The Jewish Chronical: Fat-shamed in life and death, this is the truth about Mama Cass

Mamas and Papas singer Cass Elliot suffered abuse over her weight – and she didn’t die choking on a ham sandwich, says her daughter

Owen Elliot-Kugell, daughter of Cass Elliot, the Jewish singer of Sixties band The Mamas and the Papas, remembers being asked countless times as a little girl on playdates, “Did your mum really die choking on a ham sandwich?”

Best known as Mama Cass, her mother had a powerful voice that carried the Los Angeles band’s stunning melodies such as California Dreamin’ and Monday, Monday. Despite the enduring legend, it wasn’t a ham sandwich that killed her. Elliot had a heart attack aged 32, when Owen was seven — probably as a result of an undiagnosed condition. And this Owen wanted to put straight in her book about her mum, My Mama, Cass.

“I hated that rumour, mostly because it infers this gluttonous end to her life,” Owen says. “I hated having to defend it all my life. It did really torture me and I needed to find out why a story like that would have been out at all.”

What she discovered was that it began as an act of protection, of sorts. When Elliot died in her sleep in a London apartment, her friend and manager inserted the sandwich story into a newspaper obituary to prevent people jumping to the conclusion that her death had been caused by substance abuse.

The manager had actually spotted a ham sandwich in the room and it was this that inspired the story. “And it stuck because it was such a salacious rumour,” Owen says. “I don’t think my mum kept kosher, but it just turns out that it was a ham sandwich. That has always been the funny part about it, right?”

The suggestion of gluttony was not funny, however. Elliot was the last singer invited to join The Mamas and the Papas because of reservations among the rest of the group because she was overweight. The official line though was that, having rejected her initially, they changed their minds when her vocal range miraculously improved after she had been hit on the head by a pipe in an accident.

There’s little doubt that had she been performing today, Cass would never have been subjected to this level of fat-shaming. “No”, Owen agrees. “In those days, people thought it was all good fun. Certainly, my mum let it roll off her back and smiled through those jokes, and that realisation is not a fun one for me. I feel terrible she had to go through that.”