David Cassidy on the Web
C'MON GET HAPPY ...
January 19, 2008
www.jacksonville.com
... that we have a cast member from The Partridge Family here.
By Charlie Patton,
The Times-Union
There was a time in the early 1980s when Dave Madden tried to take his two young children to Disneyland and found himself so mobbed by autograph seekers that he had to leave.
By then the run of four seasons in prime time for The Partridge Family was almost a decade past. But the show about a fictional family of pop singers lived on in reruns.
Madden, then a middle-age comedian and actor who had played the band's curmudgeon of a manager, Reuben Kincaid, had in the words of TV critic David Bianculli "emerged as some sort of mini-icon for the X-Generation, like some bell-bottomed Barney Fife."
Today, Madden is far less likely to provoke a mob scene in, say, the aisles of the Publix in Fruit Cove.
For one thing, he's older and not so instantly recognizable, his blonde hair gone white, his "lugubrious basset hound's face" (to use TV Guide's phrase) fleshier.
But when he speaks, he's still instantly recognizable as the put-upon band manager who served - and sometimes still serves - as verbal sparring partner to Danny Partridge, a.k.a. Danny Bonaduce.
"Heads pop up when Dave speaks," his wife, Sandra Madden, writes in a new book the two collaborated on.
Which raises the question: Why is Madden - who also made his mark as a stand-up comedian, a member of the ensemble cast of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In and a recurring character on the sitcom Alice - hanging out in northern St. Johns County?
The answer is that he and Sandra, who met when they both attended the University of Miami in the late 1950s and married 10 years ago, decided to move to Northeast Florida about a year ago to be close to Sandra's grandchildren.
Still in show biz
Madden turned 76 in December and is mostly retired now, though he still flies to Los Angeles a few times a year to voice a character on the long-running syndicated radio program Adventures in Odyssey.
Meanwhile, the Maddens have just finished Reuben on Wry: The Memoirs of Dave Madden.
It's a breezy read, the sort of book you'd expect from a man who started as a stand-up comedian and by the early 1960s was opening for Frank Sinatra and headlining at the Playboy clubs, which were new and very chic.
But Madden hated the lifestyle of a stand-up comedian. He didn't like the hours, he didn't like the travel and he didn't drink. So he quit comedy pretty much for good about the time he landed the job in The Partridge Family. He'd already spent one season in the failed sitcom Camp Runamuck and one season in the cast of the wildly successful Laugh-In.
The Partridge Family ran 96 episodes in all. By then, David Cassidy, who played Keith Partridge, had become a teenage heartthrob as a pop singer. Between the TV show and the constant tours, Cassidy was exhausted. When he quit the show, ABC canceled it.
The show actually hadn't been a huge hit, finishing in the top 20 in the Nielsen ratings in its second and third seasons, but never in the top 10. But like The Brady Bunch, its lead-in on Friday night for two seasons, The Partridge Family lived on in reruns every weekday afternoon for most of the '70s, gradually acquiring cult status.
"It was like the show was on for 10 years," Madden said.
Adding to that cult status were the travails of Bonaduce, with whom Madden had the same sort of relationship that Reuben Kincaid had with Danny Partridge - affection mixed with exasperation. On the day of the Times-Union interview, the Maddens had just received Bonaduce's Christmas card ... about three weeks late.
Dueling with Danny
During the run of the series, Madden often took Bonaduce to stay at his beach house on the weekends. Madden had not yet married and become a father, and Bonaduce had a troubled relationship with a volatile father. Bonaduce, who is now 48, has since claimed in a book and in interviews that he began drinking during wild parties at the beach house.
This annoys Madden, the teetotaler, who says he hosted no wild parties.
But in a section of his book devoted to the performers to whom he feels close after a lifetime in show business, he concludes with the sentence: "... There will always be room at my table for Danny Bonaduce and David Cassidy."
Madden has ambivalent feelings about the show that made him famous. For one thing, he writes, "The 'fame and fortune' aspect of show business disappointed me."
The residuals from The Partridge Family ran out a long time ago and he had no illusions that it was great art.
And yet, when people do recognize him these days, "They always say, 'Mr. Kincaid, you were a part of my childhood,' " Sandra Madden said.
"Old people in their 80s say I'm a part of their childhood," Madden said with a theatrical wince.
But what they remember, Sandra Madden writes in the book, is that Reuben Kincaid/Dave Madden made them laugh: "Who could ask for a better legacy?"
charlie.patton@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4413 'Reuben on Wry' 'The Memoirs of Dave Madden' Dave Madden, a.k.a. The Partridge Family's manager, Reuben Kincaid, and his wife recently published a book. The trade paperback retails for $13.99 and can be ordered through several online bookstores including Amazon.com. Madden also has a Web site, www.reubenkincaidbook.com.
