'I had sex with Mick Jagger in Jerry Hall's bed,' says daughter of Mamas and Papas singer John Phillips

By Paul Scott for MailOnline
Updated: 19:34 EDT, 25 September 2009

The lead singer's daughter, actress Mackenzie Phillips, has accused her father of forcing her into an incestuous affair. But that was just the tip of the iceberg for the sex-obsessed Mamas and Papas. Just ask Mick Jagger...

During the late 1970s, the mink-wearing grand dames of an exquisite Beaux Arts apartment building overlooking New York's Central Park often found themselves sharing its magnificent marble lobby with a variety of beautiful models and groupies.

The destination of the latter contingent was a suite of rooms on one of the lower floors which had become the Manhattan home of Mick Jagger and his supermodel lover, Jerry Hall.

When Jerry was away on photo shoots, the most beautiful girls the city had to offer - hand-picked by Mick, who approached the selection of female conquests with an almost military zeal - queued up to take her place in his bed.

Heady days: John Phillips with The Mamas and The Papas, (clockwise) wife Michelle, Cass Elliott and Denny Doherty

The next morning, the Rolling Stones frontman would wrap the girl in a fluffy white towelling robe, make her tea and toast, and ensure she was long gone by the time his blonde Texan girlfriend returned home.

One evening in January 1978, when Jerry was working in South America, Mick attended a party in the building thrown by one of his wealthy neighbours.

A fellow guest was his old friend John Phillips, ex-leader of hippy pop group The Mamas And The Papas, who had arrived at the soiree with his teenage daughter, Mackenzie.

As the party wore on, Mick suddenly announced he wanted a tuna salad sandwich. So Jagger, Phillips and the long-limbed Mackenzie took the lift down to Mick's apartment in search of food.

Affair claims: Mackenzie Phillips says she had sex with Mick Jagger in Jerry Hall's bed

But as they prepared the snack in the vast kitchen of his elegant home, Mick announced he was out of mayonnaise - and dispatched Phillips back to the party to find some.

With the girl's father gone, he moved quickly. By the time Phillips returned a few minutes later, the priapic Jagger had bolted the door and was already in bed with the 18-year-old Mackenzie.

Miss Phillips recalls that night in her controversial memoirs, published in a blaze of publicity in the U.S. this week.

'We went into Jerry Hall's bedroom and had sex in their bed. My dad came back and started knocking on the door, yelling: "You've got my daughter in there!"

All of which might seem to be the perfectly reasonable reaction of a protective father faced with the nightmare scenario of his impressionable young daughter in the clutches of a notoriously lascivious rock star.

But if claims made by self-confessed former drug addict Miss Phillips in her book are to be believed, this was far from a classic case of understandable parental concern.

Because in a chilling testimony, Miss Phillips claims her famous father also had designs on her - and within a year of that night, they would begin an incestuous relationship.

It is a claim that has shocked a generation of fans who idolised Phillips - the composer of seminal Sixties anthems such as California Dreamin' and Monday, Monday - as one of the founding fathers of the hippy 'Flower Power' movement.

It has also provoked a backlash from two of Phillips' four ex-wives. His second wife Michelle Gilliam, who was also a member of The Mamas And The Papas, has branded Mackenzie a fantasist.

Addiction battle: Mamas and Papas singer John Phillips poses for a photograph in December 1980 with his daughter MacKenzie, while he was in drug rehab at Fair Oaks Hospital in Summit, New Jersey, USA

Mackenzie has a lot of mental illness,' Michelle said this week. 'She's had a needle stuck up her arm for 35 years. John was a bad parent and a drug addict. But doing this to his daughter? No.'

But to add to the controversy, Mackenzie's half-sister, singer Chynna Phillips, has also stepped into the row, saying she believes the claims.

Whatever the truth, Mackenzie's revelations about her father have overshadowed her painting of Jagger as a sleazy sexual opportunist with a taste for young girls (though Miss Phillips is quick to point out that the singer was insistent that he considered making a play for her only when she had passed the age of consent).

More importantly, her disclosures serve to reveal the squalid underbelly of drugs and sexual decadence that lurked below the surface of the Sixties' hippy movement.

Certainly, the chequered story of The Mamas And The Papas, who were once lauded as 'The American Beatles' and sold 40 million records in a little over two years in the middle of that decade, can be seen as parable of the age.

Theirs is a classic tale of drug addiction, wild sexual experimentation, wasted talent and the untimely deaths of three of the group's four original members.

The principal player in all this conspicuous excess was John Phillips, chief songwriter and creative genius behind the group, whose close harmonies and preaching of love and tolerance made them huge stars with lavish fortunes to match.

Phillips was the 6ft 4in son of a U.S. Marines officer, who had himself briefly flirted with a career in the military.

He formed The Mamas And The Papas in 1965 with wife Michelle, a Californian model, singer Denny Doherty and 22-stone Cass Elliot, 'Mama Cass'.

They found international fame a year later with California Dreamin' - the song Phillips wrote in New York to soothe his wife's homesickness - and went on to have 11 consecutive Top Ten singles in the American charts.

The following year, Phillips wrote the ultimate flower power anthem, San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair) - a British No 1 for Scott McKenzie.

But behind the scenes, the group was already riven with feuds caused by drug-taking, jealousy and their highly complicated personal lives.

Even as they topped the charts, Phillips was already cheating on Michelle, and soon began a clandestine affair with actress Mia Farrow, who at the time was married to Frank Sinatra.

When a furious Sinatra, who famously had links to Sam Giancana, the Chicago Mafia boss, discovered that Phillips had been sleeping with Farrow in their marital bed while he was away on tour, he sent a bunch of heavies to warn him off.

Undaunted, Phillips, who was already insisting on being addressed by his stage name, Papa John, went out and bought a small armoury of weapons to protect himself from Sinatra's Mob cronies.

He was also rumoured to have become close to Princess Margaret, whom he visited at the private Caribbean island of Mustique, where she would play piano and join him in singing bawdy versions of Chattanooga Choo Choo.

She would also secretly smuggle Phillips into her private quarters at Kensington Palace.

By way of retaliation, his blonde and angelic-looking wife Michelle embarked on her own series of adulterous relationships with a string of Hollywood leading men, including Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and film director Roman Polanski.

The couple bought a mock Tudor estate on a hilltop in upmarket Bel Air, where the Rolling Stones and The Beatles were regular guests. At debauched parties, guests were handed bowls of cocaine and LSD tablets as they entered the house.

By then, Phillips was already an addict, and his gilded life was fast unravelling. He was once so out of his head on drugs that he let his pet golden retriever, Trelawny, munch its way through a bag of the psychedelic drug mescaline.

The poor creature ran in circles for three days without stopping, then stared at himself in the mirror for 12 hours.

Later, after being arrested for his part in a pill-pushing ring, Phillips dyed the dog black as part of a botched plan to go on the run.

But his drug-taking would also inadvertently save his life. In August 1969, he was so stoned that he failed to turn up to a party in Cielo Drive, Hollywood.

That night, the inhabitants of the house, including film director Roman Polanski's pregnant wife Sharon Tate, were murdered by disciples of the psychotic Charles Manson.

Meanwhile, the sexual carousel continued as Phillips made conquests of a string of willing women, and Michelle began an affair with the other male singer in the group, Denny Doherty.

When Phillips discovered what was going on, he sacked his wife, telling her: 'You can do a lot of things to me Michelle, but you don't f*** my tenor.'

Incest claims: Mackenzie (right), pictured here in 1998, claims she had an incestuous relationship with her father John (left)

Meanwhile, the vastly overweight Mama Cass Elliot was secretly in love with Doherty and later proposed to him.

He turned her down, though he subsequently admitted to being so drugged up he could not remember her asking.

In 1974, three years after The Mamas And The Papas split up, 32-year-old Cass was found dead at her flat in London's Mayfair after suffering a heart attack in her sleep. (She did not choke on a ham sandwich, as urban myth has claimed.)

In the mid-1970s, Phillips, who by now had developed an addiction to heroin, was reunited with his children Jeffrey and Mackenzie (two of the five children he'd had by three different women), with whom he been in intermittent contact since his divorce from their socialite mother, Susan Adams, his first wife, in 1962.

The teenagers moved into his Los Angeles mansion, but it was no place for impressionable youngsters.

When she was just ten, Phillips had taught his daughter how to roll a joint.

In her new book, High On Arrival, Mackenzie, now 49, tells how her father would also leave 'little surprises' hidden around the house for his daughter to find - tabs of the morphine-like painkiller, Dilaudid.

Not surprisingly, actress Mackenzie, who appeared in the hit movie American Graffiti at the age of 12 and went on to star in the long-running U.S. sitcom One Day At A Time, soon developed a habit to match her father's.

She claims that her father first injected her with drugs when she was 17.

It was the start of a descent into addiction that saw her sacked from her £30,000-an-episode role in the TV show and would see her check into rehab on no fewer than nine occasions - the most recent being in November last year after she was caught with cocaine and heroin at Los Angeles airport.

But it is her insistence that she had an incestuous relationship with her father that is most shocking.

Mackenzie claims her father raped her for the first time in 1979, on the eve of her wedding to first husband Jeff Sessler, who worked for the Rolling Stones.

For the next several years, Miss Phillips shockingly claims, she and her father conducted a 'consensual' sexual relationship in the haze of their joint addictions.

Phillips, who wrote his own tell-all autobiography when his career had faded in the mid-1980s, is not in a position to defend himself from her allegations.

He died, aged 65, in 2001 of complications caused by a liver transplant. Band mate Denny Doherty died two years ago of a heart attack in his native Canada.

So with her family bitterly divided over the salacious claims, it seems we may never know the full truth.

What is undoubtedly the case is that these revelations have already done much to destroy the reputation of one of the true icons of the Sixties.

Heartbreak: Actress Mackenzie Phillips breaks down while being interviewed on US television by Oprah Winfrey as she reveals she was raped by her dad, Mamas and Papas singer John Phillips