What It Is

So crazily enough, just the other day I found myself trying to remember the words to “She’s Just 14“, the Rolling Stones-produced John Phillips song about his daughter Mackenzie. Readers who are paying attention will notice that the title of Mackenzie’s new book, High On Arrival, is taken from these very lyrics. And even though I’ve long thought the song was a) an excellent example of the prodigious talent of John Phillips; and b) a testament to terrible rock ‘n’ roll parenting, it only occurred to me the other day, as I struggled to remember the lyrics: John Phillips had sex with his daughter.

So imagine my stunned surprise when Mackenzie announced that exact shocker on Oprah a couple of days later.

Although the track was recorded in the mid 70s, and the alleged incestuous rape and subsequent “relationship” didn’t happen until the end of that decade, you can already hear how Phillips idealized and romanticized his little girl. It’s terrifying to think of her, surrounded by her father’s entourage, with no one to really look out for her except a man who had, it seems from his own words, concocted a dangerous and narcissistic fantasy about and around her.

While it may be true that the timing of these very public pronouncements is calculated to sell as many of Mackenzie’s books as possible, it’s very easy to imagine the impossible position Phillips put his firstborn child in.

And even moreso because Mackenzie Phillips is not the first celebrity daughter of a celebrity father to confess to this kind of situation.

Although it was never  revealed publicly during her lifetime, Anais Nin wrote about her own adult sexual relationship with her father in her journals, published as Incest after her husband’s death in 1985. Like Mackenzie Phillips, Anais Nin was the firstborn child of a charismatic, famous musician. Joaquin Nin y Castellanos was a concert pianist and composer, and quite a ladykiller, a man who slept with thousands of women. He abandoned Anais’ mother when his daughter was just a young girl, but as the eldest child, she had a more vivid and personal memory of him than her younger brothers. Her famous lifelong diary began as a letter to him in 1914.

In the unexpurgated diary, the June 23, 1933 entry describes Anais’ seduction by her father and her mixed feelings about their subsequent year-long affair, during which Anais was alternately guilty and compliant, writing about her revulsion and desire to flee, but also the tremendous feelings he aroused in her. She finally writes of being free from his spell on June 10, 1934, after she started an affair with psychoanalyst Otto Rank. She could recognize her father’s narcissism, and described to some extent the power he had over her as the critical, glamorous, remote parent for whom she needed to be perfect, beautiful and lovable.

Blood-curdling.