Actress Bijou Phillips says she knew her half-sister Mackenzie Phillips had consensual sex with their father, Mamas and the Papas leader John Phillips.
In a statement read by Oprah Winfrey on her talk show on Friday, Bijou Phillips says she was 13 years old when Mackenzie Phillips told her about the sexual relationship.
Bijou Phillips is now 29 and says the news was confusing and scary. She says it was “heartbreaking” to think her family would leave her alone with her father.
Appearing as a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show on Friday, Mackenzie Phillips said their father “had changed his ways as much as he was able to” and she felt Bijou Phillips was safe.
Mackenzie Phillips says she did go get her sister when she “felt like she wasn’t being watched properly.”
Mackenzie Phillips said in a memoir published last week that she had an incestuous affair for years with her father. In the memoir High Arrival, which was published a year after she was arrested for cocaine possession, Phillips writes that she had sex with her father at age 19, the night before her 1979 marriage to Jeff Sessler, a member of the Rolling Stones’ entourage.
The former star of TV sitcom One Day at a Time said she and her father used drugs that night. John Phillips died in 2001.
“My father was not a man with boundaries,” Phillips writes. “He was full of love, and he was sick with drugs. I woke up that night to find myself having sex with my own father.”
The town of Marfa, Texas, is back in the spotlight again, after actor Randy Quaid and his wife were released from a jail there late Thursday after being arrested for allegedly skipping out on a US$10,000 California hotel bill.
The pair posted bail after the sheriff provided a ride to a bank.
Quaid and his wife, Evi, each posted US$20,000 after spending several hours in the jail in Marfa, Presidio County Sheriff Danny Dominguez said.
Dominguez said he drove the actor to a bank to obtain the bail money. Quaid remained in his custody during the trip but was not handcuffed. The sheriff said the actor received no special treatment.
“I like to help everybody out,” Dominguez said. “It’s a small town.” A felony warrant for burglary, defrauding an innkeeper and conspiracy was issued out of Santa Barbara, California, for Quaid and his wife after authorities received a complaint early this month that the couple had not paid a bill of more than US$10,000 due to a local hotel.
The Quaids were arrested on Thursday afternoon after a deputy spotted the couple driving in Marfa, where they had been staying at a hotel, Dominguez said.
Evi Quad “resisted a little bit, it wasn’t too much,” the sheriff said. “She calmed down quickly.”
Quaid won a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for an Emmy for his portrayal of US President Lyndon Johnson in LBJ: The Early Years; but he’s perhaps best known for his roles in the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies, Independence Day and Kingpin.
He also played a hard-nosed sheep rancher in Brokeback Mountain, then sued Focus Features and the film’s producers in 2006, claiming he was compelled to work cheaply when told the film — which earned US$82 million at the domestic box office — had no prospects of making money.
A native Texan, he is the older brother of fellow actor Dennis Quaid.
Marfa, a remote West Texas town, is no stranger to Hollywood attention.
More than 50 years ago, filmmaker George Stevens settled on the area for his epic Texas oil tale Giant, which starred Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean.
More recently, There Will be Blood and No Country for Old Men were filmed in the town of 2,100, founded as a railroad stop in 1883.
In other news, Spain’s Alicia de Larrocha, a child prodigy who went on to become one of the greatest classical pianists of her generation, has died at the age of 86.
A spokesman for the Quiron hospital in Barcelona, where she was admitted some days ago, said she died from cardiorespiratory failure shortly after 11pm on Friday.
Born in Barcelona in 1923, she gave her first recital at age 6 and made her orchestral debut aged 11. The last of some 4,000 concerts was in 2003, when she was 80.
De Larrocha was particularly renowned for her recordings of composers from her native Spain, such as Enrique Granados and Isaac Albeniz. She won two Grammys as well Spain’s Prince of Asturias award for the arts in 1994.
Finally, the first posthumous release of a new song by Michael Jackson, This Is It, is scheduled for Oct. 12.
Sony Music Entertainment offered few details about the song, except to say it includes backing vocals by Jackson’s brothers.
Two weeks later, Sony is releasing a two-disc set to coincide with the movie that shows scenes of Jackson rehearsing for his series of London concerts. Jackson died before publicly stepping back on stage.
The album includes some of Jackson’s greatest hits as they appeared on previous albums. The second disc features previously unreleased versions of Jackson songs and a spoken-word poem from Jackson called Planet Earth.— Agencies
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless