How did Cass Elliot die?
Cass Elliot
September 19, 1941 — July 29, 1974
London, England
Ellen Naomi Cohen grew up in Baltimore, dropped out of high school a few weeks before graduation to go to New York and be an actress, lost the part of Miss Marmelstein in I Can Get It for You Wholesale to a girl named Barbra Streisand, and decided to sing instead. She was thirty-two when she died in a flat in Mayfair that belonged to Harry Nilsson.
In the Mamas & the Papas she was the voice everyone actually heard. "California Dreamin'," "Monday, Monday," "Dream a Little Dream of Me": that's her. She was also the one the press wouldn't stop describing by her weight, for her whole career, in print, as if it were her job title. She had a daughter, Owen, and a solo career that had just, in the summer of 1974, started working: two sold-out weeks at the London Palladium, standing ovations, the reviews she'd wanted for a decade. She died the morning after the last show.
Four years later Keith Moon died in the same bed in the same flat.
The record
What is established, from the authorities and the people who were there.
Official cause: Heart failure caused by fatty myocardial degeneration due to obesity (London coroner, 1974)
She was found dead in bed in Flat 12, 9 Curzon Place, on the afternoon of July 29, 1974, by her secretary. She had finished a two-week run at the Palladium the night before and had been at a party afterward. She was 32.
The first doctor to see her reportedly noticed a half-eaten sandwich on a table in the room and, before any examination, speculated to the press that she had choked on it. That line went around the world within a day and has outlived everything else about her.
The post-mortem found no food in her windpipe. The pathologist, Keith Simpson, found that she had died of heart failure: her heart was enlarged and the muscle showed fatty degeneration, which he attributed to obesity and to the extreme crash diets she had been on for years. Her weight had swung by more than a hundred pounds several times in her adult life. No drugs were found.
The ham sandwich story was wrong on the day it was printed, has been corrected in every biography and in her daughter's public statements, and is still the first thing most people say when her name comes up.
What happened
The family hasn’t confirmed a cause. These are the community’s theories, in the order the community finds them most likely. Everyone here is anonymous.
Everyone 'knows' she choked on a ham sandwich. The autopsy found no food in her airway. What actually killed a 32-year-old the morning after the best two weeks of her career?
The page creator
- Most likely41 of 46 readers find this likely
Years of crash dieting wrecked her heart, and it stopped in her sleep
She had done extreme fasts, including a months-long near-starvation diet, more than once, and had lost and regained enormous amounts of weight. Repeated severe dieting damages heart muscle and throws off the minerals that keep its rhythm stable. She had just finished two weeks of nightly shows, had been up late celebrating, and went to sleep. A heart in that state can simply stop. The autopsy found exactly the kind of heart this produces.
Anonymous. Says they are a cardiologist.
ReportThe page creator can confirm or correct this. - Also raised30 of 39 readers find this likely
Heart failure from obesity, as the coroner said, and nothing more complicated
The official cause, which is also a perfectly good explanation: an enlarged, fatty heart that had been working too hard for too long, in someone who was very overweight for most of her adult life and under physical strain that week. The dieting theory is a refinement of this one, not a competitor.
Anonymous.
- Also raised12 of 26 readers find this likely
A heart attack, which the 1974 autopsy wasn't equipped to distinguish
Some reporting over the years has described her death as a heart attack. Strictly, the pathologist found degeneration and failure, not a blocked artery. But the distinction between a fatal rhythm failure in a damaged heart and a classic heart attack was not always drawn carefully in 1974, and the practical difference for a 32-year-old found dead in bed is small.
Anonymous.
- Unlikely4 of 48 readers find this likely
She choked on a sandwich
The story everyone knows. It is false. The pathologist found no food in her airway, and the doctor who started it had not examined her when he said it. It is on this page because the point of this page is partly to put a number next to how many readers still think it's true.
Anonymous.
When the family confirms the cause, the confirmed answer moves to the top and gets this mark. Theories stay, but are labeled as what people thought before the family knew.
Fatty degeneration of the myocardium, in plain language: the heart muscle has been damaged and partly replaced by fat, so it pumps badly and is prone to fatal rhythm failures. In 1974 it was attributed to obesity. Today a cardiologist would also want to know about the crash diets: repeated very-low-calorie fasting, of the kind she did for months at a time, is known to cause heart muscle wasting and dangerous electrolyte shifts, and deaths from it were documented in the 1970s and 1980s.
The ham sandwich: choking deaths leave food in the airway. Hers had none. The story came from a doctor who looked around a room and guessed, and from newspapers that found the guess funnier than the truth.
London coroner's findings, 1974 (pathologist Keith Simpson) Eddi Fiegel, Dream a Little Dream of Me: The Life of Cass Elliot (2005) Owen Elliot-Kugell's public statements on her mother's death Wikipedia, "Cass Elliot"
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