High On Arrival (10 page)

Alan and I had a hot, hot affair. There was a first kiss that I should remember, and I know I used to remember it because of the song I wrote for him about it after I came home:

Hey your pixie misses you

She wants it all to last

Hey your pixie kisses you

But our love grew too fast.

Our first kiss at the Bellgravia Fair

About that she reminisces

And runs her fingers through her hair

Alan Merrill and Jake Hooker were the center of teen-pop craziness. When I went out with them, Lorna Luft, Papa John, and Keith Richards, we had the run of the city. And we often had parties at the Glebe Place flat. At one of those parties Mick Jagger made fun of me for listening to the Don McLean song “Starry Starry Night.” Another night, out at dinner with Dad and some other people, apropos of nothing, Jagger told me, “You have to exercise or by the time you’re forty your ass will be at your ankles.” He stood up from the table and demonstrated how to do squats. I didn’t care what words were coming out of his mouth. I thought he was luminously attractive.

• • •

That summer was a coming-of-age for me Phillips style. My memory of that time has fogged over—I’m left with a blurry sense that it was bright and fun and a nonstop frolic. It’s not that I was doing drugs that summer, at least not enough to account for the fogginess, but the drugs that came later obscured bits and chunks of my past. What I remember without doubt was that sex for me hadn’t been anything too special until Alan. I loved having sex with him. I said as much in my journal, where I went into great detail about having sex all night in every imaginable position. And I remember Aunt Rosie finding my silver diary, ignoring the pages documenting the tortured days I spent alone, skipping to the naughty parts (who wouldn’t?), and discovering that in spite of all the times she waited up late, screamed over the phone, and made threatening calls to various older male parties over the years, I wasn’t a virgin. Poor Rosie.

It was a romantic, amazing, idyllic time. I was sixteen, I was in love, and I was totally free. I expected only more of the same ahead.

9

Home in L.A., when Rosie found my diary, she called me a slut. She told me that I had a personality disorder, that there was something terribly, terribly wrong with me. Now that she said it, I thought maybe it was so. When I was a little kid I’d sometimes wondered if I was different and nobody was telling me. Was something wrong with me? Was everybody hiding it from me? Were they suspiciously cautious around me? I’d been put on Ritalin for hyperactivity—Ritalin, which at least one study has linked to later smoking and cocaine use by children who take it. Now I was fully formed, successful, and newly confident in my sexuality, but still with underlying doubts that I could function like everyone else.

Meanwhile, during the first season of
One Day at a Time
, in the episode “Julie Goes All the Way,” her boyfriend, Chuck, pressures her to have sex. He says, “Only freaks and weirdos don’t make love when they feel the urge.” Hmm. Wasn’t that the exact opposite of what Rosie said?

Julie’s life on
One Day at a Time
resonated with mine, not because the writers knew what went on between me and Rosie (or me and Alan for that matter), but because the struggles of a teenager chasing independence are so universal. Season two started with a four-parter called “The Runaways.” In the course of those episodes, Julie runs off with Chuck, the sex-seeking boyfriend with a leopard-spotted van.

The guy who played Chuck, William Kirby Cullen, was myopic or something. He had terrible eyesight. When we rehearsed he wore glasses, but when we taped the show the producers would ask him to take them off. The guy couldn’t see for shit. He’d be saying, “Julie, I love you,” but instead of looking into my eyes he’d be staring deeply and soulfully at my armpit. It was all I could do not to grab his chin and say, “Hey, buddy, I’m over here!”

Julie runs away because her mother is trying to control her. She says, “Fuck you, I’m outta here”—or she would have if such things were acceptable on network TV. Then she and Chuck move into a seedy motel. Bonnie misses her prodigal daughter. She goes to find her and ask her to come home. Of course the comic relief is Schneider talking to Rest Stop Rosie on the CB radio as he and Ann hunt Julie down.

The showdown is a scene I loved doing with Bonnie. When Ann tells Julie she wants her to come home, Julie is living in squalor with Chuck. She’s unhappy. She misses her family. But she is still proud and defiant.

She says, “My relationship with Chuck has to be what we want, not what you want. I see him when I like, go on trips with him, or do anything else we want to do. Mom, this is it. Either I run my life or I don’t come back.” Julie was describing the freedom I myself had been enjoying for years.

But Ann, hard as it was for her, said, “Okay, Julie. Don’t come back.” It was a powerful scene, and for me it was a brief window into a world where a parent says “No, you have to live in my house on my terms” and is heard and heeded. It was what Rosie tried so fruitlessly to do.

Rosie was increasingly sickly, and her three charges were increasingly wild. We lived in a big house that I’d rented in Beach-wood Canyon. My cousins and I went to parties and entertained an endless stream of visitors she’d never met before. The inmates were ruling the prison and it took a toll on Rosie. She couldn’t ground me—I had to go to work every day. The more Rosie tried to control me the more I rebelled. I never thought of it at the time, but it must have been hard for Rosie to feel powerful. Dad didn’t contribute anything to our household. I paid the rent; I bought Rosie her car; I financed the household. I’d been paying for my own dentist appointments since I was twelve. I had dependents who were older than I was from the age of fifteen. How do you control someone who holds all the cards?

Still, it wasn’t a constant battle. There were many times we all cooked together, went to movies, and acted like a family. We’d somehow accumulated sixteen canyon cats as household members: Sooty, Ginger, Andu, Midnight, Brains, and eleven others, whose names occasionally come to me in the middle of the night only to disappear by morning. Each evening at feeding time Rosie and I would stand at the kitchen counter opening can after can of cat food as feline bodies wove in and around our feet. We set down sixteen bowls of cat food and watched the nightly feast. Rosie taught me to take in, care for, and love strays, animal and human. But she never did get me to follow her rules.

Rosie’s rules weren’t the only ones I was breaking. After my dreamy summer in London with Alan Merrill, I came home to my boyfriend Andy. I hadn’t intended to betray Andy, but Alan Merrill was unimaginably handsome. When I fell in love with him I felt so far away from Andy, from home, from Earth. Then I came back, and Andy could tell I’d been with someone else. He said, “Look, first of all you’re high half the time. I can’t even talk to you, and I don’t find it attractive.” That was shattering enough, but he wasn’t done. “Second of all, you’re off fucking other people. I love you, but I can’t do this anymore.” We were over. I was crushed. I cried; I told him my summer affair was just a fling; I insisted that I would change: “It’s over. I’m done. I’m not going to do it anymore. I’m not going to get high.” But I couldn’t keep that promise. I took Quaaludes the way other kids might sneak a chocolate bar in the middle of class. One day I passed out on my desk during typing class. I thought it was kind of funny—would the “ASDF” that was imprinted on my forehead fade in time for rehearsal? But Andy had plans for his time and they didn’t involve waiting around for me to wake up.

It never occurred to me that Andy might have a point about my drug use. I just thought he wasn’t hip like me and my family. My whole life I’d had it drilled into me that I was different. I came from a subculture that ran parallel to mainstream life. My father always said, “First and foremost, you’re a Phillips and the rules don’t apply to you. You can get away with anything.” Textbook megalomaniac. He was the king of a fiefdom where, for a while anyway, everything went his way. With Dad and his cohorts my drug use was completely acceptable, but I was finding out that with others, like Andy, it was not.

I started dating a lot—guys who’d guest-star on the show and guys who worked on the lot. I wasn’t sleeping with those guys, but I’d had more than one serious relationship. Meanwhile, Val was probably still a virgin. No matter, Val and I formed a special bond in spite of our differences. We were the only kids working a full-time job together. Our days were stripped of the social life that most kids find at school. We had lunch hour off, when we’d relax at my house, each having a glass of wine pool-side. On the weekends we had guys over and hung out with them by the pool.

One night we were at KC’s apartment (of KC and the Sunshine Band). It wasn’t long before Rick Springfield, already a teen phenom at the time, started hitting on young, beautiful Val. She was still fifteen, maybe sixteen years old. She came up to me and whispered, “Mack, we gotta get out of here.” I said, “But he’s so cute!” Still, we ran out the door and drove away very fast. She was freaked out, but to me the parties, the flirtations, the hookups, the mad-dash escapes—it was all a hilarious adventure. That would be our mismatched dynamic for years. I was impulsive, carefree, careless. Val definitely partied too, but compared to me she was restrained and responsible. Our differences—much like our characters—would grow more dramatic over the years and at times pull us apart. But, like the sisters we played on TV, we had a bond that would always exist, no matter what.

Valerie and I always laugh about the fact that when it came to guest stars on the show, I always got the guys. Until Scott Colomby came along. He was really cute, and he went for Val. They dated for several years. My on-set romances tended not to last so long. My boyfriends were all casual accessories. A handsome, soft-spoken guy named Robby Benson came on for an episode called “The College Man.” In the episode he is my date, but he goes for my mother—and she seems to like the attention. After the taping, Robby asked me out and we started dating. It was all very chaste. We’d go to his apartment—it was by the beach somewhere—and he’d play me songs that he’d written. One of them, “Mr. Weinstein’s Barbershop,” got stuck in my head and never left.

Anyway, we’d been dating for about a month and hadn’t had sex yet. I partied but I wasn’t promiscuous, in part because I still thought of myself as the Kid. After a date, Robby was dropping me off back at my house when he said, “I have this itch, I really need to scratch it.”

I said, “So scratch it.”

He said, “No, you don’t get it,” and raised his eyebrows suggestively. After more eyebrow raises than any dignified man should have to exercise, I finally caught his drift.
That
kind of itch. I could feel Aunt Rosie’s eyes boring through the closed door of the house.

I said, “Oh, I gotta go.” Something in me shut down and I didn’t go out with him again.

I was a good girl, but I had my moments. One of the most memorable came two years later when I was on hiatus in New York. Dad and Gen’s latest digs in New York were a penthouse on the Upper East Side. I rented the penthouse next door. I was rarely there—I was clubbing at night, sleeping during the day, back and forth to L.A.—but I had more money than I knew what to do with. I never got around to furnishing that apartment, so I always ended up crashing at my dad’s.

For New Year’s Eve I went with Dad and Genevieve to a crazy party at their friend Wendy Stark’s penthouse on Fifth Avenue. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were there, the editor of
Rolling Stone
Jann Wenner, and other luminaries. Jeffrey stayed home at our dad’s apartment. He wasn’t as comfortable partying with Dad’s friends as I was. At midnight, when the Central Park fireworks started going off, Dad got a call. It was Jeffrey, who said, “It’s the start of World War III. There are bombs going off every where. There are gunshots. I’m hiding in the closet. I’m terrified.” It must have been the cocaine talking. Dad just said, “Look, you’re on your own, kid.” That was one of his favorite expressions.

A few days later we went to a party at the gorgeous Central Park West home of our dear friends Lenny and Marsia Holzer. (The same Marsia who a few years earlier had, with her then-boyfriend Yipi, fled the chaos at 414 St. Pierre.) Lenny was Dad’s big shooting-up buddy who has now been clean and sober for five million years and is a highly paid interventionist. Mick and Jerry Hall lived in the same building.

Jerry was on her way somewhere, maybe Central America. She stopped by the party wearing an elegant hat, said, “Now you all have a good time” in her soft Texan drawl, and left.

The party went on, but at some point in the evening Mick decided he wanted a tuna salad sandwich. Dad was a connoisseur of white-trash food, so he insisted on making the Phillips family tuna salad recipe for Mick. Dad, Mick, and I went down to Mick and Jerry’s apartment. Mick opened a can of tuna, then looked for the mayo. There was no mayo. Thank you, Jesus, there was no mayo. Mick said, “John, go upstairs and see if Lenny and Marsia have any mayo.” Dad left, and the minute the door shut behind him, Mick locked it and turned around to face me. He said, “I’ve been waiting for this since you were ten years old.” I was eighteen. Eight years is a long time to wait. We went into his and Jerry Hall’s bedroom and had sex in their bed.

In the middle of our tumble my dad came back and started knocking on the door, yelling, “You’ve got my daughter in there!” It wasn’t “Look, you’re on your own kid” this time, but I imagine he was more annoyed at losing the chance to show off his tuna salad recipe than genuinely concerned about the defiling of his daughter. We ignored him and he finally went away.

That night I slept in that lux, illicit bed. I’d known Mick since I was a kid, and maybe most people think that their parents’ friends are old and gross. But this was Mick Jagger. Mick Jagger! He was hot. He had the most perfect ass in history. (I’m sure he still has a perfect ass given that he taught me how to do squats so many years ago.)

The next morning we put on big fluffy white robes. (You have to wonder if every girl who stayed at the Mick Hotel got one.) He went into the kitchen and came back with a tray carrying tea, toast, and fresh strawberries. The phone rang. Mick handed it to me. It was my father. He said, “I’ve been up all night worrying. Was he nice to you?”

I said, “Dad, I’m fine. We’re having tea. I’ll see you later.”

I was proud of my conquest, or of having been conquested, but I never intended to make it public. And then, many years later, I was talking to a friend, Mary, from the TV Guide channel for an interview. I was so naive. I honestly thought we were off the record when I told her about my night with Mick, but apparently not.
TV Guide
ran that story as the headline. In quick order it turned into a tabloid free-for-all. It was in the
Enquirer.
Jay Leno joked about it in his opening monologue. I got it: inside dirt about a globally famous rock star is money. But it turned into something I never wished it to become.

I was a good girl, but I knew a golden opportunity when I saw it, even if it came disguised as a tuna salad sandwich.