The recent revelation by MacKenzie Phillips that she had slept with her father for the better part of a drug-addled, Stockholm-syndromed decade of her so-called life has stolen the thunder of the U.N. General Assembly, health care reform, and the G-20. Who cares about the fate of the world when a story of such lurid, mythological dimensions is unfurling right before us on Oprah and the internet? Put another way, what tells us more about how messed up the universe is than the story of a guy who drugs and rapes and then has a continuing sexual relationship with his own daughter—who then turns around and tells us all about it on national TV, and is then doubted by her father’s ex-wives and a public convinced she is “making it up for publicity”?
The accusation/ confession repulses, titillates and fascinates. But it doesn’t necessarily surprise. Yes, a father having sex with his own child violates every law of nature and culture and decency, it’s true. And yet it happens. Perhaps not entirely infrequently. Twelve years ago, Kathryn Harrison’s memoir The Kiss was published to astonished and sometimes shocked reviews. It was the story of Harrison reuniting, at age 20, with the father she had never known—and having a torrid sexual and romantic affair with him for months. Like Phillips, Harrison was a young adult; like Phillips she found she had no will or volition in the matter. She eventually actually moved in with her father at his insistence, explaining, “I had no life or will apart from his.”
Harrison spared no detail in her memoir, and it is hard to imagine where she found the strength to expose her father, her past, and herself to scrutiny, ignorance, and outrage. Meanwhile, two of John Phillip’s ex-wives, Michelle Phillips and Genevieve Waite, have lambasted their stepdaughter MacKenzie, calling her a drug addict and a shameless self-promoter.
Their denials reek of denial. “She told me they had slept together over the phone. Then she called me back and said she was kidding,” Michelle Phillips told a reporter. “I told her it wasn’t funny.” Talk about knowing and not knowing. Could the young woman’s confession and retraction read as anything but an attempt to be heard—and a terrified retreat in the face of what might happen once she had let the taboo truth out? After noting that she had always found MacKenzie’s attitude toward her father “inappropriate”—a tip-off if there ever was one that the incest was real—Michele Phillips goes on to punch her stepdaughter in the solar plexus: “She had a needle up her arm…she has mental problems…” Give Michelle Phillips a few more minutes, and she’ll be talking about how MacKenzie is the one who seduced her own innocent father.
Genevieve Waite, for her part, wants to have it both ways: to acknowledge that her ex was a raging drug addict and alcoholic. but maintain that he would be utterly incapable of having sex with his daughter. There is a certain etiquette, she would have us believe, even among men who shoot their daughters up with heroin.
Of course Phillips is no angel, but that’s not the point. Yes, she’s a drug addict. With her family history, who wouldn’t be? And her addiction speaks volumes in support of her accusation: what better way to remain connected to the addict who raped her and had sex with her for years after than to be a user just like him? Is she lying? Isn’t that what we always say about incest victims?
As for the self-promotion angle, and the criticism that she is trying to profit from what happened to her, do we actually begrudge her that? Could there ever be compensation enough? Hopefully her book will sell at least as many copies as Harrison’s, and jangle as many nerves. It’s a start.
