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David Cassidy ruined my life

December 16, 2006

By Liz Jones
www.mailonsunday.co.uk
YOU Magazine

LEFT:Then and now... David as the teen heartthrob Liz fell in love with and as he is today.

When writer and YOU columnist Liz Jones was 11 she, like millions of other screaming young girls, fell in love with singer David Cassidy. He was the one every future boyfriend would have to live up to. None did. Here, 'heartbroken' meets her heartbreaker

Let me explain what I loved about David Cassidy. I loved his feather cut. I loved his teeth. His twinkly green eyes.

His skinny, hairless torso. The way he looked in a pair of tight jeans and an even tighter cheesecloth shirt. And, of course, I loved his voice: it was breathy, soft, plaintive. I especially loved the way he sang the word 'you' - which he did a lot - spinning it out in two syllables so that it sounded like 'yoooee-uuuwwww'. From the moment I set eyes on David Cassidy in The Partridge Family, the sitcom about a single-parent family who form a band, which first aired on British TV in 1971, I loved him with an all-consuming yearning of an intensity I have never - not on my wedding day, not on my honeymoon - felt since.

In 1974, when I was 11, I had no idea what I would do with David if I ever met him - scream at him, probably, then run away - but to me he was the perfect boy. I entered a disco dancing competition and won a poster of him.

I put him on the cover of a magazine called Trendy that I wrote and drew myself. My adoration reached a crescendo when I went to see him perform at London's White City Stadium: he wore an all-in-one jumpsuit scattered with rhinestones, and I remember being amazed we were breathing the same air. The huge surprise was that 32 years later, just before I was due to interview David while he was on a flying visit to London (to launch an auction of memorabilia in aid of charities for children and for his beloved thoroughbred race horses), I put his new greatest hits CD in my car and discovered that How Can I Be Sure? still had the power to make me cry.

Not because I still desire David, but because I had been so hopeful aged 11 that I would, one day, find true love, and I never did. David's millions of pre-teen female fans might have ruined his life - he suffered a breakdown, becoming a virtual recluse, when he retired after the White City appearances - but he ruined my life, too. Nobody else quite measured up. When I meet him in his hotel room I tell him all this, and he says, 'You didn't know me. It was my voice, my face, but the essence of me isn't what you see. I have flaws.' No, I insist, I fell in love with you, and he looks appalled.

He is wearing a green shirt - not cheesecloth, I'm afraid - and a pair of black cords; later he puts on a cardie. He is still very slight, and amazingly boyish for someone of 56. I ask if he is in fact a size eight, which I had read somewhere, and he looks puzzled. 'You mean, am I the same size as a woman?' Yes, I say, one a bit smaller than me. 'No, I'm not a size eight. I used to weigh 125 pounds - now I weigh 140 pounds, but I'm in pretty good shape. I tried to get into the embroidered dungarees a couple of years ago, and I almost did it!'

That morning at the launch of the auction, he had stood in front of two gigantic pictures of himself from the seventies. In one, he is wiggling his appliquéd bottom at a stadium full of girls; in another, he is in his Partridge Family uniform of jumpsuit over a shirt with ruffles.

Isn't it hard, always having to measure up to your 21-year-old self? 'I am comfortable in my own skin, but yes, I do find it a little difficult. People are always comparing me to someone at 21, and that is grotesque, unfair.' I wonder if he fears growing older, but he says not. 'I have been dying my hair for the past 30 years. I've been doing it so long I'm bored with it - I am going to have to shave my head and let it grow out.

I do occasionally think, I wonder what I will be like when I'm 80, but mostly I live in the present. I hardly ever think about the past.' He says the most important thing his years of therapy gave him (he was introduced to it by his wife, Sue, in 1986) is that his own opinion is the most important. 'It used to churn me up when someone wrote something negative, but now I don't care what people think or say, I really don't.'

I tell him that, in a recent newspaper interview, the writer implied he had had plastic surgery. 'Really? I haven't read that piece yet. I had the fat taken out from beneath my eyes when I was 29, but other than that I haven't had anything done. Not a peel, nothing.' Of all the stars I have interviewed, David Cassidy seems the least comfortable with fame. That morning, I had spoken to Nina Myskow, who was the editor of Jackie magazine when David hysteria was at its height. She said that as well as being the most popular of all the pin ups, he was also the nicest. 'He would always blush when I spoke to him,' she said. "He was very shy.'

What I didn't know growing up but know now is that, rather than sitting in his psychedelic mini bus waiting for me, David Cassidy was having sex with hundreds of girls. He would find them in his hotel bed, camping outside the recording studio and his home.

Women would sleep with his friends and his band mates just to get close to him. But when I ask whether he knows exactly how many women he slept with he seems uncomfortable, and says, 'No. That would be, a) stupid, and b) completely odious. I have never given it a thought.' Did the fact women were throwing themselves at him mean he found it hard to form a proper relationship? Women were disposable, always available; he could hardly have held any of them in high esteem.

'I worked day and night. I never had a minute to myself. Have a relationship? Tell me when. Did I think women were worthless? Not at all. I was a boy when I began, I had a lot of friends who were women, and I don't think I changed my attitude,' he says, running his hands through his hair.

There is a snippet on the new CD of girls screaming. He grimaces. 'God, that sound takes me back. I remember one night, after playing Madison Square Garden, I was driven in a beaten-up old car to a horrible little dump of a motel, all alone, with the sound of this high-pitched screaming still ringing in my ears, and just dropped there.

I had this sweaty jumpsuit on, no other clothes, no money, no idea where I was, and I thought, why on earth am I doing this?'

His premature retirement at the age of 24 was a reaction not just to the fact he no longer had a life or his health - his gall bladder had to be removed, and he developed acne from the enormous stress and workload - but also because a 14-year-old fan, Bernadette Whelan, had been killed by asphyxiation at one of the White City concerts. For 10 years he wouldn't sing a single note of the songs that made his name.

'I didn't want to be a freak. People looked at me like I was a freak. There was all this madness going on and it was because of me. I wanted people to see me as a human being and they couldn't. That is why I stopped.'

His seemingly 'overnight' success caused friction with his father, Jack Cassidy, who had struggled for years on the stage - 'he was the best theatrical actor I ever saw .' - before finding success, only to be outshone by both his wife, Shirley Jones (David's step mother who played his mother in The Partridge Family) and his son. I tell David he looks just like his father and he takes that as a compliment.

'My dad was incredible. He was a manic depressive and you never knew who you were going to get, but when he was "on", anyone who met him would remember him and tell you stories about him. He could write, sculpt, he had magnificent handwriting. He was made up of so many contradictions.'

Jack Cassidy died in a house fire back in 1976. Does David feel guilty that they weren't, for the last nine months of his father's life, on speaking terms? 'Guilty? No, not all. I am healed in so many ways. I forgive him, I understood he was incapable. I was 26, I was incapable. But I wish he were still around.' Is he worried he might have inherited his father's weaknesses? 'Not at all. His childhood was responsible for his mental illness. My grandmother had him when she was 44, and rejected him. My grandfather was an alcoholic. I inherited some of his gifts.'

When David met the actress Kay Lenz, she too had just lost her father. They got married having known each other only a few weeks and David soon found that 'I was married to the only woman in the world who didn't want me.' They divorced in 1982, and he got married again, to Meryl Tanz, in 1984; the only thing they had in common was a love of horses (the marriage lasted barely two years). By 1986, he was flat broke. 'I had $1,000 in cash, and $800,000 of debt,' he says. No one returned his calls. He had no house, no car. Does he harbour any bitterness that he made so little money from his fame?

His record sales had been huge; his debut single, I Think I Love You, outsold Let It Be by the Beatles. 'You gotta get over it, man,' he says. He more or less had to start again from scratch, and had a second career on Broadway and Las Vegas, in shows including Blood Brothers, with his half brother Shaun.

I wonder if the reason he feels no sorrow at auctioning off his past is because he had so little control over the quality of the Partridge Family merchandise (in total, he only pocketed a pitiful $15,000). 'All of this stuff means much more to the fans than it does to me,' he says, but I wonder.

It was while he was at his lowest ebb, in 1986, that he met his third wife, Sue Shifrin, a singer/songwriter he'd had a fling with 13 years before. I ask whether or not he is a good husband. 'Well, I snore. And Sue wishes I were more talkative. She is always chatting, and while I am very open, I don't sit and chit chat.'

At this point, I remind David that we have met before, and he sweetly pretends to remember. I had gone to Las Vegas about six years ago to interview him and to see his hugely successful revue,

The Rat Pack, and had stood outside his house and started rootling around in his wheelie bin, when his son Beau, who was then 10, opened the gate and said, in a resigned voice, 'Are you here to see my dad?' I tell David his son was polite, and not at all spoilt, and he gives me that twinkly smile. 'Beau is about six foot tall now. And a very talented singer.'

David also has a 20-year-old daughter, Katie, from a relationship with a model, and they have recently become close. She is about to play Lucy Ewing in the film version of Dallas. 'Do I have misgivings? No, I really don't. I will make sure they are taken care of.

There isn't anyone who knows more about this business than I do.'

As I leave, I tell David he was very hard to get over. 'It means a lot to me that you say that,' he says, and he kisses me softly on the cheek, and I almost believe him.

Could It Be Forever - The Best of David Cassidy and The Partridge Family is out now on Sony/BMG UK. The UK tour starts on April 10 in Glasgow. For box office telephone numbers, visit www.davidcassidy.com

David Cassidy Downunder Fansite