Could It Be Forever? My Story (16 page)

For the TV show and concert appearances, I wore whatever ridiculous outfits I was told to – some ‘mod’ crushed velour outfit or a skintight white jumpsuit (often made by the same guy who was making them for Elvis). Those were simply costumes. When I wasn’t performing I liked to wear jeans, a ripped T-shirt and tennis shoes. That was the real me – a pretty gritty, earthy person. The problem is that
when you work 18 hours a day perpetuating a public image, the real person gradually gets lost. He vanishes. And that’s what I felt was beginning to happen to me.

It became harder for me to do some things that once were so natural. I’d be invited to some old friend’s birthday party and I’d look forward to going and relaxing and just being myself again, like in high-school days. But when I’d get to the party, the whole focus would turn towards me, the ‘star’. And I didn’t need that! I’d been the focus of attention all day. I needed to be left alone. ‘It’s
your
birthday!’ I’d say. And, ‘No, I
don’t
feel like getting up and singing for everybody tonight. We should all be singing
Happy Birthday
to you.’

It was wearing to have people I met casually want to talk to me just because I was a success. New acquaintances would say they felt like they already knew me because they’d been watching me on TV and reading articles about me and I’d have to explain to them that I wasn’t that guy on
The Partridge Family
. They didn’t know me at all. Not the real David Cassidy.

There were some fans who were obviously unbalanced. I’d get letters from girls who seriously thought they had some kind of relationship with me, even though I had never seen them before. They would write things like, ‘David, you’re going to have to stop all of this. I know you’ve been seeing other women. You have to remain faithful to me. And you really must send me the money I’ve asked for
now
, or I’ll be forced to come after you.’ I couldn’t help wondering if they really might come after me.

There are still many people like that following me. There are a number of people in the world who believe that I’m destined to be their husband, lover, partner in life, their main financial support. Clearly those people are not dealing with reality. I think that kind of negative attention is part of the price you pay when you become a fixture in certain people’s consciousness. Fortunately, I never got a serious death threat, although there were many boyfriends who were jealous and tried to impress their girlfriends by threatening me.

The fans were taken in by the posters, the dolls, the records, the music, the magazine covers, the idolatry. They couldn’t get past that. They saw me as a phenomenon, not a person, and part of my pain and frustration was that I was never able to show them the real me.

Once, I was booked to play an auditorium some place in southern New Jersey. I arrived 15 minutes before I was supposed to go on and went into the trailer that was to serve as my dressing room. I got out of my street clothes and I was standing there, naked, looking for a place to take a leak before putting on my stage costume. The primitive trailer didn’t have a bathroom and all I could find was a plastic cup. Suddenly, I heard these little squeaky high-pitched sounds coming from under the vanity. For a moment I was thinking,
What is that? Mice? Rats?
Then I heard the laughter. I saw eyes looking at me through an opening in the vanity. It turned out that two girls had been hiding in the trailer for 21 hours, waiting to meet me. They stockpiled fruit drinks and bananas under the vanity. And now they’re unable to stop giggling at the sight of their idol, naked, trying to piss into a cup. I just lost it. I flipped out. ‘Get the f*** out of here!’ I threw the cup of piss, shouting, ‘Here I am, babe! Is this what you expected?’

I wasn’t the only one being pestered by fans. In the first year that
The Partridge Family
was on the air, my mom moved back to West Orange, New Jersey, to take care of my grandfather. He had lived quietly in that same modest house his entire adult life. My mom told me that kids were coming around, ringing the doorbell all the time and generally driving my grandfather nuts, because they knew that was my old house.

So how do you control kids who are 13, 14, 15 years old? You can’t slug them if they get out of line, but you can’t let them run all over you, either. Security on tours became an issue and many meetings were held about the problem.

I didn’t want my security people to be too heavy-handed when maintaining crowd control. My concerts would draw some very young kids and I wanted my people to be really careful, really gentle with them. But the very young fans could become frenzied and destructive, much more so than the ones in their late teens and 20s who were more in control of their emotions. They could have scratched my eyes out as they were reaching grabbing at me just to touch me. In fact, I was hurt more than once, and as recently as a few years ago.

The concert bookings just kept pouring in, and the crowds and the money kept getting bigger. My theatrical and concert booking agents never had to solicit bookings for me. They just answered the phones and booked me on as many dates as possible. The more I worked, the more money they made. They took their ten per cent commission on my gross earnings and were very happy. One agency eventually made $800,000 in commissions from me. Think about it: I had to earn $8 million for them to net that $800,000. I was a kid who didn’t know any better, so I went along with it and didn’t question anything. I mean, $800,000 just for answering the phones! I had the world’s highest-paid answering service.

And I was working to the point of exhaustion. When I had to travel for a concert date, I’d get out of bed at the
last possible minute, throw some things in a bag and go. I’d take no money with me. Even when I began touring abroad, I’d carry no cash. I didn’t need it, because I was never asked to pay for anything. Ultimately, of course, I paid for it all, financially, physically and emotionally.

I was glad to have Sam and Steve as friends, especially when I toured. I trusted them implicitly. It helped having them around to share experiences with me. We all lived well, of course. I had no money worries then. Money seemed to be no object.

I was forced to move again in 1971 because too many fans were invading the privacy of my home in the Hollywood Hills. It turned into chaos up there. I’d arrive home and find people living in my house. Or throwing a party. There’d be chicks in the pool, in the house, some of them naked,
trying to look inviting. Sam and Steve enjoyed the fruits of my success, but we knew we needed a place with more security.

I bought an old stone house, with a guest house behind it, out in Encino, a suburb of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley. It had been built in 1925. It was on two and a half choice acres of land near the reservoir on White Oak Avenue, and it included a huge orange orchard. There was plenty of space there for Sam, Steve and me. The house was expensive, but thanks to all the concerts I was doing, I could afford it. Michael Jackson’s family lived out that way too and Jimmy Webb lived up the street. At one time, I’m told, Clark Gable kept a mistress in the house. In more recent years, it had belonged to Wally Moon from the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chad Stewart from the folk-rock duo Chad and Jeremy.

Some of my belongings seemed to have been lost or left behind in the moving process, but I generally didn’t worry much about possessions. I figured almost anything could be replaced. There would always be more tours to do, more money to be made. The one item that disappeared that I really regretted losing was the gold record I got for
I Think I Love You
. I never really coveted awards and never put any of my gold records on display. But still, I would like to have that first one.

I loved the Encino house. It was a great crash pad for me and my friends. Rustic, really beautiful, old hardwood floors. The place had a casual kind of funk to it. It had no air conditioning; in the summer we’d just throw open the
windows. It felt almost like camping out. The area was still very rural back then. We even had sheep in the meadow above us. We put up an electric gate with a buzzer so I could get some privacy. That helped for a short while, but people quickly found out where I was living. So many strangers would press the buzzer, that a lot of times I’d simply disconnect it.

I even assumed an alias – Jackson Snipe. I got a telephone answering service, but I didn’t tell them I was David Cassidy. To them, I was simply Mr Jackson Snipe. When my friends would phone me, my service would answer and call me, saying, ‘Mr Snipe, I have so-and-so on the phone.’ And, if it was someone I wanted to talk to, I could say, ‘OK, put them through.’

I also had a direct phone line at the Encino house. I gave no one that phone number except Ruth and my mom. They were the only people who didn’t have to go through the service. I needed to be able to shut everyone out.

It felt like the only time I could really be me was when I was alone in my room. The only time I had to myself was when I slept or took a crap. And there wasn’t much time to get the sleep I needed. If I didn’t get six hours, and I often didn’t, I’d be irritable. Filming
The Partridge Family
actually occupied only about half the weeks of the year. I’d tour every weekend while the TV show was in production. When the show would go on hiatus, I’d tour without pause for weeks at a stretch.

When I was on the road, we had things timed as tightly as possible. If we were flying anywhere within the continental
U.S., my roadie would be at my house in a limo just 32 minutes before the flight. If we hustled, we could make it to LAX in time. We’d have the radio on in the limo. I loved hearing them play my records. But I was so worn out I’d usually fall asleep before the limo even made it from my house to the airport.

At first, I could walk through airports like any ordinary citizen. But as the TV show grew in popularity and my own following grew, I couldn’t do that any more; my presence would cause too much commotion. So it was arranged that when I flew anywhere, the police would meet me on the tarmac and escort my limo to the back entrance of whatever hotel I was staying in. In the early days, the band and I would stay at the same hotels until we attracted too much attention. It finally got to a point where some hotels simply wouldn’t take me. They didn’t want all the aggravation.

I had always tried not to take life too seriously, but things were now getting out of hand. I feared I was losing myself with this whole David Cassidy thing. Weeks turned into months. I realised I hadn’t had a moment to think,
What do I feel like doing
? I didn’t want to just get up and function,
perform, learn my lines, do the show, do the interview, do the photo session, make the plane, get in the car, get to work on time. I was becoming some crazed machine.

Before the first season of
The Partridge Family
ended, my body began breaking down from overwork. When you’re under stress and completely exhausted your body has a way of telling you that you need to rest. I had serious problems with my gall bladder. At just 21 years old, I was one of the youngest patients the doctors said they’d ever seen with that problem.

One Sunday night, when I got back from doing a concert, I felt a little funky and went right to bed. At about 2.30 a.m. I woke up screaming. I passed a gallstone. The pain was intolerable. I’ve never felt pain like that in my life. I started banging my head against the wall to knock myself out. It took 45 minutes for the doctor to get there. I had a big lump on my forehead by that time.

They knocked me out with a shot of Demerol. They put me on this diet: no spice, no fat. I was eating toast and oatmeal and nothing else. I was on it for a couple of months and I really got skinny. I didn’t weigh much to begin with, maybe 125 pounds, and I got down to 112 pounds. I was a rail.

Then, after we’d begun the second season, I had another attack, for which I had to be hospitalised. By the time they cut me open and removed my gall bladder, my liver had been affected and I’d become jaundiced. That was really a close call. I’m very fortunate they got it out in time.