Could It Be Forever? My Story (17 page)

While I was in the hospital, things got really nutty. It was
on the news that I’d been hospitalised, forcing the production of
The Partridge Family
to be suspended. Fans gathered outside the hospital and down in the lobby and started to send me gifts and cards – thousands of them. One fan broke through security and was heading towards me in intensive care. There was some scare about the fan wanting to put something in my IV. All I can tell you is for the two weeks I was in the hospital, it was a circus. Fans, family, media, me on Demerol. Flying. Just flying.

Six weeks after the operation, I returned to work. It was big news that I was working again. In addition to working on the show, I kept doing concert dates. I broke the record at the Garden State Art Center in Holmdel, New Jersey. It was the biggest single day’s business ever. The box office take was huge. Running more on nerves and adrenaline than anything else, I did six shows in one weekend. When I got back home, every muscle in my body was a mess. I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. But I dived right back into working at the same pace I’d kept up before the gall bladder operation. In some ways it was even more intense. I started a heavy public relations schedule, doing five or six things each day, almost as if we were making up for lost time.

I was trying to regain my overall strength. I got my weight up to 114 pounds, 116 pounds. But I was still just skin and bone. I developed a small tumour on my back. It was removed. My face began breaking out in infections, which could not always be hidden with make-up. I suspect the infections made it even easier for some viewers to identify with me. I can imagine teens worried about their acne saying,
‘Look at that. Keith Partridge has pimples, too.’ I was put on antibiotics, but the facial infections remained a recurring problem throughout the second, third and fourth seasons of
The Partridge Family
. The fundamental cause of them, I’m sure, was simply stress. I was burning out.

Around this time, my friend Steve was becoming diet and health conscious and started fasting. He got me interested in it, too. I figured maybe the gallstones, the tumour, the infections, were trying to tell me something. I went on a total non-fat diet. I stopped eating meat. We all started eating natural food. I wanted to feel really cleansed, really pure.

I took about two months off at the end of 1971 and beginning of 1972. I couldn’t sustain the pace any more. I had to take a break or I would have lost my mind. I vacationed in Italy and France, in towns where I could go unrecognised.
The Partridge Family
hadn’t reached there yet, so I could travel like a normal guy. It turned out to be a great experience for me. I read a lot, meditated a lot. I stayed at little inns. No one knew me anywhere. I love to be alone. I thoroughly enjoy my own company. It was just great. I recharged my batteries.

Then I was to head to England, where the show had been airing and our first Partridge Family album was just released. Ruth was to meet me at the airport, along with people from my record company’s British office. The radio and newspapers had mentioned I was coming and the record people thought it conceivable that a hundred or so fans might turn up at the airport.

Flying in, I was thinking,
I’ve never been to London before; this is going to be great.
I wasn’t thinking about being David Cassidy the ‘celebrity’. I was totally out of that mindset after spending time in France. I got off the plane and there were all these cops and people standing around. I thought,
What’s going on here?
Some official, pointing his finger at me, shouted, ‘Mr Cassidy! You’re the one that’s caused all this!’

I said, ‘Excuse me? Are you talking to me?’

He said, ‘We can’t even bring you through customs.’

I asked, ‘What are you talking about?’

He said, ‘You can’t go through passport control.’

And I certainly couldn’t. There were far too many people. Thousands of fans had shown up. There was no time for me to worry about getting my luggage, they said. More people had turned out at Heathrow for me than ever turned out for the Beatles or The Jackson Five. It was insane. I wasn’t even successful there yet.

The authorities rushed me through a part of the airport that was presumably secure, but somehow somebody spotted me and fans started screaming at the tops of their lungs. People started stampeding. They broke through barriers. The authorities urged me frantically, ‘Go, go, go!’ We were running down steel stairs; we sounded like a herd of elephants.

Suddenly, I started laughing uncontrollably, hysterically. The cops were looking at me like I was a real fruitcake. They began pushing me, saying, ‘You don’t understand this! There are thousands of kids out there, and they’re going crazy! Move! Go!’

The whole madness just hit me like a ton of bricks. I’d come to Europe to get away from all of this. The cops threw me into the back of a Daimler. Ruth was there along with Dick Leahy, the managing director of Bell in England. And we took off with a police escort. Dick said, ‘Hello, David. Welcome to London.’

They had me doing press interviews throughout my whole stay in England, from the moment I’d wake up each day until I went to bed. In a week I became a big national name. It was overwhelming. My album went right to the top spot.

I stayed at the Dorchester Hotel. By the end of the week, there were 15,000 kids in front of the hotel, stopping traffic on Park Lane. It was on the news. The unusual thing about the English fans is that they would sing. From about seven to ten every night, they’d be serenading me outside my hotel. For teenagers to be out alone that late, with badges, buttons and banners, singing all my songs – it was incredible.

You couldn’t get in or out of the Dorchester. Fans were getting crushed trying to push through the revolving doors. The hotel management was aghast. The idea that I was causing all this commotion was totally unacceptable. That was the last time I would be able to stay at a London hotel for the entire 70s. No hotel would have me after that.

I visited many different places in the U.S. and abroad while I was doing my concert tours, although I can’t say I actually saw many of them. For security reasons, it was often necessary for me just to stay put in my hotel room when not performing. If I were to even try to walk through the hotel lobby, fans might riot. I began feeling more and more removed from
the band, my friends, from the world. I became isolated.

As the tours became bigger, the lonelier I got for someone’s company, yet the more I found myself sitting in my room watching TV while the rest of my entourage was partying. Everyone and everything had to come to me. That was when it became a difficult issue. Who could I bring into the inner circle? Is this person trustworthy? What is this person’s motivation? I started to become more and more hyper and anxious as things evolved.

I didn’t know what to do. The whole thing was gaining momentum weekly, daily. I was getting more famous. I was becoming less and less myself and more and more this guy whom people perceived as Keith Partridge.

I no longer trusted anybody. Everyone I met wanted me for sex, or for my money, or they just wanted to make themselves feel more important by hanging out with someone famous. It became very difficult to trust anybody other than friends like Sam and Steve. I distanced myself from almost everyone else. It took me a long time after
The Partridge Family
years to regain trust in anyone.

For a long time, I had disliked people’s reactions to me. I was embarrassed when people started screaming just because they saw me. And the more famous and successful I became, the more shows I did and the bigger the arenas I was playing at, the more difficult it all started becoming for me. I felt I suddenly understood why the Beatles had broken up, why they were saying they never wanted to go out on the road again, regardless of public demand. I really learned the downside of being a rock star when
I
became
the deal. No matter how pleasurable it might be for that one hour of the day when you were performing on stage, the other 23 hours of the day were impossible to cope with. They were hell.

I
t’s bizarre but true that once I became really famous, virtually the only real contact I had with people outside my immediate circle was with women who wanted to have sex with me. They’d come into my inner sanctum for a little while and we’d talk. I’d talk to them about the most mundane things. They’d say, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t care about my job . . .’ But I did care. They became my last connection to the real world. I’d ask things like, ‘Where do you go for fun? What do you do? What’s it like when you stand in line at the bank?’ There was no way for me to know these things. I didn’t live that kind of life.

As soon as people started to talk to me, they’d find out I was not that guy on the TV show. I had adult thoughts
and sexual fantasies. Part of the game became the fact that I could do anything. I could have anyone I wanted. I mean, come on, who wouldn’t get turned on by that?

The dialogue became the aphrodisiac. The fact that they wanted me. I felt sexually aroused by their wanting to please me, wanting to satisfy me, wanting to touch me, wanting to be intimate with me.

I genuinely liked some of them. There were women I got to know well. It was great to have a real conversation with someone I didn’t work with. I like listening instead of being the one who had to do the talking all the time. Then it was a matter of living up to their sexual fantasies.

We’d be in my room, one-on-one, and I’d say, ‘Tell me how you fantasise about me.’ I’d want to know, ‘How did you end up in my room? What did it take for you to go out and buy a ticket, or come back to the hotel and sit and wait, or chase the car I was in? What motivated you to do those things?’

In truth, I knew it wasn’t
me
they loved; they really didn’t know me. I was trying to find out,
What made you idolise this creation that you think you know through the media?
Could they have glimpsed something of the real me and been attracted to that?

I’ve always been very comfortable with my sexuality. I really love women. I think they’re beautiful. I find them enchanting creatures. I enjoy being with them. I enjoy their attention. I enjoy giving them attention. The difference between me now and me in my early 20s is I now enjoy
giving
a lot more than I enjoy receiving. Back then, I was more self-centred. More chauvinistic.

I never had to hit on women. I didn’t have to. Women would come up to me all the time and say things like, ‘Hi, want to have sex with me?’ I always liked that blatantly honest approach. No b.s., right? Ah, it makes me miss the 70s just a little when I think of how wild a time it was.

Sex was just sex. It was there. It presented itself to me numerous times during the course of the day, and I could take advantage of it or not. Pick anyone. Who would you like to meet? Who would you like to sleep with? I was 21 years old, I was always ready, and they were all so willing.
Yeah, I
can
live with this . . .

My brothers call me ‘Donk’. It’s their nickname for me. One fellow even published a book on the Hollywood scene and included a reference to my being ‘blessed’. I decided that if I
had
it, there wasn’t any point in just keeping it in the holster all the time. I’d have to let it out. And let it out I did.

I had many sexual encounters. Did I do anything any red-blooded man in his 20s wouldn’t have done if given the opportunity? The most beautiful women in the world were calling me, saying, ‘I’ve got to see you. Please let me see you.’ And they would come up to my room.

As the pressures of my career mounted, I felt like the sex was compensation for not being able to lead a normal life. At least I could be the real David Cassidy in my bedroom.
There, the real David Cassidy could live, and live well.

To me, the act of sexual intercourse represented a serious commitment, which oral sex did not. I could indulge in the fantasy with talk and oral sex, without feeling I’d really
committed myself in terms of time or emotion. So I almost always avoided sexual intercourse in these casual encounters. I had to feel a real connection before I’d sleep with someone. I still held on to this romantic concept that intercourse should mostly be saved for more meaningful relationships. Well, OK. Maybe not
meaningful.
But at the very least I’d need to know her last name.

If I slept with a girl, she would have to stay for a while. She might even want to stay the whole night! This was not something I usually wanted. In addition, you risked knocking her up. Nobody wore rubbers in those days, so I felt I had to be very careful if I actually had intercourse. My friends and I also took antibiotics constantly. We lived on brown rice, sex and tetracycline, which we figured would protect us from getting venereal diseases.