John Phillips later dropped his objections to Cass though not because of any moral awakening. He had his own selfish reasons. On the day that the New Journeymen were to audition for record producer Nik Venet, Cass tagged along as usual, this time giving the musicians a lift to the audition. Mr. Venet, bless his soul, liked the sight and the sound of Cass in the group and offered a contract to the four of them or none at all. They eagerly agreed. Apparently, Nik Venet recognized talent when he heard it. And to think that one “papa” wanted to exclude a fantastically talented “mama” from the band because of his own bigotry!
The friction between Cass and John Phillips didn’t dissipate after the band exploded onto the world music scene. Cass was deeply hurt when she found out that John had written a song for the third album that contained a gratuitous fat joke about her. The song, “Creeque Alley” was later released as a single and would become their third most popular after “California Dreamin’” and “Monday, Monday”. “Creeque Alley” was an autobiographical song about the formation of the band. References to Mama Cass served as the punch line to John’s sick joke. “And no one’s getting fat except Mama Cass” went the lyric, repeated over and over throughout the song.
To make matters worse, John expected Cass to sing that line! She put up a half-hearted fight against the lyric, but John insisted that it be included. In the end, John had the final say because he was the band’s unofficial leader and its chief songwriter. His hurtful putdown would forever be enshrined in one of the band’s signature tunes.
The Mamas and the Papas broke up after their contractually obligated 1971 album “People Like Us”. Cass Elliot struck out on her own, determined to shake her identity as “Mama” Cass.
By all accounts, she was a smashing success. Her musical career post-Mamas and Papas was really taking off. Cass Elliot was the hottest ticket in London during the summer of 1974, booked for four live shows at the Palladium. As a little girl, she had dreamt of singing at this most famous of venues. To her joy, her dream was coming true. She had completed two shows to fawning audiences that had given her standing ovations and demanded encores.
Tragedy struck when she was discovered dead at 12 Curzon Place, the Mayfair flat she’d been staying in. It was the same flat where The Who’s drummer, Keith Moon, would die four years later.
What happened next can only be described by Winston Churchill’s maxim, “A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots on.” A sandwich and a Coke were found in the flat, which led Dr. Anthony Greenburgh to jump to the conclusion that Cass had died from choking. As I mentioned earlier, doctors harbor some of the most extreme anti-fat prejudices. He told reporters, “[S]he appeared to have been eating a ham sandwich and drinking Coca-Cola while lying down—a very dangerous thing to do…[S]he seemed to have choked on a ham sandwich.”
Reporters jumped on that tidbit of information and a fiction was born. The ham sandwich tale was quickly debunked, but the sniggering public hardly seemed to care. The first story was just too delicious not to gobble up (pun intended)—the fat chick died while chowing down. Not just any food either, but the flesh of a pig. Oink, oink. Even in death, Cass Elliot could not escape fat jokes.
The autopsy found no particle of food obstructing her throat; no ham sandwich or anything else. The true cause of death was a heart attack, an unusual fate for a woman of thirty-two years.
While many people concluded that “obesity” led directly to the heart attack, there is a more plausible explanation: Cass’s heart condition was a direct result of yo-yo dieting. Like most fat women, she spent her whole life trying to slim down, resorting to zany diet after zany diet in order to achieve her elusive dream. She was a crash dieter extraordinaire. For periods of her life she suffered from what could be called anorexia, long before anyone even knew what the word meant. Cass called it “fasting” though it was essentially self-imposed starvation. She was known to lose twenty pounds in a single week, a feat that cannot be accomplished by so-called “sensible” dieting. Her crash dieting is the only factor that can explain how a woman so young could suffer a heart attack and drop dead. The “obesity” theory doesn’t pass the laugh test, nor does the phantom ham sandwich theory.
Falsely attributing a fat person’s death to “obesity” is not uncommon. Whenever fat people kill themselves with dieting, diet drugs, and diet surgery, the death is always chalked up to their fat and never to the supposed “cure”.
Halfway around the world, Cass’s death brought sorrow and rage to the women of the Fat Underground and the Fat Women’s Problem-solving Group. Just around the corner was Women’s Equality Day and the two groups planned to participate in a rally at a park in Los Angeles. They intended to make an issue out of the singer’s death by marching onto the stage wearing black armbands and carrying candles. Lynn Mabel-Lois delivered a speech to thousands, railing against the medical profession, calling them out as murderers of fat women. She accused them of wanting to kill off the fat population, slowly and deliberately, a kind of fat genocide.
The Women’s Equality Day event was a turning point for fat feminism. Prior to that event, the American Left and the feminist movement did not understand fat feminism as a legitimate struggle. Though usually eager to do battle with all forms of injustice, most mainstream feminists were thoroughly unenlightened on this issue. Their advice was usually to quit kvetching and lose weight. The death of Cass Elliot and subsequent Women’s Equality Day demonstration went a long way to punch holes through the wall of resistance.
The ham sandwich lie persists to this day. Her death will be forever overshadowed by an untruth that has lingered so long precisely because fatphobes get such a kick out of it. A tub of lard like Cass Elliot dies and the cause of death is a ham sandwich? That’s a real knee-slapper. Too funny to check! If you really want to upset a fat liberation activist, just use “Mama Cass” and “ham sandwich” together in the same sentence. I guarantee you’ll get popped in the nose.
As for the woman herself, she departed this world much too young. I would argue that she achieved her dream of being the “most famous fat girl who ever lived”. Good for her.
But despite her commercial success, despite the standing ovations she received at world class venues, despite the albums and the money, Cass remained a troubled soul. Her close friend David Crosby—member of Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young—recalls her unhappiness: “When she was performing she was happy…The rest of the time, she had a very rough go. Because inside she was very beautiful but our society is built on surface and not substance. And that’s how all the programming was back then and it’s worse now, so she had a rough go. She never talked about it or came out front, but she wanted to be beautiful! She wanted to be loved. I think it was probably the single greatest driving force of her character.”
Cass Elliot’s gift to the world was music; surely she would have had much more to give if she’d lived longer.
Chapter Twenty-One:
The Coffee Date, Take One
My first meeting is over. It wasn’t awful.
Judith passed out a few pins to members who had lost their first ten pounds. Like tossing fish to a seal or milk-bones to a dog. How degrading. She handed out stickers for “non-scale victories”—an umbrella term for any progress made besides simply pounds lost. I got a little lump in my throat when one woman claimed a “non-scale victory” because she stopped wearing a heavy coat year-round in order to hide her body from view. After having lost a bunch of weight, she was finally able to walk around in regular clothing. Fat people have a lot of shame to work through.
Afterwards, the new members stick around so that Judith can instruct us on the time-tested Weight Watchers system of eating. Ron and I are the only two new members. We get little booklets to calculate the amount of points we can eat. Because of my age, weight, height, activity level and gender, I am allowed thirty-eight points per day. I am supposed to eat foods from a variety of food gro
ups, as well as drink a lot of water—six to eight glasses per day.
We are about to break when Judith asks if we have any questions.
“I do,” I say. “Did you really lose thirty-five pounds?”
“Yes,” she replies.
“And you’ve kept it off for eleven years?”
“Yes. I just changed my lifestyle, that’s all.”
I nod. “Okay. I get it.” I want to ask her about the little slogan printed at the bottom of the blue pamphlet— Stop dieting, start living. It seems that the diet industry has co-opted a lot of the vocabulary of the anti-diet movement. I decide to let it go.
I slip out the front door. Like a man exiting the peepshow, I am honestly afraid someone will see me. I head to my car, fumbling around in my pocket for my keys. I plop my purse on the roof of the car and begin to rummage through it.
“Excuse me! Gabby!”
I turn around. Ron is coming across the parking lot at a brisk walk. Maybe I left the keys at the meeting.
“I was just wondering…” he pants, “…if you’ve got a minute right now…for a cup of coffee.”
I smile. I’d rather not let on how good it feels to be asked that. I check my watch as if I’ve got somewhere else to be. In reality, I don’t, but there’s no reason he has to know that. “Yeah, sure,” I say. “Let’s get some coffee.”
This is a date. I can tell. It’s just a tiny first step, but it’s definitely a date.
“My car’s right over there,” he says, pointing with one finger.
I finally locate my keys in my purse. I jingle them in my hand. “Or I could drive.” I hate gender roles.
“Sure. Why not?” I unlock the door and let him in the passenger side. I start the car and speed off. “You know the IHOP down the street?” he asks.
“Uh huh.”
“How about there? We can get some coffee.”
We’re there in a flash. The smell of sizzling bacon draws us in. Ron asks the hostess for a table for two. Fat people don’t usually like booths. It’s hard to get in and out, depending on how big the booths are. The hostess grabs two menus and leads us to a table near the windows. I catch an eyeful of the delicious food as we march through the dining room. It’s difficult to look upon the stacks and stacks of pancakes, crowned with whipped cream and strawberries, flanked with sausage links, and not want some. We take our seats at the table.
Ron grabs a waitress and orders two cups of coffee. He tells her that the menus won’t be needed. She returns quickly with our coffee, complete with sugar and tabs of cream. We both decide to skip the cream and sugar. Black coffee is a good zero calorie beverage just the way it is.
We have a view of West Springfield’s congested route five. I blow on the coffee to cool it off.
“Tell me about yourself, Gabby,” says Ron.
“What do you want to know?”
“Whatever you feel comfortable telling me. You married?”
“No,” I reply.
“Ever been?”
“Nope, never. Never took that walk down the aisle. And yourself?”
“Divorced,” he replies. “I was married for twenty years and then…it just fell apart. Well, maybe not so suddenly. It unraveled over time.”
I nod. “Yeah, divorces are tough. Not that I’ve ever been divorced, but I’ve had some really bad breakups.”
“Eh,” he shrugs. “I think we just got married too young, that’s all. I was twenty-three and she was twenty. You don’t even know who you are at that age. As the years went on, we hardly seemed to know each other anymore. We both changed.”
Perhaps this subject is a sore one for him. I’ve been told that it’s better not to talk about ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends on a first date. I suppose that applies doubly to ex-husbands and ex-wives. Then again, he brought it up.
I am at a loss for words. I want to say something, but nothing comes to my tongue. “Sounds tough.”
“It’s been three years since the divorce,” he replies. “But anyway, enough about that. Let’s talk about something else. I just wanted to say that I admire all of the work you do on your radio show.”
Dread creeps into my throat. That last comment hit me like a ton of bricks. No one was supposed to find out. I suddenly feel the need to flee the scene. “Excuse me?”
“Your show. The Fat Majority. I really like it. I listen whenever I can.”
I wonder if it’s worth denying. Could I bullshit my way through this? “The radio show…” I say weakly.
“Yeah. That is you, right? Gabby Medeiros? The Fat Majority?”
“Yes,” I admit. “That’s my show.” I’m flustered, scratching at an invisible spot on the table. “How did you know?”
“Your voice,” Ron replies. He takes a sip of the hot coffee. “I’ve heard it on the radio dozens of times. I recognized your voice when I was talking to you before the meeting. And then I saw your nametag. Which you’re still wearing, by the way.” He points at my chest.
I look down and blush. Indeed, I am still wearing the sticker. I’m such a silly girl. I snatch at it, peeling it off and crushing it into a ball. “Oh, sorry.”
“No problem. So that’s how I knew it was you. I must say that you look different than I had imagined. I was picturing you as a blond.”
“Huh,” I say. My hair is dark chestnut, almost black. “Really? A blond? That was the image you had?”
He nods. “Yes. Anyway, I had to meet you. I couldn’t pass up the chance.”
I’m a little flat-footed here. I can hardly believe that a dedicated Fat Majority listener would be found at a Weight Watchers meeting. “I…don’t know what to say.”
“I have one burning question,” Ron continues. “I must know the answer.”
“Shoot.”
“Aren’t you dead set against Weight Watchers? I never thought I’d meet you there. I was really shocked. Gabby Medeiros, of all people, is at Weight Watchers? Wow. Pigs are flying and Satan’s selling snow cones in hell.”
“Research,” I blurt out.
“Research?” Ron leans forward across the table.
It’s a good lie. I can’t believe I’ve spun it so fast. “Research for The Fat Majority. Basically, I was spying on them. I want to do a segment on some of their misleading practices, how the prey on the vulnerable.”
Ron nods along. He appears to believe the hastily cobbled together fib I just spat out. “Ahhhh…I get it. Like undercover journalism.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you find anything? Misleading practices, I mean.”
“I did. They’re selling shakes and bars and exercise bouncy balls. The whole thing is a for-profit business venture. It’s all about selling stuff.”
“Stuff to help you lose weight?”
“Stuff they claim helps you lose weight,” I reply. “The reality is probably something else.”
Ron sips his coffee. “Okay. So that’s why you’re there. Makes sense.”
“Yup. I’m planning on doing a Weight Watchers exposé after I’ve been to a few meetings.”
“I see. Well, I’m there to lose weight,” Ron explains. “Like I said, I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.”
I want to get out of this situation as quickly as possible. My worst fear has come true—I finally attended a Weight Watchers meeting and someone found me out. I hope my dishonesty doesn’t show too clearly on my face. “Ron, it’s been really nice talking to you,” I say. “But I just remembered I have an appointment.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” says Ron, a look of surprise crossing his face. I grab for my purse and fish out my wallet to pay. “Oh, that won’t be necessary,” he says. “You’re my guest.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” I say. I guess I don’t hate gender roles that much. “Gotta take the dog to the vet,” I add. That extra detail makes the lie seem a little more believable. “Slipped my mind.”
“Understandable,” he replies. “Give me a ride
back to my car?”
“Sure,” I say.
* * *
I’ve actually considered going into politics. People have noticed my passion for the issues and have suggested that I run for some public office where I could affect change. I’ve mulled the idea over in my head and decided that I like it in a vaguely theoretical sense. I could be a state rep or something. I could go to Boston and file a much needed fat civil rights bill. As progressive as Bay Staters are, Massachusetts still does not prohibit weight-based discrimination.
Of all fifty states, only Michigan has outlawed discrimination based on height and weight. Passed in 1976, the Elliot-Larsen Civil Rights Act was the first of its kind. Unfortunately, it hasn’t caught on. It seems to have been a passing fad of the seventies much like streaking and leisure suits. All of these years later, no other state has passed a similar bill, although a few municipalities have. You can lose your job in forty-nine states for being too fat. I think that’s a travesty.
The reason I’ve never seriously attempted to run for the state house is because I don’t think anyone would vote for me. I may seem slightly hypocritical because I’ve always said that fat people shouldn’t permit their lives to be limited by other people’s narrow minds but politics is a field in which we have no choice but to consider the consequences of fatphobia. There’s no sense in expending the money and energy on a campaign if people just won’t vote for a fat candidate. I can’t imagine quitting my job to campaign full time and then losing badly on election day. Could I find another job in this economy? How would I support myself? Sadly, it’s necessary to consider fatphobia when making practical decisions.
We Are Fat and We Are Legion Page 17