David Cassidy on the Web
Imaginary lovers outlast our teenage years. Every woman has the right to a man who is so perfect he can't be real
June 19, 2010
The Times
My daughter is in love. At the tender age of 14, she has found the man of her dreams. When she thinks no one is looking, she practises signing her married name. Evie Cullen. For several months, and despite threats of what would happen if she didn't wash it off, her wrist bore a declaration in weeping blue Biro: "I love Edward Cullen and Edward Cullen loves me and only me."
I must admit that Evie and Edward's relationship is going well. They never argue. She has his picture by her bed, knows his likes and dislikes. She chomps her way loyally through his favourite breakfast cereal (Curiously Cinnamon). The only obstacle to my girl living happily ever after is that the object of her crush is a vampire. Oh, and he doesn't exist.
Edward Cullen is the hero of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga. In less than five years, Twilight has colonised the young female heart . Resistance is useless. A member of the Undead blessed with exquisite, courtly manners, Edward has merged in 50 million imaginations with the young English actor who plays him, Robert Pattinson or RPattz to his fans.
For those of us condemned to live in the dreary, mortal world with men who can't lift trucks with one hand, July 9 will be just another Friday. For the Robsessive, it's a date as keenly anticipated as her own wedding day: the release of Eclipse, the third Twilight film. Needless to say, Evie has been studying the Eclipse previews on YouTube with the pedantic intensity of a Talmudic scholar. She already knows entire passages of dialogue by heart. A few days ago, I overheard her on the phone reciting Edward/Rob's proposal in a male voice grown hoarse with wanting. "Isabella Swann, I promise to love you for ever. Every moment of forevahh."
I notice the way Evie and her friends enjoy whipping themselves into a frenzy of anticipation. The hysteria acts as a bonding glue for girls at an age when their identities are fragile and half-formed. Feeling ancient, I smile indulgently at my daughter's fervent belief in her true love. Is there anything more crazed or deluded than the teen-idol crush?
And yet, for a second, I am thrown by vertigo. Not space vertigo; more like time vertigo. A sudden plunge back through the years to a bedroom where another teenager is kneeling on the carpet, frowning as she struggles to Sellotape together the sections of a lifesize poster she has saved for the past three weeks from Jackie. On the top third is the face of the beautiful boy she is going to marry. She knows everything about David Cassidy, this young girl. His favourite colour, the names of his mother and his stepmother (Evelyn and Shirley), all the things that make him happy and sad. She squirrels away this knowledge because, one day, she senses it will give her some crucial advantage over the other girls who claim to love David as much as she does. Girls such as Paula Jones, who has recently lost all credibility by owning up to warm feelings for David Essex!
That girl assembling the David Cassidy poster was me. Thirty years later, I tried to find her again when I began work on a novel in which I wanted to explore the mystery of the crush, of the idol who burns so bright and fades so fast, and of the budding young women in his thrall. The crush is as old as hormones. It's made from hormones. Think of the young Judy Garland in Broadway Melody of 1938. Her eyes glittering with adoration, Judy stares at a scrapbook of Clark Gable photographs and sings in a voice that is half-woman, half-child: "You made me love you, I didn't want to do it."
Seventeen years later, British girls felt exactly as Judy did when Johnnie Ray crossed the Atlantic. The teenies went cavegirl crazy for the singer whose fey fragility anticipated Marc Bolan, the Bay City Rollers, Leonardo DiCaprio, Take That's Mark Owen, Westlife and a host of other wispy boys who never looked like they'd want to do any of those things that a bad boy would want to do. (Except to other boys.) One newspaper could barely contain its indignation at Ray fever: "They scream. They yell. And he's just a little man with a weedy torso and a hearing aid!"
When I went to a Cassidy concert, in 1974, I remember telling myself that I would maintain a respectful silence when David and I finally came face to face. You see, I had read that he liked girls to be ladylike. But then my hero leapt on stage in a white catsuit with sequins picking out a sun on his right buttock and I screamed along with all the other aspirant Mrs Cassidys till my lungs were sandpaper. Reader, I harried him.
Talking to my women friends about their own girlhood fantasies, I found that crushes came in all shapes and sizes. Donny Osmond, Pete Duel, Elvis, Hutch and occasionally Starsky, Fred Astaire, Ilie Nastase, Julio Iglesias, the rugged man from Poldark, even Mr Spock. Carrie told me she was so in love with David Gower that she became a Wisden fanatic to make sure she would be ready to trade batting averages on their first date. When I pointed out that the lovely blond-haired man Carrie married is rather like the England batsman, she merely smiled. Spooky, but not quite as mad as the two devout Cassidy fans who married American men with the initials D. C.
Nowadays, when girls are taught about sexually transmitted diseases before they have their first kiss, you might suppose the innocent crush would be as unfashionable as the avocado bathroom suite. Not a bit of it. There was a riot in Sydney back in April when 5,000 teens camped overnight for a concert by the Canadian munchkin Justin Bieber. (Come to think of it, if you lined up Bieber, Cassidy and Zac Efron from High School Musical they would stack inside each other like Russian dolls.) "The difference between our generation and our daughters' generation," says one senior US agent who represents Efron, "is that those guys - Zac, Robert Pattinson, Justin Bieber, the Jonas Brothers and Taylor Lautner - currently dominate the entertainment business. Being a devoted teeny bopper is totally in."
Not only is teen idolatry in riotous good health, it is now perfectly acceptable for a woman as she grows older to carry on harbouring crushes. Queueing for their morning latte, female office workers are likely to discuss how much they adore Mad Men's dark and dangerous Don Draper or Richard Armitage in Spooks, who looks out of the TV with those concerned flinty-blue eyes as if he was longing to come and help you with the recycling. Or maybe that's just me.
In its new, more mature form, the crush often comes with ironic inverted commas. During Strictly Come Dancing in 2008, British womanhood developed a "crush" on John Sergeant, who is not easily confused with Donny Osmond, but looks like he might be good fun. I blame George Clooney. Since it became clear that Gorgeous George far preferred his Vietnamese potbellied pig to any of his interchangeable brunette escorts, certain females have given up on male idols entirely. Suddenly it is cool to admit to Angela Brazil-type pashes on head girls such as Joanna Lumley and Stephanie Flanders, the BBC's thrillingly authoritative economics editor.
Sarah Jessica Parker from Sex and the City captured the mood perfectly when she admitted that she had a crush on Nicolas Sarkozy. More Monsieur Minuscule than Mr Big, the French President is not every girl's idea of a pin-up, but SJP was insistent: "There have been men in my life up to 20 years older than me whom I have had little crushes on and to this day I think that's good and important. And I'd be perfectly happy to say that in front of my husband."
Hmm. I wonder if this is yet another of those delightful areas where the female allows herself to operate a double standard. If Matthew Broderick, Sarah Jessica's husband, went public with a crush he had on Carla Bruni, would that be "good and important"? Or would Matthew be sleeping in the spare room with a fork in his eye?
Men can't have crushes because a crush is not sexual, never has been. 'Tis a consummation devoutly not to be wished. The crush means being in love with the idea of love. An idea that consumed me 30 years ago and consumes my daughter still. It's about a girl longing to be wanted and held by a beautiful boy who says: "I promise to love you for ever. Every moment of for ever."
Allison Pearson's novel I Think I Love You is published by Chatto & Windus on June 24 (£12.99 in hardback)
The daughter's view: Evie Lane, 14
I can clearly remember the moment that I fell in love with Robert Pattinson. It was when the first small teaser for the film Twilight was released, in which he plays Edward Cullen, the brooding, masochistic vampire who is desperate to be good. With his perfect golden bouffant, long lashes and undeniably ravishing crooked smile, he won the hearts of teenage girls all over the world.
But that wasn't the moment I knew we were meant to be. No, that was when I met him, in the beautiful, pale flesh. My mum was interviewing him and she had decided to take me and Lotti, my best friend, with her. As Lotti and I took deep breaths outside his room, the door opened and there he was. The love of our pubescent lives. Very tall, very awkward and very English, he nodded towards us, smiled timidly and said: "How you doing?" As he turned and went for a bathroom break (VERY sexily, of course), Lotti and I silently danced behind his back and blew kisses. Mum looked confused. "You don't seem to understand," I told her. "We just met a GOD."
Despite my desperate attempts to deny it, I must say that my obsession with Robert Pattinson is quite similar to my mother's obsession with the Spandex-wearing god that is David Cassidy. Although I am sure that Robert Pattinson would NEVER be caught in anything that, well ... camp, the way my mum smiles when his name is mentioned and the way that she still has hundreds of magazines about him scattered around her study (she says it's for research) is very similar to the way that I smile at my various posters of Rob. (Yes, we are on nickname terms ... in my head, anyway.) OK, my mother's infatuation with "that girl", as my dad refers to David Cassidy, was pretty similar to my own. I think that it will always be the same; every generation will have teenage girls who follow the lives and kiss the pictures of beautiful heart-throbs. But occasionally there will be a bizarre lone girl who thinks that she should be living in the real world instead of lusting after forbidden fruits such as Pattinson, Cassidy, McCartney, Gable ... How weird.
