High On Arrival (13 page)

After the spelling debacle, Letterman and I sat down to chat. I nervously babbled on about being in a relationship with a married man. I was obviously fucked up, I had no media training, I said all the wrong things, and I was a perfect target for Letter-man’s teasing. I can spell “abysmal.” And afterward there was no comfort from Peter. His primary concern was how his wife would react to what I’d said about my relationship with him. He gave me shit about my performance, more like a father lecturing his daughter than a lover comforting his mate. Our age difference wasn’t so spicy that night.

I wasn’t oblivious or self-centered. I completely dug how hard it was for Peter’s wife, Betsy. When the well-known, fast-living, eighteen-year-old star of a hit sitcom starts dating a thirty-four-year-old separated-but-still-married mega music producer, it’s big news. Betsy, a thirty-seven-year-old, had to watch her not-yet-ex-husband conduct a very public relationship with a teenager. I’d seen my mother go through the same thing with Michelle. Plus Peter and Betsy had been together for a very long time, and now I was hanging out with all their musician buddies—people who must have felt to Betsy like part of the marital property they were still dividing. Betsy wanted to attend Linda Ronstadt’s shows, as she always had, and under no circumstances did she want to run into me. But the way Peter handled it showed no care or respect for me. We’d be backstage at a show or at the studio and Peter would get a call from Betsy saying she wanted to come by. He’d dismiss me and I’d leave to wait for him at home alone. Or a distraught Betsy would call and he’d leave me to go to her house. It happened over and over again. I felt confident that he wasn’t having sex with her, but it still made me feel like a piece of furniture, moved out of the way when necessary. I understood it, from all sides, but I didn’t like waiting for my boyfriend in empty houses the way I’d waited for my father for all my childhood.

For all my frustration, I never complained. I had no idea how to stand up for myself. I didn’t like to make a fuss. I was developing a less confrontational method for dealing with my emotions. It worked for my parents, and it would work for me: drugs and disappearance.

12

Our conflicts ran like quiet poisonous subterranean rivers, but Peter and I continued to live the high life. James Taylor was doing a free concert at Sheep Meadow in the middle of Central Park in Manhattan. Peter and I arrived at the gig by helicopter, which itself was more memorable to me than the show—not because I didn’t love James Taylor, but because attending rock concerts had quickly become as common to me as going to the movies.

What happened after the concert doesn’t make sense, except in that cocaine was involved, and the only thing that out-of-control cocaine use consistently guarantees is an irrational, impulse-driven life. Peter and I were staying at the Pierre, a landmark hotel facing Central Park. Back at the hotel, the phone rang. It was Anita Pallenberg, Keith Richards’s girlfriend who had once greeted me with disdain at their country estate. Anita was staying in a suite a couple floors above us. She invited us upstairs. Peter didn’t want to go—it was late and he was flying to England the next morning to visit his mother—but I said, “Come on, let’s go. I haven’t seen Anita in years.”

Anita wasn’t clean yet. A guy named Jeff Sessler was working for Anita and taking care of her son Marlon. I don’t remember the scene Peter and I walked into—I can’t tell whether my memory lapses are the fault of years of drug use or whether they mark memories so painful that I’ve hidden them from myself—all I remember is that Peter whispered, “These people are so bizarre, let’s get out of here.”

I was fucked up on coke, in general and on that night in particular. I was pissed off about all that had been going down with Peter, how he snubbed me for Betsy, how he made me feel incidental. Peter was bright, worldly, well educated. He treated me like a disciple, and I was over it. I was angry, and the antidote was obliteration. I said, “I’m just going to hang out for a little while longer.” So Peter went to bed, and I stayed. And stayed.

Then I noticed an odd light coming through the curtains. It was morning.
Oh, fuck.
I called down to our suite, but Peter didn’t pick up. I went down in the elevator, the shame shadow starting to cross over me. When I let myself into the suite there was utter silence. It was too quiet. Peter was gone. His suitcase was gone. There was a note on the desk that said, “I’m going to the airport. Where the fuck are you?” Shit. I called the Ambassador’s Club at American Airlines and had Peter paged. When he came on the line he said, “You didn’t come home last night.”

I said, “I know I didn’t and I’m sorry.” I
was
sorry. I loved Peter and couldn’t bear disappointing him.

But then I missed my plane home. And I stayed in New York with Jeff Sessler for five days without bathing or leaving the hotel. Whereas Peter was professorial and distant (albeit in a loving way), Jeff was silly and irreverent. He was a kindred spirit. We had the same urge to chase fun, consequences be damned.

For all our excesses, Peter and I led a life with a certain domestic rhythm. We both went to work every day. We ate together. We made commitments and kept them. When I cast Peter aside, I also lost the last vestiges of a stable life. Compared to what was about to happen, the life that Peter and I led was about to look downright Puritan.

Jeff and I decided to fly to Florida to see his father. I knew Jeff’s father, Freddy—everyone knew Freddy. He was the drug man for the Rolling Stones. The bag man. Freddy ran a weight-loss clinic in Florida that was actually a speed dispensary. Jeff and I told people we were flying to Florida so I could meet his mother, but we both knew our real reason was to get prescriptions for speed from his father.

In Florida Jeff and I decided to get married. Through his father he had access to pharmaceutical cocaine, which for me was the equivalent of marrying into royalty. Sure, I knew that our five-day-long affair was an unreasonable basis for marriage. In fact, I’d always thought marriage was a bogus institution. Why would you need to be married in order to be with someone? It seemed limiting and formal. But I was almost twenty and took pride in being impetuous. If Jeff and I wanted to get married, what or who could stop us? Nothing and nobody. Jeff’s mother had us over to her house for dinner. After we ate, his mom, Liz, pulled me into the kitchen. She said, “Mack, don’t marry my son. He’s an asshole.” It wasn’t the only time someone had said that I was making a mistake with Jeff. His younger brother also tried to stop me. Jeff was the black sheep of the family. I knew he could be a cocky jerk, but I liked his bad-boy vibe. Besides, he only ever treated me like a princess. At some other point even Betsy Asher—Peter’s ex—called me on the phone. Betsy, the last person with any reason to care what happened to me, said, “Please, don’t do this. Don’t go with Jeff. Go back to my husband.”

I didn’t listen to these people, who had every reason to be telling me the truth. But there was another messenger en route, with a new, nefarious means of voicing his opinion. My father.

Lately my father had been particularly fly-by-night. I referred to him as an area code, because his was different every time I tried to find him. I knew Dad was still shooting up coke. He had come to stay with me in Laurel Canyon. He and Genevieve were to perform a campy, Burns-Allen comedy/musical act at the Roxy. Dad flew in before Genevieve and was staying in my room while I slept in the guest room. I went back into my room for something and found a bag of syringes under the bed. There were needles and spoons. But when I confronted him he cut me off, as he did so well, saying, “Aw, kid, everything’s fine. It’s nothing to worry about, just a little chipping.” What could I do?

Then, months before Jeff and I met, when Peter and I were staying in the penthouse at the Chateau—the same suite where I’d first tried cocaine with my brother—I realized that I hadn’t spoken to my father in months and months, and I suddenly became convinced that Dad was going to die. It was one of those sudden, certain, gut-wrenching convictions—if I didn’t find him, help him, I would lose him forever. I couldn’t get him on the phone; nobody could get him on the phone. He was avoiding everyone. There in the penthouse I started making calls, the calls I always made when I had to track him down—friends, family, known accomplices, dwarves—but this time nobody knew where he was. He had disappeared into the ether.

Finally I called Mick Jagger. Something about him—his wisdom, his status, his power, his money—made it seem like he could find anybody anywhere on earth. Unlike the other friends who just told me they didn’t know where Dad was, Mick said, “Look, I can’t help you because I can’t help John. He’s going to do what he wants to do. You’re not going to pin him down. He’s running away from everyone. I can’t find him for you.”

I said, “But Mick, he’s going to die.”

He said, “You’re going to have to let him die. He’s a grown man. Stop doing this to yourself. Stop it.”

I fell back on the couch and thought,
What do I do now?
My father was lost.

Now, in Florida, on the eve of my wedding to Jeff Sessler, my elusive father showed up. Dad, who chased my rapist with a shotgun. Dad, the unreliable ghost, seemed to appear whenever I stumbled. Or was he the only person I wanted to catch me? Did he rush to rescue me or did I ignore all other options in favor of his scarred arms of salvation? I never thought about it then. All I knew was that when the dad I longed for emerged from the clouds, I ran to him. I always ran to him.

Dad came to Florida with Bob, an old friend of his, determined to stop the union. They checked into our hotel, staying in a room a few doors down from Jeff and me. The night they arrived, Jeff was sleeping and I went to visit Dad and Bob. Bob was asleep too. I had tons of pills and Dad had tons of everything too. Dad and I got high on downs, and eventually I passed out on Dad’s bed.

Then this: The biggest, worst moments of our lives never announce themselves. A car wreck suddenly changes everything terribly and forever. Words that destroy a relationship spill out unexpectedly but can’t be unsaid. Actions, emotions, missteps, mistakes—no matter who is to blame, there are tiny hints and billowing flags of warning, but we are powerless to wholly predict and self-protect. I loved my father and I still do. But he was not a man with boundaries. He was full of love, and he was sick with drugs. He drew me to him and pushed me away. He wanted to rescue me, to protect me, but he also wanted me to reflect his greatness.

It’s complicated and it’s simple, and neither makes it right, and neither gives it reason, so simple will have to do. I woke up that night from a blackout to find myself having sex with my own father. I don’t remember how it started or, thankfully, how it ended. There is only a vague memory of the middle, of waking up to a confusion and horror that I was unable to stop, change, process. Bob was watching from his nearby bed with a face I couldn’t read. Was it the first time? Had this happened before? I didn’t know and I still don’t. All I can say is that it was the first time I was aware of it. For a moment I was in my body, in that horrible truth, and then I slid back into a blackout.

Your father is supposed to protect you.

Your father is supposed to protect you, not fuck you.

• • •

I was the feel-no-evil monkey, the child whose rape settled quickly into a dispassionate truth. The year before, in my relationship with Peter, I’d miscarried a fetus I didn’t know I was carrying into a toilet. I scooped it out into a cup. It was the size of my fist. A moment passed, the moment in which I realized,
I was pregnant; I’ve miscarried; something that I didn’t know was happening is already over.
And when I saw that it was over, I boxed it away, poured the contents of the cup back into the toilet, came out of the bathroom, and told Peter, “I need to go to the hospital.” But before I left I stole two grams of cocaine from James Taylor, because even the feel-no-evil monkey needs a little help from her friends.

So my father had sex with me, and when I came to next to Jeff the next morning, I saw nothing, I said nothing, I heard nothing, I felt nothing. I put it aside for the moment and went on. My marriage to Jeff didn’t happen. Dad didn’t stop it. I didn’t take a stand either way. The notion seemed to pass as impulsively as it had appeared. Bob and Dad and Jeff and I flew back to LA. Jeff and I had sex in the lavatory of the first-class section before we even took off, because that was how we rolled.

13

Back in L.A., Peter had moved all of my stuff out of our house and back into my house. It was fucked up, and I was fucked up, and now, at home, the reality of what had happened with my father started to hit me. It was so wrong. I had to do something. I told my mother. But she said, “Are you sure?” My mother had always been in love with my father. She loved me too. She couldn’t process this. I went to Aunt Rosie, who believed me and was furious. We talked about what to do—me, Rosie, Mom, friends—and I wondered if I should press charges. Wasn’t that what you did when somebody wronged you? Shouldn’t he be punished? But Rosie helped me realize that if I took action against him, it would not only ruin my father’s prospects of ever finding success again, it would also taint me. And my family. I would be dragging the family name through the mud. It would destroy us. The general consensus was that yes, it was terrible; no, it shouldn’t have happened, but there was nothing for me to do but let it go.

Months later, in New York: The room was dimly lit. My father sat in a rocking chair. I said, “Dad, we have to talk about how you raped me.”

He said, “Raped you? You mean when we made love?” And that statement, more than anything, captures my father. He wasn’t a liar. He wasn’t in denial. He didn’t try to blame me. None of the tricks or excuses you’d expect an abuser to make. He simply lived without rules. If sex happened, and nobody protested, it was consensual. If sex happened between a father and a daughter, and nobody protested, there was no problem. If it felt good, it could be done, and if nobody put a stop to it, it could happen again, and again, as often and whenever it was convenient for him.

So I made Florida into the only kind of memory that was bearable—a bad dream. And in some ways that was all it was. Are the mistakes that you make real when they take place under extreme influences? If you fix them, undo them, ignore them, can you make them disappear?

I went back to work, and Peter and I met at the Chateau during a lunch break. We decided to get back together. I returned to the studio relieved. I belonged with Peter. I called Jeff to tell him it was over.

That night I went to another James Taylor concert with Peter. We were backstage at the Forum when the familiar call came. Betsy wanted to come backstage, so I had to leave. I went back to the Chateau, really pissed off. If I’d hoped my dalliance with Jeff would fix this part of our relationship, I was wrong. I was hanging out with my dear friend Rick Marotta when Peter called to say that he had to go to Betsy’s place after the show because she was upset. It was already late; I’d been waiting for Peter for hours. Rick saw what a state I was in. He pursed his lips thoughtfully and said, “You gotta do what you gotta do. I don’t see this changing.”

I waited up late for Peter to come home that night. We went to bed angry and the next day I left for work before he woke up. After work, I headed to Malibu because Peter and I were taking a helicopter to a gig in Irvine. On the way I stopped in Venice Beach, where Jeff was staying with a friend. I wanted to give him the last of his stuff—a pair of shoes that he’d left at my house in the canyon. When I came into the Venice bungalow, Jeff said, “Marry me.”

We were cokeheads, craving the rush of drama and control. A spontaneous wedding—what could be a brasher display of our renegade spirit? It didn’t really matter who Jeff was or whether I imagined us together forever. Jeff was intense and passionate and made it absolutely clear that he wanted to be with me. I was still angry at Peter for the previous night, and here, standing before me, was revenge. Or the antidote. I didn’t know which I wanted or which was driving me. It didn’t matter. I said, “If you want to marry me you have to marry me right now.”

“Come in,” he said.

We looked in the phone book and found a place that would marry us that night. Jeff was staying in his friend Michael’s apartment. We asked Michael to stand as our witness; the three of us got in my car and we drove away. The chapel, if you can call it that, was a little backyard garden next to the airport in Inglewood. I was wearing skinny jeans, a gray cashmere sweater of Peter’s with a T-shirt underneath, and red satin tennis shoes. There were deafening jetliners zooming overhead. The minister broke up his words to let the planes pass: “Do you take … this man, Jeff Sessler, to be your … lawfully wedded husband?” It was slow going, but we finally got through the ceremony. The minister said, “I now pronounce you man and wife. Ms. Phillips, may I have your autograph?”

It wasn’t exactly a dream wedding, but Jeff and I thought getting married was hilarious. Our families, my managers, everyone wanted us to do one thing and we were doing the opposite. We loved bucking expectations.

I was married, but nobody knew I was married except Jeff, our witness Michael, and my fan the minister. Then Peter called. He wanted to see me. After work I went over to the Chateau, to the penthouse where I’d lived with him. I came into the apartment and as we said hello I slid my hand behind my bag, hiding the diamond band, a ring I’d already owned, that was now on my ring finger. Peter said, “I see your hand, you know.”

I said, “Yeah, I married Jeff.”

Peter paused; he took both my hands in his and looked into my eyes. He said, “I wish you would understand that the night I got home from being with Betsy I finally asked her for a divorce. You left while I was sleeping. I was going to ask you to marry me.”
Bullshit.
My heart flip-flopped, because I was nineteen and I loved him and I wanted to believe him. But he wasn’t saying “Leave Jeff, because I want to marry you.” He was saying “Now that you’re married to someone else, I can torture us both with the pretense of devotion.”

In my father’s already dramatic life this was a notably insane period. He and Genevieve were now living in Newport Beach, California. His friends were trying to keep Dad and Gen off smack, but whenever my brother and I visited they were all high. So much for reliable sponsors. Dad had somehow gotten his hands on my limo account and charged thousands of dollars on it. Dad and Gen fought constantly—she hit Dad over the head, on separate occasions, with a guitar and a baseball bat. Michelle and Aunt Rosie were so worried about my brother, Tam, who was only nine years old, that they went to court and Michelle got custody. My father and Gen were soon to kidnap Tam back and flee across the country, but before they did so Dad somehow got it together to throw Jeff and me a reception.

Dad rented John Wayne’s yacht, the
Wild Goose,
for a twenty-four-hour wedding bash. We sent out invitations that Genevieve helped design. They were black and white with pressed wildflowers and fancy, cursive script. They weren’t exactly my style—I always liked thin, deco-y thirties fonts—but it didn’t matter.

Tons of people came to the party. I wore a gauzy mauve dress. Dad held court in a white captain’s hat and a double-breasted blue blazer with brass buttons and insignia on it. My mom was there, my cousins Patty and Nancy, Aunt Rosie, and a bunch of Jeff’s friends from Florida. Michelle even let Tam and Chynna come.

It was a wild party, a blast, with drugs, sex, music, and booze. There was champagne and excellent food. We were out on the water, on a beautiful yacht. Racer, a band that Jeff was friends with, set up on the deck and started playing seventies rock. I sang with the band, and as my dad somehow recalled for his book, apparently Jeff and I made love in John Wayne’s stateroom. We probably did. What I remember more vividly was that John Wayne had only died a couple months earlier and all of his personal effects were still in the stateroom. His clothes were in the drawers. His toothbrush was in the bathroom. His prescription pill bottles were in the medicine cabinet. He wouldn’t be needing those anymore. I wanted to steal one as a souvenir, but it didn’t seem right.

At some point my father said, “Excuse me, dear. I’m going to go downstairs and abuse the Zulu.” That would be Genevieve, who was very into Zulu culture.

After the party, there were piles of wedding gifts that we somehow managed to cart up to my house in Laurel Canyon. My mother-in-law, Liz, stayed at my house to cat-sit Brains, the one cat I’d brought with me from Beachwood Canyon, while Jeff and I went on a honeymoon to Hawaii.

In Hawaii Jeff and I ordered room service and picked the most exotic food on the menu. We rented a cabana every day, sipped tropical drinks, and had races in the pool. Jeff put all the umbrellas from the tropical drinks in his hair and I adored him. I loved that goofiness. We made love all the time. We were perfectly matched sexually and had great fun in bed. It wasn’t kinky as it had been with Peter, just pure passion. Jeff and I had a real connection. There was something about him that made me willing to throw away everything I had with Peter.

No matter how impromptu and misguided our union, we were really happy … for those first few days. Then we were in our hotel room watching the Pineapple Bowl on TV when the station broke in with a special report. There was a fire in Laurel Canyon. They announced that my house was on the damaged list. The honeymoon was over.

Jeff and I caught the next plane home. The band REO Speedwagon was in first class with us and the lead singer, Kevin Cronin, tried to help Jeff comfort me. I drank cognac from Hawaii to LAX. We took a limo back to Laurel Canyon. It was nighttime, and as we drove up the winding road of the canyon we saw bright flames shooting into the sky. We drove until the police stopped us. There were fire engines everywhere. They wouldn’t allow cars up the small winding canyon road, so we climbed out of the limo and ran up toward the house. I prayed that it would still be standing. As we approached my driveway I breathed a sigh of relief. The house next door was still there!

We ran on—but mere yards away, the lot where my house had stood was completely empty, a pile of charred wreckage. My house was gone. My mother-in-law had escaped just in time, but my cat, Brains, was lost and all my possessions were ashes. There was nothing left standing except the dishwasher and the fireplace.

Jeff and I checked into a penthouse suite at the Chateau Marmont—the same suite where I had tried coke for the first time and where I had lived with Peter Asher. All I had left were the few clothes I’d taken with me on my honeymoon—shorts, flip-flops, some T-shirts, a light dress—and a husband whose true (dark) colors would soon emerge. Everything was gone. I took stock of all that I’d lost. My beloved cat, Brains, was never seen again. The new wedding gifts were the least sentimental items— they were still in their boxes. But I’d been the family archivist. I had my sister Chynna’s bronzed baby shoes, a classic record collection, the Madame Alexander dolls that my mother gave me every year. Genevieve’s five-hundred-year-old wedding jacket, countless photos and negatives. All my diaries, including the big silver one that I turned to in my father’s flat on Glebe Place when he and Keith Richards forgot about me. It never occurred to me that as a newlywed I might have found enough joy and happiness in another person to overcome the material loss. Jeff was fun to frolic with, but he wasn’t that man. I was truly destroyed. Jeff and I went to score coke that same night, and in the weeks that followed I snorted mountains of cocaine. Oblivion was how I dealt with shit. With the help of coke I disappeared into myself for a long time after the fire.

We eventually rented a lonely house above the strip on Franklin Canyon Drive. Since we had no dishes or furniture, we rented it fully furnished. Some time after the fire I went back to the ruins of my house. I found slips of charred paper, a melted bowling ball, and one of the roller skates Peter had given me for my nineteenth birthday, with its wheels grotesquely melted. I took the dishes out of the dishwasher. No matter how many times I reminded myself that most of the loss was only material, the fire felt bigger than that. The sum was greater than the parts. It was a devastating blow, and a bad omen for the marriage.