Read Could It Be Forever? My Story Online
Authors: David Cassidy
Sam Hyman:
I was fortunate to have nice girlfriends and some long-term relationships. David and I would sit down and talk and I’d say, ‘Man, I wish I had the Midas touch like you. You
can have a hundred girls in a hundred days if you want.’ And he would say, ‘Man, I wish I had a long-term relationship like you.’ Here was a young man who was vying for the love of his father and not getting it, and wasn’t able to have a meaningful relationship. It took him a long time to mature emotionally in that way. I don’t care if you’re famous or not, having that life partner is such an important part of one’s life.
I
gave interviews all the time, but the teen magazines wrote what their readers wanted me to say, not what came out of my mouth. They could ask, ‘What do you think about most?’ And I could’ve said, ‘I like getting sex in my dressing room in between takes.’ And they would’ve said, ‘David would like to walk down the beach alone and read poetry with that someone special he’s yet to find. You could be that person.’ That’s funny. I had no time for a walk on the beach. There was never any of that. They were all fabricated stories for their readers.
Sandy Stert Benjamin (associate editor,
Tiger Beat
):
Because of the volume of magazines we were putting out, plus the fact
that the people who were around long enough, like David, were in every issue of every magazine, you had to fudge a bit. We had to get the material out there without having to call them on the phone or be in their face every five seconds.
He and Susan Dey did an advice column called ‘David and Susan Tell It Like It Is’ and I was writing that. If anybody paid attention to any of the advice in there, hey, I hope it worked out for them because I was trying my best. I was a teenager myself – just fresh out of high school when I was hired – and was actually the youngest one on staff at the time.
Ann Moses (editor,
Tiger Beat
):
The headline on the cover of the January 1971 issue of
Tiger Beat
was ‘David Cassidy Quits’. Now what’s the story about? We’d been protecting David for six months or a year because he chain-smoked. So in this story we had a picture of him smoking from one of our photo sessions. It was the first one we ever published. We would never normally publish a picture of a teen idol smoking. We were a part of their whole image. So the story, which went on for two pages, was about how he had quit smoking. I don’t call that a fabrication, I call that taking one sentence and making it into a two-page article.
We had a headline, ‘David’s Struggle with Death’. Our photographer, Kenny Lieu, went with David and Sam Hyman to Hawaii. David was into scuba diving and he ran out of air underwater and they buddy-breathed ’till they got to the surface. But, of course, the headline is, ‘His Brush with Death’.
Sharon Lee (editor,
The Partridge Family Magazine
/editor and editorial director,
Tiger Beat
, 1972–84):
The articles were
based on one kernel of truth and then were expanded pretty dramatically. That’s how all the teen magazines operated. You’d get an interview and use parts of the same interview over and over. You’d take something that David said and just elaborate on it. A lot of it was quotations that you just made up and some of the people didn’t even care. For instance, we ran a column by Susan Dey and she never even looked at it. We were very creative as writers. We’d have idea sessions. We’d clip things from newspapers, titles that sounded good. We’d look at a photo where David looked really sad and think, ‘What can we write about to go with the picture?’ We’d come up with the idea that his heart was breaking because he didn’t have free time. Then we’d write our story based on that idea. It was true, he didn’t have free time. We had to deliver stories that would capture the readers’ attention. We’d have to be creative and really descriptive. Instead of saying, ‘David walked into the room smiling,’ it’s ‘David walked into the room with the light glowing on his hair and his eyes sparkling and his lips open . . .’ You had to make it
dramatic
.
Sam Hyman:
I did a monthly column for
Tiger Beat
but I didn’t actually do the writing. I’d tell the writer something like, ‘OK, this month we did this. Why don’t we talk about how he got a new car?’ After a while it was pretty lame. He was such a big star and he had to have so many stories written about him that the articles would just be a bunch of fluff, like: David goes on a picnic with his old friend. But the kids wanted to know as much about him as possible. And the magazines were portraying a very squeaky-clean image. You’re portraying an image and you
perpetuate it and you’ve got a machine behind you to let everybody think this is what it is. It’s the same today. It drove him nuts. He couldn’t wait to break away from it.
On television I may have been playing a 16-year-old, but my fans knew I was really older. For one thing, the teen magazines would make a huge deal out of my birthday. Every reader knew when I turned 21 on 12 April 1971, because Chuck Laufer threw a ‘surprise party’ (translation: photo op) for me. His magazines published photo after photo of Sam Hyman, Steve Ross and me opening presents and reading cards. One typical posed photo showed Sam ‘surprising’ me by dumping boxes of cards from fans over my head. The caption assured everyone that I had read each and every one. That sounded much better than what really happened, which was that the Laufer Company, which was licensed to handle my fan mail, simply recorded the names and addresses of everyone who wrote to me so they could be added to their mailing lists, and the mail disappeared. I never saw any of it. But, those youngsters would then be solicited to purchase other David Cassidy and
The Partridge Family
memorabilia, as well as subscribe to Laufer publications. Nice work, eh? Clearly, I never saw any of the fan mail, and I certainly never got any money out of it.
Other birthday party photos showed Laufer magazine editors giving me supplies of cashews and 7 Up (which the magazines relentlessly reminded readers was my drink of choice). Another photo showed me hoisting what could have been mistaken for a large glass of champagne if you
didn’t read the caption, supposedly quoting my own words: ‘Time out for cake and 7 Up, and a toast to you for making this the happiest birthday of all. I never expected such love from you. How can I thank you?’ Another caption had me insisting that this Laufer-organised event was ‘my all-time best birthday’. Yet another had me accepting a poster from Sharon Lee, editor of the Laufer publication
Tiger Beat Spectacular.
The caption quoted me as responding, ‘Gosh, Laufer’s editors are so wonderful.’ Gosh, that sure does sound like me talking all right.
And the editors informed the presumably lovesick young readers nationwide, ‘David wants all of YOU to know that he loves you very much and without your love he couldn’t have known happiness.’ And, ‘David wishes he could give YOU a hug and a kiss to let you know how much he appreciates your thinking of him.’
Even though I didn’t really have any use for them, I was touched by the care fans took in sending me gifts, particularly the handmade ones. I got a lot of those, I suppose because most fans realised that I was already a millionaire. A fan who sent a really great birthday gift knew she might even be lucky enough to see her name in one of the magazines. They’d print a line saying, ‘David is going to use the hand-knitted Afghan sent by fan Eileen Fry of Bellmar, NJ, as his bedspread,’ and other fans would rush to send similar gifts.
One person who really should have been cognisant of my age – but, fortunately for me, was not – was the lawyer for Screen Gems (or its parent company at the time, Columbia
Pictures Industries), who drew up the contract signing me to them.
You see, when I signed that remarkably one-sided contract I was under 21 years of age and so, as a minor at that time, the contract would only have been valid had either my father or my mother or another legal guardian signed it. But they just assumed I was an adult. They didn’t check. That one little oversight would wind up costing Screen Gems a lot of money.
The show went into production with me being paid just $600 a week, little more than scale (the very lowest amount they can pay anyone). They promised to give me modest raises in subsequent years. With that contract, they believed they had acquired all the rights to my name, voice and likeness for seven years. At some point, however, someone from Screen Gems finally realised they’d made a mistake and that the contract was not legally valid. The work I’d been doing for Screen Gems and its affiliates, including Bell Records, was not under contract at all.
Rather sheepishly, they asked if they could just get one of my parents to sign the contract so it would be binding. Ruth, of course, knew better than to allow that. Now, for the first time, we clearly had the upper hand. She went in to see them on my behalf. By this point, the show had been running for more than a year, my record sales were in the millions, I was on the covers of magazines. I was
the
hot young dude. Screen Gems and Bell Records needed me.
Ruth told them, ‘Look, you’ve treated this person badly. You’re making millions of dollars off David Cassidy and are
paying him just $600 a week. I want you to remove his name, his voice and his likeness from everything unless you are willing to make him a profit participant.’
The first time she said it they freaked. Never before had anyone shown any guts with these people. I mean, they raped everybody who ever worked for them. The Monkees received nothing compared to the money they earned for the company. But that was standard in the industry at that time. Who got the profits? The corporations. Screen Gems and Bell Records stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars off me, yet they were content to pay me less than they would have paid guys in middle management. Ruth said she wouldn’t stand for it. She was about to change the rules of the game.
Bob Claver (executive producer,
The Partridge Family
):
Ruth renegotiated a contract that he (David) was entitled to. The studio was expecting the worst. She could have asked for almost any amount of money but she didn’t. She had the power to have had the show taken off the air but she didn’t. She was a wonderful, honest, forthright, intelligent person . . . a rare bird.
In the end I wound up owning a piece of the
net
profits, which at that point was unprecedented. Columbia Pictures and Screen Gems had never given up a piece to anybody. My base salary shot up to $4,000 a week. That was a lot of money in 1971! And as a token of their appreciation, Screen Gems also gave me a new Corvette, a classic move in Hollywood and the record industry. A performer is expected
to feel grateful for the wonderful gift and to be less inclined to check carefully whether he is being paid fairly. I took the bait.
Under the contract I had originally signed, I was not to have been paid
anything
for making records – that was to have been part of the work for the salary I got. Ruth insisted I’d now have to be paid royalties for my records too. We settled on the following terms: for all the records issued under my own name (and the first David Cassidy single,
Cherish
, was on the
Billboard
charts for 12 weeks, beginning 6 November 1971) and all
Partridge Family
recordings, I’d receive five per cent of the net profits to $500,000, six per cent to $1 million and seven per cent thereafter. This was a very good royalty rate in 1971; today it would be three times that.
Ruth also insisted that I participate in the profits derived from all
Partridge Family
or David Cassidy merchandising, that is to say, anything that Screen Gems licensed using
The Partridge Family
or David Cassidy names or likenesses, from a poster to a lunchbox. Sounds good, right?
Ruth further insisted that the period the contract covered be shortened from seven years to four years. After four years, we figured we could probably negotiate an even better deal, or I could go elsewhere and do better. Screen Gems took the attitude that they had made me a star, just like they had made The Monkees stars, and that I was raping them. They felt that I was becoming too big for my boots. Screen Gems had helped launch my career, but now it was me that the public wanted. I had a notion that
The Partridge Family
TV show might even be holding me back. I didn’t want to
be tied down for seven long years. I wanted greater freedom to express myself as a creative artist. I wanted freedom to do whatever I chose after four years. And I wanted to be paid. I could envision my career continuing to grow in subsequent years – concerts, records, TV and films. Ultimately, I got most of the terms that I asked for.
I still wound up being paid a lot less money than I should have been. Ruth simply didn’t have experience in the record business or merchandising. She’d certainly never represented an ‘idol’ before.
One mistake we made when renegotiating was that we agreed to accept a percentage of the net profits. We should have insisted upon a percentage of gross income. With clever accounting, a record company, for example, could claim that even if they grossed hundreds of millions of dollars on my recordings, their net profits – and consequently the royalties they had to pay me – were actually surprisingly small. At one point, when we suspected that Bell Records was not paying me all that it should, we had an audit done which indicated they owed me an additional $400,000. They then grudgingly gave me about half of that, which I accepted, knowing that if I fought them in a long court battle, I’d spend a fortune in attorneys’ fees.
I earned virtually nothing on merchandising – a total of $15,000, even though every time I turned around someone was marketing another product bearing my name. They were making the money, not me. But Ruth and I were barely aware of what was going on in the merchandising field and we let millions of dollars slip through our fingers. If we got
a report that only 6,000 David Cassidy posters had been sold in a certain period, at very little profit, we didn’t challenge those figures. By the time Ruth was managing my brother Shaun’s career in the late 70s, she was much more knowledgeable about merchandising deals and watched the money much more carefully. I think Shaun made a million dollars from the sale of posters and related items, even though his career as a pop star didn’t last as long as mine.