HICKEY
The news that David Cassidy has dementia is the latest devastating setback for the Partridge Family star who has struggled with bankruptcy, addiction and divorce
AT THE height of Cassidy mania in 1973 teen idol David Cassidy played to two sellout crowds of 56,000 at the Houston Astrodome in Texas over one weekend. Fast forward 40 years and he’s more likely to be found at somewhere like the Canyon Club (capacity less than 1,000), a tired venue in the LA suburb of Agoura Hills.
It was there on Sunday night that the 66-year-old presented a pitiful sight as he forgot the lyrics to many of his songs, slurred the ones he could remember and appeared to fall off the stage.
Many in the audience assumed he was drunk. After all Cassidy has been arrested three times for drink-driving in recent years and on the third occasion was sentenced to 90 days of live-in rehab.
But in the wake of Sunday’s theatrics it appeared that there could be a darker explanation for his performance: an emergence of the dementia that felled both his mother and grandfather.
“I was in denial but a part of me always knew this was coming,” Cassidy said yesterday, adding he had decided to stop touring to concentrate on his health.
“I want to focus on what I am, who I am and how I’ve been, without any distractions,” he explained. “I want to love. I want to enjoy life.”
If one final scheduled concert next Sunday does prove to be his last, it will be a sad end to a career that was turbocharged by his starring role in the 1970s sitcom The Partridge Family.
The TV series about a group of musical siblings who hit the road with their stage act attracted an audience of 14 million in the US at its peak and turned the 20-year-old Cassidy into an instant heart-throb.
On the back of the show’s success he launched a pop career and was soon the highest-paid solo performer in the world, with international hits such as Cherish and I Think I Love You. Nowhere was he more popular than the UK where he notched up seven Top 20 hits between 1972 and 1974 – including a No 1 with Daydreamer – and packed Wembley for six concerts in 1973.
But it was a tragic incident during another British tour a year later that prompted him to largely retire from showbusiness at the tender age of 24.
When he took to the stage at London’s White City Stadium on May 26, 1974, a section of the 35,000 crowd surged forward and many fans fainted and were trampled on. One paramedic said the scale of the injuries reminded him of the Blitz. The director of the British Safety Council called it a “suicide concert”.
About 650 fans were hurt in the crush, 30 had to be taken to hospital and one, 14-year-old Bernadette Whelan, never recovered consciousness and died of heart failure four days later. Cassidy spoke to Whelan’s parents and sent flowers but, keen to avoid turning their daughter’s funeral into a media circus, he did not attend the service. He later said that the incident would haunt him until the day he died.
In the years that followed he attempted to live a more normal life free of the demands of superstardom and got married to the actress Kay Lenz, the first of his three wives, in 1977.
By 1983 they were divorced and a year later he married wife number two, horse trainer Meryl Ann Tanz. Within two years they too had separated and Cassidy had his first child – daughter Katherine – with girlfriend Sherry Williams Benedon.
However by the time she was born Cassidy had met the woman who was to become his third wife, songwriter Sue Shifrin, whose work has been recorded by such pop royalty as Michael Jackson, Tina Turner and Cher. They married in 1991, the same year their son Beau was born.
But, as the years went by, the man who struggled to come to terms with the fact that he had peaked in his early 20s began to take solace in drink.
He was first arrested for driving under the influence (DUI) in 2010. By now his mother Evelyn, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s eight years earlier, was close to death. “She can’t walk, can’t talk and lives in a nappy,” he told one interviewer.
Her condition prompted him to become a campaigner to raise awareness of dementia. “People don’t really want to talk about it but we need to,” he said.
Evelyn died aged 89 in 2012 and Cassidy’s life became even more shambolic. He was arrested for DUI in August 2013 and then again in January 2014.
BY NOW Sue had had enough. She filed for divorce after 23 years of marriage and Cassidy was forced to liquidate his assets. The marital home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was put up for auction and went for more than $2million. Success in a legal action against Sony over merchandising fees raised another $158,000. But touring proved less lucrative. A series of UK dates in 2015 – the year he filed for bankruptcy – made a profit of just £408 and he vowed never to tour this country again.
It’s 10 years since Cassidy published his updated autobiography under the title Could It Be Forever? On the latest evidence the answer to that has to be an emphatic “No”.