David Cassidy on the Web
I could have had any girl that I wanted - and I did
April 11, 2002
Evening Standard (London)
by Richard Barber
THIRTY years ago, David Cassidy could have any girl he wanted. And did. "I might have a little time to spare in my dressing room," he recalls.
"One of my people would show in a female groupie. I'd say, 'Look, I've got 10 minutes. Do you want to talk?
Or shall we have sex?' They weren't interested in talking."
For a man who hardly drank and who only occasionally smoked a little pot, sex became like a drug. Cassidy lost count of the girls he bedded, barely registered their names. On one occasion, he even had sex with a willing groupie through the locked, wrought-iron gate of his Hollywood home.
"I was a young, wild buck," he says now, a touch superfluously. "I'd go from being concealed in the boots of cars to backstage dressing rooms to secret hotel suites. It was a crazy life. It was life in a bubble."
And sex was as freely available as room service. "Yes, but this was a period, pre-Aids, when sex was safe. And I never bragged about it. I was never cocky." Nor does he regret his actions. "If you had put any red-blooded young man into the situation in which I found myself, he'd have behaved as I behaved. I wasn't outrageous.
I wasn't cruel. No one got hurt."
Except Cassidy, of course. He'll be 52 on Saturday, when he gives the first of two concerts at the Hammersmith Apollo, before beginning a nationwide tour. In 1971, he was the biggest star in the world.
His fan club was larger than that of either Elvis or The Beatles. His TV show, The Partridge Family, was a global hit.
But it all got too much. "I had everything anyone could want. But I was miserable. I couldn't feel good about myself because there was a hollowness about my success." So, in 1974, and with a dozen hit singles under his belt, he did the bravest thing, he says, he's ever done. He walked away from it all. No more stretch limos.
No entourage of 32, including three bodyguards, a personal hairdresser and a psychiatrist. Nothing.
Cassidy rapidly fell into a downward spiral, making up for the alcohol-free years and sampling more than his share of drugs, too. "I felt ashamed - of who I was, what I'd come from, the mistakes I'd made. I felt a failure."
In 1977, he married actress Kay Lenz. The following year, she went on record as saying their marriage was so happy that even David's stress-induced acne had cleared up.
Three years later, they divorced.
In the Eighties, he dated horse breeder Mary Tanz. They set up a ranch with 60 thoroughbreds in Santa Barbara and married in December 1984. Two years later came an acrimonious divorce. Cassidy had hit rock bottom. He recalls being invited to go skiing in Aspen. At a celebrity party he was ignored, except by old friend Don Johnson, who sneered at him.
The turning point came the following year. Cassidy embarked on analysis. And then he met again singer/songwriter Sue Shifrin.
The two had first been introduced after one of Cassidy's Wembley concerts in the early Seventies.
"We'd remained friends. She'd been writing songs for Tina Turner, Cliff Richard, Olivia Newton-John.
I'd been running around the world. In 1987, back in LA, she contacted my attorney for my phone number. I rang her back. We were both single by then. I suggested dinner.
The couple live in Las Vegas with their 10-year-old son, Beau. And this one's going to last, says Cassidy.
His private life in good working order, Cassidy determined to put his career back on track. Last November, three decades after it all began, he released a new album, Then and Now, his first for 17 years. It has sold more than 300,000 in the UK alone. His current happiness is palpable.
IN middle age, Cassidy turns out to be eerily like his teenybopper counterpart. He's still as thin as a whippet. The cheeky smile still crinkles the corners of his mouth on a face suspiciously free of lines. A little plastic surgery, perhaps?
"No, no facelift," he says. "I don't smoke. I hardly drink. And I take regular exercise."
He's also free of emotional baggage.
Vast amounts of money were said to have been siphoned off by so- called advisers. "I was left with $15,000," he says, without rancour, "and yet I'd made millions." But that was then. "I'm so much more comfortable with it all now. This time, I feel I'm driving the bus."
Looking back, he has mixed feelings about his rollercoaster life. "I'm proud of what I achieved. But fame isn't good for the young. How could a 19-year-old know how to cope with the level of fame that happened to me? I was lucky enough to talk a lot to John Lennon about this. When you get so famous you can't send out your laundry for fear it'll be stolen as souvenirs, you realise superstardom is a double- edged sword. John understood that."
Does he have any regrets? "I just thank God every day that I've been dealt this kind of a hand and that I've been able to play it right. I survived superstardom. Then I came back and did it my way. You're looking at a very contented guy."
