Graphic bio follows Cass from child to star

If a graphic novel can be thought of like a three-minute pop song, then French author Penelope Bagieu wisely holds a beautiful epiphany well past the two-minute mark. The timing is sublime.

In her new work California Dreamin' (First Second, $24.99), a graphic biography of Mama Cass Elliot, the pivotal scene that shows this revelation takes place in the '60s Baltimore basement of Cass' watchful mom, Bess, a trained nurse. (Her father, Philip Cohen, had recently died, in 1962.) Her friends John and Michelle Phillips and Denny Doherty have come down from New York to hang out, and Cass (born Ellen Cohen) offers that it's "soooo strange to be back in Baltimore."

At that prompt, Michelle says offhandedly: "The East Coast ... the brown leaves, the gray sky ... I'd be warm, at least, in L.A."

And just like that, as husband John scampers for a pen to put that sentiment to paper, the reader enjoys the satisfying crystal-ball perspective: We know just what a smash hit "California Dreamin'" will become for the Mamas and the Papas, and how those words, eventually set to catchy and overlapping call-and-response, will soon be elevated to pop rock history as part of the mid-'60s rise of "the California Sound."

That moment aptly captures, too, the degree to which the dulcet-throated Cass Elliot, this warm and ebullient presence, seemed to be in the middle of everything in that decade. (She was with the Beatles 50 years ago on that morning the lads opened the windows and blared their just-recorded Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band into the neighborhood.)

Yet much of the graphic novel's "first minute" is set in the Maryland (with nods to Alexandria, Va.) of Cass' youth, where Dad tries to make a go of it with a mobile deli. We see Cass at Baltimore's Forest Park High, brimming with high creativity and volume as she finds her tribe of musical-theater kids. Even as a teen, Cass positively leaps off the page, befitting her real-life presence.

California Dreamin' finds its strongest narrative resonance when capturing Cass' special blend of confident, undeniable talent with vulnerability always just beneath the surface, especially in matters of the heart.

The creative result is less about the Mamas and the Papas and more about how one irrepressible, winning young woman rises from her Baltimore roots by reaching for wherever her dreaming points her. Bagieu captures her incandescence well before Ellen "Cass Elliott" Cohen died in 1974, at age 32.

Style on 05/28/2017

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