The True Story Behind the Mama Cass Elliot Ham Sandwich Rumor
In 2020, former Hollywood Reporter columnist Sue Cameron made a startling admission to The New York Times: She’s the source of the ham sandwich story that has long plagued the legacy of The Mamas & The Papas singer Cass Elliot. Cameron, who was Elliot’s neighbor and close friend, revealed that when she got the news of Elliot’s death on July 29, 1974, she picked up the phone and called Elliot’s flamboyant manager, Allan Carr. Elliot had been living it up in London, and Carr — scared of what his client’s official cause of death might be — begged Cameron to quickly issue a public tribute announcing that the beloved singer had tragically choked to death on a ham sandwich. Elliot actually died of a heart attack.
With a few strokes of her typewriter, Cameron — desperate to protect her pal — had inadvertently helped create one of music’s most enduring urban legends, and equally enduring heartbreak for Elliot’s family.
Yes, a sandwich was present
Cameron’s story wasn’t entirely a fabrication. Elliot, born Ellen Naomi Cohen, was staying at “Coconut” singer Harry Nilsson’s London apartment with her friend and backup dancer Joe Croyle. Elliot told Croyle she was going to take a bath and head to bed early to shake off a few nights of overindulgence. Croyle fixed her a ham sandwich, just in case she got hungry in the night, and placed it on her nightstand. When Elliot’s secretary, Dot MacLeoud, couldn’t reach her by phone the next day, she headed to the apartment, and found the half-eaten sandwich, as well as her employer’s body.
Cameron also told the Times that, since Elliot had long ago decided to be the one who laughed the loudest about jokes about her weight, Cameron went along with Carr’s belief that choking on some food would make a kinder legacy than a drug-related death. Especially since Elliot was the proud single mom of her then 7-year-old daughter Owen, who was staying with her grandma when her mother died.
“What a terrible thing,” said Cameron, looking back on that decision, “but I was in too much of a state of shock to clean it up.” Plus, she said, she had no idea that the “ham sandwich” story, however untrue, would dominate Elliot’s legacy.
Taking back her mom’s reputation
In the years since her mother’s death, Owen Elliot-Kugell, who was raised by her aunt and uncle, devoted herself to correcting and preserving Cass’s legacy. She told the New York Times that she finally learned the origin of the cruel rumor when she met Cameron for lunch in 2000, and that she accepts that her mom’s hard-partying lifestyle did no favors to the loving heart that gave out sometime on that July night.
Elliot-Kugell says what she knows most, though, is that her mom loved her desperately and was thrilled to have a little being to call her own. And that to Cass’s fiercely loyal fans, what matters most is how Elliot’s music, humor and down-to-earth nature could make them feel so good.
In 2022, Elliot-Kugell, a performer herself, successfully scored Cass a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, telling Variety that “a hundred years from now, that star will still be here. If my mom knew the effect she’d had on so many people’s lives in making them feel good, that would have made her happy.”
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Two years later, she released the memoir My Mama, Cass, revealing exactly how Elliot refused to let the cruelties of being a plus-sized woman in a male-dominated business dim the outsized personality and talent which led to her success in music and on TV. Even when the slights and disparagements broke her heart in private.
And she has moved on from the sandwich story, knowing that the best way to beat it back is to focus on her mom’s passions for music, friendship and motherhood. Elliot-Kugell recently told PEOPLE that she accepts that Carr and Cameron’s intentions were good. “So many of my mother’s peers had died from drug overdoses — Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and I think Allan was afraid they’d make the same assumption,” she shared.
“I really believe they were protecting her legacy and they were trying to protect me,” she continued. “And in a weird way, I’m grateful for that crazy story. As much as it caused me grief, and people made jokes, I now realize it kept her relevant and ready to shine again.”
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