The Papa and the daughter
Fasten your seatbelts; it's going to be a bumpy column. The world moans, "TMI!" but we at SideShow depend on stuff like the new Mackenzie Phillips memoir, High on Arrival. She told her story yesterday to Oprah. A daughter of "Papa" John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, Mackenzie says she and dad had an affair for 10 years. It began in 1979, when she, then 19, was about to marry Jeff Sessler, a Rolling Stones entourage guy. Papa swooped in to stop it, everybody got upset, got wasted, and . . . well . . . . The next year, Mackenzie was fired from her role as Julie on CBS' One Day at a Time, a casualty of the drug addictions with which she has struggled ever since. Mackenzie's half-sister, singer Chynna Phillips, tells Us mag that when she first learned of the affair, in 1997, "Somebody could have dropped a piano on my head and I probably wouldn't have felt it. But I knew it was true." John Phillips died in 2001. Normal is easier to keep straight