Owen Elliot-Kugell’s mother drove a dark-blue Cadillac with white leather seats and a personalized California license plate that read ISIS, a tribute to the Egyptian goddess of life and magic. And while navigating the streets of Los Angeles, she joined in full throttle with whatever song was playing on the radio.
Mothers warbling along to AM while behind the steering wheel—there are few more surefire ways to irritate the young’uns and send them diving for cover. But five-year-old Owen loved listening. Then again, her mom was Mama Cass Elliot, who’d been one-quarter of the mid-1960s folk-rock group the Mamas and the Papas. (Denny Doherty and husband-and-wife singer-songwriters John and Michelle Phillips were the other members.)
“Her voice was strong and sweet, easily the most recognizable of the four-part harmony that had made the Mamas & the Papas famous…. My mom’s bracelets jangled on her wrists as she sang and steered the car down Sunset Boulevard,” Owen writes in My Mama, Cass, a daughter’s diligent effort to learn about the mother she lost way too early. Cass died in her sleep, apparently of a heart attack, after the last of 28 sold-out performances at the London Palladium. She was 32; Owen was 7.
“Her voice was strong and sweet, easily the most recognizable of the four-part harmony that had made the Mamas & the Papas famous.”
The eldest of three, Ellen Naomi Cohen was born in Baltimore. Ellen it may have been, but her father called her “Cassandra,” and the name stuck. Music was a big part of the Cohen household. Her parents sang, and her mother, Bess, played the piano. “Listening to music, and singing along was something they did frequently as a family,” notes Elliot-Kugell.
Ellen was a skinny kid and a poor eater, as she later told the magazine Ladies’ Home Journal. Perhaps feeling insecure about the sudden new competition when her sister, Leah, was born, “I did … what I thought would please my parents—eat.” By the end of high school—Ellen dropped out two weeks before graduation—she hit 180 pounds. Gaining pounds, dropping, and regaining them became a lifelong pattern.
She wore baggy clothes to disguise her size—caftans did the job later—and used humor to parry the inevitable snide remarks. But she was self-confident enough to tell anyone who would listen that someday she would be the most famous fat girl who ever lived. She already had her stage name picked out: Cass (her nickname) Elliot (in memory of a good friend).
Cass got her start in show business when a friend who was working in summer stock recommended her as a replacement for a chorus member in a production of The Boyfriend, then went to try her luck in New York, where she supposedly tried out for the role of Miss Marmelstein in the musical I Can Get It for You Wholesale. The part went to another oddball Jewish girl: Barbra Streisand. “There just don’t seem to be many parts for a 200-pound ingenue,” Cass told a friend.
With the aid of newspaper and magazine clippings; the reminiscences of Cass’s friends, family, and peers; and her own understandably limited cache of memories, Elliot-Kugell attempts to tell her mother’s story and, when indicated, to set the record straight on certain matters. See: ham sandwich. (For years, rumors circulated that Cass had choked to death on a bedtime snack. It was viewed by her then manager Allan Carr as a far more blameless way to meet her maker than what was suspected at the time: the inevitable result of the party-hardy rock ’n’ roll lifestyle.)
There were the early, hungry years touring in folk duos and trios, followed by the formation and instant success of the Mamas and the Papas, even though Cass was initially regarded as a dubious proposition. John Phillips complained that her voice was too low. What he meant was that her weight was too high.
During their time together—two years as an active entity, two more on the outs but with recording and live-performance obligations to fill—the Mamas and the Papas released five studio albums and 17 singles; six, including “California Dreamin’,” “Monday, Monday,” and “Dedicated to the One I Love,” made it to the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100. When the group disbanded, Cass pursued a solo career—TV specials, several stints as guest host on The Tonight Show, a nightclub act.
Along the way there was a marriage, apparently platonic, to a friend and fellow musician, James Hendricks, a way for Cass to keep her pal out of the clutches of the draft board. Hendricks was the name on Elliot-Kugell’s birth certificate, but as she learned many years later, with the help and support of quondam Mama Michelle Phillips, her biological father was Chuck Day, a blues guitarist. There is considerable evidence here that Cass looked for love in all the wrong places.
My Mama, Cass contains a good bit too much filler. (Bafflingly, mention of a theater program Elliot-Kugell attended at Mount Holyoke College includes a full list of the schools that compose the Seven Sisters.) There are also some infelicitous prose stylings. (Elliot-Kugell makes reference to J.F.K.’s “brutal assassination,” as if to distinguish it from another sort of assassination.) And there are a few too many details about Elliot-Kugell’s life and not nearly enough about her mother’s. When she’s short on facts, Owen speculates about how Cass must have felt or thought about this or that. The strain shows.
Still, Cass comes across as smart and ambitious, with an uncanny ability to pair performers who would sound good together. She played a role in the birth of the Lovin’ Spoonful when she carefully arranged for John Sebastian to meet Zal Yanovsky, and worked similar magic to unite Crosby and Stills with Nash.
At least as important—maybe even more so—she emerges as a generous friend, and a very loving mama.
Joanne Kaufman is a New York–based journalist and critic