Beauty and beast of fleeting fame and fortune

David Cassidy’s dead. Dead of drink, disappointment and dementia. He was 67.

Younger readers won’t have heard of him.

Older ones may remember him as a pop singer from the early 1970s, but few will remember his songs.

What they will remember, perhaps with a pang of residual feeling, is how he looked. He was beautiful.

Girls by the hundreds of thousand were drawn to him.

Boys too, if in smaller numbers, for I was one of them.

I didn’t buy his records or attend his concerts or pin posters of him to my bedroom wall, but I very much liked looking at him.

Not that I told anyone, of course. Those were different days. The girls told everyone. They screamed, fainted and wept and gathered in huge throngs in the hope of catching a glimpse of him. Each girl yearned to own him, and each girl had only to look around to know that her chances of owning him were roughly her chances of winning the lottery.

But that didn’t stop her any more than it stops people buying lottery tickets.

When in season a female toad emits a chemical that male toads can’t resist.

The males, who are a quarter of her size, cling to her and won’t let go.

Thus a ball of thirty, forty, fifty toads can form, all of them cleaving in hopeless hope to the one love object. David Cassidy emitted something similar.

At one of Cassidy’s London concerts there was a stampede. 600 girls were injured and one died.

To those who say we differ as a species from the rest of evolution by having reason and being selfaware, I proffer this deluge of girls.

They were as powerless to defy their chemistry as moths besieging a lamp. Whatever twigs of selfawareness they might have had were swept away in the hormonal flood. Reason stood no chance at all.

Of course, the wave receded almost as swiftly as it came. Within a year or so David Cassidy stopped emitting whatever it was and a chemical tap was turned off.

The girls went elsewhere leaving only a much-kissed poster on the bedroom wall and a vague sense of having been duped by time and chemistry.

It doesn’t matter what name we give to what the girls felt.

Call it puppy love, or infatuation or a crush, call it cod and fry it in batter for all I care, it was powerful.

It mattered to them at the time more than anything else in the world and it briefly made Cassidy the highest paid performer on the planet. And its cause was beauty.

The difference between David Cassidy’s appearance and that of other young men was a matter of millimetres. But somehow in the disposition of his features, he came closer than the rest of us to a template of the ideal.

The power of beauty’s as old as the species. Helen had it, Helen of Troy, she of the face that launched a thousand ships. A thousand ships don’t come cheap. Antinous had it, too.

The Emperor Hadrian was so besotted with Antinous that he took him everywhere and named a city after him. But at the age of 19 Antinous fell into the Nile and drowned.

Or else he was pushed. Either way he died at the peak of his beauty so never had to come to terms with life without it. David Cassidy, however, survived.

When his fans moved on, he became David Cassidy the former idol, the ex-heart-throb. He tried to keep going. He had a lukewarm hit or two, could still pull a bit of an audience for old times’ sake.

But the magic, the pheromonal wonder, was gone.

Of course the leeches and parasites made more from his beauty than he ever did.

The acne-ruined agents, the shrivel-faced exploiters, siphoned off millions then melted elsewhere.

Cassidy had no elsewhere to go to. He’d been.

And half a century stretched ahead. He underwent psychotherapy. He played to the sad-bags of Vegas. He appeared on Trump’s TV show.

That’s a triple scraping of the bottom of life’s barrel. Is it any surprise that he drank?

His was the classic curse. He was given the lot: fame, wealth and above all beauty. And he came out of it with empty hands. It’s the morality tale from way back.

You’d have thought we’d have seen through it by now.

Especially the beauty bit, its ephemerality, its fundamental unimportance.

Yet who among us has never been in thrall to beauty?

And who among us has not had the course of their life shifted by beauty’s influence? And, perhaps most tellingly, who among us would have had it any other way? Not me for one.