David Cassidy on the Web
The dark side of a teen idol - Part 2
24rd February 2007
By DAVID CASSIDY
www.dailymail.co.uk
This was to star my stepmother Shirley Jones as a widow who formed a pop band with her five kids. It sounded contrived but since I could sing and play the guitar, Ruth saw this fluffy-sounding sitcom as an opportunity for me to become a big star.
I somewhat reluctantly accepted the part of Keith Partridge - a happy-go-lucky teenager, three years younger than my real 19. If anyone had told me that by the year's end I'd be a household name and a best-selling recording artist, with my picture on the back of Rice Krispie boxes, I would have asked them what drugs they were on.
In fact, I almost wrecked the whole thing before it happened - thanks to my own enthusiasm for drugs. One day, before the first show had aired, some friends and I drove some girls into the mountains above Malibu in my 1968 Mustang.
One of the guys brought some peyote buttons - hallucinogenics which come from the cactus plant - and we drank them in blended milkshakes. They tasted so awful that I threw up before we had even left Los Angeles but we were soon all pretty high.
Once we were out in the wilderness, we hiked away from the road and stripped down to our underwear. I kept referring to myself as 'Soaring Eagle', saying things like 'Soaring Eagle sees such and such' and 'Soaring Eagle wants to fly'.
My nervous system was all over the place but I felt really good, getting in tune with nature, pretending to be a wild animal. We ended up lying on some rocks, sunning ourselves under a magnificent blue sky, sharing a joint.
It was then that we heard a whirling sound and a loud amplified voice above us. 'Go back to the road,' the voice ordered. 'We are the sheriffs.'
One minute we were in paradise, the next it was like Apocalypse Now. Stoned and confused, we made our way back to the car to find it being torn apart by the police. 'We know you've been smoking pot. We can see it in your eyes,' one of them told us. I was shaking.
All I could think was that my whole career was about to fall apart because getting arrested on drugs charges would undoubtedly get me thrown off a wholesome show like The Partridge Family.
I was really scared, but eventually the police gave up searching. They had found nothing stronger in the car than some aspirins and vitamins. They let us go with just a ticket for illegal parking.
I was still shaking. I was in no shape to drive home and once I got there, I was too wired to sleep for almost two days.
It was an amazing escape because The Partridge Family quickly became one of the biggest TV hits of the 1970s. Wearing the ridiculous crushed velvet suits which were our stage costumes in the show, and with my vocal tracks speeded up to make my voice higher and more appealing to young girls, I became a teen idol almost overnight.
I Think I Love You, the first song released from the show, quickly reached Number One and soon tens of thousands of screaming fans were attending the concerts I did each weekend before returning to LA on Monday mornings to film the show.
The teen magazines whipped up frenzied interest in me with their cheesy articles and ran adverts telling kids to send in money and join the official David Cassidy fan club. Or buy David Cassidy 'love musk' perfume. Or David Cassidy pillow-cases.
It was exciting to be the object of so much attention but I felt my life changing in ways that already made me uneasy. The fans clustering outside the studio gates morning and night quickly became a problem. There were hundreds of them, the more aggressive girls even baring their breasts.
Each morning, I had to meet a friend a few hundred yards away from the studio, leave my car and lie down on the floor in the back of his so I could ride in through the gates unseen. It was an incredible hassle.
Security at my home became an issue, too. Women showed up, unannounced, uninvited, at all hours. You might think this is every male's fantasy come true and I'm not going to claim I turned down every opportunity for fun and games that was presented to me - far from it - but some fans were obviously unbalanced.
I'd get letters from girls who seriously thought they had some kind of relationship with me, even though I had never seen them before.
They wrote things like: 'David, you're going to have to stop all of this. I know you've been seeing other women. You have to remain faithful to me. And you really must send me the money I've asked for now, or I'll be forced to come after you.'
Before one concert somewhere in New Jersey, I took my clothes off in the primitive trailer which served as my dressing room and was standing there naked, looked for somewhere to take a pee before I put on my stage costume.
There was no toilet and all I could find was a plastic cup. Suddenly, I heard these squeaky, high-pitched sounds coming from the cupboard underneath the sink. For a moment I was thinking: 'What is that? Mice? Rats?' Then I heard the laughter.
I saw eyes looking at me through an opening. It turned out that two girls had been hiding in the trailer for 21 hours, waiting to meet me. They had stockpiled fruit drinks and bananas to keep them going and now they were unable to stop giggling at the sight of their idol, naked and trying to pee into a cup.
I just lost it, I'm afraid, and told them to get out of my trailer in no uncertain terms. There was a lot of pressure for all the cast of The Partridge Family. Susan Dey, who played my sister, was desperately afraid of gaining weight and started living on carrots. Her skin turned noticeably orange.
Danny Bonaduce, who played my smart-alec middle brother, had a violent father who beat him up regularly. He was a pretty wild kid, who lost his virginity at 13 to a girl who'd come to meet me on set.
You could see he was heading for trouble and later in life he was arrested for trying to buy crack cocaine on a street corner. Then he got into trouble for beating and robbing a transvestite prostitute in Phoenix, Arizona. I still really like him and think he deserves forgiveness.
Even before the first season of The Partridge Family was over, my body had begun breaking down from the stress and overwork. I developed lots of health problems including a tumour that had to be removed from my neck and serious acne across my face, which had to be hidden with multiple layers of make-up.
I also developed gall-stones and by the time I had been taken into hospital to have my gall-bladder taken out, my liver was affected and I'd become jaundiced.
As I was lying in intensive care, a fan broke through security and was discovered heading towards me. Apparently, she wanted to put something in my IV drip. Goodness knows what.
When I began touring again, we devised ever more ingenious ways to get me in and out of venues. Once, I was smuggled through the waiting fans in the back of an ambulance. On another occasion, I walked through their midst dressed as a woman: a wig, lipstick, rouge, the whole deal. I have to say, I looked rather good.
Every time we found a new ruse, the fans would rumble it and eventually the only safe option was for me to stay shut in my hotel room when I wasn't performing. If I were even to try to walk through the hotel lobby, fans might riot.
Virtually the only real contact I had with people outside my immediate circle was with women who wanted to have sex with me. They'd come into my inner sanctum for a little while and we'd talk about the most mundane things.
They'd say: 'Oh, you wouldn't care about my job...' But I did care. They became my last connection to the real world. I'd ask things like: 'Where do you go for fun? What do you do? What's it like when you stand in line at the bank?' There was no way for me to know these things. I didn't live that kind of life.
Sex presented itself to me numerous times during the course of any given day. I was young, I was always ready, and they were all so willing. I'll admit that I did things that I now think were degrading for the women involved, and for that I'm ashamed.
At the time, though, it seemed impossible to resist. I've always been very comfortable with my sexuality and my brothers call me 'Donk' - as in Donkey. People have talked about me being 'blessed' in my physique.
I remember spending time with Gina Lollobrigida, the Italian sex goddess. She was about twice my age, but very attractive. The first time we met she looked me up and down and said: 'I hear you're a monster. I want to meet the monster.'
Well, I decided that if I had it, there wasn't any point in just keeping it in the holster all the time. As the pressures of my career mounted, I felt like sex was a compensation for not being able to lead a normal life. Some of what happened was pretty wild.
After a concert in Dallas, I was visited by one of the most celebrated groupies of the era - a woman known as Barbara the Butter Queen, who liked to cover her conquests in butter before performing a particularly intimate act.
If you were a rock star - or close to one - Barbara went with the territory. She serviced countless rockers of the Sixties and Seventies and I'd heard her name in connection with Joe Cocker, the Rolling Stones and others.
The guys in my band and crew just gasped when they heard that Barbara was coming to 'do' them all. They were shaking with anticipation.
She turned out to be a rather tiredlooking woman with a heavy Texas drawl, around 30 years old and by no means a beauty. But it was still a memorable evening. Another bizarre encounter occurred at a house I shared with a couple of friends in the San Fernando Valley. We were having a few drinks around midnight when we heard the buzzer on the gate.
One of my friends, Steve, answered it and the rest of us listened as a girl none of us knew started talking very intimately to him over the intercom. The girl wanted to see me, of course, so Steve and I walked down the drive to meet her.
There she was, already down on her knees, her face pressed up right between the slats of the gate. She got to know us both, under the stars, through the holes in the gate.
As time went on, it became a contest between a couple of the guys in my entourage to see how many girls they could pull for me. I felt increasingly uncomfortable about this. What was I supposed to be? Some sex machine, servicing the groupies of the world? One night I came back to my room to find that they had lined up seven girls for me in the outer room of my hotel suite, all undressed and waiting to come into my bedroom at ten-minute intervals.
You want to know what I did with all those naked girls? Nothing. I somehow felt emasculated by the situation and I was totally turned off.
I was also disturbed by the age of some of the girls throwing themselves at me. I can remember a time when a 14-year-old fan wanted to have sex with me. I wouldn't do it, even though she was one of the most beautiful girls I'd ever seen.
A lot of the older women I met struck me as opportunists who were hoping to use me to advance their acting careers or were just interested in me for my money. As my fame grew, I became reclusive and retreated increasingly into my shell.
I started seeing a psychiatrist because I needed help to deal with what I was going through. I was bothered by my inability to build lasting friendships with women - real, meaningful relationships.
One woman I did properly fall for was the actress Meredith Baxter. We started dating after she made a guest appearance on The Partridge Family, and I really carried a serious torch for her. She was a beautiful person - warm, intelligent, independent and kind of a hippie at heart, like I was.
Then, after we had been dating for about a month, I got a call from my agent telling me to leave my house immediately. The Los Angeles Police Department had been tipped off that two guys planned to kidnap me for a multi-million-dollar ransom. What happened next completely disrupted my relationship with Meredith.
For the next two months, I had to live in a hotel under tight security. Initially, there were FBI agents in the room on one side and LAPD officers on the other. Then I hired a bodyguard who lived in my room.
We didn't want to let anyone know what was going on, so I simply had to bring this guy with me everywhere I went, as if he were an old friend of mine.
He was a muscular fellow, the bodybuilder type, in his early 30s. And I was this rather slight, androgynouslooking 21-year-old - my stand-in on The Partridge Family, if you can believe it, was a girl. Everyone at work was convinced we were lovers.
It's that gay thing again. All through my career, there have been people who've assumed that I am homosexual. Thanks to The Partridge Family, I found I gained a pretty strong gay following, which I rather liked. But I'm not that way myself and feel very secure about my sexual identity.
I was hugely relieved when the kidnapping threat was deemed to be over and I could finally let my bodyguard go. I'd hoped I could simply get things started up again with Meredith but it didn't work out. I was too immature to see that the kidnapping threat was not the real problem.
I could confide in Meredith and longed for a real relationship, but I was not emotionally equipped. Frankly, I was too young for her, both emotionally and intellectually.
There wasn't enough free time in my schedule to have a relationship with myself, let alone with another human being. But I just couldn't grasp that. I was totally lost.
I continued to fantasise about having a real relationship, about going out in public on a date without having people going stupid over me. There I was, rich and famous, a star, wishing at times I could be some thoroughly ordinary, anonymous guy instead.
I felt like I was on a huge rollercoaster that was just going up and up. But though I knew it was inevitable that some twists and drops were certain to follow, I had no idea just how difficult a course my life would take before I could find the happiness which had eluded me since childhood.
Extracted from COULD IT BE FOREVER? by David Cassidy, published by Headline on March 8 at £20. David Cassidy 2007. To order a copy for £18 (p&p free), call 0870 161 0870.
Read more:
. The dark side of a teen idol
. The dark side of a teen idol...part 3
