David Cassidy on the Web
David Cassidy interview
Monday, September 05, 2011
By Mark Voger
The Star-Ledger
www.nj.com
"I can remember being down in that area Belmar, Seaside Heights, Asbury Park and all those places that I went back and revisited," says David Cassidy of summers at the Jersey Shore.
Whenever singer David Cassidy plays New Jersey, it's a homecoming.
The onetime teen idol remembered by a generation of swooning teens as guitar-strumming Keith Partridge in the '70s musical sitcom, "The Partridge Family" lived in West Orange with his maternal grandparents from age 5 to 11.
"I played Little League," Cassidy says in a recent call. "There was a field that's still there. I went back and took my son (Beau) through there a couple of years ago. We drove all through where I grew up. We visited the house my grandparents owned. My mom was raised there.
"I had a lot of very religious influences Christian religious," he says, launching into his conservative, blue-collar credentials.
His grandfather, a Methodist, and grandmother, an Episcopalian, were involved in their respective churches. Cassidy became the soloist in the junior choir; his grandmother was a pianist and soloist in the senior choir. There was a lot of Bible school, according to the singer.
"It probably was subconsciously something that later on in life, as I went through becoming extremely successful early on helped to keep me grounded," he says.
Cassidy a recent "Celebrity Apprentice" participant who is scheduled to perform in Englewood on Wednesday and Red Bank on Oct. 6 wants to tell his fans that he is still grounded, despite his DUI bust in Florida in November. He doesn't deny culpability in the incident, which he calls "a great wake-up."
Explains the New York native, 61: "I had come from a funeral. I was with a buddy of mine. I dropped him off at the airport. I made a horrible mistake.
"I can't say anything other than I'm really strong, healthy, clean, sober. I don't drink at all now. It was a great wake-up for me and something that I'm grateful for."
Cassidy says he received "an education" from the activist group Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
"Getting behind the wheel when you're impaired is a horrible, horrible thing to do," he says. "Just don't do it. It's something that I now know I will never do again."
Boyhood years
Cassidy's parents, actors Jack Cassidy and Evelyn Ward, divorced when he was 5, at which point Cassidy and his mother relocated to West Orange.
"My mom used to take me down to the Jersey Shore when I was 7, 8, 9 years old," the singer says.
"I can remember being down in that area Belmar, Seaside Heights, Asbury Park and all those places that I went back and revisited."
Cassidy was bitten by the acting bug, and moved to Los Angeles as a teenager. He graduated from high school after working with the LA Theater Company during his senior year.
"I moved back to New York and took a job in a mail room," he recalls. "My father had a guest house. He was doing a Broadway musical at the time."
It wasn't long before he found an agent. "By fate, someone from the film company went to New York to see young actors," he says.
Cassidy found himself on a plane back to Los Angeles. A screen test led to Cassidy landing roles on one-hour TV dramas such as "Marcus Welby," "Ironside," "Bonanza" and "Medical Center."
"In a very short period of time," he says, "actors can become kind of relevant and hot. At the end of that season, they did pilots. I had to do a number of different auditions for a half-hour situation comedy with music."
That show would become his breakthrough: "The Partridge Family." Cassidy, who had been in bands as a teenager, sang and played guitar for his auditions.
David Cassidy (third from right) with the cast of "The Partridge Family."
"Even though the network and the studio didn't care, I started off playing (the Jimi Hendrix song) 'Voodoo Child,'" Cassidy says with a laugh.
"Because at first, there wasn't any music. Nobody knew what the music was going to be like. They knew I could sing, they knew I could play, but I was cast as an actor, as everybody else was."
By coincidence, Cassidy's stepmother, Oscar-winner Shirley Jones, was also cast in the sitcom, in which the singing Partridges traveled across the country in a psychedelic bus performing rock concerts.
Sudden fame followed; Cassidy found himself on posters, lunchboxes, trading cards and the cover of hundreds of teen magazines.
"It was fascinating how quickly it evolved, just by fate," he says.
"It was obviously God's intent. I feel very, very fortunate to have had all of the stars align to do that. Because I was able to not only become very successful, but to touch people's lives and bring light into their lives."
But Cassidy says he was never swayed by the flattery and attention of sudden celebrity.
Says the singer: "My dad told me early on, 'Talent is the only commodity that survives.' That's how, in his words, I did it. He said, 'You've got it,' and that success is not always going to ascend. Nobody's does. (Frank) Sinatra, probably his biggest influence, had terrible years."
During this period, Cassidy missed the nurturing environment he knew in New Jersey.
"I can remember when I moved to Los Angeles," he says, "I really longed for just the real, grounded, no-illusion it was just very loving, supportive and very genuine. I never felt like I belonged in L.A., in Hollywood."
To this day, while touring, Cassidy occasionally hears from old friends and classmates from his West Orange years.
"It's kind of cool," he says. "People that I went to grammar school with come to see me. I get notes backstage saying, 'I was in the third grade with you.' A couple of them, I actually remembered playing ball with them and I remember little snapshots.
"It's pretty great. Having traveled all over the world and done so much diverse work, it's just really a nice thing to know that I'm still attached, and they still feel a connection to me."
Personal mission
Earlier this year, Cassidy appeared on "Celebrity Apprentice." The singer says he was not keen to appear on a reality series, but "Apprentice" figurehead Donald Trump twisted his arm and appealed to a pet cause of Cassidy's.
"Originally," the singer says, "I had turned it down. I was offered the first year of what is that show? I can't watch it 'Dancing With the Stars.' Having gone through a lot of theater and choreography and dancing I'm not a trained dancer, but I've done enough. And I thought, 'You know what? It just feels, to me, very flimsy.' It's about people wanting to get on TV. I really have no interest in doing celebrity reality shows."
But Trump called Cassidy after he had turned it down: "He said, 'You know, you could raise up to three-quarters of a million dollars for your charity,' which is something I'm about to embark upon."
Cassidy says he is gearing up to lecture and record public service announcements to bolster awareness of Alzheimer's disease.
"This is something I am very passionate about," he says. "My mother has had severe dementia. She's been in nursing care for seven years almost five years now in 24-hour nursing care. She has no quality of life. She has disappeared.
"She can't feed herself, she lives in a diaper, and she's my mother. She raised me and brought me up. This vibrant, wonderful, beautiful woman is gone. She can't do anything for herself. It's very painful. I'm her only surviving relative. I've had to take care of her, and also my wife and kids."
Cassidy warns that many Americans will be facing this plight in the near future.
"That's why they call us the 'sandwich generation,'" he says. "But we are the Baby Boomers, the largest percentage of our population. As we age, I don't want my kids to have to think about taking care of me and watching me disappear.
"It needs to be addressed. Right now, this year, the earliest Baby Boomers are of retirement age. It's going to be an epidemic. We need to be very proactive about it."
Satirizing fame
On a lighter note, Cassidy is well aware that he is the subject of Allison Pearson's best-selling novel about an obsessed fan, which Pearson named after a 1970 No. 1 hit that he sang: "I Think I Love You."
"I read it," he says, laughing again.
"I thought it was great. She's a wonderful author. I removed myself from it. I just read it as a piece of literature.
"Clearly, I understand who I am and what I represented to my fans. I have heard about the impact from their perspective, so it would be disingenuous for me to say I didn't realize that. Of course I did. If you lived my life, you would have understood."
Cassidy has always maintained a bemused air about his former status as a teen idol.
"There's a saying in the U.K., which is 'taking the piss out of myself,' 'taking the mickey out of myself,'" he says. "Satirizing fame and celebrity is something I love doing. Even to myself.
"People need to have a sense of humor about themselves. I always have, in terms of the genre and people's perception of me, which was built on an early, mega, public-relations machine and a character I played on television. Because they merchandised and also marketed me as that character.
"I certainly was not. I was acting. But I'm really proud of the fact that people loved the work."
DAVID CASSIDY
Wednesday: With Davy Jones at 8 p.m at the Bergen Performing Arts Center, 30 N. Van Brunt St., Englewood. $59 to $145; call (201) 816-8160 or visit bergen pac.org
Oct. 6: 8 p.m at the Count Basie Theatre, 99 Monmouth St., Red Bank. $28 to $128; call (732) 842-9000 or visit countbasietheatre.org
Oct. 28: 8 p.m at the B.B. King Blues Club & Grill, 237 W. 42nd St., New York. $48.50 in advance, $55 day of show; call (212) 997-4144 or visit bbking blues.com
