Read Could It Be Forever? My Story Online
Authors: David Cassidy
I asked Shaun how he experienced my success and how he thought I might have changed as a result of it.
Shaun Cassidy:
When it all began to happen for David, I was only 11, so I was too young to have a great deal of insight as to who David was as a person. I mean, I didn’t even know David sang until he did
The Partridge Family
. Up until then, my perception of David was simply as my half-brother who I hung out with. And I loved hanging out with him. I thought he was a good older brother to me when he was around. He teased me a lot, like I’d tease my younger brothers. I loved going places in the car with him.
Then suddenly he was acting on this TV show. And don’t forget,
The Partridge Family
was not just any TV show. It was very popular and it was considered very ‘wholesome’. So there I was, this kid whose mom and brother were starring in this wholesome show. And David’s music was invariably described as ‘wholesome’, too. So I acquired a
Partridge Family
kind of image by association. And, believe me, when you’re a kid going into your teens, as I was when David’s fame was reaching its peak, ‘wholesome’ is not a cool thing to be. So I pushed hard to go the other direction, to establish a different identity with my peers. And I made it clear my musical tastes were Led Zeppelin and the Stones. When I was 13, I had dreams of someday going into music, but the Partridge Family sound was the last thing I would have wanted to emulate.
From my point of view, the most important change I noticed in David as he became successful was that he just wasn’t as accessible. Timewise, he just wasn’t available as often as he had been before. I didn’t feel really close to him. He became much more insular.
Looking back with the wisdom of an adult, I’d say that when success happens to anyone as early as it did for David – or, a few years later, for me – it can be damaging, because you end up being surrounded by a lot of sycophants. And that was certainly the case with David. The same thing happened to me, too. Had I been older, more experienced, I could have said to David something like, ‘Don’t wrap yourself up in Graceland here.’ He definitely had a bit of that going on.
As I became more and more famous, my father and I saw less of each other. Things had never been great between us,
and my success only seemed to add to the tension. Every kid wants his dad to put his arm around him and say, ‘Great goin’, son. I’m really proud of you.’ I never got that.
Sam Hyman:
Just the way Jack presented himself, I think there was that intimidation factor, father to son. You know, the son could be real tough when we were together with friends, and then you get with the dad and you become the little boy. Jack would say things about David like, ‘You’re just lucky. You were at the right place at the right time and you have the right look.’
My dad didn’t have the capacity as a human being to show real emotion, and I can now forgive him for that. For years he was upstaged by his wife. And then came 1970, and he became known as Shirley Jones’s husband and David Cassidy’s father. It drove him round the bend. In his heart, I’m sure he was proud of me; he genuinely
did
care about me. But his ego was bent out of shape. However, just because his feelings were hurt, I wasn’t going to kowtow to him like a child, the way my brothers did.
Shaun Cassidy:
My father, by nature, was a very competitive guy. I don’t think you should ever be in competition with your children. I think you should only be supportive of your children. But I think what is viewed by some, including David, as only jealousy was also a lot of conflicted feelings. I think my dad was also feeling protective of David. My dad saw the career David had in the early days as one that would be very short-lived and tough to recover from. I think he was feeling competitive, but
I also think he felt,
What’s gonna happen to my son when he’s 21?
I can only say that now with the objectivity of having children who are young adults.
David didn’t live in our house. He had the extra challenge of being a guest, visiting a new family that he probably often felt threatened by. Competitiveness is common in a lot of divorced families. When kids are shuttled back and forth there’s resentment. I’m divorced and I have children who’ve grown up in two households and even if they love both sets of parents, it’s a pain to have to pack up half of your room every two weeks or in the summer and move to another place with another group of friends and new rules. All of those things are challenging and complicated and painful. The dynamic that David experienced with my father isn’t as unique as perhaps David thinks it is. It’s only unique in that it was projected on to the world stage as a result of David’s success and my father’s success.
David wanted what we all wanted from our father, which was more of a dad. My father was not a good parent. He was not a practising parent. He wasn’t a guy who really enjoyed the company of children. When my parents finally divorced, I never got a sense that anything was much different because he’d be in New York for periods of time or on the road. A lot of David’s issues related to my dad are his fantasy of what he thought he might have been missing. I don’t know that he missed as much as he thinks he did.
By the early 70s, my father was drinking like a fish every night. Although he denied he had an alcohol problem, he obviously did. He lived his life in a constant state of denial.
There were times when I overdid it, but my drinking never became a problem for me like it was for my dad. And he had a mean streak in him that surfaced when he drank.
That’s why I was glad I never really lived with him. Whenever I was with him for a few weeks while growing up, I found him an impossibly strict disciplinarian. He was so overbearing, I vowed I’d never be like him when I became a parent. And I’ve tried hard to keep that vow. Shaun has turned out to be a very good parent as well. Perhaps we’re both overcompensating because of what we suffered as kids.
My dad had such selfish household rules. He’d have silent periods when he didn’t want to be disturbed. In the morning you couldn’t make any noise and wake him up. Four boys, right? When he wasn’t working, he and his friends would likely stay up until 3 a.m. and it was likely he wouldn’t get up until noon the next day. You try to tell kids they’ve got to be quiet all morning because daddy needs his rest.
The funny thing is, he could never see that he had any problems. By the early 70s he was convinced I was the one with the problems. He’d complain to reporters that he didn’t have access to me, that I’d gotten too big for my britches and was surrounding myself with hangers-on who barely knew who he was, that he couldn’t get to see as much of me as he wanted to. Yeah, right! Like he’d ever wanted to see a lot of me. He couldn’t conceal his resentment of my success.
New York
Daily News
gossip columnist Robin Adams Sloan reported (13 July 1972) that Jack Cassidy was ‘basking in reflected, teeth-gritting envy’ of me, adding, ‘They say if you want to make friends with Jack nowadays, don’t say
anything to him about another show business star, little David.’ Yep, that was my dad.
One reporter tried to get me to say whether I thought my father or I was the star of the family. I responded curtly that I didn’t consider myself part of my father’s family, that his family consisted only of himself, Shirley, Shaun, Ryan and Pat.
I wasn’t the only one having difficulty getting along with him. Before the year was out, newspapers were reporting that Shirley Jones and Jack Cassidy had agreed to a trial separation. Their marriage sputtered along, off and on, for a few more years before finally collapsing. He was slowly destroying everything around him. The years of alcohol abuse, combined with his mad behaviour, caused his life to begin to unravel.
I wasn’t deliberately trying to isolate myself from my family or anyone else. Running an international career involving television, records and concerts was exhausting. The only reason I was making millions of dollars was that I was working hard, doing as many shows as I could. During a two-year period of time, I was the highest-paid solo male artist in the world. I was playing huge venues. I could work one night and take in $70,000 or more.
I talked to Ruth numerous times every day. She was the only person I talked to so frequently; no one else had access like that. I was closer to her than I was to my parents. We had a business together, Daru Enterprises, Inc. (‘Daru’ came from the first two letters of my first name and hers.) My
career was so unlike that of anyone else she’d ever handled before and she’d never been involved with commercial success like mine, so she was learning a lot as she went along. The record business was all new to her. She had to hire several other people just to work on my career. Directly or indirectly, I was supporting a lot of folks, but I had no cause to be concerned about money at that point.
I trusted Ruth’s judgment. There are mixed opinions about her. I thought she was great – a unique, in many ways bizarre human being who lived and breathed show business. She always championed me and was a close ally of mine. A number of people, including members of my family, don’t agree with my assessment of her and in fact actually came to hate her. My mother, for instance. I think she was simply sorry that I didn’t spend as much time with her as I did with Ruth. Even Shirley eventually decided to leave Ruth because she was being slowly drugged and taken advantage of by her doctor, thus reducing her clarity and effectiveness. But I loved Ruth and would have done anything for her. I thought she was right on top of things. And she was, until the last months of her life. Talking to her wasn’t the hassle talking to my parents could be. And I didn’t have the energy for a lot of idle chit-chat.
No matter how successful you are, you sometimes have to wonder how long it will last. I did all the time. It was gratifying reading articles saying I was causing more excitement in the pop music field than anyone had in five years, that no one since the Beatles had drawn so many
screaming fans to airports. But every front-runner has to worry about who might be gaining on him. I was
filled with self-confidence one moment, touched by pangs of self-doubt the next. If a concert didn’t go over quite as well as expected, I’d wonder if it was just a meaningless blip on the graph or possibly the first sign of trouble.
When I returned to the Wildwood, New Jersey Convention Hall in the summer of 1972,
Variety
noted with approval that I’d become ‘a well-rehearsed and disciplined talent’. But they also noted that, ‘Although the Wildwood area was jammed with over 400,000 tourists, Cassidy did not repeat last season’s bonanza business when he had even the aisles crowded in the 3,800 seat hall. This time, he pulled only slightly over 2,000 to each of two shows on Sunday.’
Variety
thought the problem was due to some poor press. But was that it? Or were the concerts not promoted as well as they should have been? Or were the fans who’d been dying to see me last summer simply not so eager to see me a second or third time? Reporters always asked me, ‘How long do you think your popularity can last?’
My concerts were selling out and my fees for appearances were still rising. But mass opinions can change unpredictably. Why? Who knows? In 1972, I was as ‘in’ as bell bottoms were. But I’d wonder how long it would be before bell bottoms were ‘out’. Along with, perhaps, David Cassidy.
One 17-year-old fan from Long Island, Penny Bergman, told the
New York Times
she’d be hesitant about admitting to friends at school she was still a fervent David Cassidy fan. ‘He’s known as a teenage idol. I’m too old.’
One 13-year-old even insisted, ‘Just about everybody in my class thinks he’s gross. He’s for those younger kids who read dopey fan magazines.’
But a lot of kids all across America were buying those ‘dopey fan magazines’ and avidly reading the articles relentlessly being ground out with headlines like, ‘You Know Your Love for David Cassidy Is Deep and True’, ‘Why No Girl Can Make Him Happy’ and (a classic) ‘Would You Like to Know When I Was Born, How Old I Am, My Colouring – and All My Measurements?’
The people around me assured me I was just as popular as ever. They pointed out that, in 1972, we were conquering the British pop record market in a way no American had in years. In May 1972 a David Cassidy single with
Could It Be Forever?
on one side and
Cherish
on the other reached number two on the British charts. My career as an international pop star was still growing.
Dick Leahy:
David Cassidy happened in England before
The Partridge Family
television show was shown. We released
I Think I Love You
without any television support and it took awhile but we promoted it and broke it. Television in England wasn’t particularly into
The Partridge Family
; they saw it as very American. David’s success in England started purely through records and images. In those days, we had massive support from some huge-selling teen magazines like
Jackie
. We occasionally gave
Jackie
some exclusive pictures. Their circulation in a country this size topped a million, principally because of David.
The big challenge was to promote the records without the tool that made them huge in America, which was
The Partridge Family
television show. Here was a kid who was making very good pop records and using the tools available – the support of one or two disc jockeys and the teen media. That’s how we broke David in the U.K. Once everything else kicked in, as with any phenomenon, people tend to play things anyway. They’ll just programme them because they know they’ll get audience numbers.
The other great challenge was to start pushing David’s talent, not just
The Partridge Family
phenomenon . . . I was quite disappointed when
The Partridge Family
started to be shown in the U.K. because I thought it might inhibit his musical growth. By that time, David was doing solo albums as well.
The Partridge Family
helped build David’s success but it also led to massive numbers of both David Cassidy and Partridge Family records being released. I always focused on his solo records. Of course, we did push The Partridge Family records but not with the same effort.
David Bridger:
When we got the first solo album together, it shipped gold. We had half a million copies going out the door on the first Friday. I think it went platinum within ten days. They couldn’t press the album fast enough. They kept the presses going 24/7 and still couldn’t satisfy the demand.