Well, OK then. Mackenzie Phillips promised a bombshell on today's "Oprah" and ... kaboom!
She had sex with her father. A lot.
It's the hot button issue in the "One Day at a Time" star's new memoir, High on Arrival, which hits shelves today.
In the book, Mackenzie details how it began -- on the eve of her first marriage. She's 19 and about to marry Jeff Sessler, son of a member of the Rolling Stones' entourage, and her father, John Phillips (of the Mamas & the Papas), showed up talking about stopping the wedding.
"I had tons of pills, and Dad had tons of everything too. Eventually I passed out on Dad's bed," she writes. "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. Had this happened before? I didn't know. All I can say is it was the first time I was aware of it. For a moment I was in my body, in that horrible truth, and then I slid back into a blackout."
That was 1979. The following year, Mackenzie's drug use got her fired from the sitcom "One Day at a Time." (Here's an interesting People article from 1980 about that situation.) She and her father both went into rehab, and then out on tour with his band. They continued their sexual relationship -- and it became consensual.
"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.' He was completely delusional. 'No,' I thought, 'we're going to hell for this.' "
See photos of Mackenzie, John, Chynna and Bijou Phillips and more
Mackenzie and Sessler remained married until 1981. He died in 2005. John Phillips died of heart failure in 2001.
Mackenzie's sexual affair with her father, she says, lasted ... 10 years. It ended when she became pregnant and didn't know who had fathered the child. She had an abortion, which her father paid for, and "and I never let him touch me again."
John Phillips and MacKenzie during a taping of "The John Davidson Show" in 1981. (AP file)
In today's interview with Oprah, Mackenzie explains that her father also introduced her to the drug use that plagued her life for years to come. "My father shot me up for the first time," she said. Mackenzie was arrested as recently as October of last year, after being found at the Los Angeles airport with needles, cocaine and heroin. She was sent back to rehab.
She told Oprah that her siblings "definitely have a problem with this." Oprah also read a statement from Genevieve Waite, John Phillips' wife at the time of the alleged abuse and Mackenzie's stepmother that said he was "incapable, no matter how drunk or drugged he was, of having such a relationship with his own child."
Mackenzie's sister Chynna Phillips, 41, of the music group Wilson Phillips, tells Us Weekly today about the day she found out about the incestuous relationship. Mackenzie called her in 1997 while she was between flights at LaGuardia Airport in New York City: "She said, 'I don't know why, but I just really felt the need to call you and tell you something that I think you need to know.' And she went on to tell me that she had had an incestuous relationship with our dad for about 10 years. Somebody could have dropped a piano on my head and I probably wouldn't have felt it. But I knew it was true. I mean, who in their right mind would make such a claim if it wasn't true?"
At the end of her new book, Mackenzie writes: "It was, as I've said, a hard decision to reveal the sordid side of my relationship with my father. But these are complex, painful, heart-wrenching truths that infiltrate lives, many lives, not just mine. I can't be the only one. And I needed to tell that part of the story because I wanted to earn the right to talk about forgiveness."
