‘Fat girls need love too’: The heartbreaking life, and cruel death, of Mama Cass
In a life in which people happily dissembled on her behalf, it seems fitting that the story of the passing of “Mama” Cass Elliot was built on a lie. Likely you’ve heard it: that following the final performance of a run of 28 sold-out concerts at the London Palladium, 50 years ago this week, the 32-year-old retired to her digs at 9 Curzon Square, in Mayfair, where she choked to death while attempting to eat a ham sandwich.
Never mind that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has pulled on its strides, the bona fides of this story lay snoozing for more than four decades. Only in 2020 did the journalist Sue Cameron admit to knowingly inserting this culinary falsehood in an obituary written in The Hollywood Reporter at the behest of a manager, Allan Carr, who worried that the death would otherwise be associated with the misuse of drugs. (An autopsy report revealed no trace of narcotics in Elliot’s system.) As the New York Times would later note, the “cartoonish rumour – propagated in endless pop culture references – casts a tawdry light over Elliot’s legacy and still threatens to overshadow her mighty, underappreciated talent”.
So here’s what actually happened. In the hours after composing a kindly note, in red lipstick, to Debbie Reynolds, her successor on the Palladium stage – “if [the audience] is half as nice to you as they were to me, you’ll have the time of your life,” she wrote – Cass Elliot died from a heart attack while resting in her bedroom prior to a party in celebration of Mick Jagger’s 31st birthday. A sandwich – ham and cheese, actually – and a can of Coke remained untouched on a bedside cabinet. Notwithstanding the grim coincidence of Keith Moon dying in the very same room, four years later, that’s all that happened.
The falsehood, of course, gained traction because at its core lay an image that people might easily imagine to be true. After all, what could be more fitting for a plus-size singer than to die while shovelling down food? In what today looks like the humour of cruelty, even in life, Cass Elliot appeared to be in on jokes aimed at her physical appearance. “No one’s getting fat, except Mama Cass,” sang The Mamas & The Papas, the group with which she first found fame, on their 1967 hit Creeque Alley. As a guest on an episode of The New Scooby-Doo Movies, of all things, she went so far as to voice a character who owned an apparently haunted candy factory.
Even the story of how she joined The Mamas & The Papas was a kind of “joke”. Despite getting on famously with her future bandmates – abetted, no doubt, by her arriving for an initial meet-up in Greenwich Village with a bottle of liquid LSD – full membership was slow to arrive. To hide the truth that weight, again, was the problem, group leader John Phillips concocted a ridiculous story in which he claimed her entry had been approved after a concussion had mysteriously added three notes to the top of her vocal register. Dishearteningly, Mama Cass, as she would then be known, repeated this falsehood for years afterwards.
“As she had learned early on, the best way to deal with an uncomfortable situation is with humour,” wrote her daughter, Owen Elliot-Kugell, in the book My Mama, Cass. “While she was always known as being happy and outgoing on the outside, on the inside my mom wanted to be thin and conventionally attractive like everyone else. To have been excluded on account of her weight, something she’d tried so hard and been unable to control, must have been excruciatingly painful. I imagine she’d been loath to re-experience that pain on a continual basis… To have a funny story to recall may have been the easiest way for her to handle the memory of [that] early… rejection.”
Maybe. But the consistent tragedy of Cass Elliot, at least for as long as she was alive, was one of physical aspect overshadowing a significant talent. While she may not have been a songwriter, her ear was impeccable, and her pitch was perfect. But as with so many interpreters of other people’s material, her career as a solo artist suffered from misdirection by record companies and managers who ought to have known how best to sculpt an identity on vinyl that amounted to more than her remarkable voice.
Instead, she became a habitué of the TV variety show circuit. As always, she arrived armoured in self-deprecating humour. Recalling a headache that had caused her to cancel an earlier appearance on The Tonight Show, she told host Johnny Carson (and his late night audience of millions), “I hadn’t been able to eat anything [that] day. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t think that would have been such a hardship for me.”
From the off, the girl born Ellen Naomi Cohen was made to feel uncomfortable about her size. The mockery of schoolmates saw her stepping into the kind of ceiling-to-floor dresses she wore in adulthood; her panicked parents sent her to doctors and psychiatrics who prescribed amphetamines to the eight-year old patient. A decision to pursue a life in show business added yet more worries to the pile.
After a good deal of back-and-forth, the warring factions at last struck a deal: if, after five years, success had eluded her, the young and headstrong Cohen would return home to Baltimore in order to study medicine. With this, she entered a world in which the drugs were prescribed by unlicensed pharmacists.
The release of California Dreamin’, The Mamas & The Papas blockbusting first single, from 1966, came with another barefaced lie. Los Angeles may have been warm, but it certainly wasn’t safe. Adrift in a sea of sharks, the group’s recording contract, with Dunhill Records, earned them a pitiful royalty rate of five per cent of 90 per cent of the retail price of their records. Like so many talents of the time, Mama Cass focussed on the numbers rather than her meagre cut of the profits. As a woman of means, she drove a midnight-blue Cadillac convertible with white leather seats. Had she survived into old age, likely she would have given up personalised license plates bearing the name of the Egyptian goddess of life and magic – “ISIS”.
Right from the start, The Mamas & The Papas were a wreck. The group were led by the often unreadable John Phillips, a man whose relationship with bandmate and wife Michelle decoupled and re-united like Burton and Taylor with harmonies. No one, it seemed, could be trusted. During her first meeting with the group, Elliot explained her instant and deep attraction to fellow member Denny Doherty with the words – and beat this for a heartbreaking sentence – “Fat girls need love too, Michelle”. Not that it mattered – the strikingly beautiful Phillips began an affair with him just the same. “You can have anybody you want, and still you took him,” Cass complained. “You knew how I felt.”
In an interview with the NME, in 1972, unsurprisingly, Elliot took a dim view of her bandmates. “I felt that I was carrying the other three and I’d get out on stage and say to myself, ‘Why should I be doing this work for the four of us when I could be earning more as a solo act,” she said. The previous year, The Mamas & The Papas had been contractually obliged to record one more album. “I added the proviso that they should all turn up for rehearsals on time and they all pulled their weight,” she explained, rather richly for someone who didn’t write songs. “But they were just the same as ever and [re-union LP] People Like Us was a disaster as far as I was concerned.”
Of course, then there was the usual – a mountain of hash smuggled onto a ferry bound for England, the double-helpings of LSD, the smoking of opium with David Crosby while in London. With its irregular expressions, at times, Elliot’s lust for life resembled a cry for help. In 1967 she was arrested for stealing bed sheets from a posh London hotel – “I liked ’em so I took ‘em,” she later said – while in New York City she nicked a brass cast of the Francis Barraud painting His Master’s Voice. Back home in California, meanwhile, the easy comings and goings at Chez Cass took on hues of potential danger.
“Having a free, open-to-everyone house… meant that my mother’s generosity was frequently taken advantage of,” recalled Owen Elliot-Kugell. “There were hangers-on of all types, many of whom were ingesting a variety of questionable substances… things could get a little bit nutty at the house, and people who my mom would never be associated with had she been paying closer attention would gather there. People who’d bring and do drugs and hang out for hours and hours, generally making themselves at home in our home.”
It may have been that she was simply uneasy with the prospect of ever being alone. After deciding she would try for a baby, Cass Elliot told her friend, the folk singer Judy Henske, that her ambition was to have someone in her life who would never leave her. The sole responsibility of a potential father, she explained, began and ended at the point of conception. As an independent woman and a rock star, after that, the rest she could do by herself. As things turned out, of course, it was the seven-year-old Owen who was left alone, decades earlier than she might have been.
Long before the end, warning signs were beginning to flash on the dashboard. In 1968, Elliot was signed up for a $40,000-a-week residency at the Circus Maximus Theater, in Las Vegas. To prepare, she embarked on a six-month crash diet that saw her weight drop by more than a hundred pounds but led to her losing her voice and contracting a stomach ulcer. The milk and cream she drank to counteract the pain would cause her to gain another 50 pounds.
Elliott was confined to her bed for three weeks before the shows were due to begin, and on the night she could barely sing; the residency was abandoned after the second of the first day’s two concerts. In just one of a series of merciless reviews, Newsweek described the spectacle as like watching “some great ocean liner embarking on an ill-fated maiden voyage [in which] Mama Cass slid down the waves and sank to the bottom”. Even after shedding all that weight, the allusions to her size kept coming.
The following year she had a moderate hit with the pathos-laden Make Your Own Kind of Music – now a TikTok favourite – but, overall, things got worse. In the months before her death, Elliot was hospitalised no fewer than five times with headaches, dizziness, glaucoma and bruises and breaks from tumbles on pavements and floors. She walked with a cane for months after reconstructive knee surgery. Such was the state of disrepair that a dispassionate observer might have wondered whether she was in any fit state to travel 6,000 miles for a string of bookings at the Palladium.
On the other hand, in rock and roll, vested interests are thick on the ground. As her daughter would later ask, “With so much riding on getting her to London, both financially and professionally for my mom and others, were [people] wilfully turning a blind eye?”
Or perhaps Cass Elliot just couldn’t be stopped. As she once told the US TV talk show host Carol Burnett, “I think my plans are just to build up, not relent for a moment. That’s what rock and roll is. Rock and roll is relentless.”
So instead of returning home to Baltimore and a career in medicine, instead, Elliot screamed across America aboard private planes. On one flight, the pilot of a one-time Swedish air force jet told The Mamas & The Papas that he planned to ascend to 70,000 feet, the point at which everyone aboard would experience zero gravity. Upon reaching this apex, a delighted Cass Elliot unbuckled her seatbelt and floated in the air. It shouldn’t have mattered, really, but to her, and to others, it did – for the first time in her life, she didn’t weigh a thing.
My Mama, Cass: A Memoir, by Owen Elliot-Kugell is published by Omnibus Press
