Could It Be Forever? My Story (18 page)

One of the most celebrated groupies of the era, known as Barbara the Butter Queen, came to the arena when I played Dallas. If you were a rock star – or close to one – Barbara the Butter Queen sort of went with the territory. She was legendary. She serviced countless rockers of the 60s and 70s. I’d heard her name in connection with Joe Cocker, the Rolling Stones, Donovan and others. The guys in my band and crew just gasped when they heard that Barbara the Butter Queen was actually coming to do them all. They were actually shaking with anticipation. I was sort of fascinated by the whole groupie thing. I mean, back then, you could actually become famous for performing fellatio. Yes, and a performance it was. What a concept!

Barbara got into all the gigs for free because she would
blow all the promoters and the guys at the gate. Everybody knew her. She would blow everyone along the way, in order to get to the rock star. So democratic of her.

When she arrived at my three-room hotel suite, where we were having a party after the concert, she looked about 27 or maybe even 30. She was no kid. She looked tired and spoke with a heavy Texas drawl. She was not a beauty, not even attractive, and nor were the two younger girls – her apprentices – she brought with her. She looked us all over, the whole band and crew, and announced, ‘I’ll take the star, the dark hairy one [Sam] and the guitar player. My girls will divvy up the rest.’ She had been through all of this so many times before. She made some small talk about how she thought rock was dead and she had seen its glory years. She was a joke. This wasn’t gonna turn me on.

One of her girls decided she would take the horn section and the other would take the rhythm section, or something like that. The girls were actually very shy; they obviously hadn’t had anywhere near the experience Barbara had. But some trumpet players had brought up a couple of other chicks to join in the action.

Barbara picked up the phone and called room service. ‘Can we have a pound of butter, please?’ And up came a silver tray piled with tubs of butter! That was her gimmick.

Barbara and her girls went about the business of going down on everybody. I would not do anything in front of my whole entourage; I was still much too private a person for that. But I felt comfortable with Steve and Sam. After all, we’d been friends for years and shared a house. So
the three of us went into my bedroom with Barbara.

She took one look at me and said – trying to flatter me, I guess – ‘Oh, wow, man, you’ve got it all over Mick Jagger.’ Then, before I got too cocky, she turned to Sam and said, ‘Oh, wow, man, look at all that hair. I’m in love with you.’

She brought out the butter and put it all over Sam. You know what butter smells like when it’s hot? Steve and I began watching television while she was doing Sam and I said to Steve, ‘Pass the popcorn.’ He fell over, dropped to his knees.

It was all over for us. Steve and I rolled out of the room. It was hysterical. The whole place smelled like old buttered popcorn. Funky. Very, very funky.

One night at the house in Encino, Sam and I and a few friends were getting pretty drunk when we heard the buzzer at the gate around midnight. Steve answered it. The rest of us listened as some girl none of us knew started talking sex to Steve over the intercom.

We were falling down laughing. Steve and I decided we’d walk down to the gate. The girl wanted to see me, of course, but by this point she felt as if she knew Steve because she’d been talking on the intercom with him. By the time we got there, she was already down on her knees, her face pressed right up between the slats of the gate. She did us both under the stars, right through the gate.

I think back on it and think I must have been mad! Had anybody – a stranger, a cop,
anybody
– driven down White Oak Avenue that night, they would have seen this girl giving blow jobs through the bars of my gate. We could have all
wound up in jail. But once again, the Good Lord shined His light . . .

I guess it’s safe to say that at that time a lot of fans would have done anything for me. I’ll admit I did things that I now think were degrading for the women involved, and for that I’m ashamed.

I’m not sure how I felt about all the adulation I received. You’re always trying to convince yourself that you really are worthy of it. But are you? Come on, no one is. There were a lot of other guys who were more handsome and talented. I happened to come along in the right vehicle, at the right time.

On tour, there’d be all these girls hanging around the hotels. The guys in the band and the roadies would pull in girls who were looking for me. Sometimes those guys would tell the girls they’d have to have sex with them first if they expected to ever meet me. I had no way of knowing that was going on. I didn’t want people to take advantage of their power and do things like that. But that was the deal, and I learned later that there were plenty of girls who were glad to comply.

I had a guy travelling with me who had only one job to do: hand me my guitar when I needed it for one number in my concert and then take it back from me when I’d finished with it. I can remember this one huge outdoor daytime concert. I’d reached the point when I was supposed to do the number with the guitar and the fans were screaming and yelling, eager for me to get on with the show. I was
looking around frantically for the guitar, ad libbing, ‘Thanks, and now for my next trick . . .’
Nothing.
Finally, I spotted the guy who was supposed to be handing the guitar to me, way off to one side of the parking area, his pants down around his knees, having sex with some chick leaning on an open-back truck. And you want to know something? I didn’t fire him. That’s how loose things were.

We had a name I coined: ‘Squeaky Clean [which was me] and the Dirty All-Night Boys’. In fact, I wanted to make an album under that alias. Steve and I were going to do some of the stuff from our garage band days, all that really hard, stoned-rocker stuff I loved before getting trapped into
The Partridge Family
bag.

Sometimes it became a contest between a couple of the guys in my entourage to see how many girls they could pull for me. They thought they were impressing me or something, or somehow proving their masculinity by rounding up a lot of girls quickly. But it usually made me feel terrible. Empty. What was I supposed to be, some sex machine servicing the groupies of the world? It was uncomfortable, feeling I had to live up to others’ expectations that I’d be some superstud because I was a star.

I can remember one night in particular. These guys had rounded up seven different girls. They had them waiting for me, undressed, in the outer room of my hotel suite and they’d send them into my bedroom at ten-minute intervals. You want to know what I did with all those naked girls in my hotel bedroom that particular night? Nothing.

I can remember the first girl coming in, awkward and
uncomfortable, standing nude at the foot of my bed saying, ‘Well, uh, hi. I, uh, guess you sort of know what I’m here for.’ Yeah, I got that. And then suddenly it hit me and I was totally turned off. I thought of my roadies out there in the other room, so proud that they could get these girls up here like this. I felt somehow emasculated by the whole situation. I felt like a sleaze.

I’m sure there are some of you out there who are reading this book who might strongly disapprove of promiscuity, who will say I used women. You’re right. I did. But it wasn’t always clear to me who was really using whom. I was usually the one being pursued by fans who wanted me much more than I wanted them.

Once, Sam brought a girl home who turned out to be a real nutcase. She was obsessed with me. It turned into a rather difficult situation because Sam thought she was in love with him. But she lied to him to get into our world. She used him, but he really dug her. That was awful.

He’d met this girl on one of our tours. She was really dirty – I mean literally, she had dirt all over her hands – but there was something about her. She just reeked of sex. And Sam fell for it, big time. She really got under his skin. He brought her around. Showed her off. Then she got drunk one night on the road and started crawling into my room. She was banging on my door, crying. I wasn’t interested. A couple of my guys grabbed her and took her downstairs. Sam couldn’t look me in the eye. He tried to rationalise the situation, saying, ‘Well, she was drunk.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but she
was
trying to get into my room. That tells you
something.’ He was really hurt by it and a little angry with me.

Even when I was 20, I wasn’t attracted to 16-year-olds. I went for older women, 30-year-olds. I was well aware of the difficulties Elvis and others had had due to involvements with underage girls. And I was also concerned about the possibility of inflicting trauma on someone who was just too young.

It was not always easy turning down those temptations. I can remember one 14-year-old who wanted to have sex with me, but I wouldn’t do it. I felt like such an old square declining her offer. She was a virgin and one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen. I told her I didn’t want to be the one to take her virginity. ‘Save it, baby. Your time will come soon.’

I had some male groupies who would also hang out around the hotel or wherever I was, waiting to see me. Some transvestites, some gay guys. I always liked seeing them. They were always interesting and amusing. I never treated them any differently than I did the female fans. Except I’d only sign autographs for them!

Part of the bizarreness of being a teen idol, a rock star, a TV star is becoming the focus of people’s sexual fantasies – both male and female. I used to feel flattered when I’d hear that a friend had gone into a gay bar and heard half the guys saying they’d slept with me. I thought it was funny. I’ve always figured it’s a compliment when someone says they’re attracted to you. Gay friends would say to me, ‘Hey, I hear you’ve been spending a lot of nights at the Rusty Nail,’ which was a popular gay bar. Right! As if I had the energy or the time to go out to any bars after work! But there’d be that kind of gossip. To borrow a phrase from Dustin Hoffman, the first time I realised I had made it was when I walked into a bar and heard I was gay.

I never wanted my fans to be disappointed in David Cassidy. That was a tremendous weight on me. There were things about me that they believed that weren’t true, and I didn’t want to burst their bubbles. I was torn, because I wanted to be myself, but then I couldn’t live up to their expectations.

I was painted to be this White Knight, this perfect guy, and the truth about David Cassidy is he was and is flawed, just like everybody else. My friends used to say, ‘Your drugs are women and sex.’ And that was true. I’m not ashamed to say it, although I can’t say I’m proud of it. I never discussed the people I was dating. I never exposed anybody. I never taped anybody. I never did anything sick, you know? I wasn’t cruel. It was consensual. It was fantastic. I was fulfilling people’s fantasies and they were fulfilling mine.

In the 70s, the Playboy Mansion was beyond the beyond and I thought it would be interesting to check it out. I was taken there by two beautiful women in their 30s. When I got there, there were naked Playboy Bunnies running around and they were more than anxious to meet me. This was probably in 1972. There were only a few men in the world who were permitted to go up there and I became one of them, although I wasn’t nearly as frequent a visitor as some of the others, only because I was working almost every weekend. I walked into the Grotto and a number of Playboy Playmates screamed as if I’d walked into Madison Square Garden.

That night I felt compelled to live the American Dream as every boy would have. I got to know all four of the girls that night, intimately. And I got to know them again on a couple of different occasions. Wilt Chamberlain, one of the superheroes of basketball, made the greatest mistake of his life by telling the truth about his sexual exploits in his autobiography. I met Wilt there; he was one of the guys in the entertainment business who were welcomed by Hef. It
was Hef’s palace and his world and we were just living in it for a while. I loved the fact that he was genuine and generous about his home, providing food, women, movies and anything else you wanted. And I will defend him because he deserves to be defended as a guy who is living what every man in our culture has dreamed of. He was willing to risk everything he had and go on the line to do what was, in the 50s, not socially acceptable. In the 60s that lifestyle became very acceptable, and then came AIDS and political correctness. Hef’s not somebody who cares about being politically correct. I liked him. Most women see him as being the poster boy for the anti-feminist brigade. But he loves women. For a decade and a half, my way of life rivalled his.

As my fame grew, I became even more reclusive. It was a big responsibility living up to my image so I retreated into my shell. I was scared that if people really got to know me, they wouldn’t love me as much. How would they really feel about me if they found out I wasn’t this superhuman I was built up to be?

For a couple of years during the run of
The Partridge Family
, I went to see a psychiatrist every Monday night. I wanted help so I could deal with the kinds of stress that were too great for me to handle alone. I was particularly bothered by my inability to form lasting friendships with women.