Could It Be Forever? My Story (35 page)

I loved her independence. I wanted her to do all the things she wanted to do, to do well in her career, but unfortunately things didn’t happen for her when she wanted them to. And at the time I didn’t give a damn, really, about doing anything productive, because I had already achieved about as much as anyone could achieve professionally. It had already been three and a half years since I’d worked. No television show, no job, no place where I had to be. I could do anything I wanted and was just sort of trucking through life.

But it started to seem wrong, staying home all the time while Kay went to work. I remember Kay would get scripts sent over by her agent. Ding dong. There’d be a messenger with a script at the door, and I’d think,
Gee, I used to get scripts
,
and sometimes I’d miss that
.
She’d get up and go to work and I’d
call my friend who lived downstairs, a great guitar player, and go hang out with him for a while and jam. But after a while that got boring.

A couple of months after we got married, after such a long hiatus from working, I let it be known in the business that I was available as an actor again. And there were old friends who remembered me. Former
Partridge Family
producer/director Mel Swope was, by this point, producing a dramatic series,
Police Story
,
and he offered me a role guest-starring in ‘A Chance to Live’, a two-hour movie that aired on 28 May 1979 on NBC. That
Police Story
episode was directed by Corey Allen and was a really nice piece of work. To me, it was different, something that was more challenging. People hadn’t seen me do that kind of work before. I had a chance to work with really good actors, a good script and a good director.

I did some press to promote my work. The headline above James Brown’s piece in the
New York Post
was typical. It read, ‘Cassidy: Time Ripe for Comeback’. Another line promised ‘A Look at a Teen Heartthrob’s Return’. I explained to Brown that by the end of
The Partridge Family
I was emotionally and physically drained. ‘I was all used up, and for several years thereafter I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to work again. But there’s something to be said about getting up in the morning and having something to do.’

I received an Emmy nomination for Best Dramatic Actor for my performance in what was the highest rated
Police Story
ever. That was enough to convince NBC and Screen Gems that I might be worth gambling on for another series.

The head of the network at the time, Fred Silverman, called and said, ‘I want you to do a television series.’

And I said, ‘Oh, great. What?’

He said, ‘What do you mean, “What?” You’ve just given us the highest-rated show we’ve ever had. We’re gonna do a television series based on that character.’

I wrote the main title song,
Hard Times
, with Jay Gruska and it was really good. Originally, either that title or
A Chance to Live
, like the episode, was going to be the name of the series. At the last minute, the head of the network decided the series would be
David Cassidy
–
Man Undercover
.

I said, ‘No, wait. I’m playing a character named Dan Shay here. This is not The Loretta Young Theatre, is it?’

It was a good two-hour movie that was not intended to be, nor should it have been, a series. That was the same season they did
Supertrain.
They had some bad ideas back in those days.

That job destroyed me, emotionally and physically. We’d work 18 hours a day and do lots of night shooting in the gutters of downtown L.A. We made ten episodes and they were horrible. It was the middle of the season and all the good writers and directors were already booked, so we got cast-offs, guys that couldn’t cut it. And they didn’t have any original scripts, so they took old scripts from
Police Woman
and just revamped them a little bit. It was awful.

And there was a single released. They wanted me to perform it in
David Cassidy – Man Undercover
, and I was appalled. ‘Wait a minute. I’m playing a policeman now. I’m not playing a musician. It doesn’t make any sense.’

I managed to pick up a few other television movies over the next few years (all, incidentally, on my old
Partridge Family
network, ABC). But Kay got far more work than I did. In the 70s and 80s she made 60-odd TV appearances, guest-starring in one top series after another and some great made-for-TV movies
.
So – thanks in no small part to Kay – we continued to make a pretty good living. With her money and mine, we began speculating in southern California real estate. The problem was, we got in when the market was just about reaching its peak. When the bottom fell out, around 1980, we lost a fortune. How much? Our mortgage payments alone were over $15,000 a month. It would take me all of the 80s to pay off the bank loans. I would have to say that the boom and crash in the real estate market wiped us out almost completely.

Our marriage became full of heartache and disappointment. I knew early on that we were in trouble and the strains of our mounting financial worries certainly didn’t help matters.

I must also note that Kay was not prepared for my old fans, some of whom kept coming on to me, sometimes right in front of her. That situation still occurs, with women hitting on me right in front of my current wife, Sue. It’s embarrassing.

Between 1970 and 1974, I had made about $8 million, virtually all of which was gone by 1980. Don’t forget, in the
early 70s a house on Beverly Drive that today would cost $6 million was selling for $125,000. By 1980 my net worth was less than $100,000. That, to me, was dead broke.

More than that, my career was in the toilet. I had trouble getting anyone at my agency, which had been handling me since the early 70s, even to return my phone calls. If you’re not a big moneymaker any more, they don’t want to know you, and no one in Hollywood seemed eager to hire David Cassidy any longer.

OK, so I had retired from the business. But now I was back and I really needed work. Yet nobody at William Morris seemed to feel they had any kind of moral obligation or loyalty to me. No one said that, because I’d been such a huge money earner for them in the early 70s, they’d make sure I’d get work now that I needed it. I felt they didn’t give a damn about me or my career, but maybe there was nothing they could do.

I went in to see the head of the agency, Sam Weisbord. He bullshitted me about what a champion I was and how I had the blood of champions; he had a great respect for my whole family. He pointed over to the new wing of the agency, saying, ‘It’s because of you and your family that we were able to build that wing.’ I thought,
That’s great. That’s really wonderful. Our family made a lot of money for you. Now what are you going to do to help me?
I needed work, not just for financial reasons but for my mental wellbeing.

In 1981, Kay and I separated, leading to the divorce, which we knew was inevitable the following year. If my
personal life was not gratifying, it was essential to me that my professional one was.

My agency got me one final decent job before our relationship came to an end. They figured Broadway would be the place for me to make a comeback. So in 1981, I went out on the road for a pre-Broadway tour of a new production of George M. Cohan’s
Little Johnny Jones.
Believe me that was one tough role – singing and dancing to classic Cohan songs that we’ve all seen James Cagney perform superbly when he portrayed Cohan on screen in
Yankee Doodle Dandy
. However, the critics didn’t think I was ready to step into Cagney or Cohan’s shoes. Let’s face it, no one was. Before the show made it to Broadway, where it quickly died, the producers replaced me with Donny Osmond. In the months of our pre-Broadway tour, we did boffo business. I was paid well, but by the year’s end I had nothing to show for it. God, what I wouldn’t have done, over the years, for some good financial advisors.

I picked up whatever work I could in regional theatre, including a production of
Tribute
,
written by
The Partridge Family
creator Bernard Slade, a loyal friend from the old days.

In 1983, I finally did get back to Broadway, but I can’t say I made any great waves. I replaced Andy Gibb in the leading role of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s hit show
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
,
which had opened the year before. The show was going to close until I joined it, but my fans came in droves and I stayed for the entire six-month run. Ironically, my brother Patrick has been starring in the same show in the same role, touring
the U.S. on and off for several years. He is arguably as good a Joseph as anyone who has ever played that role. And, by the way, he undoubtedly has the best six-pack of anyone who has ever worn that skirt.

In 1984 I moved to England and started writing new songs and recording for MLM/Arista Records. I had a Top Five single,
The Last Kiss
, in the British charts in March 1985. On
The Last Kiss
I got to work with George Michael when he was just starting to break with Wham! He was a big fan of my work.

Alan Tarney and I had written
The Last Kiss
and I had just sung the lead vocal that afternoon. I went out to dinner with George and said, ‘Come back to the studio. I want to play you something.’ And he listened and said, ‘Wow!’

I said, ‘Would you sing the answer part?’

He said, ‘Yeah, I’d love to.’

So I said, ‘Go out and riff, man, I love your voice.’ And he sang fabulously. He’s a tremendous talent.

We did the
Romance
album at RG Jones Studios. I was living with Dick Leahy and his wife, Tinca, at The Wick on Richmond Hill and I was making the album with Alan Tarney, who lived around the corner. There have been so many hits recorded at RG Jones over the years. It’s this little studio in Wimbledon, this little hole-in-the-wall kind of place that has been there for so long that at one point or another most artists had recorded there, the Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, Average White Band, A-ha.

The single
Romance (Let Your Heart Go)
made it to number 54 in May 1985. That same month, the album reached number 20 on the British album charts. I believed in the
Romance
album and the record company believed in it and
it worked. I got a platinum album and a platinum single. I changed my look by tinting my hair. They thought I needed to get away from the look I’d had in the 70s.

I had a sold-out British concert tour, including two nights at the legendary Royal Albert Hall. The audiences were incredibly receptive and enthusiastic. What was really amazing was that a lot of the fans brought their kids! Had that much time gone by?

In the U.K., I gained a lot of people’s respect for what I was doing as a writer and a singer. In America people still saw me as Keith from
The Partridge Family.
The
Romance
album was never released in America. I was frustrated that no matter what I tried, a really successful comeback never seemed to materialise for me in my own country. Sometimes I felt I was truly close. It was clear as I toured that I had a loyal audience, I’d made a hit record, but I just didn’t have the support I needed from others. I had no management to speak of any more. I went through several managers, none of whom were committed to me the way Ruth had been, and they certainly didn’t work towards long-term career building. They just wanted to make some quick money off me, which, of course, they did.

My record companies kept disintegrating under me. In 1985, the very week that
Romance
, on Arista Records, made the Top 20 in England, BMG acquired Arista and fired the whole staff, so there was nobody there to promote the album. I dropped off the charts immediately. My relationships with record companies have always been, at best, frustrating.