The Times: The secret life of Mama Cass — by the daughter she left behind

When Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas died in 1974, her daughter, Owen Elliot-Kugell, was just seven years old. She tells Hadley Freeman how she finally unravelled the mysteries of her mother’s story.

For the record, Mama Cass was not killed by a ham sandwich. Cass Elliot, better known as Mama Cass, was in the 1960s Los Angeles band the Mamas and the Papas, who made some of the most irresistible songs in a decade that was not short of gorgeously melodic musicians. California Dreamin’; Monday, Monday; Straight Shooter; Dedicated to the One I Love — it is hard to imagine 1960s music, and therefore the 1960s, without the Mamas and the Papas. 

Elliot had a voice that was strong but yearning, clear but earthy. As an overweight Jewish girl she didn’t fit the usual mould of the 1960s waifish blonde girl singer, but her talent underpinned by determination turned her into one of the most central figures of that musical era. Without her there would have been no Lovin’ Spoonful (Do You Believe in Magic; Summer in the City) and there would have been no Crosby, Stills & Nash, because she introduced those musicians to one another. “She was the one who envisaged what we would sound like, because she had that much expertise and experience,” Stephen Stills said. Elliot’s solo work is still loved today, especially her rendition of Dream a Little Dream of Me and her paean to individuality, Make Your Own Kind of Music, which was recently used in the trailer for the film Barbie.

And yet if people know one thing about Elliot today, it’s that she died in 1974, aged 32, from choking on a ham sandwich. It’s one of the most infamous deaths in pop music, up there with Elvis Presley on the lavatory, a grim punchline to an extraordinary career. However, unlike the Elvis story, it isn’t true. 

“She died from a heart attack. That story about the ham sandwich always felt like a cruel joke and it was a real source of pain for our family. So I wanted to know where it started and why,” Elliot’s daughter, Owen Elliot-Kugell, 57, tells me over lunch in Hollywood as we talk about her book, My Mama, Cass, which is part biography, part exploration of her mother’s life. In writing it she learnt the truth about the sandwich and a whole lot more.

We are sitting in the sunny garden of the Sunset Marquis hotel. Originally we were going to meet at a different hotel, the Sunset Tower, but Elliot-Kugell rejected it. I ask if that’s because her mother once lived there. “No, nothing to do with that. I just wanted to check out the gallery here, if it’s open,” she says.

The hotel’s art gallery is open and it’s full of classic rock photos featuring stars such as Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles. One in particular is given extra prominence: it shows Joni Mitchell, David Crosby and Eric Clapton lounging in the grass with a baby in the foreground, looking back at Crosby. That grass was Elliot’s garden, and the baby is Elliot-Kugell. It’s a neat illustration of how much at the epicentre of the 1960s scene Elliot — and her daughter — were. 

“The mayhem was going on downstairs, but my mom did a pretty good job of making sure I was safely ensconced upstairs,” Elliot-Kugell says. Not everyone thought she was safe. Elliot lived in Laurel Canyon, the epicentre of the 1960s LA music scene, and she kept a famously open house where anyone from Jack Nicholson to James Taylor to passing drug dealers would stop by and hang out. One of Elliot-Kugell’s nannies quit because she was worried someone would spike the baby’s bottle with LSD. “There were,” Elliot-Kugell says, with dry understatement, “some pretty weird people around then.”