When Michelle Phillips and Denny Doherty spoke on January 18, they did as they’d done for 40 years: “We made it a point to keep things very professional and not … slip back,” Michelle says in that arch, bemused way of hers. “Slip back” into talking like lovers, she means. Denny was about to undergo surgery for an abdominal aneurysm, and she’d called with moral support, her reliable compassion delivered with its usual frankness. “I was gung-ho and positive. ‘If it has to be done, just get it over with!’ ”
The Mamas and the Papas had always remained a family—a shadow of the old, clamorous family, to be sure (“It was two and a half years of total melodrama,” Michelle fondly recalls), but touchingly close, even through the decades of Sturm und Drang that postdated their breakup. Early on, their ranks had been thinned from four to three (in 1974, Cass Elliot died, at a tragically young 32, of a heart attack); then, much later, from three to two: in 2001, John Phillips, 65, finally succumbed, after decades of drinking and drugs, to heart failure. And so, by last January, only Denny, 66, and Michelle, then 62—like the little Indians in the children’s rhyme—remained standing, their old, red-hot affair, which had nearly torn the group apart, self-protectively excised from their frequent reminiscences.
That two people in the seventh decade of their lives would need to try to bury several months of ancient lust is a testament to the mystique that has long outlived the group’s thin songbook and brief domination of the pop charts. The Mamas and the Papas were cannon-shot onto the airwaves when the country was still shaking off its post-Camelot conventionality; girls were wearing go-go boots, and boys were growing out their early-Beatles haircuts. No group had ever looked like them—a magnetic fat girl, a pouty blonde beauty, two sexy Ichabod Cranes in funny hats—or sounded like them: Cass’s wry-beyond-her-years alto and Denny’s aching choirboy tenor lacing through that creamy, 1950s-prom-worthy close harmony, kissed with all those ba da da das.
The Mamas and the Papas were the first rich hippies, stripping folk rock of its last vestiges of Pete Seeger earnestness and making it ironic and sensual. They made the rock elite part and parcel of Hollywood. (Michelle’s eventual serial conquest of its three top young lions—Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, and Warren Beatty—nailed for her its femme fatale sweepstakes.) And then, just as fast as they’d streaked across the psychedelic sky, they burned out in some unseen solar system.
The day after her pep talk to Denny, Michelle got a phone call from Cass’s daughter, Owen Elliot-Kugell. Denny was dead. He didn’t survive the operation.
“I’ll bury you all!,” Michelle had screamed at the other three one night in 1966, when they’d (temporarily) evicted her from the group for her romantic transgressions. Now that wounded taunt revealed itself as prophecy. Michelle flew to Toronto for Denny’s funeral and then to Halifax for his burial. No one loved the group more than she. For 25 years she had tried to bring a Mamas and the Papas movie to fruition. (The right script is in the process of being written.) She was the group’s impeccably preserved face on a PBS tribute. Now she was the last one standing.
Yet people who have seen Michelle mature into a consummate rescuer know she’s repaid her luck. According to Cass’s sister, Leah Kunkel (who started out “unsure Michelle had my sister’s best interests at heart”), “Michelle has rescued a lot of people over the years. I’ve come to really respect her.” Plastic surgeon Steven Zax, Michelle’s beau of eight years, says, “She is the most generous person I know. She drives hours to visit friends who are shut-ins. Every Saturday and Sunday she packs bags of fruit and sandwiches and money and takes them to the homeless, who know her by name.” And those who watched her mint the shrewd-chick archetype in the midst of the reckless, sexist counterculture don’t doubt her resilience. “I’m not saying Michelle was Helen of Troy, leading men to war while she remained unscathed, but that’s close,” says her onetime musical partner Marshall Brickman. “She was a very clever, centered girl, to have kept afloat in that environment. There’s steel under that angelic smile.” According to Lou Adler, the Mamas and the Papas’ producer and Michelle’s lifelong friend and at one time romantic interest, “Michelle is the ultimate survivor—so loyal and ‘street’ that John and I called her Trixie. And, unlike John—who was swept away … who was a devil, on drugs—Michelle was more logical, more constant. She had an anchor, her dad.”
‘My father was six foot three, dashingly handsome, and so unflappable nothing could rattle him,” Michelle is saying, sitting in her picture-windowed living room in L.A.’s leafy, off-the-status-track Cheviot Hills. In pride of place on the coffee table is a photo album of her three grandchildren from daughter Chynna, 39, and actor Billy Baldwin, yet she’s sipping wine in the early afternoon like any self-respecting sybarite.
Gardner “Gil” Gilliam, a movie-production assistant and self-taught intellectual, was all Michelle and her older sister, known as Rusty, had after their mother, Joyce, a Baptist minister’s daughter turned bohemian bookkeeper, dropped dead of a brain aneurysm when Michelle was five. Gil took the girls to Mexico for several years, then back to L.A. There, as a county probation officer who smoked pot and never made a secret of his love affairs (he would eventually marry five more times), he seemed to model the axiom “Hedonism requires discipline.” “My father had very few rules, but with those he was steadfast. ‘Clean up your messes.’ ‘Be a good citizen.’ ” (The code stuck. “I have never been late for work a day in my life, I refused to ask John for alimony, I have never been in rehab,” she enumerates proudly.) But young Michelle needed more than a male guide. “In retrospect, I see that I was looking for a girlfriend/mother figure.” In 1958 she found, through her sister’s boyfriend, a 23-year-old who had an unsurpassable store of harrowingly acquired female survival skills to impart.
The Black Dahlia Heritage
Tamar Hodel was one of six children—by three different women—of the most pathologically decadent man in Los Angeles: Dr. George Hodel, the city’s venereal-disease czar and a fixture in its A-list demimonde. She’d grown up in her father’s Hollywood house, which resembled a Mayan temple, was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, and was the site of wild parties, in which Hodel was sometimes joined by director John Huston and photographer Man Ray.
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