November 10, 2001
By Caroline Sullivan
The Guardian (London)
Butch Cassidy
David Cassidy set hearts aflutter as the wholesome Keith Partridge. Now back in the charts, he reminisces with Caroline Sullivan on a surprisingly sordid time.
David Cassidy has a joke that would have shocked the millions of girls who fell in love with his girlish features and fashion-statement white jumpsuit back in the early 1970s. It's too tasteless to repeat - suffice to say the punchline goes "Hey, I'm only fucking with you. She's dead!" - but the odd thing is that, as he tells it, he still sounds exactly like Keith Partridge, the cuddly character from the prototypical teen sitcom The Partridge Family that made him a household name.
hough three decades separate him from the Keith years, when he was so popular he received 25,000 fan letters a week (most of which - don't read this, diehard fans - he never saw because the teen mags burned them after recording the sender's addresses for their mailing lists), his speaking voice is still that of the 16-year-old brother in the shiny-toothed singing family. Pretty remarkable for a man of 51. (Yep, Keith Partridge is 51, something that once seemed sheer impossibility.)
Cassidy was actually 20 when he began playing Keith in 1970, but looked young enough, with his soft face and authentic zits, to pass for a teenager. "I was older than people thought I was, I was 21 playing 16, 22 playing 16... when I got to 24 I was playing 17, which I had to beg the producers for," he says, his unnervingly young, California-boy voice almost swallowed up by the vastness of his London hotel suite.
But while he may sound 21, he definately doesn't look it. He's a good deal handsomer than most men his age, with an abundance of glossy hair and a shapely figure, but he doesn't look younger, any more than Cliff Richard looks a day under 60. He shares Richard's fine-boned quality, which photographs youthfully but ages early. But for someone who's success owed so much to his looks, perhaps Cassidy's pleased that his face is no longer his USP.
After his stint as an idol ended in the mid-70s with a total of 21 hit records (12 with The Partridge Family), he made an anomalous return to the Top 10 in the 80s, then reinvented himself as an actor of some repute. He starred, to acclaim, in West End productions of Blood Brothers and Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and wrote a stage show, The Rat Pack Is Back, which is still running in his adopted home of Las Vegas.
Yet he's not above playing on his status as a time traveller from the endlessly revived 70s. Recently, Cassidy discerned a need and rerecorded 23 of his 70s songs on CD under the title Then And Now. To his own surprise, it reached number five in the British chart last month. No doubt he'll be singing them all on his first UK tour in 15 years, which kicks off this week.
An appealingly wry type, he appreciates that this latest revival is predicted on nostalgia. As the baby boomers' top pop puppy, his candy-coated hits still rouse a frisson of school-disco pleasure in anyone old enough to remember the immortal Puppy Song.
"You don't go into a project thinking 'This will really be unsuccessful', but to say I was pleasantly surprised is correct," he says, wandering to the mini-bar for more mineral water. Now teetotal he used to enjoy a drink back in the Keith days, when his daily grind consisted of filming in the daytime, recording all night and catching four hours' sleep before having to be on set again at dawn. Something not generally known, though - until he revealed all in an unusually candid 1994 autobiography, C'mon Get Happy... Fear And Loathing On The Partridge Family Bus - was his fondness for drugs. He tried everything from heroin to Quaaludes, a pretty good tally even by early 70s standards, but nowadays refuses to discuss it.
"I don't take drugs, I don't advocate drugs and I was never a drug addict or alcoholic," he emphasises, bonhomie temporarily gone. "I grew up in the 60s, in a world we can't relate to anymore, and I've lost three or four close friends to drugs. So I really don't want to talk about it."
He's more forthcoming on the subject of the women who have passed through his life. Happily married to Sue Shifrin, a songwriter, since 1990 (they have a son, Beau), he also had brief marriages to Kay Lenz and Meryl Tanz. Before he met the first Mrs Cassidy (Lenz), though, he found out that being Keith Partridge meant an abundance of sexual attention from girls. He wasn't above exploiting it. He writes in C'Mon Get Happy, "I could tell them to get down on their knees and bark like a dog or act like a choo-choo train, and they'd do it gladly." Apparently, those who did were rewarded. In a 1972 Rolling Stone cover story that became the magazine's best-selling issue until John Lennon died, Cassidy's then-girlfriend pronounced our deceptively innocent-looking hero "a really good fuck".
Well, he'd had enough practice. The book tells of encounters with "three sexually incredible Dutch stewardesses", a Dallas groupie called the Butter Queen, various actresses and - surely not - Susan Dey, who played his sister Laurie Partridge. Fortunately for those who can't get their heads around the idea of Laurie and Keith doing the nasty, the liaison ended almost as soon as it began. The reason, it seemed, was that Dey "lacked the slutty aspect I always found so attractive". He tries to elaborate. "I was attracted to naughtier women, and Susan had such a sweetness and innocence that I couldn't have those feelings about her."
But how could you fancy the person who played your sister?
He grins reminiscently. "You only spend 1% of your time on set, actually working. The other 99% you're just hanging out and being yourself. Susan and I tried to move on from our working relationship and have a personal relationship, but I couldn't see her as anything but her brother."
Even now, with all that safely behind him, Cassidy's former way with the ladies is still envied by male friends. "Yeah, but it was all appearances," he maintains. "They didn't have to live the other 23 hours where I'd be wrapped up in blankets and thrown in (car) trunks. I talked to John Lennon about what the Beatles went through. He said the reason they stopped touring was because they couldn't handle it anymore. We talked a lot about demystification and how all we wanted was to be able to just walk down the street."
Does he ever get together with contemporaries like Donny Osmond and Michael Jackson to chew the fat about those blanket-wrapped days?
"I never see Donny or Michael. Much as you might perceive us as being in the same world (he's slightly miffed here), Michael was at least a decade younger than me, and the Osmonds were the living embodiment of the Partridge Family. I think Donny was really a true innocent."
Tell us a joke, Dave. He thinks for a second, then comes up with the one mentioned in the first paragraph. Then he blushes and apologises, "That's really sick, isn't it?" Fiftyone and he blushes. Sweet.
