As someone who enjoys the deplorable practices of drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana, I’d feel like a hypocrite giving my future children the same hysterical lectures about the evils of pot and booze I received as an impressionable member of the “Just Say No” generation. Yet in a strange way, I’m grateful I was inundated with histrionic anti-drug propaganda from a young age. I’m strangely appreciative that it was drilled into me that my first marijuana cigarette would lead irrevocably to sucking off random passersby for crack money a mere week later. I’m glad I read Go Ask Alice, that famously bogus anti-drug “diary” of a teen runaway/LSD addict that was actually concocted by a Mormon youth counselor with highly dubious academic credentials. These measures didn’t keep me from using pot or mild hallucinogens, but they scared me away from everything else. I’m glad they did.
Teenagers are going to rebel. They’re going to flout the rules and break their parents’ hearts. That’s the nature of adolescence. So when my children break the rules, I want that to mean sharing a joint at a party or drinking too much with their friends, not doing coke before class or shooting up or experimenting with crystal meth. Anti-pot hysteria is perhaps a necessary evil. We need this false or soft or untenable restriction so that teenagers, who are going to rebel anyway, can break the rules without getting hurt or subjecting themselves to serious harm.
Mackenzie Phillips’ compulsively readable new memoir High On Arrival is notorious as a book about celebrity incest, but it’s really about what it’s like to grow up without any of the restrictions that govern everyday life. It’s a meditation on what it’s like to come of age as a borderline-feral countercultural princess in a world where nothing was forbidden, where the overriding philosophy was an ecstatic commandment to just say yes, yes, yes to everything: to sex, to drugs, to life, and ultimately to death. The fact that Mackenzie Phillips eventually entered into a decade-long consensual incestuous relationship with her father was merely the ultimate manifestation of this anything-goes ethos.
In Arrival, the shimmering promise of the ’60s—a world of absolute freedom, especially where drugs and sex were concerned—leads to an apocalyptical emotional Altamont where the most fundamental restrictions of morality and basic human decency are cavalierly discarded. It’s all well and good until you wake up one morning with a pounding headache, a mind flooded with bad chemicals, your skintight jeans around your ankles, and the enduring sense of shame that comes with having fucked your own father.
Phillips led a curiously bifurcated existence as a pre-adolescent, shuttling between a relatively stable life with her alcoholic but fundamentally conventional mother and a fairy-tale world of Dionysian excess at the debauched pleasure palace of her father John, the eccentric, wildly self-destructive leader, frontman, and chief songwriter of iconic ’60s band The Mamas And The Papas. At Papa John’s dilapidated mansion, Phillips roller-skated in an empty pool, palled around with regular guests like Gram Parsons and Mick Jagger—who she later seduced, if it is indeed possible to seduce a sentient erection like the Rolling Stones frontman—and learned all about drugs from raiding her dad’s Texas-sized stash.
You’ve got to give John this much—he was no hypocrite. He made no effort to hide his drug use. Nor did he apologize for it. So Phillips grew up in an upside-down looking-glass world where a bang on a bathroom door was answered with an incongruously paternal, “Just a minute, honey. Daddy’s shooting up.” Drugs were everywhere. For John, they were as natural and necessary as oxygen. There was no delineation between hard and soft drugs, between mild herbs that relax and powders with the power to destroy and enslave.
The slim to nonexistent chance that Phillips would grow up healthy and functional amid all this madness vanished once she became that most doomed of all creatures—a child star. At 12, Mack was cast as a precocious smartass who tags along with hot-rod enthusiast Paul Le Mat in 1973’s American Graffiti. A starring role as the daughter of a single parent in the long-running Norman Lear sitcom One Day At A Time followed, and with it, stardom. Oh, and also a very serious, very public cocaine addiction fueled and fed by Mack’s poisonous relationship with her father, who also taught her how to shoot up.
Then came the dad-fucking that elevates Arrival from an unusually sordid, drug-sodden child-star tell-all to a pop-culture phenomenon that managed to sicken and disgust a seemingly jaded society. It’s the tragic twist that transformed Mack’s sad saga from E! True Hollywood Story fodder to Caligula-level depravity. It all began with Papa John trying to convince his 19-year-old daughter, the night before her wedding, that she shouldn’t marry her rock manager, Jeff Sessler, following a whirlwind three-week courtship.
John’s instincts were sound; the marriage was predictably calamitous and short-lived. John’s tactics, however, were criminal. He brought over a pile of pills, drugs, and booze. Phillips woke up from a blackout drunk to find herself having sex with her father. It was a new, almost unimaginable low in a relationship that was fatally flawed from the start. Phillips desperately wanted to be close to her father, who was both fiercely protective and distant. Drugs alienated John from those closest to him; he kept out the incursions of a scary outside world by cocooning himself in a bubble of heroin addiction. He was emotionally unavailable and sometimes just plain AWOL.