersey like army brats while we toured all over the world for the next decade. We went to England, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Hong Kong, Japan, Brazil, and all over Canada and the United States. We played cruise ships. We played state fairs. We played in Vegas for months at a time. Sometimes Michelle came to visit us on the road, stepping onstage to sing “Dedicated to the One I Love,” which was her most famous solo with the original group. We’d play three weeks on—a different city every night—then one week off. We toured for 280 days one year. We were always on the road. Touring constantly was my job now. It was how I made a living and I loved it. We drank, we went onstage completely fucked up, and the audience loved us. Those were fun days, some of the best times of my life. I wouldn’t trade them for anything.

  The New Mamas & the Papas was in many ways a dream come true for me. I was performing, which I’d always done. I was in a world of music, which I’d always wanted. And, above all, it was the first time in my life that my father was fully available to me, for hours and days on end. I was no longer chasing a phantom. Now I was part of his trip.

  18

  As far as the world knew, my father and I were clean. They’d read it in People magazine—that touching cover story about our joint rehabilitation. The producers of One Day at a Time wasted no time in calling to invite me back as a recurring character. The show’s ratings had declined in my absence, and the producer Patricia Palmer later said that Julie added a rebellious conflict that the show needed. She put it simply: if I could come back and be okay, they wanted me. The irony was not lost on me. Being a rebel was great for ratings, but not for real life. Still, I was overjoyed and gladly accepted the offer. Close to the beginning of season seven, Julie came home because she was having troubles with her husband, Max, and just like that I had my job back.

  The first day I came back to work, I found that some things had changed at the show in the year-plus that I was gone. I walked reflexively to my dressing room, but stopped short when I saw the name panel on the door. It said “Valerie Bertinelli.” Valerie had my dressing room, a slightly bigger corner dressing room. Then, the first time I watched the credits roll at the beginning of the show, I saw that her name had replaced mine for top billing in the credits. These things weren’t important to me in and of themselves. I’d never felt competitive with Val about our status at the show. But they were an ungentle reminder that Val deserved these things and—obviously—I didn’t. I’d been fired, my character had been written out of the show, and the space I’d filled had closed up behind me. My colleagues had gone on without me, living their lucid lives.

  I don’t think that when I left, people washed their hands of me, good riddance. They liked me, they worried about me, they wanted the best for me. But over the years I had become a topic of whispered worry: How is she? What’s she on? Has she lost more weight? Is she going to show up? Is she going to make it? Nobody wanted to see me go, but I’m sure everyone was relieved when I did, because all that concern and instability went with me. When I was gone you could breathe again.

  When I came back, Valerie and everyone was nice to me, but they had known me for years during which I’d only ever been a person who often came to the set tired and out of it and just as often left at the end of the day to get high again. I’d go away, come back promising I’d reformed, then tear the house down. I was the black sheep, the prodigal daughter, on-screen and off. They were understandably wary of my ability to stay clean. In addition, my behavior threatened their jobs. It threatened the show and everyone who worked for it. Now that they had seen that the show could survive without me, why in the world would they want to bring that threat back into their lives? The dynamic in which I was not a peer but a source of speculation revived at my return. I could feel it. People were careful about what they said and did in my presence. I didn’t blame them, but I missed the comfortable familiarity I had squandered.

  In addition to the justifiab
le distrust, I felt judged, by Bonnie and others. Times were different, and I don’t think anybody who hadn’t experienced addiction in his or her family or life understood my behavior as a sickness. Drugs were for Bowery bums, people with a bottle in a paper bag. It was hard not to think that the addict had a choice, that the addict was a fuckup, that the addict should just stop. I felt a little defensive. Yes, I was most definitely fucked up. And yes, there was also accountability. But hadn’t I gone away and done exactly what they’d asked me to do? I had worked hard to fix myself. I was still young, and it was hard for me to accept that all wasn’t instantly forgiven and erased. Little did I realize that all their doubts and concerns would soon be justified.

  I never saw a shadow of doubt or aggravation cross Pat Harrington’s face. He just saw me as a young famous girl with lots of money who was living the life. For all those years, he loved me and treated me as someone who was just doing her thing, though later he would say that my return caused tensions and misgivings. And Norman Lear—the show’s creator—was amazing. He was so kind, so supportive. He never talked down to me. He saw me, heard me, and recognized me. But I would break his heart. Again.

  The close working relationships I might have formed at One Day at a Time were at one time my best shot at a real, functioning family and support system. I saw that Valerie and Bonnie had become extremely close over the years. They often had dinner together and even traveled together. I envied what I saw between them. I looked up to Bonnie, and maybe if things had been different, she could have been the parental figure that I so needed. But night after night I had chosen drugs over human contact. My conversations with Bonnie were formal and restrained, mostly limited to talking about the show and the characters. Now, after seven years, Bonnie and Val had a long-term friendship and all I had was a relationship with evil, addictive drugs.

  I came back to a changed show, and I myself was changed in more ways than being clean. When I left the show I was rail thin. The coke, which kills your appetite, had brought me below one hundred pounds. But during the time I’d been in New Jersey, substituting wine swilling for cocaine snorting, I’d gained an enormous amount of weight. As we were blocking one of the first episodes after my return, I sat down on the arm of the couch. From the control booth the director Alan Rafkin said over the PA, for all the cast and crew to hear, “It used to be cute when you sat like that, when you were thin. Now it doesn’t look good, so sit up straight, okay?” I felt like a big fat pig. Now, when I look back at the “fat” episodes, I see how warped my perception was. I was still Hollywood-slim. But I can’t fault Alan Rafkin for his harsh words. He had been through hell with me. I’d gone so far over the line so many times that he had earned whatever frustration or resentment he was venting.

  As soon as my return was announced, the show’s ratings went up again. I knew people wouldn’t be watching just to see what happened in the plot of the show. All eyes would be on me: Was I thin? Could you see the psychic or physical scars of my past? I wanted to succeed, for myself and for the show.

  Success meant doing what I’d always done without trouble— acting. Julie was in my bones. Stepping back into her character should have been like getting back on a bicycle, but I felt a huge responsibility to perform as well or better than I ever had. Without drugs I found that I was able to calm down and focus on making my character feel more real to fit into the evolving style of the show. It was no longer the hypertheatrical overacting that had been popular on sitcoms when it launched. I had a thrilling sense of rediscovering acting, but at the same time I was newly self-conscious. I’d never performed without having my substances waiting backstage to congratulate me. The first time I went out before the studio audience without drugs as my security blanket, it was almost as if I was truly aware for the first time that I was saying lines, and that they could be said in a million different ways, that I had infinite choices as an actor, and that those choices could hit or miss. These thoughts were distracting and dangerous onstage. I forced myself past the feeling, but it wasn’t easy.

  These days rehab programs look at the pressures of post-rehab life and ask you to think about how you will handle them. But back then, once you were clean, you were on your own and good luck. My appearances on One Day at a Time were squeezed into the New Mamas & the Papas’ already busy schedule. At one point we had a long run in Vegas; I would perform in Vegas at night, zoom back to L.A., and arrive on the set of One Day at a Time the next morning. My schedule was tight and I was tired a lot. The schedule, the exhaustion, the pressure to be thin—after a year I had all the classic pressures that lead people to start using again lined up like an army of pro-drug rebels. And then I went to New York.

  Around my twenty-third birthday, just before Christmas of 1982, I visited my friend Susan in New York. It was the eighties. Everyone was doing coke, and it was all about the club scene. Susan and I were hanging out at Limelight, Area, Dance-teria, and Studio 54. The club scene was my coke scene. Without drama or fanfare, coke and I fell back into our old routine like long-lost friends. But my usage was comparatively moderate and I wasn’t shooting up. Yet.

  Coke made me nuts, but in kind of a harmless way. Susan had a studio at Thirty-third and Third. One night she had crashed in her bed and I stayed up snorting shitloads of cocaine. With my partner-in-crime asleep, I decided to thank her for hosting by undertaking a few household chores. First, I took her toothbrush and used it to clean out part of her hair dryer. Her toothbrush. I was so pleased with my own industriousness that I crept over to Susan’s bed and whispered in her ear, “I’m using your toothbrush to clean your hair dryer.” She groaned and rolled over. So much for gratitude.

  Soon the hair dryer was good as new, though it seemed that Susan would need a new toothbrush. But I was on to my next task. The tiles on her kitchen floor were chipped, and that night I noticed some new tiles stacked in her closet. I’d made an ashtray when I popped into rehab as a teen. I knew a thing or two about tiling. So naturally, I decided it would be a fine idea to retile her kitchen in the middle of the night. I got a steak knife and started prying up the worn tiles. This time when I whispered my plan in Susan’s ear, she said, “Are you fucking crazy?” Well, that night I pulled up half of her kitchen floor with no idea how to fix it. It cost a thousand dollars to have the floor re-tiled.

  I felt kinda bad about the retiling incident, so I decided it was time to rent my own apartment. I found a gorgeous loft in Gramercy Park and besmirched it with silly decor. There was an electric-blue futon, giant stuffed animals, and from Think Big! a fetish store for giants: a human-size toothbrush and a massive can opener. Good thing the ceilings were twenty-five feet tall. I put a life jacket that I’d stolen from an airplane around the neck of the toothbrush and a Greek fisherman’s cap on its bristly head. If I’d thought about it, maybe I’d have seen that it was an apartment that screamed, “I’m out of place! I don’t fit in this world.” But I just saw it as a playhouse.

  By this time Val and Eddie Van Halen were married. Val called to say that they were in town and I invited them over for champagne. It was very civilized. I had some blow, but Valerie didn’t know that, and I planned to keep it that way. I didn’t mean to deceive Val, but I didn’t want it to get back to the powers that be at One Day at a Time. Up in the apartment, it turned out Eddie had secrets of his own. He whispered, “Don’t tell Val,” then went into the bathroom and proceeded to hoover up most of my coke. In the elevator on our way out, Eddie dropped his smokes. When he leaned over to pick them up, about fifteen Quaaludes fell out of his pocket. Val was pissed. But we must have taken them, or at least I did, because I don’t remember the rest of the evening. So much for being discreet around Val.

  Some of the “little” incidents that happened in that time were big—or they should have been—but my perspective had warped, thanks to the coke. Retiling projects loomed large, and criminal abductions were odd mishaps. One night I went by myself to an after-hours club wearing Susan’s floor-length sable coat an
d one of the best little black dresses of all time. And it was really little, since the coke had reduced my weight in a matter of weeks to about four pounds. The dress was organza, short-sleeved, with raw silk around the sleeves. It glittered all over. It sounds tacky, but it was beautiful.

  One of the many dangers of drug culture is that it’s common to hang out with people you don’t know, to start a night with friends and end up in the wee hours at an unfamiliar apartment with a group of newly discovered fellow users who either have drugs or are going to get drugs or think there is some remote chance that they might eventually be able to score.

  This time I picked the wrong group of strangers. Somehow they drugged me. I was on coke already, yes, but this was like being roofied. One minute I was leaving the club, drink in hand. Next thing I knew I woke up in a strange place with strange people and, most disturbing, I was wearing sweatpants. My dress, Susan’s fur coat, and my stockings and heels were gone.

  I had no idea where the fuck I was. When I went for the door, one of the guys said, in broken English, “You stay with us now.”

  I said, “What do you mean ‘stay with you’? I don’t know you.”

  A couple of guys pulled me away from the door, saying, “You’re with us now.”

  I said, “You can’t keep me here.” I squirmed out of their grasp and went for the door. It was locked. I looked around. Six men and women stood staring at me.

  They said, “You can’t get out, so we can keep you here and we will.” I ran back to the door again and started pounding on it, calling for help.

  The same two guys pulled me back and told me to shut up. I had no way out. I had been kidnapped.

  I was there for days. The food must have been drugged—I was foggy the whole time. I remember watching a fish tank, talking to the fish, watching them swim by, slow and melty.