SINK ALONG
WITH MAMA CASS
By
William Kloman
The
road through Laurel Canyon rises
from a small country store where
dreamy young couples smile at
one another across the apple
bins. It rises, past the house
where Tom Mix's wonder horse
Tony is buried under the
living room floor, and up past
the rubble of Harry Houdini's
mansion, which attracts pre-teen
hippies, who picnic there on
Twinkies and Fresca. Above the
picnic ground, the homes of
record industry company freaks
cling to cliffs by spidery beams
and willpower. Police
helicopters chop overhead, alert
for signs of psychedelic
vegetation drying on the
rooftops. Inside the houses,
small families wait for the
Earthquake. Come the Revolution,
they tell you, Laurel Canyon
will be the new Warsaw Ghetto.
The
road goes up until it joins
Mulholland Drive, where people
used to go to park and neck,
before the Pill, when girls lost
their virginity in borrowed
cars. The Tonight Show audience
always laughs appreciatively
when Johnny mentions the Drive.
It recalls the Arcadian joys of
whisky highs and guileless
contraception.
From
Mulholland Drive, the alert
traveler can glimpse an
overgrown Victorian rose garden
nuzzling against a grand stone
cottage. It is the sort of house
Bo-peep might have designed for
herself if she had ever struck
it rich. An egg-yolk yellow
Aston Martin stands idle under a
carport jutting from the
cottage. The front yard is
littered with a child's toys.
A
horn blows in the cottage
driveway and a tangle of dark
blonde hair flounces from a
gabled window overhead. Hair,
house, and roses belong to Cass
Elliot. So does the James Bond
sports car and the baby who owns
the toys. The toys are those of
Owen Vanessa, Mama Cass Elliot's
little baby girl. Mama Cass is
the chubby girl who used to sing
all those hefty mezzo-soprano
parts with the Mamas and the
Papas. She has broken with the
other Mamas and Papas, and is
off to become a big star of her
own.
Now
between jobs, Mama Cass reigns
as superstar, earth mother, and
legendary queen of all the
hippies in the canyon below. As
we join Mama Cass, she is
visited by her sister Leah
- the cause of the blowing
horn - who
is preggers, and who has a pain.
Leah stands in the garden below,
looking up. "Drink a glass
of milk and go to bed,"
Cass says from her window.
"Warm it first, then get in
bed and drink it." Leah
goes away, content, and Cass
withdraws. The interior of the
cottage belies its pastoral
exterior by closely resembling
an East Village crash pad.
"My
sister is prenatal," Cass
says, padding through a tangle
of clothing and ostrich
feathers. Framed gold records,
mementos of Cass' glory days
with the Mamas and the
Papas - line the floorboards, unhung. "I wish I was
prenatal again. Oh, well."
Cass climbs into bed. Her aspect
is glum. Her hair - soft and
stringy like that of a small
girl - catches the morning
sunlight as Cass fluffs a pillow
and gently clears her throat.
The bed is massive, canopied,
draped in golden velvet. Carved
wooden panels supporting the
canopy are crowded with arcane
fertility symbols: birds of
paradise, thin elephants, exotic
vegetation.
In
bed with Cass is a telephone, an
ashtray, cigarettes, magazines,
books, a box of Kleenex. Perhaps
there is a picture of Little
Lulu on the Kleenex box, and
perhaps not. On a shelf at the
foot of the bed, inside the
velvet curtains, there is
definitely a television set,
more magazines, and an
assortment of pills (big reds,
little yellows) that would cause
Jacqueline Susann to weep for
joy. The scene is one of
convalescence. Cass has
tonsillitis. For a week now, the
Hollywood trade papers have been
following the progress of her
illness with enthusiasm. Daily
Medical bulletins have appeared
in all the gossip columns. Some
say mononucleosis. Some say
hepatitis. Some say
hemorrhaging. Some do not. The
columnists have begun to call
her Miss Cass because she gave
up her last name when she went
to Las Vegas billed as plain
Mama Cass, lost her voice, and
bombed.
The
disaster in Las Vegas was heroic
in proportion, epic in scope,
and becomes even grander in the
retelling. Cass opened and
closed on the very same
night - the first night of what
was to have been a three week
engagement at Caesars Palace.
Billboards throughout the Westlands herald the swank
resort. "There is only one
Palace," the billboards
say. It may look like a giant
concrete nutmeg grater plunked
mid-desert. It may blend
Hellenic, Hellenistic, and Roman
decor with mad abandon.
It
may even - as detractors claim - be
the terminal vulgarity of the
modern age. But
show business-wise, Caesars
Palace is the top of the heap.
Mama Cass Elliot chose the
Palace for her first encounter
with a live audience since her
split from the Mamas and Papas
partly because of its grandeur,
partly because her salary would
be $40,000 a week, and partly
because she knew four Mexican
boys who worked there. Now she
was resting her voice and
considering her comeback. It
would be the first time in
entertainment history that a
performer would make a comeback
after only one night of stardom.
Such things used to take
decades.
Several
distinct varieties of comeback
were available at this point.
There was the Judy Garland,
which was dazzlingly traumatic
but somehow threadbare. There
was the Kate Smith, but that
involved years of waiting, and
who could tell if today's
audience had that kind of
patience. There was the Helen
Morgan comeback, which required
an abandoned nightclub and
hundreds of extras to cheer and
cry. And there was the Shirley
Temple, which meant hiding out
long enough to work up a new
kind of act. None of these would
do. Some people had said that the Las Vegas opening itself was not unlike a comeback.
Cass's
personal manager, Bobby Roberts,
a former tap dancer who also
guided Ann Margaret's career,
had been the first to identify
the odd atmosphere of the
opening night. When it became
clear that the act was falling
apart - clear that Cass should
never have been permitted to go
on stage to begin with - Roberts
had whispered to friends, amid
sniffs of nervous laughter,
"It's just like watching a
comeback. Watching a big star's
comeback, watching Cass UP there
is."
Cass
is out of bed, restless. She is
standing in front of her gabled
window, barefoot and in a
quilted dressing gown. The
rosebushes at the far end of the
yard have withered and gone to
seed. Some months before, the
man who lives across the road
had come down his hill to tell
Cass that the rosebushes were on
his property, not hers. Cass has
not tended the rosebushes since
that day, devoting her attention
instead to a small patch of
artichokes on the opposite side
of the house. Friends who have
eaten Cass's artichokes claim
that they are the best
artichokes in California, with
the possible exception of the
artichokes grown by the Mafia in
the Salinas Valley.
The
previous night Cass had consoled
herself by walking around
barefoot in her new sable coat.
The coat was a gift from Cass to
herself, a token of impending
stardom as a single. Cass could
no longer afford sable, so the
coat would have to go. Cass was
miserable. Friends who dropped
in for the evening teased her,
making reference to things like
Sunset Boulevard which added
considerably to Cass's misery.
She had taken the fur coat off
and walked on it, wiggling her
toes among the pelts. She had
gone upstairs and spread it on
her bed and patted it smooth.
Then she rolled around on it and
began to cry.
"I
don't think I have to have my
hand slapped that much that
they'd take away my coat,"
she is saying, looking out at
the ratty rosebushes. "All
I did was get tonsillitis. The
worst possible thing happened at
the worst possible time."
She begins to form a syllogism - a
natural tendency for Virgos
under stress - then wipes her eyes
with a Kleenex. "The worst
possible," she says.
"What a good premise. It's
so reassuring." Then she
turns and smiles. "I
consider myself now second only
to Paul Krassner in tying
totally unrelated facts together
to form a conspiracy. I'm
convinced that I'm the helpless
victim of a terrible plot. For
weeks somebody has been slipping
something into my Chemex
coffeepot to cause damage to my
pipes at the worst possible
time." She climbs back onto
the bed. "I'm glad that's
all cleared up. For a while
there I thought I had bombed 'on
purpose." Or perhaps it was
the Mafia, trying to turn off
Cass's artichokes. It was hard
to tell.
The
Caesars Palace fling had indeed
been costly to Cass. Estimates
of the cost ran as high as
$90,000. Singers, musicians,
sound men, lighting men, all
wanted to be paid. Cass had
spent $10,000 on the script for
the show alone. It was written
by Mason Williams, a Smothers
Brothers writer who commands
high fees. Cass had read the
script once and discarded most
of it because she decided that
she didn't want somebody else's
words getting between her and
her audience. Cass's intention
had been to flatten the audience
with sincerity and love, to turn
them on to honesty and, in her
own words, "blow their
minds." In spite of the
fact that even old troupers
refuse to play Vegas without
weeks of meticulous rehearsal,
Cass had not managed to stage a
fun run-through of her show by
opening night. "When I hear
my music, it will an come
together," she had said
repeatedly. Cass had prepared for Las Vegas by spending three weeks in bed with nervous flutters, punctuated by attacks of nausea and stomach cramps. While Cass was dealing with her vapors, a show had been put together. Harvey Brooks, a highly talented bass player from the defunct Electric Flag, had assembled a six-man rock band to back Cass. To back the rock band, a twenty-piece house orchestra was added in Las Vegas. A psychedelic lighting expert was flown in from San Francisco. He found the Palace lighting system equipped for Virgin Mary apparitions but short on jazzy effects. A production supervisor was hired to coordinate the various elements, and he brought with him a female rhythm trio called the Sweet Things to add a gloss of soulful pizzazz. Cass' own contribution was the quartet of sequined Mexicans - Los Hermanos Castro - whom she had once seen on television, and with whom she had immediately fallen in love.
The Castro brothers had, in
fact, been me determining factor
in Cass's decision to play Las
Vegas. When Cass had seen them
on the Joey Bishop Show they
were appearing in Nero's Nook, a
small lounge off the Caesars
Palace casino where the
"Bottoms Up" revue
gives the hotel's patrons a
mid-afternoon respite from
gambling, much as tea does for
British sportsmen. Cass had gone
directly to Las Vegas to meet
the Castros in person. They told
her they had long dreamed of
playing the Big Room - the Circus Maximus
- so Cass signed them to
appear in a show in which she
would star, In the Big Room. The
yellow James Bond car would have
to go. Definitely the sable coat
(that was the worst of it).
There was a $5000 wristwatch and
a $1200 pair of earrings being
held at Tiffany's in New York
which would have to be canceled.
Maybe the Bo-peep house would
have to go too. That would come
as a shock to the hangers-on - the
lovable, scruffy hippie-types
who hung out at Cass' pad,
drying their socks in Cass'
bathroom and making cheery vats
of Cream of Wheat in her kitchen
on rainy afternoons. Maybe they
would have to go.
In
the three years Cass had spent
with the Mamas and Papas,. the
single most successful musical
group in In many cities, Cass stepped wearily from limousines, smiling indulgently at hotel doormen. "It is my fate," she sometimes said, "to be constantly dependent upon the generosity of strangers." Perhaps her finest moment came in Carnegie Hall. She had just introduced John Phillips as "the man without whose help I'd still be making beer commercials." When she sat on the apron of the Carnegie Hall stage to sing I Call Your Name, the house went wild. You would have thought Judy Garland had just told them a love secret.
With
Denny Doherty, John and Michelle
Phillips - the other three Mamas
and Papas - Cass Elliot became a
celebrity, which means that fame
suddenly transcended talent and
existed independently of their
ability to perform. They’d
appeared on the covers of
national magazines. They drew
crowds wherever they went.
Cass
was the most visible member of
the group, and her voice the
most distinctive, so she became
the biggest celebrity. Wherever
the group appeared, little fat
girls would seek Cass out, ask
her advice on their careers, and
sit at her feet talking about
life. Cass was loved more than
the others, perhaps because her
people had the greatest needs.
What Streisand did for Jewish
girls in Brooklyn, Cass Elliot
was doing for fat girls
everywhere. The diet food people
must have hated her the way nose
surgeons are said to hate
Streisand. While the Mamas and
Papas were defining a lifestyle
for their fans to emulate, Cass
was redefining the concept of
beauty among the young.
While
Warhol was trying to decide
whether Cass or the boys would
be more effective nude, Cass
withdrew from the venture on the
advice of her agents. They were
-
concerned about what such
exposure would do for her image. In the meantime, Cass posed for photographer Jerry Schatzberg, and the resulting picture was featured as the centerfold of the first edition of Cheetah, a rock magazine that died after eight issues. Cass appeared mother - naked and tattooed, sprawled on a field of daisies. Nobody blamed the Schatzberg photo for Cheetah's collapse, but there was general agreement that editorial taste had not been one of the magazine's strong points. "I don't know why I wanted a sable to begin with," Cass is saying. "I just always have. Ever since I was eight years old there has never been a time I didn't want a sable coat. I never wanted a mink coat or anything. I just always wanted a sable coat. It was probably some popular song at the time, 'Have to buy me diamonds and pearls, champagne and sables and such.' I just always equated it with the pinnacle of. . . . It was so soft and groovy. Now I have to give it back." Cass pads around the room, gloomy and distracted. She hums a snatch of song, and shakes her head. "That is show business, man," she says at last. "You never know what's going to happen. It is the least pre - informative of all businesses. I just don't want to have to make a comeback now. That's so ridiculous. I should have stayed in Baltimore and gone to Goucher and become a teacher or something. You don't just give up your entire life and go into show business. It's too much of a luxury. A luxury, man."
"Why,
then, did you…?" The
question, scarcely begun, hangs
in the still air like a smoke
ring. Cass waves it aside
lightly, climbs back into bed,
and lights a cigarette.
"The story of my
life," she says.
"Random House wants it
too." Mama Cass Elliot - her name was Naomi Cohen in those early days - spent her little girlhood shuttling back and forth between Alexandria, Virginia, and Baltimore, following the flickering star of her father's business schemes. She recalls at least ten instances of bankruptcy during her formative years, but considered her lot infinitely preferable to that of her playmates, most of whose daddies were in the dreary old Army and carried their lunches in brown bags to the Pentagon every morning.
Cass
likes to describe her family's
situation as "groovy
lower - middle - class." When
she was eleven, Cass found a
consoling object of
identification in Carroll
Baker's portrayal - in The
Miracle - of the hot little novice
who leaves her convent to run
away with a passing tribe of
Spanish gypsies. In the film,
the Virgin Mary descends to take
Carroll Baker's place in the
nunnery, scrubbing floors for
her and such, while the young
postulant dances the nights away
with her dark lover. Cass's
first response to the movie was
an overwhelming desire to
convert to Catholicism, perhaps
sensing that the Virgin Mary
didn't go around scrubbing
floors for Jewish girls. When Cass reached high' school, her father hit upon a business idea which worked.
He
bought a retired public transit
bus, equipped it with
ultramodern stainless - steel
kitchen fixtures, and parked it
beside a busy construction site.
The restaurant - on - wheels venture
was so profitable that the
Gohens soon had a fleet of five
converted buses doing business
at five different construction
locations. Cass' task in the venture was to get up at four - thirty every morning and drive around with her father, cooking breakfast for his customers. In the winter, Cass recalls, her father would have to bang on the buses to scare away the rats and mice which had crept inside to sleep before Cass could go in to start the oatmeal cooking.
At
seven - thirty, the workmen sent
off to their jobs, Cass would
change into her school togs and
drive to class, which she found
desperately dull compared to the
gruff repartee of her father's
breakfast trade. Cass still
looks back on her restaurant
days with fondness. "Meals
on Wheels for Schlemiels,"
she says nostalgically.
"What
a life Naomi had." The
Cohens' peripatetic ways cost
Naomi half an academic credit
toward the end of her
high - school career. The family
had moved to Baltimore, and Cass
struggled with night courses in
French to make up the missing
half credit. After class - it was
summertime - she would drive to
the Owings Mills Playhouse,
where a girl friend was a
summer - stock apprentice. The Boy
Friend was at the end of a
successful run, which the
producers wanted to extend. The
girl playing the French maid,
however, had other commitments,
so Cass's friend suggested Cass
for the part. Pointing to Cass
one evening, she had said:
"She can sing!"
"I said absolutely
not," Cass says, beating
her pillow for emphasis. "I
had braces on my teeth and
everything. Anyway that was my
theatrical debut, singing It's
Nicer, Much Nicer In Nice, and I
was very good. I still remember
that song." She lifts her
hands and makes floating
motions. "They say it's
lovely when - a / Young lady's in
Vienna / But it's nicer, much
nicer. . . .' Oh, it was so
sophisticated," she says. After being the French maid in The Boy Friend, school was out of the question, so Cass stopped going. Instead, she took a part - time job on the society desk of the Baltimore Jewish Times. Cass's job was to layout the magazine section of the paper and to write obituaries. If she weren't actually cheek - to - cheek with the sophisticates of Baltimore Jewish society, she was close. A long shot closer than when she was slinging hash for bricklayers from the back of a bus.
A
weekend visit to New York City
was enough to convince Cass that
she had to try for the Big Time,
or regret it forever after. Back
in Baltimore, the Cohens flatly
refused to indulge their
daughter's theatrical impulses,
and insisted that she continue
her education at Goucher College
as soon as she made up the
missing half credit.
"They
always had great aspirations for
me intellectually," Cass
says. Crestfallen, Cass quit her
job with the Jewish Times, moped
around the house for a while,
then went to work for the
Baltimore Sun, partly to
convince her parents that she
wasn't a vegetable. Cass's new
position called for her to spend
her day taking classified ads
over the telephone. The whole
idea was a bit much, but Cass
managed to avoid taking too many
ads by chatting all day with her
friends, whom she called on the
"out" line. When she
was fired for clogging the
switchboard with personal calls,
her parents agreed that maybe
New York was the place for their
daughter, after all.
Cass
packed the family car with
clothing and small appliances,
and headed for the city. Once
there, she parked the car in
front of an aunt's house and
went in to make a telephone
call. She returned a few minutes
later to find that all her
belongings had been stolen. "You see, I was just a bumpkin. Just a country bumpkin," Cass explains. "I had just come in to New York from Virginia. Or was it Baltimore?" Cass then began acting classes at a small theatre workshop. Downstairs, a doorbell rings. Voices are heard. A door opens. More voices. The door shuts. "Irma," Cass calls hoarsely. "J Que 'Pasa?" She listens but there is no answer. "I think it's my divorce papers. They were due today. They're going to freeze my tonsils out, so I won't have any actual tonsils to show people, but if they were going to cut them out, I wanted to have them made into earrings - bronzed or something. I think it would be a nice gesture on my part. I could go out on stage and say, 'Here they are, folks.' I want everything to be out front. I'm very worried about my reputation in this business - of always being on time and doing my job, and the whole thing.
Now
it's all balown,
man, I don't care what anybody
tells me about how many people
are on my side. I don't want to
know how many people are on my
side. I want people to
understand and believe what went
down in
"I
was led to believe by my agent
that there were only three of us
up for the part: Streisand,
myself, and Zohra Lampert. She's
the girl
"So
I went to American University in
Washington, and I enrolled. I
was twenty - one. I'd been out in
the world and doing my thing,
and here I was a freshman - a
provisional one because I didn't
have my high - school diploma - with
all these seventeenyear - olds,
all dewy - eyed about the theatre.
Dewy - eyed I wasn't. I tried
staying away from the university
theatre, and after six weeks I
was hanging around the theatre.
I had been in Broadway houses,
and I was back on the college
level, and it came easy. There
was this one young professor who
really turned me on. Man, I dug
him, and I was one of the
worldly compared to the other
girls in his class. I'd love to
see him. I know we'd still like
each other.
"Anyway,
I got interested in the theatre
and started hanging around with
some guys. Then we had the Cuban
missile crisis. Remember the
Cuban missile crisis? Well, I
remember it mostly because
American University is a very
political school, and everybody
was sitting around instead of
going to classes. American
University is kind of like
Berkeley. It gets pretty radical
there at times.
Not
many people know that. So we
were all sitting around
wondering what was going to
happen - whether we were going to
get bombed or what was going to
go down. That day when nobody
knew what was going to happen?
And I met some people, and
through them I met this guy, who
said, 'Hey, you can really sing
good. Why don't you come to
Chicago and we can sing?' So I
said okay, and I took some money
and bought a Volkswagen and we
went to
In
Omaha, Nebraska, the composition
of Cass's traveling group
changed. One young singer - Jim
Hendricks - was added, and another
was dropped. Cass later married
Hendricks, at a time when he
would have been drafted had he
remained single. The divorce is
pending.
Hendricks
and his girl friend, Vanessa,
were at Cass's opening in Las
Vegas. Friends say that Cass is
so fond of her husband and his
girl friend that she named her
own daughter Owen Vanessa in her
honor. Cass says Hendricks is
not Owen's daddy. Some people
believe that Cass produced the
child by sheer willpower. Others
hold that the fertilizing agent
remains a mystery to Cass
herself. Reporters for classy
magazines don't ask their
subjects questions about such
matters.
In
those early days of pop culture
(before rock, and near the end
of folk unless you want to count
Dylan's latest stuff), small
bands of singers with
non - electric guitars
crisscrossed the country,
singing for college audiences in
off - campus coffee houses where
the biggest high you could get
was from chewing on the cinnamon
stick that you got with your
Cappuccino. In one of these
houses, Cass met Denny Doherty,
who was on the road singing with Zalman Yanovsky. Cass fell
immediately in love with Doherty
and his glorious golden tenor
voice. Denny can be assumed to have responded with his gruff, thrifty, Canadian Northwoodsman, tender silence.
Cass
and Denny kept in touch by
telephone while their respective
groups were on tour. In
mid - 1965, both groups broke up,
so Cass and Denny formed a group
with Yanovsky and Hendricks,
which was billed as Cass Elliot
and the Big Three. A Clrummer
was added to the group, and its
name was changed to the Mugwumps.
The Mugwumps cut a record for
Warner Brothers, and lasted
until the end of the year, at
which point Yanovsky and John
Sebastian (who had been signed
on as a sideman to play
harmonica) split to form the
Lovin' Spoonful.
Doherty
went off to join John Phillips
on the island of St. John in the
Caribbean, where John and
Michelle had gone after their
landlord on East Tenth Street
auctioned off all their worldly
goods to make up for overdue
rent. On St. John, Denny, John
and Michelle (with a few other
Village dropouts) lived in
tents, slept on the beach,
experimented with LSD, and sang
together a lot.
Cass
returned to Washington, D.C.,
where she worked for a while as
a single in a small Georgetown
club. Then she joined her
friends (the folk people all
knew one another from the
Village) in the Virgin Islands.
Cass waited tables in the
Islands but didn't have a high
enough vocal range to work into
the music Phillips was writing
with the aid of acid. One day,
while Cass was poking about on a
construction site on St. Thomas,
a workman dropped a thin chunk
of pipe on Cass's head. When the
headache went away she
discovered that her upper
register had been increased by
three notes. Thus, not unlike
the Pallas Athena, who leaped
full - blown from the head of
godly Zeus, the Mamas and Papas
were born, emigrated to
California, became the nation's
top new singing group, and grew
rich and famous beyond the
dreams of avarice.
From
the highway, Caesars Palace does
indeed resemble a giant concrete
nutmeg grater. Vast pools and
fountains gurgle and play near
its entrance, drenching guests
on windy days. Approach to the
Palace is made by way of a
mammoth landscaped parking lot,
the greenness of whose jutting
lawn seems an obscene gesture of
defiance thrust into the
desert's crusty face. The sun
shines fiercely on the outside. Within, the air is kept fresh by giant machines hidden in the ceilings. There are no clocks; there is no day or night. The noise of gambling in the great casino - it is, in fact, the hotel's lobby - seems like the din of a passing train. Here gaming is pursued more as religion than as sport. Women past their prime gravitate to the machines, insert their coins from paper cups, and pray the gods of fortune will compensate the losses of a lifetime in cold, hard cash. The men are more covert in their play. They throw their dice and turn their cards with practiced nonchalance, the way Clark Gable would. They page one another on lobby phones, and sign their bar bills with sweeping strokes. When they urinate, they do so in marble toilets marked Caesars. Their ladies repair their eyes in powder rooms labeled Cleopatras. The place has style. Cass and her troupe arrived on a Saturday, to allow time to "shake the bugs out of the show" before the Monday opening. The Saturday - afternoon rehearsal had not been much, but Mama Cass - no one in Las Vegas ever called her anything else - had made a good impression in the Noshorium, the hotel coffee shop, joshing with the help and signing autographs. Waitresses, particularly, wanted her signature, usually for their daughters. "My little girl just loves you, Mama Cass," they would say in their tight Lady Bird twangs. "She even has your record. Plays it all the time. I think it's near wore out," "Buy her a new one," Cass would say. Sunday evening, Cass appeared briefly at a makeshift rehearsal hall to skim through a medley she planned to sing with the Castro. brothers, then disappeared down a long corridor with two Castros on either arm. The Harvey Brooks ensemble played late into the night, until their sound was tight and hard. The musicians were happy with their sound, but their misgivings about the star of the show gave an early warning of trouble.
"One
thing I don't want to do,
man," one of them said on
Sunday, "is to carry Mama
Cass. It's her show, if you know
what I mean." A full rehearsal was called for Monday afternoon, in the Circus Maximus. As the house staff prepared the Big Room for the dinner show, the twentypiece house orchestra arrived, as did a battered honky - tonk piano which had been shipped at great expense from Los Angeles to add sixteen bars of old -
time
funk to the middle of one song.
Cass appeared in cable - stitch
white wool knee socks (no
shoes), Polaroid shades, and her
custom - made sable coat. She
worked out a few numbers,
squeezed a Castro or two,
discarded what little was left
of her $10,000 script, and
noticed that her voice was going
scratchy. "Honesty is all you need," she said. "This show will blow their minds." Celebrities arrived for the opening throughout the afternoon. Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr. were rumored to be on the premises. "Peter said he was coming for the opening," Cass observed, "and I guess he brought Sammy with him." While Cass was putting it together in the Big Room, John and Michelle Phillips were working their way through the lobby, dropping money into various games of chance on their way to their suite. The day before, they had decided to fly to Vegas from Los Angeles to watch Cass strike out on her own. Denny Doherty had planned to come, but cancelled his reservation at the last minute.
Having
negotiated the lobby, John and
Michelle came upon a large bank
of floral tributes waiting to be
delivered to Mama Cass's
dressing room. There was a basket from Joan Baez, who was in Nashville making an album, a bunch from Mia Farrow, who was in New Orleans, and a used sledgehammer sent by Tommy Smothers.
Michelle
found a spray of American Beauty
roses which bore no name. A card
attached to the roses read
simply, "Sock it to 'em."
Michelle rummaged in her purse,
found a pen, and added
"Love, John and
Michelle" to the greeting. As Cass left the rehearsal stage, her secretary, Carol Samuels, handed her a cup of hot tea with lemon. "John and Michelle just checked in," Carol said. Cass took the tea. "Screw 'em," she replied. The show that evening went badly from the start. As the orchestra was playing her overture, Cass mistook the music for a cue and started singing California Earthquake over a backstage microphone. The mike was quickly shut off, and the overture continued.
"Naomi!"
a ragged voice screamed over the
music. Heads turned to the
center aisle, where Steve
Brandt, a gossip columnist for
Photoplay, was making an
entrance two beats ahead of the
evening's star. Brandt, a sort
of bush - league Savonarola, makes
his living skewering celebrities
with their own peccadilloes. He
got his start in the gossip
dodge by sneaking onto the set
of the original American
Bandstand in Philadelphia and
taking candid shots of the
Regulars for teen magazines. He
had been observing John and
Michelle Phillips ever since
they moved into Jeanette
MacDonald's Bel Air mansion
three years ago. It was partly
on their account, and partly to
help Cass remember her roots,
that he was in Las Vegas. Peter
Sellers calls Steve Brandt
"the Prince of
Darkness," but Peter
Sellers always exaggerates. Cass opened with the old Mamas and Papas favorite, Dancing in the Streets, which some of the audience seemed to recognize. There was a smattering of applause down front as the oleo curtain swept up to reveal Harvey Brooks' six - piece rock combo.
When
the song was done, Cass made
passing reference to the Mamas
and Papas, indicating that while
running around with a kinky
rock - and - roll act was fine for
kids, she was now in the Big
Time, and was pleased that you
all could come tonight. She did
an album plug, then attempted to
turn on the fish - cold audience
by singing Rubber Band, in which
she lyrically invited the
roomful of wall - eyed whiskeyswillers to "roll
enough to pave the way/To a
brighter day." By the time
Cass got to California
Earthquake, a broken line of
patrons could be noticed moving
up the center aisle toward the
door. Mama Cass wasn't a hippie;
she wasn't sexy; and, having
nearly killed herself losing one
hundred pounds for her solo
debut, she wasn't even very fat.
At least fat would have been
something, so what was there to
see? Cass had never become a
legend with this crowd. They
weren't prepared to sympathize
with her raspy, tortured
delivery because they carried no
memories of her earnest
mezzo - soprano tones the way they
sounded when she didn't have
tonsillitis.
In
fact, they were having none of
it. No smart - assed songs about
pot. No crap about earthquakes.
No longhaired bastards with
electrified guitars. None of it.
Las Vegas, they knew, was the
town where Streisand played
second banana to Liberace.
The
town that regularly scares the
pants off Sinatra so bad he
works his butt off rehearsing
his act. The biggest names in
the business crawl into Vegas on
their bellies, and this lady
can't even sing!
The
advance guard of the exodus was
back at the slot machines by the
time the back lighting revealed
the twenty - piece house orchestra
in tasteful black - tie outfits.
They had been back there behind
the scrim all along. The
appearance of the orchestra held
up the traffic flow in the
center aisle momentarily, but a
double - edged joke from Cass
about the Soviet secret police
set whole families to jiggling
their silverware as they hurried
out of their booths and to the
exit.
Down
front, at long tables
perpendicular to the stage, were
two hundred friends, press
people, and hangers - on whose
tabs were being picked up by the
lady in the psychedelic chiffon
who was at that moment
struggling on stage to make her
vocal chords respond to music.
The group included a contingent
of about twenty from the deeper
recesses of the Hollywood Hills
who were said to be personal
emissaries of Papa Denny
Doherty, whose whereabouts were
unknown. It was said that Denny
rarely left his mountaintop,
except to bailout friends, and
had decided to make no exception
for Cass's opening. Denny's friends weren't happy when Cass brought out the Castro brothers - all sequins and brilliantine - to sing licorice - sweet counterpoint to Words of Love, which had been translated into Spanish for the occasion. "They've always wanted to work the Big Room," Cass announced proudly, as the quartet broke into an energetic, toothy grin that shot hot Latin love and laughter to the far corners of the auditorium. Quick, poignant glances were exchanged, then shaded, at the front tables. The show was coming apart at the seams and Cass knew it. She battled on, trying to coax mellow sounds from her aching larynx, but they wouldn't be coaxed. High notes were out of the question, and low ones turned into a scratchy hiss. The Los Angeles Times would excuse her illness, but not her lack of preparation.
Reviewer
Pete Johnson counted every
fluffed line and forgotten
lyric. He called the performance
"painful," and
reminded his readers that once,
under different circumstances,
Mama Cass Elliot had been
"glittering, stunning, and
magnificent." In the middle
of Sweet Believer, Cass's
normally lithe voice was reduced
to a crusty whisper as she sang:
On
your knees but unconquered
Taxed
beyond your strength
Now
you know the Prince of Darkness
Will go to any length
To
keep you from flying, Flying too
high." At the end, the applause was perfunctory, not even polite. On her curtain call, Cass came too far out onto the stage, and the applause stopped dead before she could get off again. The room was now silent, except for the shuffle of patrons who had stayed for the finale.
John
and Michelle Phillips sat in a
crescent - shaped booth, watching
the room empty. During the show,
Michelle had mouthed lyrics as
Cass sang, and winced when she
fluffed her lines. "When we
were all together," she
said, "one of us could
always jab Cass in the ribs so
she'd make her high notes."
Mama and Papa looked at each
other blankly. "Should we
go backstage?" Michelle
asked, then answered her own
question. "Yes," she
said. "We have to."
John shrugged and followed his
wife across the Forum toward the
stage. Bobby Roberts and Hal
Landers - Cass's managers, who had
worked for the Mamas and Papas
in the old days last year - were
huddled in the side aisle.
Roberts managed a smile as
Michelle and John approached. "John," Bobby said. "Did you…like the show?" John stared at Bobby, then broke into a grin. "Gee, Bobby," he said. Michelle kept walking. "I know. I know," Bobby said. "Do you think she can last a week?" Hal Landers regarded John closely. "I'd pull her out tonight," John said.
"What's
Vegas?" Landers demanded.
"Who gives a damn what
happens in Las Vegas? It's not
like this was some big - time
room." John smiled and
patted Landers on the arm.
"That's right, Hal,"
he said. Bobby winced. "Hal had an idea," he said. "It'd never work, of course. But he thought maybe if you and Michelle and Denny went on with her. I mean the Mamas and Papas. . .." . "It'd never work," John said. "Wouldn't last out the week," Bobby said, nodding at Landers.
"That's
right, Bobby," John said,
and walked fast to catch up with
Michelle, who had disappeared
behind the great stage curtain. Backstage, an argument was in progress in the doorway of the star's dressing room. A dark, curly - haired young man in a white double breasted suit was hustling a freelance photographer out of the room. "Man, that's show biz," the photographer protested.
"I
don't know anything about show
business," the young man
said. "I'm just a
stockbroker from Toronto who
happens to be in love with her.
She's tired and she needs rest
and you're bothering her."
Through the dressing - room door
Cass could be seen slumped on a
couch, looking tired and
bothered and in need of rest.
She was bracketed by two men who
were shouting at each other
above her head. A second
photographer snapped away at the
scene. A vase of long - stemmed
red roses - the only flowers on
display sat on a table near the
couch. A card attached to the
roses said, "Sock it to 'em.
Love, John and Michelle."
The men parted as Michelle
Phillips swept through the
doorway and past the
stockbroker, followed by John.
Cass opened her arms, and
Michelle entered the embrace.
Michelle looked solicitously
into Cass's eyes, then sat on
the sofa beside her. Cass fell
sideways into Michelle's lap,
and Michelle patted Cass's head.
Order broke down at the door,
and both photographers snapped
vigorously at the pop Pieta
scene which was being played out
before them. Ten or twelve people now had crowded into the dressing room, and they stood looking like stationary sleepwalkers. Lynn Roberts, Bobby's attractive blonde wife, moved gently among them, distributing drinks from a bar provided by the Palace man age men t. Lynn introduced strangers to one another, and talked lightly about anything but the show. She seemed to be the only person in the room who was surviving opening night with sanity and poise unimpaired. "I know a doctor here who will give her a B - 12 to get her through the second show," someone offered.
"What's
she want with a speed quack
shooting her up?" a girl
with sleepy eyes replied.
"Get one of those head
doctors Denny sent down. He'll
fix her UD in a minute." "Cass," a thin young man in a Nehru shirt said, "get yourself some boiling water and half a lemon, and. . . ." John Phillips and the Toronto stockbroker were sputtering at each other. John's cool had obviously unstrung Toronto, so the stockbroker offered to smash the composer in the face. Phillips had offered to do worse than that, and the stockbroker had told him to pick on someone his own size. John went outside to wait for Michelle, passing Steve Brandt of Photoplay on the way. "Is this where they're reading the will?" Brandt asked, then hurled himself through the door. "Where is she?" he shouted. "Where's my girl?" The door closed behind Brandt, and several reporters who were clustered nearby looked at one another quizzically. The door swung open, and Steve Brandt swept out in a rage.
"The
bitch!" he said. "I
just got through announcing in
Photoplay that she was flying to
Geneva to marry Pic Dawson when
she finished here. Now she's
introducing this number in the
confirmation suit as her fiancé." The reporters watched Brandt storm by. A lady from Look moved to where Denny's friends were huddled and asked softly, "Who was. . . that?" One of the group shook his head. "Dunno," he said. "I think he's an actor or something." John Phillips had stationed himself about fifteen yards from the dressing - room door. In the space between, a small knot of agents, managers, and secretaries - Cass's business people - stood trying to make conversation. One by one, they noticed Phillips and shot him painful little smiles and nods. John smiled back, and lit a cigarette.
The
group, which included Roberts
and Landers as well as Mason
Williams, Cass's script writer,
began to sway perceptibly, as if
they were testing the direction
of the wind. Her advisers didn't
know which way to fall. If they
moved too soon, they might lose
their heads in the morning.
Rather than do anything rash,
like speak to Phillips or ignore
him, they stood and swayed and
nodded and grinned.
Inside
a single room, Dave Victorson,
who is responsible for booking
acts into Caesars Palace, was
making a last - ditch effort to
spruce up his star for the
second show. Like everybody else
in Las Vegas, Victorson is an
instinctive gambler. A couple of
months before he had gambled on
Tiny Tim and won. The audience
had laughed themselves silly.
Win some; lose some. Victors on
had rushed into the room like a
used - car salesman whose
merchandise was falling apart on
the floor. "They loved you!" he reported, undeterred by expressions of horror from the onlookers. Victorson had been standing at the main door of the Big Room during the show, and had counted a hundred fifty walkouts before he stopped counting. On the way backstage he had had to contend with a crew of angry waiters who claimed that people had not only walked out in unprecedented volume and haste, but that many of them had refused to pay their tabs as well. "Loved you!" he repeated for emphasis. "Look, Newsweek, the L.A. papers - they were all out there tonight. You should have heard them after the show. One of them said you were the greatest entertainer of the decade. Another one said something else." Cass looked up from the couch and clucked softly. "Is that what they said?" she asked. "I wonder what they would have said if I had been good?" "Good?" Victors on replied. "I'm sorry, Dave," Cass said. "I really have a pretty voice when I'm not sick." A phone rang, and Carol Samuels picked it up. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and whispered, "It's the Scientology people. They want to come and do a reading or something on Cass between shows.” "Don't let them do it," someone said. "They'll freak her out completely." "Mama Cass is resting now," Carol said, into the phone. "Thank you very much, but maybe some other time. She's awfully tired now." Carol listened for a minute, making faces, then she said firmly, "I am sure it would be of great benefit, but some other time not now she needs rest thank you so much goodbye," and hung up. "How'd they get this number?" someone asked. "Dunno," Carol said. "Didn't say." The room had filled with smoke, and Cass began to cough. Someone suggested that fresh air might be the answer, so Carol Samuels and Toronto helped Cass to her feet and trotted her down a backstage corridor to look for an outside exit door. As the three turned a corner, six men approached from the opposite end of a long hallway. One of them carried a small dark box. Another had books tucked in the crook of his arm. "Oh my God!" Carol said. "The Scientology nuts.
They've
got their tin cans and
everything. You take Cass and
I'll head them off,"
Toronto
jerked Cass through a handy
doorway as Carol tried to
outmaneuver the six
Scientologists. She finally
succeeded in leading them into a
side room, where she explained
the delicate nature of her
employer's condition, and
pleaded with them to go away. By
the time the argument was over,
Cass was nowhere to be found.
Carol returned to the dressing
room, overwrought. "You
should have seen their
eyes," she said. "It
was just like in Village of the
Damned except these were grown
men." The second show of
the evening was much like the
first, except that Cass had even
less voice. Her backstage
encounter with Michelle Phillips
seemed to have softened her
attitude toward the Mamas and
Papas, and she told the audience
that she looked forward to
making records with her old
friends. The Vegas venture she
passed off as an "ego
trip." Cass told her
audience that, in years to come,
she would be happy if people
would just stop whatever they
were doing now and then to ask
one another what had become of
Mama Cass that girl with the
pretty voice. The audience response this time was, if anything, more decisive. Walkouts began earlier, and made more noise as they went. A convention of two hundred fifty miners who had reserved an entire tier of the Circus Maximus left in a
group right in the middle of
Walk On By. As the miners passed
the baccarat tables in the
casino, one of them told his
wife about the time his great - grandaddy had
seen and heard Miss Jenny Lind,
the Swedish Nightingale, on her
triumphal tour of the American
West. "There was a
singer," he said.
"Never been one like her
since." After Cass was packed off to bed at the conclusion of the second show, a conference began in Bobby Roberts' room which lasted into the early hours of the morning. It was finally decided to bring in a doctor from Los Angeles to certify the fact that Cass was sick. She would be released from her contract by mutual consent - hers and the hotel's - with the understanding that a future engagement could be talked about later.
Word
of these decisions was held up
until the hotel could find a
suitable replacement for Cass.
After a few phone calls, a small
plane was dispatched to Members of Cass's company were informed of the abrupt closing of their show by the removal of Cass's name from the giant marquee at the entrance to the Caesars Palace parking lot. Before sunrise Tuesday, however, the story of the ill - starred opening spread all over Las Vegas. Stars. in other shows along the strip gossiped in their dressing rooms about Cass's problems. "What should happen," one of the town's top performers said, "is that Bobby Roberts should go on in her place, do his tap dance routine, and then explain to the audience what Cass was doing here in the first place." Tuesday afternoon, while Cass was receiving friends in room 301 of Caesars Palace, the Las Vegas radio stations were reporting that Cass had been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. Waitresses at the Noshorium told their customers that Mama Cass had awakened in the middle of the night to find her pillowcase all streaming with blood. From Las Vegas, an unidentified source wired several Hollywood gossip columnists that Cass had been unable to perform because she was strung out on hard drugs. The washroom attendant behind the door marked Caesars on the casino floor heard none of these alarming stories.
"What
I heard from the gentlemen who
came in here last night,"
he said, "was that it was
just a plain bad show." But Cass is comfy now, home in bed. Las Vegas blurs in and out of focus like an unwanted dream. She talks about other things. How she wants to move to the Canadian Northland and build a house for herself and throw up an electric fence around it. How she wants to move back to New York and take rooms at the Dakota. How she wants Oscar De La Renta to build a wardrobe for her, which would include a little plastic anonymity suit Cass could put on when she wanted to travel incognito among the people. How she wants to get into movies and help make Hollywood once again the film capital of the world.
Cass
searches for an image that will
help pull the saga back into
focus. "There was a line I
used on stage about how since
I'd left the group and become a
single there'd be just me and
Julie Andrews fighting it out
for those parts. Mason said it
was the only line in the whole
show anybody laughed at -
- he
wrote that line - and I said yeah,
it was a funny premise, but it
wasn't me and Julie Andrews,
only I couldn't figure out who
it was, but now I know who it
is. It's me and Vanessa Redgrave.
That's because I really identify
with Isadora Duncan, not with
Gertrude Lawrence or Sarah
Bernhardt. Definitely Isadora. I
know that woman. Isadora Rules.
That's California humor. I don't
understand it. It's just not
sophisticated enough for me. I'm
sorry. Definitely Isadora."
Isadora's gay scarf flaps
breathtakingly near the flashing
silver spokes of an egg - yolk
yellow Aston Martin streaking
through Laurel Canyon. Music is
issuing from the spokes, which
blur into guitar strings clogged
with fur. There is blood. Flashing steel thrashes the fur, which flies in many directions as Baby Cass is lowered to the stage riding a cardboard moon - crescent.
Cass
falls to the stage, grasping her
throat as small tattered sables
scamper underfoot. The sables
are naked, and have been crying. "I've done some spectacular things in my life," Cass is saying. "Things that have nothing to do with the Mamas and Papas. I mean I'm equipped for all kinds of careers, folks, but we're not talking about that. We're talking about my professional career on the stage. We haven't even mentioned my daughter. Why is that? What about my career as a mother? I think that career is a word that I don't like. Is career what you decide to do with your life, or is career something that you must have. I mean there are some people who can't live their lives without a career, and there are a lot of people who live very well without careers. I don't have any ambition, folks. I've never had any ambition. I've just thought if I was in the right place at the right time and I was working. . . and whatever goes down goes down, right? I could have been a pharmacist. I'd make a good one. I'm jolly." |