Tormented teen idol and star of The Partridge Family

Slim, fine-boned and boyish, David Cassidy, who has died aged 67, was one of the biggest teen stars of his generation. In the early 1970s, “teenage girls didn’t just follow him around”, said The Guardian – “they spirited themselves into hotels, camped in the air-conditioning unit of his house and howled at the sight of him”. Mobbed wherever he went, he received 25,000 fan letters a week at the peak of his popularity, and his fan club was said to be bigger than The Beatles’ and Elvis’s combined.

The devotion Cassidy inspired was not unprecedented: Beatlemania had come first. But its commercial exploitation was new: even The Monkees, created by the same TV studio, were not as ruthlessly marketed as Cassidy. Knowing that his moment would be brief, TV executives put him on a relentless schedule of filming, recording and live performances; his face appeared on everything from pillowcases and lunch boxes to colouring books and bubblegum wrappers. The merchandising generated about $500m; he claimed to have seen only about $10,000 of it. Most teen stars tire of their fame at some point. Cassidy hated it from the start. Playing Keith Partridge had taken over his life, and scuppered his chances of being taken seriously as an actor or a musician. “I was pigeonholed as a teen idol [and] there’s no credibility,” he said in the 1980s. “I paid a tremendous personal price – it’s a very empty, isolated, lonely existence.”

Born in New York, David Cassidy was the son of two actors: Jack Cassidy and Evelyn Ward. Often working, they left him in the care of grandparents and divorced when he was six. His father then settled in LA with his second wife, Shirley Jones, who played his mother in The Partridge Family. He had a fraught relationship with his father; nevertheless, he followed him into acting and, at the age of 20, won the role of Keith Partridge. Most of the cast lip-synced in the singing sections, but when the studio realised Cassidy had a decent voice, they let him do his own vocals. While the Vietnam War raged, viewers delighted in the feel-good simplicity of the show, about a family of musicians who travel around in a psychedelic van. With his warm green eyes, shy smile and feathered haircut, Cassidy became an unthreatening fantasy boyfriend for a million teenagers. But he wasn’t goody-goody Keith: as a teenager in LA during the Summer of Love, Cassidy had smoked pot, picked up girls and driven to Haight-ashbury to see Jimi Hendrix.

The show ran from 1970 to 1974 and spawned chart hits, including I Think I Love You – with Cassidy also enjoying solo success with songs such as Daydreamer – on both sides of the Atlantic. When he visited London, thousands of fans besieged The Dorchester, said the Daily Mail. On his next visit, no hotel would have him, so “he hired a 200-ton yacht on the Thames with a 24-hour security team. But the fans didn’t care. They jumped into the river and had to be rescued.” And when he flew home, 3,000 people turned up to wave him off – bringing the airport to a standstill. In 1972, he tried to change his image by posing naked for Rolling Stone, and talking about sex and drugs. But it didn’t win him any older fans, and he ended up having to issue an apology to his younger ones.

Matters finally came to a head in London in 1974, when a 14-year-old was crushed at one of his concerts and died. Around the same time, Cassidy quit The Partridge Family, exhausted and burnt out, most of the money he’d earned lost to managers, agents and hangers-on. Instead of focusing on his solo career, he partied hard, dabbled in drugs and drank. By the end of the 1980s, he was in therapy and fighting bankruptcy. He also had two failed marriages behind him. He continued to tour and to perform in musicals, but the fans who attended his concerts expected him to still be 21. His mistake, he told The Times’s Janice Turner in 2006, was to have gone on living. “I could have killed myself and been like Monroe, Elvis or James Dean. A legend. But I chose life.” He continued to struggle with alcoholism, and earlier this year disclosed that he was suffering from dementia. His last words were reportedly: “So much wasted time.”