RIP Geneviève Waïte: the famous SA actress you've probably never heard of

At the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, at the end of Michael Sarne's Joanna, the title character, played by SA-born model, actress and later singer Geneviève Waïte, cries out in the musical finale, "This ain't the end, you know! I'm coming back!" Part of the audience cruelly shouted back, "No! No!"

The film, about a promiscuous art student lost in the "mod morality" of London, was the proverbial curate's egg, according to New York Times critic Renata Adler.

Donald Sutherland, for example, who plays a terminally ill aristocrat, was rather good in it, and there were moments of "technical brilliance" from the director. But a lot depended on what audiences thought of Joanna, a role played by wide-eyed and vacant-faced Waïte in a babyish monotone.

"As she wanders about," Adler wrote, "being surprised in beds where she doesn't belong, being lectured by her grandmother when she oversleeps at home, searching for commitment, falling in love with a Negro nightclub owner (ably played by Calvin Lockhart), she verges (though it may be the part) on being unbearable. I didn't mind acutely, but the charm of it rather passed me by."

That, sadly, more or less describes the sort of existence that Waïte, who died at 71 in Los Angeles at the weekend, would have. It's something of a Hollywood cliché to talk of life in the fast lane, but it's one she lived at jet-trash speed.

Her film career started out humbly enough. She was a 19-year-old model when she landed a small role, little more than eye candy, in Jamie Uys's 1967 comedy, Die Professor en die Prikkelpop (The Professor and the Pin-Up), about a fictional platteland dorp, Pietergrahamesbosch, hosting its first beauty pageant.

After that, Waïte was off to London to study acting. There she met Sarne, a former pop singer and actor about to direct his first feature, Joanna. Sarne had a certain louche reputation - he had famously slept with Brigitte Bardot a few days after she began her third marriage, in 1966, to the German playboy and industrialist Gunther Sachs - and saw the young South African as an ideal lead for his tale of waifish lost innocence.

Waïte was the talk of the town at the time. London gossip columnists referred to her as the "South African Twiggy", and Vogue magazine described her as a "a kinky wink of a girl" and "a myth, a Martian, a crazy flower". Her first marriage, to one Michael Reichs, was soon over.

Joanna was banned in SA because of interracial love scenes and general nudity. The film barely broke even, but it attracted Hollywood's attention - and, soon enough, Sarne and his leading lady were off to Los Angeles.

There Waïte was introduced to singer-songwriter John Phillips, founder of the legendary Mamas and the Papas, a group whose sunny, hippie lite mid-'60s pop hits California Dreamin' and Monday, Monday masked a darker, wilder back story of sex and debauchery.

In a nutshell, it went like this: struggling folk singer Phillips was married to wealthy Virginian socialite Susan Adams when he met teenager Michelle Gilliam with whom he had an affair and, after his marriage to Adams ended, married in 1962. They moved to New York where, with Denny Doherty and "Mama" Cass Elliot, they formed the Mamas and the Papas.

The group's brief career, from 1965 to 1969, was almost derailed after Michelle had a brief affair with Doherty and then a longer one with Gene Clark, a former member of the Byrds. Others conquests included Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and Roman Polanski.

(Grim fact: when Polanski's pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and others were murdered by members of the Manson gang in August 1969, a grief-crazed Polanski was convinced Phillips had ordered the killings in retaliation for the affair with Michelle.)

Phillips was bedding film actresses whenever possible. One was Mia Farrow, married to Frank Sinatra at the time.

The couple divorced in 1969 shortly after the Mamas and Papas broke up. Enter Geneviéve Waïte, who was introduced to Phillips by Sarne. The night they met the three went down to the beach outside Phillips's Malibu home where they dropped mescaline around a bonfire.

Waïte became Phillips's partner, muse and artistic collaborator for much of the '70s. They were married in 1972. It wasn't a fruitful decade for either of them, thanks largely to the drugging.

Waïte appeared in a few more films, the most notable being Sarne's Myra Breckinridge, a 1973 adaption of the Gore Vidal novel that starred Faye Dunaway and Mae West. Waïte's role was so inconsequential it was listed as "dental patient" in the credits. The film was so savagely panned, Sarne's career never recovered.

The following year, Phillips began work on his wife's debut solo album, Romance is on the Rise, released on his own Paramour record label. It was not easy going; one studio engineer described Waïte's voice thus: "It was like a cross between Betty Boop and Billie Holiday - which is a combination that should not exist."

Phillips had attempted to construct a super-hip, big band sound for the album, like '40s swing gone to seed. The lyrics of Phillips's compositions were full of drug references, like this couplet from the song Biting My Nails: "A flake of snow on a silver spoon, a pretty woman and a big balloon."

Somehow legendary fashion photographer Richard Avedon was persuaded to shoot the cover for free. Waïte was styled as a 1940s glamour girl wearing glass shoes and hot pants, coyly bending over and clutching a large red heart.

Avedon reportedly suffered a heart attack the next day because, according to Waïte, the shoot had so excited him. "I felt really bad about that," she said. Cover notwithstanding, the album bombed.

Phillips's career was going nowhere. An attempt to record a solo album with members of the Rolling Stones degenerated into chaos as Phillips and guitarist Keith Richards decamped to the studio bathrooms. Phillips would pitch up hours later, his shirtsleeves flecked in blood from the needlework. He made the mistake of introducing his daughter Mackenzie Phillips, the American Graffiti child star, to Mick Jagger who promptly deflowered her.

Years later, in her druggy 2009 memoir, High on Arrival, and on Oprah Winfrey's TV show, Mackenzie would reveal that she'd had a "consensual" incestuous relationship with her father that lasted, "on and off", for 10 years.

This abuse started when Mackenzie was about 18 - roughly halfway through her father's marriage to Waïte (they divorced in 1985). Mackenzie cannot remember when it started, given her drug intake; her father had introduced her to cocaine at 11, it's claimed.

But both Waïte and Michelle Phillips have dismissed reports of incest. They question in particular why Mackenzie had waited so long before making the allegations - and after her father's death in 2001. But Chynna Phillips, Michelle's daughter, has revealed that her half-sister had discussed their father's assaults with her years earlier, and had been sworn to secrecy. Phillips's former band member, Denny Doherty, had also indicated to his own daughter that he'd been horrified at Phillips's behaviour.

Little was heard of Waïte after that, until her death. A statement by her daughter, Bijou Phillips, read: "Our beautiful mother Geneviéve Waïte Phillips, passed away in her sleep. She was a beautiful soul, and born from another planet. Her ideas, her songs, her voice, and her heartbeat to a beautiful African rhythm no one else had and I am so thankful she was able to share it.

"She was a light, a fairy, and a gift of a creature. The lyrics she wrote on her album were timeless and smart. Her mind was poetry and wit, her sense of humour was quick and dry. She was like a child in a way, who was too smart for her own good."