Second paragraph of third chapter:
Silver relied on his many connections to get the Big 3 booked on The Danny Kaye Show and The Tonight Show, but unfortunately the record company failed to market and promote the album, and sales were disappointing.
Most people will have bought this because they are interested in the subject, and I am probably unusual in that I came to it more interested in the author. Owen Elliot-Kugell is one of my twins, born like me on 26 April 1967, along with Trish Doller, Warren Read and Nicki Elson, and the book is half the story of her mother and half her own story after her mother’s early death.
Her mother was Cass Elliot, born Ellen Cohen, who enjoyed a meteoric career as one of the Mamas and the Papas in the late 1960s, and I must admit that I found myself being thoroughly earwormed by the Mamas and the Papas greatest hits as I read the book. Cass Elliot struggled with obesity throughout her adult life, and died of a heart attack aged 32 in London in 1974, leaving a seven-year-old daughter (whose biological father had never been part of her life).
Owen Elliott-Kugell, admittedly not a dispassionate observer, thinks that her mother was the best singer of the Mamas and the Papas, and I agree that there is a very good case. Perhaps the best showcase of her vocals is “Dream a Little Dream of Me”, where sadly there doesn’t seem to be any readily available footage of the group performing, but there is plenty of audio:
She also made it one of her signature songs in her solo career:
She also took the lead in the Mamas and the Papas’ performance of “Dancing in the Streets”, here live at the 1967 Monterey festival, just a few weeks after baby Owen was born:
But even in the songs where one of the other group members takes the lead, you can hear Elliot’s vocals soaring and swooping, making the music as memorable as it was. The internal personal dynamics of the group were often poisonous, but as an ensemble their performances are riveting fifty-five years on.
After the inevitable break-up of the Mamas and the Papas, Cass Elliot had a decent enough solo career but struggled to reach quite the same heights. Occasional failures, such as her first live show in Las Vegas, were devastating. Her weight was always an issue, and in the months before her death she had in fact been hospitalised several times as a result of fainting and similar problems. (It had started early; one of The Mamas and The Papas’ songs had the repeated lyric: “And no one’s getting fat, except Mama Cass”.) Her size became part of her branding, but it must have been awfully uncomfortable for her. She starred as herself in an episode of Scooby Doo a few months before her death; and the fat-shaming jokes in the script (in a show aimed at children of the age that her daughter and I would both have been at the time) are pretty awful.
Cass Elliot conceived her daughter fully intending to be a single parent, and was by Owen Elliot-Kugell’s account a dedicated mother, though clueless about money (she died intestate, and her estate remained in debt until the invention of the compact disc a decade later liberated a new revenue flow). Owen describes the rush of emotions on hearing for the first time, twelve years after her mother died, the introduction to her song “Lady Love”:
One of the iconic photographs of Elliot’s (perhaps too generous) hospitality has the baby Owen chewing on a film canister, watching Joni Mitchell performing songs from her as yet unreleased first album. Eric Clapton waves a joint at the photographer (Henry Diltz) and a glowering David Crosby smokes a rollup. (Crosby, Stills and Nash were put together by Cass Elliot.)
The book is a tremendously moving portrait of a great musical talent and a loving parent who died too soon. There is one rather obvious gap – Cass Elliot’s brief marriage to a journalist in 1971 is not mentioned at all, though it’s mentioned in every other reference to her life. Owen told the Guardian that this was because “he talked shit about her. And it wasn’t like their marriage changed her life. He was just another opportunist.”
The second half of the book covers the author’s life after her mother’s death. She was adopted by her mother’s sister and brother-in-law (also musicians) in Massachusetts, but as a young adult gravitated back to her grandmother in Los Angeles, where she found a boyfriend (also a musician) and married him; they have two children, now adults, the older born when Owen was 32, the same age as her mother when she died.
A particularly poignant subplot explores how Elliot-Kugell found her biological father at the age of twenty; he had never been part of her life before and did not become a major part of it after, except at the end of his own life when she became responsible for sorting things out, there being nobody else available. But the whole book is basically about her relationship with her mother, who died fifty years ago next month. I must say that I ate it up. You can get it here.
