Mackenzie Phillips has opened up about her cocaine lunch breaks with Valerie Bertinelli on the set of One Day at a Time. In an interview, the 66-year-old actress shared, “So this might surprise you that during lunch break, Valerie and I would drive to my house, get in the pool, drink wine, and snort coke.”
Mackenzie shares what Barbara and Julie Cooper were really doing at lunch…
Talking to Fox News on May 31, Phillips said, “Valerie talks about it openly, so it’s not like I’m pulling her covers or anything. The thing was that I was the, you know, Valerie didn’t have the kind of addiction that I had, she didn’t have an addiction.”
“And you know, so we would do coke together in the dressing room and stuff. I just happened to be the one who got caught. And thank God I got caught, you know?” Phillips described.
In a 2022 episode of the Behind the Velvet Rope podcast, Phillips spoke about her bond with Bertinelli. She said, “We were teenagers, and now we’re women of a certain age, and we loved each other. We loved the people that we worked with. We were a family.”
Phillips played the rebellious teenager Julie Cooper, while Valerie Bertinelli played her younger sister Barbara Cooper on One Day at a Time, which aired on CBS from December 1975 to May 1984. The sitcom ran for nine seasons and produced more than 200 episodes.
However, the daughter of legendary rock star John Phillips was fired twice because of her drug addiction in the 1980s, reports Variety. In a 2021 interview with HealthyWomen, the actress recollected, “I was very much into substances, like heroin, cocaine, pills. And, of course, alcohol was always there. And during times when I wasn’t using other drugs — because alcohol is a drug — my alcohol use would ramp up. And then when I would start using the other drugs again, I wouldn’t drink. And then when I would put down the other drugs, I would start drinking again. They really go hand in hand.”
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Originally reported by Meenakshi Sengupta on Reality Tea
