CASS ELLIOT
She was Gertrude Stein to the Age Of Aquarius, so how did Charles Manson, heroin and heartbreak still the sunny soul of The Mamas & The Papas?
april 27, 1966: The mamas & The papas are working in Western recorders studios on sunset Boulevard, los angeles. Fresh from a reception for The hollies, Graham Nash has crashed the session. Quietly, he fancies his chances with Michelle phillips, but the archetypal Californian blonde is overdubbing vocals with her songwriting husband John phillips and Denny Doherty, the group’s mellifluous tenor. instead, Nash ventures outside and strikes up a conversation with the woman the world was just getting to know as Mama Cass.
“she had a huge crush on John lennon,” Nash recalls, so she asked the englishman what the Beatle might think of her music. “he’d probably put you down,” Nash replied candidly. Cass was crestfallen. “Within 15 minutes of meeting, she was in tears,” Nash says. “That upset me greatly.”
Next morning, the hollies man met with a different Cass elliot. “she knew she could really sing,” says Nash, “that The Mamas &
The papas were already very popular. she knew all that.” in her convertible porsche, elliot pulled up at Byrds guitarist David Crosby’s place where Nash duly had his mind blown with the first joint he’d had in his life. For elliot, Nash and the new rebel folk rock crowd, California dreaming was becoming a reality.
years before fleetwood mac and abba, The Mamas & The papas sang away hardship, heartache and all that interminable bed-hopping with a string of hopeful, harmonydriven, exquisitely arranged hits. Yet there was always something quirky about these midwives to the late-’60s love-in. “i think there were things about the group physically that startled people,” Cass elliot reflected when it was all over. “as scruffy as could be,” said lou adler, their manager and label boss.
Naturally, elliot won most plaudits. Geoffrey Cannon in The listener swooned over her “magnificent soaring power [that] makes aretha Franklin sound like a schoolgirl”. after she sat for
two Andy Warhol ‘Screen Tests’, the pop artist declared her “The New Beauty”. And at the height of flower power, Cass posed naked and proud on a bed of daisies for Cheetah magazine, a centrefold with her favourite butterfly motif tattooed on her ass. “Success was a real boost to her self-esteem,” says John Sebastian, Lovin’ Spoonful frontman and close friend of pop’s grandest voluptuary. “She got letters that would make you cry, little fat Jewish girls saying, ‘You changed everything for me.’ And Cass was the kind of person who’d write back.”
Everyone looked towards Cass Elliot. At the height of The Mamas & The Papas’ fame, in October 1966, the quartet rolled into her native Baltimore for a couple of shows. Elliot stayed with the Eventoffs, whose singing teacher mother Ethel had “warmed up Cass’s pipes” a decade earlier. “In the morning,” says son Nisan, “Cass threw me the keys to her Aston Martin and said, ‘Take me to a deli.’ We walked in and the whole place stopped. Cass wore a big hat and sunglasses, but you couldn’t disguise her.”
Anonymity didn’t come easy to Elliot, the young drama student with the big voice. “I was house act in a folk club called The Crooked Ear in Omaha,” says Jim Hendricks, “and she would sit in the front row and flirt with me. You know, make little faces. She was kinda cute.” It worked. Soon afterwards, Hendricks was heading to the East Coast to join Elliot and Tim Rose in The Big 3. It was spring ’63 and they were chasing the Peter, Paul & Mary market.
“Cass was more a commercial folk singer,” says Sebastian, “but with this powerful body projecting this voice.” The memory of one song, A Woman’s Lament, still gives him chills. “‘My body is ruined/They’ve left me to die.’ Holy shit, that was rough to sing.”
N A CHRISTMAS ’63 BREAK FROM
The Big 3’s Village residency at The Bitter
End, Elliot and Hendricks – who she’d recently married so he could avoid the draft – holidayed to Toronto. There, she rekindled a friendship with folkie Denny Doherty, heard The Beatles and decided she needed both in her life. “Tim was getting to be a thorn in our side,” says Hendricks, “so Cass pushed for Denny to sing with us.”
Elliot, Doherty and Hendricks, plus Doherty’s guitar-playing Toronto pal, Zal Yanovsky, duly became
The Mugwumps, relocating to Washington DC, where Cass had studied Speech Arts at American University. Arriving with his harp and a bag of weed, John Sebastian briefly quit the Village to join them. “Man, for two weeks I was farting through silk,” he says, recalling his stay in the relative luxury of Arlington Park Towers. “That’s where Cass painted all over the walls while whacked on LSD.
“Me, Cass and Zal were this triumvirate,” Sebastian continues. “She invited me over to watch The Beatles on Ed Sullivan and said, ‘Ringo’s gonna be there.’” It turned out to be “this tall, Sephardic gentleman who, if you scaled him down, did resemble Ringo in a way.” Cass had a hunch Sebastian and Yanovsky were kindred spirits. She was right: the following summer, The Lovin’ Spoonful broke big with Do You Believe In Magic.
Back in Mugwump world – one with its own Cass-created lingo that Sebastian still rattles off today – passions stirred. “Denny was a love interest,” Sebastian says, “and that made things more complicated.”
By early 1965, and with The Mugwumps fading, Doherty also moved on. He joined The New Journeymen, fronted by songwriter John Phillips and his wife Michelle. Tired of the East Coast folk scene, the threesome took off for St Thomas in the Virgin Islands armed with John’s American Express card, a bunch of his latest songs and some liquid acid. Elliot, now singing jazz standards in a DC bar, heard about the trip from Doherty and packed her bags immediately.
“Cass took a job as a waitress out there just to be in the same room as them,” says Hendricks. The trio sang to audiences including groups of US Marines stationed on the island. Elliot dispensed the food, just as she’d done from her father’s mobile café truck back in Baltimore a decade earlier. John Phillips, quoted in Eddi Fiegel’s Cass Elliot biography, said she suffered “more humiliation in a week than a human deserved in a lifetime”.
To compound Cass’s mortification, Phillips had no desire to bring her into the act, claiming spuriously that her vocal range was short of a couple of notes. As if by happenstance, a metal plumbing pipe dropped by a workman knocked Cass on the head and those two notes miraculously appeared – or so the story goes. “Just the kind of thing Cass would come up with!” Hendricks says.
EANWHILE, HENDRICKS HAD PITCHED up in LA, in an apartment close to the Whisky A Go-Go. By September ’65, first Elliot then Doherty and the Phillipses had joined him. “The Mamas & The Papas kinda formed in my apartment,” he says. “They had no money. It was like a throwback to the folk days.”
What they did have was chemistry: John’s songs and production ideas; Denny’s choirboy tenor; Michelle’s fragile, mellow voice – excelling on ballads like Dedicated To The One I Love. And Cass – the poster child for new bohemian times.
“We clicked instantly because we were different,” Elliot told Cobey Black of the Honolulu Advertiser in 1973. “We added women’s voices. Our material was fresh, clean and original. But what made our music special is that it was hopeful.”
The appeal of The Mamas & The Papas was spelt out in hits – six Billboard Top 5 placings between February ’66 and summer ’67, California Dreamin’ to Creeque Alley. A year after Graham Nash had told her to expect only scorn from John Lennon, Elliot was staying just off the King’s Road in London when The Beatles paid her a visit. It was here, in the dawn hours of one Sunday in April 1967, with the windows wide open, that an acetate of Sgt. Pepper had its first semi-public airing.
Elliot and co’s hymns of hope had laid the ground for the Summer of Love. But by the time they closed the Monterey Festival in June ’67, pop’s first hippy family were feeling phoney and falling apart. John and Michelle’s relationship was beset by infidelity. Denny
had wooed Michelle but denied Cass. Moreover, Cass had given birth to daughter Owen in April 26, 1967 – the fruit of a one-night-stand.
“His name was Chuck Day,” says Owen ElliotKugell, who only discovered her father’s identity in 1987. He had played guitar on early Mamas & Papas recordings and, as a Johnny Rivers regular, knocked out the classic Secret Agent Man riff.
The Mamas & The Papas finally collapsed in spring ’68. Cass, whose post-pregnancy crash diet saw her weight drop from 285lbs to 175lbs, was ready to strike out alone. “It was a big risk,” says Dunhill session man Mike Deasy, “but Cass’s gift was on the line.”
“I felt I was carrying the other three,” Elliot would tell MOJO’s own Fred Dellar, then of the NME. “Why should I be doing all this work for the four of us when I could be earning more as a solo act?”
Something else toughened her resolve. “My mom had said to Denny, ‘Marry me, I love you, I will take care of you,’” says Owen. “And Denny said no. He told me he wasn’t man enough to deal with who she was, and kind of regretted not taking her up on it.”
In June 1968, Dunhill Records gave Elliot its blessing, lifting a song from the group’s fraught fourth album (The Papas & The Mamas) and releasing it on a 45 credited to Mama Cass With The Mamas & The Papas. A smoochy, old-time ballad once covered by Ella Fitzgerald and Doris Day, Dream A Little Dream Of Me was an elegant
OHN SIMON, WHO produced Cass’s first solo album, says the pop star’s home she’d bought in January 1967 now became “headquarters”. Situated on the fringes of Laurel Canyon, 7708 Woodrow Wilson Drive was, says Graham Nash, “a very peaceful house for Cass, faux-English style with lots of wood and car vings.” It was her refuge, a longed-for piece of paradise and a perfect setting for the new mother and child. To make it complete, Cass brought the party home.
“She was like Gertrude Stein in Paris in the 1900s,” says Nash. “You’d go to dinner and there’d be movie stars, artists, composers, people who were moving and shaking.” And by day, in the garden or by the pool with their acoustic guitars and perfectly matched voices, three young men began to busk out the sweet, mystic sound of future rock. “Cass was friends with David Crosby and Stephen Stills,” says Nash. “She knew The Buffalo Springfield had broken up, that David had been thrown out of The Byrds. She also knew my voice. She thought the three of us could sing together.”
Stills insists CSN took its collective bow at Cass Elliot’s. Crosby and Nash err towards Joni Mitchell’s cabin up on Lookout Mountain, possibly with Elliot cheering them on. What’s not in doubt, says Nash, is that Elliot made it happen. “I believe Cass intentionally put us together. That’s how important she is.”
“I worked out what would be my ideal group,” Elliot con
fessed months later, in spring ’69, weeks before the release of the first CSN album: “Dave Crosby, Steve Stills, Graham Nash and myself.” The realisation that it wouldn’t be CSN&E was, she said, “the bitterest blow”. It’s news to Nash, though: “That was never in any conversation or any idea.”
Elliot covered Nash’s Burn Your Hatred on her Dream A Little Dream solo debut, alongside songs by John Sebastian, Cyrus Faryar, Leonard Cohen and her sister Leah. “We weren’t aiming for hits,” says John Simon. “It was more like a home-made object you’d find in a craft fair. Cass was totally professional, fun-loving and could sing like an angel.”
Meanwhile, the singer had been shopping at Tiffany’s on Rodeo Drive. Her manager had just done a quarter-million dollar deal for a stint in Las Vegas, and her sights were on the full-length sable coat she’d been promising herself since she was a girl, entranced by the mention of same in the lyric to Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen’s 1946 standard, Personality.
“When the curtains open, I want them to go, ‘WHAT???’” Cass told Rolling Stone’s Jerry Hopkins shortly before opening night at Caesars Palace. And on October 14, 1968, that’s exactly what the audience did. The orchestra struck up the fanfare, Cass – still out of view – misjudged a cue and started to sing California Earthquake. Then more fault-lines: half-remembered lyrics, weird ad-libs, slurred words and a voice, noted Esquire magazine, “reduced to a crusty whisper”. “This show will blow their minds!” Cass had insisted backstage. The many friends who’d come to support her, and who witnessed the audience walkouts, knew otherwise: Cass had just blown her career. The following day, she was released from her Vegas contract with immediate effect.
“It was such a sad thing,” says James Hendricks. “Her manager had flown me down to see if I could straighten her out before the performance. We did a lot of walking, a lot of coffee, but it didn’t help. She’d taken some painkillers and she took too many.”
The truth was that, except for a spell in rehab, Elliot had been using heroin for over a year. “Yes, that did surprise me,” says John Sebastian, a regular visitor to Woodrow Wilson Drive. “But that tells us something about Cass’s skills as an obfuscator.”
ROUND THE TIME OF THE VEGAS DEBACLE, IT WAS rumoured that Elliot planned to elope to Geneva with on-off lover Pic Dawson over Christmas. “Pic was trouble,” says Caroline ‘CC’ Cox-Simon, who’d met both Cass and Pic back in Washington DC. “He came from a wealthy family and had this devilmay-care attitude. It was ver y seductive. Cass absolutely loved him.”
But, as often happened in Elliot’s private life, things got complicated. Backstage at Vegas, Elliot paraded a new fiancé, Billy Doyle. “Those guys were bad news,” Hendricks remembers.
Doyle and Dawson were regulars at Woodrow Wilson Drive, and embedded in Hollywood’s elite party scene. In late August 1969, both were quizzed by police investigating what became known as the Manson murders. Elliot was also questioned. She was good friends with those slain at the Tate residence, a 20-minute drive
away. Actor Michael Caine remembers being spooked by Manson one night at Elliot’s place. And songwriter Jimmy Webb has claimed that Elliot was at the Tate murder scene before the police. Perhaps she was late for the party. Or, as is likely, she was never there.
What’s certain is that, like everyone else in the Hollywood Hills, Elliot was freaked by the tragic carnage. “She had a guy named Charles move into the house,” says Owen. “I have memories of him throwing knives in the backyard against a tree trunk. I think he was there for our protection.”
As for her career, Elliot affected not to care. “I don’t have any ambition, folks,” she said post-Vegas. It wasn’t mere face-saving. “I’ve never had any ambition,” she reiterated. It was her inner rebel speaking, the one that never quite fitted in anywhere. Elliot was always, says John Sebastian, “a bit of a misfit.”
By 1973, Cass felt ready to admit her predicament. “I was looking for a home for myself in rock music,” she told Skitch Henderson, “whereas all along I had known that I never really had a rock background. I liked classical music. I liked jazz. I liked what people now call middle of the road music. With The Mamas & The Papas, I was entrenched in rock music and when I left, I expected to stay there. But I didn’t have the material, [and] I didn’t really have the inclination.”
While her many peers and protégés were all aboard rock’s new express train, Elliot – who’d famously mouthed “Wow!” at Janis Joplin’s performance at Monterey – returned to more natural territory in 1969 with It’s Getting Better, a warm, upbeat bubblegum hit. The tie-in album suggested more: I Can Dream, Can’t I?, a string-laden ode to ecstasy, sounds painfully close to the soul of Cass Elliot. After that, a stillborn collaboration with Traffic renegade Dave Mason was followed by two impressive, big budget 1972 solo albums for RCA. Her voice was better than ever, the songs were clearly close to her heart – and she photographed beautifully through the lens of legendary Hollywood shooter George Hurrell. In ’71, Cass even got herself hitched – to dapper US writer Donald von Wiedenman, alias ‘The Baron’ – in a black dress from Biba. It didn’t last long.
LLIOT HAD FAR MORE SUCCESS AS A REGULAR FACE on US television. Personality, the song she’d loved as a kid, helped define what she had and who she was. “She could adapt to any situation,” says Nisan Eventoff. “And her talking voice was as beautiful as her singing voice.”
During 1972, she used that voice to help make the world a better place. She got behind the Voter Registration campaign and laid into US foreign policy. “What we’re doing is barbaric,” she said. “[It’s] bomb them out or buy them out.” She earned a large FBI dossier for her troubles.
Elliot even spoke of becoming a Senator one day. But first, she needed to secure her place in the entertainment world. Sparkling in pink in her new show, Don’t Call Me Mama Anymore, she finally succeeded in Vegas, earning fine reviews in 1973 for her standardsheavy shows at the Flamingo. In July 1974, she was booked into the London Palladium for two weeks. En route, Cass stopped off in New York to spend time with John Simon and old pal ‘CC’, now Simon’s wife.
“Duke Ellington had just died,” says Simon, “so I dashed together an arrangement of Mood Indigo which Cass sang on a makeshift stage in a neighbour’s cabin with some high school kids on horns. It was just beautiful.”
Elliot wasn’t alone during that woodland sojourn. “She came with Pic,” says Caroline. “She talked about her sadness that it had not worked out, but I think she’d grown to love him in a different way.” Certainly, their intimacy had been restored. Hours before leaving for London, Cass called The Baron. “My, my,” she said. “How time flies when you’re having sex.”
Supporting Elliot at the Palladium were Paper Lace. “She was normal, at ease and seemed perfectly happy,” says singer Phil Wright, who loved the show and met her backstage. But on July 29, two days after the last performance, Cass was dead.
“I understood she choked on a sandwich,” says Wright.
It wasn’t true. The urban myth derived from a hasty, incautious autopsy report. Some, David Crosby included, blame long-term drug use. Others point to recent hospitalisations back in the States and insist there is no mystery.
“My mother passed away from natural causes,“says Owen Elliot-Kugell. “She’d been up all night at Mick Jagger’s birthday party. And all that dieting does something to the muscles around your heart. That’s why she died.”
Graham Nash was with Cass’s brother-in-law, Russ Kunkel, when he heard the news. “We were on a balcony somewhere in Florida and we were incredibly upset. Then this beautiful, red, what looked like a mammoth butterfly, came floating by, stopped in front of us then flew off.” The pair looked at each other, knowingly: “An amazing moment.”
Many thanks to Richard Campbell, who runs casselliot.com. John Simon’s memoir, Truth, Lies & Hearsay, is out now.