High On Arrival (6 page)

5

Not long after I made it home from my ill-fated summer at boarding school in Switzerland, I went to see
American Graffiti
for the first time with my dad and Genevieve. It was a private screening for the cast, producers, and their invitees. I wore an amazing 1940s red-and-white polka-dot dress of Genevieve’s, white patent leather six-inch platform heels, and short, spiky hair. I’d shaved off my eyebrows and painted on glitter lightning bolts. Dad wore hand-stitched suede pants, and Genevieve looked like a movie star, as always. Mom and Lenny were there too. It was my big night.

It seemed like ages since I’d first landed the part. Nearly two years had passed since I’d shot the movie, during which time I’d moved from the shadow of Lenny’s scary dictatorship to the trippy glow of my father’s hedonism. When I think of that night, it’s as if I’m watching it on a TV screen. I can see myself stepping out of the Rolls in my teetery heels and walking into the theater, but I see it from a distance. I remember a lot of the major events in my life like this, as though I watched the moment instead of experiencing it. Maybe it’s a side effect from years of drug use, maybe I disassociate because it’s easier for me to digest my life from a distance, maybe I create memories from stories I’ve been told, or maybe I’m just insane.

Regardless, we walked down the red carpet and took our seats in the theater. My dad gave me a couple Quaaludes and I popped them all at once. All I remember of that first viewing is the opening credits, which started before the ludes kicked in. As they rolled, my name came up on the screen. The people in front of us said, “Mackenzie Phillips, who’s that?” I practically had the same reaction—I’d been Laura Phillips my whole life.

When I got the part in
American Graffiti
my manager, Pat McQueeney, whom I’d met through Fred Roos, didn’t like “Laura Phillips” and asked me what my middle name was. I told her it was Mackenzie. People have always thought I was named after Scott McKenzie, my dad’s lifelong friend and one of my favorite people on this planet. Scott sang Dad’s song “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)” to promote the Monterey Pop Festival, launching the Summer of Love. But the truth is that when I was born Scott McKenzie was still known as Philip Scott Blondheim. I was actually named after my great-grandmother on my mother’s side, Sarah Mackenzie. When I told Pat my middle name was Mackenzie, she said, “Oh my God, that’s it.”

Now, as the people whose heads bobbled disruptively between my fourteen-year-old eyes and the screen wondered who Mackenzie Phillips was, Dad leaned forward and said, “You’ll see.” And after that the night is a blur. I was stoned off my ass. Maybe Dad felt guilty about the Quaaludes. He kept passing me little silver spoonfuls of coke to help me wake up.

No one expected
American Graffiti
to be a huge success, but it was an instant classic. The critics loved it and it was nominated for multiple Academy Awards that year. I was suddenly frighteningly famous. I already had some level of recognition as John Phillips’s daughter, but after
American Graffiti
was released, I was a familiar face. And it wasn’t just my face that was familiar. Suddenly everyone also knew me by the name Mackenzie Phillips. I thought of Mackenzie as my stage name, and for a while I continued to think of myself as Laura. People would say, “I know who you are, you’re Mackenzie Phillips.” I’d say, “Yeah, I’m Mackenzie, but everybody calls me Laura.” But I’m so not a Laura. People were confused. It was too complicated. So I just decided,
Fuck it, I’m Mack
.

I was unabashedly thrilled at my new stardom. A few days after I saw the movie with my parents, I went back for more. My cousins Patty and Nancy, a few of my friends from Highland Hall, and I hitchhiked to the Avco Cinema in Westwood to see it again. At the ticket booth I proudly announced, “I’m in it! I’m in the movie!” They let us all in for free. That was such a coup that we went back over and over again. We must have seen that movie thirty-five times. We’d be reciting all the lines of the movie and people would turn around to say “Would you kids shut up?” But then they’d see that it was me and smile. I guess if it was worth paying to see the rude, precocious kid in the movies, it was worth it to have the rude, precocious kid disrupting the show.

When I wasn’t cutting school to watch myself on the big screen, I was back at Highland Hall. I’d left school to make
American Graffiti,
and then I’d spent the summer away. Now I was back and things were different. I was different. I’d been in Europe for a few months. The movie was out. I was famous. Highland Hall had a hippie vibe, but I was in the glitter scene, running around Hollywood, wearing dramatic makeup, and leading what seemed like a sophisticated life. At Highland Hall I had my first taste of how fame changes your regular life. I’d done something— it was just work, really, and had nothing to do with who I really was—but it changed how people saw me and dealt with me. There was an awkwardness, a hesitance. My friends—and family too—started treating me differently, like I had some new value or merit that I didn’t have before. It felt odd and wrong. And it wasn’t all them. I was still a kid, but I didn’t feel like a kid.

Most of my nights were spent back at my favorite hangouts on the Sunset Strip. My friends and I were glitter kids, followers of British glam or rock acts such as Silverhead, Slade, the New York Dolls, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Sweet, and the Stones. We were young hot girls who wore platform heels, fishnet stockings, and spiked Ziggy Stardust hair. We went to the Whisky, where my cousin Nancy worked as a waitress, the Roxy, Rodney Bingenheimer’s, and the private upstairs club above the Rainbow Room, called Over the Rainbow. Rodney’s was an underage club, but none of the others were. Mario Maglieri, who ran the Whisky and the Rainbow, had a signal. If the Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) came around looking to bust underage drinkers, he gave us the signal and we knew to throw our drinks on the floor.

I was hanging out with older people, wearing crazy clothes, listening to crazy music. Everyone knew I was Papa John’s daughter, so the people who worked there and the musicians around all made it clear that they had my back. Mario would say, “Keep your hands off the Kid.” There was an invisible barrier around me. Nobody messed with me. I was living it.

I often brought people back to the house at all hours. My room was gigantic, as was my closet. If I heard my dad coming down the hall, I’d hustle everyone into that closet. When Dad came in he’d just march straight to it, fling open the doors, and say, “Hello, ladies.” I couldn’t hide anything from Dad, but I also couldn’t get in trouble. All the drugs I did, all of them were taken from Dad’s vast supply, and he was not a man to set a double standard.

I was loved, but I wasn’t protected. It was a carefree and careless youth, which was fantastic and liberating, but things happen. There are reasons for the standards society sets. Nobody was watching out for me, but someone was watching me. One night, leaving Rodney Bingenheimer’s, my friends Billy and Jody and I hitchhiked with a guy we thought we recognized. I don’t know how many times I made a mistake like that, but I was young and irresponsible, and there was no safety net. I climbed into the front seat of this man’s car. Billy and Jody piled into the back. Just above Sunset Boulevard, the driver pulled off on a side street. I said, “This isn’t the way to my house.”

He said, “I think the gas cap’s loose,” and turned around to Billy and Jody. “Can you guys get out and check?” They hopped out. I started to get out too, but he said, “You stay here.” I saw the glint of metal in his hand and knew in an instant that I was in trouble. I lunged for the door. Billy and Jody must have heard or seen something. Billy was at my door in an instant. He grabbed my arm to pull me out, but my attacker threw his arm around me, catching around my neck. Billy pulled at my arm, fighting to free me. Now I was half out of the car, between the open door and the seat, with the guy’s arm around me and his knife at my throat. The threat of that knife felt like a band of fire, raging and unstoppable. The guy stepped on the gas. As the car pulled away Billy couldn’t hold on any longer. He let go, and I was dragged between the car and the door for several long seconds. Once Billy and Jody were left in the dust, the driver pulled me back in, drove me up into the hills, ripped off my stockings, pushed me down on the front seat, a long bench seat, and raped me.

I was terrified, but desperate to save myself. I started talking, saying anything I could think of to get him to stop: “You don’t have to do this. You’re a really good-looking guy, a nice guy, you can get any girl you want.” He said, “Shut up. I’m going to fucking kill you, you white bitch.”
He was going to kill me
.

I said, “You can’t kill me. You’re going to get caught. I can’t die. This is not going to happen to me. Oh Lord, please don’t let me die.” They were foxhole prayers. I knew as he was raping me that there was nothing to stop him from killing me.
I was going to die.
But when he finished, he shoved me out of the car and drove away.

The car pulled away and I stood on the side of the street, stunned. I’d been dragged between the car and its door. My fish-nets were shredded, my legs scraped and bruised. I wobbled on my high platform heels. The straps were loose, maybe broken. I steadied myself, trying to figure out what had happened. He had said he was going to kill me, but then he’d let me go. Was I bleeding? Did he cut my neck?
Am I still here? Am I alive?
I was. I was alive, and at that moment, no matter what else had happened, that was all that mattered. I don’t know how much time passed, but as soon as I realized I was still in one piece I started running down the street.

I was wearing a denim miniskirt, a tube top, my torn fishnet stockings, and the high platforms. I stumbled down the hill to Rodney’s—it wasn’t far. The police were already in front of the club, and Billy and Jody were crying. Dad showed up. They took me to the hospital to do a rape kit, then we went to my grandmother’s house. This time, instead of giving me a Coors, she handed me a Valium. The more I saw how upset my friends and family were, the more upset I became.

My family gathered at Dini’s. Everyone was wailing, and I was crying too. But when I look back on that experience it’s not a lower low. It’s an event in a box. This happened to me, I remember it, I do. But was it before
American Graffiti
or after? Did Aunt Rosie move into Dad’s house because of the rape, or was she already there when I came home from Switzerland? Or did the rape happen before Switzerland? What is the chronology? What happened to that girl I was? Why does it feel like I watched it happen to her?

When she was young, my mother went to a finishing school in London called the Club of the Three Wise Monkeys. It was the place my grandmother hoped would purge my father from my mother’s heart. The school emblem was the three wise monkeys—see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. My grandmother worked at a jewelry store and she had a gold charm with three little gold monkeys made for my mother. As a child I always loved that necklace, and when I was in my twenties my mother gave it to me. I became fascinated with the concept and the expressive nature of monkeys, and I’ve been collecting depictions of monkeys ever since.

I own my memories, but I still sometimes see them from afar. I’m positive, I’m happy, I’m fun, and I can be these things because I refuse to take on the full weight of my experiences. I am the missing monkey, the fourth monkey, the feel no evil monkey. I learned to box up the evil and separate it from the joy of life at an early age, before the rape, before the kidnapping, before losing Patty, before what happened with my father.

There are many of these boxes. Unprocessed memories, sealed up and set aside. Sometimes they climb out unexpectedly. A night at Anthony Kiedis’s father’s house when I was thirteen or fourteen. I was with some older friends who instructed me to have sex with a forty-five-year-old actor. He told me what to do and how to do it. I was scared. He seemed like an old man. In the morning he insisted that I make the bed. He said, “Tuck the sheets in tight. I want to bounce a quarter off the bed.” To this day I don’t know why they told me to do it. It is a memory that bears no connection to who I am today, and so it feels like it happened to somebody else. I was there. I watched it happen to me. But I didn’t let myself live the experience.

Feel no evil. There’s an upside to it and a downside. But in the case of the rape, and similar but lesser ordeals, feeling no evil helped me stay alive. Over time I ran into discomfort with intimacy, wanting people close and keeping them far. But there was a cap on the fear and misery I was willing to experience.

The day after the rape I went home to my dad’s house. That night Quincy Jones’s daughter, Jolie Jones, was at Ben Frank’s on Sunset, a diner where we’d hang out and ditch the check. Jolie heard two guys talking about how their friend had raped Papa John’s daughter. Jolie told Quincy, and Quincy told my dad. Dad took a shotgun and disappeared for a day and a half. I have no idea what happened, and I never asked. I think, in a way, that I don’t want to know anything more, because I don’t want to learn anything that might change what I found out then: In a moment of crisis, Dad wanted to save me. In some primal way he wanted to protect me, to rescue me. I clung to that as evidence that for all the lax parenting, for all the hitchhiking to school and empty refrigerators, for all the joint-rolling and coke-supplying, I had a father who cared. I packed up and stored away the rape with dispassion, but I cradled that memory—Dad dashing out the door with his shotgun in a rage—as proof of his love.