Sophie Tucker lung cancer and kidney failure on February 9, 1966, aged 79, in New York City. She had continued working until the months before her death, playing shows at the Latin Quarter just weeks before. She is buried in Emanuel Cemetery, in Wethersfield, Connecticut, her home state. Tucker's comic and singing styles are credited with influencing later female entertainers including Mae West, Rusty Warren, Carol Channing, Totie Fields, Joan Rivers, Roseanne Barr, Ethel Merman, "Mama" Cass Elliot of The Mamas & the Papas, and most notably Bette Midler, who has included "Soph" as one of her many stage characters. She also
The Mamas & the Papas album "Romance Is on the Rise" (1974) by his then wife Geneviève Waïte, which he also produced; and he co-wrote "Kokomo" (1988), which was a number-one hit for the Beach Boys. Phillips was lost to heroin addiction through much of the 1970s, a period that culminated in his arrest and conviction in 1980 on a charge of conspiring to distribute narcotics, for which he spent a month in jail in 1981. In later years he performed with the New Mamas and the Papas (see below) and appeared in revival shows and television specials. He told his side of the Mamas