Cameron learned about Elliot's death in the newsroom of The Hollywood Reporter, where she worked at the time: “I went into professional mode and said, no one else is going to write that obituary.” I'm going to do it.” She tracked Carr down to Nilsson's apartment by phone. “He could barely talk,” Cameron recalled. She asked what happened and he said he didn't know. “Oh, wait,” she recalled he said, 'I see a half-eaten ham sandwich on the bedside table. That's okay. Tell everyone she choked on a ham sandwich, you understand?'”
“And I did it,” she added, “because I wanted to protect Cass.”
What was she protecting her from? “I wasn't aware of a lot of drugs,” she said. “I just wasn't one of those people. And around the time she went to London, I had a hunch that she was taking some kind of pills, but I didn't really know anything. In a split second, Carr and Cameron decided that there was less shame in a woman being ridiculed for her weight than there was in a drug problem. “What a terrible thing,” said Cameron, “but I was too shocked to clean it up.”
She too is confused by the story's persistence. “Of all the things I've done,” she said, “this ham sandwich has followed me my whole life.”
That story has also long haunted Elliot-Kugell, although she felt some closure after Cameron privately revealed its origins to her when they met for lunch in 2000. Elliot-Kugell is clear-eyed about what likely caused her mother's death : 'I mean, look . She was awake for 48 hours and was at a party. Do the math.” But she won't elaborate. “What was really important to me was that I didn't want to write a salacious book,” she said.
In a sense, every memoir by a child of the Mamas & the Papas exists in the shadow of Mackenzie Phillips' 2009 bombshell, “High on Arrival,” in which she accused her father John Phillips of sexual assault. But Elliot-Kugell's memoir belongs on a different shelf entirely. It is a humanizing portrait of a woman whose legacy has been reduced to an outdated urban legend for far too long.
And it is a story about an imperfect mother and a grieving daughter, about loss and long-delayed catharsis. A few weeks before we spoke, Elliot-Kugell went to visit her mother's grave. “It's always weird when I go there because I never know what to say,” she said. “But that day felt a little different because when I went to the grave, all I said was, 'Hello.' Like the way I would greet one of my cousins, or someone I know very well and haven't seen in a while.
“I thought to myself, 'Why, why does it feel like this?'” she said. Suddenly it dawned on her: “After going through this experience, I feel closer to her.”