Michelle was with Bob Burch for two years. Then, 26 years ago, yearning for another child, she got her beau of six months, the handsome, easygoing actor Grainger Hines, “absolutely smashed on martinis,” she recalls, and proposed a deal: if he fathered a baby for her, she would take full responsibility for it. “The minute you tell a guy that he doesn’t have to parent, he becomes the best parent,” she says of the father of her son, Austin Hines, who is 25. “Grainger has been the greatest!” Michelle purchased her house in Cheviot Hills, and in 1986 she was cast as Nicolette Sheridan’s mother on Knot’s Landing, a role that put her back in the public eye through the beginning of the 90s. Sheridan says, of their “deep and caring” friendship, “I admire Michelle’s zest for life and fearless nature, and I feel blessed to be part of her intoxicating world.” During these years Michelle was involved in a serious relationship with singer-songwriter Geoff Tozer.

After the relationship ended, Michelle accepted, in 1999, a dinner date with Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Steven Zax. “The little hippie chick and the surgeon don’t seem like a real match, but we’ve been able to bring each other closer to the center,” she says. They spend weekends together, and they travel frequently. Lou, Ann, and Genevieve say it’s her best relationship ever. (“She’ll want to slug me for [saying] this,” says Chynna, “but it’s her first truly mature, grown-up relationship.”)

Being a Good Citizen

In the end, the romantic statistics of Michelle Phillips’s last 30 years don’t tell the story of what she has become. Something else does: “Michelle grew into her name,” says Owen Elliot-Kugell. “She became everyone’s Mama Michelle.” As the others flamed out, her character expanded to fill the Mama/Papa role—the parent to the whole burgeoning brood.

First step: rescuing John and Genevieve’s son, Tamerlane. In March 1977, Chynna came home from a visit to her father and Genevieve (who lived on the East Coast) with some pretty heavy memories. “It was your typical heroin scene,” Chynna recalls. “A lot of needles and a lot of blood and very sick people. Genevieve asked me to please not tell my mom what I just saw.” Chynna recalls asking Michelle, “Mommy, can drugs kill people?” Alarmed, Michelle flew out to see John and Genevieve. “I told them, ‘I’d like to take care of Tam.’ They put up a little bit of a fight, but not too great of a one.” (Genevieve concedes that what Chynna says she saw “was right,” and “I knew it would be better for Tam because John was pretty bad off.” However, in her mother’s heart, she says, she believes “Michelle stole Tam.”) A court granted legal custody to John’s sister, Rosie, with the understanding that Tam would remain in Michelle’s care. Tam moved in with Michelle, Chynna, and Bob Burch, and for two years he thrived. “I was in therapy with a really nice therapist in Beverly Hills,” says Tamerlane, a former mortgage broker and now a musician (his upcoming pop-rock album has three tracks produced by Sean Lennon). “His teachers were telling me how great he was doing,” Michelle says. She loved the little boy, and Chynna was happily bonded with her half-brother.

But, for Genevieve, losing her child was painful. “I spent hours and days talking John into kidnapping Tam,” she says. “I said, ‘John, if we do, people will think you have normal feelings.’ ” Genevieve (who was then pregnant with Bijou) flew out to L.A. and, on a ruse to take Tam to Disneyland, spirited him to Las Vegas, where they met up with John. Then they all drove across the country. Child-stealing charges were filed against John and Genevieve in California, and an anguished Michelle flew east with Rosie to try to reclaim Tam. In the Connecticut courtroom, the tension between Michelle and Tam’s parents “was thick enough to cut,” Michelle recalls. “John and Genevieve convinced the judge that I was just a disgruntled ex-wife.” They won custody of Tam. “I left feeling Tam was in a lot of danger. I cried on the plane the whole way home, and, partly because Bob wanted me to get over it and I couldn’t get over it, we divorced soon after.” (Genevieve says a psychiatrist told her that “kidnapping Tam was the best thing we could do, because otherwise he would have felt that we didn’t love him.”) About eight months after John regained custody, he was arrested by federal agents for narcotics trafficking. (He disclosed in his book that he had had an illegal deal with a pharmacy to buy drugs without prescriptions.) Using the promise of anti-drug media outreach, he bargained his maximum-15-year sentence down to a mere 30 days.