Phillips’ many loves

Michelle Phillips was a dangerous woman to love, says Sheila Weller in Vanity Fair. When she rose to fame with the 1960s folk group the Mamas and the Papas, the California-born singer was a high-spirited femme fatale who took the slogan “free love’’ quite literally. Her husband, John Phillips—the group’s leader—tried to ignore her numerous affairs until she began fooling around with fellow band member Denny Doherty. “The four of us would sit around,’’ she recalls, “and there would be so much sexual energy between Denny and me that we’d be playing footsie under the table.’’ That was too much for John Phillips, who screamed at her, ‘“You know, Mitch, you can do a lot of things to me, but you don’t f--- my tenor!’ I’m thinking, Am I really hearing this? You can f--- the mailman, the milkman, but not my tenor?” John took his revenge by sleeping with a model; Michelle struck back with what she calls a “quiet affair” with Gene Clark of the Byrds. After the Mamas and the Papas broke up in 1968, she and John divorced, and she took up with, successively, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, and Warren Beatty. Heartbroken, John Phillips careened from affair to affair, and fell into alcoholism and drug addiction. “I was John’s muse, and now I was gone,” she says. “I was the person John drew all his despair and joy from, and he didn’t know where to go from there.”

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