Could It Be Forever? My Story (33 page)

I blotted out reality by immersing myself deeper in drugs, alcohol and music.

T
he night of Saturday 11 December 1976 started out like any other for me. Some musician friends dropped over to party and jam with Steve and me. We stayed up most of the night playing music. Because that was such an unhappy period of my life, I spent as much time as I could outside of myself – being in the zone, I used to call it. We were all pretty wiped out, emotionally and physically, by the end of the night. Numb. I always wanted to keep the party going so I didn’t have to go to sleep, so I didn’t have to be alone, so I didn’t have to deal with real life.

Around five in the morning, after we’d stopped playing, I still felt too wired to call it a night. We had the radio on in the background. I was just sitting around talking to
Steve, half listening to the news on the radio, when the newsman announced it had just come over the wire that actor Jack Cassidy had apparently died in a fire that had swept through his apartment. His body had been so badly charred, however, that it had not yet been possible to make a positive identification. Silence. Was I dreaming this? I looked at Steve. He looked at me and said, ‘Oh, shit.’

I picked up the phone and called my brother Shaun. No answer. Then I called Shirley. No answer. I called her service and waited for a call back. It must have been nine or ten o’clock, a long time, before anyone called me back. It was Shaun. They had been out trying to identify the body, which had been so thoroughly burned that an absolute identification was only possible through dental records. I just listened in silence. I couldn’t believe this was happening.

I drove to Shirley’s house. It wasn’t until I opened the door and saw my brothers that I suddenly realised that there was no one left except us. We were the only ones who could relate to each other’s loss. At that point it felt as if someone thrust me down to the ground. I completely collapsed, dropped to my knees and wailed, weeping like a child, which is just how I felt.

My brothers and I held each other. I remember saying things like, ‘It’s just us now. His job here is over. We just have each other.’ I felt so much stronger because my brothers were there. And it’s been like that with us ever since. We have a bond.

We didn’t know much about his death at first. There seemed to be some uncertainties connected with it, and that
bothered me. The police asked an awful lot of questions in an attempt to reconstruct his final night. He had had dinner with actress Nanette Fabray and her husband. After he’d called it a night with them, it was believed that he had gone to meet some guys for drinks. It appeared that he got drunk with them that night. Although he’d told interviewers shortly before his death that he’d quit smoking and drinking, that did not seem to be the case. Later, back in his apartment, he lit a cigarette but apparently fell asleep, or passed out, on the couch, which then caught fire. His body was found on the floor, as if he’d been trying to crawl to the apartment’s sliding glass door, where it seems he died due to smoke inhalation.

But some believed there was more to his death than met the eye. Syndicated columnist Liz Smith, for example, reported (2 March 1977): ‘The Los Angeles police have not closed the book on the tragic death by fire of that wonderful actor Jack Cassidy . . . The dapper Jack loved to gamble and there are those who believe he was heavily in debt to the mob. To add to the mystery, two unsavoury type guys were seen at his apartment earlier and a young woman who had been visiting the actor contends that he was safely tucked in bed when she left him. So why did Jack get up and move to the couch? And was his death an accident or wasn’t it?’

I believe it was.

What some of the columnists and police investigators knew, but the public did not, was that my father was bisexual. The police concluded that on his last night my father had gone out drinking with some of his homosexual friends.
However, they never found out who was the last person who saw him alive.

Though I’d heard some rumours, I didn’t really know about my father’s bisexuality until after he died. Now I can see it; it fits with the man I knew. Certainly he never discussed it with me, although he could have been open with me had he chosen to. But I guess, in some ways, he was very private. I can understand that.

Cole Porter had an extended sexual relationship with my father, according to information he shared with his friend Truman Capote. In Gerald Clarke’s bestseller
Capote: a Biography
, Capote is quoted as saying how Porter described ‘his long affair with that actor Jack Cassidy’.

Of course, my father, an aspiring singer and actor at the time, revered Cole Porter and Cole knew it, which I’m sure made the keep-it-cool psychological power-playing possible. Being close to Cole Porter, one of America’s most important writers of Broadway and Hollywood scores, could only have helped my father’s career.

In Boze Hadleigh’s book
The Vinyl Closet
,
Dance
magazine
editor William Como confessed that when Jack Cassidy – in his eyes, I guess, an unapproachable star – made a pass at him, he initially thought ‘it had to be a joke’. But it soon led to a ‘scorching affair’. Como said of my father (whom he found quite vain), ‘He loved the showbiz whirl, and he loved seducing VIPs of both sexes, even if he had no intention of bedding them.’

I was sorry I didn’t see my father for the last nine months of his life. If I had one more chance to speak to my father
again, I’d say, ‘I forgive you.’ I couldn’t do that at 25, which is how old I was when he died.

As it turned out, my father left me the big goose egg. I was cut out of his will, which placed his estate at $100,000. It made the news that he had excluded both Shirley and me. Maybe my father decided we were rich and could take care of ourselves. Or maybe he wanted to pay us back for how he felt we’d treated him. In the end, though, the lawyers’ fees and the taxes and everything else ate up most of the estate. They had an auction of his clothes. I didn’t go. I bought my father’s pocket watch for $1,000 before the auction, just to have it to remember him by. He had had it engraved to himself. That was my father. It was later stolen by someone close enough to me to have access to my home. I can’t prove who did it, but I have some strong suspicions. I really would like to have kept that watch. My son would have had something of his grandfather’s.

The only other thing I had from him was a ring that I had always wanted. He gave it to me for my twenty-first birthday. He went back into our family history, and found our family crest and had it made for me as a ring. That ring was my connection to him. I’ve been all around the world and managed to hold on to it for years until it was stolen in Las Vegas when I was starring in a show I wrote,
At the Copa.
It could have been stolen by anyone who came through the backstage area. I offered a $50,000 reward for it, even though the ring itself wasn’t worth anywhere near that. It wasn’t returned. Someone has it
who doesn’t know what they have, or they had it melted down for the gold. It’s very sad that it’s never been recovered.

The desire to anaesthetise myself was already pretty strong, but when my dad died my desire to make the pain go away doubled. That was such a horrible time in my life. I just retreated further into myself.

My father’s death was also a terrible blow to Ruth Aarons. They had been close for more than a quarter of a century. She began noticeably deteriorating, both psychologically and physically. I don’t know that she had many friends, other than her small (and dwindling) pool of clients, now my father was dead and I was retired. I resisted her periodic attempts to get me to go back to work, which she felt would have been good for me – and, of course, good for her. I didn’t mind visiting her when I could, to try to buck her up (although I was bothered by the hundreds of pills she had at her home), but I rebuffed her suggestions that I go back to work, even when she tried to get me to do a proposed TV show called
The Hardy Boys.
I turned it down, but it ended up launching Shaun’s career. Ruth received a further blow when Shirley decided to leave her. Who did she have left? Her world was shrinking.

Shaun’s career, which kicked off in 1977, was Ruth’s last hurrah as a personal manager. She wasn’t sure if they could get lightning to strike twice, but they did. His career trajectory followed much the same path as mine. Although it didn’t last long, for a couple of years, 1977–9, he had
enormous success on TV, with his records and in concert. It would have been a trip if we could have worked together. As it turned out, we had to wait 15 years before performing together, which we did in the Broadway production
Blood Brothers.

Shaun had three platinum albums in 1977 and 1978 and five hit singles. He donned the tight white jumpsuits and shook his backside at screaming young girls, just as I had. His face appeared on posters, magazine covers and lunchboxes.
Rolling Stone
even profiled him before the fever ran its course. He retired from recording four years after he began.

For a while, when Shaun’s career first began happening, it must have seemed like old times for Ruth, having another Cassidy become a teen idol. This time, she vowed, we won’t make the mistakes we made the last time; we’ll keep a careful eye on marketing and all the rest. She meant well, but the drugs had taken too great a toll on her. Shaun needed a manager he could feel confident in. He saw her failing, due to her drug addiction. He felt she was losing her mind and he bailed out.

All Ruth’s clients left her in the end. I’d visit her a couple of afternoons a week. She wouldn’t leave her bed. She didn’t have the energy. She was so drugged from all the Seconals she took, she was just out of it. She’d tell me things like, ‘I
have
to take the pills; I have a terrible backache’ – the rationalisations of an addict. Her muscles atrophied. It was such a shame, seeing this once vibrant person becoming so weak.

Then one day I got a call from Lloyd Brown, a man who worked for her. Apparently she’d slipped in the shower, hit her head and died. It was perhaps almost inevitable something tragic would happen. When she died, there were thousands of pills in her home.

With Shirley, with my father, with me, Ruth Aarons had the world on a string. She played all 88 keys of the piano, and the piano was the agents, the PR people, and the rest of the people she had to deal with. I have met millions of people in my lifetime. I have never met anyone who had the intellect, the humour, the passion, the business savvy, the boldness to do what she was doing at a time when
women weren’t expected to do that. They weren’t invited to the party. She could be as tough and as ball-busting as any man. She was strong and competitive, but also sensitive, bright, instinctive, cutting-edge and wickedly funny. I’m convinced my father and she had a love affair without ever physically touching.