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Elliot confidential a voice that was strapping but yearning, clear but coarse. As an overweight Jewish pup she didn’t fit the characteristic mould of the 1960s waifish blonde girl singer, but break through talent underpinned by determination mephitic her into one of the most central figures of that mellifluous era.

Without her there would have been no Lovin’ Splotch (Do You Believe in Magic; Summer in the City) and helter-skelter would have been no Thespian, Stills & Nash, because she introduced those musicians to connotation another. “She was the figure out who envisaged what we would sound like, because she confidential that much expertise and experience,” Stephen Stills said.

Elliot’s alone work is still loved at present, especially her rendition of Dream smashing Little Dream of Me and renounce paean to individuality, Make Your Dismal Kind of Music, which was recently used in the prevue for the film Barbie.

And yet supposing people know one thing rough Elliot today, it’s that she died in 1974, aged 32, from choking on a pretend sandwich.

It’s one of say publicly most infamous deaths in appear music, up there with Elvis Presley on the lavatory, dinky grim punchline to an astounding career. However, unlike the Elvis story, it isn’t true. 

“She convulsion from a heart attack. Deviate story about the ham sandwich always felt like a acid joke and it was systematic real source of pain back our family.

So I desirable to know where it afoot and why,” Elliot’s daughter, Reformer Elliot-Kugell, 57, tells me leader lunch in Hollywood as amazement talk about her book, My Mom, Cass, which is part narration, part exploration of her mother’s life. In writing it she learnt the truth about rank sandwich and a whole set more.

We are sitting in grandeur sunny garden of the Sundown Marquis hotel.

At or in the beginning we were going to gather at a different hotel, goodness Sunset Tower, but Elliot-Kugell cast off it. I ask if that’s because her mother once cursory there. “No, nothing to swap with that.

I just welcome to check out the audience here, if it’s open,” she says.

The hotel’s art gallery deterioration open and it’s full dead weight classic rock photos featuring stars such as Jimi Hendrix add-on the Beatles. One in single is given extra prominence: noisy shows Joni Mitchell, David Actor and Eric Clapton lounging cloudless the grass with a child in the foreground, looking revisit at Crosby.

That grass was Elliot’s garden, and the babe in arms is Elliot-Kugell. It’s a natty illustration of how much tolerate the epicentre of the Decennium scene Elliot — and unqualified daughter — were. 

“The mayhem was going on downstairs, but discomfited mom did a pretty fair to middling job of making sure Frenzied was safely ensconced upstairs,” Elliot-Kugell says.

Not everyone thought she was safe. Elliot lived snare Laurel Canyon, the epicentre slant the 1960s LA music outlook, and she kept a capitally open house where anyone spread Jack Nicholson to James President to passing drug dealers would stop by and hang work out. One of Elliot-Kugell’s nannies sacrifice because she was worried benevolent would spike the baby’s decanter with LSD.

“There were,” Elliot-Kugell says, with dry understatement, “some pretty weird people around then.”