David Cassidy on the Web
The dark side of a teen idol - Part 3
25rd February 2007
By DAVID CASSIDY
www.dailymail.co.uk
David Cassidy's wholesome image won obsessive devotion from his teenage fans. In this brutally frank autobiography, he reveals the secret life of drug abuse and reckless sex that drove him to breakdown:
Racing off stage at New York's Madison Square Garden, with the screams of thousands of teenage girls still echoing in my ears, I was grabbed by two burly security men who covered me in a blanket and threw me into the boot of an ordinary-looking saloon car.
Ahead of us, a fleet of limousines were sent out as decoys and my hysterical fans jumped on their roofs and pressed against their windows so hard that the glass started to bend. Six of the limousines were completely written off as the fans tried to smash their way in.
Unnoticed, we slipped out behind them on that crazy March night in 1972 and stopped a mile or so away so that I could climb out of the boot and into the back seat.
None of the best hotels in Manhattan would let me stay any more because they didn't want to be besieged by my fans, so instead I was driven to some dump out in the suburbs where a room had been reserved for me under an alias.
There I was, the highest-paid solo male artist in the world at the time, being dropped off at a shabby motel, still wearing the sweat-drenched white jumpsuit I had worn on stage. I didn't know where I was, I had no money and no clothes except for what I was wearing.
Lying alone in the bathtub for an hour and a half, I waited for someone to call or come and get me. I didn't know where anybody was. I suddenly understood why Marilyn Monroe couldn't get a date on Saturday nights.
'What am I doing this for?' I wondered.
It was a question I had asked myself many times since my role in the hit TV series The Partridge Family had turned me into an unwilling teen idol.
Being famous had never been my aim. In entering showbusiness, I wanted only to become a serious actor like my father Jack Cassidy who prided himself on having learnt his craft over many years.
A charming but utterly selfish man who had left my mother for another woman when I was only three, he rarely made the effort to spend time with me as a child and things had never been good between us.
Deep down I hoped that if I became an actor too it might bring us closer together. Instead, my success had just bent his ego out of shape and made him incredibly jealous.
He couldn't stand the whole screaming teen idol thing and used to say that I was living like 'a monkey in a cage'.
In one interview, he dismissed me as a 'bubble gum star' whose bubble would soon burst. It hit a nerve because I was far from happy with my career myself.
More and more, I felt resentful of the David Cassidy the public saw. The sweet and innocent goody-goody image wasn't the real me and soon after the Madison Square Garden concert I made a decision which many around me considered to be professional suicide.
I agreed to let the music magazine Rolling Stone send their writer Robin Green, a woman known for her revealing interviews, to travel around with me for a few days with virtually unrestricted access to my life.
I liked the idea of being profiled in a serious and respected rock journal, rather than just another cheesy teeny-bopper magazine. I wanted the public to know who I really was and I spoke freely of my frustrations at being pigeonholed as this pre-packaged pop singer for pre-pubescent girls.
Robin Green's agenda, of course, was to find anything that would be shocking and controversial about me.
As we arrived for one concert in Maine, she watched as I jumped into a limousine which contained two women wearing nothing but bikinis and lollipops stuck all over their bodies - a welcome present from the promoters.
After the show, she overheard me yelling at my business manager to find these women and make sure they ended up in my bedroom.
Back home in LA, she came to the house I shared with my friends Sam and Steve and saw Sam sunning himself naked while she interviewed me.
She also saw a half-empty bottle of booze in my room and smelled pot in the air. It may not sound like much, but for her it was enough.
I explained that the pot wasn't mine. I hadn't smoked it since 1968 because it made me stupid and paranoid but Robin chose to betray my trust in her and imply in the article that I was using illegal drugs.
Meanwhile, some readers read the reference to my naked roommate, put it together with my admission that I wasn't in a meaningful, long-term relationship with any one woman, and came to the bizarre conclusion that I was coming out as a homosexual.
All in all, it was a public relations disaster - but my worst blunder came with the photo-shoot to accompany the story. It was done by Annie Leibovitz, the best photographer in the world, and she said she'd like to photograph me naked. 'Great idea,' I said.
My manager went insane and begged me not to do it, but I went ahead. I wanted to reveal the real me and they said it would all be very tasteful. Maybe a hint of body hair or something, but nothing graphic.
The picture went on the cover with the headline 'Naked Lunchbox' - a mocking reference to the fact that my merchandising people made lots of money from children's lunchboxes with my face on them. The fall-out was more dramatic than I could ever have envisioned.
There was tremendous controversy and the TV bosses hated it. They just looked at me and said: 'What kind of an idiot are you?' Today they'd love that kind of media attention, but values were very different in those days.
The Partridge Family was just about the last gasp of real innocence on TV. There were no references to social problems of any kind on the show.
Yet here I was, violating the trust of young America by letting myself be photographed naked and supposedly associating myself with alcohol, drugs and all manner of other debauchery.
The backlash didn't take long. First, Coca-Cola withdrew from an episode they had been planning to sponsor. Bob Hope backed out of doing a TV special with me. Then the food manufacturer General Mills threatened to stop using me to endorse its products.
By the autumn of 1973, it was apparent that - in America at least - the David Cassidy/Partridge Family craze was over. The show's ratings, and my own record sales, began to fall precipitously.
In my heart, I wasn't sorry. At 23, my face caked in three layers of make-up, I made a less convincing teenager than ever.
I was tired of being a superstar and increasingly strung out on Valium that I was taking to calm my nerves. At night, I was haunted by insomnia; by day I was burned-out and lethargic.
I decided the only way out was to quit showbusiness entirely - doing one last season of the TV show and a final world concert tour before quitting while I was on top.
For the time being, my popularity in Britain and other places outside the States was still riding high.
At one of my last concerts, at White City Stadium in London, a 14-year-old British school girl named Bernadette Whelan was fatally injured when the crowds got out of control.
My people tried to comfort me by telling me that it wasn't my fault - that she had an existing heart condition and had suffered a heart attack during the chaos.
But years later I looked back at the newspaper coverage of the event and discovered that this wasn't true - that the coroner specifically blamed her death on asphyxia caused by her being crushed. I was devastated.
Had I known this at the time it would have intensified still further the terrible depression I felt in the years following my retirement in 1974.
Back home in America, I suffered a breakdown. Or several successive breakdowns, because each time I thought I'd fallen as low as I could go, the bottom would drop out from under me again.
For the first six months, I locked myself in my room and sat alone, talking to myself and trying to figure out my life.
The problem was that I didn't have the kind of career I wanted - and the career I'd had, I'd never wanted. Sure I still had plenty of fans but did they love me or just the manufactured image of me?
I thought I'd like to sing songs that truly expressed who I was but who was I? And would the fans have any interest in the real me anyway?
I was tormented by these questions and the easiest course was to just shut down and try to dull my existence by drinking.
At this point in my life, my father suddenly decided that he wanted to become closer to me. Maybe he was really worried about what was happening to me, I don't know, but in late 1974 he invited me to Massachusetts where he was touring in a show with my stepmother Shirley Jones.
By that stage in his life he was drinking heavily and had been diagnosed as manic depressive. He was gambling and losing a lot of money, and - as I soon discovered - he was also cheating on my stepmother.
What I remember most about that weekend was spending the night with one of the girls in the show, only to find that she had already been sleeping with my dad. When she told him she'd had sex with me, I think this probably sent him further over the edge.
He appeared to suffer a complete breakdown and was committed to a mental hospital for 48 hours. A week or so afterwards, acting as if nothing had happened, he called me up and invited me to lunch.
When I arrived, it was clear that he had been drinking and though he tried to act like we had this unbreakable father-son bond, he soon got to the point: he wanted to borrow ten thousand dollars from me.
I told him I didn't have it. I knew that if I gave it to him, he would probably blow it on alcohol and spiral further out of control. That was the last time I saw him alive.
One Saturday night in December 1976, I was up late, drinking and listening to music with friends. Because that was such an unhappy period of my life, I always wanted to keep the party going, so I didn't have to be alone or deal with real life.
Around five in the morning, I still felt too wired to call it a night. We had the radio on in the background and suddenly we heard on the news that my father was dead.
By then, he was living apart from my stepmother and that night he had been out drinking. When he returned home, he fell asleep on the couch, dropping a lit cigarette and starting a blaze which swept through his apartment and killed him.
The realisation of what had happened didn't really hit me until I got to Shirley's house and saw my half-brothers there. We were the only ones who could relate to each other's loss. I collapsed, dropped to my knees and wept like a child.
I was sorry I hadn't seen my father for the last months of his life. If I had one more chance to speak to him again: I'd say 'I forgive you.' But I couldn't do that at 25 which is how old I was when he died.
Afterwards I learned that he had cut me out of his will - not that there was much to inherit since most of his estate was eaten up by taxes and legal fees.
When I heard they were planning to sell off his clothes and other belongings, I bought his pocket watch before the auction, just to have it to remember him by. He had had it engraved to himself. That was my father for you.
Perhaps he had excluded me from his will because he thought I was rich and could take care of myself. In fact, the very opposite was true. Between 1970 and 1974, I had made the equivalent of about £4 million. Yet just a few years later, my net worth was less than £50,000.
Much of my money had gone thanks to a series of business advisors who were either dishonest or incompetent. One simply ran off with hundreds of thousands of dollars of my money. Another invested in whatever scheme would give him the biggest commission, regardless of the likely return for me.
Thanks to him, I sank a fortune into an oil excavation company which turned out to be a huge scam - the perpetrators actually painted water pipes orange to convince investors that they were oil pipelines. I got burned really badly.
Perhaps I might have found it easier to deal with such setbacks if I had found the right person to share my life with but I was seemingly incapable of making wise decisions when it came to relationships.
In 1977, I married a bright and beautiful actress named Kay Lenz within just six weeks of meeting her. We had both just lost our fathers and were unhappy souls who somehow made each other laugh.
That seemed good enough for me but we should just have remained friends because we were certainly not compatible as a couple. One problem was that Kay couldn't deal with the attentions of my old fans, some of whom kept coming on to me right in front of her. For my part, I found it difficult to accept that she was the main breadwinner in our home.
We divorced in 1982, leaving me free to embark on a second disastrous marriage - to Meryl Tanz, a strikingly attractive divorcee from South Africa.
She was psychologically unbalanced but since I have always felt from the time that I was a little boy that I could make everybody OK, I believed I could fix her. I was wrong.
After 18 months of fighting, raging, screaming and crying, I packed what I could fit into two suitcases and walked out the door, never to return.
I left that marriage with not much more than £500 in my bank account. My only possessions were the things I could carry out of the house. I didn't have a car. I didn't have a job. And I didn't have anywhere to live.
I was smoking and drinking way too much. I even began to black out on a number of occasions.
Struggling to afford the rent on a room in a friend's two-bedroom flat, I soon faced another major drain on my finances.
In 1986, an affair I'd had with an actress resulted in the birth of my daughter Katie. I found myself hit by a paternity suit and somehow had to find the money to pay child support.
As if I needed any confirmation that my life was not working in almost every imaginable way, I made the mistake of accepting an invitation to a party in Aspen, Colorado, which was thrown by the Miami Vice star Don Johnson, an old friend of mine from the days when we were both struggling to make it as young actors.
I had been invited by another friend who assured me that my name would be on the guest list and I was one of the first to arrive. There were only about 12 people there and Don was holding court, wearing a ridiculously expensive mohair suit.
This was a guy who'd known me from the beginning, who'd been to my home, an old, old friend. Yet when I walked up and greeted him, he just looked at me, smiled tightly for a fraction of a second, and then went back to his conversation with somebody else. He completely blanked me.
I laughed to try to break the tension. 'Don, you're kidding right?'
When he didn't turn round, I said: 'Don't do this, Don.'
No response.
'I don't f***ing believe it,' I said and walked away.
At the time it hurt. It seemed like a thousand people walked through the door of the party, a veritable who's who of showbiz. I walked out quietly, alone. Nobody noticed I'd left, I'm sure.
Some people might have given up at this point in their lives. But somehow I always believed I had the talent and strength to make it through this darkness, and in 1986 I received a phone call which was to mark the beginning of my recovery.
It was from Sue Shifrin, a beautiful singer-songwriter I had dated briefly back in 1973. All these years later we began seeing each other again.
Once I re-connected with Sue, I really began to shift my life from the dark side into the light. Just being around her made me feel better - she was so positive, so supportive, so loving.
Her whole attitude was: 'I don't care that you're a drunk, David; I don't care that you're a mess. And I don't care that you have no money.'
When someone embraces you at your lowest point, it really means something. It carried a lot of weight with me.
Sue and I married in 1991, shortly before the birth of our son Beau and I have since rebuilt my life from the bottom up - working on stage in musicals such as Blood Brothers, resuming my concert career and pursuing my passion for breeding horses.
Today I have a deep, caring and supportive relationship with my daughter Katie Cassidy. Both she and Beau want to follow me into showbusiness and while I hope I have been able to inspire them, my wish is that they find happiness in their lives, not just fame or money.
That is what I pursue and that is what I believe in. My attitude used to be that we were all in a race and those of us who achieved the most success, the most fame, the most money, the most power were the winners. That isn't how I view life any more. That view is for fools.
Now I know that there is no race. There are no trophies. The only people who really win are the people who get hugged by their loved ones every morning and can go to bed at night knowing they've done right by themselves and by the people they love.
Extracted from Could It Be Forever by David Cassidy, published by Headline on March 8 at £18.99. To order a copy for £17.10 (p&p free), call 0870 161 0870.
Read more:
. The dark side of a teen idol
. The dark side of a teen idol...part 2
