Could It Be Forever? My Story (15 page)

I’d occasionally drink a little, but I steered clear of drugs throughout
The
Partridge Family
years. I could not possibly have used anything and done all that I had to do back then. I tried to behave professionally. I respected professionalism.

The
Partridge Family
was often looked down on as merely a cute little show, but it was very well executed. Bernard Slade, who dreamed up the show in the first place and wrote some of the scripts, went on to become a successful playwright and screenwriter. Producer Paul Junger Witt went on to produce such hit TV shows as
Benson
,
Soap
,
The Golden Girls
and
Blossom
. Story editor and producer Dale McCraven, a really funny guy who had previously worked
on
The
Dick Van Dyke Show
, went on to do
Mork and Mindy
,
The Betty White Show
and
Perfect Strangers.

Mel Swope, who was initially an associate producer on the show after serving in the same role on shows like
The Flying Nun
and
The Monkees
, became the producer in the second season when Paul left. After our show, he became a producer on
Police Story
and ended up winning seven Emmys for it. He was Executive in Charge of Production for
Fame
and
The Outer Limits
and went on to do about a hundred quality made-for-television movies like
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
and
12 Angry Men.

A pretty extraordinary group of actors were guests on
The Partridge Family
in supporting roles. When you watch the reruns, look for appearances by Rob Reiner, Louis Gossett, Jr, Farrah Fawcett (she did a walk-on with one line), Jaclyn Smith, Richard Pryor, Jodie Foster, Ray Bolger, Richard Mulligan, John Banner, Mark Hamill, Annette O’Toole, Pat Harrington, Harry Morgan, Noam Pitlik, Jackie Coogan, Michael Ontkean and Meredith Baxter.

The members of the cast became familiar faces to all America. Here are some of my impressions and recollections of them.

Dave Madden, who played our bumbling manager Reuben Kincaid, was a very good comedy actor who’d appeared on
Rowan & Martin’s
Laugh-In
and
Camp Runamuck
. I liked working with him. Sometimes I’d be doing a scene with him and he’d mug – his face was like rubber. We had a friendship, but we didn’t become really close. There was definitely a generation gap there.

Susan and I were basically contemporaries. Susan was a sister, friend, confidante and girlfriend without being a lover. I really valued our friendship. We could talk about anything and we supported each other. We started working together as teenagers and by the time it was over we were adults. She had gone through a couple of long relationships that were very serious and I had gone through many short-term relationships that weren’t.

Susan became very thin. She starting living on carrots and her skin turned noticeably orange. I would look at her and say, ‘Susan, you’ve got to eat something besides carrots.’ I think she had an eating disorder. At the time it was called the ‘Barbie Syndrome’. She was desperately afraid of gaining weight.

She got involved in a relationship with story editor Dale McCraven. They lived together for over a year. He had hair down to his butt, a full beard and wore a headband and hippie clothes. He looked like he was right out of Haight-Ashbury.
She was 18 by then; he must have been 40. She obviously always looked for a father figure because both her husbands were many years older than her. She used to talk to me about problems she had in her relationship with Dale. I don’t mean to suggest it was a bad relationship; they were the kind of problems that crop up in any relationship.

She went to Europe with Dale and when they came back we noticed that she had gained all this weight. Our mouths dropped open. Oh my God, she had tits! She must have gained 20 pounds. And 20 pounds on a girl like her is a lot. It was 20 pounds she needed to gain. I was happy for her. My relationship with Susan was rooted in real love and support.

The two littlest kids in
The Partridge Family
cast were Suzanne Crough, who played my sister Tracy, and Jeremy Gelbwaks, who played my brother Chris. They weren’t expected to do much more than just look cute.

Jeremy was at a very bad stage in his childhood. He was an obnoxious, almost hyperactive kid. He’d come to the set and run around making jet noises, crashing into people. He couldn’t say a line and had personality conflicts with every person in the cast and the producers. He left the show at the end of the first season. His parents moved out of the area and that was pretty much the end of his showbiz career.

Brian Forster replaced him. I got to know Brian a little better. Acting was in his blood; his mother, father, stepfather and grandfather (Alan Napier, best known as the butler Alfred on TV’s
Batman
) were all actors. Brian had acted in commercials before joining the show. He worked very hard
with a drum instructor so that it would look like he was actually drumming when we mimed our musical numbers. He and Suzanne Crough had a bit of a romance, but it never progressed beyond simple kisses, I’m told. He says he got his first French kiss on the set of our show, from a young guest actress.

Danny Bonaduce wound up getting a lot to do on the show, because he was funny. He had a lot of personality. He had a tremendous need to be accepted and liked. He had to be ‘on’ all the time. Obviously, he didn’t get enough attention at home. Danny was a pretty wild kid, and his father was a pretty violent guy. He beat him regularly. We were all very concerned about it. Dan would come to the set in the mornings looking completely dishevelled. He’d look like he’d been run over by a truck.

Danny was really starved for love. He needed a role model. He was maybe 11 years old when we started doing the show and he started looking up to me, imitating my mannerisms. He also started having problems socialising with other kids. When we weren’t filming the show, he’d go to a regular school and he didn’t fit in there.

He deserved better than what he was getting. I saw him acting out his need for love. He started smoking at 11 or 12, hanging around with all these misfits. I saw a little of myself in him. Whenever someone told me what to do I’d do the opposite, and Danny was the same way. He’d bring these loser friends of his to the set, 14, 15, 16-year-olds. Bikers. You could practically see it tattooed on their foreheads: seven years to life, armed robbery. You could see it coming.

On the show, Danny was always trying to act older than he really was. And in real life, he wanted everybody to think he was cool. He lost his virginity when he was just 13, with a young woman who’d come to the set hoping to meet me. I could see he was going to have problems. I remember talking to Susan and Shirley about it; we were all concerned and we pulled together. There was a real closeness, a bond, between Susan, Shirley and me. Although Danny liked being with me, he was actually closer to my younger brother Shaun’s age, so Shirley would take Danny home so he could spend a little time with Shaun.

Like the younger kids in the cast, Danny was absolutely terrible when it came to remembering dialogue. Dave Madden once did this scene with Danny up in a tree house and it took them 36 takes.

‘I swear,’ Dave Madden said to me, ‘if Danny messed up one more time, I would have thrown him out of the tree house.’

In one show, Danny and I had a scene together where we were supposed to pull up in front of the house in the family’s bus, get out and say, ‘Hey, Mom,’ or something simple like that. Danny made a mess of it two or three times. I said, ‘One more time and you’re out of this scene.’ The fourth time he screwed up, I said, ‘Get on the bus!’ I threw him on the bus and, on impulse, drove right off the Columbia lot, into Burbank.

Once I drove off, I realised I had this power, this freedom. Suddenly I was driving down the street. Car horns were honking and people were shouting, ‘Hey, there’s David Cassidy and
The Partridge Family
bus! There’s Danny Bonaduce!’

Danny, of course, was thrilled that I was that bold, that defiant. It was one of the worst examples I could have set for him. Breaking rules, and even the law, was something Danny got very good at as he became an adult.

I
felt my life changing rapidly. It’s hard to convey how big the teen idol phenomenon got. America’s youth was being conditioned to believe that I was the hottest young actor and singing star around. The dream guy that every girl was suddenly supposed to want. Sometimes it was ridiculous. Walking on the Paramount Pictures lot one day, I was spotted by a couple of the girls from
The Brady Bunch
. When they saw me, they dropped to their knees and screamed. It didn’t matter that they were featured in a popular TV show themselves. In fact, they were already on television the year before, when I was just an unknown scuffling for enough work to pay the rent.

Throughout most of the first year, it was exciting to be
the object of so much attention, even though the girls were simply idolising a magazine cover. My career was escalating at an amazing speed and I was getting more fan mail and more money for personal appearances.
The Partridge Family
show steadily picked up viewers during the first season and attracted even more of an audience for the second season. And even though I wasn’t drawing a salary that was commensurate with star status, the public was certainly treating me as the star of the show. By 1971–2, I had the highest Q rating (a rating which reflects a performer’s likeability quotient) of anyone on television.

My record sales were huge. My very first record
, I Think I Love You
, won the National Association of Record Merchandisers’ award for being the biggest-selling single of 1970, even bigger than
Let It Be
by the Beatles, who broke up that year. I was beginning to understand why the Beatles stopped playing live. Just getting in and out of a venue was so stressful; it was insane.

In the spring of 1971, Bell Records released
I’ll Meet You Halfway
, the third Partridge Family Top Ten hit single in a row. I took pride in those record sales, even though I wasn’t receiving a dime in royalties. The success helped me to continue to believe in myself. Everything was really rockin’. I felt like I was on a huge rollercoaster that was just going up, up, up, but I couldn’t help feeling that some twists and drops were certain to follow.

The fans clustering outside the studio gates morning and night were becoming a problem for me, though. To try to avoid them, I started to go in and out by different exits;
there were three or four gates I could choose from. But inevitably, one or two of the fans would start following me. That became a major pain. Losing them was really hard.

So I had to start meeting someone every morning about six blocks from the studio gate. I’d leave my car there, lie down on the floor in the back of this other fellow’s car and ride in through the gates unseen. It became an incredible hassle. And some fans still managed to sneak into the studio to try to meet me.

Security at my home became an issue, too. There were women showing up, unannounced, uninvited, at all hours. You might think this is every male’s fantasy come true. And I’m not going to claim I turned down every opportunity for fun and games that was presented to me – far from it – but I wanted to maintain some sense of control over my personal space, over my life. I’m basically a very private person and I was losing my solitude.

If I went out to eat at a popular restaurant, it seemed like the moment I’d get some spaghetti in my mouth some guy would be standing next to me, demanding, ‘Come on, come on, give me an autograph. Let me take your picture. It’s for my kid.’ And if I didn’t give fans what they asked for they’d sometimes stomp off saying I was a jerk. I was happy to discover a couple of restaurants, like the Imperial Gardens in Hollywood, which would put me into a private room so I could eat without being disturbed.

At heart I was still a teenager, but I had adult responsibilities. I really wasn’t ready to deal with financial concerns; I’d had no education or preparation in that area.
I figured my manager could take care of such matters for me, but Ruth had never really been a money-oriented person. She’d always taken care of building her clients’ careers. She was interested in the creative side of the business and had generally let her brother take care of money matters. Unfortunately, he died shortly before my career had taken off and she found other people to manage her clients’ money. I didn’t worry much about who was handling mine, although in time it would become painfully clear I should have. I just had so many other things on my plate.

And I didn’t feel like I could go out to a local bar or anywhere for a diversion. I had a responsibility to my fans and I had to be careful about where I was seen going, what I was seen doing. I knew I had fans who looked up to me and I felt a responsibility to be something of a role model. I always felt I had to be careful where I went and what I did. These fans expected me to have answers for everything and I was uncomfortable with that. I had enough trouble coping with the stress in my own life, without having to be anyone else’s guru. You may find this hard to believe, but I actually had fans who would tell me, ‘I do whatever you do,’ or, ‘I moved to Los Angeles just so I could see you.’