Why I wrote a play about Mama Cass

Plus, my vegan recipe of the week. My new novel will continue next week, as my post this week is apparently well over the limit!

Mama Cass Elliot

We know I have been rejected, a lot. Sacked. Passed over. Well, last year I decided to take matters into my own hands. No one gives Alan Bennett, say, or JK Rowling permission to write. They just go ahead and do it. I have long admired Mama Cass, ever since I was a child. Not just her wonderful, unique voice, but her drive. She refused to accept that the only way to look in the Sixties as a young woman was, well, just like her bandmate, Michelle Phillips. Cass insisted she be allowed to join the band, investing her own money to get them started, haranguing them, following them to different countries, waiting tables while the others sang onstage. She died very young, a victim not just of a food industry that was just flexing its power over women, but of low self esteem. To put it bluntly, she is the embodiment of everything I have been writing about for 40 years.

         I sent the play to six producers, got one rejection email back. I read in The Times about a new play starring Amanda Abbington, famous most recently for speaking up about her ill treatment on Strictly Come Dancing. The London theatre putting on the play sounded interesting, experimental, willing to give female creatives a chance. I emailed them.

         A reply. Oooh! Oh. ‘For information on how to submit your work, please visit our web site. We will only consider work with a producer attached.’

         It’s a case of the chicken and the egg, and I’m vegan.

         Anyhoo, here’s my play. Do stream the music where indicated for the full experience… and let me know your thoughts in the comments. Can we get it made?

Mama Cass

A one-woman play

By Liz Jones

Copyright Liz Jones 2024

INT. A LONDON DRAWING ROOM. NIGHT. IT IS ALL VERY SEVENTIES, WITH CHROME AND MIRRORS. LOTS OF BROWN AND ORANGE. BEHIND A WALL OF FLOOR-TO-CEILING WINDOWS IS A BIG SCREEN.

It is late on the evening of July 28^th 1974

(Mama Cass enters in a whirlwind. She is wearing a loud, paisley smock with a white Peter Pan collar, knee-high flat white go-go boots. Feather boa. Fingers covered in rings. Her hair is long and loose. In her arms is a huge bouquet of flowers. She relives taking a bow. She is ecstatic. She hums, then sings)

Monday, Monday

(She is doing her trademark swizzle dance with her feet. She sings acapella for a few more bars. Disappears stage right. We hear running water. She returns after a few minutes with a loaf, some ham, a plate… She plonks the lot on a table, makes a messy sandwich. Gets up, exits, returns with a bottle of champagne, which she pops, pours. She takes a long, delicious sip. She sits, facing us. The sandwich sits in front of her. It goes untouched)

Mama Cass

You know.

I will be dead in, oooh (looks at watch), precisely 12 hours.

(She drinks to that)

In case you’re wondering, I’m not going to eat that sandwich. Won’t even touch it. It will curl at the edges. But, of course, it will be blamed for my demise. Even Rolling Stone will write that I choked on a ham sandwich. Died eating. I imagine John Phillips rolling his eyes when he reads that. ‘Typical,’ he will be muttering. Denny will shake his lovely, shiny mop top, say that my size was the only thing that stopped him loving me. Honey, it’s the only thing that stops me loving me.

(She stands, sloshing her drink. Her autopsy report appears on the screen: Fatty myocardial degeneration due to obesity. Weight: 16 stone.)

Oh God, great, thanks. I really didn’t need to see that. No one told me that was going to happen! Call my agent! Hahahaha!

So, the ham sandwich did floor me, in a way, or at least its predecessors did. How unglamorous to die, aged 32, from fatness. Not in a fast car, not from drugs. I didn’t even, James Dean fashion, get to leave behind a beautiful corpse!

         I know you probably feel sorry for me, see that on screen, knowing I am about to die, but come on, how do we all live, get up every day, when we know that some time in the future there will be an inquest, and we will all get to star in our very own funeral. News headlines, if we’re lucky. A grave. Mine? A little more generous than most.

         I’m reminded of that passage in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Denny was of course my Angel Clare.

         ‘There was another date… that of her own death; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it?’

Well, we all know now, don’t we?

And Michelle? Beautiful, blonde hippy chick Michelle. How did she react?

(We see footage of Michelle arriving at Cass’s funeral, looking beautiful in big dark shades)

She hasn’t even gone puffy from crying and look, her nose isn’t even red! How is that even possible!

Stood next to Mitchy onstage, I was like an early form of airbrushing. I made her look goooood…

(We see Michelle on stage, swaying, mic in hand)

Michelle might have appeared on live TV eating a banana –her protest about the fact we were always forced to lip synch -- but she never swallowed. No, no, no, no, no. Just ask John! I always felt, standing next to her, usually to her right, that one false move and I would squash her like a fly. But she had her uses! She acted like a brake on my voice: her high sweet soprano would have been obliterated if I went full Ethel Merman.

(We see and hear Ethel Merman on screen)

But Mitch was never able to stop me eating. She wasn’t a teeny barefoot blonde gastric band. I would just look at those cheekbones – I could grate cheese on them -- and say, well, what’s the f**king point?

(We see Michelle on screen. Her face is huge, angelic, and she is singing the first bars of Dedicated to the One I Love. Mama Cass joins in on Each Night before I go to Bed my Baby. Using the Get Back technology used at Glastonbury to allow Paul McCartney to sing with John Lennon, Cass is now duetting with her three band mates, but she does not appear on screen. Cass sings the iconic line, ‘And it’s SOMEthing that everybody NEEDS.’ The song ends)

You notice what Mitchy is wearing? Striped trousers. An old shirt! She never had to try. She didn’t own an iron, or a cleavage. John didn’t want us to wear make-up or set our hair. That was way too Fifties: to look like our mothers, or the Supremes. He wanted us to look like hippies. Me, today I’m in a Zandra Rhodes kaftan creation

(She holds it open across her body, does a twirl)

 I’m a triangle. I’m the Bermuda triangle.

You know who the most famous designer here in London is right now? Mary Quant. Mary f**king Quant. She died recently, didn’t she? Not from overeating, that’s for sure. She invented the dolly bird. Listen, Lady, I would have told her should she have come to see me at the Palladium. I’m not a bird. I’m a plane.

I’ve been into Biba, too. On Kensington High Street. I met Barbara Hulanicki, you know, who runs it. Polish, like me. She welcomed me into her store with open arms – well, tried to [mimes hugging, not been able to get arms around herself] -- told me that women were only supposed to look like Twiggy for two, three years max, until they got married. Then these little ingenues would grow up and begin to look and dress like their mothers. Being a dolly bird wasn’t supposed to go on forever.

It’s too exhausting!

I do feel sorry for women alive now, where you are, dear audience, having to permanently be young, bikini ready, thin, and Hollywood waxed.

(She mimes being waxed, winces.)

         Ow! Who invented that? A man, surely. Why would a woman want to look like a child in bed, why?

In my day, women looked like Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris. I caught an early cut of that film before I left LA. The great thing about being fat – well, the only good thing – is that if Marlon Brando wanted to have sex with you on the floor, you kind of come with your own mattress. You’d probably bring your own butter.

I wear a lot of rings…

(Waggles her hands)

I call them knuckle dusters. In the music business, every day is like getting in the ring with a gangster. Or a shark.

(The number 165 flashes on the screen. Cass looks, notices, laughs)

No, no, no. That’s not what I weigh. Not even close, despite the fact I lost about 100 pounds before coming here to the Home of Twiggy. I fasted four days a week. That particular figure up there is my IQ. No applause, please.

(She bows)

Although I do indeed speak five languages, I don’t know how to say no in any of ‘em.

Even to a c**ting doughnut.