THE NEW YORK TIMES – For years, the origin of the story that Cass Elliot died from choking on a ham sandwich — one of the cruelest and most persistent myths in rock ’n’ roll history — was largely unknown.
Then in 2020, Elliot’s friend Sue Cameron, an entertainment journalist, admitted to publicizing it in her Hollywood Reporter obituary at the behest of Elliot’s manager Allan Carr, who did not want his client associated with drug use.
(Elliot died of a heart attack, likely brought on by years of substance abuse and crash dieting.)
But that cartoonish rumor — propagated in endless pop culture references, from “Austin Powers” to “Lost” — cast a tawdry light over Elliot’s legacy and still threatens to overshadow her mighty, underappreciated talent.
ELLIOT’S SISTER, LEAH, coined a phrase for the strong, brassy way everyone in their family sang: “the Cohen Honk.”
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Cass was born Ellen Naomi Cohen into a music-loving household in suburban Baltimore. Her stage name partly came from her father’s penchant for calling his spirited daughter “the mad Cassandra.”
She was a precocious, uncommonly bright child who, in the years after World War II, liked to ask dinner guests what they thought about the “world situation.” In high school she was known for her bold, slightly unkempt personal style that flew in the face of 1950s decorum.
According to her biographer Eddi Fiegel, Elliot sometimes wore “wild combinations of Bermuda shorts and high heels, with white gloves to cover her bitten-down nails.”
Many people in Elliot’s life trace her struggles with her weight to when she was 6 and went to stay with her grandparents while recovering from ringworm. They fed her well, as grandparents sometimes do, and she quickly became self-conscious about her size.
By high school, she had been prescribed Dexedrine, an amphetamine then used as an appetite suppressant …
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