Las Vegas Life
December 2000
The Throwback Kid
David Cassidy (you can call him The Guy) embraces old Vegas to become the new Mr. Las Vegas. We think we love him.
By Steve Bornfeld
For a dead man, David Cassidy roars to life in a downbeat.
Or just the suggestion of a downbeat.
You see, it's post-show time--just post-show time--and a spent, juiceless Cassidy has slumped into a chair at Fiore's restaurant at the Rio as if he plans to retire into its plush upholstery and enjoy his coma in peace. Can't blame him. He's capping a day that took him through two magazine photo shoots, an E! interview and his nightly At the Copa performance opposite Sheena Easton with his usual go - for - broke, pour - me - in - a - glass - when - it's - over energy.
And it's supposed to be over. Except for this nattering reporter at his elbow, interrupting his consumption of salad with questions he's surely heard hundreds, thousands, millions of times.
Can't blame him at all.
But then the nattering reporter broaches the subject of the late Bobby Darin, you know, the "Mack the Knife" guy. Didn't he have another great tune, uh, what was it? ... "Artificial Flowers"?
The blood rushes back into Cassidy's cheeks. His body morphs from the slouch of pure exhaustion to the stance of killer cool. A forkful of his late leafy dinner idles on his plate, neglected. As he leans forward, lost in some sort of reverie, you look into his newly alive eyes and practically hear the waaa-waaa trumpets, feel the hipster "ho's!" and "heys!," see the tuxedoed panache of the past, as if materializing on cue with a shot glass and a cig.
Oblivious to the birthday party hubbub a few tables away, Cassidy, eyes narrowed, head bobbing, fingers at full-throttle finger-snap, launches into the tune's tragic tale, curiously set to an exuberant swing tempo.
"Alone in the world was poor little Anne, as sweet a young child as you'd find (ho! hey! ho!); her parents had gone to their final reward, leaving their baaaaby behind; didja hear this poor little child was only 9 years of age, when Mother and Dad went away (ho! hey! ho!), still she bravely worked at the one thing she knew, to earn her few pennies a day ..."
Bobby Darin has returned to the living. So has David Cassidy.
"It was so percussive, his singing," Cassidy, now safely reunited with his salad, says admiringly about the man he played in walks-ons in The Rat Pack Is Back. "The one thing my father [the late Jack Cassidy] and I had in common was we both loved Bobby Darin. My stepmom [Shirley Jones, a.k.a. Mama Partridge] worked with him quite a lot and loved him. He had as good or better phrasing than any artist I've ever heard. If he had been young and around today, he would have been the best white rapper--but musically rapping. He could sing the stuff that Sinatra could sing."
Sinatra. Darin. Copacabana. Rat Packers. Hey, pallie, where are the broads? The whole ring-a-ding-ding! thing. This man doesn't just miss it, he craves it. And he isn't just reminiscing about it, he's reviving it.
Which makes David Cassidy--the guy who thinks he loves you 'cause he woke up in love this morning, the guy with the Partridged past, the guy who 25 years ago could have been voted Least Likely To Be Crowned Mr. Las Vegas--the new Mr. Las Vegas.
With respect to Danny Gans, Clint Holmes, Siegfried & Roy and Wayne Newton (Mr. Las Vegas Emeritus), the multitasking Cassidy--ex-EFX star, producer/writer/director of The Rat Pack Is Back, star/impresario of At the Copa, champion of children's charities and all-round man-about-town--is the runaway choice.
But the designation, while entirely appropriate, requires clarification: David Cassidy is not New Vegas--that's "conceptual" stuff like O and De La Guarda and Blue Man Group--but postmodern Old Vegas. He's the Rat Pack 2000, surviving and thriving and swinging on the other side of the Eminem age.
"It does feel that way to some extent," Cassidy says about taking on the title. "When you see an entertainer perform here now, they do it for a week, for a weekend, for a night, but to be here for 48 weeks and do it, that's really rare."
" ... she made arrrrr-tificial flowers (ho! hey!), artificial flowers (hey! ho!), flowers for ladies of fashion to wear; she made artificial flowers (ho! hey!), you know those artificial flowers, fashioned from Annie's despair ..."
We won't rehash the whole Partridge Family gestalt here (it's all in the official record--Behind the Music, The E! True Hollywood Story, Biography, Headliners & Legends, The David Cassidy Story--look it up). Nor the theatrical triumphs--Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Blood Brothers--that transitioned him out of teen dream hell. And for those who can't shake the old image of the shag-cut stud who adorned the bedroom walls of frenzied females in the C'mon Get Happy '70s, consider that he's 50 now. (We'll pause here while you reach for that can of Ensure ...).
Besides, the man's true musical heart beats in plain sight on the At the Copa stage.
Sure, Cassidy embraces his pop past in the show as singing waiter Johnny Flamingo, belting out his hits (as does Easton as chic chanteuse Ruby Bombay).
But dig the retro rush, baby. Dig the Sammyish riffs of "That Old Black Magic." Dig the Basie-esque bops of the Lon Bronson Orchestra. Dig the, yes, Darinian dynamism of "Mack the Knife." Cassidy sells it all like Jolson on crystal meth, his Big Daddy-O dance stance--Darin again, from the scissored leg split to the ho!-hey!-ho! arm thrusts--rocketing the rhythm by pure force of will.
Cool cat copycat? You bet. By design? You bet.
And somewhere in the wings, the ghosts of the Sands are sippin' their Scotch and eyein' the broads.
" ... wwwwwith paper and shears, with some wwwwwire and wax, she made up each tulip and mum (ho! hey! ho!), as snowflakes drifted into her tenament room, her baby little finnnnngers grew nummmmmb ..."
The Throwback Kid. Who'da thunk it?
"I was listening to my own music growing up, but my dad worshipped Sinatra and Bing, worshipped Gershwin and Cole Porter--he was hired to do Broadway shows that never had original soundtracks, those shows of Cole Porter where my father is the male vocalist when he was 21, 22. I had a real love and appreciation for it," Cassidy says.
So the kid got a--ho!--kick out of Cole. And, after a brief detour into that bubble-gum-pop, teen-idol-god thing, he now talks like this, pallie: "I talked with Q" (that's legendary Quincy Jones--Q to his friends, Mr. Jones to you and me), "who came and saw The Rat Pack Is Back, and he wept. He was just blown away. And I said, 'You know, Q, your live album that you did with Frank at the Sands to me is still the greatest live album ever done. Those arrangements you did with the band, with Basie playing those killer notes, so incredible, man.' The bar was raised for me. I wanted a band that could play that [for At the Copa], but also get down in the groove with the pop stuff so we could span the latter part of the 20th century and the greatest music ever done."
Old Vegas divided by New Vegas equals Mr. Vegas.
" ... from making arrrrrtificial flowers (waaa-waaa-waaa!), those artificial flowers (waaa-waaa-waaa!), flowers for ladies of high fashion to wear; she made artificial flowers (waaa-waaa-waaa!), artificial flowers (waaa-waaa-waaa!), made from Annie's despair ..."
His chronically competitive dad--with whom he had a tempestuous (and well-chronicled) relationship fueled by equal parts love and envy--brought him to Vegas at age 12. "He loved it and hated it; hated it because he couldn't quite be The Guy"--this is Cassidy's mantra, meant to separate dream fulfillment from disillusioned defeat--"and loved it because he wanted to be, because it stood for Sinatra and Darin. He could walk into a room and take it over. He was an actor and a great singer and the funniest man I ever knew. But he wasn't That Guy."
During his heartthrob heyday, rockin' out stadiums, arenas, the Astrodome, Cassidy rejected the de rigueur rockers' ridicule of his fantasy playground (Vegas? Death, man!), coveting a place in the casinoed crazy quilt of this town.
Even as pre-pubescent girls dissolved around him--he smiled, they screamed, he spoke, they cried, he sang, they fainted--the rock star indulged his inner hepcat:
"This act is so Las Vegas. He's like a male Ann-Margret." That's a woman close to the Cassidy camp talking to Rolling Stone magazine. In 1972. She didn't mean it kindly, but if a dream is made of solid stuff, it outlives disdain.
"In the '70s, when I was The Guy, I was compared to Elvis. I had such respect for his talent, even though I could see there was a very sad man there. But I envied the fact that he was at a place in his life that he could come here and be That Guy," Cassidy says.
"A lot of the people I admired big-time--Darin, Sinatra, Sammy--were all still playing here. They meant something to me. They were old guys, and I was young, contemporary, happening, playing the stadiums they couldn't play. But I thought, 'wouldn't it be nice to be like the people you admire? Wouldn't you love to be That Guy at that stage of your life?' "
Even rock stars with groupies offering up undergarments and what's underneath them must have a dream, right? "My brother Shaun and I used to joke about it: Someday I'll be up there on a billboard with my hand going like this"--his gaze glazes over, his hand jerking robotically a la Vegas Vic--"and while we joked about it in a cynical way, it was also in a revering way. There is something great about being That Guy here."
" ... they found little Annie all covered with ice, still clutching her poor frozen shears (waaa-waaa-waaa-waaa-waaa-waaa-waaa-waaa!); amidst all the blossoms she had fashioned by hand, and watered by all her young tears (ho!-WAAAA-ho!-WAAAAAA!) ..."
The Guy loves The Town. You can hear it in his reverence. And in his frustration. The Vegas he grew up loving is the Vegas he feels he's losing. The Vegas he's hellbent to rescue.
"People forget that there were individuals who came here, who changed the face of it, who created its mystique and ambience, not corporations," Cassidy says, his words coming slower now and chosen with more care, lest he incur the wrath of corporate demigods whose business instincts can be far more frightening than Bugsy's temper ever was. "Steve Wynn and Kerk Kerkorian built these fabulous properties, the most beautiful resorts. But you can get carried away with a corporate idea, which is, let's make everything a fantasy, let's make everything a novelty, let's make Cirque du Soleil live in every property. Well, eventually people will get tired of it.
"O and Mystere, you've got some acrobats and a whole lot of weird music. They're wonderful shows for what they are, fabulous sets, very cleverly done and well-produced, but where everything comes from is the entertainer. Writing and directing and producing The Rat Pack Is Back, I tried to pay homage to the entertainers responsible for making Las Vegas Las Vegas."
Flash back almost three decades and ask yourself if Frank, Dino, Sammy, Joey and Peter ever envisioned that the guardian of their legacy would emerge out of a tacky day-glo bus on a pop-band sitcom from a smiley-face decade. Not likely, pallie.
And not entirely appreciated, either. While admiring the show, Tina Sinatra tied Cassidy up in legal knots (Sammy's widow, Altovise, later tightened the noose) over the Rat Packers' depictions, slapping the show's original home, the Desert Inn, with a trademark infringement lawsuit (a judgment is still pending).
As Las Vegas Sun columnist John Katsilometes reported, "the show created a stir among 'old school' Las Vegas entertainment figures. Representatives of more established, rival performers began grumbling about (what they termed) Cassidy's grandiose representation" of the fabled carousers.
OK, so Cassidy's ardor was taken for arrogance in some circles. Perhaps a town's heyday should be memorialized as a museum piece, gently lit, under glass, untouchable. Perhaps a living, breathing reminder of Vegas' swingin' sizzle shouldn't be perpetuated by some pop prince who wasn't old enough to drink while Rat Packers were closing the bars. Perhaps the legacy should die with its generation. You decide.
But showing its spunk, The Rat Pack Is Back came back, eventually deserting the Desert Inn for the Sahara where, despite constant rumors of demise, it swings on.
Safer by far--or at least less likely to double-book a showroom and a courtroom--is the Rat Packer-less At the Copa, where the music is true but the names have been changed to protect the producer.
"... there must be a heaven where little Annie can play (waaa!), in heavenly gardens and bowers; and in-st-he-he-hed of a halo (waaa!) she'll wear 'round her head (waaa!) a garland of gen-u-ine flowers (waaa-waaa-waaa-waaa-waaaaaa!)..."
Feeding off the town's storied past? True. Feeding the needs of others? Also true. Moved by the tragedies in Kosovo, Cassidy and his wife, songwriter Sue Shifrin-Cassidy, penned the tune "Message to the World" to aid WarChild USA's efforts on behalf of Kosovo refugee families. Inspired, Shifrin-Cassidy created KidsCharities.org, an umbrella organization that benefits numerous charities--including Special Olympics, Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, Kids Voting USA, Planet Hope and Wheels for Humanity--for children.
"My wife is the kind of person who, when she decides to do something, it's over," Cassidy says, nothing that, for his part, payback is the pleasure. "I was the junior chairman of the Special Olympics during the '70s. Eunice Kennedy asked me to do that when I was The Guy in the '70s. I always felt that children were a big part of my success and my fame and my being able to do what I love to do. I felt I could give back to them."
" ... nooooo more artificial flowers (waaa!-waaa!-waaa!), throw away those artificial flowers (waaa!-waaa!-waaa!), flowers for ladies of SO-CI-E-TY to wear ..."
The midlife life of an ex-teen dream? Cool, man. He's at peace with his past ("I'm proud of The Partridge Family and I love those people I worked with back then"). He's got a wife and 9-year-old son, Beau, who leave him at a loss for love-laden superlatives ("my son is the light of my life"). He's groovin' with his stepmom ("Shirley's a fan of mine, which is so nice to say. She's my friend. I gave her an introduction at the show that made her cry").
" ... throw away those artificial flowers, those dumb-dumb FLOW-ERS, fashioned from Annie's--waaa!-waaa!-waaa!-WAAA!-waaa!-waaa!--fashioned from A-A-A-Annie's depaaaaair ..."
He's even come to terms with the dichotomy of his dad.
How would Jack Cassidy feel about David Cassidy being Mr. Vegas? Being--forgive us, we can't resist--The Guy?
"To be honest with you," Cassidy says without missing a beat, "he'd be pretty pissed off about it. And yet, he'd be proud of me."
" ... WAAAAAAAA-YEAH!"
Editors note: The magazine contained several photos of David.
