David Cassidy in the News
Teen Heartthrobs: The Beat Goes On
October 3, 1991
By Dana Thomas
The Washington Post
SOUTH AMBOY, N.J. -- David! David! David! David!
Hundreds of mostly married thirtyish women, some weepy-eyed, stood on their chairs and screamed. They had come to the Club Bene, a dimly lit lounge 45 minutes outside of Manhattan, to see their childhood heartthrob, their first love.
And after two hours of anticipation, it was time for the encore -- the song that defined teen idolization in the early '70s.
"I Think I Love You!" they chanted.
They clapped. They shouted. They screamed.
"This is so cool!" he panted. His moppish hair was soaked with sweat. His grin sparkled in the spotlight.
"I just want to thank you for giving this old soul some life," he said, thumping his chest like Tarzan. "Man!" he exclaimed, "it feels so good to be here!"
They screamed even more.
"I promise," he told them, "it won't be 15 years again."
There was a time when David Cassidy said he would never perform in public again. It was 1974. He had just completed a wildly successful world tour as the king of the teeny-boppers, a spinoff from his gigs on the musical sitcom "The Partridge Family." He held a press conference to announce his retirement. He was 24 years old.
"When I played Madison Square Garden, they turned over three limos and destroyed six," he says. "I had to leave there in the trunk of a Toyota, wrapped in a blanket. Literally, wrapped in a blanket, carried out the service entrance! It was pan-de-mon-ium!"
He thought once he left the limelight, life would get better. It didn't. It got worse: the death of his father, two failed marriages, a brutal series of career setbacks.
But there he was, three Sunday nights ago, on that small South Amboy stage, in stretch leather pants and a Fruit of the Loom T-shirt, playing the opening chords to "I Think I Love You" on his electric guitar. It was the second show on a comeback tour that stops in Washington tonight at the Bayou. His opening act, TV sibling Danny Bonaduce, warmed up the crowd with a riotous monologue on his own recent troubles, from drugs to that transvestite prostitute:
"Good evening. Welcome to David Cassidy's First Annual Ex-Child Star Work Release Program. I'm your host, Dana Plato."
The crowd embraced them both, like long-lost pets.
"I missed you!" one woman cried to Cassidy.
"Thanks," he said sweetly, "I missed you too."
He's 41 now. Still boyish. Still skinny (attributed to Slimfast). Still long-haired, although it's thinner and highlighted with some well-earned gray. There are deep crow's-feet creeping from the corners of those devastating, long-lashed brown eyes. His voice is deeper, more gruff. But the smile, that smile. He can still make a pair of female knees wobble with that treacherous Irish smile.
He was the first superstar heartthrob for millions of post-boomers. Girls 9, 10, 12, 14, oh, how they loved him. They loved him as Keith, the archetypal big brother on "The Partridge Family." They never missed an episode, parked faithfully in front of the TV every Friday night, singing along to all the happy tunes -- "I Woke Up in Love This Morning," "Doesn't Somebody Want to Be Wanted?," "Echo Valley 2-6809." Bedrooms across America were wallpapered with that seductive, skinny kid in hip-hugger jeans. And the LPs, now safely stored in attics everywhere -- the multi-platinum "Partridge Family Album," the David Cassidy solo "Cherish."
Only one song really mattered, of course.
"I used to hear that song, 'I Think I Love You,' like 300 times a day," said Mitch Kleiner, 30, of East Brunswick, N.J., before the Club Bene show. "I remember my sister's phonograph playing it over and over."
Lunch Boxes and Fanzines Like every teen alive in 1964, when David Cassidy saw the Beatles on "Ed Sullivan," his life was forever changed.
"The next night," he says now, "I went out with my mom {actress Evelyn Ward} and bought an electric guitar."
He played in some garage bands, jamming covers of Hendrix and Jeff Beck, and daydreamed of being a rock star.
He also dreamed of being an actor, just like his dad, the debonair Jack Cassidy. By the time David was 17, he had landed some bit parts in "Bonanza," "Ironside" and "Marcus Welby, M.D." It was about then that his stepmother, Shirley Jones, was cast as the lead in "The Partridge Family," a new series based on the folksy singing family the Cowsills.
"Unbeknownst to me," recalls Jones, "they had read David."
The combination of his acting and singing abilities (and probably his relationship with Jones) made him a shoo-in for the role of Keith.
And so it began. Endless hours on the set, then endless promotional appearances. He became a mass-marketed product: lunch boxes, posters, pens, bubble gum cards. Fanzines fabricated his life. Groupies invaded it.
"They would be showing up all the time," says Jones. "They would be kept at bay by the guards, but of course they'd be hanging outside the gate every time we came out from work. David, for the most part, had to slip away, hiding down in the bottom of the car, disguises and the whole thing.
"I had trouble at my house, because the world thought that David lived there," she says. "I was the one who had the 3 o'clock-in-the-morning banging on the doors and the door bells ringing and the phones ringing and people camping out on the lawn! It was terrible. I had the police there more than once. I felt so sorry for these kids. They wanted to come and live with me. They wanted to be David's sister. Some wanted to marry David."
Then came the 1972 Rolling Stone interview, with the Annie Leibovitz photo of David naked -- cropped just below the pubic hairline. This was not the sweet bubble gum pop star the girls wanted to marry. David dropped acid. David slept with groupies. David was self-centered, sarcastic, disillusioned and exhausted. More than anything else though, David was bitter.
"There'll be a time when this whole thing will be over," he told Rolling Stone. "I won't do concerts anymore, I won't wake up in the morning feeling drained, and I won't be working a punch card schedule. ... I'll feel really good when it's over. I have an image of myself. I'm living on an island. The sky is blue, the sun is shining. And I'm smiling, I'm healthy, I'm a family man."
It didn't quite work out that way. There were still two more years of pandemonium, the climax coming in London, at his second-to-last concert. A 14-year-old girl died; she had a bad heart and got "overly excited."
"The media turned it into a circus," Cassidy remembers. "I refused to indulge them. I spoke to her parents on the phone. Sent them flowers. I didn't go to the funeral. It would have been a circus.
"Her parents told me this was the thing she looked forward to the most. Well, she got to do what she wanted to do. They knew I wasn't responsible. I'm a guy out there singing."
Within weeks, he wasn't even that.
"I ended it," he says. "I said, 'I'm not doing it anymore. That's it.' I felt like I'd worked five years, seven days a week, and been denied this person." He thumps his chest like Tarzan again.
And that, it turns out, was the beginning of "the dark period."
Father and Son It lasted 15 years.
The first blow was the death of Jack Cassidy. It came shortly after David's retirement. The two had not spoken in nine months.
"The world perceives him as this enchanting, funny, magical person. The stories. The Irish charm. The wit. The humor. He was also wounded, desperately in need of acceptance and love," says David, "and he was a very selfish person. ... For me, he was really not a great father. If he was in a good mood, it was great. If he was in a bad mood, just forget it. And for a kid, the one thing they need is consistency."
Jack Cassidy and Evelyn Ward divorced when David was a tot. He stayed with his mother in Los Angeles. Cassidy then married Shirley Jones, and together they had David's half-brothers Shaun, Patrick and Ryan (who David says are his best friends). Jones admits that Cassidy was rarely there for David as a youth. That's when the tension began. It got worse when David became an actor and, subsequently, a superstar.
"My father was very proud and very jealous of me," he says the day after the Club Bene show, sitting in the posh lounge of the Park 51 Hotel in Manhattan. "Imagine being a consummate professional, someone who is really gifted -- I mean gifted -- and being in the shadow of your wife for 20 years, 15 years. And then 15 years later you're just about to crack it, your son becomes this thing. Now everybody walks up to you and says, 'Oh, wow, you're David Cassidy's father. Oh, yeah, I know you. You're Shirley Jones's husband.' ...
"My dad and I didn't talk about it. ... He was never big enough, and I was too immature to know that I had to be much bigger than him."
This, says Cassidy, has been "part of my analysis of this last 3 1/2 years."
After his father died, he "went into a tailspin." He had two bad marriages. "One was just dead wrong," he says. "Dead wrong.
"And my career," he sighs.
In 1978 he made "A Chance to Live," a highly rated made-for-TV movie, and was nominated for an Emmy. The day after it aired, network officials approached him about starring in a series based on the movie.
"They wanted it right now, and I said, 'What do you mean? We've got no show. We've got no cast.' 'We'll put it together, babe. Don't worry.' ...
"I bought it all," he says, "and it was the worst experience of my life. I was going through the separation with my {first} wife {actress Kay Lenz}, and I bore all the personal blame and professional blame for the show failing."
The new series was a police drama called "David Cassidy: Man Undercover." It aired for half a season.
The Jinx Burned by television, Cassidy decided to do stage work. He performed in regional theater, did a stint on Broadway in "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" and, in the mid-'80s, popped up in London's West End in a dreadful production called "Time," which featured a hologram of Sir Laurence Olivier dangling from the rafters.
While living in England, Cassidy decided to record an album. Never heard about it? Here's why:
"I have a jinx. I don't want to dwell on it. I probably shouldn't be talking about it. It could be misinterpreted."
But he does talk about it.
In 1985, Cassidy cut an album for Ariola records. The single went Top 5. The album went Top 20 and gold. The company was bought out by RCA, and, says Cassidy, "they fired everybody in the office that day. The record went from Top 20 and gold to nowhere -- in one week."
Then about two years ago, he was driving down a freeway in Los Angeles when he heard Mark and Brian, two radio morning show hosts, talking about him. He called in, and they invited him to stop by the studio. He did, mentioned on the air that he had been writing a few songs and happened to have a demo in his pocket. They played it. When he left the studio, there were a hundred fans in the parking lot. When he got back to his office, there was a stack of phone messages several inches thick. Three were from recording companies -- one from Enigma, home of the Smithereens and Poison. He called. They signed a deal. He recorded "David Cassidy," his first American record in more than a decade.
Then the jinx kicked in.
"Just when my record was coming out, two weeks before, they fired all the regional sales people. They fired all the promotional guys. I'm sitting there with a record about to come out and I know it's going to fail. It can't be successful. They've got no money. They have no promotion. Who's going to get it on the radio? Who's going to make it happen? Who's going to get records in the stores?"
David Cassidy, that's who.
He visited more than 150 radio stations across the country, hand delivering his new album. He set up record store appearances and signed hundreds of album covers. He got a single out there, "Lyin' to Myself," that made the Top 20. "Which," he says, "is extraordinary."
"In the end," he says, "I felt vindicated. I believed it was good and I believed there were people out there who really wanted to hear it. And I was right. I felt there was such amazing support and dedication. Commitment. People standing for hours, waiting at record signings. I promised them I would go out on tour."
So, now, he is. A New Life Whoever said "life begins at 40" must have known David Cassidy.
He's got a new wife, Sue Shifrin, who's also his songwriting partner. He has a new son, 7-month-old Beau, his first child. His concert dates are selling out. He's slated to costar in a new series, tentatively titled "Fear of Family," on NBC next year with his three half-brothers, stepmom Shirley Jones and her husband, comedian Marty Engels (the show is the creation of 33-year-old Shaun Cassidy, also a former teen star and now a successful television writer). And he's planning on recording an album next year -- and thereby, he hopes, obliterating that jinx.
It may be another pop record, since, he says, "I'm a mainstream kind of guy." Then again, he says, "I'd love to make an album singing great classic songs. If I could give you a cross between Tony Bennett, Ray Charles, Smokey Robinson -- you know, those kind of soulful blues."
"I'd like to play there," he says, pointing out the hotel window to the Winter Garden Theatre across the street.
Oh, and he wants to coach Little League baseball.
Don't worry, though. He'll never become a fuddy-duddy.
"There's still a part of me that's 17 years old," he says with a look of genuine self-satisfaction. "When I pick up my guitar, I still want to rock-and-roll."
