Pot and sympathy at Cass Elliot’s, Crosby, Stills, and Nash in the living room, Eric Clapton in the backyard, California dreamin’ becomes a reality
During the American 1920s—a decade of prosperity and social upheaval unrivaled until the 1960s—the “moderns,” as the cultural historian Ann Douglas christened the gadabout young men and women of the Jazz Age, set about destroying the social and cultural conventions put in place in the late nineteenth century by the “powerful white middle-class matriarch of the recent Victorian past.” Douglas’s matriarchs in chief included Frances E. Willard and her Women’s Christian Temperance Union, proselytizer for prohibition; Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science Church; and the suffragette Carrie Chapman Catt, midwife of the woman’s right to vote. The moderns, Douglas argued, “aimed to ridicule and overturn everything the matriarch had championed.” Certainly a woman like Dorothy Parker—promiscuous, atheistic, alcoholic, and unapologetic about her ambition and talent—would have been a living, breathing affront to the likes of Eddy. By mocking the conventions of the matriarch in their works and deeds, the male and especially female cultural stars of the 1920s, the Parkers, Fitzgeralds, Thurbers, Dos Passoses, and Hemingways, ensured that “Christian beliefs and middle-class values would never again be a prerequisite for elite artistic success in America.” Not even the matriarch’s form, both nurturing and intimidating, was spared. “Plumpness [would] never again be a broadly sanctioned type of female beauty,” Douglas noted; “the 1920s put the body type of the stout and full-figured matron decisively out of fashion”—a point driven home by Groucho Marx’s relentless humiliation of the stout, full-figured Margaret Dumont, dripping with jewels and self-righteousness, in half a dozen Marx Brothers movies. Once the matriarch and “her notions of middle-class piety, racial superiority and sexual repression were discredited,” Douglas concluded, “modern America, led by New York, was free to promote . . . an egalitarian popular and mass culture aggressively appropriating forms and ideas across race, class and gender lines.”
The rapidly evolving cultural, social, and sexual conventions of the early 1960s, in Los Angeles as much as in New York, represented a reprisal, though exponentially more far-reaching, of the moderns’ revolt of the 1920s. Just as the ’20s were a reaction to and rejection of the Victorian past, the 1960s were a bracing slap to the face awakening America from the slumbers of the 1950s. For all the decade’s masculine ciphers—the Cold War saber rattling and presence of an actual four-star general in the White House—the zeitgeist of the ’50s is indelibly linked to the image of a monolithically white, middle-class suburbia and its nuclear family over which the woman, in conical bra and crinolined housedress, reigned as mother, housekeeper, and prim sexual helpmate. The Victorian matron, it seemed, had returned, only now she was living in a Levittown split-level with a husband named Bud and a brood of Brownies and Cub Scouts. Her comeback would be short-lived; American women themselves would rise up this time to slay her, most famously in the person of Betty Friedan and her book The Feminine Mystique. (The matron would nevertheless reappear, gentrified for the post-Reagan age, in the indomitable persona of lifestyle editrix and future felon Martha Stewart.)
At the same time that the ideal of the demure, pure Caucasian female dominated mainstream American imagery, black musical idioms of rhythm and blues and incipient rock and roll struggled—and, late in the decade, briefly succeeded—to slice through the meringue of white popular culture just as jazz had in the 1920s. It was, notably, the daughters as much as the sons of the white American middle class in the 1950s who delivered to stardom Elvis Presley, a white hillbilly singing black-authored or, more typically, black-sounding songs, his courtly country manners betrayed by the unrestrained sexuality of his performance. “[Elvis] won over the children of white people all over the country because the kids instinctively understood how vapid white culture was becoming,” the novelist Bobbie Ann Mason recalled of her childhood in 1950s Kentucky. Or, as Janis Joplin told Rolling Stone’s David Dalton in 1970, “They were playing that ’50s crap on the radio. It seemed so shallow, all oop-boop. It had nothing. Then I heard Leadbelly and it was like a flash. It mattered to me.”
Just as Parker and her cronies discredited and discarded the lingering culture of the Victorian era, so, too, did the early rock-and-roll scene of Los Angeles in the 1960s set about dismantling the suffocating pop-cultural remnants of the 1950s. In one sense, the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and other L.A. rock bands—aided immeasurably by Beatlemania—were simply finishing the job started by Elvis Presley, James Dean, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Lenny Bruce, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and the early folk-music movement: the relentless, incremental chipping away of postwar America’s seemingly bulletproof self-possession and cultural somnolence. Their advantage, and what now brought their culture, soon to be branded “the counterculture,” to critical mass where it had faltered in the ’50s, was sheer numbers; not since Fitzgerald’s Lost Generation had so many Americans, some seventy-six million of them, arrived in their late teens and early twenties at precisely the same moment. Thanks to network television and other leaps in mass communication, America’s baby boom, its vast numbers repeated in England and Europe, could now, on a whim, turn a local trend into an international cultural avalanche. It happened with the Beatles, and by 1965 it was happening to the Byrds, Beach Boys, Turtles, and other L.A. bands.
Rock music—a lot of it initially from England, but more and more of it from Los Angeles—was the glue that bound the generation together. It was at the rock-and-roll ballrooms and clubs of the mid-1960s—the Kinetic Circus in Chicago, the Fillmores in New York and San Francisco, the Whisky A GoGo in L.A.—and in the quartiers where the musicians lived and commingled, be it Haight-Ashbury or Laurel Canyon, that the far-flung members of the generation first discovered one another and with that discovery the narcotic power of knowing they were in the right place at the right time. As Hunter S. Thompson recalled of his stint living in San Francisco in the 1960s, he could point his motorcycle in any direction and be “absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was . . . you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.”
And so the matriarchal culture of the 1950s was dispatched. But where, exactly, women fit into the counterculture, with its intimate ties to music performed by male musicians marketed by male record company executives, booking agents, managers, and concert promoters, and played by male disc jockeys, was not even a matter of debate; it wasn’t, in fact, debated at all. Beyond providing comforts creature and carnal, the young women of the 1960s closest to the burgeoning music scene in L.A. were largely excluded.
Judy Raphael has a bell-clear memory of Ray Manzarek at UCLA telling her of his plans to start a rock band with their fellow student, a pudgy Navy brat named Jim Morrison. “I said, ‘Can I be in it?’ And he said, ‘No, there aren’t any girls in rock bands. You need to stop running around trying to be somebody all the time.’ ” (An exception to this breathtaking sexism was the Los Angeles bassist Carol Kaye, a member of the otherwise all-male Wrecking Crew, a confederation of crack session musicians, including the future stars Glen Campbell and Leon Russell, who played on countless hit rock and pop records recorded in L.A. during the 1960s, including the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations”; except for Roger McGuinn’s electric twelve-string guitar, the “band” heard on the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” was made up of Wrecking Crew hacks.)
The folk movement of the early ’60s had been built on the success of sexually integrated bands like the New Christy Minstrels and Peter, Paul and Mary. Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Carolyn Hester, and Judy Henske had achieved success unmatched by solo male folksingers, spectacularly so in Collins’s and especially Baez’s case. But with the rise of the Beatles and fellow all-male British invaders like the Rolling Stones, Kinks, Yardbirds, and Animals and the American, especially Los Angelean, bands who aped their duende, from haircuts to harmonies, women were held at bay by sheer masculine preemption. “Now all of a sudden you should just be a chick,” says Raphael. “Ambition was a downer. You got back into the traditional roles.” Observed Rolling Stone’s David Dalton, “There was a place for women in the ‘music biz’ all right—as torch chanteuses, teen angels, back-up singers, Mary Quant dollies, song stylists, autoharp/dulcimerstrumming folk madonnas [and] girl groups. Rock Inc.’s experience of women extended for the most part to waitresses, stewies, fans, flacks, groupies or, that most comic condition, rock wives.”
But the de facto prohibition on women performers in the rock idiom was tenuous and would soon be breached by Signe Anderson and Grace Slick, the first and second singers of San Francisco’s Jefferson Airplane, and most spectacularly by Joplin, an utterly original, ferociously smart, and streetwise phenomenon from Port Arthur, Texas, whose Bessie Smith–influenced, hippie-chick-meets-hooker bravado ultimately overshadowed Big Brother and the Holding Company, the San Francisco group she joined in 1966. But for sheer influence, as much for the way she integrated her personality into the rapidly evolving Los Angeles music scene as for her singing, no one came close to a woman who lived in Laurel Canyon at the moment of its most intense artistic ferment and whose presence there would directly shape the canyon’s identity and legacy, and have a profound influence on the music created by other, mostly male, mostly rock-oriented musicians for years to come.
Cass Elliot was one-half of the female half of the Mamas and the Papas, the group’s mixed-gender makeup a holdover from its tangled roots in New York and Washington, D.C. Born Ellen Naomi Cohen in Baltimore, Elliot had performed in the Big Three, a folk trio reconstituted as the Mugwumps with the addition of the folkies Denny Doherty, Zal Yanovsky, and John Sebastian, the latter two soon to form the Lovin’ Spoonful. After the Mugwumps broke up in 1965, Doherty joined John Phillips and Phillips’s second wife, Holly Michelle Gilliam, a seventeen-year-old aspiring model he’d met in New York, in the New Journeymen. Phillips, a first-rate composer and taskmaster, wanted a fourth, high-harmony voice in the group; Elliot presented herself to Phillips for consideration again and again, eventually following the band to the Virgin Islands. There, in one of the gentler legends associated with her life—the ghastly rumor that she choked to death on a ham sandwich persists, even though she died far more prosaically and plausibly of an apparent heart attack at age thirty-two after a history of drug abuse and binge dieting to tame her obesity—a workman supposedly dropped a length of pipe on her head, knocking her unconscious. Two weeks later, it was claimed, she could miraculously hit the high notes Phillips wanted. “It’s true, honest to God,” Elliot recalled in 1968. “My range was increased by three notes.”
In fact, Elliot left the islands alone and didn’t join until the group arrived in L.A. and ended up crashing at the Hollywood apartment she was sharing with her husband and former band-mate, Jim Hendricks (the marriage, never consummated, had been contrived to keep Hendricks from being drafted). Being cooped up in the tiny apartment with the band for weeks worked to Elliot’s advantage, as she wore down Phillips’s resistance by singing with the group daily. “That’s when Harvey showed up,” Doherty recalled. “Harvey was an overtone—a fifth voice that was created when the four of us sang together. It wasn’t folk music anymore . . . it was really and truly rock and roll.” Recalled Elliot: “When I heard us sing together the first time, we knew. We knew. This is it.” In the first of many acts of networking genius, Elliot contacted her friend Barry McGuire—the former New Christy Minstrel and “Eve of Destruction” singer—who arranged an audition for the band with his producer, Lou Adler.
Kim Fowley, publisher of Hendricks’s songs, recalls instead that Elliot, still not a member of the group, called one day to invite him to “come down and hear the New Journeymen.” After listening to them play “Monday, Monday” and “California Dreamin,’” Fowley shopped the trio to the producer Nick Venet, who, upon seeing the four of them together and ascertaining that Elliot could indeed sing and knew the fourth harmony, refused to audition them for Mirror Records unless she was included. “The first time the four of them sang as a four-piece was in his living room,” Fowley says. That was on Saturday. “Monday morning they were looking to get medicated so they wouldn’t blow it at three o’clock at Mirror Records. So they called up Barry McGuire, according to popular legend, to bring some refreshments over to bolster their confidence, and when he heard them sing those songs, he called Lou Adler. So they all went over in Barry’s car and Lou Adler said, ‘Sing.’” Adler immediately offered the foursome a $5,000 advance and signed them to his Dunhill label. “You figured, who are they going to meet between Saturday and Monday?” Fowley says. “Answer: Dunhill Records. Lou Adler was on the ball on that one.”
The Mamas and the Papas’ success was as swift and disorienting as the Byrds’. “California Dreamin’,” a meditation on the West Coast utopia written during a dismal winter in New York City, climbed to No. 4 in 1965. (Although John and Michelle are credited with co-writing the song, Michelle’s contribution was mostly transcribing the lyrics after John woke her in the middle of the night.) “California Dreamin’” was followed by a string of Top 10 hits, including “Monday, Monday” and “I Saw Her Again,” a thinly veiled jab by Phillips at Doherty, who’d had an affair with Michelle. The Phillipses and Doherty installed themselves on Lookout Mountain; Elliot bought a rambling estate on Woodrow Wilson Drive on the east side of Laurel Canyon. Amid the group’s incessant television appearances and tours—and internecine intrigue and escalating drug use—Elliot managed to turn the Woodrow Wilson house into the canyon’s de facto salon, a rock-and-roll Bloomsbury whose participants spanned two continents.
Elliot had been active in the musical theater in New York—she competed with Barbra Streisand for the role of Miss Marmelstein in I Can Get It for You Wholesale—and she brought with her to Los Angeles a measure of the theater’s backstage bonhomie and ebullience. She had a nurturing personality as expansive as her girth, plus a quick mind and highly evolved sense of humor. Inevitably, her obesity kept her from being a sexual object, and that in turn allowed her to become closer to many of the canyon’s male musicians than they, or she, might otherwise have allowed. (Michelle Phillips, a lithe, gamine beauty, had the opposite effect; men competed for her sexual attentions inside and outside the band, and her presence became just as inevitably divisive.)
In a scene rapidly filling with priapic young men bursting with talent and ego, Elliot’s home was a neutral ground where they could share food, dope, songs, and something approaching real friendship. “My house is a very free house,” Elliot said. “It’s not a crash pad and people don’t come without calling. But on an afternoon, especially on weekends, I always get a lot of delicatessen food in because I know David [Crosby] is going to come over for a swim and things are going to happen.” Elliot projected the nonthreatening, nonsexual vibe of an earth mother even as she fell deeply in unrequited love with Doherty. Still, her “Mama” stage name wasn’t entirely an act; she had a Jewish mother’s compulsion for good-naturedly meddling in the lives of the awkward boys who turned up on her doorstep, and she often really did know what was best for them.
“She was this incredible mother figure,” says Graham Nash. “I keep imagining this huge beautiful chicken gathering all her little chicks under her wings and making sure that they’re all cool, that this one is talking to that one, and this one knows what that one’s doing.” Her love of pot stirring launched or enhanced several careers and, in her most celebrated case of matchmaking, changed the course of pop music.
“She had that capacity to be a very good friend, to be there for you and to know what would be good for you even if you didn’t,” says Gary Burden, who designed album covers for the Mamas and the Papas, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Joni Mitchell, the Eagles, and Jackson Browne. “She was very important not only as an individual artist and a great singer, very underestimated, but also for knowing who would be good with who, who should be working with or singing with who. She had a great instinct for that.” Burden himself was one of Elliot’s first projects. He had grown up in Laguna Beach, an artists’ colony two hours south of Los Angeles, and had taken up architecture as a compromise. “I’d come out of art school going, Shit, I’m going to be Michelangelo,” he recalls. “It became very painfully evident I was not.” By the time mutual friends introduced him to Elliot, Burden was married with two children and miserable in his job. “I was still wearing three-piece suits and a bow tie and sneaking to smoke pot,” he says. “I was looking for a way out. She provided it.”
Elliot hired Burden to design a renovation of the Woodrow Wilson house, but it wasn’t long before she pulled him aside and wondered why he wasn’t designing rock-and-roll album covers. Burden demurred. “I said, ‘Cass, I don’t know anything about graphic arts.’ She said, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ And indeed in those times it didn’t matter. You didn’t have to be an expert, because it was all new. And because there were no experts, there were opportunities, so a person like myself who knew nothing about graphics could step in and do it.” Burden had not yet grasped this essential fact of the ’60s; Elliot, having gone from starving folkie to rich rock-and-roll superstar virtually overnight, had. Burden would go on to design hundreds of album covers—several, including Crosby, Stills & Nash’s debut, would join Fillmore posters and tie-dye in the iconography of ’60s pop culture. But one of his first was a Mamas and Papas album, courtesy of Elliot. “Through her I dropped into this world I’d always wanted to be in,” Burden says. “She gave me the life I wound up living, and if for no other reason than that, I would always be indebted to her.”
Shooting the photographs for many of Burden’s album covers was Henry Diltz, the Modern Folk Quartert banjo player and frequent guest at Elliot’s house. “She was an earth mother to the hip and cool,” Diltz says. “Very funny, very intelligent.” Diltz had come to photography much the way Burden had started designing album covers. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he went to grade school in Tokyo and high school in Bangkok and logged a couple of years at West Point before fetching up in Hawaii, where he co-founded the MFQ. He’d taken up photography as a hobby, and one day as he walked down the hill from his house on Lookout Mountain to visit his bandmate Cyrus Faryar, he heard music coming from inside a bungalow.
“I walked up to the door and Stephen Stills and the Buffalo Springfield were in there. I knew Stephen real well from New York—we were fellow musicians—and they said, ‘Hey, we’re going down to Redondo Beach to do a sound check, why don’t you come.’ I thought, Great, I can walk around the beach and take some pictures. So here was the Buffalo Springfield doing their sound check and I could have been in there shooting thousands of photos but I was shooting people walking down the beach. When they walked out, I said, ‘Why don’t you stand in front of that mural and I’ll take a shot of you.’ And that was my first rock-and-roll shot. I wasn’t even thinking; I just took it because it would be a nice picture. Then a magazine called me and said, ‘We hear you have a picture of the Buffalo Springfield; we’ll give you a hundred bucks.’ And that started my career that day, and it was just because I walked down the hill and happened to bump into Stephen Stills.”
There was no shortage of such serendipitous encounters in the canyon, but Elliot couldn’t resist helping them along. “She just loved getting people together,” says Diltz. “She was forever meeting English musicians on TV shows who didn’t know anybody, and she’d tell them, ‘Well, come over.’ One day she had a picnic in her backyard for Eric Clapton, who was in town and didn’t know anybody, and she invited David Crosby, who brought Joni Mitchell, who he had just discovered—Micky Dolenz [of the Monkees] was there, Gary Burden was there—just so Eric could meet some people.” In one of Diltz’s photos from that day, Crosby reposes against a sycamore tree—he’s wearing a Borsalino flattop hat and what John Prine would immortalize as an illegal smile. Next to him Mitchell sits Indian style, a Martin dreadnought guitar in her lap, picking out a melody, blond bangs spilling over her brow. Clapton sits on the grass opposite Mitchell, a cigarette clamped in his right hand, staring at her with an intense, inscrutable expression. Such were the afternoons at Chez Elliot. “Music happens in my house,” she said, “and that pleases me.”
Elliot’s greatest feat of matchmaking unfolded in 1968. Stills had met Elliot in their folkie days in Greenwich Village, “before any of us were anybody,” he recalled. Diltz, playing New York with the MFQ, would run into Stills on the circuit. “Stephen was playing at a little coffeehouse called a basket house—they would pass the basket around, and that would be his only pay. Between sets he would come down to the Village Gate and stand in the wings and watch us. I know we were a huge influence on him because we did four-part harmony, which was very sophisticated. Most groups had three-part harmony—Peter, Paul and Mary, the Kingston Trio—but we did four-part and that’s why he admired us.” Stills had harmony on his mind after he’d moved to L.A. and the Buffalo Springfield formed and swiftly imploded. He and Crosby—recently booted from the Byrds—had begun a desultory collaboration. Elliot, as ever, took notice. “David and I were messing around, talking about doing something,” Stills said, “and [Cass] comes up to me and says, ‘Do you think you need a third voice?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ She said, ‘Okay, don’t say anything, especially to Crosby. And when I call, come.’ ”
Graham Nash was at the time a member of the Hollies, one of the more endearing British Invasion bands, partial to rich harmony singing on winsome hits like “Bus Stop” and “Carrie Anne,” many of them co-written by Nash. Diltz was in New York shooting the Lovin’ Spoonful, Elliot’s old bandmates from the Mugwumps, then cresting on a string of Top 10 hits like “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice,” when Elliot appeared unannounced at his studio one afternoon with all five Hollies in tow. “We spent the afternoon drinking margaritas and hanging out and getting to know each other,” Diltz recalls. Elliot’s networking instincts were just as pervasive on the East Coast; the following day the Hollies asked Diltz to take some publicity pictures of the band, and he ended up shooting their next album cover.
Nash, meanwhile, was growing increasingly frustrated with the Hollies, who resisted recording his more challenging material. “The Hollies didn’t want to record my songs,” says Nash. “They thought they were shit; they thought I was shit. It was a sad time for me personally, artistically.” On tour with the band in 1967, he was ensconced at the Knickerbocker Hotel in downtown Los Angeles when the phone rang. “Cass called me and said, ‘I’m going to pick you up in ten minutes.’ So I got ready and was waiting in the lobby of the hotel, and she pulls up in this convertible Porsche. I got in and she drove me up Laurel Canyon to this house.” Waiting there were Stills and Crosby, who sang for Nash the Stills composition “You Don’t Have to Cry.”
“That was a moment that is indelibly etched on my soul,” Nash recalled. “David and Stephen sang it first. I asked them to do it again. I listened very carefully. I asked them to do it one more time. And they looked at each other and went, ‘Well, okay.’ They sang it a third time and I put my harmony in.” It was, by all accounts, an electrifying moment. “When David and Stephen and I were halfway through ‘You Don’t Have to Cry,’ we had to stop and start laughing,” says Nash. “Each of us just had terrible experiences with our bands and had left or been thrown out. And all of a sudden we realized we’d have to be a fucking band again. Because how could you deny what you were listening to?”
Burden was there that day. “David and Stephen sang their parts and Graham listened and listened again,” he says. “And then suddenly out of nowhere came this razor voice that was, like, perfect. It wasn’t like anything had been missing; it was just that suddenly this thing was elevated beyond belief. It was chilling, man, because nobody had heard anything like that before. Everybody was completely knocked out.”
What was more stupendous to the musicians was Elliot’s clairvoyance, that she could have anticipated the now instantly apprehensible alchemy of Stills’s raspy delivery mixed with Nash’s reedy tenor and Crosby’s gorgeous, transparent harmony. Individually, their voices, especially Stills’s, were distinctive; together they were unforgettable. “Cass, somehow or other, heard that in her head because she knew about three-part harmony from her own experience,” Burden says. As Nash would marvel thirty-five years later: “Just think about that. What an incredible thing to first of all envision, and secondly to pull off. It’s as if it was already a predetermined future to her, in terms of how she viewed me and David and Stephen. I mean, she knew what we had to do. But how do you know that when we haven’t even sung together?”
By the time the Mamas and the Papas played the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967—organized in part by Phillips—the band was fraying. Doherty’s affair with Michelle Phillips, begun before Elliot had joined the group, provoked a him-or-me showdown when John Phillips caught the two in flagrante. Michelle chose John. Elliot, meanwhile, still in love with Doherty, felt betrayed when she learned of the affair. The intrigue eventually metastasized to include Gene Clark of the Byrds; when Phillips saw Michelle blowing kisses to Clark from the stage during a Mamas and Papas concert, he fired her from the band, with Doherty’s and Elliot’s approval, and replaced her with Adler’s girlfriend, Jill Gibson (the record label actually superimposed Gibson’s photo over Michelle’s on an album cover before Phillips was allowed to return). Doherty, meanwhile, lovesick over Michelle’s rejection, was drinking heavily. The end came at a party in London when Elliot, recounting to Mick Jagger the details of her jailing over an unpaid hotel bill, was mocked by John Phillips and quit on the spot. The band limped through a subsequent contractual-obligation album, which sold poorly, before finally expiring in 1968.
Freed from the ongoing drama of the band, Elliot launched a solo career and had a hit with “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” recorded during the band’s final hours but released as a solo single. “My role in the Mamas and Papas was basically just to sing,” she said after the band’s breakup in 1968. “I will admit in all honesty there are a very few songs on all the Mamas and Papas albums that I’m really proud to listen to. I don’t have the records in my house.” She’d given birth to a daughter, Owen Vanessa Elliot, but wouldn’t identify the father and unabashedly admitted to dropping acid while pregnant. “I was told all the things I couldn’t do when I was pregnant, and I did them all,” she said.
Breaking with the prejudices of her peer group, she launched a Las Vegas solo show at a time when playing Vegas—where the finger-snapping “entertainers” of her parents’ generation fled when the folk rockers chased them off the Strip in L.A.—was to commit hipness hari-kari. “They’re paying me an outrageous amount of money—$40,000 a week, which is totally silly,” she said. “If Emmett Grogan”—founder of San Francisco’s Diggers, the hippie charity collective—“ever heard about it, I’d really be in deep trouble.” Though the shows were disastrous, appearances on television variety shows and return trips to Vegas followed. Having proposed to Doherty after the band broke up (he rejected her), she married the journalist Baron Donald von Wiedenman in 1971. She had just completed a well-received two-week engagement at the London Palladium when she died in 1974.
Her death was devastating to those she had nurtured in the L.A. rock scene. In a canyon filled with footloose, emotionally dysfunctional young men and women, she had fulfilled, wittingly or not, the role of indulgent matriarch—albeit a hip and acid-tested one. Laurel Canyon, says Burden, was “a place in the middle of this big city that people escaped to. Many of these people didn’t really have family scenes of their own—they’d never had the experience of a family. I think people found in those early days the family they’d always wanted.” Now the bosomy mother who’d tended to them all was gone.
“It’s very interesting,” says Nash, “that she really didn’t take care of her own relationships with the same kind of care she took of other people’s relationships. Whenever things were not going right, or when they were, we’d go over to Cass’s house. I was just drawn to this woman; she was a magnificent creature. She knew how artists were, how crazy and fragile they were.” Even the most hardened Hollywood types who knew her well were stunned she was no longer around. “Cass Elliot is the only fat person I ever loved,” recalled Julia Phillips (no relation to John), the acerbic producer of Taxi Driver, The Sting, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. “She’d come over to my house on Nicholas Beach with an eighth [of an ounce of cocaine], a suitcase and a couple of decks of cards and we would get into killer canasta that could last for days—or at least until the blow ran out.”
Phillips was as petite as Elliot was obese. One foggy day in Malibu they were walking down the beach to visit the actresses Jennifer Salt and Margot Kidder. When they were two hundred yards away, Kidder and Salt could be seen waving wildly to them. “I wonder,” Cass said, “how they knew it was us.” At the Woodrow Wilson house, Elliot designated a blank wall in the living room for guests to fill with quips and tropes. “Cass had started it all one night by writing, ‘Who is Chuck Barris and why is he saying those things about me?’” Phillips recalled. Before long the wall was black with contributions from Jack Nicholson, Michelle Phillips, Robert Towne—everyone, in other words, who was anyone in L.A. and Laurel Canyon in the 1960s and early ’70s. After Elliot’s funeral and sodden wake at the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, Phillips went through her Rolodex, found Elliot’s card, and framed the edges in black Magic Marker. “I’m not,” she thought to herself, “throwing this one out.”
Thirty-one years after Elliot died, just mentioning her name to Graham Nash causes him to sigh deeply and murmur, “Oh, dear.” Evidence of her impact on his life confronts him every day. “My daughter Nile was born on the day Cass died, which was July 29,” he says. “My daughter’s best friend is named Cass.” Referring not only to Crosby, Stills & Nash but to the whole of his experiences since driving up Laurel Canyon in her Porsche that afternoon so long ago, he says: “I mean, holy shit, look what happened. And look at what might not have happened. If it hadn’t been for Cass I would have never met my wife, Susan, and never been married and had children.
“I don’t know,” he declares, “what my life would have been like if I had not befriended Cass.”