Read Could It Be Forever? My Story Online
Authors: David Cassidy
Patrick Cassidy:
I think David has the ups and downs my father had. My father’s highs were incredibly high and his lows were unbelievable. My father was diagnosed a manic-depressive. He was a complete puzzle of narcissism and I think David suffers from that too. I think we all suffer from it. My father’s narcissism was so huge that you couldn’t help but get wrapped up in it and have it affect your life. I think David is constantly battling with that.
My father was tormented his whole life by not being recognised as a genius, except by the people who really knew him and worked with him. He was driven to be famous because of his work, not simply for fame’s sake like so many people today. What’s so fascinating about the culture we live in now is that it’s celebrity-obsessed, fame-obsessed. It’s no longer about what you do to become successful. The craft mattered enormously to my father and he passed that along to me and all of my brothers.
My father was eventually revered as one of the finest American theatrical actors. But he wanted to be a movie star and he never accomplished that. He wanted to be a leading man. He wanted to be Barrymore. Ironically, he
got to play Barrymore, in
W. C. Fields and Me,
during the last two years of his life, when he was very, very unstable. He was taking pills to keep him up and then sleeping pills to come down – with alcohol added to the mix. He was diagnosed later on in his life as bipolar (manic-depressive), and he would often go into a deep depression. If he had lived 20 years longer, there would have been medication for him. He was magnificently gifted and kind and good and wicked and cruel – all this in one human being.
Yet, for all his flaws, I worshipped him. He could be an incredibly affectionate man. Being around him was an intense experience – in both the good times and the bad. As a child, I always wanted to be like him.
A lot of people I’ve met over the years assume that Shirley Jones and Jack Cassidy raised me. This is far from the truth. When Shirley and I appeared in
The Partridge Family
, the network got a lot of publicity mileage out of the fact that Shirley played my mother on the show and is my stepmother in real life. Even today, I’ll meet fans who assume I had this fabulous showbiz upbringing, raised by movie stars Shirley Jones and Jack Cassidy. They don’t picture me back in West Orange.
I was sort of scrawny and looked young for my age. I played in Little League and all that stuff but I had severe eye problems as a kid. I had to wear corrective lenses for a while due to a wandering eye caused by two deformed eye muscles and I was also extremely far-sighted. I used to go twice a week after school with my mom or my
grandmother on the bus down to South Orange to the eye doctor. They would do different treatments and exercises with me to try to strengthen my eye. Kids would laugh at me and call me cross-eyed. Eventually, when I was eleven, I had an operation to fix the problem. But until then, the older kids were very physically abusive to me.
I also had a certain learning disability that was never diagnosed when I was younger, which is why I was unable to do well in school academically. If I was interested in a subject, I excelled in it, otherwise I couldn’t concentrate at all. As a teenager, I found myself lost. I had to fit in to the public-school system and I couldn’t do it. School wasn’t made for people like me, who already knew what they wanted to do when they grew up.
I never developed great reading skills. I wasn’t a good student. I clowned around a lot in school. I found ways to make myself the centre of attention. By being a screw-up. I always felt somehow ‘different’ from my classmates. It wasn’t just because I was the only kid in school whose parents were in show business (although that was weird enough to my friends), or the only kid I knew whose parents were divorced (which carried a stigma in the 50s). I had two very, very different parents from anyone else. My parents were ‘artists’ and my father was half crazy. I never felt like I fitted in. And I knew I was different not because of the clothes I wore or my haircut, but because I thought differently.
Shirley Jones:
David had a lot of difficulty as a child. He was a very sensitive little boy. He was not very open to me because
he felt I’d really taken his father away. So my meetings with him were a week or two in the summer and maybe a few days over the Christmas holidays when he would come and stay with us. He was always very polite, very sweet – almost to a fault – because he was trying to be on his best behaviour. His father was a big disciplinarian. Jack was really from the old school of spare the rod and spoil the child.
I think when my father periodically decided to play disciplinarian in my life, he was trying to make up for the fact that he was so rarely in my life at all. He was guilt-ridden his entire life because of his behaviour, his lifestyle, his treatment of his children, his treatment of his wives and the distance he put between himself and his brother and sister. Despite being brought up Catholic, he was not a guy who could go to church; he wouldn’t go to confession.
I remember he came and visited me when I was about seven or eight and he brought me a black-and-white television set. For a kid to have his own television set when he was eight years old was so unusual. Not every home had a television at all, and I had my own 18-inch TV. It looked like a rocket ship; it was really cool. I watched a lot of sports, and in the afternoons and in the evenings I’d watch the popular TV shows
The Three Stooges
,
The Lone Ranger
,
Mighty Mouse
and
Sky King
.
I started visiting my dad in California when I was nine. I’d spend a week or two with him during my Christmas vacation. Christmas was always a big deal to my dad. He loved it. I guess it was the happiest time in his childhood.
He dressed a tree, there was always music playing and he loved to buy gifts. This was his way of compensating for not being there the rest of the year. Generally, Christmas was one of the saddest times in my childhood because, from the time my parents split up until I started seeing my dad in California, both my mother and father were gone. My father was rarely around for the holidays.
What other early memories of my father do I have? Well, I remember him taking me to a restaurant and downing 17 Scotch and sodas. He seemed to handle it back in those days; he just seemed to be in very good cheer. His mood would become even more expansive. I felt good being around him at those times. As I got older though, I realised he was an alcoholic (even if he never acknowledged it), as was one of his brothers, as was their father, William Cassidy.
My father wasn’t the type to say, ‘I’m proud of you,’ or to give me much confidence. He wasn’t good with stuff like that. But I really adored him. So, I might add, did my younger brothers, Shaun, Patrick and Ryan – the three sons he had by Shirley – although we all suffered the consequences of his habitually putting his own desires first. Even though my dad’s marriage to Shirley Jones eventually ended in divorce in 1975, I don’t think Shirley ever really got over him any more than my mother did. Or my brothers. Or me.
The reason I now spend time every day with my own son is that I was cheated out of that time with my father. Everything he did with me, I now do the opposite with Beau. I couldn’t live with myself any other way.
I
n 1961, four years after my father moved out to California, my mom and I followed. I was 11. I’d spent summers and Christmases with my dad since 1958, so California wasn’t really new to me. I loved the idea of living there.
My mom did it partly because she figured it would be good for her acting career. She had had some success in New York – the high point was when she succeeded Gwen Verdon in George Abbott’s production of
New Girl in Town
on Broadway – and it was reasonable for her to want to try Hollywood. That’s where the money was. The big show.
But, mostly, she moved for my sake. She knew I needed more contact with my father. My grandfather, for all his virtues, couldn’t really take the place of my dad. I was
growing up wild and undisciplined. My mom was great, but she was a lax disciplinarian. If she was tied up with a play in New York or on tour, she couldn’t always be there for me. I was getting into a fair amount of mischief. A psychologist might say I was ‘acting out’ my anger at my dad. My mom was worried I might be on the road to becoming a juvenile delinquent.
We moved to a little street called Crestview Court in West Los Angeles, right off Beverly Glen. It was a small Spanish-style house – maybe 1,200 square feet. I began fifth grade at Fairburn, near where we lived. My mom was getting some acting jobs – in plays and occasionally TV shows like
Ben Casey
or
Dr Kildare
– to pay the rent. Barely. Then, in 1962, she married director Elliot Silverstein. She’d been seeing him for about five years in New York. He was then working primarily in television, on such classic 60s television shows as
Playhouse 90
,
Omnibus
and
Naked City
. He would later make his mark directing such feature films as
Cat Ballou
(1965),
The Happening
(1967) and
A Man Called Horse
(1970). My mom pretty much gave up her acting career after she married him, and tried to spend more time being my mother and his wife. Her life became invested first in Elliot’s career, and then in mine.
The first couple of years, Elliot tried very hard to fill the void my dad had left. I know it can’t have been easy for him. Elliot graduated from Yale as a theatre major. He was an intellectual and an artist with the highest integrity. He was incredibly good to me. He challenged me intellectually. He challenged me morally. When he began to date my
mother, my initial reaction as a young boy was that he was going to take my mother away. As I got to know him, I began to feel really comfortable with him. I found him to be a good role model and a true parent, a loving, caring, giving disciplinarian.
Elliot Silverstein:
David was a normal, generally very good, kid who occasionally got into a little bit of trouble. He was a very curious kid. I remember that there was a hose coiled up on the lawn and David turned on the water and the hose whipped around. He wanted to know why it did that. We sat on the lawn and I explained to him about Newton’s law. Newton’s law is every action has an equal and opposite reaction and that applies not only to physical things but also to social behaviour. I was very surprised at the way he listened. He listened very hard to things like that. He was really absorbing it.
I remember one night in our house in West Hollywood and David was sitting on a sofa and was being very quiet. I was sitting in another chair reading something. He said, ‘El?’ I said, ‘Yeah?’ And he said, ‘Who am I?’ And I said, ‘What do you mean, David?’ He said, ‘Am I David Cassidy or am I David Silverstein?’ So I said, ‘Of course, you’re David Cassidy and you always will be David Cassidy.’ He let out a sigh of relief. He was relieved that he knew who he was.
The biggest problem David had back then was the same kind of problem any kid has, staying in school and not playing hooky. I remember one time I got a call saying he hadn’t shown up for school. I confronted him and it turned out that he’d played hooky. He denied it at first. I gave him a lesson and said, ‘You’re
grounded for a month, but not because you played hooky. It’s because you lied about it.’ I think that stuck with him for a long time. That was one of the more important moments in his moral maturity.
There was a conflicted relationship between David and his father. I remember one time in particular, early in my marriage, when David, his mother and I were planning a little trip. His father called and wanted David to be with him that weekend. I told him that we’d already made plans. Jack got very emotional and didn’t care about that. He made some threats that he was gonna come over and take possession of his son. When he arrived, I told Evelyn and David to get in the back room. When I opened the door, Jack was standing there screaming, ‘I want my son!’ I told him we had plans but he could see David any other time he and David wanted to be together. There was no restriction on that. Jack was very upset by that. That was the kind of terrible situation that this poor kid had to deal with. His mother told me that when Jack used to wrestle with David he’d never let David win. He was very competitive with David. So I tried hard when we were together to let David win at least part of the time.
I’d just finished a television show with Sal Mineo and he took a liking to my wife and me and to David. David set up the drums that Sal gave him in his room and that began a nightmare. David couldn’t stop playing those drums. I couldn’t work, I couldn’t do anything. Finally I had to arrange with his mother that David could play his drums only at a certain time of day. Then he formed his own garage band. Playing drums and being in that garage band were the first signs of his
interest in music. Of course, his mother had great musical talent and his father was a prominent actor and singer, so David had all the right genes and his talent was beginning to flower.
When his mother and I got divorced, David was kind of caught between us. He did the right thing and sided with his mother and I lost contact with him for a while.
I was moving from one location to another and had found some eight millimetre home movies from the time before I married his mother. There was some footage of him when I let him get behind the wheel of the car we had and back it up five feet. I wanted to instil a sense of power in him. I think he felt powerless from his relationship with his father. I also had a boat and put him in charge of the helm and let him steer. When I found all these movies, I didn’t know where he was. I called everyone and finally found [his] manager and she passed on my phone message. He called me a few weeks later and I gave him copies of the footage. David and I arranged to meet and it was very emotional. I was stunned and shaken by the number of emotional memories he had. He even remembered a saddle he got when he first became interested in horses. He explained how conflicted he had been back then, between me and his mother, and I understood.
I have no children and I feel he’s a part of my family. My relationship with David has been an enormously emotional one. We’re very, very close today. David is knockout of a performer, but I’m more interested in him as a decent, honourable, caring person with very high values, which involve a great sense of social integrity.