David Cassidy on the Web
NEPOTISM: Cassidy keeps his family close in musical comedy
July 27, 2009
By Scott Collins
LOS ANGELES TIMES
www2.journalnow.com
Nepotism is not unknown in the TV business, but with his latest project, Shaun Cassidy has taken family ties to a new extreme.
Cassidy is the 1970s teen idol who has spent the past 15 years as a television writer-producer of cult dramas with a sci-fi bent (American Gothic, Invasion). Now he has turned his attention to musical comedy with ABC Family's Ruby & the Rockits, about two middle-age brothers, former rock gods who become reacquainted after the long-lost daughter of one of them re-enters the picture. The series premiered last week; new episodes are shown at 8:30 p.m. Tuesdays.
For the cast, Cassidy stayed close to home -- literally. One of the leads is his half-brother, David, who had his own heartthrob stint as the lead singer on The Partridge Family, the early '70s sitcom about a family of rock singers that Ruby deliberately echoes. The other is stage actor Patrick Cassidy, the younger brother whom Shaun freely admits torturing endlessly during childhood (and well beyond, according to Patrick). The clannishness doesn't stop there: Ryan, the youngest Cassidy brother, works behind the scenes as the show's lead set dresser. The title character, David's 15-year-old daughter, is played by former Spy Kids star Alex Vega.
Is it all too twistedly self-referential? As the writer in the family, Shaun Cassidy is aware of the dangers.
"The double-edged sword of working with family is it can be the most fulfilling experience you've ever had," Cassidy, 50, said during a recent interview in his office on the CBS lot, where Ruby is filmed. "But the flip side is it can also be the most tortuous and most stressful, because it's your family, and the lines can get blurry."
The brothers are all sons of Jack Cassidy, the comic actor whose presence continues to hang over the family nearly 33 years after his death. David is the son of Cassidy and Evelyn Ward; Cassidy later married actress Shirley Jones, the mother of Shaun, Patrick and Ryan. Jones, in a paradoxical twist, played David's birth mother on The Partridge Family.
When a visitor entered a soundstage where the Ruby cast was rehearsing, the four brothers were chuckling over an old photo of their father. It showed Jack Cassidy in costume for He & She, a 1967-68 CBS sitcom in which he played a preening, hyperconfident actor. In a coincidence that almost seemed preordained, the Cassidy brothers are toiling on the same studio lot where He & She was shot more than four decades ago.
According to Shaun, his father's personality, on-screen and off, inspired the character of David Gallagher, the narcissistic performer whom David Cassidy plays on Ruby. "It's just who he is. It's very larger than life," Patrick, 47, says of David's character on the show. "Everything is extreme."
Even today, the sons seem to wrestle with ambivalent feelings toward their father. David has described Jack in interviews as an alcoholic, a sufferer of bipolar disorder and a closet bisexual who broke his heart by abandoning him when he was young.
But for this story, David, who at 59 has thinner hair but is nearly as lean as during his pop-idol days, offered a balancing perspective: "If you put all my brothers together, we would add up to all the talent that was in my father."
The burden of spinning laughter out of this tangled family history fell to Shaun. The key, he realized early, was to satirize the pop-music stardom he experienced in his first brush with fame during the days of disco suits and shag hairdos.
He remembers being flown to a gig in Hawaii when he was 19 and seeing thousands of fans spelling out his name with their bodies on Waikiki Beach. It was a surreal experience, he says: "I was sort of in it, but not of it. It was all out-of-body for me." Cassidy found more fame on ABC's The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, then spent much of the 1980s in the theater. But by the time he co-starred with David in the Broadway hit Blood Brothers during the early 1990s, Shaun had tired of performing. He switched to writing and producing with the 1995-96 cult series American Gothic and the 2005-06 science-fiction series Invasion.
The premise of Ruby has David and Patrick Gallagher, hit-making brothers behind the 1980s group the Rockits, who find their lives upturned after David's daughter Ruby re-enters the picture. Patrick settled down and became a car dealer and family man; David is still playing small casinos and chasing a comeback. Asked if he'll find a part for his mother, the 75-year-old former Partridge Family matriarch, Shaun replies: "We haven't written her in yet, but it's coming. She comes to every taping."
