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In the 1970s, American singer/songwriter Harry Nilsson owned a small apartment in the Mayfair district of London. 12 Curzon Place, Flat 9 was a swanky address in a fashionable part of town.

According to Nilsson, the two-bedroom apartment was just a typical London flat, “but it was in a great neighborhood. It was across from the Playboy Club, diagonally. From one balcony, you could read the time from Big Ben, and from the other balcony, you could watch the bunnies go up and down.”

Being popular and connected, Nilsson had plenty of famous friends. When he was out of town, he often allowed one pal or the other to use the apartment. Typically, Harry was gone for half the year. Flat 9 was rarely empty.

Mama Cass

One of the pals who stayed at Flat 9 was singer Cass Elliot, formerly of the Mamas and the Papas, who was in London for a series of live solo performances in July 1974.

Even before the Mamas and the Papas broke up in 1971, Elliot had begun a solo career, and she was doing well. By 1974, she had released five albums on her own. That July at the London Palladium, she appeared before sold-out crowds.

On July 29, after a successful evening performance, Elliot returned to Nilsson’s Mayfair apartment and retired for the night. The next morning, she was found dead in bed. She was 32.

Elliot, if you recall, had a weight problem. She was 5′ 5″ tall, and her weight sometimes reached 300 pounds. Although the notoriety factor probably helped her career, she battled the condition constantly.

Elliot regularly shed pounds with crash diets and week-long fasts. Each time, the weight rapidly returned.

Back in 1968, she had dieted for six months and lost 100 pounds in preparation for her live debut performance in Las Vegas. But she became so weak and ill that the performance closed after one night.

Ultimately, the constant cycle of gain-loss-gain was too much for Elliot’s constitution. Her death in 1974 was ruled a heart attack from “fatty myocardial degeneration due to obesity,” exacerbated by her severe dieting and, of course, celebrity lifestyle.

When Elliot’s body was found, the first doctor who examined her unintentionally triggered a rumor about how she died.

He told reporters, “From what I saw when I got to the flat, she appeared to have been eating a ham sandwich and drinking a Coca-Cola while lying down — a very dangerous thing to do. She seemed to have choked on a ham sandwich.”

In spite of medical findings about the condition of her heart, and the absence of food in her windpipe, an urban legend has persisted over the decades that Elliot choked on the ham sandwich.

Moon the Loon

Four years later, in 1978, a second entertainer died in Flat 9 in the same bed. It was Keith Moon — Moon the Loon — the hard-partying drummer of The Who. Ironically, Moon also was 32 when he died.

Keith Moon was legendary for both his drumming — he was voted the 2nd-greatest rock drummer of all time in a 2011 Rolling Stone reader’s poll — and his appetite for booze, drugs, and full-throttle, self-destructive behavior.

In addition to non-stop partying, he was famous for smashing his drums and equipment after performances, passing out on stage, and trashing hotel rooms. He also liked to drop cherry bombs into toilets.

Moon once described a typical day to his doctor:

I always get up about six in the morning. I have my bangers and eggs, and I drink a bottle of Dom Perignon and half a bottle of brandy. Then I take a couple of downers. Then it’s about 10, and I’ll have a nice nap until five.

I get up, have a couple of black beauties [used by truck drivers to stay awake], some brandy, a little champagne, and go out on the town. Then we boogie. We’ll wrap it up about four.

On the evening of September 6, 1978, Moon and some friends went to see an advance screening of The Buddy Holly Story, then embarked on a night of the usual revelry.

At 4:30 a.m., he returned to Flat 9, swallowed a large number of Heminevrin tablets, which had been prescribed for alcohol withdrawal, and went to bed.

At 7:30 a.m., Moon awoke and asked his girlfriend to cook him a steak. She complained about being asked so often to cook for him.

Moon cursed at her (undoubtedly his last words) and cooked the steak himself. He ate it while drinking Champagne and watching the movie The Abominable Dr. Phibes. He then took more Heminevrin tablets and went back to bed.

Hours later, his girlfriend discovered his body and called the police. According to the autopsy, he died of an accidental overdose, having taken at least 32 Heminevrin tablets.

Apparently, a second death in Flat 9 was too much for Harry Nilsson. He never entered the apartment again. He sold it to Pete Townsend, Moon’s band mate, and moved to Los Angeles.

Nilsson’s reaction to the loss of his two friends had little to do with disapproval of their lifestyle. His own appetite for drugs and alcohol was second to none.

Fellow musician and friend Marianne Faithfull once said of Harry, “We used to do drugs together. And when I say drugs, I don’t mean those airy-fairy drugs they do nowadays. I’m talking about narcotics.”

Nonetheless, Nilsson managed to live longer than many of his contemporaries. He survived a heart attack in 1993, but died of a second attack in 1994, at the relatively ripe old age of 52.

During his funeral in Los Angeles, those in attendance felt several aftershocks from the Northridge earthquake. They joked that the rumbling was caused by Harry, when he discovered there are no bars in Heaven.

Originally, Flat 9 was one of three apartments on the top floor of 12 Curzon Place. They were furnished by ROR, a trendy design company owned by Nilsson’s friend Ringo Starr and designer Robin Cruikshank. (ROR meant Ringo Or Robin.)

The three apartments survived until 2001, when a developer renovated the fourth floor into two luxury flats. The next year, They went on the market for $1 million pounds each, with a lease of 125 years.

Back in those days, when I would read about the drug and alcohol excesses of assorted rock stars, I at first suspected the stories were exaggerated. After all, in that business, to appear daring and brash and death-defying was good press.

But when so many of them began dying early — Jim Morrison of The Doors died at 27 — I had to concede that the over-the-top behavior was for real.

I guess my brain isn’t wired to understand.

Cass Elliot (1941-1974)

Keith Moon (1946-1978) with his girlfriend Annette Walter-Lax.

Harry Nilsson (1941-1994)

12 Curzon Place, Mayfair.