Another music legend has fallen: the very good one that Mamas & the Papas singer Cass Elliot choked to death on a ham sandwich is apparently not true.
That's according to “Mama” Cass's daughter, Owen Elliot-Kugell, who was just 7 years old and living in the United States when her mother died in a borrowed apartment in London. Now, Elliot-Kugell has gathered details of his mother's death for her book, “My Mama, Cass,” which was released Tuesday.
“I would go to the kids' houses after school and eventually one of their parents would ask me, 'Your mom really died by choking on a ham sandwich?'” Elliot-Kugell told People. “First of all, the nerve to say that to a child is crazy, but it happened frequently. So I felt it was my duty to find out what that story was about.
“There was a ham sandwich, but she didn't eat it and she didn't choke. “Enough of the jokes,” Elliot-Kugell told the BBC.
The “California Dreamin'” singer was performing solo in 1968 after a few years with the Mamas & the Papas, and on June 27, 1974, she found herself staying in an apartment in London that her friend Harry Nilsson had lent her. She had just completed her two-week run of shows at the London Palladium and then stayed up for 36 hours straight, her daughter said, for Mick Jagger's birthday party and then a brunch in her honor at the next day. When she got home she was hungry, so an assistant made her a ham sandwich. She fell asleep without taking a bite.
On June 29 she was found dead in her bed.
It turns out that the story about what Elliot-Kugell called “the stupid sandwich” was made up by the singer's manager, Allan Carr. He gave it to a journalist, Sue Cameron, who wrote about it in the Hollywood Reporter, Elliot-Kugell told him. to the BBC.
“He was crying and upset and said, 'There's a half-eaten ham sandwich on the nightstand,'” Cameron told People. Carr was concerned that the “Monday, Monday” singer, like his colleagues Janis Joplin in 1970 and Jim Morrison in 1971, had overdosed. But there still wasn't enough information about her death and, wanting to protect Elliot, he said, he told the curious writer: “Just say she choked to death on the sandwich.”
The lie appeared to influence media attention on Elliot's weight, as seen in the coverage of his death and its aftermath.
Following Elliot's death, Carr told The Times news services that he had died in his sleep at age 33 and gave no cause of death. But the fourth paragraph of a four-paragraph LA Times report on her death said: “Miss Elliot, who weighed 238 pounds…was famous for her numerous strict diets. She was hospitalized during one of those diets.”
“Cass Elliot, the rotund American singing star who first gained acclaim as a member of the pop singing group Mamas and the Papas in the 1960s, was found dead in her bed on Monday night in her London apartment,” said the first paragraph of his LA. Times obituary, published July 30, 1974, the same day autopsy results were expected.
Her personal doctor told the Times the made-up story: She probably choked to death on a ham sandwich. Of course, that detail made it to the obituary headline.
“But she was a very big lady and couldn't rule out the possibility of a heart attack,” the doctor said. “She had been dead for a considerable time before her body was found.”
On August 6, 1974, the Associated Press reported that Mama Cass had died of a heart attack, citing testimony given at a British inquest into the death.
“He weighed twice what he should have,” a pathologist told the inquest. “One of his heart muscles had become fat.” He added that stress in what the AP called “the last 48 hours of the singer's life” may have triggered the heart attack.
Elliot was found naked in bed, propped up against two pillows, a coroner told the inquest. No drugs were found in his system.
Now her daughter is trying to correct what she told the BBC was the “beyond frustrating, almost unfathomable” falsehood about how her mother died.
“When she was a teenager she knew she wanted to be an artist and she told everyone she was going to be the most famous fat girl who ever lived,” Elliot-Kugell said of her mother, who had struggled with obesity since she was a teenager. She was 7 and was prescribed amphetamines when she was a teenager to combat her weight gain.
“She had that foresight of knowledge as a child. I think that's great. “I think that’s really cool.”
Times researcher Valerie Hood contributed to this story.
