Read Could It Be Forever? My Story Online
Authors: David Cassidy
I increasingly had contact only with the people I felt safe with, my inner circle: my head of security, Billy Francis, my personal photographer, Henry Diltz, and, of course, Sam.
Henry Diltz:
I’d been living in England in Stephen Stills’s manor for three or four months, working for him and taking photos. On the plane coming back to L.A., I was reading about this new TV show,
The Partridge Family
, and I was thinking to myself, Wow, that’s kinda like
The Monkees
. And I’d become The Monkees’ photographer through working for teenybopper magazines like
Tiger Beat
. No sooner did I get home, the phone rang and it was
Tiger Beat
asking me if I would go down to the set and take photos of
The Partridge Family
.
I started taking a few pictures and was talking to David. I mentioned that I had just been shooting Stephen Stills and his eyes lit up and he said, ‘Hey, come on back to my dressing room.’ He was an aspiring rock and roll singer trapped in the body of this young actor. Then he found out that I’d done album covers for Crosby, Stills & Nash and The Doors and James Taylor. I was somebody that was kind of in the world that he was interested in, and so we got to be friends immediately.
I considered Elliot Mintz another close friend in the 70s. I was impressed that he was close to John Lennon and Yoko Ono. He started doing radio shows profiling rock celebrities. He seemed to know everybody. He came along on one of my European tours and did an audio documentary; he just kept the tape rolling the whole time. Eventually, I agreed to a lot of frank, in-depth, off-the-record interviews with him. He said he wanted background for a proposed biography of me, which he never wrote. He later attempted to sell those tapes to publishing companies without my authorisation, for which I can never forgive him. I finally
concluded he was just another parasite, eager to find any way to make money out of knowing me.
I met so many people like that. For a while in 1972 I was seeing a girl named Lyn, who was into photography. I met her in New York at the Garden. Sweet Little Lynnie, she had every move. She went from rock star to rock star. When we were together, she took photos of me that she then sold to a magazine. That was it. I blew her off at that point. I just said, ‘I really don’t want to talk to you again. You broke a trust.’ I heard she did the same thing to Bruce Springsteen. Somebody told me he punched her out on the stage. Every time I met someone like Lyn, the urge to withdraw grew greater. It seemed safer not getting too involved with anyone. Everyone ultimately disappointed me and sold our friendship out for the almighty dollar.
I’d occasionally find girls that I liked and had short romances with them. But my career affected every part of my life. I wasn’t good at relationships. I couldn’t let people get too close. I didn’t feel I could trust anyone.
More and more, I felt resentful of the merchandising, the records, the television, the posters, the pictures, the magazines. I started to hate the David Cassidy the public saw. I thought,
Look what they’ve created, this crass pop-up, this transparent, shallow, sweet, innocent, goody-goody who’s now selling cornflakes.
I began to lose perspective about my positive impact on other people and how much that meant.
I had been a very positive, happy person when I went into this. I always felt this was what the public responded
to in me, more than my looks and voice, but now I was becoming embittered. I wanted people to know that I was very different. I looked so sweet and innocent. Yeah, right. I wanted to say, ‘See! I am really a
bad boy
!’
Jann Wenner (publisher,
Rolling Stone
):
There seemed to be a certain something about David that was more special than the rest of the teen idols. He was cuter. He was livelier. He could sing and he could act and he was obviously the star of
The Partridge Family
. There was just a little ring of authenticity there. He became the outstanding teen idol of his time. He didn’t look manufactured. He was just a cut above the other teen idols. All of that went into the opportunity to do a cover story on him in
Rolling Stone.
We don’t usually out teen idols on the cover. There was a talent reason and there was a real sociological reason to examine the whole phenomenon of that show and the level of popularity of a teen idol like David. Was it risky for David to appear on the
cover of
Rolling Stone
? Some of your hard-rock readers may have said, ‘Why are you doing that? That’s plastic. That’s selling out.’ But there wasn’t much of that. Everybody liked him. There’s a real validity to the people that we put on the cover. We knew that the issue would do well.
I was happy I’d be given a chance to really speak, to let people see the real me. I liked the idea of being profiled in a serious, respected rock journal, rather than just another cheesy teenybopper fan magazine.
They put one of their writers, Robin Green, on it and she travelled around with me for a few days. I agreed to give her virtually unrestricted access to me. She recorded whatever she saw. If she came to my house to interview me and Sam was sunning himself naked, she noted that; I wasn’t hiding anything. If she saw bimbos trying to put moves on me, she noted that. And I didn’t stop her from talking to the women around me either, at least one of whom told her I was good in bed. If she saw a half-empty bottle of booze in my room or smelled pot in the air, she noted all that too. She said she wanted it to be an honest piece. The booze and the pot weren’t mine. Just to keep it honest, I didn’t smoke marijuana at that time. Not since 1968. I couldn’t possibly do it; it made me stupid and paranoid. I’m stupid enough already and smoking weed makes me stupider. That was the only beef I had with it.
I spoke openly about who I was and what I wanted. I told her of my frustrations at being pigeonholed as this white-bread pop singer for pre-pubescent girls, that I was actually
a direct contradiction to my public image. I acknowledged I didn’t have any meaningful, committed, long-term relationship with a woman. I answered whatever she asked.
Maybe it was too real for the masses in 1972 America. I hadn’t envisioned what the combined impact of the nude photos and the equally revealing interview would be. Nor had I envisioned the tone the writer would take. She wasn’t greatly impressed by me.
Robin Green (writer,
Rolling Stone
, ‘Naked Lunchbox’):
Everyone else got to interview the Rolling Stones or John Lennon. The Bee Gees weren’t
Rolling Stone
type material but I got those kinds of stories. They knew my pieces were funny and ironic so they set me on David. The article was pitched to me by Jann Wenner, publisher of
Rolling Stone
. My impression was that David’s people brought the idea to
Rolling Stone
in order to help him make the transition from teen idol to serious musician. This is how it was presented to me by the editors at
Rolling Stone
. He wanted to express his adult angst about being a teen idol.
I was vaguely aware of
The Partridge Family
. I had an idea right away what the editors expected from me. They knew I would do something tongue-in-cheek. It was that kind of set-up from the start or they wouldn’t have assigned it to me. I was this Berkeley hippie with a cape and long hair. I went out on the road with David for five days. I remember going to the airport and sitting in first class next to David. That’s when he said a lot of that stuff to me that made it into the article. I tape-recorded everything he said and in that way he kind of hung
himself because he was very dramatic about his situation. He spoke about how he had been taken advantage of and how he had been led down this path into becoming a bubble gum guy. He said he was in a lot of pain from it. He was clearly very conflicted with his stardom.
The article touched on the whole teen idol business and I interviewed a lot of those people. I think David felt like a product. He felt that he was a product that the teen magazines were selling and I think he felt guilty that he had allowed himself to be sold in this way and used by them to make money.
I don’t think the article did David any good. I felt bad about it. I think the article backfired. But I think it was gonna backfire from the beginning and that it was meant to backfire on him. I think that’s what we expected the piece to be. It was tongue-in-cheek. Here’s a guy who thinks
Rolling Stone
is gonna be the instrument by which he’s going to be taken seriously. That it’s really that easy, that you can almost manipulate the press to achieve your next goal. The article had fun with him and I don’t think that was his intention. Part of my problem with being a journalist is exactly that. What did Joan Didion say? ‘Never trust a journalist.’
David Felton, one of the editors, came up with the cover headline ‘Naked Lunchbox’. It was brilliant because we had a William Burroughs interview in the same issue and it was a play on the title of his book,
Naked Lunch
. So it was wonderful and funny. It hit on a lot of different levels.
As for the cover, I think it was a picture of someone who was misjudging a situation and bared himself. The picture freaked everybody out. He looked like a boy that wanted to position
himself as a man. I understood what he was trying to do, which was to be taken seriously as an adult.
I was pleased with the writing and I was pleased with the reporting. I thought it was a very thorough exploration of the teen idol business, and that I’m proud of. But I do feel bad about the effect that the article had on David at the time. I felt the article and picture were hurtful towards David. It had a huge effect on his life. David’s done some interviews on the subject of this article and he’s forgiven me. It was a hard transitional time for him and the article that he sought was part of that painful transition.
I liked David very much as a person. I thought he was a really nice kid. He was from a show-business family and that’s a different kind of animal. He and his family were very nice people and I certainly never wished him ill. But I think I caused him discomfort and trauma. I have to take responsibility for that. That was my job. I feel that ultimately his life worked out well and I am really glad that it did.
Robin’s directive from the editor was to find anything that would be shocking or controversial. There was nothing about my life at the time that met their expectations, until Bangor, Maine, which is where we went directly after the Garden in New York. It was seven below with six feet of snow on the ground. We ran into the waiting limo, where the promoter had two women in their 30s wearing nothing but bikinis and lollipops all over their bodies waiting for me. I think there’s a reference to it in the
Rolling Stone
article. And yes, I spent some time with those two girls. Robin
discovered that I wasn’t 16 and David Cassidy was not Keith Partridge.
After the show, I went to sleep. I would grab sleep whenever I could. I had a new tour manager at the time and he happened to be gay. I asked him to wake me, knowing that the girls were waiting in their room for me. Instead, I woke up and he was in the single bed next to mine with his arm around me. I realised he had fallen in love with me. I said, ‘Wait a minute. You didn’t wake me up when I asked you to. There are two women waiting for me. Get out of my room!’ And Robin Green was standing outside the room as I yelled, ‘Make sure those two girls end up in my . . .’ She couldn’t have chosen a worse moment to show up.
After we’d finished with the interviews,
Rolling Stone
requested that I do a photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz, the best photographer in the world. She said, ‘I’d like to photograph you naked in the field.’ I said, ‘Great idea. Let’s do it. Let me just check with my manager.’
Ruth went insane and begged me not to do it, but I chose to go ahead with it. They’d be nude shots, but very tasteful, I was assured. Maybe they’d show a hint of pubic hair or something, but nothing really graphic. The photos would simply reinforce the idea that I had nothing to hide. I thought – and still think – that the photographs Annie took of me were great. Revealing and real.
We did the shoot inside my house in Encino and in a field. It took about an hour. I was totally nude. I’m not embarrassed by my body. The nudity was symbolic. It was artistic. It represented freedom. It was the real me.
Jann Wenner (publisher,
Rolling Stone
):
As far as the photo shoot, Annie went to shoot him and David was extraordinarily cooperative. I didn’t know about it until Annie got back and showed me the pictures. I mean, what a knockout. I was like, ‘What? He did that?!’ He was gonna get the cover, no matter what. From what Annie said it was his decision to take off all of his clothes. I knew we had a hot cover and I knew exactly which photo would make the cover. It was the one with his arms stretched out.
We said, ‘We can’t show everything, but we’ve got to really make it clear that he took all his clothes off so you see that little hint of pubic hair.’ There were also pictures of him naked in the bathtub with bubble bath, on the rug and on the grass. And there’s full frontal nudity. He went all the way with it.
After it came out, we got a letter from the actor Tony Perkins. He wrote a letter to one of the writers who he was friends with asking if he could have a copy of the picture. He was in love.
I got the rights to the photographs so no one could release anything inappropriate and Jann Wenner was as good as gold. I saw him last year at the ‘100 Greatest Covers of
Rolling Stone
’ party that he threw in New York. Jann is a great businessman. He’s a very savvy guy. He created the most socially and politically important music magazine in our culture’s history. It was the apex and, at the time, being on the cover of
Rolling Stone
brought a tremendous amount of prestige and had a far greater impact than it does today.
It meant more to me than almost anything else. I didn’t care about being on the cover of any of the teen magazines
or any of the movie or celebrity magazines.
Rolling Stone
was the only credible music magazine and I’d been reading it since I was a teenager. Hendrix, Cream, Clapton, all the artists I cared about were in that magazine and on the cover. And my friends thought it was cool. Mine was the biggest-selling issue of
Rolling Stone
until John Lennon died. It was so controversial at the time; no one in my genre had ever been seen naked. No one had ever taken the risk and dared to do that. I did it because I think Annie’s brilliant. I would work with her again in a minute because of the respect I have for her work.