David Cassidy
Pop idol who starred in The Partridge Family but who never quite shook off his image as a teenage heart-throb
DAVID Cassidy, the singer, who died last Tuesday aged 67, was an androgynous American 1970s teenage heartthrob with sales of more than 30 million records but who never managed to break out of bubblegum pop into anything more sophisticated. In later life, he became mired in drink and debt problems and, more recently, suffered from dementia.
Starting out as a young actor, Cassidy had found television fame in 1970 in the American show The Partridge Family, broadcast in Britain between 1971 and 1974, about four suburban children and their young widowed mother (Cassidy’s real-life stepmother Shirley Jones) making their living as a rock and roll band.
When the network discovered that Cassidy himself could sing as well as look cute, they released a clutch of Partridge Family records starting with the group’s first hit, I Think I Love You (1970), which sold nearly six million copies and reached No 18 in the British charts.
A year later Cassidy emerged as a solo performer, cutting his own records such as the double-sided Could It Be Forever? and Cherish (1971), and touring with his own band. Within two years he had sold six-and-a-half million albums and singles as well as his own-brand lunch boxes, bubblegum, colouring books and pens, while his smiling face adorned several million copies of teen magazines, wall stickers, love beads, posters and photo albums.
Years later Cassidy claimed that although the profits on his merchandise and image amounted to $500m, he received a paltry $15,000 because he had unwittingly signed away his rights.
Wherever Cassidy went in the world, teenage girls mobbed him, fainted over his hits and screamed and stampeded at his concerts. But matters got out of hand in May 1974 when a 14-year-old fan, Bernadette Whelan, suffered a fatal heart attack after being crushed against a barrier in a crowd surge at the singer’s farewell concert in London, prompting demands for the British Home Secretary to exercise greater control over “hysterical teenagers”.
This was Cassidy’s cue to temper his teen idol persona, and later that year he left The Partridge Family and in 1975 signed a recording contract with RCA. But his hopes of appealing to the lucrative middle-of-the-road music market had been fatally holed.
In 1972 he had rashly given an interview to Rolling Stone magazine in America accompanied by photographs by Annie Leibovitz which displayed his pubic hair (the article was headlined “Naked Lunch Box”). It seems that Cassidy had hoped the nude portraits — teasingly topless on the magazine’s cover, but much more explicit inside — would help divest him of his unthreatening teeny-bopper image and anodyne appeal.
In America, the hitherto clean-cut Cassidy might just as well have pressed the self-destruct button but although the edition sold out, the magazine went largely unread on this side of the Atlantic and his hits, including How Can I Be Sure? which reached No 1 in the charts in October 1972, continued to pour forth. Three were double-sided, including Some Kind Of Summer/I Am A Clown and Daydreamer/ The Puppy Song which topped the chart in late 1973. He had another Top 10 hit with IfI Didn’t Care, but his cover of the Beach Boys’ Darlin’ in 1975 proved to be his swan song. By then, his television series had wound up and after two world tours, Cassidy left showbusiness to concentrate on breeding horses.
The son of successful Broadway actors Jack Cassidy and Evelyn Ward, David Bruce Cassidy was born on April 12, 1950 in Englewood, New Jersey, moving to Hollywood with his mother after his parents, divorced when he was five.
During the 1970s, Jack Cassidy notably guest-starred as the murderer in three episodes of Columbo; bisexual and a former lover of the songwriter Cole Porter, he went on to marry the actress and singer Shirley Jones.
As a teenager, David consulted a psychiatrist, started experimenting with drugs, and in 1967, when he was 16, visited the Haight-Ashbury hippie district of San Francisco “to see what was going on”.
Expelled from University High School in Hollywood, he completed his education at the private Rexford School in Beverly Hills before taking his first job working part-time in the post room of a textile firm in New York’s garment district. At night he took acting lessons, and after picking up television bit-parts in Bonanza and Marcus Welby, MD, Cassidy, at the age of 20, was cast as 16-year-old Keith Partridge in The Partridge Family. By 21, he was the highest-paid performer in the world.
In his memoir C’Mon, Get Happy (1995), Cassidy revealed that his on-screen character was the polar opposite of his own. Off set, he was a voracious consumer of women, drink, drugs and fast cars; his minders once prevented pictures being taken of Cassidy when his skin flared up in a rash — the result of antibiotics he always took to avoid sexually transmitted diseases — and tried to pass it off as teenage acne. He was 24 at the time.
In 1986 he emerged in London from semi-retirement to replace Cliff Richard in the West End musical Time, and a decade later took over the lead in Willie Russell’s Blood Brothers, but his later stage appearances were erratic.
In Las Vegas in July 2012, he performed only a handful of songs in 90 minutes, often repeating himself, and more than 50 fans walked out. He underwent rehabilitation treatment for his drinking on at least three occasions.
Cassidy might well have been tempted to blame his decline on his abusive father Jack, a philandering sex addict, manic depressive and alcoholic, who once downed 17 scotches in front of his son at the dinner table and who routinely beat him as a child.
By the time Jack Cassidy burned to death in a fire in 1976, having passed out in his apartment with a lit cigarette, he had cut David out of his will, leaving his estate to the children of his second marriage to Shirley Jones.
After wrestling with his drug and drink addictions and financial troubles, Cassidy was forced to auction his Florida home in 2015 after filing for bankruptcy. Between 2010 and 2014 he was arrested three times for drink-driving, underwent eye surgery and divorced his third wife, the songwriter Sue Shifrin.
In February 2017 Cassidy announced he was suffering from dementia (a condition that had afflicted his mother) and had decided to stop touring to concentrate on his health after videos taken by fans at a concert in California showed him struggling to remember the words to some of his old hits and falling from the stage before climbing back up.
David Cassidy was married three times — first, in 1977, to the actress Kay Lenz, then to a South African horse breeder, Meryl Tanz, and thirdly, in 1991, to Sue Shifrin, with whom he had a son.
In 1986, he also had a daughter by a former model, Sherry Williams.