Next Tribe and Vanity Fair give slightly different accounts of how Owen Elliot-Kugell (above left) eventually found her father, but both involve her mother’s bandmate, Michelle Phillips. Phillips had asked Cass about Owen’s father just before Cass’s death, but never got an answer. She recalled to Vanity Fair that a teenage Owen called her in the mid-1980s wanting to find her father. Phillips then spent a year or so tracking down his name via various musician friends.
Owen remembered it slightly differently when talking to Next Tribe. She said her mother’s bandmates John and Michelle Phillips and Denny Doherty took her out to dinner for her 19th birthday, and during the meal, Michelle Phillips said she wished she knew who Owen’s father was, at which point the men made it clear they did. His name was Chuck Day, and he had played bass for the band circa 1966.
In both versions of the story, Michelle Phillips then placed an ad in Musician magazine looking for Chuck Day, supposedly to pay him back-royalties. When Day took the bait, Phillips arranged for him to meet Owen. “He wasn’t all that shocked” at the news, Phillips recalled (via Vanity Fair).
Owen finally met her father in San Francisco and called it “awkward but emotional.” She said she got the impression he really loved her. She said she had surrogate parents in her uncle, Russ Kunkel, and in Michelle Phillips (via Next Tribe).
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