BORN TO BE WILD

THE SONS AND DAUGHTERS

Jamming on the drums at three A.M., rolling their parents' joints, being seduced by Mick Jagger-the children of 60s rock stars grew up in a chaotic blend of freedom and neglect, pride and shame. Now they’re making their own music, raising their own kids, and confronting the past

EVGENIA PERETZ

It’s hard not to feel good when Sally Taylor takes the stage. Twenty-seven, tall and healthy, her hair long and loose, she removes her flip-flops and within minutes makes the small crowd at New York’s Mercury Lounge her family. Admittedly, it helps that many of them know her personally. She introduces each song with an endearing but superfluous explanation, and sings with every fiber of her being, embracing the world in front of her with long, graceful arms, her wide smile giving off warm, endless acceptance. She smgs about the ferry ride from Martha’s Vineyard; about the rain; about breaking up with a friend and getting back together.

But even at her best, when she’s pleading, “Be My Tomboy Bride,” it’s difficult not to see and hear her parents, James Taylor and Carly Simon—James and Carly, who wrote “Fire and Rain” and “You’re So Vain,” respectively, when they were younger than Sally is now. Sally says she doesn’t care. “It never feels like ‘Oh, I’m never going to be as good as my parents,’” she explains. “It’s a question of interpreting my experiences and interpreting the melodies and interpreting my life.”

What’s remarkable about the many now grown children of rock stars is that, despite their parents’ wild success and their own, often painful childhoods “behind the music,” most of them feel the need to follow in their parents’ footsteps—if not into music itself, then into equally rock ’n’ roll fields. Identifying them could become its own parlor game. In addition to Sally, the group of musicians includes her brother, Ben Taylor, Jakob Dylan, Sean Lennon,

Julian Lennon, Rufus Wainwright, Harper Simon, Jason Bonham, Emma Townshend, Jesse Wood, Chynna Phillips, Joachim Cooder, Zach Starkey (son of Richard “Ringo” Starkey), Francesca Gregorini (Ringo’s stepdaughter), William Collins (son of Bootsy), Tracy Lewis (son of George Clinton), and Elijah Blue (son of Cher and Gregg Allman). Another group of kids may not sing or play an instrument but are in careers that get them invited to rock ’n’ roll parties: The fashion designers— Stella McCartney and Jade Jagger. The model—Elizabeth Jagger. The actress—Liv Tyler. And the various combinations thereof—Mackenzie Phillips (actress-singer), Bijou Phillips (actress-singer), Kimberly Stewart (model-actress), Leah Wood (modelsinger), Tracee Ross (model-actress), Nona Gaye (singer-actress), Moon Unit Zappa (writer-actress), Dweezil Zappa (actormusician), Donovan’s daughter lone Skye (painter-actress), her brother Donovan Leitch (filmmaker-actor-singer). The list goes on.

Among them you will find best friends, neighbors, lovers, ex-lovers, and sometimes rivals. Unifying them is the fact that, almost without exception, they were raised by wildly charismatic, irresponsible rebels who were loved by millions, most of all their children. If that love was reciprocated, it was not always felt. After all, there are great rock ’n’ roll songs about romance, drugs, and politics, but, with the exception of “Hey Jude,” written to console a negligent bandmate’s wounded son, no truly great rock ’n’ roll songs about children. From the new generation of rock stars’ children, however, it’s easy to imagine that one might emerge about parents.

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For a child still in the single-digit years, life in the rock world is like an endless parade of loopy uncles. In the eyes of Cher’s then two-year-old son, Elijah Blue, for example, Mom’s boyfriend, Kiss front man Gene Simmons, was just this neat guy who wore black-and-white makeup and had a really long tongue, while four-year-old Jason Bonham, son of Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, happened to have three A.M. play dates with boys six times his age. “They’d come and wake me up in the middle of the night and say, ‘Can you come play drums?’ And, you know, people would be there! I didn’t know who they were!” says Jason, 35, now an excitable drummer himself. “They were just people that spoke funny at that time in the morning. You know, with slurred words.” (They turned out to be Paul McCartney, Keith Moon, and the guys from Bad Company.) Meanwhile, the son of Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann, Justin Kreutzmann, who appears in the movie Woodstock as an infant being lifted out of a chopper, was put to use nine years later when the band was asked by NBC to provide urine samples before performing on Saturday Night Live. “My dad said, ‘Go in the bathroom,”’ recalls Justin, a charmingly giddy and rambling film and video director, now 31. “And there were six little cups lined up. I’m like, ‘Get me some water.’”

There comes a point in childhood, however, when Dad’s limo and wide-brimmed leather hat become as horrifying as anything else having to do with parents. Mick Fleetwood might have thought those drawstring pants with the dangling balls—which he wore not only on the Rumours album cover but also in real life—were cool. But to his daughter Amy, his getup was the worst thing that could happen to a child. “I was just permanently embarrassed,” says Amy, a soft-spoken and willowy 30-year-old photographer and fashion stylist. “We were finally going to school in England, and we lived in this village, and all the parents were very straight, wearing tweed outfits and Remington boots. And I used to just say to my mum, ‘Why can’t Dad just be a farmer?”’

China Kantner, the daughter of Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner and Grace Slick, would “run for the hills” when her blue-haired mom emerged from beneath the wings of her DeLorean in the Marin Country Day parking lot. Kimberly Stewart tried, to no avail, to make her dad, Rod, in his “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” period, drop her off a block from school. And when the absurd rumor emerged that a quart of semen had been discovered when Rod’s stomach was pumped, life at school sucked. “They’ll say your dad is a fag. And your dad wears tight clothing,” says the lanky 22year-old model-actress, kicking back in her part of the Stewarts’ Beverly Hills estate with a pack of Parliaments and some Ricola cough drops. “I actually punched a kid across the face once because he said something about my dad, and I just went crazy.... You question yourself. You’re like, Wait, is it true? Like, my dad wears tight clothes—that means he’s a loser?”

The son of Cher and Gregg Allman, Elijah Blue had to develop "my serious ownness to survive."

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Sometime after puberty, the humiliation transforms to fist-pumping triumph. By 16, Kimberly “knew my dad was awesome, so it was like, ‘Fuck you. You just wish your dad was like that!’” As cool as rock-star life was for the rock star, it was even cooler for his hormonal high-schooler. For many, geometry homework—school, for that matter—was optional. Instead of class trips to the science museum to listen to seashells, they got to globe-trot from Jamaica to Paris to Tokyo. On tour with the Dead (whose adventures will be chronicled in Dennis McNally’s book A Long Strange Trip), a majorly psyched Justin Kreutzmann might start his day by ordering up three carts of ice cream from room service and end it with a bedful of hot groupies. “The funny thing is, they were always closer to my age than the band’s,” Justin says. “I invariably would be at the party suite, and they’d be like, ‘Oh yeah, you want somewhere to sleep? Come sleep in my room.’ So, I’d sleep on the floor, right? And there’d be four chicks in the bed, and I’d be like, ‘Something’s got to be done about this.’”

"Mick locked the door and said, Tve been waiting to do this since you were 10 years old."1

—Mackenzie Phillips

No one had more freedom than Mackenzie Phillips, now 42, sober, and I 1 acting again. At 13, after running away from her mother’s house, she showed up at her father’s Bel Air mansion, where he was living with his third wife, Genevieve. In step with the latest trends, John Phillips answered the door wearing a floor-length, tie-dyed Indian caftan and a Jesus beard and smoking a joint.

“Dad, I’m moving in—could you pay for the taxi?” Mackenzie remembers saying.

“Sure, kid, come on in.”

“What are the rules?” Mackenzie asked.

“Well, let me see,” he said. After a moment of heavy contemplation, John replied, “u have to come home at least once a week. And if you come home from going out the night before and it’s light out, always bring a change of clothing, because a lady is never seen during daylight hours wearing evening clothing.”

She walked in to say hi to Dad’s friends—Gram Parsons, Keith Richards, Donovan, and Mick Jagger, most of whom she wanted to have sex with. Her little girl’s dream came true, when, at the age of 18, she found herself over at Mick’s place making tuna sandwiches with her father. John left to go get mayonnaise, and “Mick turned around and locked the door, and looked at me, and said, ‘I’ve been waiting to do this since you were 10 years old,’” Mackenzie recalls. “My dad is banging on the door, ‘Mick, be nice to her! Don’t hurt her.’ And I’m going, ‘Dad, leave us alone. It’s fine.’ And we slept together.” The next morning Jagger gave her a beautiful robe and fed her tea, toast, and fresh strawberries.

But, as they say on Behind the Music, the party got too wild. “It was opulence and beauty and sickness and despair. All swirling,” recalls Francesca Gregorini, 27, a somewhat jittery and disarming sexpot singer, of her time at Tittenhurst, John Lennon’s estate in Ascot, during the years after Lennon’s death, when her mother, Barbara Bach, and stepfather, Ringo Starr, were hooked on drugs and alcohol. “We had a lake and 80 acres of land. And we had dogs and cats and horses. But there was such a sickness going on in it.” Nona Gaye watched her father, Marvin, grow increasingly paranoid with his addiction to coke. And Amy Fleetwood experienced alcohol and drugs turning her dad into a cipher, babbling incoherently on the phone to her for 20 minutes about the importance of seat belts. “I was like, ‘Dad, I do wear my seat belt. You do this every time.’”

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Often the habits rubbed off. Having been taught at the age of 10 to roll her dad’s joints, Mackenzie soon learned how to smoke them, too. Stoned, she might have heavy rap sessions with Alice Cooper in his suite at Hyatt House. For three months she went to school every day on acid. And that same year she slept with Jagger, her father introduced her to intravenous cocaine, helpfully injecting her for her first ride. Chided by Jagger for his all-in-the-family shooting up, John, Mackenzie recalls, told him, “You know what? Me and that kid have been friends for too long for me to hide anything from her.” Her younger sister Bijou, born prematurely to two addicts, John and Genevieve, started using drugs in her teens, too. “Maybe I did a little bit too much cocaine,” says Bijou, now 21 and starring in the stunning Larry Clark movie Bully. “Like I did cocaine every night for a month or something.” China Kantner, terrified and verbally abused during Grace Slick’s alcoholic rages, started in herself at age 12, getting loaded on whiskey and wine. “I used to drive drunk and black out,” says China, now 30, who has been sober for four years and is a devoted Christian studying Italian Renaissance art. “Pacific Coast Highway, windy roads, 50 miles an hour.”

In addition to drugs, genius also needed solitude and freedom. In the Zappa household, where there was all the junk food and television you could ingest, no such thing as bedtime, and a baby-sitter who wore tape over his nipples, one rule existed: “Even if the house is on fire, try to put the fire out before you disturb Dad in the studio,” says 33-year-old Moon Unit Zappa, now a novelist. “It was like: There must be a way we can intervene and stop it from reaching the studio/” As a result, her version of “life on the farm,” as she puts it, was “‘Dad? Dad? Dad? Dad?’ ... and there is no Dad.” She wrote the 1982 novelty hit “Valley Girl” just so she could hang out with him.

Kimberly Stewart, whose father was often on tour or squiring around a new, tall blonde, recalls, “I’d either see him on the TV or I would hear him on the radio, and that would make me sad. ‘That’s my dad. Why isn’t he here with me?’ I didn’t understand it.” Even when she was with him, his attention was distracted by the hordes of adoring fans. “You see thousands of people loving and worshiping, and you’re there," says Kimberly, gesturing an insignificant speck.

"If your parents aren't there a lot for the early years, you can feel that you're not necessarily loved." —China Kantner

Some dads just disappeared. When Mackenzie was 14, “my dad and Genevieve went to New York for a weekend and never came back.” She and her brother Jeffrey were evicted from John’s mansion soon after and taken around by the owner to collect their belongings. (She went to live with her father’s sister, Rosemary, who became her guardian.) Elijah Blue, whose mom, Cher, split from Gregg Allman nine days after they got married, has yet to fully open the “Dad can of worms” and establish a relationship with his father. As for the revolving door of his would-be stepfathers—Gene Simmons, Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, and bagel chef Rob Camilletti— well, enough said.

Other dads weren’t exactly the stay-athome types, either. lone Skye, star of Cameron Crowe’s 1989 classic, Say Anything, and daughter of Donovan and model Enid Solenberg, was conceived on the Isle of Skye, where they were living in a gypsy caravan and “grooving around with Crosby, Stills, and Nash.” But a few months later, Donovan—they called him Mellow Yellow—left Enid in Los Angeles, where she raised lone and older brother Donovan “Dono” Leitch on little more than her waitress tips and what she earned as a limo driver. (Enid sought solace with her two best friends, Nurit Wilde and Cynthia Webb, who had just been ditched with kids by their rockstar lovers, Michael Nesmith of the Monkees and session bass player Klaus Vorman.) Making only minimal contact with his son, Donovan denied for a time that lone was his daughter, insisting that she looked like a friend of his from the days of free love (lone was spared this information until she was 16). Characterizing the events as “the family falling out of touch,” lone, now 30 and a dreamy painter in the vein of Francesco Clemente, says, “I felt the longing. I had a friend when we were five years old who had a really nice relationship with her father. They just had this warmth. I remember thinking, Oh that’s—I wish—just, that looks nice.” lone’s best friend, Karis Jagger, wasn’t acknowledged by her father, Mick Jagger, until she was nine. (Mick recently walked her down the aisle.) During his father’s life, Julian Lennon, the inspiration for “Hey Jude,” was ignored by his dad, and after John’s death, Julian saw half of his father’s estate go to Yoko Ono (the other half reportedly went to charity).

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Understandably, not everyone’s selfesteem managed to grow wings and soar. “I don’t want to really say this, but I will,” says China, who has the same tough exterior as her mother, Grace Slick. “If your parents aren’t there a lot for the early years, you can feel like, as an adult, that maybe you’re not necessarily loved.... I don’t blame my parents for anything, but I had to take this into consideration when I really spiraled downward. My voice in my head talks real negative shit, real loud. It says, ‘You’re a loser.’ It says, ‘You don’t deserve to be loved.’ It says, ‘You’re not talented.... You will never make it.’”

Jackson Nash, a thoughtful, quasi-slacker screenwriter working on a script with actress Zooey Deschanel, spent many years feeling pointless, living “in the shadow” of his father, Graham, even though for a time he went to a school for “gifted youngsters.” “Inside I felt something was wrong and I also felt like I was missing something. Faster than you can say ‘selfdestruct,’ I started smoking pot every day,” says Jackson, 24, managing to smile about it all. “I hated my family, I hated my life.” He ended up spending three years at Cedu in California, a psychological boot camp designed to tear down kids’ defenses and get them talking. “They’d take you out to a room, where they’d make you take off your shoes and your belt,” Jackson recalls. “The teachers come in, and basically it lasts all night and they just yell at you, to try to get you to emote.”

Despite everything, all of these kids—all of them—from Jackson and China to lone and Mackenzie, very much love their parents. They tell you they feel guilty about certain things they’ve said about them. They remind you, and remind you some more, that their parents did the best they could. They insist that they don’t blame them, at least not any longer. They focus on the happy memories and lovable foibles. Nona Gaye melts when she remembers the way Marvin would put on “silly shows” for his kids; Amy Fleetwood laughs recalling how Mick would hide behind doors and jump out. Even John Phillips, who died last spring, had his shining moments as Dad. Bijou says, “He got me horses, and he would come to all my horse shows. He would get me puppies and things, and he would sing to me every night and tell me stories.” Now 33, Donovan Leitch remembers thinking, at age 11, that his dad’s song about poop, “Intergalactic Laxative,” was the funniest thing known to man.

"I used to just say to my mum, 'Why can't Dad just be a farmer?'" -Amy Fleetwood

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"He gets out the /Chingand rolls the coins.... It WaS great. —Donovan Leitch, on patching things up with his father, Donovan.

Leitch also fondly recalls their eventual broaching of the past—“the conversation,” as Leitch puts it—which his father took seriously, in his dippy, mystical way. “He gets out the I Ching and rolls the coins,” says Leitch. “His wife was videotaping the whole thing. It was great. There wasn’t any anger or anything, it was just getting everything out.” lone, who met her father at Leitch’s urging 11 years ago, says that, while things between her and her dad aren’t perfect, they’ve grown closer now, too. China credits constant prayer for allowing her to see her parents as “fucking amazing people.” And nine years ago, Amy Fleetwood, after years of pleading with her father to stop drinking, got a phone call from him—and this time it wasn’t about seat belts. “T want to take you out to dinner. I’ve got something to tell you,’” Amy recalls him saying. “We went to dinner, and he told me that he had stopped doing drugs, stopped drinking. That was probably the first real dinner I had with him where he was him. ”

Given their similar histories, it’s no surI H prise that many have gravitated to\# ward one another. Bijou used to go out with Elijah Blue and now lives with her boyfriend, Sean Lennon, in Los Angeles. Jagger’s daughter Karis, Ringo’s stepdaughter, Francesca, Donovan, lone, and Amy Fleetwood, who also live in Los Angeles, are like family. (Coincidentally, Donovan senior was once upon a time in love with Amy’s mom, Jennifer, and wrote “Jennifer Juniper” for her.) Stella McCartney and Liv Tyler are great friends; Leah Wood and Elizabeth Jagger are best friends. “u have the same sort of shorthand,” says Justin Kreutzmann, who hangs out with Annabelle Garcia, Jerry’s oldest daughter. Explanations aren’t necessary. No one is fazed by anyone else’s last name. They can trust that their relationships are genuinesomething that has not always been the case. As Leah Wood remembers, some boyfriends in her past were interested more in her father, Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood, than in her. “They’d go out with me, and then as soon as they’d meet my dad they’d ignore me and chat away to my dad!”

As for their present and future, they valiantly insist that they are doing their own thing. (Perhaps that’s why Jakob Dylan, Sean Lennon, and Liv Tyler declined to be interviewed.) That’s true on some level. On another, their chosen passions are also conversations with their parents, messages, questions, homages, and even love letters—which some of them may be too shy to sign.

As the son of Allman and the icon Cher, Elijah Blue had to develop what he calls “my serious ownness to be able to survive in this world.” With that in mind, he lost himself in the work of British occultist Aleister Crowley, an obsession that begat the band Deadsy, which represents a brand-new movement in music Elijah calls “undercore.” If you have two weeks, Elijah could explain it all to you. But on this summer afternoon at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, he breaks it down in just an hour, with the help of his friend and manager, Josh Richman.

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“The band is separated into five entities,” says Elijah, boiling with intensity beneath his tall, blond, reserved exterior. “There’s War, Leisure, Academia, Horror, and—”

“Medicine,” interrupts Richman, a human powder keg who wears dozens of rock-club bracelets, a T-shirt that says, LOUD, PUSHY JEW. DEAL WITH IT, and for no apparent reason carries a cane.

“And, as says the manifesto, these things, we think, are five kind of cornerstones, or whatever you want to call it, that we can kind of express all of humanity, history, whatever. We’re really kind of into showing Deadsy as, like, almost a relic. I want to associate us with, like, the cradle of civilization.”

“A philosophy. A legacy,” Richman adds.

Call it senseless jabbering if you want. As it turns out, Deadsy, a mix of heavy metal and melodic synth, is arresting and macabre, and Elijah is, as Richman says, “shredding” on the guitar. Untouched by Elijah’s past Deadsy is not. The band sounds like an evolution of Mom’s boyfriend’s band Kiss, with some Radiohead and Brian Eno thrown in. Like Kiss, its members wear makeup and have personae. Elijah’s is “P Exeter Blue,” the rich kid who went to prep school. Whether he likes it or not, the man behind P. Exeter Blue is the son of Cher and Gregg Allman and, in the view of listeners, may have had an unfair leg up in the business. Elijah says he’s found a way to use that. “What’s fun is just to be able to make them suffer when you start conquering,” says Elijah. “Where we are playing in front of 20,000 kids, crushing them. It’s, like, the proof is in the pudding.”

Twenty thousand may be an exaggeration, but Deadsy does have its cult following, mainly in L.A., where a new metal scene is emerging. One of the more recent fans is Cher, who, in 1989, three years after sending Elijah to military school, invited him to play with her band on tour. “One of our newest songs is called ‘Winners,’” says Richman, momentarily toning it down a notch. “The other night, we were riding a Ferris wheel together at a party and Cher was like, ‘I love it. It’s so beautiful.’” Elijah tries not to blush.

For London native Jason Bonham, who spends most of his time in Indianapolis as the drummer for the rock band Healing Sixes, those three A.M. jam sessions as a toddler paid off. Following John “Bonzo” Bonham’s 1980 death after a drinking binge, Jason started seriously pursuing the drums—and listening to Led Zeppelin for the first time. Famous for his pounding style, which helped define heavy metal, John posthumously provided Jason with the “backbone” of his own style. So well did Jason master his father’s technique that for Atlantic Records’ 40th-anniversary concert he was asked to perform with two of the surviving members of Led Zeppelin, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page.

“You’re looking out and seeing your uncles, really. There’s Uncle Robert and Jimmy, and here I sat on my father’s stool, really,” Jason says. Unfortunately, Uncle Robert forgot the words to “Stairway to Heaven” and Uncle Jimmy’s guitar was out of tune. Jason recalls what the press said the next day. “Thank God [Jason] was there. He was the only one who knew the songs.” As if that weren’t surreal enough, Jason appears in the Mark Wahlberg movie Rock Star, playing someone not unlike his father—a lovable, temperamental drummer with a penchant for the bottle and for throwing television sets out of hotel windows. To hear Jason describe it, he’s also playing someone not unlike himself. “As my wife said, there was no acting involved in my part. I play an alcoholic drummer.”

Rufus Wainwright, the son of Loudon Wainwright III, may be the only musician in the group whose fame has surpassed that of his rock-star parent. Loudon was among the many once touted as the “new Dylan.” Rufus’s music, a wonderfully original mix of pop and cabaret, owes more to his childhood obsession with opera and Fiorucci coats than it does to folk. In fact, as open-minded as Loudon’s worldview seemed to be, there was little room in it for homosexuality, especially in his own family. “He’d walk in on me listening to opera in the dark and he’d be like, ‘You don’t want to toss the ball around?’” says Rufus, with a laugh and a coy flip of his hair. Still, like the other dads, Loudon was more wrapped up in his art than in the fact that he had a son whiling away the days thinking about Edie Sedgwick and Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Rufus hasn’t entirely forgotten this. One of the best songs on his gorgeous album Poses is his cover of “One Man Guy,” Loudon’s ode to himself, the lone artist, reconfigured in Rufus’s voice as, perhaps, a gay love song. It is a gesture of forgiveness and a thank-you, to be sure. But Rufus, who admits his dad was touched, adds, with Oscar Wildeesque panache, “I think he was probably also touched because he can make more money off the record than I.”

Living in the shadow of an icon helped Nona Gaye win the role of Muhammad Ali's wife in Ali.

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The other musicians, while forging their own paths, are also drawing from their kidof-rock-star experiences. Singer Francesca Gregorini’s music is brazen and steeped in the defiant “grrrl” tradition of P J Harvey— about as far from Ringo’s “Octopus’s Garden” as humanly possible. But she says that one day she’ll turn her Tittenhurst experience into a song. Bijou, working on her second album, is the author of the song “When I Hated Him,” about how life blew when her dad took up with his fourth wife, Farnaz, whom Bijou saw as an enabler. One of Sally Taylor’s less crunchy numbers is the funny “Strangest of Strangers,” about the boneheads she’s met in the music business who have wanted to sign her because of her last name. “Nobody had heard my music!” Sally says. “It was really disgusting.” Even Jakob Dylan, who famously never talks about his father but is closer to him than most imagine, cryptically opened up the topic in his recent song “Hand Me Down,” lamenting, “You feel good / And you look like you should / But you will never make us proud.”

The parents find their way into the works of those pursuing creative paths other than music, too. Moon Unit Zappa, warm, with a Garafaloesque cynicism, tosses off her poignant and very funny debut novel, America the Beautiful, as a “romantic comedy” about a girl looking for love in superficial Los Angeles. The other stuff—the heroine’s wacky name (America), her brother’s wacky name (Spoony), and the obsessed, unavailable artist father, now dead—has little to do with the Zappas, she claims, and is just “the wallpaper.” In fact, the book is far more personal than Moon’s description, and the more Moon talks about it, the more she admits it. “America is the me I was trying to leave behind,” she says eventually. Describing her heroine’s quest, she says, “If all the money doesn’t make the family have dinner together, then what is important? For me, the answer is being able to move through the world with somebody.” Like America, Moon has spent years obsessing about why her relationships have failed. She persuaded her fiance, drummer Paul Doucette, to meet her therapist after only two weeks of dating.

For mellow and sensitive Nona Gaye, 28, her own childhood spent living in the shadow of an icon helped her win the role of Muhammad Ali’s wife Belinda for Michael Mann’s upcoming Ali. “She had to deal with some of the same things,” Nona says of Belinda. “Not ever being able to get away from it, not ever having just a regular life, a regular marriage, a regular family.” Donovan Leitch, who recently directed the emotional, if all-over-the-place documentary The Last Party, about the 2000 election, has been a model, screen actor, stage actor, singer, and all-around great party guest. Flighty, endearing, and living proof that “It boy” is a noble career, he’s also the reincarnation of his dad, whom he imagines as “a wandering, gypsy, minstrel guy with a denim cap and guitar swung over his shoulder.” Justin Kreutzmann, meanwhile, who has directed longand shortform Dead videos, bluntly describes his kind of work as “the nepotistic kind.”

Rufus Wainwright, the son of Loudon Wainwright III, may be the only musician in the group whose fame has surpassed that of his rock-star parent.

Even those in more frivolous careers are paying their respects to Dad, if in mildly disturbing ways. After all, is it just a coincidence that Kimberly Stewart and Elizabeth Jagger, daughters of two worldclass model-lovers, are pursuing modeling careers themselves? Surely it’s more than the good genes of their mothers, Alana Hamilton and Jerry Hall. In any case, neither of the girls seems overly concerned. Kimberly, for one, finds it hilarious that Rod, on their shopping trips, encourages her to get things like the tight leopard pants. As for her nude pictures in Black + White magazine, “My dad thought they were, like, awesome!” says Kimberly, dangling her long legs over the arm of her chair. For her part, Elizabeth Jagger has spent countless hours trying on, darning, and cataloguing her father’s trousers and concert T-shirts. Unfortunately, Mick’s reaction to her career has not been as positive as Rod’s to Kimberly’s; he’s encouraged the budding “It girl” to think about his alma mater, the London School of Economics. Perhaps it’s because he knows how some men can get with cute 18-year-olds. For the record, Steven Tyler has already hit on her.

Those who have had the most difficult relationships with their parents—Amy, China, and lone—are now, after making peace with the past, parents themselves, but of a more traditional sort. A single mother to a seven-year-old named Wolf, Amy says her instinct is to be “incredibly protective.” China, in helping to raise her stepson, Jamie, with her husband, Jamie, a dentist, is taking a different approach than what she saw as a kid. “I watch out for him like I would a younger brother,” China says. “If he is doing something that is out of line, I don’t scream at him. I treat him like a human being.” As for lone, who has gone out with Red Hot Chili Pepper Anthony Kiedis and was married to Beastie Boy Adam Horowitz, she now says rock stars are “a little bit like invalids” and is relieved that her new fiance, designer David Netto, is, if anything, “too orderly.” Expecting their first child in December, she says, “I want things to be cleaner and more organized and more consistent, and just a safer overall feeling.”

Mackenzie Phillips is also a mother, of 14-year-old son Shane, “a computer nerd slash rock ’n’ roll star,” who helped her, Bijou, and Sean Lennon sing the Mamas and the Papas’ “Got a Feelin’” at the John Phillips tribute in March. When it comes to raising him, Mackenzie has laid down the law. “I’ve said to him, ‘Dude, if I Find out you’re smoking pot, you’re going straight to rehab. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.’” As protective as she is of her son, however, her dad is the one who consistently brings tears to her eyes. “He never looked back and said, ‘God, I’m really sorry.’ Never, never, never,” Mackenzie says. “But I miss him every day.”

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