David Cassidy on the Web
The face
David Cassidy: The original tweenie heart-throb
March 5, 2007
By Penny Wark
www.entertainment.timesonline.co.uk
Can there be such a thing as too much information in an autobiography? It's one thing for David Cassidy to let us know that during his pop-idol heyday women would constantly offer him sex. It's amusing to hear him respond that he liked that blatantly honest approach. But do we really need to know exactly what a notorious groupie called Barbara the Butter Queen did to him? Dignity, David, dignity.
Not that being the most desired person on the planet in the 1970s was dignified. If his new book, Could it be Forever? My Story, tells us anything, it is that it was a time of loneliness, confusion and emptiness. Having notched up seven UK Top 20 hits in four years - Cassidy has sold 35 million records - it is no wonder that in 1974 he opted out. Less dramatic than killing himself, obviously, but while Cassidy may not be the most articulate of self-analysts, he is nothing if not a pragmatist and a survivor.
He was born in New York to Jack Cassidy and Evelyn Ward, both actors. His father left the family when he was 3, and Cassidy's sense of loss and hurt was acute. Determined to be like his dad, he landed the part of Keith in the television series The Partridge Family when he was 20. Keith was 16 and girlishly cute, and as the hit singles exploded out of the show, so Cassidy became the first prepackaged star to consume the attention of 11-year-old girls. When their regular mobbing of him led London hotels to refuse to put him up, he flew into Heathrow on a private jet, recorded his Top of the Pops slot on the tarmac, and flew back to Los Angeles. By the age of 21 he was the highest-paid entertainer in the world.
But knowing that you weren't sweet Keith, as everyone thought you were, that you were the imperfect David, wasn't fun, and his feeling of powerlessness was made worse by his failure to make more than $15,000 from the merchandising that surrounded him. He drank heavily, partied hard and tried every drug, although he avoided addiction. When his father, an alcoholic who had resented his son's success, died in 1976 he knew that the paternal approval he had craved would never happen, and by 1986 he was broke. He reinvented himself on Broadway and in Las Vegas, and as a horse breeder. These days a solid marriage - his third - to a singer-songwriter called Sue Shifrin, their adult son and a caring relationship with his daughter (from a previous relationship) make him sound calm and, at long last, grown up. They live in a mansion in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
What a shame, then, that although he denies having had cosmetic surgery, he still feels the need to present himself, at the age of 56, with scarily smooth and tanned skin. Not a good look. No, David, in real life it can't be for ever.
