What was Cass Elliot’s final performance?
Cass Elliot always wanted to headline her very own show in London.
Over multiple visits, London had by far become ‘Mama Cass’ Elliot’s favourite city in the world, and throughout the course of her life, she remained something of an Anglophile, largely due to her admiration of John Lennon, but also with an overall fixation on anything English and anything historic.
“You come from North America, and everything’s like, 200 years old, 300 tops,” explained her bandmate, Denny Doherty, quoted in Eddi Fiegel’s 2006 biography, Dream A Little Dream of Me: The Life of ‘Mama’ Cass Elliot, “But there, you look at a building, and it’s been there for six hundred years. That’s what she liked, that solidity.”
Her obsessions were only amplified once she made her first visit to London in 1966. The trip was a result of divine timing: neither Elliot nor her bandmates in The Mamas & the Papas had ever been to London, and they arrived for a promotional visit during the summer of ‘66, when the city was the epicentre of hippie-dom. With the triumphs the band scored with ‘California Dreamin’ and ‘Monday, Monday’ in the UK, the band found themselves as the upstairs neighbours to Mick Jagger and his girlfriend, Chrissie Shrimpton, on Berkeley Square, and were getting recognised on the streets, for the first time, and Elliot enjoyed the attention she received daily.
During this time, the band befriended The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and The Who, and that trip would be the first of many for Elliot, solidifying a love affair that she’d had with London all along. The next year saw her co-own a flat with her friend, Stephen Sanders, prompting her to visit multiple times in the coming years. Before she would leave The Mamas & the Papas to emerge on her own in 1968, the band had one final trip to London, as a group planned, which was thwarted, slightly, by Elliot’s sudden arrest upon arrival. Her arrest is a long and winding story in itself, but needless to say, she came out on the other side hurt but undeterred.
“Just now I don’t want to get involved in litigation… But my sense of fair play is roused, and the question must be considered,” she told the press after her release, when asked whether or not she planned to take legal action in response, “I have been wronged, and you know that old story about hell hath no fury like a woman scorned…”
In the summer of 1974, Elliot’s dreams of performing in London finally became realised when she debuted a two-week residency of solo shows at the London Palladium, a venue she’d fantasised about playing at since childhood, where she was met with a rapturous response; being a standing-room-only venue, the crowds were packed, and the adoration was, for her, a joy to see.
The final night’s show, Saturday, July 27th, would be Elliot’s last performance, and as Michelle Phillips has recounted in several interviews, she received a call from Elliot that night, where the singer cried tears of joy over the success of her residency. To celebrate, she decided to spend a full 24-hours partying, starting at Jagger’s 31st birthday at his home in Chelsea, before going to a brunch hosted in her honour, where she began to show symptoms of a cold: incessantly blowing her nose, coughing and struggling to breathe, but she carried on, going to a cocktail party until 20:00 the next night, Sunday, July 28th.
Appearing exhausted and ill, she finally left, claiming that she was tired and needed to catch up on sleep, retiring to Flat 12 at 9 Curzon Place in Mayfair, where she passed away in her sleep, at just 32 years old, found by her personal assistant, Dot McLeod, with the autopsy citing a heart attack as the cause of her death.
