Vanity Fair's Women on Women

by Radhika Jones

  “There were so many soap operas,” says Lou Adler, “but it never stopped the artistry. John was the ultimate controller, but as much as he liked to build up, he also tore down, including himself. He was so intelligent and yet so challenged. And Michelle—Mitch, Mitchie, Trixie: we had so many names for her—she could always push John’s buttons.”

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  Denny and Michelle’s affair began just as fame was hitting. “The four of us would sit around, saying, ‘O.K., you’re gonna sing the third,’ and ‘You’re gonna do the bop da bops,’ and there’d be so much sexual energy between Denny and me that we’d be playing footsie under the table, and Cass and John didn’t notice it,” says Michelle. (But Cass, who had emerged as the fans’ favorite, was no chump, fighting with John all the time, constantly chiding Michelle, “Why do you let him boss you around like that?” In their different ways, the two women were tough-chick bookends.) John’s reaction to his wife’s affair was seethingly pragmatic. Michelle recalls, “He said, ‘You know, Mitch, you can do a lot of things to me, but you don’t fuck my tenor!’ I’m thinking, Am I really hearing this? You can fuck the mailman, the milkman, but not my tenor?” As he had with her Russ Titelman affair, John used Michelle’s infidelity as material, co-writing, with Denny, “I Saw Her Again.” The group got a hit out of it, just as they had with “Go Where You Wanna Go.”

  By now John and Michelle were temporarily living apart, and John had a girlfriend, Ann Marshall, a witty, young L.A. socialite who was working as a model and salesgirl for the trendy boutique Paraphernalia, and who would become (and remains) one of Michelle’s best friends. Michelle struck back with what she calls a “quiet affair” with Gene Clark, of the Byrds. It didn’t stay quiet for long. At a Mamas and Papas concert, Clark arrived in a bright-red shirt and sat smack in the middle of the front row, and Michelle (and partner in crime Cass) proceeded to sing right to his beaming-boyfriend face all night. That public cuckolding was too much; after the show, John stormed at Michelle, “I made you who you are, and I can take it away. You’re fired!” The others joined in his decision; Michelle was replaced by Lou’s girlfriend, Jill Gibson.

  Michelle didn’t take the expulsion lying down. She crashed the “new” Mamas and Papas’ recording session—“They looked at me as if I’d walked in with an AK-47”—and “when Denny refused to stick up for me, I took a swing at him.” That’s when she screamed that she’d “bury” them all. “I sat in my car, shaking and despondent and crying hysterically. I had just been fired by my husband and my best friends. I thought my life was over.” In short order, Michelle was reinstated in the group. She retaliated against Jill the best way she knew how: she marched into Lou and Jill’s hotel room just as they were celebrating with Dom Pérignon and brightly announced that she was in love with Lou. “Lou and Jill sat there with their champagne flutes frozen mid-toast,” Michelle recalls, laughing. “Then Lou walked over to the big silver ice bucket and stuck his head in it!” Adler says he doesn’t remember the head dousing but comments with a flattered smile, “Anything is possible when she’s on a mission to get even.”

  Michelle did eventually seduce Lou, in 1972. “I was in love with Lou,” she says of their “hush-hush” affair, conducted when his serious girlfriend, the actress Britt Ekland, was living in London. “For the first time I felt like a backstreet girl. Then one day Lou said, ‘Britt’s back.’ I said, ‘I don’t care.’ He said, ‘And she’s five and a half months pregnant’”—with his first son, Nicholai. That ended the affair.

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  John and Michelle bought 1930s actress-singer Jeanette McDonald’s grand Bel Air mansion. Lou was already living in that Old Guard hillock of estates, as was Beach Boy Brian Wilson, who’d painted his house purplish-pink. “John and Michelle kept peacocks,” Lou says, “who make a sound like women being raped,” and they would stroll the streets in their shimmery, sultan-worthy Profile du Monde caftans, intriguing the neighbors. They were always having big parties, for not only the Laurel Canyon rockers but also that hitherto separate species: movie stars. “Everyone came: Ryan O’Neal, Marlon Brando, Mia Farrow, Peter Sellers, even Zsa Zsa Gabor,” says Michelle. “One night I had to ask Warren Beatty to leave the house because he was screwing some girl in the nursery [that was being prepared for Chynna’s imminent birth].”

  “I didn’t feel comfortable in that house; it was dark—and so was John’s vibe,” says Leah Kunkel. Tamar remembers “John not letting Michelle come out, once when I went to see her.” There was only one incident of domestic violence. “It was serious,” Michelle says. “I ended up in the hospital. That’s all I’ll say about it.”

  Still, “spring and summer 1967, that was the moment,” Michelle recalls fondly. And a brief, shining moment it was, when everything that immediately thereafter would be sale-priced as a silly cliché was suddenly wildly glamorous: beautiful sybarites wafting around in clothes from other centuries; life as a sensual, acid-fueled private joke. At a meeting at the house with Lou, John and Michelle were asked by a music promoter to perform at a 12-hour music festival he was organizing. John and Lou, along with singer-songwriters Paul Simon and Johnny Rivers and producer Terry Melcher, bought the investor out, turned the festival into a charitable event, and expanded it to three days. They secured the Monterey Fairgrounds, which had jazz and folk festivals, as the venue in order to validate rock. Michelle manned the phones at the festival’s office on Sunset Boulevard every day, calling record executives, culling sponsors. There was a problem when the San Francisco groups at the heart of the new sensibility balked. “John and I represented what they didn’t like about the business. [We were] slick, we were successful,” and, says Lou, relatively Establishment. Only the persuasiveness of beloved Bay Area music columnist Ralph Gleason enabled the world to view the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. (Janis Joplin was so much still the striving Texas naïf that she performed in a ribbed-knit pantsuit.)

  The Monterey Pop Festival also premiered the electrifying sight of Seattle urchin turned 101st Airborne paratrooper turned British sensation Jimi Hendrix making love to his guitar and then immolating it. Laura Nyro, whose amazing soul operatics and zaftig, black-gowned appearance were decidedly non-psychedelic, knew that she had bombed and, worse, was sure she’d heard boos. She left the stage crying hysterically. (“Laura carried the baggage of that booing all her life,” Michelle says. In a tragic irony worthy of Maupassant, in the 1990s Lou and Michelle listened closely to the tapes of Laura’s performance. “It wasn’t booing; it was someone whispering, ‘I looove you,’” says Lou. Nyro died of ovarian cancer before they could deliver the news to her.) Michelle, who was newly pregnant, “was at her most beautiful at Monterey,” recalls Lou. John wrote “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” and Scott McKenzie recorded it. It was the Summer of Love’s anthem at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. And it had all started when Tamar and Michelle had their excellent adventure with Scott and John in the lavender apartment.

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  Not long after Chynna was born, in 1968, John and Michelle divorced and the Mamas and the Papas disbanded. “I was John’s muse, and now I was gone. I was the person John drew all his despair and joy from, and he didn’t know where to go from here,” says Michelle—self-serving, perhaps, but true. He fell in love with a blond South African gamine, Genevieve Waite, the girl-of-the-hour actress (in the 1968 film Joanna, she daringly starred as a white girl romancing a black man during apartheid) who socialized with the British rock and film elite. John was “like Svengali to me—I fell in love with him immediately,” Genevieve admits today. Despite a weathered face, she is still credulous, fragile, and baby-voiced, years after a bruising on-and-off two-decade relationship with John that included, by her admission, four years of being addicted to drugs with him—mostly Dilaudid, a highly potent narcotic sometimes called “drugs
tore heroin,” and, for a brief time, heroin itself. John’s addiction was so out of control that once, when they were houseguesting with Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg, and John was shooting cocaine, Genevieve says, “Keith said, ‘This might sound strange coming from me, but you have to leave.’”

  “Michelle didn’t have those doormat tapes—the man comes first,” says Genevieve with wistful admiration. Genevieve had loved the Mamas and the Papas since hearing them in South Africa (“They were bigger than the Beatles there! They played their songs in the mines!”), and practically from the moment she met John she thought of him as a genius. “Gen loved John to distraction—she was practically his slave,” Michelle says, implying that he could lead her astray. Genevieve contends that she did not take drugs during her pregnancy, but that John did. In his autobiography John says that Genevieve “had been on a low dose of Dilaudid” and went to London for an “emergency cleanout” two months before daughter Bijou was born. (They also had a son, Tamerlane, who was born in 1971.) Genevieve says, “I just wish I had lived in another time, when there were not so many drugs. The early 70s was really a bad time to be a mother. I’ve gone through so much misery over this.” (Bijou Phillips eventually became a tempestuous teenage “It girl”; she had a long-term relationship with John Lennon’s son Sean; she’s now a steadily working actress.) “Gen wanted to fill the void that I’d left,” Michelle continues, “and John made her pay for that.” Genevieve agrees: “John slept with everyone, and he said it was because Michelle had made him feel so bad about himself.”

  While John, with Genevieve in tow, was starting his long skid into the dark side, Michelle was trying to make the transition from musical stardom to acting—a task that was harder than it looked. She started to date Jack Nicholson around the time she tested for the role of Susan in Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge, which she lost to Candice Bergen. When Jack went off to star in the film, she signed on as the female lead in Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie. She flew to Peru to work with Hollywood’s enfant terrible, who was fresh from directing the counterculture epic Easy Rider. In a madness-venerating time, Hopper was madder than most. According to his ex-wife Brooke Hayward’s account in Peter Biskind’s authoritative Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Hopper not only struck her but also once jumped on the hood of the car she was sitting in, shattering the windshield. Hopper told Biskind that he doesn’t recall the incident. (Contacted for this article, Brooke Hayward, who since 1985 has been married to the orchestra leader Peter Duchin, declined to discuss Hopper’s behavior during their marriage because, she said, “we have a child together.”) [In 2010, Hopper would die from complications related to prostate cancer.]

  Michelle fell in love with Dennis, drawn to him in part, she says, by “this Florence Nightingale instinct. I was so overloaded emotionally by this point in my life, I didn’t know what I was doing.” They married in Taos in late 1970; Ann Marshall and her boyfriend, Don Everly, were visiting there, and Don bought the marriage license. (Marshall, the droll, Bel Air–raised sophisticate, had romances with both Everly brothers, the pompadoured Kentucky twangers who’d been worshipped by the Beatles. “Phil left me on my 20th birthday, and I left Don on my 30th birthday,” she says. “I sent their mother a telegram: happy mother’s day. and thank you for not having a third son.”)

  In the days after the wedding, Dennis behaved dangerously with Michelle. Whatever Hopper did was “excruciating” is all Michelle will say. She got herself and Chynna back to L.A., where “my father dragged me into his attorney’s office and said, ‘Men like that never change. File for divorce now. It’ll be embarrassing for a few weeks, then it will be over.’ It was embarrassing for more than a few weeks. Everybody had the same question: ‘A divorce after eight days? What kind of tart are you?’” When she and Hopper (who married three more times) run into each other, “we are civil,” Michelle says with a freighted crispness.

  On the heels of her week-long marriage to Hopper, Michelle picked up with Jack Nicholson when he was casting Drive, He Said. She was now, along with Carly Simon, that rare thing on the early-70s entertainment scene: the female “catch.” Nicholson, not yet having arrived at his Cheshire-cat-smiling Über-coolness, set out to win her. Around this same time, according to Genevieve, “Mick Jagger also had a big crush on Michelle. He was crazy about her. When she’d visit us in Bel Air, he’d come over.” Genevieve pauses, squints, and waxes puzzled at a memory: “Mick and Bianca had the weirdest marriage. They were never together.”

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  Michelle and Jack became a couple, and she and Chynna rented a house adjacent to his, making it easy for him “to spy on me,” says Michelle, adding, “I only mean that as a joke. Dear Jack. He was a lovely guy: charming, sweet, and fun to be with.” The relationship went well for a year, she says, “and then, one morning, Jack had a life-changing experience. I was having breakfast in bed with him when the phone rang.” The caller, according to Michelle, was a man from Jack’s New Jersey hometown. “I’m eating my toast and drinking my orange juice and Jack is saying, ‘Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.’ Then he hangs up and dials a number”—that of his sister, Lorraine, with whom he was very close. “He says, ‘Lorraine! Are you my sister? Or my aunt?’” Nicholson had just been told that his and Lorraine’s deceased older sister, June, was not his sister but his mother, and that the deceased woman he thought was his mother was his grandmother. Lorraine immediately confessed to the decades-long fiction. “Jack was incredulous,” says Michelle.

  The news, she continues, “was horrible for him. Over the weeks, the poor guy had a very, very tough time adjusting to it. He’d been raised in this loving relationship . . . surrounded by women. . . . Now I think he felt women were liars.” Even though, she says, “I’m not sure I was aware of it at the time,” in retrospect she believes that the news about his family contributed to a changed atmosphere between them. The actual breakup with Jack, she says, was about “something so minor—some stupid thing like a comb or the car keys—[but it was] the straw that broke the camel’s back.” One day soon after, Chynna recalls, her mother told Jack, “‘I’m done.’ She packed up our few things, we got in the car with my nanny, and we never went back.” Lou Adler says, “At this point, she’d been through John and Hopper. She probably saw the signs. She falls, but she doesn’t fall so far that she can’t get up.”

  At about this same time, summer 1974, Michelle and Cass were sitting by Cass’s pool one day watching Chynna, six, and Cass’s daughter, Owen, seven, swim. (By now Cass was, as Graham Nash reverentially puts it, “the Gertrude Stein of Laurel Canyon.”) Cass had kept Owen’s paternity a secret. “I said, ‘Come on, tell me who he is,’” Michelle says. “Cass laughed and said, ‘I’ll tell you when I get back from London.’ She never got back, of course.” [In London, Cass died suddenly—of a heart attack—at age 32.] Cass’s sister, Leah, and her then husband, drummer Russ Kunkel, raised Owen as their daughter.

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  Supporting Chynna alone, Michelle called screenwriter Robert Towne one day and asked him to let her be an extra in the party scene in Warren Beatty’s new movie, Shampoo. After doing the scene, she says, “I went into the trailer, not to start up a romance, just to say hello.” The party boy she’d evicted from Chynna’s nursery now looked considerably more appealing. Beatty was still with Julie Christie. “She had Warren wrapped around her finger,” says Michelle. “He adored her, because she didn’t really go for the big-movie-star thing. Julie was so cool, so beyond the Hollywood scene. He took Julie and me to the Shampoo wrap party.” Then Julie blithely moved on, and Michelle moved in with Beatty. The John-and-Denny friction was replaced by Warren-and-Jack friction. The two men were shooting The Fortune together. “Mike Nichols had to bar me from the set, because I would show up and disappear into the bungalow with Warren, and it was terribly painful for Jack.”

  Warren was The One. “I was madly in love with him,” Michelle admits. “Sh
e had diamonds in her eyes when she was with Warren; I’d never seen Michelle so happy,” says Tamar. Warren was a good stepfather figure to Chynna, Michelle says. “He helped her with her homework; he talked to her, and he is notorious for talking.” But Michelle bumped up against his passive-aggressiveness. “I wanted to have another child, and we talked about marriage a lot, but he was very noncommittal.” She pauses. “Warren is an old-fashioned man,” she allows. Michelle believes Warren would have married her if she’d found herself pregnant. But whatever else Michelle had done, luring a man into marriage through an intentional “accidental” pregnancy was not even remotely in the cards. “I never pressured him to marry me. I waited for him to ask.” He didn’t. And despite his “carrot dangling” talk about their doing a movie together, she says, no movie materialized.

  After a while, she says, “I couldn’t live under the same roof with him; we were fighting all the time.” (Michelle says she “fell off the couch laughing” years later when she watched Beatty tell Barbara Walters words to the effect of “They broke up with me!” “That,” she says, “is what Warren makes his women do!”) According to Michelle, Warren “didn’t want me to act. He wanted me to be with him all the time. When I told him I was going to do Valentino [which would mean six months of filming], he said, ‘Well, that’s probably the end of our relationship.’” After she finished the movie, they broke up. On the rebound, Michelle married radio executive Bob Burch, in 1978. “I threw myself at him, as I tend to do,” she says. (Michelle’s last words on Beatty: “I love Annette [Bening] and I pray for her every day! She can manage the guy, and I never could. He drove me nuts!”)