By Emily Yoffe
CBS Photo Archive/ Getty Images Entertainment/ Getty Images
She’d probably appreciate the joke. Cass Elliot, who had an exquisite understanding of life’s absurdities, would acknowledge it would be hard to find a greater cosmic irony than a fat Jewish girl choking to death on a ham sandwich. But, after she laughed that colossal laugh of hers, she might have said, "Come on, guys! Read the autopsy report." She certainly wouldn’t have been squeamish about it. After all, before she decided show business looked like more fun, the plan was she would go to Goucher (the biographical song "Creeque Alley" changed it to Swarthmore for the rhyme with "sophomore"), then become a doctor.
Yes, there was a ham sandwich in the London bedroom in which her body was found, she’d concede. She had just spent the evening performing to a sold-out house at the London Palladium, so she was entitled to a snack. She could have added, "So, I didn’t keep kosher. At least I never recorded a Christmas album!" But read the report, she would have insisted. No trace of pork was found in her trachea. She would have pointed to the line on the autopsy that gave her cause of death as "fatty myocardial degeneration." In other words, heart failure caused by the lifetime strain of carrying usually more than 100 extra pounds on her 5’5 frame. (Her weight at death was 238 lbs.)
Since she’s been dead almost as long as she lived (September 19, 1941 to July 29, 1974), she might be growing sick of the fact that her accomplishments have been shadowed by the urban legend about the manner of her death. Mike Myers, as Austin Powers, the cryogenically frozen secret agent who returns from the 60s, even makes use of it when he lists the cause of the departures of his rocker friends: "Janis Joplin—alcohol; Jimi Hendrix—drugs; Mama Cass—ham sandwich." Even someone with as self-mocking a sense of humor as Cass would by now understandably scream, "Enough already!"
She was born Ellen Naomi Cohen in Baltimore. Somehow it occurred to this bright, obese girl with little formal musical training to eschew college and become a performer. She convinced her parents that if she didn’t make it in five years, she would return and finish her education. In 1966, five years after she left home, The Mamas & The Papas released their first album, If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears. It was explosively successful, featuring the group’s tight harmonies on such songs as "Monday, Monday" and "California Dreamin.’" It stayed on the charts for more than two years.
Her importance to the history of rock wasn’t just the music she made—although the songs are forever inscribed in the neurons of anyone alive at the time: "Got a Feelin’," "Words of Love," "Dream a Little Dream of Me," "Dedicated to the One I Love." She’s also important because of the music that wouldn’t have been made without her. She was one of those people who knew everybody, and brought them all together. In 1964 she was briefly in a group called The Mugwumps, with singers James Hendricks and Denny Doherty, and guitarist Zal Yanovsky. Cass introduced Yanovsky to her friend John Sebastian, a meeting that resulted in The Lovin’ Spoonful. She later introduced her friend David Crosby to her friend Graham Nash and thus, Crosby, Stills and Nash. Cass even has an uncredited moment as a backup singer on their first album.
She was known, according to a Rolling Stone interview, as "The Queen of Los Angeles Pop Society." She would order great platters of deli food and in the afternoon her house would fill with friends: Eric Clapton, David Crosby, Buddy Miles, Joni Mitchell, Jack Nicholson. Artist Gary Burden, on the A&E "Biography" of Cass, described her home as the L.A. rock equivalent of Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon. The late movie producer Julia Phillips, in her memoir, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, remembered that Cass left a blank wall in her home on which her celebrated friends wrote graffiti. Cass’ contribution was "Who is Chuck Barris?" the 1970s equivalent of "Rose is a rose is a rose."
But, as the cliché would have it, the fat woman with a million friends was often terribly lonely. In response to an interviewer she once mused on why she was fat. "I’m a very gullible person … An attractive young girl in this world who is gullible can get herself into a lot of trouble and I find that … it keeps the lechers away." But it kept almost all the men away. To save her one-time singing partner, the slender and handsome James Hendricks, from being drafted and sent to Vietnam, she married him. However soft the lights, or big the peignoir, or great the favor she had done, Hendricks preferred to leave the marriage unconsummated. Then she fell in love with Denny Doherty; he rebuffed her marriage proposal. He said on A&E that he wasn’t "man enough to say she’s 300 pounds and you’ve got to get past that, stupid." She had a crush on Tommy Smothers, and in the same documentary he said how uncomfortable it was to try not to hurt her feelings.
Cass had a tortured relationship with her body. She damaged her health by alternating between eating binges and crash diets. But, while she hated being fat, she refused to hide herself in a black caftan of shame; she even posed nude for what turned out to be a popular pin-up photo. Michelle Phillips, her gorgeous fellow Mama, recalled on A&E that just before she met Cass for the first time she had dropped acid. She was disappointed it was having no effect until she answered the doorbell and there was the enormous Cass in a pink angora sweater, white miniskirt, and white boots. Phillips recalled of her reaction to the sight, "I thought: This drug is very powerful."
By then Doherty had joined folk singers John and Michelle Phillips to become The Journeymen. In 1965, powered by her unrequited crush on Doherty, Cass took off for St. Thomas, where Doherty and the Phillipses were camping on the beach and getting stoned. She desperately wanted them to become a quartet, but John Phillips, Michelle’s husband, found her physically unacceptable; he thought the perfect Michelle was the female ideal. Finally, Cass’ voice won him over. As she told Rolling Stone in 1968: "When I heard us sing together the first time…We knew. We KNEW … this is it."
The foursome eventually got to L.A. where, using Cass’ great connections, she called her friend Barry ("Eve of Destruction") McGuire. He introduced her to his producer, Lou Adler. Adler listened to the quartet and immediately decided to record them, even before they had performed in public as a group. Their album couldn’t be released until they came up with a name for themselves. Joseph F. Laredo writes in the liner notes to their Greatest Hits album that Cass had heard a biker on a radio refer to the women in his gang as "mamas," and Cass said she and Michelle were "the mamas."
The group instantly became international stars. They immediately invested all their money in savings bonds. Oh, sorry, time for another cliché: they actually poured it into houses and cars and snorted it up their noses (or, in John Phillips case, stuck it into his arm). Cass loved lavishness and spent the rest of her life paying off debts and back taxes. The group’s endless drug use and messy personal lives— while Cass was pining for Doherty, he was having an affair with Michelle, John’s wife—doomed them.
Cass came to loathe the name "Mama"; a posthumously released album was titled Don’t Call Me Mama Anymore. But she longed to be a real mother. Unable to find a stable relationship, she got pregnant by a man whose identity she never revealed. Her daughter Owen was born in 1967. (When John Phillips first heard about the pregnancy, he asked when the abortion was scheduled.)
She adored having a daughter, although her precarious financial situation forced her to constantly go on the road. Owen was seven when her mother died. "She was warm and funny and very loving," says Owen Elliott-Kugell. "She had a very enveloping, great laugh." Owen was raised by Cass's sister, singer (and lawyer) Leah Kunkel. Owen is married to songwriter Jack Kugell and is the mother of two young children whom they are raising as observant Jews. She knows the identity of her father, but has kept her mother’s secret. She told A&E that when she’s driving with her children and Cass comes on the radio, she loves to tell them that’s their grandmother.
When Cass launched her solo career in 1968, it was a time of bitter social polarization. But Cass had an uncanny ability to transcend categories. "She was acceptable to a rock and roll audience and to Nixon-era older folks," said her friend John Sebastian on A&E. She recorded an album with rocker Dave Mason and appeared at the Flamingo in Las Vegas with Catskills veteran comedian Marty Allen. She talked about her many acid trips, hung out with Timothy Leary, and was a welcome guest on the wholesome TV shows of Andy Williams and Dinah Shore.
She was a rocker only for a short while. She gravitated to what she herself described, with perfect equanimity, as "middle-of-the-road" music—the kind of show tunes that first fired her show business ambitions. The schlocky self-esteem anthem "Make Your Own Kind of Music" became her theme song.
Ellen Cohen was the oldest of three children from a "groovy lower-middle-class" family, as she said in a 1969 Esquire interview. The family was proudly Jewish, although not particularly religious. The children went to Jewish summer camps, and Cass’ mother, Bess, was the president of the local Hadassah. Unusual for those days, Cass was bat mitzvahed.
For much of her childhood, her family moved around the Washington, D.C. area as her father, Philip Cohen, pursued mostly losing restaurant ventures. He eventually found success when he put kitchens in buses and drove to construction sites to serve breakfast. In Esquire, Cass recalled going off with her father at 4:30 a.m. to do the cooking. "Meals on wheels for schlemiels," she called it.
There was always music in the house. Philip Cohen had wanted to be an opera singer; Bess was a skilled piano player. The family often gathered around the piano and sang together. "Cass and I had a thing about harmony," recalls Kunkel.
Because of all her family moves, Cass had to make up some high school credits in order to graduate. After summer school one day she went to pick up a friend who was appearing in a local production of the musical "The Boy Friend." The director was losing a member of the chorus, and when Cass arrived, her friend pointed to her and said, "Well, she sings." She sang and got the part. As she said in a radio interview three months before her death, "Then I went back to school and somehow, school didn’t seem the same to me." People in show business, she said, "looked like they were havin’ a good time."
She went off to Broadway, leaving behind her identity as Ellen Cohen. There are two accounts for how she chose both first and last names, says Richard Barton Campbell, who with Cass’ daughter maintains the invaluable Cass website, www.casselliot.com. One was that Cass named herself after Cass Daley, a B-movie actress, comedienne, and singer with buck teeth and a large tush. The other was that her father used to call her Cassandra, after the Trojan princess and seer. Elliot was either an homage to T.S. Eliot (Cass, he was an anti-Semite!) or a childhood friend who was killed in a car accident.
Shortly after arriving in New York, she almost landed the role of Miss Marmelstein in the musical I Can Get It for You Wholesale. That part launched the career of another unconventional-looking Jewish girl: Barbra Streisand. Cass made it to a road company of "The Music Man," then came home to Washington. Leah recalls her oft-stated remark: "There weren’t a lot of parts for 300 pound ingenues." Unwilling to go pre-med, Cass entered the folk scene. By 1963, at the age of 22, she had her first taste of fame, appearing on "The Tonight Show" with her trio, The Big Three.
The night of her death she had just completed a successful two-week engagement in London. Michelle Phillips recalled on A&E that Cass called her after the show crying about how she’d gotten a standing ovation; she felt she had finally established her solo career. Cass died happy. A ham sandwich had nothing to do with it.
Emily Yoffe is a senior editor at The Free Press and the former “Dear Prudence” columnist at Slate.