David Cassidy condemned me to a life without passion

THE emails started dropping on Monday morning. ‘Liz, I’m sorry about David, you must be devastated.’ And: ‘Liz, hope David will be OK.’ I wasn’t that concerned, as my relationship with my boyfriend David is pretty on/off. But I replied to one: ‘Why, what’s wrong with him now?’

‘Organ failure. It doesn’t look good. I keep singing, “How can I be sure, where I stand with yoooooo.”’

Oh no. They mean David Cassidy! And just like that, my heart began to break.

There have been many eulogies in the few days since he died, penned by middle-aged women who claim to have been his number one fan. Puh-lease.

Unless you were standing, as I was aged 13, at White City, wishing your platforms were higher so you could see over 35,000 other adolescent heads to get a glimpse of a slight form in a spangled jumpsuit, you were no one to David. Aged 12, I even entered a disco dancing contest to win a life-size poster. I was victorious. And I’m not even an extrovert.

In the early 1970s, fans like me had to work hard to idolise him. The only thing to watch was a video of him on Top Of The Pops, hurriedly shot at Heathrow, as to travel to TV studios in Central London was deemed too dangerous because of the risk of being mobbed. To play my 45rpm copy of Cherish, I had to queue behind three brothers and three sisters to use the record player.

And there was that agonising week’s wait to get his top half as the centrefold of Jackie, having just bought part one, his bottom half.

I loved David Cassidy not just for that snaggle tooth, the minicow-bells necklace around that girlish neck, the cow eyes, the feather cut, the breathy voice that gave the illusion he was millimetres from your ear (yikes!), but because he made me believe – via a churning in the stomach, hair on the back of my neck doing the bus stop – that the future was not scary, but something to look forward to.

We were given a glimpse of what loving a man should be like. We conceded, on dark days when we had spots and greasy hair, that we might not actually get David (I had a day off school when he married Kay Lenz; he seemed to go for women with really wide mouths, so I used to stretch mine with my hands) but if that was the case, maybe there was someone out there who could make us feel this way again.

There wasn’t. I think men like David are the reason women like me end up unhappy. Every woman I know either drinks too much or is on antidepressants having been betrayed, or bored half to death.

I might have had the odd tingle in the years since, but that pre-teen intensity? Never.

David set us up for a fall (unwittingly, because nothing was ever his fault). We thought we would scream with excitement at the prospect of seeing our husband, not wish he’d spend longer at the office because he gets on our nerves. We peaked, relationship-wise, aged 13.

Be careful what you wish for. Because even the real David Cassidy didn’t measure up.

In 2001, I was assigned to interview him at his home in Las Vegas and, despite it being nearly three decades since White City, I had still not got over him, which meant his son, Beau, then ten, rather embarrassingly found me outside the white security gates, rummaging through the wheelie bin for a memento. I was frogmarched inside. Unfortunately, the love of my life couldn’t take his eyes off the giant screens showing horse-racing in every corner of the globe. He became annoyed at my questions, like why had he got rid of the feather cut, and did he ever date his Partridge Family co-star Susan Dey?

I asked if he’d been tempted by girls like me and he said: ‘While you were screaming outside… I’d be sleeping with the most beautiful women in the world.’ Oh.

His face was oddly shiny and smooth, hair suspiciously homedyed, he had no sense of humour at all, and was bitter he had made no money.

HE ONLY started the heavy drinking after he ‘retired’ in 1974: he told me he relished the fact that he no longer had to be up at dawn. At the end of our talk, he gave me a ticket to that night’s performance of The Rat Pack, a show he produced. I sat at a table in the front row, back straight, hoping he’d show.

I felt a tap on my shoulder, so I swivelled with heart aflutter; even the fact I’d found him dour hadn’t dampened my ardour. I was still the optimistic schoolgirl in tie-dye cheesecloth. But it was only a waiter, bearing champagne.

‘With the compliments of Mr Cassidy.’ He had stood me up.