The New York Times: Cass Elliot’s Death Spawned a Horrible Myth. She Deserves Better.
The Mamas & the Papas singer was known for her wit, her voice and her skill as a connector. For 50 years, a rumor has overshadowed her legacy.
Onstage with her group the Mamas & the Papas at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967, Cass Elliot, the grand doyenne of the Laurel Canyon scene, bantered with the timing of a vaudeville comedian. “Somebody asked me today when I was going to have the baby, that’s funny,” she said, rolling her eyes. The unspoken punchline — if you could call it that — was that she had already given birth to a daughter six weeks earlier.
“One of the things that appeals to so many people about my mom is that there’s a certain level of triumph over adversity,” that daughter, Owen Elliot-Kugell, said over lunch at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in Los Angeles on a recent afternoon. “She had to prove herself over and over again.”
Elliot was a charismatic performer who exuded infectious joy and a magnificent vocalist with acting chops she did not live to fully explore. July 29 is the 50th anniversary of her untimely death at 32, a tragedy that still spurs unanswerable questions. Might Elliot, who was one of Johnny Carson’s most beloved substitutes, have become the first female late-night talk show host? Would she have achieved EGOT status?
Half a century after her death, her underdog appeal continues to inspire. Last year, “Make Your Own Kind of Music” — a relatively minor 1969 solo hit that has nonetheless had cultural staying power — became such a sensation on TikTok that “Saturday Night Live” spoofed it, in a hilariously over-the-top sketch in which the host Emma Stone plays a strangely clairvoyant record producer. “This song is gonna be everywhere, Mama,” she tells Elliot, played by Chloe Troast. “Then everybody’s gonna forget about it for a long, long time, but in about 40, 50 years, I think it’s gonna start showing up in a bunch of movies, because it’s a perfect song to go under a slow-mo montage where the main character snaps and goes on a rampage.”
“S.N.L.” didn’t make a single joke about Elliot’s weight — something that was unthinkable half a century ago. During the height of her fame, Elliot seemed to co-sign some of the jabs at her expense with a shrugging grin.
“No one’s getting fat except Mama Cass,” the Mamas & the Papas sang in tight harmony on the self-mythologizing 1967 hit “Creeque Alley.” After the infamously tumultuous group broke up a year later, Elliot was a frequent guest on “The Carol Burnett Show,” where she occasionally went for the cheap laugh. In an otherwise uproarious sketch about two prudish women browsing a store’s “dirty books” section, Elliot holds up a book titled “Eat and Lose Weight” and says, “I got as far as ‘Eat’ and then I didn’t understand the rest.”
