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"Dennis, get your head out of your ass." "What?" "You're going to get screwed man. You're gonna lose your house.
You'll lose everything." I'd hit bottom and I didn't really care anymore. But Cass cared. She looked at my old hang
dog face and said: "Aw Denny, marry me? I can make you happy."
Cass had never verbalized how she felt about me until that night, but I knew from The Islands, no, from before then,
from New York - up on her roof in Gramercy Park. A blizzard. Her big old white portable record player sitting there
in the snow playing the Theme from Peyton Place.
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The Theme from Peyton Place? That was "our song".
I knew she loved me, and I loved her too, but not like she wanted me to. She did weigh three hundred pounds and I
wasn't man enough to deal with that. I made some stupid joke. She left and something was lost forever.
Not long after that The Mamas & Papas recording of Dream a Little Dream was released as Mama Cass' first single.
It was a hit. Nothing was going to stop her. She toured and recorded five albums and did a ton of TV:
Carol Burnett, The Smothers Brothers, Dr. Kildare ... comedy and drama - Cass was a hell of an actor.
You know, she hosted The Tonight Show nineteen times and finally ended up doing a special called:
"Don't Call Me Mama Anymore."
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Me ? I was still up the canyon trying to drink Michelle out of my life. I drank enough Crown Royal to have those
purple bags made into drapes. And, as Cass had prophesied , by the early Seventies the top of the hill melted and
I came down, losing everything. I was trying, unsuccessfully, to paste together a solo career when legal rumblings
began to shake the shattered landscape. See, Dunhill had been sold to ABC and upon reviewing our contracts, they
decided that we still owed them another album. It was play or pay. So I got the call. "What ? We have to go into
the studio ? Why ? They're suing us for a million dollars? What year is it? What's it like out ?"
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