Mama Cass Elliots autopsy exposed cause of death was | Music News

“Mama” Cass Elliot’s autopsy squashes one of the most well-known myths in music historical past. 

In the wake of Elliot’s death at age 32 on July 29, 1974, rumors began to unfold that she had choked on a ham sandwich. The music icon, who initially dreamed of changing into an actress, turned one of the Nineteen Sixties’ largest artists with The Mamas and the Papas at just 24. Their hit California Dreamin’ helped outline the hippie period.

However, the harmonizing group cut up up just three years after their huge success in 1965. Elliot was decided not to abandon her music profession and went solo. Sadly, her profession and life have been cut short by her death in 1974.

Elliot completed her solo debut the same 12 months the group broke up in 1968, and discovered success with Make Your Own Kind of Music in 1969. However, her stage fright led to the cancellation of her Las Vegas residency and prompted her to host discuss exhibits.

She later returned to Las Vegas to carry out at numerous nightclubs. Then, she launched 1973’s live album Don’t Call Me Mama Anymore, the last album launched before her death.

Around this time, Elliot fasted for a number of days and misplaced more than 100 kilos. However, she collapsed before an look on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. 

“I value my freedom to live and love as I want more than anything else in the world,” Elliot said in her ultimate interview. “I never created the Big Mama image. The public does it for you.

“But I’ve always been different. I’ve been fats since I was seven … but fortunately I was brilliant with it; I had an IQ of 165. I received into the behavior of being impartial.”

After years of struggling to revive her career, Elliot finally felt some success on July 27, 1974. She had finished a two-week run of performances that drew standing ovations at London’s Palladium.

Stage manager Bobby Roberts recalled that it “was one of her lifetime ambitions” (per All That’s Interesting).

“She was actually up,” recalled producer Lou Adler of her final performance. “She felt she was opening a new profession; she’d finally received together an act she felt good doing — not prostituting herself, but middle-of-the-road people loved it, and she loved doing it.”

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However, Elliot’s death suddenly halted her solo career just as it was beginning to rise.

On Sunday, July 28, she attended Mick Jagger’s cocktail party, but didn’t drink, and returned to her apartment, Flat 12 at 9 Curzon Place in the Mayfair district of London, which had been loaned to her by her friend and fellow singer Harry Nilsson.

She called her ex-bandmate, Michelle Phillips, and went to bed. “She had had a little champagne and was crying,” said Phillips. “She felt she had finally made the transition from Mama Cass.”

Several of Elliot’s friends visited her the following day but didn’t enter her room, thinking she was asleep. Once her secretary, Dot McLeod, realized she wasn’t picking up the phone, she was found dead.

Her time of death remains unclear, but the date has been inscribed as July 29. Her cause of death was heart failure due to obesity.

Her autopsy revealed that there was no evidence of drugs in her system at the time of her death. Coroner Keith Simpson found no blockage in her windpipe, either, despite the press spreading rumors that she died choking on a ham sandwich.

There were other rumors, too. One claimed her death was an FBI assassination. Another alleged that she died while giving birth to John Lennon’s love child. However, the ham sandwich conspiracy lasted the longest.

Simpson’s autopsy revealed that Elliot’s cause of death was a “left-sided coronary heart failure” and that she “had a coronary heart assault which developed quickly.”

Elliot was buried at Mount Sinai Memorial Park in Los Angeles, California. Her daughter, Owen, who was only 7 when she died, has continually been forced to contend with the ham sandwich rumor ever since. 

“It’s been exhausting for my household with the sandwich rumor,” she said, according to the Guardian. “One last slap against the fats girl. People appear to assume it is humorous. What’s so darn humorous?”