Farewell David Cassidy, my first love
News of the teen idol’s death took millions of woman back to their youth. Allison Pearson, who finally met her hero, says goodbye to the boy they all adored
‘David walked in with a smile that had beamed down from my bedroom walls’
When the Today programme rang early yesterday morning asking me to comment on the death of David Cassidy at 67, I thought I could manage it. I wasn’t upset, was I? Then, just before I spoke to Nick Robinson, they played a snatch of Daydreamer and that longlost, achingly wistful voice melted all my adult defences. I was 13 again. “I remember April when the sun was in the sky/ And love was burning in your eyes/ Nothing in the world could bother me/ ’Cos I was livin’ in a world of ecstasy…”
Nothing special about those cheesy lyrics. Nothing except the fact that, 43 years after I first heard them on a little grey transistor radio, sprawled on my mustard candlewick bedspread, I still know them off by heart. Just as I could sing along to all of David’s songs without hesitation; Cherish, Could It Be Forever, I Think I Love You and my favourite back then, the bittersweet
I Am a Clown. I reckoned that liking one of David’s less obvious hits would mark me out as a bit special, sophisticated even, so that when we met he would be really impressed. I had even taken the precaution of only wearing brown for several months because The Official David Cassidy Magazine (15p) said that brown was David’s favourite colour.
Our meeting was not in doubt. Somehow, I would travel from South Wales to a Cassidy concert in Manchester or London. Once there, I would be hit by a car. Not a serious accident, just bad enough to be taken to a hospital where David would visit me. Things would be weird at first (“weird” was one of many cool American words I had learned from the magazine, “cool” was another). But we would soon get talking and David would be delighted by my in-depth knowledge of his music and my brown cords and matching brown twin-set. David would invite me to his house in Hawaii, where we would walk hand in hand on the beach wearing puka shell necklaces and we would kiss and get married right there. I spent a surprising amount of time worrying about what footwear would be appropriate for a wedding on sand.
Do I sound mad? Well, I was mad. Very little in the orchestra of human emotion can match the teenage crush for sheer operatic craziness. (Bear in mind, we didn’t have social media back then to distract us: 10 David posters, staples unpicked from the centrefold of Jackie, had to carry the burden of all our longing.) Going through puberty, that Cape Canaveral of the hormones, young girls are in love with the idea of being in love, trying it out for sighs. The madness didn’t last long, not in the grand scheme of a life, but while it did, David Bruce Cassidy was my world entire.
Many thousands of words will be written trying to explain why, all across the world, women in their fifties had to stop what they were doing yesterday, or pull the car over when they heard the news, because their eyes were suddenly filled with tears.
I realise that I’m biased, but David Cassidy was the ideal demi-god for a skinny Welsh girl while she waited impatiently for her breasts to grow. Like all the great teen idols, David was unthreatening and puppyish. With his thick-lashed hazel eyes and heart-cleaving smile, he was so beautiful he could almost have been a girl himself. He was a safe place to put our first love while we built up courage around actual boys.
I did eventually meet my idol, although by then I had a little girl of my own. In New York to promote
I Think I Love You, my loosely autobiographical novel from 2010 about a girl obsessed with, yes, David Cassidy, I was being interviewed on live TV when a familiar figure came through a side door and walked towards me with a smile that had beamed down from my childhood bedroom walls.
David said he loved the book, not least for giving him an insight into one of the girls who had screamed at him. He denied that his favourite colour had ever been brown. (“Who looks good in brown, Allison?” Er…) He was kind, funny and intelligent, but also wounded and bitter. The millions of dollars made from his image went mainly to record companies and merchandise people.
Real life was not easy for a fantasy figure. It’s not easy to reach the summit of your career by the age of 24, and for the years after to be a humiliating scrabble downhill. It’s not easy to have been a beautiful boy, beloved of several million fans, and to spend the rest of your life being measured against that standard of youthful perfection. “Didn’t you used to be David Cassidy?” It was cruel and it hurt him.
Cassidy’s sad decline was much documented – the drink-driving convictions, the increasingly erratic behaviour culminating in David’s confession earlier this year that he had dementia and would never perform again. None the less, the announcement that he had multiple organ failure was shocking. An American friend, who grew up in Cincinnati worshipping David just as I was loving him 4,000 miles away, texted me a single word: “NNNNNNNOOOOOO.”
When I met David, I told him that, many years hence (I didn’t know how few he had left), they would announce on the radio that the Seventies teen idol, David Cassidy, had died. It would be an incredibly poignant and resonant moment for millions of women. “You are one of the ways we measure out our lives,” I said.
“A small part of you dies with me?” he asked, almost beseechingly.
Yes, David, love. That’s exactly how it is. For me, for millions I will never meet, all united in our strange sorrow this day, grieving for our lost selves and for the most beautiful boy and his songs. You think that’s foolish? Let me tell you, 43 years from now not a single person will remember a word Philip Hammond said in his Budget yesterday afternoon. Not one.
For the rest of our lives, David Cassidy fans will remember and cherish those memories. Cherish is the word I use to describe, all the feeling that I have hiding here for you inside.
When Allison met David in 2004
As I prepared to travel to Florida to meet my teen idol, several unexpected emotions crowded in. Panic about what to wear was high on the list. Should I go dressed as the fan who had worshipped him so ardently from afar, or as the wife and mother of two I now was? If David was still 24 in my heart, how old did that make me?
While I was packing and unpacking the suitcase, my husband sat on the bed and sang a tuneless version of Could It Be
Forever. “Why on earth would you want to meet him?” he asked. “David Cassidy sang flat and, let’s face it, he was basically a girl.”
I defended David, exactly as I had defended him 30 years earlier from the taunts of the boys at school. Just as I would always defend him.
David lived in Fort Lauderdale with his wife, Sue, and his son, Beau. In the cab on the way to his house, everything I had been feeling coalesced into a single thought: please don’t let me pity him. I realised I could bear just about any kind of awkwardness, embarrassment or disappointment, but I never, ever wanted to feel sorry for the man who once bestrode my world like a colossus in a white catsuit trimmed with silver studs.
David Cassidy was about to turn 54. He looked at least 10 years younger, but that still made him 20 years older than the beautiful boy millions of girls like me believed we were in love with. That comparison was clearly a source of pain to him. He, who had once turned on half the world, was now doomed to disappoint. He was not Peter Pan, nor was he meant to be. David was about to embark on another farewell tour of the UK.
The fans, now women in their forties and fifties with young girls of their own, would still turn out for him in enthusiastic numbers, but I sensed in him a great weariness that he needed to exploit for money a period of his life which, in different ways, had cost him so dear. His bitterness at the record companies and merchandising people, who had managed to spirit away the hundreds of millions of dollars that his records and his image generated, was clear and well justified. As David posed for the photographer, I said he should be careful the camera didn’t take his soul. “I had my soul stolen a long time ago,” he replied.
As an actor, and the son of two actors, he could be prone to selfdramatising statements; still, if anyone on the planet could claim to have had his soul stolen, it was David Bruce Cassidy. The interview turned out to be more moving than I could have hoped.
David was thoughtful, intelligent and extremely honest. At times he became angry, at others close to tears. We laughed a good deal as we recalled the strange, compelling experience we had shared, though separated by age, gender and thousands of miles. He was generous enough to scream at me, as I had screamed at him all those years ago, which proved he was a true gentleman. Being able to prompt David on the lyrics of one of his own songs, which I knew better than him (naturally), was a moment from fan heaven.
The David Cassidy that millions of us loved did not exist, not really; he was a brilliant marketing invention, though the man who had both the pleasure and the burden of bearing his name was not a disappointment. On the contrary. I want to thank David for helping me to recapture the way we were. No girl could ask for a finer teen idol.
‘The David Cassidy millions of us loved did not exist; he was a marketing invention’