California Dreamin The True Story of The Mamas and The Papas

THE MUSIC, THE MADNESS, THE MAGIC THAT WAS
THE TRUE STORY OF
AS AND THE P
fi
MKHtLLt PHILLIPS
THE TRUE STORY
OF THE MAMAS
AND THE PAPAS
"California Dreamin'" ... "Monday,
Monday" "Creeque Alley" ... "Go

...
Where You Wanna Go" ... the music of

The Mamas and the Papas captured the
heady freewheeling, free-loving spirit of
the 1960s. Now for the first time, Michelle
Phillips, a founding member of The
Mamas and the Papas, gives an intimate,
in-depth portrait of the superstar group
that personified and led America's Love
Generation.
It's all here: the years of poverty, strug-
gle, and obscurity ... the fateful first
meeting with record producer Lou Adler

... the incredible burst of work and
creativity that led to their first smash al-
bum ... the band's meteoric rise to star-
dom ("Monday, Monday" sold 160,000

copies the first day it was released) ...
the wildly decadent life-style that em-
braced LSD and free love... the burnout,
the arguments, and the final bitterness
and breakup of the band.
In Cdlifornid Dreamm', Michelle Phil-
lips reveals her own gripping story, from

her tumultuous marriage at seventeen to
the band's leader John Phillips, to her
constant infatuations with other men
and his growing drug problem. You'll
enter the world of history-making re-
cording sessions, and encounters with
0586 (Continued on back flap)

BOSTON
PUBLIC
LIBRARY
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN'
— —
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN'
——^—^— ———^—^——————-~——^———
—
MICHELLE PHILLIPS
^ ^
THE TRUE STORY OF THE MAMAS AND THE PAPAS
—^——
O
WVTCNER BOOKS
A Warner Communications Company
BRIGHTON
"Creeque Alley" words and music by
John Phillips and Michelle Gilliam
© Copyright 1967 by MCA Music,
A Division of MCA Inc., New York,
NY. Used by Permission. All
Rights Reserved.
Copyright © 1986 by Michelle Phillips

All rights reserved.
Warner Books, Inc., 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10103
^J A Warner Communications Company

Printed in the United States of America
First Printing: May 1986
10 987654321
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Phillips, Michelle, 1944-

California dreamin'.
1. Mamas and the Papas (Musical group) 2. Rock

musicians — United States — Biography. I. Title.
II. Title: California dreamin'.
ML421.M35P5 1986 784.5'4'00922 [B] 85-43175
ISBN 0-446-51308-3
To Cass Elliot
in loving memory.
Iwould like to thank Derek Taylor for hundreds of hours spent
helping me sort out the events of these confusing and tempes-
tuous years. Having known Cass and most of the people
involved in this tale, he was the obvious choice, and I couldn't
have written this without his help.
CONTENTS
chapter 1 CLEAN AND GOOD-NATURED 1
CHAPTER 2 JOHN AND MICHIE 25
CHAPTER 3 LEAVE THE FOLK MUSIC BEHIND 49
CHAPTER 4 HIGH JUMPS, LOW SLUMPS 71
CHAPTER 5 JUST A CATCHIN' FIRE 99
CHAPTER 6 GOOD VIBRATIONS 121
CHAPTER 7 CALIFORNIA DREAMIN' 147
EPILOGUE 176
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN'
CHAPTER
CLEAN AND
GOOD-NATURED
here's two things a girl has

"T:to be: clean and good-
natured/' So said my Gardner Burnett Gilliam, in the
father,
summer of 1961 as I set out from Los Angeles to join my
friend Tamar Hodel in San Francisco. I was seventeen; she
was twenty-six. "Be sensible, and keep in touch with home,"
my father told me. "When you arrive, get some postcards
and write."
Thus, with my father's qualified blessing and a lot of
good advice and misplaced trust, I went to rip it up in San
Francisco with Tamar. We were rarely sensible, and we didn't
keep in touch. We wrote few postcards and made a lot of phone
And before I was reunited with my father later that
calls.
summer, Tamar had made a very thorough suicide attempt

and had fallen heavily for a tall and handsome guitarist
I
who was married and the father of two children. His name
was John Phillips. For now, though, we should return to Los
Angeles and begin at the beginning ... at my beginning, in
World War II.
MICHELLE PHILLIPS
My father— Gil to his family and his many friends-

married Joyce Leon Poole, in 1940. He had been in the
merchant marines and was now a production assistant work-
ing on North West Mounted Police, with Gary Cooper and
Paulette Goddard. My mother was the accountant. There were
two daughters: Russell Ann, born in 1943, and me, Holly
Michelle, born June 4, 1944, in the waiting room of the Sea-
side Memorial Hospital in Long Beach, California. Soon after
my arrival my mother and I went home to Los Angeles, which
is where I have lived, in various of my nine lives, for most of
the years since. We lived in the city's first postwar govern-

ment housing project, Aliso Village, and in Watts and in Lyn-
wood, on Wadsworth, where we had a fairly large house: old,
maybe, but quite nice. And it was there that Tommy Sail came
to live as a boarder.
We seemed to be very happy. My
mother was all that
my father could have asked for in a wife. She was clean,
good-natured, and pretty, and he was, oh, God, so hand-
—
some six feet three inches tall, with very thick dark hair
and good eyes. He was generally healthy, but for a time he
had a collapsed lung and had to go into the naval hospital,
and there he became best friends with Tommy Sail, a Hun-
garian who had fought with the Americans during the war.
After being discharged from the hospital, Tommy moved
into our house. We had room for a boarder, and although
my father owned a liquor store, I am sure we needed the
money.
Tommy Sail was engaged to Marika, who was waiting to
get out of Budapest, and in the meantime, in this triangle in
the kitchen on Wadsworth, sitting around the table eating
artichokes with the little girls, Tommy and my mother began
to play footsie. It might have been foreseen, two men and
one woman in close proximity. Tommy and Joyce had quite
an affair until Marika arrived, but then there were recrimina-
tions and regrets. Tommy confessed to Marika; my parents
had a row of their own; and finally everyone made up and
forgave each other, and my grandfather Poole (a Baptist
minister) was sent for to get the pair safely married before
—
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN'
there could be any more hanky-panky. However . .the day

.
after the wedding Marika found my mother and Tommy

making it in the garage. Now there was a really big row.
Marika was very, very hurt, and my father, normally a patient
man but currently burdened and also caught up in a little
affair of his own, was really angry.
In the middle of all this, my mother was dying. Joyce was
in and out of the hospital. She had sub-acute endocarditis
a heart disease. They knew it was only a matter of time before
an embolism caused by the disease would kill her. She would
lie on the couch in the evenings, listening as my father read
to her. One night, after my sister and I had been put to bed,
my mother just raised her head, fell unconscious on the couch,
and that was it.
Daddy took us to a park in Lynwood and told us she
was dead. I went into a dream. I have a memory irrelevant
but vivid of an old army cannon standing in the park. With
his sad news broken, Daddy then took us to the mortuary.
There she was in her turquoise dress. It was good that I saw her
because otherwise I might have spent the rest of my life fan-
tasizing that she would one day come back. I must have felt
grief but I don't remember it.
Now, as you can imagine, my

mother and Marika had
not enjoyed a very comfortable relationship. But my mother
—
did respect and trust Marika partly, I think, because she
was European and intellectual. As much bad blood as there
had been between the two of them, Russell and I would be
motherless. She turned to Marika for the important job of
"keeping an eye on the girls." Marika accepted and so it has
been: she is a very constructive influence and a fierce friend.
Joyce knew that it would be all right. She had to know that, be-
cause wouldn't it drive any woman crazy to know that she was
dying but not know what might happen to her children? She
was concerned that we might end up trapped with her parents
in amorass of Baptist fundamentalism.
For all my father's strength and sense of responsibility,
he would be needing help. That was to come from Marika.
After my mother died, my father was emotionally
—
MICHELLE PHILLIPS
stranded and very disoriented. He packed the three of us

Russell, me, and himself— into a 1940s Plymouth automobile,
threw in books and bedding, and drove all the way to New
York in the teeth of the winter, ploughing eastward by night
and by day toward Buffalo. It was a journey in quite the
wrong direction for little Californians. But Daddy knew
a man in Buffalo, Ray Wiener, who had been a friend in the
service, and we stayed with him for nine months while Daddy
worked as a bartender. Russell and I, also seriously disori-
ented by our mother's recent death, found our new surround-
ings very strange. Before long we all piled back into the
Plymouth and went home to Los Angeles. Pretty soon Daddy
met and married Georgellen Ferguson, the first of our five
stepmothers. We liked her, and it was great to be back home.
We were learning to adjust very quickly to new people and
new environments. Georgellen was an opera star in Los An-
geles. She was very sweet to all three of us. I'm sure my father
loved her very much, but he also needed someone to help take
care of us, and I'm sure that she knew that. What she was, for
the time they were together, was just fabulous, great, and
sweet. have memories of Georgellen ironing our dresses,
I
braiding our hair. Music stands, instruments, sheet music,

and two very old ladies from Pasadena who played harp
duets . the house heavily draped and dark and full of a
. .
rather comforting Edwardian mystique.

The marriage did not last very long because my father
became restless again and wanted to do something about his
lack of formal education to increase his earning power. He
decided to go to college on the G.I. Bill in Mexico City, where
we could live much more cheaply than in the States.
— —
Georgellen detained by her career did not join the three
of us in the old Plymouth (now a real antique), once again
piled with books and pillows and sheets and blankets for
another long, long drive, this time, thank God, to a warm
climate.
We left two days after my seventh birthday, in June
1951. I remember hugging my first pair of roller skates and
setting off on the journey, south of the border, down Mexico
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN'
way; you could say we werenomadic lot. It would be ever

a
thus. We lived at first in the Colonia Quatemoc with a friend
of my father's, Favian Andres, who was a student and a
composer. He composed, among others, "Beer Barrel Polka"
and "Dream a Little Dream of Me," a song that one day, in
my exotic future lifetime, would be famously revived. While
we were settling in at Favian's, Russell and I were allowed
three months to get ourselves together. During that period
we didn't go to school but instead just hung out in the neigh-
borhood and learned how to speak Spanish. Keeping active
and on the move had helped us get over my mother's death,
and instead of grieving, we became very strong, indepen-
dent, and free.
When we were adjusted to Mexico and to its language
and customs, we were enrolled in a little private Mexican
school (motto: "Labor & Knowledge"), where we quickly
learned to read and write Spanish. Not being able to read
and write English, we had nothing to unlearn, and anyway,
Spanish was easy because it was phonetic. In due course we
picked up English, and in its written form English was a
second language for quite some time. It has been good in the
years since then for a blonde, blue-eyed American girl to be
fluent in Spanish.
Daddy was studying sociology and psychology in college.
Russell and found we were doing well enough at school to
I
cut classes every day for a period (this was eventually to

turn into a very bad habit); we found we could easily get away
with it, so we rode buses all over the city and saw the good
spots: Chapultapec Park, with its beautiful castle and zoo, was
a favorite. Mexico City had such atmosphere in those days,
before Americanization had taken hold. It was very pretty,
and the scale was manageable, and as children we found the
place was not at all intimidating. It was a beautiful city to play
hooky in.
My father took up with a woman named Frances
Chapman, a Canadian with a three-year-old boy, David, and
we all moved together to a very pleasant upper-middle-class
neighborhood, 100 Manzanillo, Roma Sur. In American terms

MICHELLE PHILLIPS
the five of us were not living on very much money — about

$120 a month plus whatever Francis made as a teacher — so on
weekends our father became a tour guide for American
tourists. He would put us in the back seat and ride all around
the city and the outskirts and far beyond— to the Pyramids,
Sochimilco, Taxco, Quautla, Guadalajara, San Miguel de
Allende, and once,by train, to Veracruz. It was always an
adventure. I liked living in Mexico and in that period became a
committed traveler, constantly adjusting without realizing it.
It became a way of life, and it was to prove useful training for

the years ahead.
We were really a happy group: Frances was happy with
us, and I, more or less, with her. Every six months for five
years we had to go to the border to renew our visas, but
otherwise Dad stayed around Mexico City, close to Frances,
and in that time there was a divorce from Georgellen. His
time in college came to an end, however, and we moved
back to the United States, and that was the end of Frances. A
—
new woman walked into our lives Lotta Lora Hahn, twenty-
five years old, German, and very bossy. She was a redhead,
thin, extremely tidy, high strung, and busy. She was undip-
lomatic, in every sense, to the point of bluntness, and you
can guess how much Russell and I liked her. However she . . .
had one great attribute. She could cook, and you can forgive
a good cook for almost everything.
My father, of course, had learned to cook and had
always given us great meals, but nothing he could produce
came close to Lotta's culinary achievements. She was fabu-
—
lous in the kitchen and in bed, my father remembers
—
fondly and she taught me how to cook many things. I was
eleven and eager to learn. She taught me to cook sauer-
braten, beer soup, and basic spaghetti sauce all the things a —
girl has to know. But after five years we had to get rid of
Lotta. Anyway we knew how to deal with awkward step-
mothers and girlfriends. So good-bye to the third Mrs. Gilliam,
auf Wiedersehen, Lotta, and hello, Carrie.
One day, to my surprise, my father dropped his car keys
into my palm and asked me to pick up his date. He had
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN'
never let me drive his car before. I was to go to the address

he had jotted down and ask "if Carrie was ready to go to the
movies. " All this was said with a solemn, rather stiff casual-
ness that fooled nobody.
Carrie was ready to "go to the movies"; indeed, she was
a bouncing teenager who was ready for considerably more
than that. I was nearly and Russell was seventeen,
sixteen,
and my father told us that Carrie was eighteen. That was
what he, now a probation officer at Juvenile Hall, had been
told by Carrie when he met her waitressing in a little lakeside
cafe in a park in Los Angeles where he used to go to play
bridge.
Well, I was and later that year,
sixteen in June of 1960,
my father married her and discovered on the wedding day that
she was actually only sixteen and indeed two months younger
than I. But he married her anyway, and she was a great step-
mother and a wonderful parent.
Nobody could have been a better little American than I
was at eleven, after coming back from Mexico. It was very
interesting, even amazing, to find myself surrounded by
what I considered to be very brassy eleven-year-olds; they
talked about sex, about boys; they talked about bodies,
about makeup . . . about, you know, all the things that mat-
tered. It was the first time I had been exposed to this stuff.
America was a quite wonderful shock to me. All that concen-
tration on clothes. (In Mexico no eleven-year-old thought
about clothes. Everyone wore a school uniform.) My first close
friend after returning was Sue Lyons. Sue was a real looker,
and maybe I was, too. We had that all down pat anyway, how
to look, how to move. I was twelve and she was ten.
We had a bet, Sue and I, that each of us would be in the
movies before the other, and I still owe her. She got her movie,
Lolita, with James Mason. Earlier that year I had brought the
novel from my father's library for Sue and me to read at her
house. Sue's mother asked where we got it.
I said, "Out of my daddy's library."
She said, "Well, take that trash back there. I don't want
it in my home."
MICHELLE PHILLIPS
Soon after that she came to my house, where Sue and I
were playing Monopoly. She brought with her a clean,

starched pink dress and fresh socks and took Sue to a go-see,
and of course that go-see was for Lolita. She didn't want Sue
to read the book, but it was okay for her to be in the film!
Though we had lived so close to Hollywood, we hadn't
known anyone in the movie business or appreciated what it
was all about, and I don't think Sue would ever have pursued
a career in movies if her family had not had designs for her.
I believe that, but for that ambition on her behalf, Sue would
have been married, had kids, and been a lot happier than
the movies made her.
In spite of her movie and in spite of the bet and what-
ever one might read into it, I really didn't want to be in
movies. If I wanted to be anything, I wanted to be in the
Waves, and that was probably because of my father's Coast
Guard connections. But I certainly didn't want to be in the
Waves enough to take it any further. What 7 wanted to do
was hit the streets, and already I was doing that, with some
skill and cunning. The other girls I hung out with were not
the socialites that belonged to the social clubs at Marshall

High like the Adamettes, the Cosees, the Cordells, or the
Gamas. But these girls were a lot more fun. They included
Laurie Leiboff, Valerie Mintz, Erica Kessler, and Darlene
Gugler. We hung out with The Diabolics (a car club) at
Winchell's and had a great time hitting the streets. Laurie
Leiboff and I used to come home at curfew, midnight or what-
ever it was, and stuff blonde-haired and redheaded dolls
into my bed, hair just showing on the pillow, and then sneak
out of those small windows in my room. We got out of windows
so tiny that you wouldn't have thought anyone could fit through
them and went to see late, late mcvies and "hang out." Living
in the present. No dreams of stardom. I didn't join the high
school acting department, and I didn't do anything musical,
except play first cello in the junior high school orchestra. I
didn't consider myself a movie buff, and we didn't have tele-
vision. However, I did listen to radio, and also to a lot of rec-
ords: the Shirelles, the Crystals, the Drifters, the Platters, the
—
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN'
Everly Brothers, the Phil Spector groups. The groups that were
coming out of New York, the black music, that was my favorite
rock 'n' roll, that and Elvis Presley. I was never into those
Rydells and Vees or Johnny this or Johnny that: far too
wimpish. It was Tamar Hodel who got me interested in folk
music, or at least into folk music people. She was nine years
older than I — —
twenty-two when we met and was to become
my very best friend.
It came about like this. My sister's boyfriend Kelly
Hodel came over to our house and told us he had just heard
that his half-sister —
whom he had not seen since infancy
Tamar, lived around the corner from our house. He wanted
to see her, and I said I would certainly go with him to give
him moral support. So off we went to Tamar's. As soon as I
set eyes on her, I thought she was the most fabulous, glamor-
ous girl I had ever met. She had a wonderful lavender-
colored room, with lavender pillows and curtains, lavender
lead-glass ashtrays, all of that. I thought it was just great. She
had just acquired a new pink and lavender Rambler, buying
it on time. She had a child with her husband, Stan Wilson, a
hip black folk singer. She hung out with a very Bohemian
—
crowd Josh White, Dick Gregory, Odetta, Bud and Travis.
Tamar was incredible. She gave me my first fake ID, my
first amphetamines ("uppers," to help me stay awake in class
after late nights). This was a girl after my own heart, and we
became very close. In fact there were all sorts of bonds it —
turned out that we had met in Mexico City when I was very
young (extraordinarily, she had lived next door), and now
she was my idol.
My father knew that my sister and I needed some stern
warnings, so he made sure we got them. Russell and I had
more information about sex and drugs by the time we were
thirteen than most people ever know in their lives. Working
for Juvenile Hall made himwhole lot wiser than he had
a
been when he started out, and he started out hip. "Never get
involved with hard drugs," he said, many times until it stuck,
and I never did. He didn't think pot-smoking was such a bad
thing. He said that, yes, he had smoked it once in a while in
10 MICHELLE PHILLIPS
Mexico, and, yes, he quite enjoyed but then he said, "It's

it,
illegal. That's why you

can't do it. If you get stuck in Juvenile
Hall, I'm the one who's going to have to drag you out. So
don't do it, you understand?"
God knows how or why, but I never did go to Juvenile
Hall, never did get busted. But there were some times . . .
there were indeed. Tamar and I were arrested after a party

for Josh White. I was fifteen; she, twenty-four. Josh White
had just done a concert at UCLA, and there was a big bash
at the Montecito Hotel, which was a pretty good place to
have a party. Everyone was there, just everyone. Tamar and
I had been to the concert and went on to the party as a mat-
ter of course, though there wasn't much there for me: There
was only hard liquor, and I was a beer drinker I couldn't —
bear the taste of anything stronger. So I lay down and went
to sleep in a bedroom. Tamar came into the bedroom soon
after, and she went to sleep. Stan, her husband, followed and
went to sleep on the couch, and that's all I remember until
the next morning at around nine or ten o'clock, when Josh
came by and said, "Okay, kids, I'm leaving, but you can stay
here till checkout time."
That was fine by me, so I said to Tamar, "We can stay,
but don't you think that you should call your baby-sitter?"
Tamar agreed, and when she finally got it together to
make the call, the operator said, "Who is this? Is this room in
your name?"
Well, the operator got real indignant because it sounded
so lame: "It's Josh White's, but he said we could stay in it,
blah blah blah."

"I'm going to call the police," said the operator and hung
up.
I told Stan, who said, "Come on. We're leaving." Tamar
wanted to sleep. "We're leaving, man," Stan said, meaning it,
and Stan and I left, with Tamar still asleep on the bed, legit-
imized by Josh White's sincere offer. He had, after all, paid
for his room until checkout time, and there was still time to
go on that.
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN' 11
I wasn't happy about leaving, though, with Tamar still in

there. Out in the parking lot I said to Stan, "I'm going to go
back up there and get her." I went back up to the room, finally
convinced Tamar we should leave, and went to lie down, fully
dressed, in the empty bathtub to wait while Tamar, sitting on
the toilet seat, arranged her makeup. Looking into the bath-
room mirror, which reflected the bedroom, I saw first one cop
and then another. They came into the bathroom and promptly
arrested us. I'm not sure what the charge was. Trespassing?
Probably.
We knew we were innocent, but it sure made no differ-
ence. They took us to Hollywood Cole Police Station and
wanted to know everything. One question in particular stood
out. "What were you doing at that party with all those
niggers?" I was very shaken. It was the first time I had ever
heard an adult use that word, and I was shocked and horri-
fied. The party had been your basic left-wing group of black
radicals, musicians, and their friends.
"Who did you sleep with?" another cop asked, going
through mypurse and not finding anything. I was a virgin.
I said, "I didn't sleep with anyone, and anyway, it's none
of your fucking business."

He came back at me: "Just want you to know that the
doctor is on his way to examine you, little girl," and he put
me and closed the door.
in a tiny cell
Ibegan to howl and scream and cry and carry on. I was
baying and making a lot of noise. Then I decided to make
some real sense in all this cacophony. "You call my father
right now!" I shouted. "You were supposed to call my
father the minute you got me down here, and it's been hours,
and I want him here right now"
They took their time about doing this, but they knew
that they really had no choice, and so when they told me
okay and asked where they could call him, I took great plea-
sure in telling them they would have to reach him through
the sheriff's station.
My father was telephoned, and to this day I don't know
what he said to them, but when I was called to the phone, he

said, "Right.They're going to let you
go, and you should #o
straight home andnot make an incident of it. Tamar should
do the same. Just go home, right now." I was really angry
because I wanted these people brought to justice. But my
father was very clear: "You just get your little ass outta there
and go home." So ... I did, and Tamar did, and that was as
close as ever came to being in any trouble like that. I never
I
have been busted. Knock wood.

My father did trust me, and I was used to a lot of free-
dom. Though he had very strict rules, he issued very few of
them. The ones he did make were all designed to keep me
out of real trouble; he wasn't petty. I saw myself as very re-
sponsible, though as life unfolded, I often had cause to wonder
at this view. Still, my father encouraged me to accept trust
and use it properly. I was supposed to be home at ten on week
nights. Weekends I had to be in by one o'clock.

We were now living in Silverlake, a nice, friendly com-
munity over by Griffith Park. It was comfortable and safe
there. It was just about the only honest-to-God place in Los
Angeles, or so I believed; you could walk to Hollywood if
you were so inclined, and that was important in a city where
there never has been enough walking. Silverlake ... a nice
name for a nice place. It was an old neighborhood coming
up, and if I had only appreciated it enough not to earn
myself demerits and scoldings, I'd have seen that the schools,
too, were good. I spent the sixth grade at Mitchell Torina
after coming back from Mexico, then went to Thomas Star
King Junior High and then Marshall High, where the fun
began.
Daddy set great store by education and reading, and I
was expected to get good grades. I did pretty well in high

school only once got a "D," and that in algebra, which was
(I
too abstract for me) though not as well as Russell, who was
practically a straight-A student. School wasn't too much
of a problem, but there was one incident, with Mrs. Richard-
son, the school vice-principal, that set me back a bit. She
and the school authorities thought (correctly) that they had

caught me ditching gym, but I knew they had no way of
proving it. I had arranged to be counted present, so what were
they bitching about? That was the way I looked at it, on the
principle that the cat may have suffocated in the shoe box,
but until you lift the lid and see that he is dead, the cat is not
actually dead. I said that I was going to take my grievance to
the student court, but my father, now a very informed and
well-read expert on young people with a good understanding
of Authority's attitudes and remedies, said that I should do no
such thing. "Take the demerits," he said, "and get on with it.
Otherwise you are going to make a big enemy/' Why?
"Because she knows you cut gym, even though she can't
prove it."
I didn't want fifty demerits, and I had a sense of
grievance, so I ignored my father's advice and took the
complaint to the student court anyway and won. Then I cut
gym again, and this time I got caught and Mrs. Richardson
threw me out. Now she had won. My father had been right
all along, and I was revealed. I came in with a perfectly
forged note "from my father," but they had already tele-

phoned him, and he had said he didn't know where I was.
It was very messy, but when they brought my father in
for a meeting to show him all the absence notes, he mar-

velled. "Such good forgeries," he said. "Such great forgeries,
I really couldn't tell." It was not enough to help, however, and
I was thrown out of Marshall High for the rest of the semester,
which meant I had to go to Eagle Rock until the end of the

term. I was horrified and thoroughly humiliated.
In the fall of 1960, Tamar, who had just been divorced
from Stan, decided she had to go to San Francisco to see
—
what was happening in the Bay area her kind of place in
those days. Beatniks. Radicalism. Folk clubs. Poets. New
ideas. Eight years of Eisenhower had started people thinking
there must be something else, for God's sake. San Francisco
was ahead of the game. So she went to San Francisco, and
boy, did I miss her! We spent hours on the telephone. My
—
next summer vacation, when I was just seventeen, I asked

Daddy if I could go join her. He was very good about it. "You
go," he said. "And when you are there, you use your brain.
You and Tamar be good. Keep in touch with me. Don't make
a lot of phone It seems so innocent, looking at
calls write."
it from seems so trusting and decent. "Post-
this distance; it
cards .use your good sense

. . keep in touch." Some
. . .
chance, with the pace, the newness of the Great Adventure

with Tamar. She was a real manipulator. She maintained a
certain classy style, always, but she lived by her wits, on
alimony, child support, trickery. Anywhere she could get
money, she got it. Here, there, and everywhere. She lived on
that, and politics, music, sex. There were plenty of drugs in
San Francisco, but the people Tamar ran with were mostly
drinkers. San Francisco was a treat. Likewise Sausalito over
the bay, where Frank Werber had the Trident Club. In fact
the Trident was a very popular place for the groups, a lot of
whom were trying to move into Sausalito. It became abso-
lutely the hippest place to live. It was so casual, with boats
and neat little offbeat houses, all so casual and leisurely and
yet so close to a big metropolitan city just across the great
Golden Gate Bridge. It was heaven. Every afternoon at four
o'clock this huge fog would roll in over the bridge like a big
monster, invading silently and slowly and then settling.
There was a restaurant called the Glad Hand that was just
next door to the Trident; it had the best steaks and salads,
and that was all they served or needed to; it seated only forty
people. It was a real haunt, very easy, very relaxing.
Tamar and I loved going out and showing off. We had a
friend Eddie, Tamar's hairdresser, who was a flaming homo-
sexual and proud of it. Remember that this was early for
gays to be obvious. Eddie was the first I knew and loved
who was blatant. He loved to do our hair and make my face
up and dress me and, God! I would look in the mirror and be
gorgeous. I was transformed. Eddie did Tamar's hair every
week for nothing, and every night she would wrap it up in
tissue paper and clippies so that she couldn't move in bed.
Eddie was a good friend of ours, and we spent a lot of

time in the beauty shop. He was exotic, and Tamar, an exotic
herself, loved others. Eddie is now Donna and lives in
Washington. He had the operation and made someone a
good wife. He was very important in our lives in those days,
and we owe him a lot. We did look good. We wore nice
clothes: little suits with straight skirts, silk from Hong Kong.
High heels and kid gloves. We would never wear sneakers in
those days, and certainly not jeans for proper wear. If we were
being casual, then we'd wear Capris or Bermudas. It was all
quite formal. We didn't always have a lot of money, but I
only once went to bed hungry. I cried my eyes out. I didn't
think it should happen to me. It was possible, mostly, to get
by really well in San Francisco. We would go to Chinatown
and get a big bag of rice and vegetables and a little soy, and
that's what we would live on for a week unless someone
could take us out for a meal.
Not long after I got to San Francisco, Tamar sent me to
the House of Charm to learn how to become a model. She
paid $600 for my "charm course," and I joined other girls
with "charm" and an eye on the main chance or the next best
thing— a break, a slice of luck, an opening, a piece of the
action. I enjoyed the House of Charm, and I did all right. I
signed with my first agent, Ann Demeter. I had my chipped
tooth capped and began to do a little work. My first job was
a billboard for Lucky Lager beer. Now I had some money of
—
my own not a lot, but it was mine. Tamar had been ready
to share with me; now I could return the favor.
The hip music in the early 1960s was folk music. Clubs
where folk was played were making money all over the
country. Folk musicians, black and white, were considered
very often to be subversive, either because of the political
views of many of the singers (liberal to left-wing) or merely
because of some perceived questioning of American values
in the lyrics. Tamar's ex-husband, Stan Wilson, was your
basic Harry Belafonte type, singing a lot of calypso; without
any obvious attempt to be "with it," he just was. Nothing
overtly subversive there and yet ... He hung out with Josh
4
,
White, the king of the black folk singers and definitely a man
with a strong black consciousness at a time when integration
and racial equality were very threatening to the status quo.
Josh carried a lot of psychic weight and had that aura of
few people. He was certainly
greatness that you see in just a
part of that whole interracial underground that included
Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Mort Sahl, Murray Roman just —
four comedians who were out there challenging the Ameri-
can Way. Mort Sahl had the greater success because he was
extremely contentious, though less outrageous, but Lenny
Bruce was really out there, way ahead of his time and terri-
bly persecuted. The sort of harassment he experienced was
common in Tamar's clique, and maybe that was why after
Josh White's party the police were so anxious to interrogate
these "two white chicks" who had been at this party "with all
these niggers."
In San Francisco, in the clubs like the Purple Onion, the
Hungry I, and, just over the bay in Sausalito, the Trident, the
folk and jazz scene was predominant. The folk scene was
very elitist in musical terms and had almost nothing to do
with pop. Everyone in folk saw each other all the time.
Everyone shared the same political values. The Tarriers;
Odetta; Peter, Paul and Mary (known affectionately in the
trade as "two rabbis and a hooker"); their manager, Albert
Grossman. There were several from the East Coast, notably
the blacklisted Pete Seeger and the Weavers. There were also
the Smothers Brothers,Bud and Travis, and the Journeymen.
Very established by the time Tamar and I arrived was the
Kingston Trio, managed by Frank Werber, who owned the
Trident. All the folk singers and related comedians did play
clubs, but their bread and butter was the college circuit. Folk
music was very "in" on campus. The groups and soloists with
acoustic guitars used to visit the auditoriums on lengthy
tours, and students loved it. It was the Big Night on campus.
I'm not sure what happens at colleges now. Do poets still
sing "songs of freedom" in darkened auditoriums?
Interspersed with folk music in the clubs around San
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN' V7
Francisco — and other cities for that matter — were the mod-
ern jazz outfits, often piano, bass, drums, and sometimes
vocalists. Among the best around was Lambert, Hendricks
and Ross. Jazz was also the chief musical interest of Ralph
Gleason, the very liberal columnist on the San Francisco
Chronicle. Gleason went on to take an unprejudiced interest
inpop music, even before it became "serious." Later, in 1967,
he became a founder of Rolling Stone magazine. Though he
was much older than all of us, he had a very benevolent and
youthful attitude that somehow kept San Francisco up with
musical events, though it would be some time before record
companies would travel to the Bay area to hunt for artists.
Other men who would put San Francisco on the musical map
were Tom Donahue and Bob Mitchell, who came up there
and turned the radio situation around with KYA "Boss of
—
—
the Bay" very often playing good singles ahead of anybody
else. They were avant-garde all the way through the sixties.
San Francisco certainly was becoming a good place to be,
just as Los Angeles in its way would become a melting pot
for music in the later sixties. It's worth remembering that the
big chart music of the very early sixties, after the gentle
decline of white rock n' roll, was middle of the road: Dean
Martin, Andy Williams, Frank Sinatra, Steve Lawrence and
Eydie Gorme, and so on. "Political" folk music, from Woody
Guthrie to the emergence of his brilliant follower, Bob
Dylan, never had an easy time of it on radio unless it seemed
"safe," but there was always an audience of people ready to
think for themselves.
We went one night to the Hungry I to see Dick Gregory,
who had stolen Tamar's warm, warm heart. We arrived late,
in the middle of the opening act —
a group that was so good
that I could scarcely believe what I was seeing and hearing.
Scott McKenzie was just about the best tenor I had ever
heard, and the banjo player, Dick Weissman, was brilliant.
But it was the Journeymen's tall guitarist, John Phillips, who
really captivated me. Tamar, meanwhile, saw much to admire
in the tenor, and it was soon good-bye to dreams of Dick
Gregory.
At the end of the Tamar had Enrico Banducci, who

set,
owned the Hungry I, introduce us. The exchanges were

brief, perfunctory: "Good meeting you nice to know . . .
you .great set," and such. "Well, we tried," Tamar and

. . I
told each other. I remember seeing John slip away to make a

phone call. I watched him in the booth, or as much as I could
see of him: his long legs, his feet propped up on his guitar
case. I sensed that he was talking to his wife; there was that
atmosphere — the Call Home.
Tamar and I went off to Enri-
co's restaurant, and there was Scott having a steak tartare all
by himself. Of course we invited him over, and from that
very moment an intense affair began between Scott McKen-
zie and Tamar Hodel.
John did not approve of the relationship. He didn't think
it a very constructive way for his tenor to spend each day
and what was left of each night after the show, making
—
love and that is really all the new lovers did. All the time.
The tissue paper Tamar had worn every night no longer
stayed in her hair. Scott had moved into the apartment with
us, and I began to see quite a lot of John because he came by
in the evenings to collect Scott and take him to the club. He
had to wait a long time every evening for his tenor to get
dressed. Scott and Tamar were always in bed, always. So
John and I talked and became friendly. And then, one eve-
ning a couple of weeks later, the Kingston Trio gave a party at
the Trident, and there was John and there was I, and it was
real easy, and it started. I really did fall quite madly in love
with John.
It was inevitable that I should have gotten together with
John, when I think back. I think that what he was after, and
what he saw in me, was right there in front of him this girl —
who was wild and young and full of high spirits. I didn't
have attached to me the responsibilities that his background
brought: his wife, his children, reputation, conventionality.
I'm sure he had never known anyone like me. I had this very
unconventional background, had lived a free life with very
aware people — Marika from Hungary; Daddy, who was free-
as-the-air, old Bohemia. John, despite his Cherokee mother,
was brought up so strictly! Meeting me was the beginning of

his dropping away from his rigid background, because al-
though he was a traveling folk singer, he had older ideas, from
an unliberated military environment. In me he saw, he said
later, the first flower child.
As for what I saw in him ... I saw strength and cha-
risma, and I wanted him. I loved his quality of leadership
and the fact that he was so sought-after. People wanted
to be around him. They wanted to be his friend. He was part
of the elite of the San Francisco crowd, and he wasn't afraid
of anyone. He was sort of a controlling force, and I liked that.
It was fun to watch. He was definitely career-minded, or to
put it more accurately, he was music-minded, and music was

his career. He would put music ahead of most things, celeb-
rity and personal matters, and in that sense he was a
—
careerist but not for the sake of power. He was born with a
gift for music, and it is important to remember that as this
story unfolds.
That night after the Trident party, we went back to
Tamar's knowing we would make love. He did have a bit of
romance (though it was not his abiding characteristic), and
he carried me across the room, from the doorway to the bed. I
knew he was married and that he had a son aged four and a
daughter aged two, but it didn't make any difference. We
were now was July 1961.
lovers. It
Some months of some years stand out in the memory,
and obviously, for me, one such is that July. In San Fran-
cisco. Jack Kennedy was in the first year of the New Fron-
tier, and everyone was a liberal. Unless you were a real
asshole, you were on the side of the angels, of those who

were always liberals. Here was a new young President with
new young ideas. The torch had been passed to a new
generation: Ask not what your country can do for you but
what you can do for your country; support Head Start pro-
grams for the needy; send bright young people around the
world in the Peace Corps. Who can say nay to such pure
motives? Certainly not Richard Nixon, the Nightmare Man,
who had lost the election so deservedly, now a forgotten
—
man with his deadly dull Republican companions and sup-

porters, so depressing, outdated, out of step with this fine and
different drum taking us to a Better Tomorrow. Wonderful
Jack and Jackie are in a wonderful White House, and I'm in
love with this wonderful man, John Phillips, whom every-
body I know in San Francisco so admires. Oh, yes . . .
I did admire him, did respect him. He was fun, and he
was very comfortable to be with. He was wiser than his

twenty-five years, very intelligent and witty, and full of
ambition. He had just turned down an offer from Frank
Werber to replace David Guard in the Kingston Trio. The
offer was accepted by John Stewart, and the Kingstons con-
tinued to do very well. I just couldn't see why John should
have refused such an opportunity; I thought he was crazy.
But the way he saw it, the Kingstons would not be able to
match the development of his own career. Such confidence
was impressive; you couldn't help but respect his self-image.
He had the admiration of the people around San Francisco
because they could see there was a good mind there. He was
smart; not yet famous, but full of assurance, as if it would all
fall into place. In work John really was the leader. It was fun
to see him giving out song parts, behaving like a friendly big
brother to Scott. Dick Weissman, a great banjo player, had
the intellect, the real radicalism of the age, but John had the
fire to make his career happen. His political commitment
came second by a long way. It was because of his ambition
for his group that, deep down, in spite of his relationship
with me, John opposed Tamar's role, seeing it as the Compe-
tition in Scott's life. Though he expressed it personally, it was
not personal; it was professional. He simply did not want his
tenor dissipating his energies in bed. Tamar was always one
to make you wander off the path, and John wanted
—
demanded total dedication. Scott had to make his choice.
He made it, and the loser was, inevitably, Tamar. To
preempt Scott's leaving first, Tamar made Scott leave, so he
moved out of our apartment and out of Tamar's life. Tamar
was traumatized. She had loved many men, and maybe
now she would say that she never loved anyone as she had
loved Josh White, but then, in July 1961, she was shattered
when Scott McKenzie left her.
She decided to commit suicide. She told me that what-
ever anyone might do to try to prevent it, she would suc-
ceed. I said I thought it was a bad idea, but what did / know,
at seventeen, that she, the great Tamar, at twenty-six,
couldn't express with so much more passion and experience?
I tried to tell her that she had "a lot to live for," that it would
"cause misery," all of that, but after several days of frantic

and deepening despair, she really did convince me that it
was the best thing to do, the only way she could find any
peace. She made some kind of plan for me to take over
responsibility for Debbie, her small daughter by Stan. She
put it down on paper that Debbie, then five and asleep in —
—
the next room would be transferred to my custody when I
became eighteen. This done, I assisted her in taking forty-
eight Seconal. helped her as she gulped them down in dif-
I
—
ferent amounts two, four, seven at a time until the bottle —
was empty. It was very serious. She collapsed in my arms in
the bathroom after having decided that she had to put some
makeup on, and I had to drag her a dead weight, un- —
—
conscious into the bedroom and onto the bed. As she lay
there, Iwatched her.
She was breathing so deeply. I didn't know what to do;
I was so scared. I tried to call John but couldn't reach him. I
remember that I just lay down beside her and fell asleep.
I don't know how long but I woke suddenly to find
I slept,
John tickling my turned and saw Tamar next to me. I

feet. I
didn't know now whether she was dead or alive. I said,
"Sshh. I just got her to sleep." Then Scott appeared in the
room.He had come from the bathroom and was holding the
empty Seconal bottle.
"Where did they go?" he demanded.
"She took them," I confessed.
They immediately called an ambulance, and while we
waited, trying not to panic, they went over the story I was to
tell the police when they came. The story was that the three
of us had come back to the apartment and found Tamar

unconscious and immediately called for help. The story

was told and accepted. Tamar was quickly taken to the
hospital. John then took Debbie and me to the airport and
put us on a flight to Los Angeles. "I just hope Tamar pulls
through," he said. I had the feeling he never wanted to see
me again.
Tamar did pull through. I was told later that had she
been left another half hour — maybe less — she would have
died.
Iarrived in Los Angeles and took a taxi home to Silver-
lake, Debbie in tow. She, too, was to recover. I had been
away two months. My father looked at me in horror. "What's
been going on, for chrissakes? You look terrible." He had
sent me away with instructions to keep clean and good-
natured. As I said, I had kept clean, and I was certainly
good-natured enough to answer Tamar's plea for assistance
in her suicide attempt. But I was not looking good. I was thin
and distraught. We had been taking occasional "uppers" and
drinking and staying up. Party, party, party. "It's time for
you to take a good look at yourself," said my father. "Also,
it's getting time for you to be thinking of school."
School? School? "I want you back at school," said my

father firmly. "Time to iron your blouses." My blouses. Time
to iron my blouses God! It all became very surreal.
. . .
Tamar was now telephoning me from the hospital. The

calls were coming all the time: "I really need you here,
Michelle. Please come."
Daddy put his foot down. He knew that she was my
best friend, but now that I was back under the family roof,
he did not want me away again in San Francisco. He said I
was not to go anywhere, but to consider instead the reality of
school.
looked at him steadily. I knew he loved me and I loved
I
him. "Now look, Daddy," I said. "What do you really think the
chances are that I am going to be ironing my blouses?"
He said he thought the chances were pretty good.
"You're seventeen years old, and you're not going back up
there to be a nursemaid to her." He told me to forget San

Francisco and get myself ready for school, and then he went off
to play bridge.
When he returned later in the afternoon,he found me
making a reservation on the train. I said, "I have to go,
Daddy. She really needs me now." That night, with Debbie,
I was on the train to San Francisco. Daddy didn't say another
word about it. It was an important moment between us.

I got Tamar out of the hospital. She was fine. So glad to
be alive. Oh, of course. The best thing in the world was to be

alive. It made me realize —
listening to her talking about the
—
joys of survival, another chance, a second life how I had
been taken in. I just hadn't understood. I had thought that as
her best friend, I was obliged to help Tamar do what she
wanted. After all, the right thing to do was surely what
Tamar thought was right for her. It was an intellectual rather
than an emotional decision. I do remember feeling that she
was wrong, but I believed at the time that I had no right to
impose my will on her. Now . well, now I see it was alto-
. .
gether different. Tamar didn't want to die at all. I should have

gotten her to a psychiatrist. But I was seventeen and confused
about my role and, let's face it, I could have used some help
myself.
So Tamar was out of the hospital, and she was just fine.
So fine that we looked at each other and realized we . . .
were back, it was okay, everything was great. Oh, boy,

Tamar and Michelle flaming in San Francisco. Tamar and
Michelle back on the music scene, having a wonderful time.
Off we went. "Thank God everything's all right; now let's get
back on track." Uppers again, and hardly any food, but bags
of energy. We couldn't find John and the group anywhere.
They had mysteriously disappeared, and wherever we asked,
nobody knew where the Journeymen were. A conspiracy of
silence? These girls were trouble. We had our reps now.
After a month and a half of tearing around without them, we
read in a newspaper that they were appearing in San Jose,
and as we did know the way there, we went. We just bra-
zenly drove to San Jose, walked into the club, and sat down,
in full view of the three of them, Dick, Scott, and John. They
were already on stage and well into their set.
Scott saw us almost immediately and walked straight off
the stage. Welearned later that he got right into his car and
drove away. John and Dick tried to continue the set, looking
anxiously into the wings. The show must go on. Where in hell
ishe? What's happening, man? The tenor has gone, and these
bad girls are back!
Well, John was glad to see me, and I was thrilled to find
that out. For him the whole hospital thing had disappeared
into time, covered by subsequent events and altered, maybe,
by missing me? Now here I was, and everything was good
again. We were not separated again from that night on for a
long, long time; at least not emotionally, for even when John
was away with the Journeymen, and now and again he was,
he was always on my mind and I was always on his, and
there was no question of there being anyone else. Not at all.
Nor ever would be, we thought. It was love.
CHAPTER 2
JOHN AND
MICHIE
lohn Edmund Andrew Phil-

j lips was born in Parris Island,
South Carolina, on August 30, 1935, the second son of Edna
and Claude Andrew Phillips. His mother was a full Cherokee
Indian. His father was a captain in the Marine Corps, so John
was born in the base hospital and lived on the base in Parris
for the first twelve months of his life. His older brother,
Tommy, and sister, Rosemary, had been born in Quantico,
Virginia, where there was also a base. It was to this base that
the family returned after an eighteen-month diversion to
Brooklyn, where Captain Phillips had the first of a series of
heart attacks. He was medically retired from the service in
1939. John was then four years old. Claude, broken up by his
discharge at a time when there were war alarms all over the
world, began to hit the bottle. John went to St. Mary's
Cathedral School in Alexandria, Virginia, for all of the first
grade and half of the second grade. After the sisters
discovered that he was skipping school and spending his
lunch money at the movies (he saw every Paramount, Fox,
25
and MGM musical ever made), it was decided that he should

be sent to private school. Claude was drinking heavily now,
and Edna had to take a full-time job. The sisters at St. Mary's
suggested Linton Hall in Manassas, Virginia, a military school
—
run by nuns a deadly combination, I would think. John
stayed there until the seventh grade, and every weekend
Edna and Rosemary went to see him. Brother Tommy had
enlisted — under-age — in the Marines and was in the Pacific
war zone, watching all his friends being killed in action.
John returned home after promising he'd stay in school,
and Tommy came home from the war and joined the
Washington, D.C., police. In and out of trouble for one thing
or another, John always depended on Tommy as an ally, and
that way he eluded serious punishment. He had terrific
grades, nonetheless, and from Washington High School he
was sent to Bullis Academy to get ready for the Naval
Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. He took the examination,
got one of the highest grades in the country, and was sub-
sequently enrolled as a plebe at the academy. However . . .
after eighteen months he had had enough of the discipline

and spent most of his free time in the medical section of the
library, trying to find a means of quitting the academy that
would not break mother's heart.
his She couldn't have faced
his discharge on any grounds other than medical. His studies
in the library paid off. He found that it was possible for the
human eye to have a blind spot that was medically undetect-
able and therefore unprovable. John dredged up a serious
childhood accident — falling on his head — as the cause of his
"condition" and was duly discharged on medical grounds,
without dishonor or disgrace or any stain on his record.
Having had several basketball scholarships offered him
before Annapolis, John now decided to claim one maybe —
Hampden-Sidney College or George Washington Univer-
sity —
but he injured his knee playing recreational basketball,
and that was the end of that. He sold funeral plots, cars, and
Singer sewing machines. He could actually sell anything and
indeed had enormous charm, as his family would verify. But
it was his gift for music that was to take him into a life in
which his charm would be but an adjunct to real insight and

leadership. His natural fascination with music of the voice

was to distinguish his entire career. It marks him still; no one
can arrange a vocal like John Phillips. He always believed
in the voice as a great instrument. Even when groups were
doing very well without a single vocalist worthy of the name,
he would say, "The group that can sing will always come
through."He was right.
During his early days as a member of the jazz-oriented
group The Abstracts, and later, The Smoothies, John married
Susie Adams, a prima ballerina, daughter of that good old
Adams family from back East. John was not a great social
catch for Susie in her family's estimation. Nevertheless, he'd
been to Annapolis and his father had been a Marine captain,
and that plus his charm and obvious promise of success
made him quite acceptable, so the marriage had much bless-
ing, including two children, Jeffrey and Laura MacKenzie
Phillips. I knew all about them from John, and quite soon
Susie knew something about me. She had found my makeup
bag in the car, John said, and had suspected there was
"another woman.". .Susie was living in Mill Valley across
.
the Golden Gate Bridge when John was working in and

around San Francisco, and he went home to her when he was
not actually booked for concerts or clubs. It would have
been strange if she had not known that there was somebody
else because John and I were being seen around. In any case
somebody had told her (I thought it might have been John),
and it was probably as well, because he was now living quite
a double life. John and I had an apartment in Berkeley with
Scott and Dick and my sister, Russell, now also, though
briefly, a Bay area raver.
Then the Journeymen went away, on the road, and I got
really pissed off because I didn't know where they were or
when I was going to see John again, if ever. It was childish,
but that was how I felt. I was very much in love with him. I
wrote him this letter:
Dear Baby, (Dear Diary)

I'm lonely once more, so here I am All of me (I
think). I must say it's been a very interesting day.
Russ and I went Chicconi (photog-

to see Stanley
rapher). He's going to use me
week thank Cod.
this
We wandered down Market Street for a few min-
utes in search of jobs, then decided to go see an old
friend from LA, an attorney working here. He took
us to lunch again, thank God. He suggested some
spicy entertainment for the afternoon so of course
we ended up watching Lenny Bruce 's trial (a riot.)
Lenny remembered Rusty and invited us to a party
at his hotel (familiar story). We declined and went
in search of better prospects for the evening hours.
The finale was a fried chicken dinner cooked by
Russ with green vegetables, three large glasses of
milk and a dash of John Stewart. It was loads of
fun.
All three of us are going to the trial again
tomorrow. Oh yes, and we also escaped three park-
ing tickets and one of jay-walking today.
you will be kept well informed, may I
Just so
add that it was beautiful here today and expected to
be HOT here tomorrow. I hear you re having a bit
of frost back there.
We saw Peter Paul and Mary last night. It was a
great show.
So how is your dating coming along? I must
admit mine isn't so hot but it'll pick up, don't you
worry John, it'll pick up.
Oh yeah, Rusty and I are inviting Paul Golden-
burg over for dinner sometime next week. Wild,
eh?!
He was so nice to me at the club last night. He
also said I could come back. See how nice he was?
I dont enough stress on the weather
think I put
conditions here, so may I add that today as we
walked down Market Street (without coats) a warm
wind was gently swaying the trees (that don't exist
on Market Street), the sky was like a clear crystal
lake with pigeons and doves lazily floating on the
warm waters. The scent of spring cast a magic spell
on the lovely Golden City and it was felt in every

crack and corner.
Tomorrow we are going to the park where the
flowers are in full bloom and the grass is as green as
emerald and we are going to lift our souls and
expose our bodies to the delight of the California
sun in the stimulating game of tennis. Enough of
that shit.
Yve got you something. I really don't
to tell
know how you but I'll take a stab at it.
to tell
Yve been going with this guy for quite a long
time now and all of a sudden he just packed up and
flew to the east coast. (He said it was on business
but Ym sure he's gone to see friends and old
acquaintances.) All of a sudden I find myself miss-
ing him more than Yve ever missed anyone in the
world. Well I know that nothing can be done about
this, but the thing is that Ym afraid he's not going to
write (as far as I know he holds no records as best
letter-writer/ answerer of the year or anything).
Please write and tell me if you have any ideas for
me, OK?
The bewitching hour is nearing so I must hurry
and change in my little black dress and gold buckle
belt.By the way, it's my moon tonight!! TEE-HEE.
Say hello to the other problem children for me
and tell them I send bites and claw marks (love and
kisses.)
your financial situation permits it and my
If
moon working wonders for me, may I BORROW
is
$20.00 from you?

Eating rice until my pay check gets here
doesn't interest me one bit.
I'll leave you with that thought.
All my love,
Michelle.
(PS kinda miss you too, dear boy. John Stewart

I
said I'm a very good cook so fuck you. Rusty.)

—
Obsessed with John Phillips, I had in his absence an

infantile desire for vicarious participation in his other life
the family life in which I had no share. There was no chance
of any good coming of it. It was childish and hopeless, but

I'm sure it wasn't unusual. Early one evening I drove to Mill
Valley with a young guy whose name I forget. I told him, "I
have to see Susie's house, where John lives with her and with
his kids." I had to see his place, stare at it, see how it felt. I
wanted to find out where it was, how to get there, what he

would see as he was driving there, whatever. (I said it was
infantile. . We parked opposite the apartment. The cur-
. .
)
tains moved. I peered to see who it was. There were two

small children, one a boy, one a girl. It was Jeffrey and
Laura. Of course it was. I knew the names so well. Now they
had movement and dimensions. These were the "little
babies." All I could think about was that those were John's
children. I could see that he had this whole other life. It just
seemed inconceivable that he should have another life
besides the one he had with me. Impossible. Yet I had
known all along that he had been living two lives. "What
are you talking about, to yourself?" I asked myself. My head
filled with paradox. Two lives. Which was real? Which one
would he pursue? Where was he? Who was I? How was Susie?
And who was Susie? The guy I was with said suddenly, "I'm
going to pretend to be an encyclopedia salesman and go talk
to her." My God! Don't too late. He was gone.
. . .
He wasn't away long. When he came back, we drove off

in silence. He concentrated on the road. Through a mist I
thought about the house, those faces at the window little . . .
faces, staring at me staring at them. As we drove over the

Golden Gate Bridge, he confessed that he had actually
broken down and told Susie who I was and that I was out
in the car. Jesus Christ, no! "Yes. I told her your name and all
that." And? "She said she wanted to meet you. I told her it
wasn't a good idea right now." This guy had been making a
lot of decisions. Now it was my turn. I made him turn right
around and go back to Mill Valley. We drove in silence. The
journey was familiar. I went up the stairs to the apartment,
"
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN' tf
and I met Susie.

"I'm Michelle," I said.
"Hi, Michelle. I'm Susie."
I know. It was notawful as I'd anticipated.
as
Susie made me a tuna sandwich. "You know, unfortu-
nately John has a 'Michelle' in every city." Oh . . There was
.
more, even harder to take. "We've been married a long time,

John and I; I don't want you to feel bad about John and his
girls. That's the way he is." I was crushed. Susie was very
pleasant, very kind to me, very kind. It was a pity that a nice
girl like me should get caught up, I was just a baby, really;
God knows, it was her cross to bear, but she was used to it.
For me, though ... so young, vulnerable.
My heart was broken. He was away with whomever he
was with, and I was here, left behind just as Susie was left
—
behind except that she was his wife, and there were those
little children. ... I got a little job at an insurance company as
a clerk and was now sharing an apartment with Russell in

San Francisco. I felt like someone in a play. It was all true,
but it was being acted out. In spite of myself I stayed on in
San Francisco, believing whatever came into my mind: One
minute he was mine, then he was Susie's; he would come
back, then he wouldn't. I changed apartments while Russell
was still on vacation from college. There were no other men
or boys for me in all the days that followed, and about a
month after my meeting Susie, there was a knock at the
door. It was John.
"Mich, how
could you have done that?" Done what? "I
was in the middle of divorce proceedings and
—
I interrupted: "You could have called and told me!"
John waffled a lot, and I was relieved because I could

see that he was waffling to get out of this. He hadn't com-
municated, and in the gap I had made a move. Maybe not a
cool move, but in the vacuum, it had been my move. Now I
was waffling. Still, he could have called and told me. "I
could have called and told you. But I didn't, and I'm sorry,
and I have been busy on the road and with divorce proceed-
ings. Now here we are back together." So, now what?
Since the reunion in San Jose, I had not been Tamar's

little teenage friend anymore. I had been accepted into the
community grown-up world.

of a very sophisticated and
Now that we were back together, it would not be John and
Susie anymore. It would be John and Michelle, and although
—
he didn't profess undying love that was never his style he —
did decide to make it "permanent" and said so in his direct
way, and said he would take me everywhere. His mind was
made up. His marriage was over; our life together was really
—
about to begin on the road. We were going to have a lot of
fun.
John said he wanted me to come to New York with him.
I couldn't go just like that, without any plans or without
good-byes to, for instance, my father. And that apart, I was
still I wanted my
only seventeen, in real terms a minor.
father to meet John, wanted his blessing even if it meant —
John's going to New York and my staying alone in San Fran-
cisco. Better that than a hurried run out of town. I really
wanted the two men in my life to meet, to get along and to
have an understanding. I called Daddy. "I have someone I
want you to meet, someone important." Okay.
My father came to San Francisco and met John, and
they got along so well that I was really happy and very
relieved because I knew it would open the way to a much
better relationship, properly based. To my father, John and I
looked like a union made in heaven. I knew almost exactly
what my father would say, which was that I was a minor,
John should not forget that, and that he had better take good
care of me. "She hasn't finished high school," Daddy said to
John. "So if I were you, I would throw a book at her now
and again. You're an educated man. At least you can teach
her how to read."
And so, with promise made, John took me off to
that
New York. It was and I was still a girl of warm
early in 1962,
climates. People had told me, "Winter in the East is cold.
Remember, take a wool dress." So I went to Orbach's and
bought myself a cute little wool dress, sleeveless and back-
less. Thank God I know how to dress, I thought. And froze
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN* 33
my little ass off. I didn't have the slightest idea what I was
getting myself into. Raised in Mexico City and LA, how
could I? God, it was cold in New York!
From the start John was protective and full of support.
He really did know his way around. I signed with the
Journeymen's agent, Charlie Ryan. Charlie was full of wis-
dom and plain speaking. "Remember this: When you are
going to see someone for work, the first thing they look at
are your shoes and your nails. The rest doesn't matter so
much. Remember another thing: A stiff cock has no con-
science." Pearls from Charlie, treasured and remembered to
this day.
Well, I picked up work. The
first modeling I did was for
True Romance and the boy walking through

stories, the girl
the park holding hands. That was for Dell Publications. I also
shot a cover for True Detective: one of those reaction shots
of me facing a man coming through a window with a knife,
startled and terrified, hands to my face, the beginnings of a
huge silent scream that wouldn't quite come. Before long I
signed with the Frances Gill Agency and had quite a good
composite of my photographs and my work, and soon I had
really quite a nice income, considerably more than pocket
—
money though that is how I regarded it, because it was my
own to spend as I wished. John and I always had money
then; this was just more money. I don't remember it going
anywhere special, except toward my own clothes. I suppose
I was just screwing around with it. A nice feeling. Freedom
from financial anxiety. I got into teenage-lingerie modeling.

That was a great job because it paid double (still does) and I
had the body for it: a good little ass and no tits.
We were living on East 70th Street now, John and I, and
I had a little poodle, Pio— Cherokee for "little girl," John
—
said and a couple of Honda 60 motor scooters. More impor-
tant than any of this, as events would underscore, I had started
singing with John, Scott, and Dick; just singing around and
about the apartment, but singing nonetheless. I had not sung
before except in my grandfather's church with my sister. As I
said earlier, I had no mind to be a professional singer. That
was why it was so much fun. There was no stress. The others
did a lot of rehearsing at the apartment. I would cook a big
pot of spaghetti (thanks to Lotta's teachings), and if John
wanted to hear a particular part sung he would have me sing it.
It was normal John sort of thing, like, "Cummere
just the . . .
sing this."He'd give me the part and sing it through for me, and
then I'd pick it up and he'd pass one to Scott to sing, and
eventually I'd say, "I've gotta get back to my spaghetti. ."
. .
That's how it started, just happening as a part of my love

affair and domestic involvement with John. I was always
there, and they were always singing, and whenever they
needed a fourth voice, I supplied it. So. It happened.
I had a respectable voice. I never thought of myself as a
—
good singer, but then neither was Dick or, indeed, John
himself. It didn't matter because the first and foremost factor
in this game John was setting up was whether or not you
could comprehend and hear. John was much more interested
in that. Of course they were all keen to improve their singing
in order to provide working vehicles for John's subtle
notions, his very intelligent, original harmonies. When in San
Francisco they studied voice with Judy Davis. She had been
a vocal coach for the Kingstons and many other successful
singers. She taught them basics: how not to injure their voices
in concert, how to do vocal exercises that would allow them
to do hours and hours of singing without getting vocal nodes
and polyps.
As the winter passed into spring, the Journeymen were
traveling and I was modeling, and John, careful of my inter-
ests and safety during his absences, would put me into the
Rehearsal Club, a residence for "teenage professionals" in
New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth
Avenues. All sorts of striving teenagers were there: profes-
sional actresses, singers, ice skaters, anything in that line as
long as you were under eighteen. It seemed funny to me at
the time, my boyfriend putting me in and out of the Re-
hearsal Club every time he went on the road. But with not-
so-distant events in San Francisco in mind, he had the right
idea, and my father would certainly have approved. John was
a responsible man. He didn't like the idea of my being left

alone in New York. I still had that California spirit and would
pass the time of day with anyone. "For God's sake, don't
talk to people you don't know," John would say. Why not? I
always did before. "This is New York." So I can't ask the time
in New York? "No. And you can't ask which direction you're
going in. Nothing like that. Never. You ask a cop."
John felt he had to teach me the ropes of living in a big
city, so, as I say, every time he went away, into the slammer
I went. It was quite a contrast. I had to be in by ten, all my
meals were prepared for me, and I mixed with good, safe
people, all young and hardworking. My roommate was
Robin Watts, the youngest member of Holiday on Ice, and
she is one of my dearest friends to this day. The Rehearsal
Club was a good place, very good for a spirited teenager,
and that I certainly was, although very loyal by now to John,
and he to me.
John and I married a few months after his divorce from
Susie. God, she must have been thrilled to death about me,
the little blonde seventeen-year-old from LA taking her hus-
band! . . Though she may have been devastated by events,
.
Susie was nonetheless always pleasant to me when we met.

She was outwardly grateful that I was nice to her kids. She
never stopped them from coming to visit us, though I knew
it was hard for her to let her children (especially Jeffrey) see
their daddy happily married to someone else. She was still

wildly in love with John.
The wedding took place on the last day of 1962. He
wanted the and we joined a long line for the
tax write-off,
marriage at Rockville, Maryland. I really would have pre-
ferred to marry immediately after the divorce, for every teen-
ager's best reasons. People saw me as this young flash-in-the-
pan whom John had picked up in San Francisco, and people
like Tommy Smothers were always bringing the point home
by saying something awful that would really crush me. I
wanted to be accepted. I wanted to be Mrs. John Phillips.
My father, too, thought it would be better if John and I were
married because we were forever taking risks by crossing
state lines —was an offense to take a girl under twenty-one

it
across state lines unlessyou were married.

Oh, there were many reasons to get married. We did
love each other a lot. John was ready for marriage, though it
was less of a novelty for him, he was in less of a hurry. How-
ever ... it happened, and when it was over, life seemed to
be exactly the same as before. It should have felt different,
but it didn't. The ceremony was performed in a Baptist
church by Doctor Gamble, in his pastor's office. He turned
down the jazz program and got the thing over with. We were
witnessed by Scott MacKenzie and Dick Weissman. They gave
me a little Lady's Martin guitar as a wedding present. The
Journeymen were playing the Shadows in Washington, D.C.
Bob Covallo, the owner, gave us our wedding reception there.
John and I had been very close since San Francisco, and
the more that happened to us, the more interesting it
became. The marriage did begin to feel strong because it
was much tested. Life on the road was rarely comfortable,
and there were dizzying hazards. There was one incident in
Washington in 1963 where well, let's tell it as it happened.
. . .
We were staying at the Potomac Bridge Marriott Hotel.

I was eighteen and still enjoying that sense of security that
enabled me to move around

without fear of big cities or
suspicion of strangers. It was about seven o'clock, and I had
taken Pio, my poodle, for a walk. It was still light. I came
back to the hotel, opened our door, and felt someone walk
in behind me. I turned around and saw a man there, just
inside the room. He was conservatively dressed in a suit
and a tie, and he seemed very assured. "What room is this?
Whose room is this?" he asked very aggressively. I was
embarrassed. I felt sure I must have walked into his room by
mistake and was shocked enough to check the key with the
door. And while I was looking at the key, he was making
a quick check of the room to see if it was empty. When
he had satisfied himself that it was, he slammed the door
shut with his foot, and now the two of us were in there
alone. He lunged for my throat and started to strangle me.
The longer stayed conscious, the more crazed he became.

I
We knocked over a lamp and a table, and now he had me

down on the floor, straddling me. His hands round my throat
were very tight and and I was going out. I knew I was
cruel,
going out. The night before we'd been up all night, the group
and others on the road, playing guitars into the small hours,
and one of the Kingstons had said, "Isn't it great, this room's
soundproof. No one can hear anything outside this room."
And that thought came right to the front of my mind now, as
the man's hands tightened. Death, the only future. And Pio,
"the Great Protector," hidden under the bed, was no help.
I felt myself going redder and redder, and as I started to
black out, I saw, in my peripheral vision, John coming

around the corner from the bathroom. His old Cherokee
background revealed itself as he jumped into a primitive
stance, screaming and began beating the man so savagely that I
thought, God, this is out of control, John's going to kill the
guy. I actually started to feel sorry for the mad strangler.
"John, that's enough!" He yelled for me to open the door as
he thrashed him to a pulp, pulling him out of the room at the
same time, and then they were out of the door and on the
breezeway, visible to about fifty people sitting peacefully at
sunset down by the pool. John was still yelling "Aaaaargh!"
and he was also completely naked, having come straight out
of the shower. So apparently the onlookers assumed that John
was the rapist and the other man in suit and tie the protector.
The real rapist wriggled away and, as everyone watched, ran
off into the night.
The were called. Why had no one come to our
police
aid? we wondered. People by the pool and all over the
all
hotel said they had seen the man around all afternoon checking
doors, but neither then nor now did anyone want to get in-
volved. That was the end of it, in documented terms. For me
it was another turning point. It was the first time I realized
that there might be something evil lurking. My father had

read me the accounts of children attacked and cut into little
pieces to make me aware of the dangers of unrealistic trust
.
of strangers— "they caught the guy, but it's too late for her"—
but it had seemed just unbelievable to me until that evening,
when I knew I was being murdered and was as good as
dead. It made me paranoid. Oh, it had been a time for grow-
ing up, since the first trip to San Francisco with Tamar, those
days of "buy some postcards and keep in touch and take care
of yourself." It was certainly the strangler's intent to murder
me. I went through the emotions of dying, of being killed.

The fright, the strangling, the blacking out, the inability to
breathe or see are so intense and so deep that they stay with
you for the rest of your was the end of the kind of
life. It
trust that you develop ifnothing has disturbed you. But he

wasn't a crazy whom people would avoid, passing by on the
other side, but a straight man in a suit and a clean shirt and
tie and black shoes, with neat hair and authority. So the fear
is compounded by the mask of sanity and normality of the
attacker. Another layer of innocence peeled away, replaced

by some sharp bumps of caution and suspicion. From then on,
for quite some time, I had physical fits if I found myself alone;
for years after, if I was in an elevator or other enclosed space
alone with a man, I started to have convulsions.
Everyone remembers where they were when Kennedy
died; / remember it as the time when I had my first extra-
marital affair. I was traveling alone from Kansas City, Mis-
souri, where I had been visiting my aunt and uncle, and I
was due to rejoin the group in Cleveland. I got off the plane
and saw people gathered, weeping, around the television sets
at the airport. Grown men were crying openly. I remember
approaching a man with tears streaming down his cheeks
and saying, "What's wrong with you?" He just pointed at the
was mayhem.
television set. It . .
Imet up with John, Scott, and Dick, but the dates had
been canceled. All life seemed to have been canceled. The
nation grieved; the boys went to New York and I to Los
Angeles to visit Marika and Daddy. I was very upset. On the
same day Kennedy died, Pio, my dog, was run over and
killed. Aldous Huxley also died. This caused enormous grief
to Marika, who worshipped him. In the midst of all this there
was one good thing happened to me. Through Russell,

that
who was Marika at this time, I met a handsome
living with
young record producer from LA, whom we shall call Steve.
He had dark brown hair and brown eyes and a slow smile,
and it was love at first sight. When I returned to LA and
Marika and Daddy, I felt very teenage. I felt single and free,
and I guess this made me more susceptible. Steve was also
twenty, and he was such a contrast, such a novelty. Whereas
John was my mentor, my teacher, my boss, and my husband,
Steve was just fun. We listened to records together, and he
played me a demo of a new single, "Anyone Who Had a
Heart." A great turn-on. He was very close to Phil Spector,
humorous, hip, and tuned into a whole new record scene,
and apart from all this music stuff, he was very attractive.
Next thing we knew, we were deep into an affair. I was
going back to New York and so was he, but we were going
to keep this quiet.
When we arrived back East, however, I just couldn't
bear the tension, the separation from Steve. It was very hard
to live out this lie with John, not because of any pain from
my conscience but because of John's suspicions. He didn't
know about Steve; he just knew something was going on.
There was a lot of questioning, a lot of denials. I certainly
wasn't going to tell John about Steve. Marika, however, was,
and she said that if I couldn't, she would. I wouldn't, and she
did. Jesus! Obviously, she didn't approve.
I left John and took a room on Second Avenue as a
boarder, just a small room, but it allowed me to hide out
from John and to see Steve. I wasn't having a bad time. In
fact it very stimulating, and I met a lot of rock 'n' roll
was all
people, including writers Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, and

Carol King and her husband, Gerry Goffin. Steve's family
didn't approve of this affair any more than Marika did. How
could they? We had intended to move into an apartment in
Brooklyn Heights, but Steve's uncle and the rest of his family
interfered. "She's married," they said. "You can't just move in
with a woman who's having an off week with her husband!"
There was a blinding snowstorm in Greenwich Village that
winter. I remember talking through this thing with Steve. I
wanted to kill him for not being able to live up to all the talk.
I saw him as a weak boy, still just a student, really. Not a
man.
Now decided I didn't love Steve after all. One thing I
I
always loved about John, my mind rambled on: Even though

Susie had hated him for the divorce and me and everything
else, and even though his mother would always be a strong
figure in his life and disapprove of John's relationship with
me, no one ever told J. P. what to do. He was a man.
Well, now that I couldn't have Steve, I had to face this
other reality, that I no longer had John either. It was a pretty
little mess I had gotten myself into. I went to the apartment
John now had on Charles Street in the Village and said,

"John. I made a mistake."
He looked at me. "I'm just leaving for the road. Are you
ready to go with me now?"
I said I was, and we left for the airport. He was very
good about it. The subject of Steve was never raised again.
After all, I was only nineteen and pretty irrational, feisty, and
adventurous. He took it in stride for all those reasons and

wrote the song "Go Where You Wanna Go" and that was
it. That song was inspired by my romance with Steve. It
was to say, do what you want to do where you want to do it and

with whomever. It was not always going to be as easy as
that. A song was a song, and real life was different.
Kennedy's torch had passed to a new generation, born
in this century, and it was giving off a lot of heat. There
was a real good dose of new liberalism in domestic affairs,
though there were very unpleasant encounters abroad. The
Bay of Pigs (whatever the CIA involvement) had been
authorized by Kennedy, and the Cuban missile crisis had
almost caused a war. I remember John and me on Daytona
Beach, Florida, watching a flotilla steaming past on the
—
horizon we were amazed to realize just how close the scare
was. I'd have had to be very insensitive not to pick up some
realities outside our life during that period, and I never did
forget that long convoy of ships headed south. When Kennedy
was shot, I, like everyone else I knew, was shattered. Folk

music changed in those late-Kennedy, early-Johnson years.
It had always been political, but there was now a hope that it
really would change things outside itself.

By late in 1963 it was clear that the Journeymen, though
a tried and proved and contented group, were not the
same anymore. They were beginning to break up. They
weren't the three musketeers of old any longer. I had begun
to travel with them between modeling jobs, and soon I was
being flown everywhere with them. They decided to break
up before they really fell out. Folk music lost a great group.
The times they were a'changing, all over America, in many,
many ways.
It was 1964. I had been doing some good modeling, and
Kayser Roth now offered me a very good teenage-lingerie

contract for $700 a week. I was very excited about it and
couldn't understand why John wasn't able to share my
excitement. Such a lot of money! "I don't want you to sign
with Kayser Roth," he said one night as we were driving
through the Holland Tunnel. "I want you to join a group I'm
putting together. We'll make two thirds of the money, and
that's a good deal for both of us —
together." I wasn't so sure
about this. "Look. We spend a fortune on airfares as it is," he
said. "Better to put it into the business, as an expense, and
earn money. I guarantee you'll make more money singing
than modeling." Promise? "I promise." So, on the basis of
simple greed, I got into the music business. I had had a good
choice, and I made my decision.
was another turning point. We went to Sausalito,
It
rented a house, and put our group together with Marshall

Brickman from the Terriers. I studied with Judy Davis, their
old vocal coach. I practiced and practiced, running up and
down the scales ("Many men and many women mining many
mines ." Up a note. "Many men and many women mining
. .
many mines ."), and we rehearsed and rehearsed as a

. .
group. Strictly a folk group. There was no rock 'n' roll,

though there was no prejudice either. We were just musically
strict in our repertoire — traditional early English ballads.
"One Morning in May" and Dylan's "Roll Turn Spin" and

"Guantanamera" and "Mrs. McGrath" and those songs. The
three of us were now the New Journeymen: Michelle Gilliam,
Marshall Brickman, and the leader, John Phillips. Not a
singer among us, really, and I don't think we were very
good, but we all had something, and we seemed right
together. I went to Saks Fifth Avenue in San Francisco and
bought a red crepe dress with big pleated sleeves, and I
wore high heels and had my hair in a flip. The guys wore
suits, of course. We looked like the most American apple-pie
group you ever saw. Marshall was a fantastic banjo player,

no question about that. Years later he was to record the
"Dueling Banjos" album with Eric Weissberg for the sound-
track of the movie Deliverance.
Now we needed to find out if it would work. We
opened the University of South Carolina Homecoming and
went on to open for Bill Cosby at the Shoreham Hotel in
Washington, D.C. I was scared to death at that Homecoming
show, and the others were nervous, but the audience loved
us. They were so drunk that everything was fine by them.
They roared and cheered and gave us an enormous shot of
confidence. After that first time on stage, I felt a little
better. That fear! I never again felt quite as scared as be-
fore that Homecoming, the first song, the first note of the
first song, or even the first word of our introduction. But
let'snot pretend! We were not yet very good. As for stage
fright, Inever did get over that and would many times have
to be dragged on stage, holding my side from pain, dying!
But John would gently prod, bolster, and praise and give me
courage. This was his specialty. He gave the confidence to
do more than I had dreamed. He gave the little girl from
Silverlake dimension.
With Kennedy's death a cloud had settled over all of the
United States. Lyndon Baines Johnson was not our idea of a
charismatic leader, and what in JFK had seemed like a cru-
sade for freedom in Southeast Asia now began to look very
like bullying. The war in Vietnam, North versus South,
Communism against the Free World "freedom" being
—
based, as usual, on American values — was now escalating in

domestic terms, and it brought with it the buds that would
soon flower into the huge conflict between Us and Them,
peace marches, flag-burning, head-cracking and draft-dodg- —
ing. Here now was the Draft, that great negative symbol of
the sixties, just as potent and disruptive as anything else that
marks that exotic decade. The Draft was something to be
avoided. Though in other times, before and maybe since, it
would have been a matter for widespread national shame,
draft-dodging was now a perfectly legitimate exercise in per-
sonal freedom and a real test of ingenuity and good old
American know-how. A friend of ours in the Village, whom
we shall call Sheldon, had not spent years devoting himself
to his music and putting his own band together only to see
himself become a soldier, and so, when he received notice
that he would be drafted, he took the first logical step
of those times and sought a candidate for the first exemp-
tion— a bride. Later the laws would be tightened up, and
children would be needed to protect a young man from
the draft. Russell, my dear sister, was to furnish Sheldon
with all the exemptions he needed to keep on trucking with
the New Journeymen.
Sheldon did have a girlfriend that he was very much in
love with, but he didn't know whether they should get mar-
ried at that time.
I one thing
said, "There's only to do. You should ask my
sister if shell marry you for, oh . . . say, five thousand
dollars?"
Sheldon said, "Do you think?"
Try her, I said. Ask her.
Russell was living with her boyfriend Peter Pilafian in
Maine. I called her and said, "Look. Our friend Sheldon's got a
big problem. Sheldon has to get married to get out of the draft.
Will you marry him? He'll give you five thousand dollars." She
talked to Peter about it, and he thought it was a great idea.
They could really use the money. So Russell came down from
Maine to New York, and we drove to Washington, where
Sheldon and Russ were married by a justice of the peace. It was
—
a crazy wedding. The couple, who had never met each other
before and would never have any relationship, were pro-
nounced over by a guy with a huge voice who intoned the cere-
mony as if he were in a cathedral rather than a very small room.
—
During the silences pregnant, as may be supposed, given the
total absence of a relationship or any spirituality in this affair
a solitary beer can could be heard rolling across the uneven
floor. The air was redolent with hysteria, and John, some-
where in the ceremony recalling his failure to settle some
debt or other in this very place, spent a lot of time conceal-
ing himself behind a screen, emerging only briefly to say his
piece as witness. No way to start a marriage, but after all, it
was simply a matter of convenience. And that it was for
Sheldon, very convenient. He arranged payments by install-
—
ments not quite what Russell had had in mind when the
—
captivating sum of $5,000 was mentioned and she, for her
part, had two children with Peter Pilafian, both of whom
were "claimed" by Sheldon for draft points. Such a sixties
story. It was repeated tens of thousands of times, maybe
many more than that, in the terrible time of the Vietnam
war. Everyone in the "youth culture" of those days knew
people who were making such marriages. Maybe some of
them even worked out as relationships, though somehow I
doubt it. At any rate, Peter and Russell never married they —
couldn't because she was married to Sheldon but they —
were together for a long time and had these two lovely chil-
dren and to this day remain ever the best of friends.
With the group locked in, safe and secure as a traveling
unit free from Uncle Sam, we were free to keep on truckm'
on the folk circuit. We were feeling as radical as anyone and
were happy to be a part of this mini- American drama. We were
on the Southern lap of the great Hootenanny tour, traveling
on a bus with other performers including Glen Yarborough, Joe
Mapes, and the Halifax Three, a group that featured a tenor
named Denny Doherty. We arrived in Alabama, and after the
bus had pulled in to the park, two black men in suits ap-
proached us. John, the natural leader in any situation,
approached the two men, who told him they were from the
NAACP and formally asked that the show be canceled. "The

promoters are refusing to sell tickets to colored people."
Apparently such a situation was commonplace. Everyone,
with John as our leader, refused to do the show. We canceled
there and then and decided unanimously to do a free concert
at the black college instead.
It was during our visit to the black college that I realized
how intense the civil rights movement had become. When
we arrived on campus, I noticed students singly and in
groups all over the place looking very watchful and holding
loaded shotguns. There were armed kids stationed every
hundred feet or so. I asked our host what it was all for. "Your
protection," he said. Our protection? I was shocked. That
concert stands out clearly in my memory. At the end, after
everyone had done their individual sets, we all joined hands
on stage and sang "We Shall Overcome." Everyone in the hall
joined in, and I was really overwhelmed by the spiritual bond
I felt with these people. Then we were put back into the bus,
and several cars escorted us to the county line. "See you
again." Right on . . .
When we got to the next town, we saw stretched across

the road a band of horrible rednecks swinging baseball bats.
They were holding the bus up, hitting it. They were real
nasty people, and they scared the hell out of me. Bang! A
dent in this side, two on the other side. Bang! Bang! Blows
against the windows. What if they stoned us? "Get out of
town!" they shouted. Nothing could have kept us in town.
But would they let us out? They would. We drove away, out
of town, and out of the South. I had never been exposed to any-
thing like this before. In America, the home of the brave, the
land of the free? Yes. This was my introduction to the South.
I said to John, "I'm writing to Governor Wallace abcut this.
It's not right. It's against the Constitution."
John laughed. "You'll never get a reply."

Iwrote a letter anyway, because though I had heard
legends about segregated drinking fountains and rest rooms,
I had never believed them till now. It had always been
impossible to accept that such things persisted so long after

Reconstruction in this land of freedom and justice for all, etc.
Oh, yeah . . . John was right — I didn't get a reply. And that
was a further revelation — not at all what I had been raised to
expect of the United States of America!
Yet something good did come out of that trip: our intro-
duction to Canadian Denny Doherty of the Halifax Three.
We all thought Denny was quite a card, and he certainly sang
beautifully, so that when, after the tour, Marshall said he
wanted out, to go to New York to be a writer, we put word
out that we were looking for Denny Doherty. "If you find
—
him, tell him to call us" that sort of message on the jungle
drums in the Village. We couldn't understand why Marshall
would want to be a writer when we were all having such a
good time making a small reputation and quite good money,
and I think we all laughed up our sleeves, but there it is. He
did become a writer, and producer of The Dick Cavett Show,
and later he joined up with Woody Allen, and made a lot of
money and quite a name.
Before moving to the apartment in Charles Street in the
Village, John and I had stayed at the Earl Hotel in the Vil-
lage, and it was there that we had written "California
Dreamin'" two years before. It was John's way to walk
around with his guitar strapped to him and make up little
tunes; often I would go to bed, have a night's sleep, and wake
up to find him still strapped to the guitar. Sometimes there
would be a song, and sometimes there wouldn't. "All the
leaves are brown and the sky is grey ."He already had . .
much of the song by the time he woke me that morning. It

was four a.m., but he was wide awake with the "upper" he'd
taken. He said, "Listen, you have to help me finish this song,
Mich. Help me, and you'll thank me for this some day." Well,
I got up, and we finished the song. "I've been for a walk on a
winter's day. I'd be safe and warm if I was in LA. California

dreamin', on such a winter's day ..." I do make a point of
trying to thank him for it every now and again. We did, do
still, share publishing on "California Dreamin'" and every
other song we wrote together. No matter how great or small

my individual part was in the writing, it was a share.
Well, "California Dreamin'" was was

a great song. It
one of those songs, like, "Dammit, I don't want to be boxed in

to what my life has to offer. I'm going to change it. The only
one who can change it is me." I can't tell you just how many
people I've met since who say, sincerely, that their whole life
was changed when they heard "California Dreamin'"! They
say things like: "I used to be an accountant in the East. Then
I heard 'California Dreamin" and left my job, my wife, and
those long winters of greyness in work and all around, and now
I'm VP of Elektra. .
." It was one of those songs that didn't
.
just reflect what was going on; it gave impetus to change, to

turn things around. "Hell, shit, man," some poet would say to
us, "I've watched the Rose Bowl on television so many times.
Now I'm going to go out and see it for myself. I'm going
after the sun. What am I doing with my life, wasting it in this
dumb job in this drab place?" The song was written long
before anything happened to it, and we moved on to other
it was to change everything for John and me and
things, but
two others who were to become part of it for all time:
for the
Denny Doherty and his friend Cass Elliott.
CHAPTER 3
LEAVE THE
FOLK MUSIC
BEHIND
ohn and I were very happy
j inGreenwich Village in the
early sixties. I think that was the best of all possible times for
both of us. The Village was in very great period, and it
its
was such fun to walk around it, in complete safety. We

seemed to be living a romantic, charmed life in our apart-
ment on Charles Street. Somehow John and I were more
considerate to each other there than we ever had been or
would be again. We would wake up in a good mood, and
one of us would say, "This is your day today, you can have it
all," whatever "it" was, and there was so much pleasure in
simple things, like just going to a little Italian restaurant or

buying pastries and drinking coffee and joining in the street
life that was so abundant. The women's prison was still open
then, and the girls would shout to friends and passers-by.

—
The Village so full of people being nice to each other.
There were lots of people around who were "names" or
who became so, and there were others, unknown, who
just were. Everyone was friendly, whatever the state of
49
their fortunes. Somehow there was no upmarket or down-

market then. It was just the Village, and Joan Baez was there,
and Peter, Paul and Mary and the Limeliters, John Sebastian,
and Jim McGuinn, and Bob Dylan. We went to Gerde's Folk
City, the Bitter End, the Night Owl, the Dugout, and, oh,
lots of other places. We moved from Charles Street in the
hip and charming West Village to Seventh Street and
Avenue D on the then unfashionable East Side, to a beau-
tiful apartment with a fireplace in the bedroom and a fire-
place in the den. People were welcome to hang out if they
were pleasant, and most everybody was. The ambience
was just seedy enough to be comfortable, seedy in a way
you would want it to be seedy. This was before hippies;
this was Bohemia. John Sebastian of the Lovin' Spoonful
came around one evening, and while we sat talking, he said
he had a song he'd like us to hear. He said he was going on to
Los Angeles to record it for some label called Kama Sutra. It
was "Do You Believe in Magic?" and it was no folk song, but
then John, though known as a folk singer, had a wide musical
background. "Do You Believe in Magic?" was in some inde-
finable way, to my ears anyway, reminiscent of hits from the
very early sixties. It did have great originality and a rock
beat. I said, "John, I believe youve got a hit," and he said, "I
believe I have." John had been a member of the Mugwumps;
another had been Cass Elliott, and another had been Denny
Doherty, formerly of the Halifax Three.
Dennis Doherty, one of five children of Marie and Den-
nis Doherty senior, was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Can-
ada, on November 29, 1940. He had three sisters, Frances,
Joan, and Denise, and a brother, Joseph. They were, as the
names imply, of Irish stock. Dennis, always known as Denny
(Little Denny at first, as his father was Big Denny) went to
two Catholic schools, Alexander McKay and St. Patrick's
High, in Halifax. He recalls without bitterness that he was
whipped through both of them and left when the welts went
down. In 1956, part-timing, he joined a rock 'ri roll band, the
Hepsters, playing the Halifax Naval Club (contributing
background music for the fights, he would say), and in 1960
he joined a good folk group called first the Colonials, then

the Halifax Three, which of course is how we met him on the
Southern lap of the Hootenanny tour. After leaving school he
had worked as a salesman of ladies' lingerie and as a pawn-
broker's assistant for three years, hearing sufficient "hard
times" tales to prepare him for though he had an easy
life,
and very real charm that always drew people to him.

Leaving Halifax with the Halifax Three, he proceeded
via Montreal and Toronto to New York. There he eventually
joined the Mugwumps, that great little group with Sebastian,
Jimmy Hendricks, Zal Yanovsky, and Cass Elliott. Man-
aged by Ron Silver and Bob Covallo, they performed at
The Shadows in D.C.
The Mugwumps were not only a good, fun group, both
in terms of their music and their personality; they also, like
many other good bands (through all of popular music from
the jazz age to the present day), sent their members out to
link up with other people to form new and even more suc-
cessful aggregates. Although they didn't last long only from —
—
early '63 to late '63 the Mugwumps were the breeding
ground for future stars. Attractive and musically demanding
enough to be a magnet for the brightest people around, such
groups broke up when more interesting careers beckoned.
The Mugwumps didn't make many records, but they became
legendary after they had broken up. They were a cult after
the event.
When Denny left the Mugwumps, he visited us at our
"palace in the slums" on Seventh and D, with Oriental rugs
and chandeliers on dimmers, where John almost imme-
diately, if casually, had him start singing. John wanted to
hear whether he could slip into our vocal pattern as a much-
needed tenor. We
decided after only one day of rehearsal
that we would join together in a group of three: John,
Denny, and me. It just made such a difference, having this
lovely tenor voice. (Such a fox, too, though I was not con-
necting yet.) That beautiful voice was the strength of our
new friend at that time. All of a sudden my seemingly very
light soprano had a place in the group, with Denny's tenor
and John's baritone. Now we all had parts we could sing in
various registers, and sounded pretty good. We were sing-

it
ing the same material we had sung with Marshall, but now it
sounded quite complete, so we took to the road under the
agenting of the General Artists Corporation, GAC, which
was one of the very big ones of those times. I began to have
a proper sense of a musical place in the group. We had not
been at all bad with Marshall, but this, now, was a real good
feeling. I felt there might be a Voice in me. Joan Baez was
the female star of the Village, with Judy Collins coming
along very well, too. Judy was my heroine. I thought, if I
could sing like anyone, I'd like to sing like Judy Collins. I still
say that. I looked up to her so much.
Now we were hitting the road in orderly fashion, with
our bennies, our wine, and our beer. We had our pharma-
ceuticals sent from Tijuana, Mexico, by our good friend Eric
Hord. He would put "Doctor Hord" over his return address,
so "the Doctor" he became, and he never lost the nickname.
Later he would become very much a part of our lives. Just
—
now we were three John, Denny, and Michelle but there —
was an unseen guest at the feast, for every night, wherever
we went with Denny, John and I would look around to find
him closeted on the telephone, locked in conversation with
Cass Elliott, his dearest and closest friend. It was coming up
to January 1965, and the phone calls intrigued us. Was it
romance? No, it wasn't romance. Well, what was it? Just
Cass and me. That's what it is. Cass is oh
. . well, she's
. . . .
my best friend. How and why, we'd just have to find out.
She had been very successful with groups, we knew that.
People talked of her with affection and some awe, and she
was very well known around the Village. The rest we would
learn by and by.
One night in January 1965 my sister, Russell, and Peter
Pilafian, came by the apartment to sit around with John,
Denny, and me. It was a special occasion. We had with
us our first Beatles album. Pointless to ask where we had
been during the first enormous explosion: invasion, Beatle-
mania, Liverpool sound, all of that. 1 don't know how
we missed it. We had been elsewhere, somewhere, every-

where, doing our own thing, through all those changes, on
the road as the New Journeymen, with Marshall and then
with Denny, singing our own songs, working through the cir-
cuit. Now, however, we had the time and the album and the
headphones and the inclination. We also had Stewart Reed,
our local pot supplier, come over with some good marijuana,
and he brought with him news of "something new" called
LSD 25. Would we like to try it? We said, as if it made any
difference, "Let's look at it," and there were little sugar
cubes, just sugar cubes, nothing else to see. "Wanna try it?"
Yeah. So we each ate a sugar cube.
It was early in the evening, warm inside, cold outside,
winter in New York. About forty-five minutes had gone by,

and we were waiting for this wonder drug to hit, all of us. I
had to do some shopping, so I went to the pharmacy on the
corner and came back. Still nothing. What is this? Had we been
mistaken? Then there was a knock at the door, unnaturally
loud. went to the door, and in the instant that the drug struck,
I
in the moment I realized that something very strange was hap-

pening, in that dawn of a new time, I saw Cass Elliott in
the doorway. Of course it was Cass, who else could it be?
My mind was going wild. This drug came, and the first vision I
had was this woman in her wide white pleated skirt, her white
boots, her pink angora sweater, lashes out to here, and her
hair in a big flip.
I "You must be Cass," and she agreed that she was.
said,
"Hi, I'm Michelle. Listen, we've just taken some LSD 25. Do
you want to try some?"
She said, "Yeah, sure."
So that was it. The first time I had ever taken LSD was
the first time I met Cass, and it was the first time any of us
had done such a thing, and she was the most incredible "trip"
I had ever known or would know. A real first. Such anima-
tion! I remember getting carried away with the expressive-

ness of her face and with the way she told stories. Such
stories! It was instant romance between me and Cass. She was
fabulous. She told me all those tales . . . well, about being raped
at knife-point in Florida, for one,and about raping someone

herself, as a joke. Itwas impossible to know whether she was
telling the truth. For her it was the story that counted. She
was five years older than I, and the first girlfriend of my
adult life. From the time I went to high school, I had not had
this sort of friend, a woman friend who was smart. She was
—
very streetwise oh, very. She seemed to know an awful lot,
and she fascinated me. I loved the feeling of being around
her. I envied her freedom. She always wanted me to be more
independent of John; she didn't want him to control me.
"You don't have to do it because John says so," she'd tell me.
Remember, at this time I didn't blink without John's permis-
sion. When I would go out together, shopping or
Cass and
something, it breaking away from John. But the best
was like
thing about Cass was that in a society obsessed with looks,
she —
was fat cheerfully, superbly, willingly fat.
The LSD 25, the acid, was working wonders with our
visions —
sugar plums danced on our eyelids. And we heard,
we heard the Beatles for the first time. We had stereo phones,
two sets of them, and we were just dumbfounded with the
music of the Beatles: the energy and those tunes, and most
important, they could sing. In thatmoment we knew that
we, this group of people, whoever we were or would
become, were going to make a transition in our music. We
had to. I was just amazed that this new sound had been
going on for some time because either I had not heard the
Beatles, or, if I had heard them, I had not appreciated what
or where they were at. Now I did, and so did the others,
John, Denny, and Cass. All.
It was a long night, that amazing meeting of acid, Cass,
Beatles, family, friends by candlelight in New York. As a

quirky game we played something we called "Birds in a
Cage." Put a candle inside a big bird cage, take the cage into
the middle of the room: We were the birds in the cage, and
John was the cat. The bars of the cage were illuminated on
the walls, and John, the cat, would approach the cage. If you
just looked, even glanced, at the walls, it would scare you to
death. Some game! We nearly laughed ourselves sick. It was
—
CALIFORNIA DREAM1N' 55
wonderful. was six or seven in the morning before all this

It
was over, and even then nothing was quite over; we were
transformed, in some way we couldn't explain. Our minds
were broader. Falseness seemed even more apparent now,
yet we felt apart from it, protected. Symbolism seemed
to be everywhere, colors more vivid, nature more joy-
ful, sadness more poignant than before. Our conscious-
ness was heightened; the laughter that had carried us

through the night wasn't the mindless hysteria of drink or
pills but some sort of cleansing, once-and-for-all change.
That was it; we were changed.

. . .
Cass was certainly in on this new life we saw ahead. It

wasn't only our perception of music that had changed; we
were looking afresh at the whole of our environment and
spirit. She was caught in cosmic drift with the three of us
we were together, in the right place at the right time. But

then Cass had always had a determination to move things, to
make a mark, though not, at first, in music. Her first ambi-
tion was to be a doctor.
—
Cassandra Elliott real name, Ellen Naomi Cohen was —
born September 19, 1941, in Baltimore, Maryland, to Bess
and Philip Cohen. Her father was in the food-service busi-
ness, and the family moved around a lot, using buses con-
verted into kitchens to provide food for construction
workers. A second daughter, Leah, was born in 1948, and it
was around this time, her family recalls, that Cass began to
gain weight, perhaps in reaction to the removal of her status
as an only and much-adored child. She was still loved but no
longer the sole object of affection. The family moved to
Alexandria for the birth of a brother, Joey, in 1951, and Cass
attended school in Washington, D.C., Alexandria, or Balti-
more, depending on where the business took them. In the
summer between junior and senior high, she landed the part
of the maid in The Boy Friend when a friend she was driving
to and from a summer Straw Hat theater recommended her
as a replacement for an actress who had fallen sick and had
no understudy. Too good a story to be true? Sure, but true
anyway. Cass knew all the dialogue; she was word-perfect,
.
and the verdict was though she had gone on "cold,"

that
without preparation, she was a sensation. And having heard
the first wonderful sound of applause, she dropped out of
high school a few weeks before graduation, to her mother's
dismay, and went off to New York. Her father was more
pragmatic. "Let her go; she'll be back in a couple of weeks."
But she wasn't back in a couple of weeks. Instead she called to
say she had a job singing in the Village at the Showplace, and
she hadn't even had to sleep with anyone to get it. Indeed,
she said, no one had even asked her to. From there she went
on to The Music Man with Forrest Tucker. After a spell on
the road, well pleased with herself, she went back home and
enrolled at American University in Washington, D.C., where,
on the basis of very high test results, she was accepted
despite her lack of recent grades. Cass was always smart; in
high school she had an IQ of more than 165.
During that phase at college she met Tim Rose and they
sang together. They picked up James Hendricks somewhere
around Omaha, and together they formed the Big Three and
recorded for Warner Brothers. Cass and Jimmy then joined
with Denny Doherty, John Sebastian, and Zal Yanovsky to be
the Mugwumps. It was in the Mugwumps that Cass and
Denny became inseparable. John and Zal formed the Lovin'
Spoonful, and Denny and Cass in their separate time slots
joined us, to become what? Well, at first, vacationers
. . . . .
Soon after the first great acid trip, we decided we had to

go away into the sun: John, Denny and I, Russelland Peter
Pilafian, the Doctor and his girlfriend, Nadeene, Laura
Mackenzie (then aged five), and in time, others. The New
Journeymen had been busy, traveling for a whole season,
September through January, so it wasn't really irresponsible
of us to go away, though even if it had been reckless, we'd
probably have done it anyway, the mood we were in. Why the
hell not? A secretary at GAC suggested we should go to the
Virgin Islands. I was really tired and thought it a great idea. We
were on the next flight to Charlotte Amalie, the capital, on
the island of St. Thomas. We found the Grandview Hotel
perched on one side of a mountain. It was two hundred years
old, a colonial retreat converted by Luis and Bianca, with

whom we quickly became very friendly. For ten days that
seemed like ten years, at four o'clock in the afternoon, we
gathered garden, where the purring blender produced
in the
the most beautiful coconut daquiris in heaven. The decision
was inevitable; we would return briefly to New York to
complete a couple of dates, already scheduled and unavoid-
able, and then come back to the Virgins and settle on the
island of St. John, which John had smartly scouted during
our ten days at Charlotte Amalie. The plan was to have a
sabbatical, throw off all our cares and woes and winter
pallor. Everyone was invited, including my new dog, Maud,
a little primped-up Manhattan lady, a replacement for Pio.
So the great adventure began. It was, though there was
then no sense of the phrase, "very sixties'': everyone aboard
with no end in view, because why the hell not? We would
live for the day, drink, smoke pot, take acid, play guitars,
sing, hang out, and make love.
We had a few thousand dollars; John and I were never
poor in those days. John had been making a very good
living, and by the time I was earning too, we had quite a lot
coming in. But there was something else: We knew we were
going to do well. John for his part had always known that,
—
and I well, I was basically fearless. We felt we had plenty
of time. "California Dreamin"' had been written, and "Go
Where You Wanna Go," and the first great Listening to the
Beatles had shown us that (though maybe this wasn't articu-
lated) we were going to develop a style. We knew that we
were taking the sabbatical for a reason. For now it was John,
Denny, and Michelle. John knew he could write commercial
music, and if there was no one around right now who could
do it justice, then there was plenty of time. All we needed
was a little reindoctrination to learn and rethink a few musi-
cal ideas.
We up camp in tents on the beach on St. John island.
set
It wasn't hippie heaven then, and it wasn't crowded with
tourists. The world was still very big, with lots of secret
places, in the early-to-mid-sixties. The Invasion of Bulging
Westerners by jumbo jet with jumbo burgers and jumbo

pocketbooks had not yet begun. It was another world from
today, and I loved every minute of it, young and free under
the sun, clear-eyed and bronzed and well loved. I did feel so
good, and hand in hand by the edge of the sand, we danced
by the light of the moon, the moon: John's moon, Denny's
moon, my moon, and then one afternoon . . .
"I don't believe my fuckin' eyes," said Denny as, lobster-

red, he shaded his eyes and looked at a short, wide figure
with pale skin approaching, obviously just in from New
York. "It's Cass!" Everyone was so delighted to see her. She
arrived penniless, having had her pockets picked, but she . . .
did have a vial of liquid acid with her. This was just what we
needed. Her band had broken up. She had decided that maybe
we were on the right track. Maybe living in a commune in the
Virgin Islands didn't seem so bad, and, after all, she was
missing Denny dreadfully.
In Cass's absence, and after our first meeting, I had
begun to see her Denny in a different light. On that first
glowing night in New York on the great acid trip with the
Beatles' first album, she had gone on and on about Denny. I
had never thought of Denny in sexual terms before, and to
hear him so described by Cass was very interesting. She told
me in manyparaphrases how much she loved this guy,
wanted him, and she said that though they had never made
love, they did "make out." The relationship remained uncon-
summated because was some curious inhibition that set
there
up all sorts of complications, stresses, and tensions with
which, it seemed, they were by no means uncomfortable.
That was their relationship, and even if it was no business of
mine, well, I did know about it and wondered greatly at it.
The sexual element was always there. She allowed it to go
on, and he perpetuated it, always just that incredible titilla-
tion going on and on and around and around.
During Cass's absence, in those first heavenly weeks on
the beach under the clear skies and palm trees, Denny and I
had begun the most enormous flirtation, starting by looking
at each other through the old vines in our hideaways. After
that we spent every breathing moment together. My sister

was cooking for everyone, John was absorbed in music, and
Denny and I were intensely close. We were in dreamland
with the beautiful coconut daquiris and the beautiful mari-
juana. I don't think John ever suspected anything when I sat
on Denny's lap, my skin against his; he was a handsome boy
then, with a lovely body and the insolent charm and features
of a young Errol Flynn. John was blind to the footsie being
played for hours on end while we rehearsed our songs, John
allocating the vocal parts with that enormous concentration
and energy that made our sounds so distinctive. Denny and I
were entwined in a wild jungle flirtation, and when Cass
arrived to provide an additional hazard on our reckless
course, the romance intensified.
Now the jungle drums beat a little louder. John said one
day, "We have to work. WeVe run out of money. All we
have left to live on is Michelle's American Express Card."
We moved from the tents to Charlotte Amalie. Where to earn
money? We looked up contacts. Some had come on trips
with us. Every full moon we rented a seagoing trimaran,
dropped some acid,and went out into the Caribbean for
five or six hours. They were ecstatic trips. Just us and the
—
crew, the four of us John, Denny, Cass, and me hanging —
on to nets slung between the three hulls, dipping us in and
out of the sea, which was always warm and friendly. As I
say, by renting boats and just generally hanging out, we had
been befriended by some good people, and John and Denny
felt comfortable enough around Charlotte Amalie to drop in
on a good-natured old sea dog named Duffy who had pitched
up in the Virgin Islands and was now the owner and operator
of a ten-room boardinghouse. Our entire encampment moved
off the beach and flooded into Duffy's guesthouse.
He built us a stage and said he wanted to have live
music all the time at his place. "To give next door some
competition." So the four of us rehearsed and rehearsed so
that we would be good enough to make the right sounds.
John was giving us the parts with terrific skill and intuition.
Of this period Life magazine said much later: "They came to
know every nuance of each other's voice and style. All

except Michelle were professional musicians and given to
experimentation. Soon John was blending his baritone with
the lower registers of Denny's tenor to produce a vibrato dif-
ferent in quality to either voice alone. Cass's forceful con-
tralto, charged by her near-200 lb. bulk, was added to
Michelle's delicate lyric soprano. They then arranged John's
music to suit their style and taste as they went along. They
sang the way jazzmen jam, because what else is there?"
That is what we did. There was also a quaint difference
in our staging because Cass, in spite of our rehearsals
together, maintained that she would never appear on stage
with me; she would not allow an audience to make "the
obvious" (physical) distinction between us. Instead she
decided to be a waitress. The set was finally built, and the
place looked just great. Peter Pilafian was now our drummer,
and Eric Hord, the Doctor, was playing lead guitar. John
was playing guitar, and Denny was on bass, and in our tran-
sition to becoming the local attraction, we had gone electric.
A first for us. I was on tambourine, and Cass was on tables,
waiting, waiting. She sang the fourth part from the back of
the room or the kitchen or wherever she was waitressing.
We'd be standing up there, three of us in the front line, the
musicians in back, and Cass would be standing way over
wherever, and I'm sure no one could quite understand what
was going on, though in our world, within the colony of
trippers we had become, it had a proper place, this three-
—
and-one relationship in song and in life outside song, as
it would always be in one or another permutation of
people ... at first Cass and the rest of us; later there would
be other groupings.
One thing is certain: In historical terms, Duffy was the
first man to have John, Denny, Cass, and Michelle singing
for their supper on his premises, even if one of them was

masquerading as a waitress. It had begun. Back in Incorpo-
rated America (the U.S. Virgin Islands were known as unin-
corporated territory) there were unmistakable sounds of suc-
cess coming from our dearest friends in music. I remember
hearing "Mister Tambourine Man" and saying, "Shit, man,

McGuinn's got a hit." Then we were hearing "Do You
Believe in Magic?" Now the Spoonful had their hit. And
McGuire — him, too. We were hearing all this news coming
out from the Coast, from California, where the Dreamin' was
inspired. Oh, but Duffy was so good-natured, and the living
was easy. Even if our capital had run out, our luck hadn't
and wouldn't for a long, long time, or so we believed. Duffy
thought we were the best thing to come along since Bing
Crosby. He was in his fifties and had a good intellect; he
could talk sense to John, if that was what the traffic would
allow, and he wasn't averse to expanding his mind.
Denny and I were still flirting madly, and it was getting
to the point where something would have to be done. It
wasn't yet out of hand, but . We took some LSD to the
. .
docks, a good grimy setting for new revelations, and Denny

—
decided to jump into the water no longer that beautiful
Caribbean but the filmy grime of a harbor slicked with oil.
Attracted by the bizarre notion that it would be good in
there ("Come on in, the water's fine!"), I, too, jumped in,
and now we were both in the water, excited, uncaring, ob-
viously out of our heads but protected by our stars, somehow
out of danger. In truth, God alone knows what was going on. I
remember seeing John and Cass sitting on a bench watching us
splash around. They said, "We're going back," and did. Denny
and I waved them away, and we came out of the water.
Denny's friends, the locals, were hanging out on the dock. They
all liked him. They admired his sense of adventure and felt
comfortable with his openness. Denny had a great attitude.

He was welcome wherever he went, even at that hour of the
morning. It was late as we got into Creeque Alley, where
Duffy's was. In the shadows Denny grabbed me by the arm
and, pushing me against the wall, came close, right up
against me, and said, "I'm going to kiss you." He gave
me a great big romantic wet kiss, and we never mentioned it
again. On we went, back to Duffy's and to bed, he to Cass
and me to John.
A couple of days later I decided to have a big heart to
heart with John, and I told him that I thought we two, John
and I,should separate our living accommodation from that

of Cass and Denny because, "Frankly, John, I feel a very
strong attraction to Denny, and I think it's unhealthy for us
all to live together and all that. What do you think?"
. . .
"Don't be ridiculous," said John. "Denny has no interest

in you, Mich." And that was that. Nothing more was said,
and nothing more was done. Now the flirtation really
bloomed and became Romance, magazine-style. I was angry
with John for not taking it seriously. I felt that if that was the
—
way he saw it "Denny has no interest in you" and "Don't be
—
ridiculous" then what difference did it make? Tension was
rising, adventure was looming in a new guise: We were very,
very short of money, and the foursome was no longer so neat
and presentable. We went one morning to a fabric shop in
Charlotte Amalie to get some material for identical little
shirts for our stage show. I presented my American Express

Card, and they cut up that more-precious-than-diamonds
little green plastic rectangle into two cute pieces, right there
in front of me. It was was all we were

a terrible sight. That
living off. It was obviously a Seriously Wanted Card, with its
number circulated to all outlets. Cruel and humbling, we
thought, as we left not only without our fabric but also with-
out our wherewithal.
Nothing much was going We
had turned in our
right.
Hondas for little Yamaha 80s, two of them, and later that
morning I drove into town and a big cop stopped me and
said, "Why didn't you stop early this morning when I told
you to stop? You were here this morning, don't tell me you
weren't. I told you to stop and you didn't stop."
"You must have me mixed up with somebody else," I
said. "This is the first time I've been out today." There was a
noisy scene.
"You have no plates," he said. "You are under arrest,
miss." He dragged me off to an old prison, built in the 1700s,
where I was soon wailing and howling like in the old Cole
Station in Los Angeles. I never enjoyed being arrested, and I
was always innocent. I had to go to court. I was charged
with two offenses. The first was driving without plates, to

which I pleaded guilty and was fined. The second, trumped
up, was for disturbing the peace. I pleaded not guilty, was
not guilty. The hearing was deferred for two weeks. We
were now very broke. "We have to get out of here," John
said. "Things are somehow catching up with us."
We owed a lot of money: We owed rent; we owed the
lady seamstress, the pharmacy, the fine. We owed for food; we
owed everybody. And what is more, we really didn't have
any prospect of earning enough. John took Denny and me to
the Mermaid Cafe, and he laid it out to us: "We cannot stay;
this is the end of paradise. It's over; we have to get back and
go to work." It was unfathomable, unthinkably grim. No one
could have said anything more harsh. "Face reality. Go to
work." It was unreal. We left the cafe and returned home.
We had ruined Duffy. It had been expensive to house and
feed us all, so we had moved to a rented house in town all —
of us, the group and our family friends and dog and at the —
house we now told Cass what had been decided: "It's over."
Cass promptly went over to the window and smashed her
fist through the glass. We had to take her to the hospital to
have her stitched. There was a lot of blood and a lot of tears.
People at the hospital were good to us. Everybody loved us,
or so it felt there in those days of freewheeling youth. Cass's
violence expressed the bewilderment all of us felt at leaving
those lovely islands, where we just ate and swam and sang
and drank and lived the life of Riley: nothing but fun and
expanded minds and wonderful friends and a welcome
everywhere. It had been, indeed, the start of something that
would become very familiar. We were, in truth, adored.
Two days after Cass's stitching, we were making our
way out in the middle of the night, by stealth, by moon-
light—a traditional flit, bags in our hands, out to
with little
the rented car (we still had our Hertz card) and on to the
airport. I had Maud with me, little Maud. God, how I loved
Maud! She had been such a little lady when we had left New
York, with her haircut and special collar and curls; now she
was a little savage, but so much freer. I was closer to Maud
—
than had been to Pio. Maud was my baby. John's baby,

I
little Laura McKenzie, five years old, had gone from the
islands some time earlier. She had been very brave, staying
in her own pup tent on the beach at night. She was really a
cute little thing, all the sweeter because of the open envi-
ronment, the freedom under the skies at the edge of the sea.
I remember her dealing with the hazards of open-air life
with great aplomb. One time she came to me: "There's a

spider in my tent. Will someone please go get it." Spiders
apart, Laura was very free and easy and wild, as was Maud.
Both had gone "troppo." Once, the U.S.S. Boxer docked in
Charlotte Amalie, spilling out hundreds of Marines into the
streets. In no time she had secured a pair of shoes, a good
feeding, and some small toys on telling a sad story that her
parents were too poor to support her. The Marines had taken
pity on her. In the Virgin Islands the Marines were friendly
and looked after little waifs.
The four of us who sang, and our assorted companions,
all adult, arrived at the airport to see — horror of horrors
Sergeant Hershey, the guy who had me on the
arrested
Yamaha. We were all afraid that he would suspect what we
were really doing, which was leaving the islands for good.
Owing. He didn't do anything, just kept an eye on us, but, of
course, looking back, I see he must have had a clear view of
what we were up to. How could he have mistaken the final-
ity of it, with our little bags, all of us together, and Maud the
poodle?
The from the islands to Puerto Rico took our bad
airline
check, and we
put Maud in the hold; all the way to Puerto
Rico, minute by minute, second by second, I heard her bark-
ing, whimpering, squeaking, crying in despair and terror. She
yelled all the way. was a bizarre journey. Such hell. In
It
Puerto Rico TWA wisely would not take our bad check for
the flight to New York, not under any circumstances. We all
tried —
Eric, John, Cass, Denny, Russell, Peter, me, and the
dog. Sorry, no flight. Oh, God! No sort of charm would get
us out of this one. We added up all our notes and coins;
together they totaled twenty dollars and some pennies.
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN" 65
There was a long deliberation in the hall at the airport.

We didn't have enough for more than a drink apiece, so we
had to stay on neutral ground. We thought very hard. Then
John said, "There's only one thing we can do with this money
that makes any kind of sense. We have to go to the tables."
John, Denny, and I went to one of the big hotels. I had never
played craps in my life, but never mind. "Give me the dice."
I then threw seventeen straight passes in fifty minutes. Now
we had more than $2000. People who were really betting

made a lot more than that, but we were only betting cau-
tiously. Still, what the hell? Two thousand dollars! The
casino gave me the dice to keep. We went back to the rented
car, where the others were sitting praying, and then we all
returned to the airport to board our plane.
The cabin crew let me carry Maud because she was a
little listless. Since the flight from the Virgin Islands, she had
not "said" much, so I held her on my lap. We were all totally

drained. It had been quite a day and a night for us.
Suddenly, in mid-flight, I noticed that Maud was hemorrhag-
ing. I nursed her all the way to New York, and immediately
after we landed, we took her to the Animal Medical Center in
Manhattan. Then we went, John and I, to our apartment on
Seventh and D, and Denny and Cass went wherever they
went, just like that, very quickly. All of it was empty of
energy or purpose; all of us were zombies, without ceremony
or feelings. Numb. Frozen. Scott McKenzie had been sublet-
ting the apartment with his girlfriend. He greeted us at the
door: "Good. You're back. Fine. I'm off." He had been hav-
ing a huge fight with his girlfriend and now left.
Cass flew to Los Angeles. The dream was over. I guess
she had enough friends in California. Everything seemed to
be happening on the Coast, so she went there. I don't even
remember saying good-bye to her. It happened so fast. We
were out of the Islands, and Maud was dead. She died over-
night, in the hospital. She had miscarried. They called the
apartment: "Is this Mrs. Phillips?" Yes. "Is Mr. Phillips
there?" Yes. "May we please speak with Mr. Phillips?" That
was it. I had quite a breakdown. My dog was dead. No one
knows, no one knew, no one in the world would ever under-

stand my grief, not even John. Certainly not John. I have
always traced the breakdown in our marriage to the death of
Maud, tying in that heartbreak with the end of the Virgin
Islands. It was over. In a way it was so over. A new episode
began, but, boy, was it ever over!
Now California dreaming was becoming a reality. Our
little house in Charlotte Amalie, that comfy little furnished
place in the sun, was a vanishing memory. An apartment on

Seventh and D was no substitute, and anyway, here we were
in New York, and there was no reason to be in New York.
No one we knew was really working in New York anymore.
McGuinn and his Byrds, the Lovin' Spoonful everybody —
had gone West and everyone was making it, everyone we
knew. Were we too late? No. We were not too late at all, but
we were still island folk: When I thought about everybody I
knew who had a hit single, I didn't see it in terms of big
commercial success. It was merely a matter of great wonder-
ment. Funny. Fascinating.
We ourselves, the New Journeymen, as we still were,
with or without Cass, did now have some great songs. We
knew that everybody in the Virgin Islands loved our songs,
but there was no confirmation in any grand way, no record-
ings that underlined that we had Something Else. It was just
an understanding between us that we sang well, sang very
well together, could create some nice tunes, but we certainly
didn't know whether it would sell. Anyway, Cass was gone.
We know where
didn't to find her in Los Angeles. She felt
Denny was just going to keep breaking her heart. God, they
were an odd couple.
Drawn back in my mind's eye to the Coast, to Los
Angeles, home, and beauty, I convinced the "boys" that we
should go there quickly, drive there. There was a system
called Drive-Away whereby one could drive a car to Cali-
fornia for people who wanted their car to get there safely
without their being in it. All one had to pay for was the gaso-
line. That was almost our favorite form of transportation
then — the People Express of the sixties, only not nearly so
—
fast. So we went to get our own drive-away. It was a 1965

limousine, a brand-new vehicle. It was the Omen. We would
drive from New
York to San Francisco: Open up, open up,
open up those Golden Gates we're coming by the
. . .
Southern route, and we're coming by limo. That trip, the

—
Great Trek, took us six days or more a nice slow, leisurely
ride through the South, through fields and fields of wild-
flowers. We filled the car with them, just packed them in in
such profusion that the limousine shimmered with them, and
then drove on, and as we proceeded west, we picked more
to replace the faded ones; it was never without flowers, that
great trip. We made it sparkle. We had with us Billy
Throckmorton, John's seventeen-year-old nephew, who had
also arrived in the Virgin Islands sometime toward the end
of our stay. Most of that long drive we spent in some sort
of cosmic bliss, sensing the goodness of nature, even though
let's —
not be hypocritical our goal was material and we were
traveling on gas, not packhorse. We could kid ourselves only
so far that we were old-fashioned, hardworking pioneers.
In fact we liked comfort and luxury, having given up so
much in the Virgin Islands.
We were, no doubt about it, hedonists. Life, liberty, and
—
the pursuit of happiness wasn't that the real purpose of
being American? Well, at any rate, we thought it was, and so,
by way of contrast but still in pursuit of a sort of happiness,
we stopped off in Las Vegas at about four a.m. and decided
to do some gambling, having been blooded on the craps
table in Puerto Rico. We locked up the car, went to the
tables, and threw some money around until, somewhere
about noon, John said we had to get back on the road. We
opened the doors and went out of the air-conditioning into
the most god-awful heat: about 120 degrees. "Kilo, Kilo!" I
shouted in panic on seeing my new kitten, bought by John as
a replacement for poor little Maud. Now it was poor little
Kilo, locked in that fierce heat for hours. Lips pulled back,
she was gasping, wheezing, desperate for air. She revived,
but she hadn't had much longer. I would have felt so bad:
Pio run over, Maud shaken around in a baggage compart-
ment until she bled to death, and Kilo suffocated. More

concentration needed here, said the ghosts of the schoolroom.
We arrived, not too long after, in San Francisco, where
this adventure with music had begun for me all those years
before. Was it really only four years? We went to see Frank
Werber to find out if he wanted to hear our songs and maybe
make a record. "Oh, he doesn't want to see us? Why?"
Maybe because he was mad at John for not replacing David
Guard. Or maybe some other reason. "Oh." We checked into
the Colombo Hotel and considered our position.
The Colombo was a real fleabag of a hotel in North
Beach, a rococo delight, and in this late stage of its life, it had
become a Chinese hotel where you could smell the opium in
the hallways. Old Chinese folk lived there, and everyone sat
around the lobby a lot or lurked in doorways and by pillars.
There was the smell of incense and a rich mood of menace
and mystery. There was a feeling you could be stabbed in
the back at any time, but we were unafraid because it was
like something fictional, just outside reality. John, Denny,
Billy, and I were all sharing one room: The casino in Vegas
had not delivered a miracle, and now we were really broke.
The spell between Denny and me, its aura lowered
through so many geographical changes, now reasserted itself,
and in that room in the Colombo, Denny and I awoke at the
same time, and I just got up and went over to him. It started
getting pretty passionate and a little strange. If we had come
to making out in front of my sleeping husband and his
nephew . . something would have to be done about it.
. well,
We were heading for consummation or discovery, if not
both. The temperature was rising, and it would not cool off
for some time. We were past boiling point and full of
trembling.
At daybreak we delivered the limousine, rented another
car, and drove on down to LA to see someone we knew who
would certainly be hospitable: Barry McGuire. We knocked
on the door to his apartment, and it was opened by Cass —
Elliott. Wow! Hey! Whistles, sharp intakes of breath, and lots
of disbelief. God, this is great. Isn't California terrific? LA is
—
really happening, man. Now the three of us stayed with

Cass, in one room, now with Barry McGuire
still big, bold, —
—
fun-loving Barry sharing his space with us. God. What an
imposition. Still, we were old friends.
We had known McGuire when he was one of the New
Christy Minstrels, and before that when he was Barry and
Barry. In short, we knew him way back when, and that was
quite enough in those days of musical fusion to form a real
strong bond. He had just had his huge hit, "Eve of Destruc-
tion," and we were delighted for him. All the folk world, a
very close community, was thrilled. Barry McGuire was
number one, and not just in America but overseas,
everywhere.
The whole darn world is explodin' The Watts. . . riots
had broken out. The disinherited blacks were burning their
communities, the police were taking full reprisals, there was
looting, beating, and burning; it was the fire this time, and
the warning was of the fire next time. American society, so
long docile and obedient in the mainstream, was now facing a
series of parallel revolts that would leave the country so
shaken and insecure that by the end of 1968 they would turn
for salvation to, of all people, Richard Nixon: Tricky Dicky
who had crawled out of our lives (forever, we thought) in
1962 when, beaten for the governorship by Pat Brown, he
told the press they wouldn't have Nixon to kick around any-
more. Barry's hit, written by Steve Barri and P. F. Sloan, was
hailed by the media as a protest song, one of many such that
would become controversial in the coming years. If there
was a change in America's view of itself, then I think it was
in 1965, the year of "Mr. Tambourine Man," "Eve of
Destruction," "Do You Believe in Magic?" and "Turn, Turn,
Turn"; Johnson's escalation of the war, massive troop move-
ments, and "Hell no, we won't go" from draft resisters. All
over Los Angeles there was a bubbling undercurrent of teen-
age resentment at the way poor dead Jack Kennedy's New
Frontier was shifting— indeed, disappearing— under the pres-
sure of a new authoritarianism.
Well, there in Barry's one room, we were bubbling with
anticipation; we had three songs. Cass couldn't wait to show

her friend Barry what we could do, to display what we had
been doing in the islands, to reveal our amazing harmonies.
We were eager to sing these tunes for Barry, and he couldn't
help but be impressed as we bounced through "California
Dreamin'," "Monday, Monday," "I Saw Her Again Last
Night," and all the others we had learned so well in the
scented nights in Charlotte Amalie. Barry was grinning right
across his Cheshire-cat face. He wanted to help. "Look, why
don't you meet with my producer," he said. "He's a nice guy.
He has a nice little family company, a little local label. He's
real nice. I think you'll get along, and I know he'll like this
material. This is good." His producer's name? "Oh. Lou
Adler."
CHAPTER
HIGH JUMPS,
LOW SLUMPS
guy.
c hicago-born Lou Adler was
a very hip, relaxed sort of
He had come from Boyle Height, LA, a mixed Jewish
and Mexican neighborhood, and now lived in Bel Air. At this
time he was married to actress Shelly Fabres. He impressed
us with his cool approach and his nice clothes, casual and up
with the times. He was recording Barry McGuire's second
album at Western Studios on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood
when we first laid eyes on him. We waited until they got to a
break in recording, and when Lou came out, we introduced
ourselves and he took us into the back studio at Western and
said, "Okay. Shoot." He just sat with his eyes closed, nodding,
as we sang what, basically, was the first album. After "Califor-
nia Dreamin'" he said, "Got anything else?" Yeah, "Some-
body Groovy." We just did about half of the first album for
him right there, and he said, "Why don't you guys meet me
back here tomorrow, around three o'clock?" Why not? Sure,
we'll be here.
71
We were there around three the next day; no second-

guessing this one. There were contracts all over the floor for
us to sign, but John wasn't going to sign anything just like
that; no fool he, he wanted some money up front. "First of
all we want five thousand dollars and a car. Those are our
conditions." So that's what we got. Five thousand dollars and

a 1959 Buick convertible, which we called Harold the Bleak.
It was white outside with red interior. We really needed it,
too. Our rented car, from San Francisco, had been stolen
from an underground garage.
Well Dunhill Records certainly seemed like the place
. . .
for us. Five thousand dollars, just like that. Dunhill was
jointly owned by Lou and his partners, well-groomed Bobby
Roberts, an ex-hoofer from the live theater, and Jay Lasker,
a seasoned record executive who knew where all the bodies
were buried. The money came in a deal, a side bet, one of
many that would accompany us to the top of the dream-
world into which we had now stepped, closing the door
firmly and happily behind us. Dunhill's charm was enhanced
by the inspired presence of a young English writer, Andrew
Wickham, who could turn a pretty phrase and often did on
our liner notes.
It was an act of God, our meeting Lou Adler and vice
versa. He told the British magazine Music Maker a couple of

years later: "How do you say what it's like seeing something
like that for the first time, a Beatles or a Stones? It's just there
and you know it. It's free." The same magazine said Lou was
all "feel" and didn't think that it often went wrong, in busi-
ness or with people. Lou brought together the brilliant

rhythm section he had used for Johnny Rivers: Larry Knech-
tel (later of Bread) on guitar and keyboards, Hal Blaine on
drums/percussion, Joe Osborn on bass, and Glen Campbell
on guitar. All of them had worked with very big names. We
could not comprehend that what we had been singing with a
single guitar on the sands in the Virgin Islands was what we
were hearing now on playback at Western studios; it was,
literally, not to be believed. With Lou and Joe and Glen and
Hal and Larry, plus strings by Gene Page, and "Bones" Howe,
Lou's brilliant engineer, it took on new life. We were all tre-
mendously excited. We
sang backgrounds for Barry on his
album and had given him "California Dreamin'." But when
the track was done we decided to keep it; although we had
given it to him, we decided not to let him release it, not as
a single. Too precious. He
accepted the situation.
That first album happened very fast. It was traumatic
for me, and terribly hard work. I had never recorded before,
never been in a studio working. I was making mistakes, but
Cass was great, very supportive; she would give me the con-
fidence to go for a note, and the more I sang the better I got.
We had a lot of fun making the first album. The manage-
ment at Dunhill couldn't believe their ears either. A gold
mine had been discovered. Jay Lasker was to say later to
Forbes magazine, "... these four animals just walked in right
off the street."
Lou was a pillar of strength. He knew all there was to
know about making records. He had partnered Phil Spector
and Herb Alpert, written songs, and produced Jan and Dean,
Sam Cooke, and Johnny Rivers, all of whom had had huge
hits. He was rich, wore interesting hats, and didn't give a lot
of clues to his innermost being. But he loved us all very

much, very quickly. And we loved him very quickly. He
soon became a fifth member of our group and was forever
after known as the Fifth Mama, Lou Adler.
We had the first album mapped out when we got to the
though with John's perfectionist nature predominat-
studio,
were always enormously complicated changes to
ing, there
be made to the vocal arrangements. I have no regrets; though
the work was hard, the living was getting easier.
Lou was so wonderful. He had the ability to sit in the
booth and watch us out there in the studio trying to work
through something, working it out for hours maybe (having
already been hours late arriving and getting started), and
then he'd step inside the group and say to John, "Maybe you
should put the bridge after the instrumental, take the first
chorus, and dump the last one," and

of a sudden it would
all
work, it would be crystal clear. We

were swooning as we
listened to playback, but still we went out and resang those
songs! We did endless takes, on and on till we got it right.
Some few things we got right the first time. Then we'd get to
a point in the next song where, two hours in, John would
change a part. "John, youve gotta be kidding!" He wasn't.
"Monday, Monday" was easy to record. Easy to write,
too, for John. He wrote it at Marika's house during the Watts
riots. Still broke, we had been down to see the riots in our
early hippie clothes. We were horrified and fascinated by the

damage. I remember it clearly. The next morning John came
out of Marika's bathroom with his guitar strapped on as
usual. "I wanna write a song that has absolute international
appeal." Well, good luck, good luck to you, we said. "A
theme that has something in it everyone can relate to," he
said. "Monday, Monday, can't trust that day ."He played
. .
and sang it. "What do you think?"

"It's just about the worst song we've ever heard. It's so
pretentious" Cass and I said.
"You're crazy," said John.

There was much more of the same, to and fro for days,
until Cass and I bitched out way into the session, not wishing
to sing our "Ba da, ba da da da's" at all.
"That song just does not have it," I said.
Cass agreed. "'Monday, Monday, so good to me . .
.'
Who are you kidding?"

Lou came into the bitching. "You do the singing. I'll do
the releasing." When the song was released as the second
single of the new group, it sold 160,000 copies on the first
day.
During the early period we lived first communally, on
Franklin Avenue and then on Flores, between Santa Monica
Boulevard and Fountain Avenue near Crescent Heights and
La Cienega, and also near Barney's Beanery, that great center
of social intercourse in the There were two separate
sixties.
but interesting early-morning callers at the house on Flores.

Our San Francisco-rented car with almost all our worldly

goods had been stolen from the underground car park on
Franklin. We
reported it to the police and in the pace of
events forgot about it. After moving to Flores we had a visit,
without warning, from a member of the FBI, who said the
car had been found and had been stolen by someone they
were interested in. He spelled out his story while I, horrified,
froze as I saw that all across the coffee table was an array
of marijuana in various stages of preparation and cleaning:
a hundred joints, all neatly rolled, separated, and stacked
by Denny; some still clinging together dried, from the fields;
some cleaned; some twigs; a lot of seeds. A whole mess of
pot.
While the FBI told his tale of sleuthing rewarded, I
decided that the only way to deal with this awful sideshow
of cannabis was to busy myself, like a housewife, and I took
a big paper bag from the market and started just shoving in
the marijuana, as if to indicate, "These untidy guys around
here, always leaving things around." If the FBI man knew or
suspected anything, he never indicated it to me. His eyes
didn't stray to the table. He just kept to the subject at hand,
the stolen car, while I showed suitable interest: "Really? How
amazing. Well now gee."
. . .
Another dawn raid was announced by Cass. She came

upstairs hotfoot, into our bedroom, shaking us awake. "John,
John. Get up. Liberace is at the door." He wanted to look
over the house. Real estate was a multimillion-dollar hobby
of Liberace's, and he liked to check it all out in person. We
got up and threw clothes on and showed him the rooms.
It was soon after we moved into the house on Flores and
during the early stages of the first album that we had a Great
Revelation. We did not really have a name. New Journey-
men wouldn't do at all. We were sitting around thinking
about it, smoking pot and watching the Les Crane Show, a real
hard-nosed talk show. Sonny Barger of the San Francisco
Hell's Angels was on this particular night, and we were half
listening and half trying out names. Magic Circle was a sort
of favorite but it sounded pretentious, and though we were

trying for something mystical, we knew that was really the
wrong approach.
Les Crane was sticking it to Barger, very aggressively,
and it struck us as odd that he should have him on the show
at all. Crane began to talk about the Hell's Angels women,
suggesting they were sluts.
Barger straightened up in his chair. "Some people call
our women cheap. But we just call them our mamas."
It was at that point that Cass jumped up and said, "Ah!
We are Mamas. I don't know who you guys are, but Michelle
and I are the Mamas."
I joined in. "Yes. We are the Mamas."
John looked very thoughtful and sat for a minute or two

before saying, "Mmmm yes. The Papas and the Mamas.
. . .
That sounds pretty good."

"You asshole!" shouted Cass. "You don't say 'the Papas
and the Mamas.' You say 'the Mamas and the Papas'!"
We went to Lou Adler and Bobby Roberts and Andy
Wickham with this idea, and they were ecstatic. They loved
the name. Later, of course, John made up a story, a whole
tale of how we were in the islands and we got the
name. . ."The Papas used to do this and that, and the Mamas
.
used to get the wood and cook the food," he'd say to inter-
viewers. A whole lot of bullshit. We got our name from
Sonny Barger and Les Crane.
So .the Mamas and the Papas we were, and we fin-
. .
ished the first album, and the name went up there on the
cover in big letters: "The Mama's and the Papa's," apos-
trophes and all, under the title If You Can Believe Your Eyes
and Ears. And Wickham wrote some elegant liner notes, and
in the album-cover photograph by Guy Webster, we are
lying (or squatting) in the bath, and there is a lavatory on the
right in the corner of the room; this was later to be covered
up "for the sake of decency" by a summary of the songs.
Some original album covers are still in circulation and no
doubt have a rarity value.

By the time we had started recording at Western Studio
#3, several new slogans and catchphrases and categories
relating to pop music had entered the glossary. The term
"folk-rock" had been applied to the Byrds. In spite of David
Crosby's avowed dislike of "labels," it was a convenient
media way of describing the Byrds' music and later that of
the other quaintly nature-oriented bands around LA who
would make records: Turtles, Leaves, Grass Roots, Seeds.
People who were hip were now "where it's at," there were
good and bad "vibrations," depending on the atmosphere
permeating the "scene," and if you were enjoying yourself
you were on a "good trip," or if not, you were on a "bad
trip" or, worse, a "bummer." "Good-time" music was used to
work of the Lovin' Spoonful.
describe the cheerful, jaunty
"Granny glasses" were being worn by boys and girls alike
after Jim (who later became Roger) McGuinn of the Byrds
made them world-famous. He wore them in performance
and on publicity shots for their huge mood-changing hit "Mr.
7
Tambourine Man," released in May 1965 and soon to be

number one everywhere. The Byrds, by electrifying a Bob
Dylan song and adding a powerfully original rock beat of
their own, with an eye and an ear on the comfortable space
between the Beatles and Dylan, had turned American pop
music in an entirely new direction.
As most of the groups had come into pop or rock from
folk, playing in coffeehouses, or country-, the term "folk-
rock" was comfortable enough, and it was all the rage for a
long time.
"Pure" folkies still played the Ash Grove in Los Angeles
and the Troubadour Club on Santa Monica Boulevard, and
while there was no real conflict between folk musicians and
those of their brothers and sisters who were trying new
forms, there was still an idea among the folk fans that "going
electric" was wrong. Bob Dylan would be soundly booed in
his turn when, at a concert, he plugged in and "betrayed the
cause." That sort of snobbery seems weird today when any-

thing goes, but those were days and nights of enormous
change. Pop music was getting a little more "serious," and
folk music was getting a little more pop. It was a time of
fusion. Pop was to folk what bebop had been to older jazz.
You had to listen more carefully, and people took sides.
Into this incredibly active scene in Hollywood where it
was "all happening" (another newish phrase) we were
drawn, as if by osmosis. We knew that we had something
good, and John, with his organized and absolutely original
vocal arrangements, was somehow able to take that high
ground. In a period when almost all groups were all-male,
we had an unusual combination of two boys, two girls. It
was, as Joe Smith, one of the wisest record men of our time,
has said, "a configuration with great appeal and a refreshing
new sound. They also had the priceless asset, for a new
group, of a bunch of hit singles very quickly. It gave them
vitality and presence."
The timing of our arrival and signing in Los Angeles had
been a miracle but hardly a coincidence. We had set out
from New York with Los Angeles in mind. There were any
number of soft rock bands thriving in the clubs along Sunset
Boulevard to the Strip, from the newly named Hullabaloo at
Sunset and Vine, along through the Red Velvet, the Trip
(newly opened with a "swinging" up-to-date name), Gaz-
zari's, the Whisky A Go Go, and many others. A lot of people
seemed to be smoking pot, then very illegal, and hair among

the avant-garde groups and their followers was becoming
longer. Increasingly, the style of clothing was buckskins, boots,
jeans, hats of all sorts. The impudent Beatles had changed
things around, and now America was responding with some
force and a lot of music and mutual admiration. Pop music in
the charts was very varied: the Righteous Brothers, and Ike and
Tina Turner produced by Phil Spector, the Sir Douglas
Quintet, Jan and Dean, the Beach Boys, Paul Revere and the
Raiders, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Lou Adler's pro-
tege Johnny Rivers. They were all centered in Los Angeles.
Even the out-of-towners on the charts like Otis Redding,
Wilson Pickett, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, the Miracles, and

—
the British Gerry and the Pacemakers, Herman's Hermits, the
Stones, Petula Clark, and Them among them — made for the
West Coast, Los Angeles and its new energy and free
for V
easy was the groovy place to be in 1965, and for
life-style. It
the rest of the decade, it had the edge over anywhere else
except London as the pop music capital of the world. It was
wonderful later to find we'd arrived with absolutely the right
sound at the right time. Now was the hour. It never occurred
to us at first that ours would be the crown. A lot later I was
quoted in Life magazine as saying, "To me being a huge hit
meant playing the Hungry I." What did I know. Our first
concert would be a benefit for the junior blind at the Holly-
wood Bowl on a bill headlined by Sonny and Cher, who by
1966 were very big pop stars.
We were now living at a very fast pace, writing, singing,
recording, doing picture sessions (including a cover story
for Post magazine and a four-page spread in Life magazine),
meeting people, moving house, and changing clothes, atti-
tudes, drugs —
and partners. Or two of us were. One night
toward the end of our stay on Franklin, we had a sensa-
tional dinner for Cass's birthday. It was rather like a scene out
of the movie Tom Jones. It was a Cass special, duck a l'orange.
It was one of those nights. Sucking on those last bones. Cass
and John were actually sleeping at the table, by candlelight,

bottles empty and glinting. Everyone was quite well fed and
quite well drunk. These were the times when the real devil
came out in Denny Doherty and when you saw the twinkle in
his eye that was so attractive. It was alluring. He never said
a word. He just got up and walked to the sliding glass doors,
beckoning with a crooked finger. I got up and left the two
sleeping monsters, went out to the patio, jumped the little
fence, went to the identical little patio and into the unoccupied
apartment next door, and there, on the wall-to-wall carpeting,
made love with Denny Doherty. We then slithered back to the
still snoring beasts at the table. And that was the first and
last real sexual contact I had with Denny.

It was such an emotional thing, much less physical than
emotional. It arose because of the closeness of the relation-

ship. Itwould recur, this bonding, with others of John's
friends. It was inevitable that I would become really close to
whomever John was close to. John made very powerful
bonds with men. John and Scott had been like blood
brothers. John and Denny next. They shared creative relation-
ships and remarkably strong friendships, and it was unavoid-
able for me not to love the other men. I could, in a way, be
very protected, married to John and flirting like mad with
Denny and imagining all sorts of things. And then the
moment of truth and opportunity presented itself, inevitably,
and we came together like the perfect couple; what else?
There was a price to pay.
Soon afterward John, Denny, Cass, and I went to Mex-
ico for a joyride in Harold the Bleak. We made for Ensenada
and there got absolutely drunk. Shit-faced. We went to the
Chicago Club, a lewd strip joint full of sailors and marines and
Mamas and Papas. The girls were doing really low routines,
grabbing the customers in the groin or by the ears. I went
into the bathroom to decide whether or not to throw up;
deciding not to, I came back into the heaving melee to see a
stripper pinning Denny by his ears and grinding herself
against him. I returned to the bathroom, and this time I did
throw up. Next day we went to the ocean to blow away our
hangovers. Denny dove into the sea and came out covered in
blood with a broken Coke bottle protruding from his chest.
It was to the hospital for stitching and then home to Los
Angeles in Harold after our untidy break from routine. On

the highway the four of us sat in silence, feeling none too
good. John was at the wheel; I was at his side. I heard Cass
crying in the back seat, and looking around I saw Denny, in
his corner, looking out the window as if in a bad dream.
There was a chill in the car. Despite an understanding that
this was between him and me, Denny had talked. He had
told Cass!
Why he told her remains a puzzle to this day. It must
have had something to do with their own relationship, which
was close and warm and tense but not sexual. I would never
have told John. Indeed, hoped the thing would die away
I
despite Cass's sobbing. had been even more scared of

I
Cass's knowing than of John's knowing. To Cass it was a

betrayal, whereas John would see it simply as his property
being tampered with. But Cass! She had confided all to me,
all about everything, including much about Denny. What
treachery this was. . Some days later I brought Denny little

. .
kisses and orange juice in bed at the Flores house. I sat on the
bed as I handed it to him, and we began to make out. John
and I had a bedroom upstairs. So did Cass. Denny's was
downstairs, next to the kitchen. We were both in night
clothes. I saw a shadow on the stairs: It was John, descending
slowly and silently, edging closer. I fled the bedroom, ran into
the street and away. When I crept back, because there was
really nowhere to go, they were talking, Denny and John, by
a hedge. I crept behind the hedge and listened in great fear.
To my astonishment they were discussing this thing man-
fully: "Couldn't help it, John ."
. and "Know how it is,
.
Denny ..." This awful temptress and her poor victim. A song
—
was written by the two of them "I Saw Ker Again." Denny
was forgiven. John didn't want to lose his tenor, and he wasn't
prepared to throw me out the door at that moment either.
Denny felt he had to make amends. I had to make amends.
John was in control just then. Soon afterward we moved into
different houses, Denny to the Hollywood Hills, John and I
to Lookout Mountain, and Cass to Stanley Hills.
We were in Harold the Bleak with the top down driving
up Laurel Canyon when we heard "California Dreamin"' on
the radio for the first time. I think it was KHJ. We heard the
—
very beginning "All the leaves are brown .
."
. —
and then all
four of us descended on the volume control. "Up!" A won-
derful moment. On the radio for the first time! That's when
you know you're a singer. A Musician. "We've arrived." We
had the KFWB hit sheet with us soon after, when we were
number one, and there, right next to the listing of "California
Dreamin'," was an advertisement for Cole bathing suits,
featuring me, the model, unnamed, unrecognized no doubt,
from another life. Too strange! It was so exciting and
—
confusing. People were so glad to see us on the charts. Just

why were we what we were becoming? Was it the music
or . . . what was it?
people were ready for something that was
I think
modern, hip, an image that was new, animated, and attrac-
tive and had women in it, liberated women yet. These were
hippies. This is what people were talking about. This
is . lookit, these guys are bearded and wear funny clothes,
. .
one of the girls is barefoot, there's a fat one, they wear beads
and bells, and they sing. This is the kicker. They sing. People
liked that new comfortable look where people were people.
We were always "in a bathtub" together, always just a little
bit suggestive but not enough to offend. It was modern that
this married couple and this other nonmarried couple should
live together in this house, and then, they're all rich, they
picnic together and sing pretty, they're strange, and wild and
liberated progressive left-wing feelings spring from them.
For all that, we didn't look dangerous. We were young, up
with the times, and very commercial. That was it. We were
real cool, man.
We had to obey almost all the rules in the record busi-
—
ness of those days and probably of earlier and later days
however, and appear in front of the public as often as we
could and in as much of the media as possible, being pleas-
ant and interesting. We were out there plugging just as
commercially as anyone else, for all that we were noncon-
formists, free spirits, hippies, with all the windblown, care-
free, barefoot characteristics we had brought to Dunhill from
the Islands. We were certainly as unself conscious as anyone
today can imagine, living as we now do in much more self-
conscious and programmed times. These "animals right off
the street" were working quite hard to make a success of
their new careers. After all, why not? It was fun becoming
famous. We did all the good TV and some bad. We did
Shindig and Ed Sullivan, Hollywood Palace with Arthur
Godfrey, American Bandstand with Dick Clark. We did
Hollywood A Go Go, Hullabaloo, Lloyd Thaxton's show,
and other Hollywood-based "dance shows" where the artist
—
"lip-synched" to the record and hoped it didn't show too

much. There was little attempt at sincerity in this miming; no
one expected it then any more than they do now. The guitars
had no leads; the MC apart, there was not a microphone
wired for sound on any of those dance shows. Who knew?
Who cared? We didn't overwork; we liked our rest, and we
were hard to organize. In the beginning, however, we did a
lot of what was asked of us, and record companies have
always had a certain imperative: The artists must sing for
their supper. Jay Lasker showed his respect by hanging a
sign over his desk to the effect that even caged birds sang.
I was proud of our early success, and it did come fast. I
was particularly proud that it was happening all around us in

my hometown and my dad would hear it, and my sister,
Russell, and Marika and all the family. My father was driving
a school bus at the time. When he retired from the probation
department, he was offered a desk job with the folks who
ran things, but if he couldn't be working with the kids any-
more, he didn't want a desk job, so he took a job driving.
The whole interior of the school bus was lined with Mamas
and Papas pictures, posters, and album covers. He was
extremely pleased that Michelle had made something of her-
self. He had, after all, given his blessing when John and I
went off, unmarried, and he was very relieved that the risks
he had taken were paying off. All my friends loved my
father because he was so cool. In the end, he, too, got high.
He used to smoke Bull Durham loose tobacco, rolled up, and
he'd come over to where John and I were living and look
into the big jar we kept our pot in. He'd take a couple of
pinches of pot and smoke it with his Bull Durham, making it
splief. He was very happy about everything, particularly as
I was now safely over-age so that even if I were to be busted
I wouldn't be going to Juvenile Hall. Relief all around!
After finishing the first album, // You Can Believe Your

Eyes and Ears, John and I had moved into a little house on
Lookout Mountain, off Laurel Canyon. It looked lovely with
bougainvillea all over it, and we tried living together, tried
dispersing the cloud of my fling with Denny, but after a few
weeks it was obvious it wasn't going to work out. Everything

was weird: leaving the Islands, Maud's death, Denny . . .
perhaps the relief of finishing the album and wondering how

that might affect us. At any rate, everything did feel strange,
so we decided that he should move out and share a house
with Denny. He agreed, but as it was my idea that we should
separate and not John's, he decided that he would beat me at
my own game, and though he wasn't happy about the sepa-
ration, boy would he show me. So he and Denny set up a
bachelor pad in a big way and floated gardenias in the
ninety-nine-degree pool and had Martha and the Vandellas
up there.
They were just a rockin' and a rollin', with a sunken pit
in front of the fireplace in this love nest, and they had parties
that I wasn't invited to, so, in due course, I met and fell in
love with Gene Clark of the Byrds in the great Laurel
Canyon community of the Canyon, that
mid-sixties: Laurel
romantic rustic highway that meandered off Hollywood
Boulevard up into the Hollywood Hills, with dozens, scores
of little roads running off to the left and right and tiny cracks
running off into ever smaller backwaters, wherever you
could fit a little wooden house, so that there were friends
dotted over the hillside and right up to the edge overhang-
ing the great, wide, shimmering city. Everybody knew every-
body. There were more pop stars than you could count in
Laurel Canyon and environs. It seemed as if we all lived
there. Gene lived on Stanley Hills, Cass lived right up the
street from Gene, Chris Hillman and David Crosby of the
Byrds lived on Skyline and Wonderland respectively. I met
Gene at Cyrus and Rusty's. Cyrus Farar was in the Modern
Folk Quartet, and Gene hung out with him. It was easy to
meet on a warm spring evening on a timber veranda as the
crickets' chorus rose from that fat ground cover that abounds
in the canyons. Gene and I started to see each other.
It was a fine romance if one was into danger, but Gene
wasn't, not really. Gene was a farmer's boy, a lovely boy

about my own age, but he was also a neurotic little Scorpio
from Missouri, once a New Christy Minstrel, then a Byrd,
Gil and Joyce Gilliam Holly Michelle
The Gilliam family:

Joyce, Gil, Michelle, and Russell.
This photo was taken eight days
before my mother's death.
My first professional
photograph, at age 13.
(Credit: Patrick /<r/ss«.
The Journeymen as I first saw them at

the Hungry I. Left to right: Dick Weiss-
man, John Phillips, Scott MacKenzie.
(Credit: James J. Kriegsmann)
John at Linton Hall

Military School.
Laura Mackenzie Phillips
in St. John: a brave
and happy camper.
John and I with Pio, on the day we

told John's mother we were
getting married. Wa
The New Journeymen,

dressed to kill.
Left to right:
Marshall Brickman,
Michelle Gilliam,
John Phillips.
Girl Scout Naomi Cohen Little Denny
The Mugwumps, minus Sebastian.

Left to right: Zal Yanovsky, Jim Hendricks,
Cass Elliott, and Denny Dougherty.
(Right)One of the very first group shots of the
newly formed The Mamas and the Papas.
(Credit: Guy Webster)
The Letter
June 28, 1966
Mrs. Michelle Gilliam Phillips

8671 Lookout Mountain Avenue
Los Angeles, California 90046
Dear Michelle:
This letter is to advise you that the under-

signed no longer desire to record or perform with you
in the future. Moreover, the undersigned desire to
terminate any business relationship with you that may
have heretofore exiBted.
To the extent there may have been any agreement

between us creating a partnership, the undersigned elect
to terminate and dissolve any such partnership pursuant
to California Corporation Code Section 15031(1 )(b).
This letter should not be construed as an

admission that any su:h partnership exists. Nothing
contained in this letter should be construed as a
waiver, abandonment or relinquishment of any right or
remedy which the undersigned, and each of them, may
have against you. All such rights and remedies are
expressly reserved.
Very truly yours
.s Doherty
££ss Elliot
The newly-formed
new Mamas and Papas. The
image of Jill Gibson
has been superimposed on to
the original photograph.
(The original appears on
the front cover.)
Lou Adler with Jill Gibson.
Back in the group — reconciliation. (Credit: Lee B. Johnson)

783 Bel Air Road
The first Mamas and Papas album cover-

exposing the indecent toilet.

^m"
KrvV vfc - ^
John
f H^ » •
sK]
Michelle
(Credit: Guy Webster) »> . 'J E* ii
C >ass
< n dti Cm/ u .
biter)
Denny
Wild and crazy kids in the pool at Bel Air. (Credit Guy Webster)
Dinner in Acapulco,
late '67. Clockwise from left:
Scott, Michelle, John, Steve Brandt,
Ann Marshall.
Lou Adler withdate, John and I accepting a Grammy for best group
performance on "Monday, Monday."
(Credit: This photo uas printed by permission of the National Academy of Recording Arts <L- Sciences.)
Cass shows off newborn
Owen Vannessa.
Mama Cass frolicks in the daisies.

(Credit: Jerry Schatzberg)
Sr?, <j*y~ &&

Backstage at The Bowl with Jimi Hendrix.
(Credit: Henry Diltz)
Vocalizing before the set at The Bowl.
(Credit: Henry Diltz)
Live at Monterey.
If
I
Mama Michelle cradles newborn Chynna

and wonders what to do next.
and later a soloistand part of a duo with Douglas Dillard. It

was all a bit tense because he felt very guilty and didn't like
the idea of having an affair with a married albeit separated

woman. We couldn't go out together, couldn't be seen to-
gether; that would be too blatant. He would sometimes wake
up in the middle of the night and wake me and tell me to go
home. But we were together a lot. Sometimes we'd go off to
Catalina Island on a yacht sailed by Jim Dickson, one of the
managers of the Byrds. Still, it was overwhelming for Gene. I
didn't mind the affair at all, but to Gene it was wrong. He
and John were friends, peers; that old guitar players' ethic,
"the artists stick together," and all that. Similarly, John
wouldn't have cared less if Gene had been a nobody, but
when it was somebody who was his peer, another visible
musician, he was embarrassed.
And one mad, bad night, all caution fled me and the
game was up.
We were due to play Melodyland, a theater in the round
opposite Disneyland at Anaheim, near LA. Gene said he
would like tickets. He had never been to a Mamas and Papas
concert, and he wanted to see what we were like on stage. I
wanted him very much to be in the audience, so I called the
Dunhill office and they said they would take care of Gene,
and that was that. Simon and Garfunkel opened the show. It
was an exciting night in my home
state. The place was full,
and we had huge album, new clothes, exotic
hit records, a
pot, and plenty of money. Our cup was overflowing. We
heard our names announced. "You're on."
We ran on stage, John and Denny taking their section of
the audience and Cass and I ours, two and two. Absolute
horror! Gene was in the front row in a scarlet jacket, grinning
from ear to ear! No one could have missed him. He was very
well known and obvious anyway, but even if he'd been
Charlie Simpson from the Valley, he'd have been conspicu-
ous in that jacket. My paranoia told me to move quickly with
Cass to that section of the audience and hold that part of the
stage so that John wouldn't see him in the round theater. Cass
was scared for me, and I was absolutely terrified myself.
—
Gene was so plain, so visible. After we settled down, Cass and

I started singing to Gene, doing the whole concert to him. In
a funny way Cass approved of my affair, if only because it
was something did independent of John; she supported

I
that — but she knew the shit I'd catch if I got caught throwing
it in John's face. John finally realized what was going on, and
to everyone's amazement he shouted through the speaker
system, "Get the fuck over here!" Cass and I very quickly
did get the fuck over there and finished the concert, with
John and Denny now singing to Gene's section of the
audience. I ran very fast off the stage when it was over,
grabbed my things, and got to my car. John ran out after me,
grabbed my arm, and said, "You're fired." There was quite a
crowd of fans to witness this astonishing and very rewarding
was my birthday. June 4,
spectacle. "You're fired!" Fired! It
1966. was twenty- two and old enough to know better but
I
young enough to be in love all the time. John had known

about Gene but had never been able to nail me.
He held my arm and made sure I could hear him saying
the words. "Fired, fired, fired!" It didn't sink in. I repelled it.
I was going to fire me. How dare he? We

couldn't believe he
were the Mamas and the Papas; we had hit records. He was
my husband. I was his wife. I was indispensable. We all
were. Anyway, it was my birthday. My birthday! Thank
God, a diversion! There was a party already arranged at
Cyrus and Rusty's house in Laurel Canyon, and I wasn't
going to cancel it. Fired or not I was going to have a good
time. There was a happy crowd there: Canyon people, free-
wheelin', pot-smoking longhairs with nice hippie clothes
moccasins or boots, jeans, beads, long dresses dewy-eyed, —
hangin' out, "hey, man" people. My friends. Our friends,
including Gene Clark. John was not there, and it was to be
some time before I saw him again. It was the warm spring of
the Mamas and the Papas, turning into something else ... a
winter of discontent coming out of this summer? Would
there be no lasting glory now? It was beginning to look as if
there might not be, but these were thoughts best left till
morning.
The concert, despite the stresses of Gene's spectacular

appearance in scarlet, had been fabulous, and I was still high
from it when I arrived at the party to many cries of "Happy
Birthday" and a cake and a general unawareness of the scene
in the parking lot. My sacking seemed at first unreal and then
ridiculous, and then it slipped behind a veil and vanished in
the euphoria. Besides, I hadn't been the only one of the
group have a special guest in Dunhill seats in the front
to
row. One of the most formidable of Hollywood's younger
set, pretty and willowy Ann Marshall, had been in John's sec-
tion of Melodyland, very chic and pert and noticeable in

minidress and tights. Both John and I were playing danger-
ous games.
Next day came and went; I don't remember any details.
I didn't hear anything from John or the others, nor from Lou.
They all left town; the group fled. Then a letter arrived,
brought by hand to the house. I signed for it and opened it.
It was on headed notepaper from Mitchell, Silverberg and
Knupp, attorneys that represented us (the group, the record

company, and Lou Adler) and almost everybody we knew
through the personable and charismatic (Abe) Somer, the
hot music-business lawyer who, though not that long out
of law school, was very much wiser than his years. The
impact of the letter was chilling. It said, more or less politely,
"Thank you for your participation to date, as of now you
are no longer with the group, it is over, don't say you are
a Mama anymore, don't get in touch, don't call us, we won't
be calling you, and it was nice knowing you. Good-bye." It
was a terrible, terrible letter.
Its worst aspect was that it was from us, from the
Mamas and the Papas, my own group, it stated that very
clearly. And since it was from the Mamas and the Papas, it
was therefore from my husband, from my best friend, from

my lover, from my manager, my producer, my label, and my
attorney. I was very scared. I thought then that I would
never feel as bad again as I did in those moments of reading
the letter. But things were going to get much worse. Really, it
was a "fuck you" from everyone I knew and valued in that
life. I I was
cried and cried out of sheer hysteria and fear.
gripped by fear, no doubt about it. I couldn't believe what
was happening to me. It was June 1966, we were the most
happening thing around anywhere in the music world, origi-
nal and successful and new and attractive, and now it was all
over? My God! My God, why had He forsaken me? What a
nightmare and how unfair! Then, aha, I told myself, it was
just a scare, something to make me feel bad for a while. Every-
thing would soon be all right. I started to find it impossible to
take the letter seriously. See! They're just trying to show me
that I shouldn't take anything for granted. I won't again, that's
for sure. This won't happen anymore. be a good girl now.
I'll
Take me back. I am one of the Mamas and the Papas, after all;
all for one and one for all.
I was getting clammy hands. Time passed in a frenzy of

crying and screaming and loneliness. I did get in touch with
some people. Cynthia Webb was one of my best friends, a
real pal from high school days. It was like being back in high
school now, because everything I had known since high
school had left town without me, gone out of my life
for .for what? Forever? Was I then not indispensable?
. .
No, was not, and I would never again make that mistake.
I
"You can be replaced." Terrifying words but all too true. All
things must pass. Cynthia and I started to look for distrac-
tions. She was a great girl, a dancer at the Whisky A Go Go
when they used to have girls dancing in cages above the
audience. "Go-go dancers" would later go topless and then
bottomless, but in these early days it was very straight.
Cynthia was a real friend, and for distraction she took me to
New York.
It happened this way: Cynthia was staying with me at
Lookout Mountain when Otis Redding swooped down on

the Whisky A Go Go to collect her and all the other Go Go
girls to appear with him at the Apollo in New York. He
needed them to dance in his show. I went because I couldn't
stand the idea of being left behind by the group and my
roommate. I had to go. John, Denny, Cass, Lou (by now, long
separated from Shelly), and Jill Gibson, Lou's girlfriend, had
left for England, where they met and hung out with the
Beatles, found out later. I went to New York with Cynthia.
I
We checked into the Sherry Netherland, and the first night

we were there, we went to the Apollo in our limousine. I was
the only white person in the balcony, crying my eyes out and
having the most wonderful time despite it all. It was a great
show. When we got into the limousine later, Cynthia burst into
tears. 'Tm the only black woman I know with no rhythm,"
she sobbed. Her mother was a lawyer, and her father was a
doctor. I don't know whether that had anything to do with it.
She wanted to quit the show, so I said, "Well, do so then,"
and she did. We went around New York together and saw
Broadway shows, including Annie Get Your Gun with Ethel
Merman and Hello, Dolly with Carol Channing, and we
became middle-class young ladies with lots of room service,
limousines, and theater seats. I was doing everything I could
to blot out what had happened. It was so painful. Still, it was
beginning to sink in. All the luxury in and around the Sherry
Netherland couldn't blot it out. It was a mistake to think any-
thing as serious as being sacked from one's own group could
be blanked out like that. I decided I should get a lawyer and
start the investigation into my actual rights. It seemed I
didn't have too many. Was there nothing to assuage this

misery?
We went to a club in New York called Arthur, run by
Sybil Burton, ex- wife of Richard. Arthur was named after
George Harrison's haircut in the movie A Hard Days Night.
("What do you call your haircut?" "Arthur!") Cynthia and I
met the house band at Arthur's and started to hang out with
them backstage. We decided to go with them to the Chelsea
Hotel, where they were living, and found they had painted
the whole apartment in Day-Glo. I felt a little out of my element
there, but I had no place else to go and they were good com-
pany, or at least they were some company, and that was
enough. Things did look up, and we started to have a fabulous
time. We had met a young redheaded girl named Rachel, and
when Cynthia and I decided to fly back to LA while we still
felt good, we found that Rachel would be coming back, too.
It was all very free and easy. We stayed out all night with the
boys and made the plane with Rachel saying, "I'm going to
California. All I have to do is stop by my place." At six a.m.
reservations were made, and in our boas and cocktail dresses
we took the helicopter off the Pan American Building to La
Guardia. It wasn't until we were on the plane that Rachel said
she had not after all been up to her apartment to tell her par-
ents, and she was a minor. We were responsible for this,
Cynthia and I, and it was not something we needed. We were
running away ourselves. Or running back. At any rate, as soon
as Rachel saw her first palm tree, she disappeared into the
wasteland, and that was the last we saw of her.
was coming down off the New York trip now. The
I
party was over, and I was trying to face the fact that this was
for real. Mostly, now, I was expecting the group to come
back and forgive me. I was waiting for a phone call. There
followed a grim period: Even to recall those days makes me
weepy and sad. I forget a lot about what happened; I just
know I was totally lost. There was nothing on earth or above
it that I wanted more than the group. The Mamas and the
Papas. Not John, Denny, or Cass. Not them. But the group. I
wanted my job back. I didn't feel they had any right to take
it from me. It was spiteful and vindictive and all of those
things. My lawyer was asking, and friends (such friends as

were left) in their way were asking, "Did you not have an
agreement, a partnership arrangement, something on paper?"
No, we did not have a partnership agreement. We had a con-
tract with the record company, but that was the group's con-
tract and I was not now in the group. It looked as if I might
not have any case, and furthermore, I was having to face up
to the truth that there was not going to be any phone call or
any visit of forgiveness. I was going to have to make a move
myself if anything positive was going to happen. Things
seemed very dark, very bleak. Summer was not going to
come this year. Nor glory. Then, one night, Denny made one
incredibly bold gesture. He called. He was not calling from
or for the group, that was obvious. He was just very drunk,
crying, saying that he had no control over what was happen-
ing. He "just felt so terrible about it." He came over on his
—
motorcycle and took me to the top of Mulholland Drive. He

told me he loved me. Then he said, "If you want to run away
right now, let's go." He was willing to give up the group for
me. I declined his offer. It was the ultimate sacrifice for him,
and I loved him for suggesting it, but I wanted the group
for me and for him.
At least now I had a contact with the group, though the
more information I pulled out of Denny, the worse things
seemed. It was clear that not only was I not missed or for-
given, but the three of them were in fact much happier with-
out me. And Jill Gibson was taking my place. Denny con-
firmed all of this. Everyone seemed to have formed a very
happy little family very quickly, and we had not really been
a happy family for a long time. This was true. I'm sure it was
a relief to Johnand Cass, and maybe to Denny for a time.
Ihad been running away from that and other certainties
in New York. I had probably been running away from the
consequences of my actions for some longer time. I should
have known better, but I didn't, and there was nothing to be
done about it now. My attorney said I should find the group
in one place and ask them for a formal release. That would
mean finding them in the studio with Jill, and I didn't want
to go through that trauma. I liked Jill and she liked me, but
that didn't mean it would be comfortable for me to see her
as a Mama or for her to be a Mama in front of me. Denny
said Jill had fitted in very well. She had learned all the parts,
—
was ready for a full concert all this in two weeks, said
—
Denny and she and Lou were very happy about everything.
Not exactly music to my ears. However, if I had to face
facts, I had to discover what they were, and so . . .
With eyes ablaze I went to Western Studios one after-

noon to ask for a formal release. I took care to travel in
armor, in my new Jaguar, baby-blue bodywork with dark
blue interior and navy top. Inside the building on Sunset I
saw Jill with my tambourine standing next to Cass at the
microphone. We had been in the middle of the second album
when this nightmare began. Jill was brought in almost
immediately, and they re-recorded the songs we had done
together and recorded some new songs, too. Business as
usual. Show business as usual. There's no business like the-

show-must-go-on business. The absolute folly of ever be-
lieving I was indispensable! Now Lou didn't want me in the
studio. I could see that. I stayed in the booth, out of the
recording area, and could see them inside the studio. There
was a commotion when John saw me. He came out: "What
do you want?" I told him I wanted a formal release. John
said, "You can go fuck yourself." He had not finished. "Oh,
and by the way, stop pestering Denny with your calls."
Through a red mist I saw Denny sitting on a high stool
listening to this. He said nothing. "You want me to stop
pestering Denny?" I looked at Denny. "Denny, is that right?"
He looked at me and then lowered his gaze to the floor. That
was just too much. I hauled off and hit him so hard that he
flew all the way across the back of the room and knocked
down one of the sound bolsters. I was beside myself. "I'll
bury you all," I screamed and stormed out to my car. I got
into it and sat there, shaking so hard that I thought I was
going to go crazy. Lou followed me out and tried to comfort
me. I shook him off and screamed. I was trembling; I was
ready for padded walls. It was as if everyone was being his
or her real self: John, his hard self; Denny, hopeless; Lou,
trying to help but . . . , Cass, just watching, watching. Jill
was not blame, but she was still there, Lou's girlfriend in
to
my place. I just knew I had no friends in that room. That was
obvious. They wouldn't show the least sign of affection.
They couldn't because of what they'd done. It was so com-
plete that it didn't allow for them to say anything like, "How
are you?" The message was and would remain: "You got
everything you deserved, baby." And it was pretty much the
same when I walked into any room where they were in the
weeks ahead. Everyone around them had taken a position on
this matter. They had to; John was very sure that everyone
should have a position. His was that if you weren't with him,
you were against him.
I sat in the car with all this raging through my head. I
told Lou to get lost, told him he was as big a traitor as

anyone; after all, his girlfriend was in the group. It was just
—
too easy, too pat, too happy, too convenient. John had
always said, "You can be replaced, you can easily be
replaced." had never believed it, but IVe always believed it
I
since. But at that time I was only twenty-two and part of a

huge international success, and I did feel irreplaceable,
unassailable. I had felt that from the very beginning. "Where
am I?" my head was screaming. I was shaking too much to get
the key into the ignition. Lou left me, and somehow I drove
off, blind with distress and hatred, anger and despair. Bad
moments followed each other into the night. Nothing shed
any light on it. No one could lighten the load, or, if they
could, no one among our old friends did except for one man:
Elmer Valentine, who owned the Trip on Sunset and the
Whisky A Go Go at this time. Once a cop in Chicago, Elmer
was a man-about-Hollywood in the sixties and man enough to
take me to dinner many times when I was "down and out."
He introduced me to Steve McQueen, who was surprisingly
right-wing. His idea of dealing with all anti-war demon-
strators was to line them up against the wall and have them
shot. Aside from his politics, though, he was adorable and
charming.
Back home, I sat many nights in misery and wondered
who and what I was. The most horrible realization — fear
was that maybe I didn't have any I was a
talent in music.
woman alone. Outside of my be a great group
ability to
singer (which only really developed later), I was not very
confident about my singing or my ability to do anything else,
and I had never really been away from my husband before. I
was the most alone I had ever been in my life: dejected,
rejected, and shunned. To be abandoned in Hollywood is the
worst isolation of all. Doors shut silently, familiar pathways
disappear, friends vanish, calls are unanswered, invitations
don't arrive — the humiliation is complete.
Now and again my spirits would lift, when I imagined
that after the passage of time John and Cass would feel
guiltyand would call me and say so. Denny, I knew, did get
drunk and feel bad. But in more realistic moments it seemed
to me that Cass and John would see my absence as the
solution to Boy, was my position weak!

many problems.
What what to do? I sat for days thinking about the
to do,
problem, and out of the diminishing choices one realization
came through very strongly: If I was to get back, it would
have to be through John alone. And that had a corollary: I
would also have to make a commitment to him personally
and exclusively. I could not have the group alone; I would
have to regain my husband, too. So groveling was the
. . .
only way to begin, and that was what I began to do. I

groveled and pleaded, crying, begging, phoning. They were
still rehearsing and recording. I was still calling. John was
staying at the Sunset Tower Hotel, and I was now always on

the phone to him because times were moving fast and I
knew the first concert without me was planned very soon, at
Forest Hills in New York. I was panicking. Two days to go.
Every time the phone call came down to the same thing:
"There is absolutely no way I can get you back into the
group, Mich. I have irreversibly made it so much more
palatable for Cass and Denny. They're never going to have
you back. It is so much easier without you." As for the
personal relationship: "Yes, I do want to see you, Mich, but
this has nothing to do with the group." Finally I went to the
hotel where John was living, the Sunset Tower, where he had
a lower left-hand suite on the main floor, on the street level,
with a little garden that led around to the front. He invited
me in.
I was a totally devastated woman. I just didn't know

what I was going to do. I knew that the hotel was a last
resort because it started and ended with John, but at the same
time I had to be clear that I was not going back with him if I
could not get back into the group, and the minute I brought
this up, John was equally clear that he would just love to be
back with me but that it would now be impossible for me
ever to go back to singing with the group. That was the deal-
breaker for him. And for me. I would not strike a deal
without the group in it. In fact, it wasn't that I wouldn't; I
couldn't. I could not see how, if I was back with him, I could
not be back with the group.
John wanted me to know there was no plea bargaining.

He talked about other possibilities. Me back as his wife, him
with the new group, just comfortable and without any
conflict of interests. "Hey, Mich, I love you. I always have. I
just can't work with you, that's all. You're just trouble." I
think that he and Cass and Denny did perceive me as the
troublemaker. Neither Cass nor John, for personal and
professional reasons respectively, was ready to treat Denny
too harshly for what had happened between us. Obvious
reasons, itseemed to me, but it did leave me as Trouble. As I
saw it, I was much more relaxed about relationships than the
others. This attitude arose out of my upbringing with Daddy
and my friendship with Tamar and the general atmosphere
of "freedom." I was raised in a much more liberal atmo-
sphere than any of them: I was this little waif who had
grown up with Bohemians and incense, and to me the things
I had done did not warrant the punishment that was being
meted out. It didn't seem right or fair, just because Denny

and I had been lovers. Maybe, I thought more than once,
maybe that was why I had been fired, as a delayed reaction
to Denny and me, rather than Gene. But what did this . . .
have to do with the pleading? I had to press my case with

John. It was still the only way. He had to listen. So did I.
We talked a lot. Now I had a foot in the door; maybe I
could still rearrange things before Forest Hills. I was pretty
certain that begging and groveling and a lot of kissing would
begin to heal the wounds, but it was time I was short of.
Two days to go before they left Los Angeles. Was that
enough? At the hotel I talked on and on to John as he
sidestepped the bottom line: Let me back in the group.
Progress was very slow. On the day of departure I made a
last desperate visit. "Please don't take Jill. Take me back,
John. Please. I'll do anything."
"Mich, I can't take you," he said
he threw another pair
as
of socks into the Samsonite. I became
hysterical. As "our"
driver, Iggy, arrived, a bit teary-eyed, I became even weaker
at the knees. John walked straight out, determined not to
cave in, and he didn't. He walked away, and I was left alone
in the room. I dried my eyes and ran out the back door into
the garden and to the wall that separated John's backyard
from the little circular driveway in front of the hotel. Cass
and Denny were in the limousine. It was so bizarre. It had
nothing to do with me. I was apart from any of it; it seemed
as if I had never been connected to it. I saw John's guitar and
luggage go into the trunk, and then I saw the three of them
illuminated in the back of the limo, John now with Denny
and Cass, laughing and greeting each other and hugging.
They were passing around a bottle of Crown Royal. They
were in a great mood. Even John was laughing now. How
little time it took. It was the worst moment of my life.
They drove off. I was forgotten. That experience was so

dreadful. It will always be traumatic for me, and I rarely
think about it. The pain is still real now, but then it was
beyond desperation and I don't remember much of it. I
know it was much worse than being strangled at the Marriott
Hotel on the Potomac, much worse. This had hideous
aspects. They were going to be Mamas and Papas in public,
and the public would be perfectly happy. It was quite, quite
unbearable.
The new Mamas and Papas, John, Denny, Cass, and Jill,
performed at Forest Hills, Denver, and Phoenix. Jill just
blended in. She was not at all a bad singer. She sounded
great; she was amazing, as a matter of fact, and she was
certainly a very nice girl. But that wasn't the point. The point
was that she had my
position and I was shattered.
However .something wasn't going right in the three
. .
concerts. I was talking regularly to John on the phone, and

he gave the impression that there were problems. It wasn't
that they found it difficult to explain my absence. They just
introduced Jill as Mama Jill, and people accepted that. No,
the problems came from something deeper. More personal?
Surely not! Anyway, I knew before they came back to Los
Angeles that I had made certain strides. I felt John's attitude
was changing over the week and a half that they were gone.
One evening, just before they returned to the Coast, he
phoned and asked me if I would meet him off the Lear jet,
the private chartered plane we had started to use for

concerts. Meet him off the Lear? Wasn't that a strange
request from John?
I went to the airport and saw Lou and Jill get off first
and walk to their limo and drive off. Cass and Denny
were next. They said hello and went off. John and I got into
his car; I don't remember where we went. I sensed that I was
back in the group. I felt that the impenetrable shield was not
there anymore. When Denny and Cass had said hello, I had
known there could be only one thing behind it. I don't know
if they had discussed it between them, but it was obvious
that they were trying to be friendly. I was going to be okay.

This was the new reality; the groveling had only partly
contributed. It must have been the right way for events to
unfold; it couldn't have been mere manipulation of John on
my part. Jill was perfectly good as a member of the Mamas
and Papas show, but it was our group, and people in the
audience had been shouting, "Where's Michelle?" That had
told on them while they were away. I was safe now, as long
as I behaved. I knew it, and they knew it.
CHAPTER 5
JUST A
CATCHIN' FIRE
|\ /I y sacking from the Mamas

and the Papas face to face
with a broken or breaking marriage, the intrigues of fame,
and the blessings and problems of large injections of money
into our midst had made life very complex. How much we
might have longed for the freedom of the Virgin Islands
of. .when was it? Only a year ago? But there really wasn't
.
time to yearn; these events and the comings and goings of

Gene Clark, Ann Marshall, and Jill Gibson were all colliding
with hit singles, albums, and concerts, as well as the flying
visit of the Mamas and the Papas (without me) to the Beatles'
court in swinging London. All these happenings occupied a
very few crowded weeks in the summer of 1966. Perhaps
young people ought not to have so much happen to them,
but that was where it was at, that was our reality: It had
happened, and now we had to pick up the pieces and repair
the various relationships. There was much damage. First of
all, John was still hurt by what had happened. His ego, his
pride had been in ruins; I had embarrassed him, betrayed
99
him, hurt him, all the classic insults. First it had been Denny,
then Gene, and then the repeated entreaties. All of that had
to be made up for. Repentance had to be clearly uttered, not
merely implied, and I didn't enjoy humbling myself. I had
never had to beg before, never in my life. I was back in the
group, however, and in these circumstances I had to be
thankful and get over my own feeling of betrayal, which was
also quite strong. I, too, had been humiliated and hurt. We
were all reaping what had been sown. Consequences were
being impressed upon us.
Now let's not be naive here, the wonderment had gone
from our marriage. But we were entering a new phase
which, in a curious way, would be one of our most enjoyable
times. We probably got along better at this time than at any
other save the very beginning, which had been wonderful:
loving and close and exciting. The new phase was one in
which John and I worked very hard, made a lot of money,
had a lot of fun with our loot, and managed, through
increased self-knowledge, to avoid the big fights. Dear Gene
Clark had to pass out of my life, and Ann Marshall out of
John's. She, however, was to reappear as a very close friend
to both of us, and to the Mamas and the Papas. Jill Gibson,
so nearly a full-time, forever Mama, left and was paid a
lump sum from the group's funds. There was no rancor, nor
should there have been. She was very nice and quite a good
Mama. It just hadn't worked out. It wasn't meant. My own
view is that the public wouldn't have missed me; I would just
have been "the one who used to be in it what was her
. . .
name . Mama Michelle?" Who would really have cared?

. .
W e can all be replaced. Brian Jones of the Stones, Gene

7
himself from the Byrds, Pete Best of the Beatles, all gone
with the wind when their time was up, unmourned by the
masses.
For me there was a very cleansing outcome from the
sacking and separation, and the reconciliations. I never again
anywhere took much cheek or impudence from anyone. I
had to harden my heart. As for John and me, we did have
fun, though had I known Ann Marshall then as well as I
know her now, I would probably have confided to her, if to

no one else: "When the group is over, the marriage will be
over." John always said that the group was "just for now,"
and that was the way I saw our marriage. I feltvery
comfortable with John, but I knew for sure that I was not
going to be with him for the rest of my life.
There never would have been any further life in the
John and Michelle relationship without the group. I was
adamant on that point. I did love John, but I would never
trust him again. How could anyone trust someone who had
done what he did? I told the others I would never trust them
either, and I never did. I said I would forgive them but I
would never forget. Would John and Cass trust me to be
faithful tothem? Would Denny trust me to be faithful to
John, which at this point would suit him just fine? Well ... I
don't know that there was anything more they could do to
hurt me, I had after all been reduced to groveling. But as
Tennessee Williams said, pride is pointless if it stands
between you and something you want, and now that I had
what I wanted, I did feel that a new life was opening up. I
could see more clearly. I was really back in the group, and at
this point, after everything that had gone down, I had a new
wariness that was wise.
In the same way once lost respect for Steve for
that I'd
chickening out, I now felt about Denny that it would no
longer be fun to flirt with him. I wasn't innocent about
Denny anymore. He, too, had signed the letter. As for Cass, I
was also wary of her because she was no wimp. She knew
how to be a good friend, of course, but she had felt betrayed
and therefore had used anything she could to get back.
As for what happened on the road after I was fired,
although there had been a lot of cruelty in leaving me out, I
do know that everyone softened a little bit as the concerts
progressed. I don't know that they felt the Mamas and the
Papas couldn't be done with Jill, but they did soften toward
me. I'm not exactly sure why. I know that it must have been
a terribly frightening experience for Jill Gibson to have had
the title of Mama given to her and then suddenly taken
away. There was no way she could have seen that that could
happen to her because for so long and so firmly John had
said he would not have me back. It was him or me. They
chose him. There was no talking to him about it. Everyone
around it, Elmer Valentine, Bobby Roberts, they all knew
there was nothing to be done until things worked themselves
out in whatever way they did. It would have to evolve. They
knew that John had been put through the wringer; even if
they didn't all know about Denny, they knew that for other
reasons and affairs John had had it with me. And yet, in
time, I was well and truly back.
Ann's place in John's life during my Gene Clark period
had been very complete. They were seeing a lot of each
other during the time that I was groveling and begging and
pleading. For all John's indignation about Gene at Melody-
land, Annie had been there on Dunhill tickets, too, as I said,
right there in the front row in her little Rudi Gernreich green
dress and tights. After John and I came back together, I
expected to hear from Ann; some sort of scene would not
,"
have been surprising: "I have to talk to John that sort of
. .
.
thing. But there was nothing. She never did call, and I was
surprised by it. I didn't know anyone else who wouldn't have
caused some sort of trouble. I had not yet realized how
classy a gal she was. She knew just how to behave. She knew
everybody around our life, the great and the near-great
among the young set, and she also knew Gary Cooper and
Claudette Colbert and Ronald Colman and those people in
their time. She was Herbert Marshall's daughter. He had
been an important British stage actor in the 1920s and had
become a successful leading man in Hollywood films during
the early days of talking pictures. Herbert Marshall was a
very distinguished film star. His daughter inherited his good
sense of self-worth.
So, as I say, Ann did not cause any trouble about John
and indeed went on with her own life as we went on with
ours.
There were certain very practical matters to sort out.
Guy Webster had taken a picture of the Mamas and the
Papas, including me, for a billboard on Sunset. That was the

plan. Sunset Boulevard then was developing into a fabulous
showcase for the new rock stars; glossy and showy and beau-
tiful as we all were, we had to have our billboard on the
Strip.
The kids had taken to hanging out on Sunset Boulevard,
particularly on that portion from the 8,000 block to the 9,000
building, wherein lay the clubs and restaurants of the hour,
or most of them. The Strip was the center of youth culture,
and tensions were building there between the young people
and the law enforcement agencies: the Sheriff's Department,
the Los Angeles Police Department, and to a certain extent
the Highway Patrol. The realtors and restaurateurs of Sun-
set Boulevard did not like the kids. They were no good
for business, hanging around in hippie clothes, wearing their
hair long, often shoeless, and certainly full of a new freedom.
There was curfew enforcement for under-eighteens, which
logically led to marches against the curfews, wedges of
police flying into the marchers, hassles, tussles, beatings,
arrests, and convictions. The "drug problem" then was
unrecognizable by modern standards, uncomplicated; it was
almost entirely pot, with acid second by a long way and
neither of them much abused, in our opinion, anyway. Hard
—
drugs like heroin were considered inorganic negative, bad
trip kind of drugs. On the Strip there was less prostitution
than elsewhere, as there was free love.
There was conflict, owing to the "new life-style" of "Do
your own thing," "Make love not war," and "Troops out
of Vietnam," for the established citizens to make a great
fuss about, and there was a lot of petty repression through-
out our key period, 1965 to 1968. The war in Vietnam had
gone badly wrong; everybody we knew was, naturally,
against it. It was a shocking war. We knew we were being
lied to by the government, and suddenly everybody became
political.
Back in early 1966, I was fired from the group,
before
Guy Webster had taken photograph of the four of us for
this
the billboard and also for the cover for the second album. I
learned while I was out of the group that they were in die
process of taking me out of the picture and superimposing
Jill. I went John and Lou and made an official and damning
to
protest. "Now wait a minute. I have been taking a lotta shit
here, and this is the worst of all. I don't know why it is so impor-
tant, but it is. This is LA, and it is my city." They saw the
wisdom in all this, and the billboard was delayed for my head
to be restored. By the time it went up, I was back in the
group, and though some (now valuable) albums did go out
with Jill's face on the cover, that, too, was soon changed.
A whole lot of shaking was going on. We were becoming, no
doubt about it, successful in that late summer of 1966, and we
began to live very high on the hog.
We were traveling a lot, with large audiences, from
10,000 to 20,000 a night. Peter Pilafian was our number-one
road manager and also played electric violin on Spanish
Harlem. Our number-two roadie was Steve Saunders (The
Bomber). Back in LA, Erica Kessler, my dear friend from
school, became president of the Mamas and the Papas fan
—
club. We had two hit albums both million-sellers —
and three
hit singles. The third, the follow-up to "Monday, Monday,"
was "I Saw Her Again," the song John and Denny wrote fol-
lowing the former's discovery of me with the latter on the
awful morning of the "Shadow on the Stairs." There wasn't
much in the group that wasn't remarked upon in song. We
were now getting along pretty well. There were little flare-
ups, though, between Cass and me and sometimes John and
me, and Lou decided it might be prudent to have an extra
road manager along for balance, just in case we tried to kill
each other. So Terry Dean arrived in our lives and always
traveled with us. It turned out to be a wise decision.
A test of Terry's ability to protect us from ourselves was
close at hand. At the airport in Atlanta, Georgia, John and I
walked across to the plane (a commercial flight: no Lear on
this trip), and after we had taken our seats, we started to
draw pictures on each other's hands in felt- tip pen. This was
one of a thousand pleasant and idle pastimes during our long
and short hauls across the great continent. As I started to
sketch a face on John's hand, I seemed to be drifting into
drawing someone I —
knew. It was very abstract indeed,
—
hardly there at all, not even really a face but as John gazed
at it, his hand stiffened and he turned to me and said, to my
amazement, "You're fired." I asked him what on earth he
was talking about. "I'm saying you're fired. That's it!"
Impossible! Fired? It was crazy!
"That face is Gene Clark's," said John. I told him he was
being ridiculous. He said the face was Gene Clark and I was
fired. "You know it is Gene Clark, and I know it is Gene
Clark, and you are fired."
So I said, "Fine!" although it wasn't fine at all. I glanced
briefly around the group, then got to my feet, said, "'Bye,
everybody," and began to walk off the plane. I was almost at
the exit when Terry leaped at me. It must all have been very
strange to the other passengers. I was screaming and crying.
I'd suddenly woken to the reality that I was fired again, and I
couldn't, just could not, go through that madness and
humiliation a second time. Terry grabbed me and put me in
my seat. I settled down and wept quietly as he made it quite
clear that he was in charge: friend and strong man, inde-
pendent ally to everybody. I cried all the way to Miami and
made up my mind that I wasn't going to go to work ever
again. I didn't care what happened. Terry said, "Calm down.
John's just being hysterical. You and I know it." No doubt he
said the same to John. I did the concert that night. I didn't
know what was going to happen, but I did the show anyway.
As for that face I drew ... it was Gene Clark. John was right.
I have not admitted it before now, but confession is good for
the soul, and God knows this statement is public enough. I

have no idea why I should have done anything so deter-
minedly provocative.
Life went on. hard, but we tried
The road was long and
not to overwork, and every so often canceled shows. We
we
treated our career in a very cavalier way. A lot of times it was
hardly worth going out on the road because it cost us so much;
we were big spenders. We liked having a lot of people with us.
Even though some were incompetent, they were all good com-
pany. (I don't know of any band of real stature that had or
has so many unorthodox and useless assistants on the road.)
The Lear jet that took us so many places cost a fortune. But
what an excitement it was, leasing our own jet! Part of the
fun of using the jet was having the pilots do things with the
plane that they weren't supposed to do. They would fly
straight up and come down so that for a couple of minutes
we were weightless. It was a marvelous experience, all of us
floating around the cabin. Sometimes they'd even fly us
upside down.
Cass and Denny were always doing practical jokes on
the road. It was part of their relationship. Their favorite was
pie throwing. You could never be sure that you wouldn't walk
around the corner and get a pie in your face. Once, when
we were doing the Rodgers and Hart special with the Su-
premes for NBC at Burbank, there was a huge pie exchange.
During the dress rehearsal someone hauled off a pie and it
flew across the room, hit the wardrobe mistress on the
shoulder, and went right down her dress. We were later fined
by the union.
We were scarcely entitled to be exhausted after a tour.
Even if we did play twenty-nine shows in thirty days, that
was not unusual then, and we sang for only about an hour,
including encores. So we had plenty of time to play, smoke
pot, drink Crown Royal, and laugh and meet people and
carry on generally. These days I wonder at the offhand way
we canceled shows. There were lawsuits, but Abe Somer
always sorted them out. Good old Abe.
On the road we did get along pretty well because it was
fun being so famous and popular with so many people. Now
and again Cass and I would have a fight about my not speak-
ing onstage. I hated speaking onstage. I had nothing that I
wanted to say to the audience. Cass, on the other hand, was
very quick and funny and just loved communicating with
—
strangers the more there were, the cheerier she became.
She used to get down to the apron of the stage and sing her
solos, and everybody would think she was singing just for
them; she was wonderful, and people adored her. She
would carry on with the audience as she carried on with
the people onstage, all wit and impromptu repartee. At one
place we played, a guy shouted, "Cass, I love you." She
shouted back, "Dynamite. Where ya' stayin'?" She chuckled

with them, made jokes with them, talked to them as friends,
old friends, long-lost friends. She was mercilessly flirta-
tious, entertaining, and funny. So she was fun to be with
onstage because she was happy there. She and John did most
of the rapping because they were into being funny together.
People loved that about the Mamas and the Papas, the funny
side of us. And we did look so good; as we got richer, the
—
clothes got prettier never anything but loose and beautiful,
but certainly silkier and ever more colorful and stylish.
However fancy our clothes, John forbade us to wear
makeup or mess with our hair because it would be bad for
our contemporary hippie image. He felt very strongly about
that. Certainly we wanted to wear makeup, but if I had put
on mascara, Cass would have put on lashes, and if I had
teased my hair, then she would have put on a hairpiece, so
John just told me I wasn't to put any makeup on or try any
tricks with my hair. It was the right decision. We were ahead
of the trend, and anyway, our clothes made up for any lack
of makeup. Toni from Profile de Monde in Beverly Hills
made sure of that. Mia Farrow, always full of great ideas,
had put us on to Toni, who just swept us up and gave us
fabulous Damascus brocades; beautiful silks in scarlet, gold,
silver, blue, and green; harem pants, bell-bottoms, long
coats, capes, jackets. Toni knew just what would look good
onstage: Our clothes were the best you could get.
Right from the start we had glamour; no doubt about it,
the appearance and the substance of the Mamas and the
Papas was without compare. The music industry was aware
enough to acknowledge that very quickly. We had it all:
appearance, youth, style, originality, wit, great tunes, and
above all, we could sing.
That was John's obsession: good singing. You can hear it
—
today on the records, and you could hear it except on rare
—
occasions onstage. John's arrangements were getting more
and more fluent, and with Cass's love of the musical theater,
our varied folk background, John's sense of jazz, Denny's
rock 'n' roll, and Lou's production, there wasn't anything we
couldn't cover in contemporary light music. I don't think we
were ever self-conscious in our approach to popular music,

nor cunning or stylized, but looking back at it, I can see why
we were so good. We were all original individuals, but we
had harmony and unity. Life magazine said: "Until a
real
year ago they were very very poor. Now they are rich, and
getting richer .the most inventive pop musical group
. .
around and the first really new vocal sound since The
Beatles. In their first album .the sound was a close
. .
weaving of folk and rock with a trace of the blues and now
and then a moment of Stan Kenton's dissonant modernism.
... A musky tenor usually sang the lead, crowded underneath
by a rich contralto. Hovering nearby were a knowing bari-
tone and a clear, true soprano seemingly going separate
ways, but sliding together on songs like 'Monday, Monday,'
with intricate modulations and harmonies."
Denny, that musky tenor, was always so good in the
group, neither wanting much publicity nor getting much
notoriety. Some people don't go for that, and Denny was one
of them. He was absolutely gorgeous, and he had a very
blithe spirit. Whatever he wanted to do, he always made it
fun. Always cleaned the grass with a cheerful spirit. He liked
his grass and his beer, and he liked to fiddle with his guitar,
but he didn't really play it that well. He was really happiest
when the four of us were together. He never asked much,
and yet he gave a lot. We owe Denny plenty, but then again
he had a whale of a time being a Papa.
It wouldn't be right to suggest that he was oblivious to
his status; it was just that he was a happy man, secure in

singing all those leads. John could talk to the press all he
—
wanted he was good at that. As the "leader" and old folkie
with some consistent understanding of the musical environ-
ment, he was the best qualified to tell people what we were
allabout. I was happy enough to let John tell the press, and
Cass the audience, just where it was at: what was what and
who was who. Except, as I said, that now and again Cass and
I would have a fight about my not speaking onstage. I told
her that as long as she did it well and I did it poorly, she
should do it. "You love it, Cass, and I don't feel comfortable,
so you do it." There was one very unpleasant evening when
she said to the audience, "Michelle won't be saying anything

tonight because I didn't program her before the show." She
said that kind of thing. She knew it was evil, but I don't think
she was being hostile. She didn't mean it to hurt; she meant it
to be funny. That it was also hard and evil was just too bad.
It was a joke and, as such, to be forgiven. It didn't really
break my heart. There wasn't a lot Cass could do to break
my heart anymore.
She used to like to think of us as the Body and the Brain.
We loved to go out together. The two of us would get more
attention from guys than any two women I'd ever known.
Cass was an unbelievable flirt. We were so close, maybe
because there was competition between us. I think she
resented her weight and my slimness. So much was made of
her size and figure. It didn't seem to her to be fair. She knew
she was brighter than I; she knew she was funnier. She knew
she sang better, and yet there was always going to be that
fact that she was not pretty or alluring or any of those things
^
I had down pat. We never much talked about it, but it wasn't
a taboo subject. We laughed at the difference a lot. It had

always been so obvious that we had to reach a point of secur-
ity where we could poke a lot of fun at each other without
being insulted.
I think I was envious of the way she sang just as she
envied me my appearance. But I also knew how lucky I was

to be singing with her. She made me sing better than I would
ever have sung. That would have applied to anyone Cass
— —
sang with she was that good and I was lucky to be there.
There was, in an unequal way, in an unbalanced way, a good
evening-out of our relationship. It's difficult to explain except
that, unlikely though it all was, we were very close. I knew
that Cass saw me as a vapid blonde, but I was also competi-
tion for her that she never had wanted. But there it was, right
there, and it was something she had to face and deal with,
and so we were good friends. Besides, we had to band
together often against John and Denny! It was complicated
enough, but it did work. Even if I didn't, couldn't, trust any
of them, we were all in this "trouble" together, in the end.
We were a good, funny act, and the public, all smiles,
got used to us and expected us to make them feel good, and

we always did. We also got used to the public and to each
other, and short of being professional, we actually were pro-
fessionals (if you understand the subtle difference) by the
time the second album was away and running past the mil-
lion mark. We had it all worked out. The whole group
thrived on the theory that everything that happened was
right. There were no mistakes in the relationship onstage or
before the mike. It all had to be worked out. It was all
proper and in its place.
We now moved into our separate and big new houses.
We were all very rich. We were also, for the first time, inde-
pendent of each other. That helped, because it gave us space
and freed us from living on top of one another (no pun
intended), which made us value each other more. Denny
bought a house on Appian Way at the top of Laurel Canyon.
It had once belonged to Mary Astor and had no doubt seen a
lot of old Hollywood action. Now it was an arena for much

vivid sexual activity. Denny, if he'll pardon me, was fucking
everything that walked. John wrote the song "Young Girls
Are Coming to the Canyon" about those days. There were a
lot of thin, insipid girls moving in and out of Denny's life.
Flower children, we called them. Denny's was a great house.
He had his drapes made out of the little fancy fabric bags
that contained Crown Royal, our favorite whiskey. He was
ahead of his time in pop art as home decoration. He and Jim
Morrison (now rich on "Light My Fire") took to driving
around in a limousine picking up girls; that was Denny's
flower-power period. He also kept two huge sheepdogs that
used to fight, and one night, in a drunken rage, hearing the
two dogs growling and snarling under his window, he leaped
out of a second-floor window to break up the fight and broke
both his feet. He was always in some sort of bandage or
plaster. A wild man.
Cass moved into an A-frame house on Summit Ridge
Drive, Beverly Hills. Natalie Wood had lived in that house
and had kept it very conventionally designed. Cass brought
her huge cushions with her, big pillows to strew all over the
floor, and slung a hammock from one end of the living room
to the other. She had masses of friends and "well-wishers"
and was pretty consistently ripped off, but, presumably since
she was having a lot of fun, she never appeared to mind.
As for John and me, we had started to live very well
quite some time before moving into our dream house. We
had, before our split, bought two Jaguar cars. We went on
huge shopping sprees. The Jaguars were part of an early
spree and were symptomatic of our attitude: luxury first. We
bought them straight off the floor of the showroom, a his and
hers. Mine, as IVe already said, was baby blue with dark
upholstery and so beautiful, though precious little consola-
tion to me at the time of my sacking from the group. We
really did have a lot to learn about the realities and limita-
tions of wealth and possessions. I plead extreme youth, if I
plead anything. I do think I approached my new status with
some intelligence, however, because with my first royalty
check I went to the Farmers' Market and bought my first tin
of caviar. I knew I would be expected to acquire a taste for
it, and that happened, of course. It was expected, and I did
indeed acquire the taste; such indulgences are quickly

learned.
John and I went house-hunting. We found a beautiful
house in Bel Air, just right for us and the baby I now wanted
very much to have. The thought of pregnancy made me
think of nesting, and Bel Air looked like a good setting for a
nest. We were also attracting some pretty fancy friends,
whom we wanted to entertain. So I was on many parallel
tracks, getting rich and famous, wanting to settle down with
a baby and John. (I didn't want to go out father-hunting and
couldn't imagine having anyone else's child, no matter what
reservations I may have had about spending much of the rest
of my life with John.) So, with parenthood and parties in
mind, John and I settled on 783 Bel Air Road, where Jeanette
MacDonald had lived for all of her long and happy marriage
to Gene Raymond, through all those musicals with Nelson
Eddy and Maurice Chevalier and Allan Jones and through all
those parties in the magical days of Hollywood's second
golden age —
the first two decades of talking pictures. I knew
the house was mine the moment I hopped the fence to have a
look at it. It had a "For Sale" sign that said we should call the
agent and make an appointment, but I wanted to see it right
away. John came inside the grounds with me. The house was
empty. Jeanette MacDonald had died in 1965. It was now
just the beginning of 1967, and the house had been empty
since her death; Gene Raymond, himself a movie actor,
director, and businessman, had moved out and now lived
somewhere else. The house had been an engagement present
to his wife way back in the early 1930s, and it had a wonder-
ful atmosphere, as I told John immediately.
I said, "I want this house."
He said, "You haven't seen inside."
But I had. One glance through each of the windows told
me it was and as John looked in he said he felt
just beautiful,
exactly the same. There was no question that it was the most
beautiful little English Tudor house, planted on two acres of
terraced, landscaped garden in Bel Air. It had leaded win-
—
dows in the library, showing a sailing ship a lovely period
touch, so charming and restful. The only furniture there
(though all of the drapes had been left behind) was in a
room we called "the Pub," and that had been specially built
for the room and wouldn't have fitted anywhere else. It had
a strong English feeling.
We bought the house very quickly and moved in with
great delight. It felt as if it was made for us. Jeanette Mac-
Donald and Gene Raymond had lived in it for thirty-two
years. Jeanette MacDonald: so Hollywood and yet so respect-
able. I felt a great closeness to her. I love watching her films
because of it. I knew her home as my home and as her home,
and it gave John and me a new lease on life and on marriage.
We would have a lot of fun in that house and in the garden,
which, like all that lay therein, was just divine. Practically the
entire two acres was planted, terraced, manicured, and quite
beautifully gardened. There was a grape arbor outside the
back door, and a path led from the house down to the pool. I
remember every turn and twist in the path. You went down
stairs of slate, came through the grape arbor, and then, when
—
you turned the corner in the rose arbor, you came upon a
little water fountain halfway down to the pool. There was a
loveseat by the fountain and then two more steps to more

rose arbors and finally to the pool itself, built of slate. By
the pool there was a small version of the main house, with a
large fireplace in the living room, a bedroom, a small
kitchen, a bathroom, a dressing room, and so on. We used
to go down there and spend the night sometimes, just for
the fun of it.
In the main house there was a formal dining room,

which we converted into a pool-table room. We ate in the
Pub. The library we converted into a little Indian-style room,
with paisley silks billowing from the ceiling and big pillows
designed and made for us by Toni at Profile de Monde. We
put a large Indian hookah in there and filled it full of pot. We
had wonderful times in our Indian room. It was a dream
house. We bought a champion peacock in Ojai near Santa
Barbara. His name was Gideon, and he had two hens,
Sarah and Hannah. They lived outside, but when it rained, I
would light a fire in the Pub and they'd comeand stand
in
around on the furniture, shitting over everything. It was easy
to clean because there was a stone floor in there and lots of
wood and besides, what the hell? Gideon and his hens had
class. Zsa Zsa Gabor lived nearby and would sometimes tele-
phone to say, "Darling, this is Zsa Zsa. I can see your pea-
cocks walking down Bel Air Road. I think they must be
going to the hotel!"
There was quite an environment up there where the real
money was hiding out. Old money still lived there. Gene
Raymond and Jeanette had had stables built for their horses;
there was a bridle path behind all the houses in Bel Air
it led down to the Bel Air Hotel, which had been the Bel
Air Stables. Originally, everyone in Bel Air had horses.

Can you imagine such times? Back in the sixties it was still
possible to recall old Hollywood as something not all that
long ago; many of the great stars were still alive. Jeanette
herself was only in her sixties when she died of cancer in
1965.
The feature of the house that really embodied all the
grace and splendor of her way of life was the cedar closet.
My, it was spectacular. She had taken a side of one wing of
the house and converted it into drawers of different sizes to
house her lingerie and accessories. There were great stretches
of drawers in layered rows, one above the other. Each glove
drawer, so slim and smooth, would contain a different pair
of gloves: "rose lace, black leather, white silk," and so on.
Each drawer was labeled with hand-inscribed tape. There
seemed to be some sort of code; everything was very orga-
nized. She must have been a very orderly woman. She cer-
tainly had an extravagant wardrobe. (Cher, eat your heart
out!) This woman had drawers for her ball gowns, deep
king-size drawers so the ball gowns could be fully stretched
out, without folds or squashing. You could have gotten a per-
son in each drawer inside the gown. These drawers were
labeled with the name of the designer and the color of the
gown. Such a lot of money must have been invested in there.
They obviously socialized a lot. The cedar
closet itself was
magnificent. On were the twenty large
the left-hand side
drawers, and on the right-hand side there was hanging space
and more drawers. These closets were also built to take her
furs. There was a secret door from the main part of the
house; it was her place, and the aroma in there, the cedar,
was overwhelming.
I have to say that John and I paid Karmically for years
for what we did to that cedar closet. We allowed it to be

completely destroyed so that we could build the sitting room
for the recording studio that we built behind it. Every
drawer, every panel, every last piece of cedar wood was
ripped out, broken up, utterly destroyed. Gone. Nothing
remained, not a splinter of wood, not a tape off a drawer,
not a brass handle, not a scent of cedar, not even a photo-
graph. Oblivion. To add a real insult to a terrible injury, we
tore the stables apart and turned them into an echo chamber
for the studio. The devastation was complete.
We did set about filling the rest of the house with lovely
things. We had a decorator, but we chose everything our-
selves. There was a period when we'd go to auctions and buy
Pierrepoint lamps and Tiffany lamps; we bought a 250-piece

set of antique Limoges china, a dinner service. Lalique glass,
antique crystal, a beautiful big old standing clock, a gorgeous
Venetian chandelier. A hugerug was made for the living
room by Eddie Egan (the big rug guy around LA at that
time), and John was at last able to have a bed made, seven
feet long by nine feet wide— a dream he'd had for a long
time, as his feet had always dangled over the edge of
normal-size beds. We bought a wonderful seventeenth-
century hunting table, and Howard Stark, vice-president at
ABC/Dunhill Records, gave us an eighteenth-century oil,
which we hung in the living room. We also acquired a 1932
Rolls-Royce touring car, a 1932 Rolls-Royce limo, and a
1957 Rolls-Royce Silver Dawn Coupe. We became very
knowledgeable; I was a quick learner, and at the auction
salespeople didn't like to bid against John or me. Probably it
seemed pointless to bid against these kids who were going to
get it if they wanted it. Whatever it was, we were determined
to have it. We usually got what we went for at a pretty
decent price.
Now we had a full recording studio set up, and there
was no need to go out. A lot of the time we didn't go
—
anywhere anywhere and everywhere and everything and
everyone came to us. We were rich, we were beautiful, we
were famous, and we were hot.
We had become very skilled in recording by now. There
were six hit singles in the months up to February 1967, and
then, not too long after we moved onto Bel Air Road, we
released "Dedicated to the One I Love," with me singing
lead.
We had enormous confidence by time but still not
this
much discipline. I couldn't organize time or balance my
my
checkbook. That sort of thing didn't seem to be part of our
lives. We didn't have to cook; we called the best markets to
deliver. Lou lived in Bel Air and had his food delivered from
wherever was convenient: the Bel Air Hotel, the Luau,
—
wherever he chose. We ate out a lot at the Luau, the Villa
—
Capri, La Scala and always spent far too much money.
—
None of us was thrifty. When we had lived together, we had

spent less and kept better time; apart, we had no way of
sharing expenses and no real system of coordination so that
we were always late at studios. We were really four lunatics.
We drank a lot, smoked a lot. Every session there would
be a case of Marlboros (mercifully, we all smoked the
same brand), and there would be a case of Crown Royal
whiskey and three cases of beer. We'd talk for an hour or
more, and then we'd start to learn the part. Studio costs
—
even before we had our own at Bel Air were irrelevant. It
didn't make any difference. It didn't really matter. It was
money that had to be spent, and it was somehow covered by
the amounts that were coming in. Or so it seemed to us.
Anyone with a cool overview would have seen what was
—
happening some did see, though little was said to us. It just
seemed to us that we made fabulous records and people all
over the world bought them and made them into hits and us
into millionaires. We were blessed with all that you could
have imagined in this idealized life, and more. Dreams were
still made in Hollywood!
It was just one long summer, and an idyllic one, without
too much heat. If there was a winter, I don't remember it.

We were woken up, dressed, chauffeured to the studio,
—
nursed through problems someone had to find our sun-
glasses; nothing must be too much trouble for us. We were
not nasty to work for, but we must have been rather trying.
So untogether. Cass moved into a house on Woodrow Wilson
Drive; always preferring a white wood-frame house, she now
picked one that needed an enormous amount of work.
Turning to our accountant, Dotty Ross, she said, "You can
say 'I told you so.' I'll buy it." She bought it when it wanted
for everything, and it was always a disaster. People used to
write on her walls: messages, loving graffiti, pestilent stuff.
Problems arrived inside the house wearing pants or shorts or
nothing at all. Cass was easy to intrude upon.
We, however, were not. John and I were not go-as-you-
please people-about-town. Whereas some people took ad-
vantage of Cass and she accepted it because she loved the
attention, our behaviorwas the height of snobbery. John and

Lou and I were teaching ourselves everything there was to
know about snobbery. Oh, yes, it was very exclusive over at
the Phillipses. Wasn't that the way Jeanette MacDonald
would have wanted it? Of course we shouldn't have been
snobbish, because it is a stupid way of living, but in those
circumstances it did protect us from bad people. Anyone
looking on Cass from the outside would say, "Get rid of
those people!" But she didn't take any notice.
—
It is —
more's the pity impossible in the 1980s to see life
quite as we saw the Arcadian idyll of the late 1960s, particu-
larly the great year 1967, but it requires little effort of
memory to see how serenely independent we were. We had
everything, and no one alive could have appreciated it more
than I, simply because I had come so close to not having it at
all. Life might have been so different had I been thrown out
forever, before the second album, before Bel Air, before

—
1967 and before Monterey, that great dream festival that
changed the face of rock 'n' roll. More, much more, on that
later. For now I am still marveling at the seven months that
changed my life. Who knows when it began to change? I
went through so many phases in one year, from never having
been in a studio to taking hit records virtually for granted.
The year was so amazingly full of contrasts.
It was tough and confusing and battering, probably too
much for a young kid to go through, but there was, by the

time we reached Bel Air, such an enormous amount of glory
attached to being a member of the Mamas and the Papas
that we accepted it as our right. "The Kings and Queens of
Rock 'n' Roll." "The Royal Family of Pop." Keep saying it.
Everybody said it. We had the style and the confidence to
handle anything. The record company and the management
company and Abe Somer were taking care of us. John's
experience and worldliness and Lou's power in Hollywood
were terrific anchors. We were invulnerable. Although there
were other good new American artists around, our peers,
there was no doubt that our records did seem to have a sort
of halo around them. We were blissfully unresented. That
was the spirit was a great deal of

of those days. There really
love around. People were turning on, tuning in, and drop-
ping out, and in such a climate there was little room for envy
or hatred.
Dropping out, in itself "very sixties," was something that
had drifted into the American consciousness. The idea was
that you didn't have to fight and hassle with everyone and
everything. People would say things like, "Hey, man, if
you're cool and do your own thing and just dig it, then every-
one else can do their thing and you can dig it." Dropping out
for us had begun in the Virgin Islands, when it was not at all
fashionable. We just did what came naturally, and we
worked comfortably to get that sound that was to make our
—
fortune not because we had ambitions, but because that
sound was a good and original one. And we kept on drop-
ping out, even when we were making it. That was partly
why we canceled some concerts; we were so relaxed, man.
We had left the Islands not because we had anything special
to go back for but because we had no money, and that
would be one of the snags for others who dropped out later.
They would run out of money. Some were natural dropouts.
Tamar fell into it as if her whole life had been a preparation
for long Indian robes and flowers in her hair. She, like a lot
of other dropouts and hippies and free folk of the sixties,
moved later to Hawaii, where the ever so mellow beat goes
on in that green and pleasant land.
Well, anyway, as rich hippies we wouldn't have said
"uncle" to anyone. I would not have changed places with
anyone I knew. I remember driving from San Francisco to
the airport with the others, and John was reading aloud from
the KHJ newsletter something about the Monkees' progress.
"Seems they're going to make a movie," he said.
"So what?" Cass observed. "In the end, they'll have the
money but we'll have the legend."
Cass also had a little corner of her psyche that she
allowed no one to see. She had a secretive side, a dark side,
if you like. I didn't really know about anything she didn't
want me to know about. Around this time she came to a

meeting and told us she was pregnant. She wouldn't name
the father; it was an immaculate conception, as she put it.
She was really serious about it and insisted, much to our hor-
ror, that she was going to have the child. Her gynecologist
had said it was pretty unusual for anyone of her weight to
get pregnant. According to Cass he had said, "You may
never get pregnant again," and on that basis she was going to
go ahead. John nearly died! We were stunned; in fact, I'm
still stunned. We had never thought of this happening. She
took a certain glee in it, like this was something she could do
and there was nothing we could do about it because we
needed her; there was no one going to tell her what to do. John
Phillips was certainly not going to tell her. Nobody. It was a very
womanly thing.
"I'm going to go on the road with you," she said. She
wouldn't cancel the tour. She still wouldn't tell us who the
father was. "I'll tell you sometime but not now; it's not the
right time. Believe me." never was the right time. She
It
never did tell. She did manage to keep going, though she got
so big on the road that I can hardly believe now that she
actually pulled it off. When I look back and remember what
the last months of my pregnancy were like, I am amazed that
Cass kept going, moving from city to city in the Lear jet, at
such speeds, in such heat, and on such an exhausting sched-
ule. Cass thrived on it; she was such a trouper when she was
pregnant that you would want to kill her. Envy! She was so
great. She finished the last tour of the nine months and went
— —
and had the baby a girl like clockwork, and then she was
back rehearsing, and little Owen Vanessa Hendricks was beau-
tiful and the apple of Cass's eye. Cass had married Jim
Hendricks when they were in The Big Three, to keep him out of
the draft, so Owen Vanessa's last name was Hendricks.
Vanessa was Jim's girlfriend around the time of the birth, so
Owen Vanessa was named partly for her. Not too confusing,
is it? At any rate, Cass and Vanessa and Jim were real close, so
Owen Vanessa was well loved.

It was all quite a trip, having a Mama who really was

someone's mama. "Cass won't be able to make it to re-
hearsal, the baby's sick. ..."
On hearing such a message John would flip. "Whaaat?
The baby's sick? Tm sick." The times they were a'changing
very quickly.
CHAPTER 6
GOOD
VIBRATIONS
T ime to consider the serious

business of making records
and writing songs, which we did do very well, as the sales
charts showed. It's curious to note that Cass, so prominent on
the records, never wrote a song or even contributed to one.
Nobody knew why. She should have, because she had such a
great sense of melody and could certainly turn a phrase. John
and Cass used to have fights over her refusal even to attempt
to write. "Just come and sit in a room with me, and well
write," he'd say. He was easy to work with, but she never
did, never would. He was fun as a collaborator, and she
could have made money. I have since wondered if Cass felt
vulnerable and didn't want John to have the upper hand.
Perhaps she was reluctant to put herself in a position where
she might be made to look a fool. Or maybe she just felt she
couldn't write. She certainly had all the spontaneity of the
very great performers, but of course, many of them couldn't
or simply didn't write any of their own material. Singers
doing their own songs was very sixties, and one or two of
121
those songs that filled many pop albumsof the day were
definitely substandard. For our first three albums we had
only the best material, and like the Beatles and Stones on
their early albums, we had no hesitation about recording
great songs by other people. A good song was a good song,
no matter who wrote it.
John did enjoy writing with other people. He was a real
writer, a great pop composer, as anyone can see. I would
never have written songs without John. I was good as a
critic, and he used me as a sounding board, though he'd get
terribly angry with me sometimes when I criticized his lyrics.

He was always much more brilliant than I, but he could be
led down the right path. Even if I didn't know how to struc-
ture a lyric, I could lead him to it. We
used to have whole
charts about how to write songs, and he much preferred to
pore over the charts and the songs themselves in company
with someone who was really participating. He didn't like
the solitude of writing alone. Even if you just sat there and
corrected lyrics, he would give you fifty percent.
Nothing was sacred. Not if we could turn it into publish-
ing. You can't help it; you write songs like that because the
hottest things that strike you are the things that are affecting
—
you like when John and Denny wrote "I Saw Her Again."
"Creeque Alley" was the most formidable song of that
sort: so strong and completely accurate and autobiograph-
ical. Itwas named after the little street in the Virgin Islands
where Duffy had hung out. The names and places and
events were just told simply and rhythmically. We, John
and I, wrote it very quickly, and I remember we had more
fun writing that than anything else we ever wrote. This was
just sheer joy and laughter. At first we came up with lyrics
and rhymes that were really wild but not chronologically
true or accurate. We tried to keep truthful. That was the
whole point of it, and the tricks were in the arrangement, the
music, the way the voices were laid across the lyric. We
didn't take any artistic liberties with events. If it was the
story of how we all got together and where we'd been and
where our friends were at and what they were doing, then
that would have to be the basis, and we'd make that into fun.
It came out pretty well.
CREEQUE ALLEY
John and Michie were gettin' kind of itchie just to leave the
folk music behind;
Zol and Denny, workin' for a penny, tryin' to get a fish on
the line;
In a coffeehouse Sebastian sat, and after every number they
passed the hat.
McGuinn and McGuire just a gettin' higher in LA, you know
where that's at;
And no one's gettin' fat except Mama Cass.
Zolly said, "Denny, you know there aren't many who can
sing a song the way that you do; let's go south."
Denny said, "Zolly, golly, don't you think that I wish I
could play guitar like you?"

Zol,Denny and Sebastian sat (at the Night Owl), and after
every number they passed the hat;
McGuinn and McGuire still a gettin' higher in LA, you know
where that's at;
When Cass was a sophomore, planned to go to Swarthmore,

but she changed her mind one day;
Standin' on the turnpike, thumb out to hitchhike: Take her
to New York right away.
When Denny met Cass he gave her love bumps called —
John and Zol and that was the Mugwumps.
McGuinn and McGuire couldn't get no higher but that's
what they were aimin' at;
Mugwumps, high jumps, low slumps, big bumps: Don't you

work as hard as you play.
Make-up, break-up, everything is shake-up; guess it had to
be that way.
Sebastian and Zol form the Spoonful— Michelle, John, and
Denny gettin' very tuneful.
McGuinn and McGuire just a catchin' fire in LA, you know
where that's at;
And everybody's gettin* fat except Mama Cass.
Broke — busted— disgusted; agents can't be trusted, and

Michie wants to go to the sea.
Cass can't make it, she says we'll have to fake it, we knew
she'd come eventually.
Greasin' on American Express card; tent's low rent, but
keepin' out the heat's hard.
Duffy's good vibrations and our imaginations can't go on
indefinitely;
And California Dreamin' is becomin' a reality.
The line "No Cass" was a

one's getting fat except Mama
shock when John first sang it to me. Very funny, I told him,
but what were we really going to say? "We're going to say

that, Michelle. This is Art, and we can get away with any-
thing. Particularly the truth." Okay. I remember clearly sing-
ing the song for Cass, and she loved from the first moment.
it
I think that was the first time the dreaded word actually
came out. Fat. John used to tease her without mercy. When
she went on diets, he'd say, "Don't lose any more weight."
Why not? "Because your eyes are getting too close together."
Or, "You should have your own label, Cass. Fat Records. Then
the record label's ads could read 'Another Obese Release from
Fat.'" She'd had a lot of time to get used to being chubby,
and she had a marvelous capacity for self -mockery. You can
hear Cass singing her heart out on that lyric from "Creeque
Alley." It's a good record.
I always liked "Words of Love," which was written for
me after some kind of spat. Motivation always seemed to
come from within the relationships, and even if there had

been a bit of trouble, we could always change our environ-
ment, and would work for us, and tunes would arrive.
it
There was one odd one that arrived overnight. John was up
until dawn, strapped into his guitar, and he came to me in
the morning and played me a wonderful tune. "Isn't it
pretty?" he said. "I have just spent the last few hours writing
it."
I listened to it. It was lovely. "John," I said. "You've just

spent the night writing *
Autumn Leaves/" These things can
happen.
We had the best of people working on our records. I
mentioned Bones Howe, Lou's engineer. He had the stamina
to go on recording for seventeen, nineteen hours, as we had,
but it is one thing to initiate and lead these marathons, it's
another thing to follow and stay the course. Bones always
did. During one of those times we decided in the middle of
the night to buy him a red Fiat. During a break, at dawn, we
went outside with him and showed it to him. A gift. Amaz-
ing! It was pretty impressive in the middle of the night to
accomplish this, but it was Hollywood, and we had the
money, so we did it. Bones went on to become a producer,
and a successful one. Among his early ventures, he produced
the Fifth Dimension in 1968. And though black, they were,
to his horror, reviewed in Time magazine as the "White
Mamas and Papas," because they were so slick. Up, up,
and away .into the charts, however, whatever anyone
. .
said. Bones was and is great. And he helped so much to make

our records good.
Sometimes we did swoon when we listened to record-
ings being played back. "Was that us?" Incredulous, we
acclaimed our own work in great innocence, in an exultation
of praise and wonderment. John and Lou were fabulous
together in the studio. They had great understanding, and
they both knew how to do it. A lot, too, was accidental. "I
Saw Her Again" had and a beautiful
a false ending on it,
entrance. I listen to it now, and it's still great. Cass was

wonderful with that swoop she had in her voice. There was a
lot of borrowing in the compositions. That was normal. The
Beatles, of course,were borrowed from. After all, if you were

going to borrow from anybody, you'd borrow from the
Beatles. The Beatles themselves borrowed from the Byrds,
and then Dylan borrowed and loaned and so on. That was
accepted among the people making records then. It was a
compliment. The really interesting thing to me now, listening
to Mamas and Papas records, is to hear the influences.
Cass's interest in show tunes, the blues influence from
Denny and Cass, and John's and my folk singing. Because I
was not long out of my teens, there was also the Crystals.
They had hit in my childhood. I was dying for us to record
"He's a Rebel." It would still be good for it to be done.
Anyway, we didn't do it then because John had a good idea
for the vocal arrangement for "Dedicated to the One I Love"
instead. That worked out well, as I said, and I had a good solo
on it. Lou, Jay, and Bobby picked up the publishing for their
company, Trousdale. No fools they.
The music was very gratifying for all of us. It was one
hell of a wonderful life, just creating things. Every time we
recorded a song, we amazed ourselves. "Oh, God, we were
great," we'd say. "Couldn't have done it better myself." We
took a lot of pride in the music.
We had come so was getting over my
far so fast that I
had seen myself as the
fears of being the least experienced. I
least talented, the newcomer, the one who had never

recorded and had done the least work on the road as well as
in a group, the least musical. In fact the little music I could
read was more than the three of them could. But John and
Cass both knew their music, and it didn't matter with Denny
because he just knew instinctively what to sing. Once he'd
heard a tune, he sang it better than anyone. So, despite being
able to read music, I'd felt, at first, inferior to anyone and
everyone. I did have the weakest voice. I also had a terrible
intonation problem, but I worked at improving it, and grad-
ually my confidence grew and my intonation got better and
better as I sang more with Cass. Cass taught me to sing. She
made me sing. It was easier to get the courage to go for a
note if Cass was there. It was not easy without her. John
really cracked that whip with Cass to get it smooth, to con-

trol her voice and blend, blend, blend. "If you can't sing with
Michelle," he would threaten, "then well let her sing it by her-
self. If you want to sing this by yourself, Cass, sing it by your-
self." Cass was forced really, because of my small voice, to

control her voice, and that's how the Sound was made. She sang
most gracefully when she was really controlling that big
voice. And her bellowing is what gave our songs their con-
trast, their punch. Denny, too, was never afraid to sing out.
God! With the opening phrase of a song, the tendency (if
you're not very good) is to slide on the first word, but what
you learned from Cass and Denny was attack, attack. That
was everything. When we came in, we had to be in full voice
even on top of the meter. Our vocals could be soft and
pretty, but we had to be strongly motivated by style. John
knew at almost every moment what he wanted, and if he
didn't know, then he could always dream. He was schooled
in so many musical styles that he had great fun arranging for
us. He could comfortably do marches, ballads, cabaret, rock
'n' roll, and jazz.
Our singing got better and better as 1967 proceeded. We

had kept up our lessons. Judy Davis and her "Many men and
many women mining many mines" in San Francisco re-
mained a good discipline, and we went to Judy when we
were in that neck of the woods. There was also another
teacher in New York whom John and I liked to look up when
we were back East. He was Bert Knapp, and his basic tech-
nique was to put wax in both sides of your mouth, which
filled up your cheeks and forced you to enunciate very pre-
cisely. It sounds terrible, and it was, but it worked. Bert
Knapp was a very effective teacher. He would also put a
baton in your hand and ask you to swing the baton out of
—
meter while you sang sort of like patting your head and
rubbing your stomach at the same time. Not at all easy. He
was getting your mind off the technical side of singing so
that you could concentrate on the heart of the matter. He
was great. He loved teaching stars. He loved teaching us how
not to do it, saving us from exhaustion, nodes, polyps, and all
of that.He taught us how to loosen ourselves up so we could

go out and sing for ninety minutes without trouble, although
we rarely sang so long in concert. Often we were recording
for fifteen hours at a stretch. We used to know it was time
to pack up and go home when Cass turned green.
There was so much to learn that there wasn't time in the
busy years to get bored in any way. I picked up so much on
—
the way tricks of the game. Like, if you vocalize the letter
"E," you will make it. If you sing "E," you can't sing out of
tune. We were always trying to write songs where the notes
that had to be held were the "Eeee" sound, as opposed to
"Mmmm" or "Aaaahh." All the vowels were easy to sing, but
"Eeee" was the best of all.
We were able, now, to choose most of our concert
venues, arrange our tours to suit ourselves, go where we
wanted to go, be what we wanted to be. I could be the bare-
foot Mama if I wanted; the boys could grow beards or shave
them off. Cass could be fat or lose weight, be pregnant, have
the baby; no one could touch us. We were hot. It was
wonderful and powerful and painless. God knows how. We
were hardly as protected as we thought, nor as rich, but I
didn't feel as if it could matter. We went to Hawaii in March
1967 and spent a couple of weeks that just felt wonderful and
dreamlike. This was the best of times on the road. We shot a
lot of home movies, and I have them now on videotape. It all
—
comes back in color in the memory; in black and white on
the sixteen-millimeter. It was the typhoon season in Hawaii; we
were on Oahu, and on the night of our concert they were
asking everyone to stay in their homes. But we sold out none-
theless, and there was standing room only —
if that. It was
absolutely packed and very exciting, with the most enormous

electric —
storm going on outside lightning like I have never
seen in my
life. Inevitably in such excitement, the show was
fabulous. Hawaii was our kind of leisure paradise.

Bobby and Lou, some time earlier, had come to us and
begged us to give them a two-year extension on our contract
because, after all, they were a small family company and
—
they'd put so much money into us, and yes, we had a

number-one album and they loved us more than life itself,
but it had taken a lot of money to make that investment
rational, and .Based on that we agreed to the extension,
. .
and we woke up two days later to read in the trades that

Dunhill had been sold. Maybe for business reasons, whatever,
we could not be told. At any rate we were sold, and it was a real
nasty piece of business. Bobby, Lou, and Jay picked up a mil-
lion apiece —we got nothing. We would one day look back and
see that it was the beginning of the end for our recording,
really. ABC did not understand us at all. From this time on I
fought constantly with Jay Lasker, with whom I did not have
a comfortable relationship, not to put too blunt a point on it.
He became president of ABC/Dunhill, the new company, as
part of the deal. I found it impossible to reach into my
psyche and bring out a modicum of affection for Jay. I
would call him terribly rude names, and he would say, "I
don't like to hear women talk like that." We forgave Lou,
which in itself is interesting. Still our pal and producer and to
the best of his ability our protector, he did say in a British
magazine interview late in 1967 that he had one real regret in
his career and that was selling his record company, because
in so doing he had lost the ability to adequately protect his
artists. So Lou was not afraid to confront his mistakes and
own up publicly. He was right to do so, too, because ABC
couldn't understand us, and they did have the whip in hand.
Their later recording demands on us were such that in trying
to meet them we didn't make the best albums possible, and
that was to prove disappointing to us and to our fans.
For now ... we were still the Royal Family of Pop. I felt
my hard work had paid off when I was described in Time
magazine as the purest soprano in popdom, which I mention
with modesty. It was true that we were now a very good
group, and with hindsight confirming contemporary events,
it's clear that the Monterey International Pop Festival would
inevitably slip into our hands. Without us there could be no

pop festival in that time frame, in that space, in that mood
in the great summer of 1967. Monterey Pop: die first great

festival of electric music. The very first. What an event it was
to be!
began as Alan Pariser's idea. Alan took it to Ben
It
Shapiro, and the two of them brought in Derek Taylor.

Pariser was an enthusiastic man-about-the-scene in those
days. His pot, called "Ice-Pack" because it came in insulated
ice bags,was a great hit in 1966. He was a friend to many of

the groups and producers and never short of an idea. Shapiro
was a promoter and former club owner. Derek Taylor was
the former Beatles press officer and now a publicist for
groups in the United States, including the Byrds and the
Beach Boys. The trio decided they would approach us to
head the list of artists for a three-day pop festival at Monte-
rey, near Carmel in northern California. There was a show-
ground up there that seated 8,000 people. It was obviously a
great idea.
Pariser, Taylor,and their friend David Wheeler were
sent up to the Bel Air house to sound out John and me. We
were wary because we knew that there was a lot to consider.
This was already the great idea of its time. But the next great-
est idea was to make it a charitable event. The whole thing
would have to be planned in nine weeks to get it into the
showground on the dates booked, June 16, 17, 18. John and I
told our visitors that we were not anxious to make a decision
right away. In any case, in commercial terms they were not
offering us enough money, as I pointed out. We wanted to
talk to Paul Simon and Arthur Garfunkel, who were in town,
staying at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. We knew they would
do the show if we did. We knew that others would have no
hesitation in joining us. It was thus taken out of the hands of
—
Benny Shapiro, who was paid off $5,000, then such a good
round figure for paying people off. Pariser and Peter Pilafian
became co-producers; Derek Taylor, publicist; John and
Lou, the directors, and we formed a board of governors
from across the spectrum of performing stars of those
days. It was such an intellectual business challenge for every-
body. It seemed so morally correct, but it wasn't all done
purely for the good of mankind. There was also much ego
—
involved had to be at that level of performance. But there
was no sense of self-adornment and no attempt to rip any-
body off. The Monterey Pop Festival had everything going
for it. It had style. Everyone would have a seat if they
bought a ticket to see the concerts, and those without seats
could hear the music across the showground. Never again
would there be a time when a new idea would be pursued
with such energy and innocence. It was successful because in
that happy time simple notions such as "Music, Love and
— —
Flowers" the slogan for the festival could be presented on
a bumper sticker without fear of ridicule from insiders. What-
ever outsiders might say was of no account; we were the
masters now, and we flaunted it. Nothing was beyond Lou
and John. They were great talkers, great stylists.
They also were very disciplined, and so was I. For the
first time in our lives, we began to keep office hours at the
old Renaissance Club, 8428 Sunset Boulevard, opposite the

Continental Hotel (now a Hyatt, but then owned by the
former cowboy star Gene Autry). The Renaissance was right
on the edge of Sunset Strip, hippie heaven for the youth of
Hollywood and a righteous spot to plan a pop festival. John
and Lou had to be more charming than they had ever been
in their lives. They had to teach the tastemakers and trend-
setters of San Francisco, young and very tough people who
were seriously into free everything, that we were not rich
Hollywood sharpies coming north to take credit and loot
back to our lairs in the canyons. Wearing ties and chinchilla
caps by Leon Bennett, driving vintage Rolls-Royces, project-
ing some kind of Noel Coward twenties born-into-it image,
John and Lou also had to convince the powers in Monterey's
administrative hierarchy that we were not going to pollute
their environment or its people. It was a terribly tough, taut
tightrope, but every one of us walked it and won all hearts
for just long enough to pull off the best festival there ever
was. Tony Palmer, in his book All You Need Is Love, wrote:
"One weekend in June 1967, a hundred thousand orchids
were flown from Hawaii and scattered over a field near
Monterey, California, among crowds who had gathered for a

weekend of music. From the stage, flanked by what seemed
at the time incredible banks of loudspeakers, roared a sound
that was to echo round the world. Eleven hundred of the
world's communicators were there, newspaper and magazine
journalists, critics, photographers, television and radio re-
porters. Although few realized it then, the event marked the
climax of seventy years of popular music ..."
The Monterey Pop Festival was inevitably taken over by
Lou Adler and John Phillips. They saw it as their absolute
right, just as clearly as the men who had thought of the day
had known that the best festival in the world could not be
staged without the Mamas and the Papas. Had Lou and John
not held that ace, they could never have taken it over and
imposed on it their own flair and their own arbitrary selec-
tion of artists from the United States and Britain. It was a
supreme act of confidence to know that it would be safe
only in their hands, with their grasp of flash with class, and
with no hint of parsimony in the presentation. With the best
of legal and financial advice, they set out to spend gener-
ously, and their attitude was spend. As Mel Brooks said later,
"If youve got it, flaunt it."
RollingStone said the Monterey Pop Festival was

extravagant. Unable to dispute its success, they ran a story on
the front page of their very first issue in November 1967, five
months after our triumph at the Monterey County Fair-
grounds, that said it had been self-serving for Phillips and
Adler, and wasteful. So? It was a wonderful success, and
anyway, what's a few Lear jet rides to Monterey between
impresarios determined to put on the greatest festival of all
—
time and for charity? Cass, however, was not pleased. She
wasn't into Monterey at all. Neither she nor Denny wanted to
get involved in any way with the planning. They didn't come
to the offices. They didn't feel part of it, though of course
they could have been had they wanted to be. Pretty much
anyone who wanted to work on it was welcome.
Cass was disgruntled because we were not on the road.
—
Without publishing royalties and income from the concerts,

she only had recording money coming in. She thought that
John was power-hungry. She didn't see Monterey as a group
activity. She saw it as John and Lou glorifying themselves. I
think that Cass was starting to feel that the Mamas and the
Papas wouldn't be on the road for much longer anyway, and
what she wanted was to work in concert. She had people
—
who shall be nameless telling her she didn't need us. "You
could go it alone now, Cass." Cass would have loved to be a
single, drop being "Mama" Cass, and yet it was only sixteen
months since our first single. Such crowded months. Perhaps
it was all a bit too much?
Butloved Monterey and the excitement, and the fun of
I
working with the graphic designers and stage managers

around us; my job was telephoning record companies and
rich individuals and getting them to pay $1,500 for a page
advertisement program put together by Tom Wilkes,
in the
Guy Webster (who had covered our career with his camera
from the start), and David Wheeler. Nobody turned us down
for ads. The Beatles designed their own full-color psyche-
delic ad. If there are any copies of that book around today, I
don't know what they must be worth. At the Fairgrounds it
retailed for $2. Ticket prices themselves were modest, and
the sights and sounds were unbeatable, unrepeatable. Live
Aid, that more recent triumph, differed greatly from Mon-
terey. Those were days of colorful innocence. Monterey was
the first. It came, remember, two years before Woodstock.
The record companies were represented by their chair-
men and presidents. It was the place to be that June. Only
the Beatles, of the world's pop leaders, were not there, but
they were present in spirit. They couldn't have come in person
without causing major security upheavals. The mania for
them was to sizzle and seethe for many a year. But the
record companies came, and afterward nothing was ever the
same. Clive Davis, then newly appointed chief recording
executive of Columbia Records, wrote in his book Inside the
Record Business:
Itwas a glimpse of a new world.

I remember the young people most of all:
bright kids, open faces, flowers everywhere, a read-
iness and willingness to talk of the joy they felt. So
much of this became seedy and desperate in the
East Village later, but in 1967 they were trying to
communicate their warmth and trust. The road into
the festival was jammed with them, walking and in
cars, but instead of the honking and fist-shaking
that dominate a New York traffic jam, everyone
seemed to be saying hello and sharing things. . . .
So many of their words were later manipulated and

twisted until they became cliches and gimmicks,
but at the Monterey Festival you could honestly talk
of "love" and enjoy communicating with people.
The festival exuded love, brotherly love, the idea
that love could cure ills and solve problems, the
feeling that the world's problems would go away if
people just loved one another more. . . .
Looking back, it is clear that much of the festi-

val's "love" was eventually forced to give way to
the harsher demands of the larger society. But at the
time,it was beautiful. And I honestly think society
was affected by the ideas and emotions of Monte-

rey and what followed. So many of us became
more flexible in our lives, embracing new ideas and
even such simple things as long hair, or
life-styles,
different music, and greater naturalness and infor-
mality in clothing. It was a revolution, a wonderful
moment to be part of.
As you can see, one record executive was not afraid to

have his defenses lowered and his consciousness raised. And
Clive was not unique, though he was the first to put it into a
book.
The program leaflet for the festival listed the acts as
follows:
Big Brother & the Holding Company (with Janis Joplin

unbilled!)
The Mike Bloomfield Thing
Paul Butterfield Blues Band
Canned Heat
Country Joe & the Fish
Steve Miller Blues Band
Quicksilver Messenger Service
The Association
Buffalo Springfield
Grateful Dead
Jimi Hendrix Experience
Laura Nyro
Lou Rawls
Simon and Garfunkel
The Beach Boys
Booker T & the MG's
The Byrds
Jefferson Airplane
Hugh Masekela
Moby Grape
Otis Redding
The Blues Project
The Impressions
The Mamas and the Papas
Johnny Rivers
Dionne Warwick
The Who
Of few did not appear. The Beach Boys

these acts, a very
failed toshow; trouble and strife within the group was
covered by the phrase "prior engagement" or some such.
Likewise Dionne Warwick. But not listed and very much on
the bill, now with a new and astounding number-one single,
was Scott MacKenzie, a shining symbol of the new Love
Generation with a fabulous John Phillips anthem. Scott had
come back into our life, still with that great tenor voice but
now quite ready for major solo work. Lou had left ABC/
Dunhill to form his own company, Ode, which he signed to

Columbia Records, and it was on this label, produced by
Lou, that John's song "San Francisco" ("If you go to ... be
sure to wear some flowers in your hair") reached the top
spot in that great summer. Lou expressed the wish in an
interview with Derek Taylor that Scott's solo career would
not live and die in that one single, "like Barry with 'Eve
of Destruction, '" but in a way it did. Though John wrote
a good follow-up, "Like an Old Time Movie," and Lou
produced an album, it was never the same for Scott after
that brief shining moment. At Monterey, however, who
knew any of that? Scott came on in the middle of our act; we
closed the final night of the three. Cass, Denny, John, and I
hadn't sung together in three months. We sang flat, but I
don't think anyone except us minded. It was a sensational
festival. The spirit was all around us. There were 50,000 in
the surrounding showgrounds, under the most wonderful
sky. Heaven was not far away that weekend. Such great
names came, either to perform or to watch. There could
never be such people together again.
In the euphoria of Monterey, run with enormous effi-
ciency by Lou and John, there was such a richness of willing
talent available that those who didn't show were not at all
missed. We had become good friends of Marilyn and Brian
Wilson of the Beach Boys, neighbors in Bel Air, and we had
been looking forward to seeing them, but in the event, at the
event, when they failed to turn up, we forgot about them.
And musically they were not needed. Imagine those con-
certs! One headed by Simon and Garfunkel, another by Otis
Redding, another by Janis Joplin; and on the Sunday after-
noon, for the first time in a wholly pop setting, Ravi Shankar,
then the new most improbably hip guy on the scene. An
acknowledged master of Indian music for many years, he
was lionized by George Harrison of the Beatles, by the
Byrds' David Crosby, and by many others whose heads had
rightly been turned by the whisperings of Eastern culture.
Ravi Shankar was one of the great triumphs of the Monterey
Pop Festival, and worth remembering that although

it is
there was a lot of pot smoked in and around the stage, there
was an honest response to Ravi's request from the stage to
listen to his music "straight" and let the sitar and its accom-
panying instruments do the levitating. Like I've said, we
meant well, and so did everybody else.
It's fairly well known now that the notable "discoveries"
at Monterey were and Jimi Hendrix, but for
Janis Joplin
me the important moment was going to be Otis Redding.
I was very keyed up for his entrance. However, Laura
Nyro had not done well in her set. Although a much fa-
vored singer-songwriter and cult figure, who had gotten
very rich from good copyrights, she was somehow not
right for the festival. She didn't do well, and she knew it. I
came offstage, so I put her in a limo
really felt for her as she
and her a huge joint and opened a beer and drove around
lit
for about thirty minutes comforting her. And when we got

back to the showground, Otis was, oh, dear ... he was just
finishing his set. I was stunned. I got the last three and a
half minutes of "Try a Little Tenderness." I knew I had
blown it, that there would never be another Otis Redding
show would be too few shows of
like that one. In fact, there
any sort by Otis. He died in a plane crash in December of
that year. What misery. So far as I was concerned, Otis Red-
ding was one of the reasons we had worked so hard for the
Monterey Pop Festival. Somehow because we knew he was
coming, everything was going to be right. The festival was
blessed in every way. The spirit in the offices from the start
had been quite astounding.
And on June 18th, after performing at Monterey, I
realized I was pregnant. Before too long I would have a
wonderful daughter, Chynna.
Around this time I started to get very friendly with Ann
Marshall, who had had an affair with John during our separa-
tion and was soon to be Scott MacKenzie's girlfriend. We
had been introduced by Steve Brandt, a publicist with Guy
McElwaine and Associates, who handled Mamas and Papas
publicity. Steve knew everybody, but everybody . Steve was

a rather pathetic guy way, and though we be-
in a lonely
friended him and he us, there was always an isolation there.
He committed suicide in the late 1960s, but not before he had
made sure that everyone earning over a certain amount had
met everyone else in the same bracket, as long as they were hip.
There always were such people in Los Angeles, and nothing
had changed.
Ann and I were at adjoining tables at the Daisy, the so
fashionable club,when Steve introduced us. We sat down
together and became instant friends. She was the first
woman I had met since Cass who I really thought was a lot
of fun. She was amusing, good-natured, caustic, and funny.
That English sort of "funny," lots of asides and quick verbal
flicks. She was very particular about the sort of company
she kept, and she did know so many of the "right people."
She was so hip, I was always impressed. She was also very
reliable and orderly, and we were all to value that as time
went by. We became more or less inseparable.
Now and again we would leave the Bel Air house for a
drive through the greatest show on earth: the hippie dream
trail of Sunset Strip, where, on weekends, all the folks from
the San Fernando Valley and the other "out of towners"

would drive through, slowly, at cruising pace, curb-crawling,
bumper to bumper, to see "the freaks," the young and not so
young with funny hair, long dresses, cowboy boots, jeans, all
sorts of hats, and all sorts of heads under them. It was a
familiar sight for those of our generation who had grown into
it, or even helped create it, this new freedom: so frail, so
unsuitable in the long run, but while it lasted, so cheerful and
original. We would occasionally venture into it in spite of our
developing remoteness from day-to-day life in old-fashioned
terms. One night John and I, with Cyrus from the Modern
Folk Quartet and his wife, Rusty, were driving in their pais-
ley Studebaker. We were all very high. It was during that
period when it was commonplace to see the "bust" on the
Strip: "Up against the wall, boots off!" And sure enough, we
were pulled over on Sunset. A cop drew close, lights flash-
ing. John took the bag of pot out of his pocket and stuffed it
under the front seat. The cop stopped by John's door and
told us to get out. "We got it," shouted the cop, after a quick
flashlight search under the seat showed where John had
stowed the grass. "I got it," he said again, and then, "Up
against the wall." Hard to believe that it was happening.
"Everything that we see or seem is but a dream within a
dream."
"What can they do?" I asked someone. "What can
happen?" Call Abe. Hell get us out of it. It'll be in and out.
What can they do about a lid of grass, for God's sake? We
were ordered to put our hands up. We took off our boots.
We were patted down, and they went through the car, fully
expecting to find a pound of heroin and . .well, what could
.
they be expecting to find? Marijuana itself was then very

suspect, though it has never yet proved to be dangerous;
today the law is mercifully more benevolent, and few are
now jailed for possession of marijuana. (It was because of
drug busts that neither Donovan nor the Rolling Stones as a
group had been able to get to the United States for the
Monterey Pop Festival, where of course they would have
been among the great attractions.)
"What's all this, then?" asked a Beverly Hills cop as he
pulled his squad car up alongside the sheriff's car. This one
was a sergeant, and he got out, looked at us, and shook his
head, then took John off down the street to talk to him. We
tried to guess from their gestures what was being said. God,
what could they be saying that took so many gestures? The
officer finally came across and spoke to the cop who had
stopped us. The latter screamed an obscenity and flung
down two Doredin tablets he had found in John's pockets.
Then the Beverly Hills officer came across to us and told us
to go home immediately. I got back in the car with the oth-
ers, and as we moved away, I asked John what he had said
what / said that was interesting,"
to the officer. "It wasn't
said John. was
"It what he said."
And he told us what the Beverly Hills cop had said:
"Aren't you guys in the Mamas and Papas? I can't believe
this! Do you mean that you guys are on the Stripon a Satur-
day night in a paisley Studebaker? I thought you guys were
so hip and so cool. This is such a disappointment!"
John said, "That was what he laid on me. That and the
fact that it was, according to him, 'Illegal search and
seizure/"
So we went home and became even less anxious to go
out. We were now not only too snobbish but far too notice-
able as well —a sure recipe for an acute desire to stay at
home. And meanwhile, at home . . .
Free City had arrived. It announced itself one afternoon.

I remember it well. Ann Marshall and I were sitting on the
fox-fur rug toasting someone with Dom Perignon out of

Lalique glasses. John and Lou and their friend Terry Melcher
were having a meeting in the Pub, about a plan to form a
company called MAP, Melcher/ Adler/Phillips. There was
not even a knock at the door to announce the arrival of a
large man in long robes, accompanied by five similarly clad
acolytes, male and female. The leader announced himself:
"We are Free City, and we have come to see John Phillips."
I said, "Hold on just a second." I went into the Pub and
said, "Free City are here. To see you."

By now guy had made his way to the living room
this
and put his feet up on the coffee table. The object of the visit
was money: Free City was going to have a tented city out-
side Palm Springs that would feed thousands of homeless
people, and they wanted $10,000 cash to get this thing
started. They were old fans. They had supported us; now
they were going to have us support them.
I was quickly insulted. I remember refilling my glass
and getting really angry. "Obviously we are not interested in

Free City, and we'd like you to leave." They didn't budge. I
took John into the kitchen and said, "You get them out of
here right now, or I'm calling the Bel Air patrol. They can't
just walk in here demanding money."
John stalled me: "Now slow down, okay? I'll deal with
them, Michelle. I'll take care of it." He went out, and there
was some conversation: John, the rich hippie, full of guilt,
141
CAL IFORNIA DREAMIN'
would love to see this thing through but couldn't take care of
everyone, where would we be, da da da da da . . .
They were still going on and on, still in our living room,
Free City, and they were being offensive and abusive, like I
had everything and they had nothing. Far from being truly
cosmic we were bourgeois, and that's what they had ex-
pected all along. I said to them, to the leader, "This is the last
time I'm asking you nicely." I smashed the Lalique glass
against the wall and put the jagged edge to his throat. "That's
it, motherfucker. Out of my house!"
He looked at me with disdain. "Bad vibes," he said, and

left. Bad man. The equivalent of "I'm calling
vibes, my
lawyer" in those days. John didn't really approve of this
summary execution. He was very superstitious, didn't like
giving offense to those people, to the "true hippies," the ones
who "reallywanted" to change the world. He was vulnerable
to those people. That was how it was then, from Monterey to
the ends of the developed world. There were great expecta-
tions within the Alternative Society that it would somehow
cure all ills, help the Lord to provide for all.
I remember doing a concert in Chicago. We were very
recognizable by then, and John and I had quite a crowd fol-

lowing us as we walked up the street. A guy came up to John
and said, "We're trying to get to California, man," and John
pulled out a hundred-dollar bill to give to him.
I said, "Don't do that, John. Come on, don't do it."
But John did it anyway. He liked to be philanthropic if it

was somewhere within reason, no matter how near the
—
edge Big Daddy with the bucks. This guy said, "Thanks,
man," and vanished, and about three weeks later we were
standing in front of the Whisky, where we'd gone to see a
friend performing, and the same guy appeared and said
again, "Thanks, man. I couldn't have done it without you."
Posthaste he had arrived in LA, the promised land.
It was certainly in the spirit of quick money, that and so
many other hippie, "Hey, man," guilt transactions. Music,

love, and flowers, baby, you're a rich man, all you need is
love, how does it feel to be one of the beautiful people,
young girls coming to the canyons, if you go to San Fran-

are
cisco, be sure wear some dollars in your hair. Lazy, hazy
to
days of that summer, long ago and far away, when there
were no known lurkers. At least Free City had shown up in
full daylight, as bold as you like. In time John was to develop
a paranoia about everything in Bel Air, but that was some

—
distance ahead far from our present life with the peacocks
and tea parties and rose gardens and the swimming pool
made out of slate, friends, friends, friends everywhere, at all
those wonderful parties.

The sixties produced a very special combination of
people with good intentions and a generous, sharing spirit,
some of whom also had wealth, though that certainly wasn't
the most important ingredient. It wasn't a myth; it was real.
It didn't all go bad, though of course it couldn't be sustained
at such a pace and there were mistakes. One such was

believing that original sin had fled the Love Generation.
We believed that the media was increasingly on the side of
the right against might. We were for peace, an end to
the war in Vietnam, for sure, and it was a badge of honor to
be disapproved of by those who believed in the war.
I remember I was asked to do a cover for Teen maga-
zine. It was and now. I was

a very important monthly then
anxious to do it; it was a good opportunity to do some-
—
thing on my own not a Mamas and Papas but a Mama
—
Michelle thing and I found it exciting. At the magazine's
studio I found an art director and a photographer, of course,
and they'd brought Carrie White in to dress my hair. The
idea was to put my hair in braids, which was fine with me
because that was how I often wore it.
Then I glanced into the air director's bag and noticed a
green beret, neatly folded in a piece of tissue. "Look," I said,
"that isn't for me, is it?" The art director said it was, and
added it was going to look great. I said, "I don't know

that
whom you have to call, but you better call someone right
now because I'm not going to wear that beret." She asked me
what I was talking about. It was what they'd planned for the
cover of that issue; it had all been decided. I had to wear it.
"I'm not going to wear a green beret," I said. "It's contrary to

everything I believe in and everything I stand for. I cannot,
will not put it on." In that case, the art director told me, I
couldn't do the cover. "Fine," I said. She changed her tactics,

switching from threats to persuasion: hey, come on, no big
deal, it's just a fashion. . . . But nothing she could say would
sway me on These were the days when every
this issue.
subtlety of people's views was examined: political stance,
song lyrics, and everything else. Hard to remember that now,
when everyone's buying GI Joe dolls for their kids. In the
sixties (and, in fact, today) I certainly didn't buy war toys
or wear green berets. Anyhow, that was the end of the Teen
cover. They were not going to be pushed around by this little
rock 'n' roller, so I was replaced this time. I felt good about
it. There wasn't a person I knew who would have said, "You
should have worn the green beret." There was an article in

the following issue of Teen magazine called "Mama was a
Heavyweight," with a picture of the four of us and a script
you're wrong
—
that began: "You probably think we're talking about Cass but
" They ripped me apart for being un-American
and all of that. I loved the article. I couldn't have put it
better myself. Ha! Once again the idea was more important
than the person. They, those green berets, were the fucking
heroes. They were murderers. They said, some of them,
later: "When it got right down to it, we were the guys slitting
throats with piano wire." They were, however, glorified
then.
Still, politics, as I've said, was never a primary preoccu-
pation of the Mamas and the Papas. We were good-time rock
'n' with our hearts in
rollers the right place; we were not
active protesters, though many of our best friends were. We
were, however, all at one about peace. At a concert in New
York John made a joke about us being in the Veterans
Memorial Hall and took a sideswipe at the Vietnam war.
Word came through from the side of the stage that he had
better apologize for that remark or the police would not
offer us any protection as we left the stage. John didn't
apologize (nor should he have done), so we had to make our
own way from the stage to our car. Itwas kind of scary; our
hair was pulled, and Cass cried. It was soon over, but it was
forgotten by neither side. It was so different then because
the anti-war movement, the pot and the acid, the songs'
words and music, language, clothes, hair, everything was so
loose and free and open that we couldn't separate one from
the other. We were somehow all one, and, as the Beatles song
said, life flowed on within us and without us. We were,
despite our individual snobberies, so tolerant as long as
people were cool!
I remember we had an artist called Vito come to one of
our parties; he was well known on the Strip. We'd never

hung out with him at Ben Frank's coffee shop or wherever
else he was to be found nightly, with Byrd followers and
flower children, lecturing them on the merits of the free life,
holding forth, holding court, and so on. He was welcome at
our house, though, with his wife, Susie, and any friends they
had, so long as they had some sort of loose "security" clear-
ance. This was the height of hippie madness, a time when a
girl could take off her dress and dance naked while everyone
just stood around and watched and said, "Hey, man," and
the like. I remember one girl who did, one of Vito's girls. She
ended up on the big couch, asleep, and I went off to bed and
left her there. When I got up that night, she was still asleep,
so I went back to bed, and when I got up again next morn-
ing, she was still there. I vacuumed around her, and still she
slept. When she finally awoke that evening, I packed her off
to Vito. He was like a wonderful friendly satyr, sometimes
on the verge of being angry but always a lot of fun and really
quite safe. In those days it was still possible to be very "out
of it" and yet not ruined. There were very few white
powders, though people did take a lot of mind-expanders.
We did a lot of things on impulse then, like the time we
decided to go to Mexico. John was mixing an album, so
Annie and I went on ahead to Las Brisas, Acapulco, and took
a house and made it real comfortable and as Mexican as pos-
sible. We went to the marketplace and bought some beauti-
ful serapes (those colorful woolen shawls) to put over all the
couches so that everyone would have something pretty to sit

on. We bought twelve parrots in cages —
$1.50 for the parrot,
—
50 cents for the cage and put one in every room. We also
bought armfuls of sombreros. We stocked the house with
lovely things and had flowers in great profusion all around
the house and floating in the pool, just like in Bel Air, where
flowers in the pool added so much period charm.
We had such a time in Mexico. The boys came down,
and Cass and Steve Brandt. Steve was crazy and mad,
power-mad, socially. He knew everybody Mia and Frank, —
Eddie Fisher, Zsa Zsa and Marlon Steve Brandt was part
. . .
of the great All Together Nowness of those days. No hippie

he, but a man with his own role on the edge of hippie
heaven. The elements were so mixed then, and we were cer-
tainly in our element. The Mamas and the Papas sometimes
felt as if they were all the elements.
What was wanted, we decided, was the greatest concert
ever at the Hollywood Bowl. We chose a Saturday night in
August, and though we didn't know it, there was to be a full
moon. Saturday night, full moon, orchids by the thousand
from Hawaii again, and beautiful new outfits in silk from
Toni. We knew and so did Lou that it would probably be our
last Los Angeles concert, but we didn't announce that to the
audience. Lou made sure that everything would be wonder-
ful, and it was, a really loving concert. I don't know why it
was our final LA appearance, because we had plenty of

work ahead elsewhere, but it was, and it took place on a
lovely balmy evening with the arena packed. Seventeen
thousand eight hundred in the Bowl; everyone we knew was
there, crowding into the front boxes, knowing every song so
well by now and loving them, us, it, everything. As a group
we were very close, and it was easy to communicate this. It
was understood; we assumed that. Indeed, we assumed every-
thing, including the mantle of Greatness. I remember that
assumption surfacing as our limousine approached the Bowl.
Jimi Hendrix was performing, and you can imagine the
volume of acclaim as that unforgettable music swept through
the night sky. Los Angeles had not seen this man before, but
we had, at Monterey, where we'd closed the very last show

in the wake of astonishing tours de force from Hendrix and
theWho.
We had that Monterey feeling now, as we drove into our
Bowl, where we had given our first concert. When we got to
the wooden horse that barred the entrance, the guard asked
our driver, Iggy, for the special pass, which of course we
didn't have. When we toldhim we were the Mamas and the
Papas, he said, "I don't care who you are, you're not coming
in. You don't have a pass, you don't get in." So Iggy just
stormed the gate, and I leaned out at the guard and flipped
him the bone and shouted, "Eat shit, motherfucker!" The
barefoot Mama of the Love Generation hardly at her—
gentlest. It was a good-natured concert, though, and Toni
had given us our finest wardrobe. There would never be
anything quite like it again. It wasn't straight downhill from
then on, but we had climbed the mountain because it was
there and reached the peak, and now . . well, Cass was
.
already a mother, and I was soon going to be one, and we

had to get our commitments sorted and work out how we
were going to spread our time. Time! Was it running out at
last?
CHAPTE R 7
CALIFORNIA
DREAMIN'
Autumn, full of night-club-

bing, hobnobbing, showing
off at the Daisy,and then it was time to go east, get on the
road, go to London and Brussels, play Carnegie Hall, do the
Ed Sullivan show, work and play hard. I was not going to get
any less pregnant, let's face it. It was live hard now, rest
later. We arrived in New York in true Mamas and Papas
style, very grand, staying at the Sherry Netherland, all strut-
ting around, having a good time flaunting ourselves. I
walked down 57th Street with John on the afternoon before
the concert, and we looked at all the posters for our show.
All the words "Mamas and Papas" had a slash across them,
the second poster strip: "Sold Out." We stared at them in
wonderment. Sold out. Carnegie Hall. We walked and we
walked, and then I heard a terrible "cl-a-a-a-ng," and John
had walked himself into a post, a metal post, and he was
sitting, now toppling, now managing to sit on the curb and
not fall over, his head shuddering like Stan Laurel's, a similar
vacant grin on his face. His brain had momentarily disen-
147
gaged, and both his head and the post were somehow still
reverberating. I could hear that clang! There's nothing worse,
physically, than a trauma to the head— that awful bell-like
sound, that deep thump.
Well, the show must go on. It may be an anticlimax to
say that John recovered, but he did, and we gave a sensa-
tional show at Carnegie Hall. Lots of our friends were there.
We were all happy as happy could be, but maybe Cass was
happiest of all. She, the great Cass, had made it to Carnegie
Hall. Roy Silver, Cass's old friend and manager of the Big
Three and the Mugwumps, sat in the audience grinning and
misty-eyed. It was Roy, after all, who had first known that
Cass and Denny had a lot of talent, and here they were, at
Carnegie Hall! "This one's for you, Roy," Cass said. And she
meant it with all her heart. We did two Ed Sullivan shows
—
(not our first time on Sullivan we had done one soon after
"California Dreamin"'), but I wasn't as much fazed by that as
might be supposed. It was a big, big TV show, but since I
hadn't watched much TV, I did not have the relationship
with the show that some people had. I knew its great reputa-
tion, but I had never really watched it, and we didn't hang
out with Ed or anything like that. The Sullivan show was just
something you did if you made it very big in the pop world,
whether you were Elvis or the Beatles or us. It was just
understood, I guess.
We
announced on television that we would be sailing to
Europe on the France, one of the last great transatlantic
liners of those days before the Queen Elizabeth II. We heard
froxii the shipping line when we
got back to the Sherry:
"Glad to know you're taking the France; now that we do
know, we'll make the necessary arrangements for you." It
had never occurred to us that there would be any problem,
but of course we would have to buy tickets and make a few
plans. Boy, were we casual!
Scott MacKenzie was traveling with us. He was scheduled
to do some television shows in Europe, where, as everywhere
else in the world, his version of John's "San Francisco" song
had been number one, an anthem for the times and the true
essence, undiluted, the pure song of flower

absolutely
power, that idealized and rather wonderful abstraction in
which we all quite properly believed. And why not? Every-
thing else, all the formalized violence and power-broking,
had been tried and had failed. Now we would say it with
flowers. We had lots of finery for the voyage. We had outfits
for all occasions. Before leaving New York, Ann and I dressed
fit to kill and went off visiting. We saw Bonnie and Clyde in
Manhattan with Denny. Phil Spector had a recording session in

one of the high buildings, and I knew that Steve, my old
record-business lover, was in the same building. I told Ann I
was going to see an old friend, and, as it happened, she also

had a friend in this very busy building. So we went up in the
elevator, and I told Ann that John would die if he knew I
was going to see this guy. Just then the elevator door opened,
and there stood Steve. Both Ann and I greeted him simul-
taneously: "Steve!" He looked very embarrassed. Ann and I
stared at each other incredulously and then cracked up.
"Steve! You, too?" It was becoming apparent we had the
same taste in men.
We passed some time, and then I rejoined the others,
John, Scott, Peter Pilafian, Denny, and Cass, and boarded
the ship with a whole new set of Gucci luggage. Lou, Jill,
Ann, and Abe Somer flew over later. We sailed out of New
York headed for Boston, at which port we disembarked and
made a short detour by car to score about half a pound of
the very best pot. Back on the ship, we slipped out into the
Atlantic. We were a sight to behold on that ship, and
instantly recognizable. They had all seen the Sullivan show
and just thought we were great and so funny! They couldn't
believe we were going to be on their ship, the five of us
(Scott included), so young, familiar, and famous and all, in
the flesh and very friendly. The pot was terrifically happy
stuff. We were loving everything and everybody. We sat at
the captain's table. As we entered the first-class dining room,
we got a standing ovation. All of us were dressed up in vivid
Indian silks. The whole trip to Southampton (we weren't
going on to Le Havre, the ship's we had a
final destination)
ball, smoking all the while, drinking, dining, dancing . . . Oh,

boy, being the first family of rock V roll was all right, right
on, man. It was very glamorous and sixties, but it was also
very thirties.
It was a fabulous and it ended too soon and with a

trip,
really nasty shock. Suddenly the fun was over. Peter, John,
Denny, and I were asked to step aside by a purser, who then
said, "Sorry to have to tell you this, but there is something
you should be aware of. There is a constable waiting to
arrest Miss Elliott when you have disembarked." We were
only minutes away from disembarkation, and as Cass and I
had spent some of the last full day on board carefully sewing
the last ounces of our Boston pot into our coats ("Put the pot
into baggies, slip the baggies in the lining, then sew up the
lining"), we were in trouble.
John quickly found Cass. "Cass. Get rid of your pot.
Right now." She went to the bathroom. I was just furious. I
knew that she had to get rid of it, but it still broke my heart.
What a waste! Time passed. We really were due off this ship,
and Cass was not coming back! What could she be doing?
After twenty-five minutes had passed, John turned to
me and said, "Go get her."
I went into the bathroom and found Cass on her knees,
crying. There was marijuana from one end of the bathroom to

another. She was scooping it up and trying to flush it down
the toilet, and it wouldn't flush away; every time she pulled
the handle, the pot just remained, floating on top of the
water. And it was just everywhere in the room and on her
clothing and all over her hands. It was such a mess and
looked so silly. She was still crying. "I think you should get
back to John. Ill take care of this," I said.
She left, relieved and terribly confused. So was I. How
could such a terrible thing be happening to the two so-loved
ladies of the Royal Family of Pop? The slim blonde queen of
rock Vroll, fresh from the captain's table, kneeling on the
floor of a lavatory scooping up herbal cannabis, still highly
illegal and a very hot substance in England, where the
Rolling Stones had been in so much trouble over it. Oh, God.
But had got rid of most of it, methodically and quickly, by

I
the time John appeared in the doorway. "You, too!" he said

urgently. Me, too, what? "Get rid of your pot!" No. "Get rid
of it, dammit," said John and rushed off. Now I was getting
rid of many ounces of this most beautiful pot by steady
flushing and rushing from one lavatory to another. I knew
they were overreacting. I wasn't going to be arrested, and
anyway, why were they arresting Cass? What was happening,
man? It made me real angry.
Now we walked down to the landing stage and huddled
together. "She's under arrest," said a policeman, indicating
Cass, and he asked her to come with him. John asked what
the charges were. "I don't have to tell you what the charges
are," said the officer. "You're not in the U.S. now. This is
England."
"If she doesn't know what being charged with,"
she's
said John, "she's not going with you." He motioned Cass to
get into one of our cars; Andrew Oldham, the Stones'
producer and manager, had arrived with three or four Rolls-
Royces. Cass got into one of them. I followed with Denny.
The police then placed a car in front of the line of Rolls-
Royces. John said, "Don't go with them, Cass, don't do it."
So she just sat there, and then a big matron arrived.
"Come with me, please." She grabbed Cass by one arm and
started to pull. We held on to the other arm. A tug of war
began with Cass as both the anchor and the prize. There was
a lot of screaming and yelling, American-style, with the
police shouting orders to us and each other. The matron kept
on tugging, and in the end she won. She was bigger than
Cass, bigger than all of us put together, and she certainly
won. I was so incensed that I got out of the car and ran over
to her and socked the woman right in the face. But she was
not about to let go of Cass, having struggled so hard to get
her, and she said to me, "I'm going now, but I'm coming
back to get you for assault." Then she left, and they drove
off.
Not having been come back for, I left with the others,
and we followed Cass's police car right back to the police
station. ranted and raved and said, "I want to see my

I
friend!" The police said that Cass was being processed and
that we would have to wait. In fact, we would have to leave.
It was so bizarre, it didn't seem in any way credible.
From the elevation and privilege of state-room luxury and
splendor to this, in two allowed the imagination to
hours. It
roam over all paradoxes and parallels. Sic transit

sorts of
gloria mundi. How are the mighty fallen! The bigger you
are, the harder you fall. So Cass was now in the dungeon,
. . .
and I knew that she had her purse with her, and I knew also
that Cass never had a clean-as-a-whistle purse. She was going
to have something illegal with her. But nothing could be
done; we would just have to wait and see. Lou Adler and Jill
Gibson had arrived, and we were all booked into the Hilton
Hotel on Park Lane. Everybody was staying there, including
Peter, Abe Somer, Lou, Jill, Denny, Scott, Ann, and Cass
(when or if we should see her again). John and I had a great
suite, which and Lou had
failed to ignite a cheerful spark. Jill
the suite below. Scott had a room next to Lou, his producer
and protector. Denny had a little room into which he locked
himself and where he stayed, watching television. John and I
went for dinner; the press found us and took photographs.
The evening papers had been full of the story and pictures.
In the London Daily Mail the next day was a miserable
photograph of us, in our finest Monterey Pop uniforms. "In
London last night," said the caption, "Papa Denny Doherty,
Mama Michelle Gilliam and Papa John Phillips. The group
are leaders of the flower people." We certainly didn't look
like leaders of the flower people or of any other people. I
looked exhausted, as indeed I was. Pregnant, tired from the
ship, tired from crying, and on top of all this, wildly
unhappy about Jill Gibson being with us. I mean wildly; I
was still very insecure, all the more so now that I was
pregnant, more vulnerable. In fact I was on the verge of a
good old nervous breakdown. I passed a very tense night.
Next morning there was wide coverage of our "Fifteen-
stone Mama." The Daily Sketch picture showed her in a cage
in a police van, wearing a "light-colored felt" hat, a raincoat,
and black stockings and looking very fed up. Mama Michelle
Gilliam was quoted in the Daily Express: "She's a personality.
They just shouldn't do this to her." Scott was described as
"America's No. 1 Flower Child." The charge now was
quoted as "allegedly stealing two blankets and two keys,
total value £10 10s.," from a London hotel some months
earlier.
We got up, got dressed, and prepared to go to court to
see Cass answer the charges. I saw Jill in the hall, waiting for
Lou to join her for the trip to court. Upstairs in our suite I
had a big fight with John about Jill going to court. I said, "I
don't want her there. It's enough that she was my replace-
ment on the first London visit, but I'm not going to have her
as a close and constant traveling companion." I was ex-
tremely sensitive about this, but John shouted me down in
the limo. Still boiling with resentment I went into the court-
room and sat down beside him.
On the other side of the court, I saw Jill with Lou. We
were all waiting for Cass, just waiting for everything to start.
Lou looked across at me, and I gave him the finger. I was
ready to kill. Really ready. I gave him a full finger, and he
walked over to me with Jill beside him and said, right there
in thecourtroom, "Michelle, you'd better think why you're so
angry. You just better think about it." He then walked out of
the courthouse with Jill, and he was still missing when Cass
appeared.
I was feeling terrible. I waited and waited for him to
come back in, as I knew he had to, and when he did, I went
to him and said I was sorry, really sorry. He said that was not
enough. "I have to know why you're so hostile to Jill. You
just have to think some more about it."
I thought that if it wasn't obvious why I was hostile,
well ... I said, "I'll think about it, Louie."

Our reason for being in this place reasserted itself when
"Cassandra Elliott" was called by the clerk to the court. She
had been charged with stealing the keys and blankets from
rooms at the Embassy Hotel in Kensington when "she and
another person had been in occupation" earlier in the year.
The prosecution told the court that she had, however, given
a satisfactory explanation. She had no case to answer. A
warrant had been issued for the arrest of the "other person."
The magistrate said, "You leave this court without a stain on
your character."
Cass told the waiting press, "Your policemen are wonder-
ful, but I don't think much of your jails. There just weren't
enough blankets."
So Cass was in the clear, if shaken, but I was still shaken
and by no means clear. I went back to the hotel, up to the
suite in the Hilton with a view across London, and I stood in
the window looking out with tears of self-pity stinging the
back of my eyes.
"What's the matter, honey?" asked John.
"I think I'm in love with Lou Adler," I said.
John got up, left the room, went down in the elevator,
and checked out of the hotel and into another.
I went Lou and Jill's suite and knocked on the door.
to
When Lou answered, I said, "I have to talk to you. I've
thought about it, and I have to talk about it." He invited me
inside, and I saw Jill sitting in an armchair. "Lou," I began.
"The reason I flipped you the bone in the court is because I
don't like seeing you with other women, and I really won't
tolerate it." Lou looked wildly around the room, first at me
and then at Jill and then away from both of us. Across the
suite he had a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket, and now
he took the bottle of champagne out of the bucket and stuck
his head deeply into the ice. It all was too much for the poor
man.
I was always too much. I was a terrible person, I really
was. I was a real behind-the-scenes troublemaker, and these

shifts of behavior were somehow carrying our main story
forward. Had I been a reliable, monogamous woman, this
wouldn't have been such a rocky tale. But there it was.
Does it seem that my love for Lou came out of the clear
gray sky over London? It didn't. Not long after I had been
readmitted into the group, after the "disgrace" of Gene and
following the little matter of Denny, John and I stopped
hanging out with Denny and started keeping company with

Lou. John and Lou became the inseparables, and the same
agreeable sexual tensions arose. Lou lived exactly one and a
half minutes from our house down Bel Air Road. John and I
would get in our Mini-Mokes and go down the hill to be with
Louie. On the road, staying in thesame hotels in adjoining
suites, flying in the same tiny jet, we were always together.
John needed a best friend, always. All men love the
camaraderie, and in John's case, because he was a worka-
holic, these intense relationships were very constructive. The
way he was with other men, he was able to make the
friendships into very successful and creative business ven-
tures as well. They were not just sitting around getting high.
These guys, besides being best friends, were geniuses to-
gether, making hit records, writing successful songs. We
were all, I knew, plugged in. The energy was passing
between us. It was like a conduit. But I seemed to be the one
that kept breaking the news. "Hey, guys, guess what. It's
love ..."
I have already said was inevitable that I would
it
become really close to whomever John was close to. The

relationships with Denny, Lou (later, Scott), and probably
Marshall Brickman if he'd stayed around, were unavoidable.
They were wonderful guys, very attractive men, all of them.
You couldn't get up and spend your whole time with people
and not respond to their charm and wit and talent. They
were just so lovable. So it was that I came to fall in love with
Lou.
Another factor that helped to trigger these awful hap-
penings was Lou's ecstatic reaction to the news that I was
pregnant. John, a father twice before, had not been that
excited. This was not my wild and crazy imagining. Lou was
the onewho was buying baby clothes and having Toni make
a gown for me and a baby gown to match. When I'd told
John of the special arrangements I'd made for him to be
present in the delivery room, he was horrified. "What, Mich?
Sure, I love you, but I just couldn't do it. Not be there." Lou,
on the other hand, was swept up by the idea of my having a
baby, and my basic perception of the situation now was that,

metaphysically, John and and Lou were having a baby.
I
Jill was dumbfounded at my announcement. I don't
think I actually said, "I love you" to Lou there and then; it
was really not so much that I loved him, not yet, but that
people had to understand that I was not stable, that it didn't
take much to shake me up. I thought that it was terribly
insensitive of Lou to have brought Jill with him. My heart
was still broken over what had happened when I was fired. I
thought they were still flaunting her. The justification that
Lou had a right to bring his girlfriend on a trip to London
didn't hold any weight. This was a business trip, not a vaca-
tion. Had it been a vacation, I would not have been traveling
with Jill. We did plan to enjoy ourselves (that, by now, was
implicit in our way of life), but we were in Europe primarily
to work —to work, no less, at the Royal Albert Hall in Lon-
don and at the Olympia in Paris. Now we were caught up in
real trouble that put the lid on "having fun" and threatened
to cause problems with the engagements. I was hysterical.
John was missing, and the other two, Cass and Denny,
miserable at the way things had turned out since disembarka-
tion, were very pessimistic. Cass, after all, had been through
a very unpleasant encounter with the law, and although she
had "no stain on her character," she did have a scar on her
consciousness. Indignation reigned in the Hilton. They would
all say they anything they did; I'm sure there
felt justified in
was no punishment they could think up that was too severe
for me. It was more than a year since the Trouble, but I was
still pretty sensitive. I hadn't expected my profession of love
for Lou to change anything in any way, but of course it did.

Everyone got very jumpy. I went to Scott's room; realizing
I should not be alone, I sought company. Scott, however,
looked at me pityingly. I was treated like a mental pa-

tient and watched carefully. Lou must have thought I
would try to kill myself. Cass, fresh from prison and the
courtroom, was now back in the hotel hearing all this news.
After that wonderful fairy-tale trip on a transatlantic liner,
how could all these terrible things have happened: arrest,
nervous breakdown, Michelle in love with Lou, John split

from the hotel, Denny glued to his television set, Lou with
his head in an ice bucket, Jill thoroughly bewildered and
probably angry? How come we got into all this trouble? We
had all been overdoing things. Now we were paying the
price.
Lou, Jill, and Ann went to Belgium. I slept in
Scott,
Scott's room for many hours, and somehow after a rest I was
able to find John in another hotel. I apologized. From the
bottom of my heart, I said, I was sorry. Everything seemed
to be falling apart, I said, and John didn't disagree.
I talked to Cass. She was totally traumatized, first by
prison and then by the discovery that John was missing

because I was supposed to be in love with Lou. Oh, Christ,
what's happening? "I'm going to Paris," she said. "I can't take
any more of this, and what's more I don't have to. Cancel
Albert Hall, cancel the Olympia." But ."No buts. I can't
. .
take you two, you and John, anymore. 'Bye." I don't know
what Cass said to Denny, but she went off to Paris to be with
the man who'd let her in for the trouble at Southampton. She
couldn't wait to see this man, who was really nothing but
trouble. He was a bad man, and somehow the arrest and his
badness glorified the romance for Cass. He was not wanted
for a blanket and two keys, that much is certain. There was
talk of drugs — —
hard drugs and "unusual passport arrange-
ments" and currency frauds, but it made no difference to
Cass. Denny stayed in his hotel room. John forgave me,
treated me very well, like a tragic victim. The Albert Hall
—
and Olympia dates were canceled so unprofessional, but
there it was. We did not have a group. People must have
been very displeased, but we were so "spaced out" we
couldn't grasp that. It had no reality. Everybody in the group
was dismayed by the consequences of my throwing my stone
into the pond already disturbed by Cass's arrest. It was so
selfish. But the public, the press, nobody outside would
suspect that the little blonde, that innocent and pregnant little
barefoot Mama, could have had anything to do with any of
this trouble. After all, it was the other one who had been
arrested, who had now flown to Paris. My image was intact.

I had never pretended to be "good." I just looked so
innocent.
I was in the clear now, and we went to Belgium to join
Ann. Having no concerts now meant some good free time for
a vacation, though really we should have been earning
money to pay for the cost of the voyage on the France.
However .Abe decided he and Peter would go to Israel
. .
after France. The Holy Land beckoned the Jew and the
Greek Orthodox Armenian. Abe was an amazed traveler, lov-
ing Europe, thrilled by the Arc de Triomphe when we
arrived in Paris soon after Cass. Now that we were out of
London, where all the bad things had been happening, we
saw that really I had not fouled everything up. There could
be calm after the tumult. People started to take it in their
stride. We went to the Brussels Hilton for a short time, and it
was there that Ann picked up a copy of Vogue and read a
huge article on Morocco, with a picture of the Mamunya
Hotel in Marrakesh. The article gave both of us ideas, and
we lost no time in communicating them to John and to Scott.
But first Scott had a television show to do in Paris with
Brigitte Bardot and Johnny Hallyday. I remember going to a
party and meeting Brigitte. She seemed to have an aura, a
halo around her. She radiated light. She had men, literally, at
her feet, hanging on her, clinging to every word she uttered.
We didn't say much to each other, though we were happy
enough to meet. I was still shattered, and she, well, she was
Brigitte Bardot, the sex goddess. She was wonderful.
So, in her own way, was Ann Marshall. Her presence was
helping everybody and certainly taking the edge off my
paranoia. It interests me now to look back at it and realize
that while I was ranting at Lou for being with Jill Gibson,
something that was no concern of mine, I had no objection at

all to the presence of my husband's ex-lover. It was not at all
rational, but then, it isn't a rational world. In their different

ways both Ann and Jill were terrific girls; I just didn't want
Jill there on our tour. Later we were good friends, but back
then, in Europe, she was terribly in love with Lou and prob-
—
ably still shell-shocked from having to leave the Mamas and

the Papas.
At the George V hotel in Paris, we were now well into
the Vogue piece on Marrakesh, dreaming of escape because
all the other plans had gone awry. It really didn't take Ann
and me more than a few minutes to convince John and Scott

to go to Morocco. Suddenly things looked right. We were
going to go to Africa, something I'd been looking forward to
all my life, and Vogue gave us the impression that Marrakesh
was one hell of a place. An adventure. Not Europe, which

now we sort of knew, not Mexico, which was well within our
experience this was Northern Africa. We flew out of Paris
very quickly and went straight to the exquisite Mamunya
Hotel, full of Eastern treasures, which was exactly what
Vogue magazine had told us to do. We
were typical tourists
in Morocco, buying the clothes, the shoes, and putting it all
on so that we would look suitable. John and I spent a fortune
in the ancient souks (the marketplace) buying old rugs. They
saw us coming, of course, and loved it. We walked around
these winding, twisting little roads in the souks, and lovingly,
warmly, they'd come and get us. They were our best friends.
John and I were still furnishing the Bel Air house and
needed, I mean needed, these beautiful Moroccan rugs. We
could not wait to buy them. We had money, fists full of the
stuff, and we meant business. The minute we arrived to
spend, they would bring out a kettle of mint tea and trays of
pastries, and we sat there for hours, very content in the thrall
of kief, a combination of grass and hash, which we had
bought in bulk, scoring almost immediately after arrival. By
the time we got to the souks, we had smoked God knows
how much kief to make sure we got the right rugs. We cer-
made plenty of friends.
tainly
One such friend met us at the mouth of one of the many
entrances to the market and led us through half a mile of
little streets to a door, which he opened to reveal a palace
within. He closed the door, bringing us totally into this new

world and shutting out the other, all two thousand or more
years of it, passages and dirt roads forgotten now in the
amazement of the little palace. I remember it so well. It was

all tiled, and in the middle was a citrus orchard with lemons
and limes and grapefruit. It was just beautiful, and the smell
in there was so clear and fresh, with mingling of fruits like
nothing else before or since. The best of North Africa and
privilege. The house was built around the garden, and the
rooms led off the tiled and covered walkways. The bed-
—
rooms were half-tiled in white and mosaic it was like being
in a huge Roman bath —
and of course there were carpets.
They were the most beautiful I have ever seen in my life
because as a carpet merchant our new friend had the best,
the most gorgeous rugs. The other soft furnishings were pil-
lows that went along the walls, forming a big couch. There
were tables made of brass that sat low on little breakaway
wooden platforms. Dinner that night was quite unbelievable.
—
Ann and I were the only women present the women of the
household were fascinated by us, hiding and watching us.
The men treated us with great respect, and we knew it was
because they understood us and American society. They
didn't treat their own women so well, and really, underneath
it all, they thought Western women were tarts.
We ate our meal pigeon pie and lamb and couscous

—
—
among other delights and afterward John asked if they
would mind our smoking a joint. He just sat there smiling,
like the confident, replete pop star he was, and the host and
his people said no, they didn't mind if we wanted to smoke a
joint. But they indicated that a joint was child's play and
anyway, not something they were into. Pot was for tribes-
men, peasants; these people were whiskey drinkers. For us,
however, there was a snapping of fingers, and a boy came in,
and somebody said, "Wait a minute, we're going to get
something good here." What came in very soon was a jar,
and in it was what looked like a kind of wet hashish, sort of
like a thick jam, black in color. God knows what it had in
it — three-eighths hash, almonds, honey, poppy seed, all
—
mixed up but we each had a teaspoon, and it gave me the
most wonderful interior high, a really marvelous experience.
I mean, we had eaten pot cookies, but this was ridiculous.
Wonderful. I remember it, can almost sense it all over again.

God it was great.
The palace itself was enough to get hung up on, but
there were also snake charmers and fortune tellers and our
first hole-in-the-ground toilet. That was interesting: just a gap
in the tiles and instead of a seat your basic hunkering position

that got you there and back. As for the fortune teller, he said
many interesting things, among them that John would have
lots of money and lots of success for many years. When he
read my palm, he saw the same, only for many, many, many
years. Then he read Scott's hand and was much more du-
bious and cautious. After reading Annie Marshall's hand he
closed up her palm and patted it and said, "A happy life." I
think that what he saw was something that would not repre-
—
sent a happy life for a woman in his society that she would
never marry and would never have children. But he could
not see far enough beyond his own environment and values,
and his prediction for Ann was to prove accurate. She has
indeed had a happy life. Anyway, as the honey mixture was
coming on, we were all satisfied with our readings at the
time. Happiness was all around. There were good omens,
and we were very into them.
We were in the dining room at the Mamunya a couple of
nights later, marveling that although we just about knew
where we were, no one else we knew had any idea not —
even Lou Adler. Just then the bellman came to the table and
told John there was a call for him, and we were stunned
because no one could have known where we were. Grinning
from ear to ear John returned from the phone call and said,
"Well, if you're finished with dinner, we're going to go
upstairs to have coffee and dessert with Terry and Candy."
Terry Melcher and Candice Bergen were in the full blos-
soming of their romance in that Indian summer of 1967.
They had walked by the dining room, and Terry had said, "I
think I've just seen John and Michelle." Instead of coming
back to make sure, he went to the bellman and asked if we
were registered, and of course we were. So then they went
off to their room and phoned us, and we went up there, and
they gave us all their kief because they were leaving on a

plane next day and they were not foolish enough to takr it
if we were. And we were, quite foolish
across a border, even
enough to do that and more. We had a great evening with
Terry and Candy; we laughed all night. They left the next
day and we kept on smoking, and then we, too, came home.
Scott MacKenzie had an album in the works. It was
recorded in the studio behind the sitting room, where
Jeanette MacDonald had had all those lovely cedar drawers
in the beautiful cedar closet. "If You Go to San Francisco"
had also been recorded in that studio, where we now did all
our rehearsing and where we would record our fourth and —
to all intents and purposes, our final —
album. The little tingly
noise you hear on the start of "San Francisco" is the sound of
a little push-along toy I had bought early in 1967, before I
was pregnant, for the child I hoped to have. The studio was
actually very beautiful in spite of the destruction that had
preceded it. It was also illegal, against the building codes.
We had taken the fire loft to build it and now had no third-
floor exit. Still, Scott's album was completed there, and we
did have a lot of fun because it was so much a part of our
house, a studio with every sort of instrument: bells, tambou-
rines,cymbals, finger cymbals, percussive delights. It was so
good have Lou and John in there, working happily with
to
the musicians coming up to Bel Air, and every home com-
fort. How much we had carved our way of life since the
"greasin' on American Express card!" How, then, did it begin
to get problematic? Or, rather, how did its problematic
nature change? Because let's not be naive, it had never been
easy for long.
Well ... it had all begun in the Virgin Islands, when we
learned the songs. We hadn't intended to get together
forever; it was just fun and ambition somehow melding, and
then the times that were a'changing took us with them and
allowed us to change them some more. And then? And then
we had a meeting. We had run out of material. We were in
no frame of mind to do anything much. We always wrote
our songs when there was some period of rest, in inspired
good lyrics and tunes. By

times, with diversions to alert us to
the time we came back from Europe and Morocco, we had
exhausted our song- writing capabilities. Denny had never
written a song before "I Saw Her Again." John had never,
before this, written hits. We were being sapped of our re-
One said, "I give up." Another: "I can't play anymore."
serves.
Someone else: "I can't sing anymore." Basically the position
was: "Look. We
can beat this to death or ."
. .
At the meeting John said, "We can go on making Mamas

and Papas money for a long time. If we wanna put up with
one another and fight and find some time to write, if we
want our lives to be like the lives of those performers who
just go on and on, well get schlockier and schlockier and
we'll hate ourselves." This was the way we had been thinking
for quite some time. A meeting that took place just before
the Bowl concert had pushed the idea closer to realization,
and now seemed the obvious, the right time to discuss it. We
didn't do anything unless it seemed right. We were always up
front about the way we
felt. I personally felt that nothing
would make me
happier than disbanding the group. The
only one who was really unsure about it was Denny. The rest
of us discussed it gleefully. John had lots to do, the world at
his feet. He, Lou, and Terry Melcher were going to shake the
world up some more. Cass couldn't wait to be a single; it was
most important for her to know she could have a career
without the Mamas and the Papas. In fact she hated being
called Mama Cass. She knew she would be a terrific solo,
and so did we, and so she became. As for me, I just wanted
to nest. John said, "Look, Cass has a baby, Michelle is going
to have a baby ..." I didn't want to be bothered about any-
thing more than wallpapering the nursery. It seemed natural.
So the principle was established: It is over, but there are
still a few things to clear up, like how to do this thing, how to
meet record commitments and get ourselves sorted out with
ABC/Dunhill, Jay Lasker, and all of the business crowd. We
also had burgeoning social lives and more parties to give. It
wasn't yet time to tell the world our most intimate thoughts.
When is it ever time for that? Now?
As for our contract, I felt that in recording negotiations

Jay should be challenged. We liked each other less and less,
and every time we saw him, he seemed to want more and
more material, and every time they demanded another
album at ABC/Dunhill, we had to face the stress of making
one. That is what put such a strain on us. No one in his right
mind could produce the amount of good material that we
were expected to produce in those few short years. In early
times Dunhill, the little company, had never made unrea-
sonable demands. We had the material. We could do every-
thing. Then Lou had been amazed. "These four animals
walked in off the street . .
," as Jay put it, "and they had
.
this whole album for us, a Number One album and all we
had to do was record it." But ABC and Jay had started crack-
ing the whip because ABC wanted as much material as they
could get. It was obvious they did not relate to the finer
points of this group's needs, because the smart thing would
have been to send us to the Virgin Islands for a four-month
vacation to write.
There was one period when I was not allowed to go to
the meetings because I argued too much. During this time
they had restructured the contract. John and Lou and Abe
and Jay. Now I was brought in to sign the contract. John
cautioned me before the meeting. "Mich, we are going in to
sign the contract/' he said. "We are not going in to have a
fight with Jay." Fine by me. I couldn't wait to sign a new
contract. It would improve our deal in many ways. But in the
meeting, and much to everyone's shock, I actually read it. I
had never read a contract before, but since I hadn't been
part of the negotiations, I thought I had better read this one.
I remember the setting very clearly. We were in the con-
ference room at Mitchell, Silverberg and Knupp, Abe's law

office. We were sitting around a long oval table that could
have seated twenty. There was Abe, Jay Lasker, and Lou,
and John, Cass, Denny, and me. I took a long, long time
reading it and finally came to a paragraph that read as fol-
lows: "In the event the group should break up, John Phillips
has the right to use the name Papa John, Denny . etc.
. .
. Cass Elliott has the right to use the name Mama Cass.
. .
. . . Michelle . . . does not have the right to use the name

Mama Michelle."
"What the fuck is this?" I demanded. Now Abe and
John and Lou were all looking at it like they had never seen
this contract before. What is that? How can this be? All that
sort of stuff. Does it go to show how ready they were to
negotiate my points, to settle the contract? It was really
mean-spirited anyway. I don't think they expected me to
read the contract. Was it Jay being vindictive? I know he
would have loved to spring it on me if, a year later, I'd
wanted to record on another label. He felt he had John,
Denny, and Cass pretty well tied up, but he knew that he and
I were never going to do a record together; there was just too
much bad blood between us.

Now Lou of course was still acting as our producer, and
he, on the surface and, as far as I know, deep down, was as
put off by the demands made by ABC as we were. I looked
again at the paragraph taking the "Mama" away from me. I
looked at Jay and asked again the terrible question: "What
the fuck is this?" We stared at each other for about one min-
ute in total silence. Then Jay got up, slammed his briefcase
shut, and walked out of the room.
Abe went running down the hallway after him and said,
"Er, where you going? These negotiations are not finished."
Jay said, "They are finished. They are over. I'm not sign-
ing the contract; they are not signing the contract." Abe
asked why, and Jay replied, "Because Michelle looked at me
as was a piece of shit."
if I
There was a delay of many days, and the offending

clause was taken out, and I could be Mama Michelle forever
and a day if I wished. I had of course no intention of forming
a group, joining another, being Mama Michelle, or even of
ever singing again. My realistic view was that not until I
died, at a party, with a joint in one hand and a drink in the
other, were they ever going to have to call me Mama
Michelle. But I'd had a great time, and I was not going to go
out of this thing sucking the fuzzy end of the lollipop. I sure
as hell wasn't going to have the thing legalized away from
me. Call me Mama on the contract, if you please, and I'll
sign on the dotted line. And so I did, and we went off home
our baby and our parties. We were happy
to Bel Air to plan
again, and the future seemed rosy for we were still very
young and very rich. Yet I did sometimes feel very down.
One day John was off to a meeting (another to which I
wasn't invited) and I was lying in bed, crying and pregnant.
"Why don't you just call Ann?" said John. "Go to La Scala
and have lunch and have a nice time." Ann is working, I
reminded him. "Call her," John insisted. She's working, I
repeated. And / have all the time in the world. It just didn't
add up. .Ann was working at a clothing store called
. .
Paraphernalia, where one bought clothes after going through

the De Voss phase. "Well," John said, "go down to Parapher-
nalia and ask her if she would rather work for you." I had
never imagined anything being so simple, never thought how
much fun it would be to hire your best friend. I mean, one
could pay her so that she wouldn't have any financial prob-
lems and wouldn't have to work at that horrible Para-
phernalia — for that was the hip clothing store in Beverly
all it
Hills — and she would be close the time! all
So I threw on some clothes, went to the shop, found Ann

under a pile of clothing, and just said, "Would you prefer to
work for me and John?"
She went across to the guy she worked for, dropped the
clothes at his feet, and said, "I quit."
We went directly to the Luau and had a drink and then
had the best time from that moment on. Ann made our life
so much fun. She organized us, made sure our parties weren't
shambles. She taught me how to write thank-you notes all
over again, made sure we sent flowers to Mia, and so on. She
just had a great knowledge of how to be wonderfully social,
ofhow you behaved in Bel Air, Beverly Hills, new Holly-
wood, old Hollywood — what you did and did not do. She wore
gray flannel slacks with a little thin black belt and a white
silk blouse when everyone else was wearing tie-dye. Oh, she
had the tie-dye, too, but she was up with everything else, and
that was unusual then.
Ann was so helpful when there was conflict. She was
extremely diplomatic. For instance, the fact that she and

John had been lovers and that she had been mad for him
never came up again and never would. She loved him, cared
for him. It was just that it never did arise again. Her daily
routine was impeccable. Sorting mail, sending invitations, all
of that, and best of all, screening calls. She was wonderful at
that, and in the heat of those Royal Family days, we were
under some social pressure. Ann had everything covered. She
—
knew the rockers she'd been a rocker herself and she—
knew Bel Air. As I say, she had it all down pat. She had been
born to the purple. With Ann at our side we were now party-
ing as if there were no tomorrow. All sorts of arrangements
were possible.
And there was always the Daisy! Ah, the Daisy. Nights
at the Daisy became the quintessence of our love of life at
the top in the days of wine and roses. It was on Rodeo Drive
in Beverly Hills, just between Wilshire Boulevard and Santa
Monica Boulevard, and it was owned by Jack Hanson, who
still owns it. It had everything of Hollywood. There was just
enough old Hollywood, because some of the great older stars

went there, but really it was the place that new young Holly-
wood created: Ryan O'Neal, Barbara Parkin (from the hot
soap Peyton Place), Ali McGraw, Liza Minnelli, David
Hemmings, Richard Harris (fresh from Camelot, the movie),
Alan Warnick . oh, so many others, including Mia and
. .
Frank (this was the height of Mia and Frank!), Ann, of

course, and the four of us, and the Rolling Stones when they
were in town. Lou was a habitue, and all of us were there
because Steve Brandt put us on the okay list. Sammy Davis
and Groucho Marx were there from older generations of
Hollywood, Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten on that con-
siderable level, and I remember there was an advertising
campaign linking unusual "couples." I doubled with Groucho
—
Marx "Michelle Phillips and Groucho arrive at the
Daisy . .
," that sort of thing. It was fun. It was where
.
exclusive old Hollywood and young Hollywood came to-

gether. Sally Hanson helped Jack run it. They were good
friends of ours. Likewise George, the maitre d\ It was like an
old speakeasy. They had door in the big door so they

a little
could peer out to see who

was wanting to get in, and either
it
you were let in or the door was unmercifully slammed in

your face. There was never any doubt about where you
stood. You were either on the list or not on the list.
Steve Brandt certainly made it his life's work to bring
people together. He was very close to Rona Barrett, who had
a column then, "Rona Barrett's Hollywood." She didn't yet
have a television show, but she was influential. Any big star
who came to LA and could get to Steve or to, say, someone
like us for approval could get on the list. There was absolute
security (no riffraff) and valet parking. There was a lovely
string of Porsches, Rolls-Royces, and Jaguars there and such
a range of people, all the way from the new free music to the
old studio star system. It wasn't a very big club, but it was
large enough to have much more than a bar and tables. In
addition to a small dance floor, there were pool tables down
the whole of one side. John and I had gotten quite good at
pool with our own table in Bel Air. You could play back-
gammon, drink, dance, or just around with your pals, and
sit
the great thing was that all your pals were there. That made
it complete fun. We wore exotica of the time: the men,
caftans; the women, sequined minis or long Indian dresses,

all silk. We glittered. And drank. Denny took over as waiter
one night. Jack Hanson and he had a joke about the amount
of champagne Denny drank. Jack told me, "If you wait on
tables tomorrow, you won't have to pay your tab." He
regretted his offer, because we started drinking the next
afternoon, early, and by the time the night was over, we had
finished a case of good Dom Perignon. Jack paid the tab,
and Denny was never asked to wait tables again, though he
had been very good and very funny. It was a good place for
showing off, in the nicest way, and I don't know anywhere
quite like it today, not in any city, not quite like that place in
The good old Daisy.
that time.
Toward the end of 1967 we had two huge parties within
two weeks at the Bel Air house. One was a big Saturday
night party with about five hundred people; then we had a
New Year's party for about nine hundred people, with

Chasen's catering. It was quite fabulous. Jeanette would have
approved. The food was served at about twelve-thirty a.m.
The New Year, 1968, had arrived and we had quite a nice
little feast — French champagne (always), scrambled eggs,
sausages, bacon, muffins, and croissants. Steve Brandt had a
lot to do with the guest list.
We oversaw the trend of the thing, John and I, with Ann

right in there checking and rechecking. Marlon, Ryan, Janis,
Warren, Zsa Zsa, Ravi, Joan Collins, Tony Newley more . . .
stars than there are in heaven. Ann was so in love with Sandy
Koufax, the great star of baseball in those days, that she
invited him, and when she actually got him on the telephone,
her great cool failed her and she nearly fainted. She was
almost in tears, so I had to play secretary and take the phone
from her and invite him. Well, she was crazy for him, but
finally he married Richard Widmark's daughter, and the big
newspaper headline read: "Sandy Koufax Marries Ann,
Actor's Daughter." Ah, well, she is still Laughing Ann. John
wrote a song for her; the original lyrics were about Laughing
Lou and Peter Pilafian, and everyone had a stanza, and then
it was changed to "April Ann."
We saw all of Hollywood stretched out before us, rib-

bons of wonderful people of all ages, but mainly our own
young friends in that mini-chic of the time, with lots of
feathers and silks, Nehru suits,
Indian paisleys, beads, saris,
very long hair, sequins, lots of marcasite earrings, aquama-
rines, all the semi-precious stones that were so popular with
young hippies. There was such a huge crowd that I felt
overwhelmed, and I took a bottle of champagne into a closet
and watched some people putting their cigarettes out on the
seventeenth-century hunt table. It was a real hippie free-
for-all, but it was still very smart. There was no real drunk-
enness and no white powder, and we did have a lot of room
in the house and a lot of land. They slipped out into the
garden and often into the studio, where John directed a lot
of musical fun. Still, nine hundred people was a lot for one
house, though, thank God, our snobbery prevented us from
slipping into the "crashpad" mentality that was part of the

decline of the hippie ethic. Real sloppiness was never our
And style was terribly important to
style. us and our friends.
Ann Marshall and Tina Sinatra for instance, with access to all
the precious stones from their families, wouldn't have

dreamed of wearing real jewels then. So stylish not to! I
remember Ann turning her nose up at a beautiful ruby
brooch her mother wanted to hand down to her. "Mother,
I'm a little young for that." She finally put it to use as a clasp
for her own strand of pearls. Ann has the best pearls in town.
It was, no question about it, a time for youth to be itself.
Youth was all. To be young was everything. Drugs were

young, music was young, freedom was young.
It may have been much: too much youth, too
rather too
many what messages were received out
drugs. I'm not sure
there by the masses; we had obviously been high during
those years of plenty. There was quite a movement based on
music, love, flowers, and a lid of pot and a tab of acid. The
lines between "good" drugs and "bad" drugs became blurred.
Certainly turning on, tuning in, and dropping out (Timothy
Leary's phrase) wasn't intended to mean doing nothing like —
just —
hanging out, getting loaded, and panhandling but that
in the end was what happened. Often the musicians and
writers were in fact working quite hard, as the record shows.
It was a shame when things went wrong in the cities, with a
lot of young people looking very wasted. It was too much of

a good thing. Human nature with all its flaws insists on sur-
facing in this fallen world.
At the top, however, and still young and healthy, we
were and removed from street life. The older

attractive
stars were now very interested in us. The opposition of the
early 1960s had been worn away by the tremendous reckless
success of young people. Frank Sinatra became fascinated
—
by it all late, but not too late. There was, for instance, a
house party at Frank's. It was very nice, and I remember not
knowing what to expect from him. I was a little afraid, but as
it turned out, I recall him being quite humble. He told us he
loved our music so much and had in fact attempted to record

"Monday, Monday," but it didn't sound anything near as

good as ours did (or so he said), so he didn't try to release it.
It was hard to take it all in. Frank Sinatra's place. In
Palm Springs! We had a wonderful two or three days at the

complex in the vast Sinatra compound. Tina Sinatra had
made the arrangements. She was now going with Lou. (Jill
had left for Italy some time ago.) We were couples: John
and I, Tina and Lou. Tina asked me if I wanted to play
tennis.
I said, "Yeah, I'd love to."
She said, "Have you ever played tennis before?" No." I
thought you were from California?" I am, but I never played
tennis. I'd love to learn though. . . .
Tina took me to the racket club and bought me a tennis

dress and tennis shoes, the whole outfit, and charged it to
Frank. "Put this on Daddy's account." I'm sure he was
thrilled. We were his guests, and he was a generous host. He
was in and out and around and very nice. I never said more
than three words to him, but that was okay. It was all okay.
People were so great to us. We couldn't do any wrong. A cliche,
but so true. In concert our music set was a real and famous
treat: "Creeque Alley," "Words of Love," "California
Dreamin'," "Monday, Monday," "I Call Your Name," "My
Girl," along with others, and we usually closed with "Dancing
in the Streets." We used to do "Once Was a Time I Thought"
a cappella, one example of how we mingled the styles with-
out giving offense. That song was done in a very jazzy style,
very Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. I was in such awe of
Annie Ross; I had been a huge fan of hers for so many years.
Remember, John was into jazz long before he was into folk.
Our roots, in a way, were really in Annie Ross. So when she
came to me at a social gathering in London and said how
pleased she was to meet me because she was such a big fan, I
was speechless. She was a fan? I had so much admired her.
She was such a smart singer; she could do the most astound-
ing things musically, and if you were a vocalist, you couldn't
help but be amazed by her because she was such a musi-
cian's musician, and I felt anything but that. But there it
was — the worlds were meeting comfortably in 1967.

In 1968 our daughter, Chynna, was born. It was impos-
sible forJohn and I to agree on a conventional name, so when
I asked if he liked the name India, he laughed and said, "If
you're going to name a child India, you might as well call it

—
North Vietnam or China ah, China, that's nice." I said,
"Okay. Yeah. I like it, too." Now both Mamas had deliv-
ered, and we had three albums (The Mamas and the Papas
Deliver being the third); we had met everybody there
was to meet, including Elvis Presley, and we were loved
across the universe. The parties continued as the music
went into an ever so slight decline. We had made a Rodgers
—
and Hart special for NBC television a success we had —
had our string of number-one singles and platinum albums,
and we had won a Grammy for Best Vocal Performance
on "Monday, Monday." Yet things were not right. John
had been talking to the ancient gods as far back as our
life on Lookout Mountain. He would have bouts of good
honest mysticism, chanting out there in the street and making

some kind of loud, loud sense. He was half Cherokee,
remember, and it didn't take more than a little LSD to make
him very interesting.
He became quite paranoid as time went on, about every-
thing in Bel Air. He heard sounds one night and went down-
stairs carrying a shotgun. I waited, without much anxiety, for
him to come back. "I saw six people," he said when he
returned, "all dressed in black, in tights and leotards, men
and women, and they were in the Rolls-Royce, out in the
garage, and when I went to the door, they all tiptoed away
like penguins." He demonstrated this to me, walking just as
they had walked, at least as he saw it. I gave him a Valium
and told him to come to bed. I really thought it was one of
his wild imaginings, maybe the result of too many drugs. I
took the gun off him and put him to bed. I had no reason
to believe that there was anything lurking there, no reason to
think there might be crazy intruders running around in tights
and leotards. But there was something lurking, and one night
it struck and killed many people in an outburst of terrifying,
mystifying violence. John and I had been visited by Charles

Manson's people, the "Creepy Crawlers," and we had sur-
vived. The "lurking" had begun, and from then on the rich
and famous in Hollywood would live at best in an enduring
state of anxiety and at worst in paranoia. From 1969 onward
—
there were darker aspects to the hippie dream some of it
caused by acid. We had always been very careful to take
LSD under "perfect conditions," in the right environment
and with the right people. We'd lay in good food and drink
and pot, and "downers" just in case. We didn't have duties
and obligations, and we had no children then. I always
thought that the acid casualties, and there were some, were
well on their way to being casualties before they took any
acid. LSD was the straw that broke their camel's back; get-
ting themselves that close to self was too much. There are
people who took it only once, and some, even among the
people we knew, who never took it at all, though these latter
were never quite on our wavelength. For myself, I am happy
to say that I never had a bad trip. I never did see LSD as a
hard drug then, although I have strong reservations about its
use now. My father had always warned me against hard
stuff, heroin and the opiates. Never, never, never do any
heroin. I never did.
The beauties of the sixties, largely a heroin-free era, live
on. I wouldn't want to dignify our taking of such drugs as we
did, but equally I want to deny the glories of the age. It

don't
was a great time. There was a lot of spirituality. People were
trying to find something beyond their mundane selves, look-
ing into mysticism, meditation, Hinduism, Subud, and other
corners of belief into which the old pop world would never
have strayed. Mia Farrow was a great one for ideas. She
always wanted to go someplace. One time Mia, Ann, and I
decided to go to Crete to look at the ancient world, live in
caves. A was upstairs recording. What a
great idea. John
—
great escape it would have been out of Bel Air into Crete.
We never did go. Mia went, instead, to Rishikesh with the
Beatles, her sister, Prudence, Mike Love of the Beach Boys,
Donovan, and many others, to sit at the feet of the Maharishi
—
and learn how to transcend her material self through medita-

tion. That also was a Great Idea of the times. I should have
gone. I always wanted to meet John Lennon.
Instead, in our own studio at the Bel Air house, we made
the Papas and the Mamas album, and I hardly remember
anything about it except that it wasn't very good. Tom
Wilkes, who had art-directed the Monterey Pop Festival,
designed a fine album cover with a very interesting inter-
change of faces, but it wasn't a big seller because we really
hadn't the material or energy to write or sing it well. What a
waste of a cedar closet.
I don't remember a date or a day when we knew it was
all over or when we admitted it to each other, but it was all
over, and it ended, just as it had begun, organically, gradu-
ally, with mutual understanding and relief. We abdicated
some time and place in 1968. The singles kept on coming
until the end of the year, but it really didn't matter anymore.
My marriage to John also ended in that year. In a last des-
perate threat from a mind going at a thousand revs per min-
ute, he yelled, "You'll never ride in a limo again!" In fact I
did and sometimes do, but it was never that important. It
was as if "limousine" was symbolic. He saw himself taking
from me the only things that he thought had ever meant any-
thing to me: glamour, money, fame, Mamas and Papas. For
sure I wouldn't have missed any of that; we had all learned
in our hippie heaven that really all we needed was love, and
there was to be plenty of that in the years ahead, in every
aspect of my life.
Needless to say, I am grateful for the public's over-

whelming enthusiasm for The Mamas and Papas. We were so
embraced by our era that the adulation left each member of
the group reeling with a permanent fame. The songs seem to
remain a looming, all pervasive presence in the daily Amer-
ican life. I can't shop in a market, board an elevator or drive
across town without the chances being pretty great that I'll
hear the four of us doing what we did so well, together. We
could sing. We had as much fun recording those songs as it
—
sounds. The experiences the good, the bad, and the ugly
have left me personally more resilient than most. I'm better

off for all youve read. I think, at the end, we all were.
that
In hindsight, The Mamas and Papas accomplished in a
little permanent legendary niche in the American
time, a
culture. So forgive me if I remain an incurable optimist,
believing that even the most improbable, unlikely scheme
might just work out. After all, I've seen it done. Up close.
For me, and my three partners, and the American record
buying public California Dreamin' is always becoming
. . .
a reality.
EPILOGUE
After the breakup, our lives changed completely once

again. We didn't have to do anything to perpetuate the group;
we would always be The Mamas and the Papas. But now,
we were all free to do what we wished.
For Cass, that meant becoming a solo act, which she did
immediately. Having great success, she recorded two al-
bums, had two hit singles, toured the club circuit in California,
and also played Vegas. She had her own television special,
"Don't Call Me Mama Anymore," and she hosted The Tonight
—
Show twelve times. We became very close closer than we
had ever been. A new bond had formed between us while I
—
was pregnant a purely feminine bond. Whatever bad feelings
there had been between us were now overshadowed by the
fact that we shared the experience of motherhood. She
loved the fact that she had been the first one to have a
baby, and she loved teaching me all about it. She was like a
big sister to me. For the first time, all the barriers were down.
Our friendship deepened once John and I separated. She could
—
confide in me now she trusted me. For the next seven years,
176
we were like two average moms — taking our kids to parties,

visiting,going to the movies.
I stopped by to see her before she went to London to
perform at the Palladium. We were sitting outside, watching

the kids playing in the pool. I turned to her and asked who
Owen Vanessa's father was. She treated it very lightly, but
refused to answer. I begged her. She finally promised to tell
me after she got back from England. A few days later I was at
the Burbank Studios having lunch when a friend of mine came
running in. "I've got bad news, Michelle. Cass died." She died in
her sleep of a massive heart attack. She had called me the night
before. She'd had a little champagne, and was crying. She told
me she had sold out both her shows at the Palladium, and she'd
gotten a standing ovation both nights. To her it was the ultimate
success, to have done that on her own. I know that when she
died she felt that she'd made the jump from Mama Cass to Cass
Elliot. Her daughter, Owen Vanessa (who is now eighteen),
was raised by her aunt and uncle, Leah and Russ Kunkle.
Denny went on to work for the Neptune Theatre in
Canada. He produced and starred in his own television show
there, called Denny. He has also appeared in a number of
dramas for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He is a
wonderful actor. He lives in Halifax with his wife, Jeannette,
and their two children, Emberly and John Dennis.
John continued to write and produce. He made his own
album, "Wolf King of LA," produced by Lou, and full of
wonderful John Phillips material. He did the soundtracks for
Myra Breckenridge and The Man Who Fell to Earth. He
married actress Genevieve Waite, with whom he recorded an
album, "Romance Is on the Rise." With Andy Warhol, he co-
produced a Broadway musical, "Man in the Moon," which
starred Denny and Genevieve. John and Genevieve have two
children, a son, Tamerlaine, and a daughter, Bijou.
Life in the fast lane escalated in the 70s, and in the
crash that followed there were many casualties, including
John Phillips. We had all taken the 60s drugs pot and—
—
psychedelics but some experimented with massive doses of
amphetamines, cocaine, or heroin, that crippled careers and
shattered lives. John found help through a drug rehabilita-

tion hospital and soon afterward re-formed The Mamas and
the Papas with Denny, MacKenzie Phillips, and Sparky
McFarland. They tour the country, re-creating the sound first
—
heard twenty years ago and do it with great professionalism.
As for me, after Chynna was born I couldn't imagine
spending time away from her. I spent the next three years in
acting workshops. IVe been acting steadily since 1970, both
in feature films and on television. In 1976 I did a solo album,
"Victim of Romance," on A & M records, produced by Jack
Nietchze. In 1982 1 had a son, Austin Devereux Hines. Chynna,
now eighteen, lives with us in West LA.
BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
3 9999 01811 868 5
A
a\ Boston Public Library
BRIGHTON
BRANCH LIBRARY
KL421
.M35P5
1986
The Date 86032112-22 BR jket indi-

cates the date on or before which this
book should be returned to the Library.
Please do not remove cards from this
pocket.
(Continued from front ti,
Bob Dylan; Jimi Henc Joan Baez,

Peter, and Mary,
Paul, astian; I
Jim McGuinn; and others. 'low >
the group on grueling cross

tours and to reckless West Coast pai i
where the drugs flowed and fans

flocked. You'll meet John and Denny the
"papas" of the band-and learn how
Michelle loved them both. You'll dis-
cover the true story of hippie queen
Mama Cass Elliott, her strength of char-
acter, her fierce loves and intense dis-
likes, her long friendship with Michelle
that would survive jealousy, rivalry, and
bitter feuds.
Most of a 1
1
, California Dream in ' descri bes
what was it really like to live at the cen-
ter of the rock music scene in the 1960s:
the community of musicians and their
fans, the haze of love and drugs, the
phenomenal successes and the shatter-
ing defeats-all from the point of view of
an insider who lived, loved, struggled,
and found her way through it.
A Selection of the Preferred Choice Bookplan
About the Author

Termed "the purest soprano in pop-
dom" by Time magazine, Michelle Phil-
lips is today an acclaimed actress as
well as a musical legend. She starred
opposite Audrey Hepburn and Omar
Sharif in the film of Sidney Sheldon's
bestseller Bloodline, opposite Rudolf
Nureyev in Valentino, and with other
major stars in numerous motion pictures,
TV mini-series, and made-for-television
movies. Her latest starring role is one
opposite Olympic gold medalist Mitch
Gaylord in the motion picture American
Anthem (Lorimar/Columbia) for Albert
Magnoli, director of Purple Ram.
Jacket design by JackieSeow

Jacket photo by Guy Webster
Author photo by Greg Gorman
OWWMER BOOKS
A Warner Communications Company
0-446-51308-3
COVER PRINTED IN USA
- 1986 WARNER BOOKS

California Dreamin The True Story of The Mamas and The Papas

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

California Dreamin The True Story of The Mamas and The Papas

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

THE MUSIC, THE MADNESS, THE MAGIC THAT WAS

THE TRUE STORY OF

Monday" "Creeque Alley" ... "Go

Where You Wanna Go" ... the music of

meeting with record producer Lou Adler

bum ... the band's meteoric rise to star-

dom ("Monday, Monday" sold 160,000

lips reveals her own gripping story, from

0586 (Continued on back flap)

A Warner Communications Company

Copyright © 1986 by Michelle Phillips

^J A Warner Communications Company

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Phillips, Michelle, 1944-

1. Mamas and the Papas (Musical group) 2. Rock

chapter 1 CLEAN AND GOOD-NATURED 1

CHAPTER 2 JOHN AND MICHIE 25

CHAPTER 3 LEAVE THE FOLK MUSIC BEHIND 49

CHAPTER 4 HIGH JUMPS, LOW SLUMPS 71

CHAPTER 5 JUST A CATCHIN' FIRE 99

CHAPTER 6 GOOD VIBRATIONS 121

CHAPTER 7 CALIFORNIA DREAMIN' 147

here's two things a girl has

summer, Tamar had made a very thorough suicide attempt

My father— Gil to his family and his many friends-

the years since. We lived in the city's first postwar govern-

there could be any more hanky-panky. However . .the day

after the wedding Marika found my mother and Tommy

Now, as you can imagine, my

stranded and very disoriented. He packed the three of us

braiding our hair. Music stands, instruments, sheet music,

rather comforting Edwardian mystique.

way; you could say we werenomadic lot. It would be ever

cut classes every day for a period (this was eventually to

neighborhood, 100 Manzanillo, Roma Sur. In American terms

the five of us were not living on very much money — about

It became a way of life, and it was to prove useful training for

never let me drive his car before. I was to go to the address

Soon after that she came to my house, where Sue and I

were playing Monopoly. She brought with her a clean,

the socialites that belonged to the social clubs at Marshall

Mexico, and, yes, he quite enjoyed but then he said, "It's

illegal. That's why you

there were indeed. Tamar and I were arrested after a party

blah blah blah."

I wasn't happy about leaving, though, with Tamar still in

of your fucking business."

what he said to them, but when I was called to the phone, he

have been busted. Knock wood.

nights. Weekends I had to be in by one o'clock.

was expected to get good grades. I did pretty well in high

and the school authorities thought (correctly) that they had

forged note "from my father," but they had already tele-

for a meeting to show him all the absence notes, he mar-

which meant I had to go to Eagle Rock until the end of the

next summer vacation, when I was just seventeen, I asked

cards .use your good sense

chance, with the pace, the newness of the Great Adventure

Eddie was a good friend of ours, and we spent a lot of

At the end of the Tamar had Enrico Banducci, who

owned the Hungry I, introduce us. The exchanges were

you .great set," and such. "Well, we tried," Tamar and

told each other. I remember seeing John slip away to make a