Could It Be Forever? My Story (2 page)

Our neighbourhood is purely middle class, very white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Very church oriented. Elm Street is made up of unpretentious, closely spaced, single-family
homes, with clothes lines in clear view. There are people across the street from us who keep chickens in their backyard. The ‘rag man’ comes down the street collecting people’s old rags and bottles. My friends’ parents are carpenters, plumbers, policemen. I’m the youngest kid on the block and the only one who has begun school at Eagle Rock Elementary School. This is the local public school located about four hundred yards from the Indian reservation near where I grew up. My friends have all been going to Our Lady of Lourdes, the Catholic elementary school across the street. It’s a small, solid kind of place.

My mom never worried about me walking to Eagle Rock or running off to play at Eagle Rock Reservation. As I think back on those years now, it’s almost as if that was another person’s life. For Hollywood . . . gasp . . . distorted who I really am.

I didn’t hate West Orange, because my mother’s family was there. My grandfather was really fantastic. He was more of a father to me than my own dad. Born in 1889, he worked in public service all his adult life, reading meters. My grandmother, Ethel, was like a second mother to me. She and my aunt Marion, along with some other relatives, had factory jobs. My grandmother never missed a Sunday at Holy Trinity Church, which she and her sisters had been attending for decades. My grandmother was the head of the senior choir. They had me singing in the choir as soon as I was old enough.

I’d watch the Yankees with my grandfather. He took me to Yankee Stadium for the first time when I was seven. He
didn’t drive, so we had to take a bus and a train. And he was getting on in years. It was one of the biggest thrills of my life. I saw all the greats – Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Bobby Richardson, Gil McDougald. He took me one more time, in 1960, when we saw Roger Maris. I’m still a sports enthusiast, particularly baseball, and have a good collection of 1961 Yankees memorabilia.

I remember waiting for my father to visit the weekend that I was to ask him the important question. He drove up to the house in grand style in a shiny new Cadillac. So Jack. Even when he didn’t have much money, he always looked the part. My mother used to say, ‘If he had fifty dollars, he’d spend forty on a suit for himself and leave ten for us to live on.’

When he arrived, I remember him bundling me into a bulky overcoat – it was winter – and saying exuberantly, with a wave of his hand, ‘We’re going to New York!’ He could make it sound as if he had just invented New York and was about to make a present of it to you. He had so much charm you couldn’t help but love him.

Before I started school, I’d spend almost every day in Manhattan with him and my mom and we would go to all the matinees. The first time I went to New York City was when my father was starring in the Broadway show
Wish You Were Here
. I was only three and a half, yet I remember him in the back seat of a taxi saying, ‘You have to be quiet during the show.’ But when I saw my dad come out on to the stage I got excited and shouted, ‘That’s my daddy!’

I can remember his presence so vividly. I knew when I
saw him standing on the stage, with his arms spread out, singing, and everybody clapping for him, that I wanted to be a performer, just like him. And as I grew older, maybe a part of me even believed that if I became a performer like he was, it would bring us the closeness we never had.

My first impressions of show business are wonderful and inextricably linked in my memory with him – bright and gay and buoyant. My primary childhood memories of West Orange – coloured by my dad’s absence so much of the time – are that it was grey and drab. Even when I was as young as six, I secretly felt that I belonged much more in the bright-lights world of my father in New York than in West Orange. My mother felt that way, too. That’s why she left home as soon as she could and headed for Broadway.

We lived less than 20 miles from New York City. On this particular trip, as my dad and I drove there on Route 3, passing the marshlands of Secaucus, New Jersey, I finally asked him the big question.

‘Are you and Mom divorced?’

I knew he would say ‘No’ and then everything would be exactly the way it was before my friends had started taunting me. But, instead, he paused, drew his breath, and said, ‘Yes.’

Whatever problems I have today with trusting people, whatever problems I have with dealing with rejection, with loss – and I’m hypersensitive about abandonment, about needing people around me to be consistent and loving – have their origins in that moment.

When I heard him say that, and learned that they had
been divorced for over two years, I could hardly keep myself together. It felt like every part of my body came unglued at once and I began to shake and convulse out of pain, fear and rejection.

I was stunned that he had decided to leave me and my mother – and hadn’t even bothered telling me. And with that first lie comes the first time you know that you can’t trust people. When I found out that I’d been deceived by my own parents, I was so devastated that I’ve never completely recovered.

It couldn’t have taken much time to drive the rest of the way into Manhattan, but in my memory it took hours. Dad said he would still come and see me. But throughout my growing-up years, he never did come around very much. I felt shunned, like I’d done something wrong. I was a very sensitive kid.

I’ve largely gotten over the pain of it. But I recognise that it still lives inside me. It’s just like when you cut yourself. At first it’s really sore. Eventually it heals over, but you’re left with a scar. Now, years and years and years later, the scar is still there, but after 15 years (on and off) in psychoanalysis – three and a half of them intensely, three times a week – trying to heal myself, to rid myself of some of the darkness and heartache I’ve felt through the years as a result of my father’s selfishness, the pain has subsided. I now understand that those years in therapy weren’t about me being a miserable sod. I really had an interest in being a detective and discovering who I was and why, and finding out what makes me tick.

I’m basically a very positive person, and want to believe people are of good intent. But trusting love has always been a difficult thing for me. This is true of almost anyone who has come from a broken home and has not had much contact with a parent who left. There’s a certain naïvety in unconditional trust because, for the most part, as we all learn, people disappoint you. To paraphrase Carole King, you can expect to have pieces of your heart torn out along the way, and people
will
desert you.

When I became famous, I never had a doubt about whether people liked me for me. There is a certain amount of intuitiveness that I’ve always had about whether people are good or bad. Most of the time, I have surrounded myself with people who know me and were friends of mine before I was successful. People used to say, ‘Boy, you can’t tell who your friends are.’ I said, ‘Oh, yeah, I can.’ Consequently, those closest to me now are my brothers, my wife, my son, and a few close friends.

My father got married again in August 1956 to actress Shirley Jones, whose career was going much better than his. She had starring roles in the film versions of
Oklahoma!
(1955) and
Carousel
(1956). She and my father had met in a stage production of
Oklahoma!
They made their home in New York until 1957 then moved to California, which meant I saw even less of my dad. There he began getting some guest shots on television.

My dad and Shirley lived quite comfortably. They were even considered rich, thanks largely to Shirley’s earnings. She went on to appear in movies like
April Love
(1957),
Never Steal Anything Small
(1959),
Elmer Gantry
(1960)
,
for which she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress,
Two Rode Together
(1961) and
The Music Man
(1962). After she won the Oscar, they moved into a 40-room mansion on five acres in Bel Air that had belonged to Merle Oberon that must be worth $20 million today. I remember visiting my father once in the early 60s and counting the shoes in his closet. He had 104 pairs! Even at the peak of my success, I don’t think I ever had more than five pairs. I’m happy with two. But he was so self-indulgent. A self-absorbed man, I came to understand as I got older, who expected everyone in his life – his children, his wife, the people he worked with – to deal with him on his terms. His reality. The world according to Jack.

Although my childhood was marred by my sense of abandonment, I was inspired by my father’s phenomenal sense of the theatrical. He was the epitome of grandeur and had a certain charisma and a genuine connection with all people – he treated every human being on the face of the earth the same way, no matter how high or low they were on the social or financial scale. I guess this was because he needed everyone to love him. He didn’t ever discriminate. Treating everyone equally, and truly feeling no prejudice against anyone is all I knew from my upbringing.

His grandiose persona as a human being had an enormous influence on me and my brothers. We each inherited a lot from him. Shirley has said I’m like him in so many ways – I walk like him, I talk like him, I move
like him, my gestures are like his. My mother had also told me that a lot. He taught me the work ethic I live by, in addition to the responsibilities of being a good role model, knowing how to deal with people, how to connect with them. He had all those qualities. I always had ambition, but he raised the bar for achievement.

My mother, Evelyn, was born in 1923 in West Orange, New Jersey. Prior to her birth, her mother and father, Ethel and Fred Ward, had five other children die as infants. When my mother was ten she got very, very ill with strep throat. They thought they were going to lose her but her life was saved by penicillin, which had just come on the market. As a result, my mother was pampered, babied, protected, doted on; she became their life. She was treated like a little princess, which is a dangerous thing for a child. When the real world smacks you in the face, it’s a very difficult pill to swallow. My mother has suffered the pains of accepting her beauty, accepting her talent, but not accepting her lack of real success. She did accomplish quite a bit as an actress and a singer–dancer in the theatre but, much like my father, her frustration was that she was never a movie star.

My mother was a genuine innocent. She believed in right and wrong and in doing good. She had to accept her parents’ very staunch religious beliefs and was a black sheep in that environment because she went to New York and became a showgirl and worked at the Roxy as a Roxy-ette (she was too small to be a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall). But she was magnificently beautiful,
sang wonderfully and danced very well. She aspired to be a Broadway musical comedy star, much like Ethel Merman, Gwen Verdon and Mary Martin, only more beautiful.

My mother was always aware that I was different from most of the other kids we knew. She also knew that my father was different. And that she was different. After all, it was a small town and people looked at show-business people as being a separate breed.

My father, unfortunately, was not kind to her and was not willing to support us financially after the divorce. My mother had to take him to court a couple of times because he refused to pay child support, claiming he couldn’t afford it, even though when he and my mom were first married, he had thought nothing of sponging off my mom’s parents, living with them rent-free. He had washed his hands of us emotionally as well as financially. My mother loved me and cared for me as much as she was capable of, bearing in mind that she, too, was extraordinarily narcissistic. She wanted me to have a relationship with my father but was stunned and hurt by his leaving her.

My father was raised in Jamaica, Queens. As a child, he was an Irish tenor and performed all over Queens with the church. Later on, he was hugely influenced by the movies of the early 30s. When he saw John Barrymore, he realised that’s who he wanted to be. Barrymore was the prototype of the Jack Cassidy we all knew. My dad wanted to get out of a very tough environment. He used to tell me that he had to either give the local kids a dime so they wouldn’t beat him up when he went to school or he had to fight them.

He came from working-class Irish Catholic stock. According to family lore, his mother, Lotte, was a really hard nut. Everyone said she had ice water running through her veins. She bore my father exceptionally late in life, in 1928, when she was 48. She was unhappy to have this unwanted change-of-life child; she seemed embarrassed by him, as if she believed a woman her age shouldn’t be having sex any more, much less children. And she rejected him, handing him over to a woman a few houses away, who nursed him and looked after him. He once told me he couldn’t remember his mother ever kissing him.

My father, I’m sure, was damaged goods from the moment his mother rejected him. The various psychological problems he had, including that insatiable need of his for attention, no doubt had their origins right there. As did the fully fledged mental illness he would develop later in life.

His father, Willie Cassidy, a railroad engineer, was by all accounts a wonderful man. When I was a lad of about eight or nine, he always made me laugh. A big drinker, but lovable. He had a remarkable sense of humour. And he was a notorious rogue. He was quite the womaniser, according to my aunt Gertrude, my dad’s sister. She claimed that he had a woman at every stop. Eventually, I began to hear talk from various people that my own father also did his share of philandering. Nothing people told me about my father has ever really surprised me. He was a larger-than-life kind of guy.

He invented himself early on, that dashing, debonair, devil-may-care guy, but the transformation wasn’t complete until he appeared in the starring role as the womaniser,
Kodaly, in the Broadway show
She Loves Me
in 1963. He took on that persona in real life, but there was a significant part of him that was still the blue-collar working guy. He could sit in bars and entertain the boys for hours, and yet he could dine with kings and queens. You never knew who you were going to get with my dad.