'Mercifully, John is dead.' The dark history of The Mamas & the Papas.

Content warning: This article mentions sexual assault and could be triggering for some readers. 

"It was two and a half years of total melodrama." 

That's how Michelle Phillips, one of the four members of the 1960s folk band The Mamas & the Papas, describes the group's brief but tumultuous time together. 

Michelle was still a teenager when she moved to San Francisco and fell in love with a guitar player named John Phillips in the late 1950s.

"I fell in love with his talent, his poise, his ability to be the leader of the pack," she told Vanity Fair in 2007.

In his 1986 autobiography, Papa John, John described Michelle as “the quintessential California girl... She could look innocent, pouty, girlish, aloof, fiery".

John was married with two children at the time, but as his then-wife Susan later told Michelle over martinis, he had "a Michelle in every town". 

The Mamas & the Papas. Image: Getty. 

He soon divorced Susan and married Michelle, and the pair moved to New York with her father's permission. 

“John just charmed him like a bird off a tree, and they became very good friends,” she told Rolling Stone in 2022. 

“I remember my father saying, ‘John, you’ve been to college. She hasn’t even finished high school.’ And John said, 'Gil, I promise you I’ll teach her everything she has to know.'"

Michelle found work as a model as John became more and more possessive of her. 

In 1961, he formed the band The New Journeyman with Denny Doherty and brought Michelle on board as a singer, simply so he could keep an eye on her. Soon Cass Elliot joined the group, and the four became The Mamas & the Papas. 

They were an odd-looking band. The men were still growing out their Beatles-esque haircuts and Michelle looked more comfortable on the cover of a magazine than behind an instrument. 

“John Phillips and Denny Doherty wrote the songs; Mama Cass had the great voice; Michelle Phillips had the blonde hair and the legs,” is how a 1986 profile described the foursome.

The Mamas & the Papas weren't together long when Michelle began sleeping with Denny. “The four of us would sit around, saying, ‘OK, you’re gonna sing the third,’ and ‘You’re gonna do the bop da bops,’ and there’d be so much sexual energy between Denny and me that we’d be playing footsie under the table, and Cass and John didn’t notice it,” Michelle told Vanity Fair. 

Soon, though, John cottoned onto the affair. 

“John didn’t actually find us having sex, but he did come downstairs, and I was sitting on Denny’s bed in my nightgown, feeding him candies,” she recalled to Rolling Stone. “He said, ‘You could do a lot of things to me, Mich, but you don’t f**k my tenor.’”

In an act of retaliation, he wrote the band's next single, 'I Saw Her Again,' about the affair and made Doherty the lead vocalist. Doherty sings in the chorus:

But what can I do?
I'm lonely, too.
And it makes me feel so good to know
(And it makes me feel so good to know)
She'll never leave me.

John, however, was apparently free to sleep with whomever he wanted. 

“He wrote that song, ‘Young Girls Are Coming to the Canyon,’” Michelle explained to Rolling Stone. “I used to say to him, ‘Yeah, John, and you’ve f**ked them all’.”

John wasn't the only person upset about the affair. Cass was infatuated with Denny and pleaded with Michelle to leave him alone. 

"Cass confronted me and said, 'I don't get it. You could have any man you want. Why would you take mine?'" Michelle later recalled. 

After Michelle had another affair, this time with Gene Clark from the Byrds, John kicked her out of the band and replaced her with their record producer's girlfriend. Furious, Michelle crashed the band's next recording session and yelled, “I’ll bury you all!" 

She later told Vanity Fair, “I sat in my car, shaking and despondent and crying hysterically. I had just been fired by my husband and my best friends. I thought my life was over."

Soon after, Michelle rejoined the band. 

A short while later, John and Michelle bought 30s actress-singer Jeanette MacDonald’s grand Bel Air mansion and they would stroll the streets in kaftans and throw parties, inviting some of the biggest names in Hollywood like Ryan O’Neal, Marlon Brando and Mia Farrow. 

Michelle told Vanity Fair there was only one incident of domestic violence, but she "ended up in hospital" as a result. 

Not long after their daughter Chynna was born in 1968, John and Michelle divorced and The Mamas & the Papas disbanded.

“I walked out with three things,” she told Rolling Stone. “My daughter, her crib and the Tiffany lamp that I had to go back and steal, because I was so afraid of John.”

After their divorce, Michelle established a career in acting and John's addiction problems spiralled out of control. 

“There was no love lost between John and I towards the end,” she said during her Rolling Stone interview. “At all. I saw how he had changed from that handsome, wholesome, all-American boy into this depravity of addiction. He was not the same person I had loved.”

In the late 1970s, John allegedly raped Mackenzie Phillips, his daughter from his first marriage. 

“On the eve of my wedding, my father showed up, determined to stop it,” she wrote in her 2011 autobiography, High On Arrival: A Memoir. “I had tons of pills and Dad had tons of everything, too. Eventually, I passed out on Dad’s bed… My father was not a man with boundaries. He was full of love and he was sick with drugs. I woke up that night from a blackout to find myself having sex with my own father.”

As they both fell deeper into drug addiction, their relationship evolved into what Mackenzie described as a "consensual affair". She divorced her husband of two years in 1981 and continue to sleep with her father. 

In the early 1980s, they toured together as The New Mamas & the Papas. Mackenzie would later describe her relationship with her father to Oprah Winfrey as a “sort of Stockholm syndrome, where you begin to love your captor".

Her relationship with her father made Mackenzie feel isolated and trapped.  

Mackenzie and John Phillips. Image: Getty. 

“I was a fragment of a person, and my secret isolated me. One night Dad said, ‘We could just run away to a country where no one would look down on us. There are countries where this is an accepted practice. Maybe Fiji," she wrote in High On Arrival.

John died in 2001 and was largely hailed an icon. Eight years later, in 2009, Mackenzie finally told her side of the story. 

Cass Elliot was the first member of the band to pass away. She died from heart failure in 1974. She was only 32. Denny Doherty died in 2011 from kidney failure. 

Michelle, the last remaining member of The Mamas & the Papas, is now determined to tell their story. The real story. All of it.  

“Mercifully, John is dead. So he can’t stand in the way of me doing it, and neither can Denny,” she told Rolling Stone. “Once you’ve taken the knife out of your heart, it makes for a wonderful story.”

Feature image: Getty