“This is going to break your heart, but much of the music
you heard in the ‘60s and early ‘70s wasn’t recorded by the people you
saw on the album covers. It was done by me and the musicians you see on
these walls … Many of these kids didn’t have the chops and were little
more than garage bands … At concerts, people hear with their eyes. Teens
cut groups slack in concert, but not when they bought their records.”
-Hal Blaine, longtime drummer for the Wrecking Crew, quoted in the Wall Street Journal on March 23, 2011
Before moving ahead with the John Phillips saga, I first need to
pose an extremely important question to all my readers: is anyone out
there in the market for a slightly used, covert film studio? If so, then
all you need do is pull about $6.2 million out of your penny jar
(though in today’s housing market, you might be able to cut a better
deal) and Lookout Mountain Laboratory can
be yours! And if you act fast, you might be able to get a package deal
on the lab and the Hodel house! (the photos in this post are of the lab
as it looks today as a converted residential dwelling).
Another item worth noting: as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle on
January 28, 2011, “Ron Patterson, the flamboyant, free-spirited creator
of the Renaissance and Dickens fairs, died Jan. 15 at a friend’s house
in Sausalito after an illness. He was 80.” As staff writer Carolyn Jones
noted, Patterson’s creation “was sort of a medieval precursor
to Burning Man.” And Burning Man is, of course, a rather explicitly
occult ritual first performed on the Summer Solstice of 1986 and now
performed every summer in Nevada’s Black Rock Desertbefore an audience
of 50,000+.
What does any of that though have to do with Laurel Canyon? As we
have seen so many times before, all roads on the Conspiracy Superhighway
seem to lead to Laurel Canyon: “In the beginning, the Renaissance Faire
was an experiment in Mr. Patterson’s backyard. In the early 1960s, Mr.
Patterson and his wife, Phyllis, who were both interested in theater and
art, began hosting children’s improvisational theater workshops at
their Laurel Canyon (Los Angeles County) home.”
One naturally wonders whether aspiring thespian and golden child
Godo Paulekas (originally cast, it will be recalled, to play Satan in
Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising) was involved in those workshops.
In any event, there is certainly nothing creepy about children’s
workshops being hosted in a small, tight-knit community that was home to
more than its fair share of pedophiles, so let’s just move along.
One last item of note, this one from, of all places, the pages of Sports Illustrated circa
June 29, 1981. The following excerpt is from a short piece written by
publisher Philip Howlett to introduce readers to writer Bjarne Rostaing:
“Born in Lincoln, N.Y., Rostaing grew up in various places in
Connecticut, where he attended what he recalls as an even dozen schools.
‘I got my B.A. and master’s in English from
the University of Connecticut,’ he says. ‘Then I did part of a Ph.D. at
the University of Washington before going into the Army Intelligence
Corps in 1959. We had Paul Rothchild, who later became producer for The
Doors and Janis Joplin, to give you some idea of what the unit was
like.’”
I’m guessing that it was like countless other intelligence units
designed to churn out shapers of public opinion, whether actors,
novelists, newsmen, or, in this case, sportswriters and producers of
popular music. It is quite shocking, of course, to learn that the
handler of two of Laurel Canyon’s most influential and groundbreaking
bands (Love and the Doors) had an intel background. Apparently the
search is still on for anyone of any prominence in the Laurel Canyon scene who didn’t have direct connections to the intelligence community.
Anyway … during the heyday of the Mamas and the Papas, John and
Michelle Phillips knew, and regularly played host to, virtually everyone
of importance in the canyons. In addition to all the singers and
musicians living in Laurel Canyon, the power couple’s circle of friends
included Warren Beatty, Peter and Jane Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Terry
Melcher and girlfriend Candace Bergen, Marlon Brando, Roman Polanski and
Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger and Voytek Frykowski, soon-to-be-dead
gossip columnist Steve Brandt, Larry Hagman, presidential brother-in-law
Peter Lawford (fresh from his probable involvement in the murder of
Marilyn Monroe), Dennis Hopper, Ryan O’Neal, Mia “Rosemary’s Baby”
Farrow, ethereal Freemason Peter Sellers, and Zsa Zsa Gabor.
And a short, scraggly singer/songwriter by the name of Charlie Manson.
There were, to be sure, numerous ties between John Phillips, the
‘Wolf King of LA,’ and Charles Manson. And ties as well between bandmate
Cass Elliott and Manson. And between Philips and Cass and the Cielo
Drive victims. John Phillips, for example, had invested $10,000 in Jay
Sebring’s business venture, Sebring International (rumored to have been a
front for various illegal activities, including drug trafficking).
Michelle Phillips had a brief affair with Roman Polanski in London while
Polanski was married to the soon-to-be-dead Sharon Tate (during that
same sojourn to London, Tate was reportedly initiated into the practice
of witchcraft).
Mama Cass, as previously noted, lived across the street from the
house occupied by Folger and Frykowski at 2774 Woodstock Road. Both
homes were frequently visited by known drug dealers. Regulars at Cass’s
home included Pic Dawson (also a regular at the Frykowski/Folger home
and at the Tate/Polanski home), the son of a US State Department
official who, according to John Phillips, was suspected by authorities
“of using diplomatic pouches to move drugs between countries,” and Billy
Doyle, a local dealer who was infamously filmed while being flogged at
the Tate/Polanski house just three days before the murders (according to
Dennis Hopper). Another regular was Bill Mentzer, later convicted of
the brutal murder of Cotton Club producer Roy Radin and labeled ‘Manson
II’ by journalist Maury Terry. The LAPD once described Mentzer as a
member of “some kind of hit squad.”
So dark was the scene at the home of the ‘Lady of the Canyon’ that,
according to Terry, four of the LAPD’s initial prime suspects in the
Tate killings were drug dealers associated with Elliott. And yet,
curiously enough, all of the canyon’s peace-and-love spewing musicians
were regulars at Mama Cass’s home as well. As Rolling Stone noted
in its Fortieth Anniversary Edition, “’Mama’ Cass Elliott’s cozy canyon
house functioned as a sort of rock salon.” In a similar vein, Barney
Hoskyns wrote in Hotel California that “Cass kept permanent open house.”
Also noted in Hoskyn’s tome was that the Laurel Canyon scene “all
spun around him and Cass,” with the “him” in this case being David Van
Cortlandt Crosby, who, like Cass, had an insatiable appetite (by his own
account) for potent pain killers like Demerol, Dilaudid and
Percodan. Crosby was one of many Canyonites who regularly dropped by
Cass’s place to hang out and engage in impromptu jam sessions, and to
mingle with some seriously disreputable characters.
Also a regular at Cass’s place, by some reports, was Charlie Manson
himself. According to Ed Sanders, it was at Cass’s home that Charlie
first met her neighbor, coffee heiress Abigail Folger (who helped
finance Kenneth Anger’s films, like the one that was supposed to star
Godo Paulekas but instead starred Mansonite Bobby Beausoleil). According
to Terry, the rather notorious group known as The Process: Church of
the Final Judgment – which evidence suggests had deep ties to the
Manson, Son of Sam, and Cotton Club murders – actively sought to recruit
Mama Cass, as well as John Phillips and Terry Melcher.
A few further bits of Mansonalia: Terry has written that the
Family’s iconic bus was seen parked at the home of John and Michelle
Phillips in the fall of 1968. Reports also hold that Manson attended a
New Year’s Eve party at the couple’s home on December 31, 1968, just
months before the murders. So close were the ties between the Mamas and
the Papas and the Manson clan that both John Phillips and Mama Cass were
slated to appear as witnesses for the defense at the Family’s trial,
though not surprisingly, neither was ever called.
For a band that sang about being “safe and warm, if I was in LA,”
the members of the Mamas and the Papas kept some pretty dangerous
company in the city of angels … which reminds me that, not long after
the band hit the charts, Tamar Hodel received a postcard from Michelle
Phillips asking her to watch their scheduled performance on the Ed
Sullivan Show and then meet the group at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel
before a scheduled concert. Tamar showed up with father George at her
side, the two apparently still maintaining a close relationship, and
Tamar, George, John, Michelle, Denny and Cass embarked on a drug-fueled
pre-show odyssey.
By 1970, John and Michelle had divorced. Many years later, Michelle
would reveal that their time together had included at least one episode
of domestic violence, one that she was still reluctant to discuss: “It
was serious. I ended up in the hospital. That’s all I’ll say about it.”
The union had yielded John a second daughter, Gilliam Chynna Phillips,
born February 12, 1968 in Los Angeles.
On January 31, 1972, John Phillips married for the third time, to
actress and Crowley aficionado Genevieve Waite; on the wedding guest
list were soon-to-be-governor Jerry Brown and
soon-to-be-lieutenant-governor Mike Curb. The couple’s time together
would be marked by wildly out-of-control drug consumption and the birth
of two more offspring: Tamerlane, whose name is presumably in part an
homage to Tamar Hodel, and Bijou Lilly, who was taken away and placed in
foster care in Bolton Landing, New York after her drug-addled parents
were deemed unfit to raise her.
In June 1972, shortly after marrying Waite, Phillips moved into a
canyon home at 414 St. Pierre Road that had been built by William
Randolph Hearst. The Rolling Stones had just vacated the property, and
their trusty sidekick, Gram Parsons, would grow very close to John
Phillips. Parsons, of course, would soon turn up dead, while John would
head off to London, where he reportedly planned to record a solo album
with assistance from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. That project never
got off the ground, however, as Phillip’s addictions rendered him
impossible to work with, even for a world-class drug abuser like
Richards.
Cass Elliott turned up in London the very next year, but unlike her
former bandmate, her trip abroad was to be one-way; on July 29, 1974,
she was found dead in occasional Canyonite Harry Nilsson’s London flat.
Ms Elliott, it seems safe to say, knew a little too much about the dark
side of Laurel Canyon.
Following the dissolution of the Mamas and the Papas, Cass had gone
on to a successful solo career and had become a familiar face on
American television screens. In addition to hosting two prime-time
network specials, she had guest-hosted the Tonight Show and had appeared on such popular early-1970s shows as The Red Skelton Show and Love, American Style.
She had been married twice, first in 1963 to vocalist Jim Hendricks
in what was reportedly a platonic arrangement aimed at getting
Hendricks a draft deferment. During that first marriage, which was
annulled in 1968, Cass had given birth to a daughter, Owen Vanessa
Elliott, born on April 26, 1967. Hendricks, however, was reportedly not
the father and Cass steadfastly refused to reveal who Owen’s true father
was. In 1971, following the breakup of the band, Cass married again,
this time to Baron Donald von Weidenman, a wealthy Bavarian heir. That
marriage collapsed after just a few months though and Cass was single
when she died just a few years later. Owen, already fatherless, was just
seven.
Denny Doherty, meanwhile, went on to host a popular variety show
in Canada, as well as performing in various formations of the New Mamas
and the Papas. He passed away on January 19, 2007, reportedly due to
kidney failure.
Michelle Phillips released an unsuccessful solo album, but then
switched gears and went on to a successful acting career, gracing the
small screen in such hit shows as Knot’s Landing, Hotel, and Beverly Hills, 90210.
She continued to have numerous flings and has married several more
times. At sixty-seven, she is the only living member of the original
Mamas and the Papas.
Returning now to John Phillips, in 1975 he sobered up enough to put together the soundtrack for the film The Man Who Fell to Earth,
a surreal venture featuring the talents of fledgling actor David Bowie
and director Nicholas Roeg, who had previously collaborated with
Crowleyite Donald Cammell on the heavily occult-influenced Performance.
Roeg’s film, curiously enough, includes a cameo appearance by Apollo
astronaut Jim Lovell. At that same time, Phillips was working on
completing a horrifically bad, Andy Warhol-produced musical entitled Man on the Moon, which closed just two days after opening.
As a side note, Phillips at one time had Don “Miami Vice” Johnson
in mind to play the lead in his space opera. Like the rest of
the Hollywood notables in this story, Johnson was a canyon dweller at
the time. His next-door neighbor was a guy by the name of Chuck Wein, an
avid occultist and buddy of Warhol who, in addition to managing bizarre
nightclub acts, directed the 1972 new age documentary Rainbow Bridge, filmed
less than two months before star Jimi Hendrix turned up dead. Wein
shared a curious nickname with fellow Canyonite Charlie Manson: ‘The
Wizard.’ But I may have drifted a little off-topic here …
Some of you may have noticed, by the way, that I am all but cured
of my former addiction to the word ‘digress,’ thanks to a twelve-step
program I’ve been working my way through. I can now veer off on wild
tangents having little to do with the main topic of discussion – like
filling you in, for example, on nonexistent twelve-step programs – and
not feel the slightest compulsion to point out the temporary loss of
focus.
Anyway … for the remainder of his career, Phillips’ musical output
consisted primarily of occasionally writing songs for and with others,
his most well known contribution being his co-writing duties on the
wretchedly awful Kokomo, recorded by the Beach Boys.
In 1981, Phillips found himself facing charges of trafficking large
volumes of narcotics. By his own account, he had an arrangement with a
pharmacy that allowed him to obtain large amounts of narcotics without
prescriptions (daughter Bijou would later say that he had actually
purchased the pharmacy, guaranteeing virtually unlimited access). The
charges were quite serious; in Phillip’s own words, he “was looking at
forty-five years and got thirty days.” He began serving his sentence,
appropriately enough, on April 20, and he was released just
three-and-a-half weeks later.
He should have gotten at least ninety days just for Kokomo. It never hurts to have friends in high places.
Phillip’s circle of friends, in the post-Mamas and Papas years,
included J. Paul Getty, Jr., Bobby Kennedy, Jr., and Princess Margaret.
Getty and Kennedy, both plagued by demons of their own, were likely
being supplied by Phillips. Another name in Phillips’ rolodex was Colin
Tennant, the wealthy heir of a massive petrochemical conglomerate in
the UK. Tennant owned a private island in the British West Indies where
wealthy friends like John Phillips and Mick and Bianca Jagger could
engage in unknown activities in complete seclusion.
Upon being released from his preposterously short period of
confinement, Phillips put together a version of the Mamas and the Papas
that included daughter Mackenzie Phillips and original lead vocalist
Denny Doherty. Scott McKenzie, who had summoned all the runaways across
the country to come to San Francisco with flowers in their hair, later
replaced Doherty. Laurie Beebe subsequently replaced Mackenzie Phillips,
after which Doherty returned one again to replace John Phillips. The
band finally called it quits in 1994.
Phillips had divorced Waite in 1985. In 1992, he received a liver
transplant and a new lease on life. Just months later, he was
photographed drinking in a bar in Palm Springs. In 1998, Phillips and
the other surviving members of the Mamas and the Papas were inducted
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Three years later, on March 18,
2001, Phillips died of heart failure. The saga wasn’t quite over,
however; Phillips’ daughters would carry on with the family tradition –
while spilling some dark family secrets along the way.
Oldest daughter Mackenzie began her acting career at the tender age
of twelve when she landed a role in what was to be George Lucas’
breakthrough film, American Graffiti. Just a few years before, it
will be recalled, Lucas had been an unknown cameraman at the Rolling
Stones’ notorious Altamont concert. During filming of Graffiti in
1972, John Phillips, who I’m sure had lots of important business to
attend to and therefore little time to look after his daughter, signed
over legal guardianship of Mackenzie to producer Gary Kurtz.
A few years later, in 1975, Mackenzie landed a role on what would quickly become a hit television series, One Day at a Time.
During the third season, however, Mackenzie was arrested for public
drunkenness and cocaine possession, after which her substance abuse
problems continued to spiral out of control, causing frequent problems
and considerable tension on the set of her hit show. Providing a
template for Charlie Sheen to later follow, she was fired from the
production in 1980.
After two nearly fatal overdoses, she was invited back by producers
in 1981. The following year though she collapsed on the set and was
once again fired. What had once seemed a very promising acting career
was over as quickly as it had begun.
From the late 1980s through the early 1990s, she performed
intermittently with the reformed Mamas and Papas. In 1992, she
reportedly entered a long-term rehab program that she didn’t emerge from
for nine months. Following that, she kept a low profile for many years.
In August 2008, however, she was arrested at LAX for heroin and cocaine
possession and on Halloween day 2008, she entered a guilty plea and was
once again sent to rehab.
A year later, in September 2009, Mackenzie released her tell-all memoir, High on Arrival,
which painted a dark and disturbing picture of her late father. In
addition to introducing her to drugs at the age of eleven by injecting
her with cocaine, Mackenzie claimed that Papa John had raped her on the
eve of her first marriage, and had engaged in an incestuous affair with
her that spanned a decade and ended only when she became pregnant and
did not know who the father was – a scenario, it should be noted, with
remarkable parallels to the ordeal endured by Michelle’s surrogate
mother, Tamar Hodel.
John Phillips’ memoir covering the time period in question makes no
mention of the illicit relationship with his daughter. He does claim
that Mackenzie was once raped at knifepoint by an unknown assailant. He
also notes, shockingly enough, that Mackenzie’s “house
in LaurelCanyon was destroyed by fire.” That, as we all know, hardly
ever happens.
The year after dropping her bombshells, Mackenzie appeared on what
is arguably the most appalling ‘reality’ show to ever hit the airwaves, Celebrity Rehab,
in a role far removed from her glory days on a hit primetime show. That
same year, sister Chynna Phillips entered rehab as well, though she was
seeking relief from, uhmm, ‘anxiety.’
Chynna first captured the spotlight in 1990 as 1/3 of the vocal group Wilson Phillips,
alongside of Carnie and Wendy Wilson, offspring of the reclusive Brian
Wilson (the only Beach Boy, by the way, to not be involved with the
aforementioned Kokomo, and arguably the only really talented
Beach Boy). That group though proved to be very short-lived, as did
Chynna’s musical career.
In 1995, Chynna married actor William Baldwin. In 2003, she became what Vanity Faire described
as a “fervent born-again Christian. She was baptized in brother-in-law
Stephen Baldwin’s bathtub.” The magazine also quoted Chynna as saying
that “being a mom is challenging for me – my perspective is warped.”
Like her older sisters, Bijou Lilly Phillips – born April 1, 1980,
just a year before her father was harshly punished for running a major
narcotics trafficking operation – merged into the fast lane at a very
young age. Her mother was addicted to heroin while carrying her and
Bijou has candidly described herself as a “crack baby.” Raised partially
in a foster home, she was reunited with her father by the courts when
in the third grade. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
Described by Index magazine as “a wild child who, through
fate and circumstance, was somehow allowed to partake of New York’s
nebulous nightlife at an age traditionally more suited to playing with
dolls,” she was a cover model from a very young age. She was also,
perhaps not surprisingly, the fourteen-year-old star of a Calvin Klein
ad campaign that many people (as well as the US Justice Department)
considered to be bordering on child pornography, and that Bijou herself
has referred to as “the kiddy porn ads.”
Bijou told her interviewer from Index that lurking behind
the scenes of that notorious Calvin Klein photo shoot – I’m guessing as a
technical adviser – “was this porn guy.” The interviewer identified
that “porn guy” as Ron Jeremy, probably the world’s most famous, and
arguably the world’s most inexplicable, porn star.
I should, I suppose, qualify that last statement: Ron Jeremy’s fame
is inexplicable in the sense that it is hard to imagine that anyone,
male or female, really wants to see Ron Jeremy naked. He is not,
however, just any ol’ porn star. To the contrary, he is a porn star
whose mother was an asset of the OSS, precursor to the CIA, and whose
physicist father had probable intel connections as well. And he is a
porn star who attended high school with none other than future CIA
director George Tenet, and a porn star whose uncle had ties to notorious
gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel.
He is, in other words, an extremely well hung connected porn star.
Bijou has alluded to the fact that Mackenzie was not the only
Phillips daughter to receive unwanted attention from Papa John. In her
music can be found lyrics such as “he touched me wrong.” Asked directly
about such references, she told an interviewer that she had “made this
decision not to talk to the press about anything that’s gone on in my
life, but just to write music about it. They can interpret it
themselves,” though she then quickly added, “It’s blatantly obvious.”
The youngest of the Phillips clan also acknowledged that she has a
“Daddy” tattoo on her rear. “That was [done] during a time,” she said,
“when I was a pretty sick puppy.”
Bijou made her film debut in 1999 and has had a number of
low-profile film and television roles since then. Most recently, she had
a recurring role on the freshman season of Raising Hope as, of
all things, a serial killer. She is currently an avid Scientologist.
Many of the problems she has faced, she ultimately realized, stem from
the fact that she’d “never been shown respect by [her] parents. [She’d]
always been treated like an object, not like a human.”