Could It Be Forever? My Story (6 page)

Sex was available and I was very sexually precocious. Like most teenagers, I had raging hormones. Most of my friends and I were interested in sex. At the time, there was no sex on television so it was more of a taboo than it is today. My Christian upbringing repressed me and that’s also probably why I felt so inclined to experiment sexually. Try telling a 13-year-old boy with a strong sexual appetite that he can’t do anything about it. As I’ve learned through having a teenage son, views are very different today.

I wanted to touch every girl I saw. I was always curious about sex. My earliest experiences – going back to when I was as young as nine – were feeling up a friend’s older sister. By the time I was 12 or 13 I’d be making out with 15-year-olds, who were thrilled that I was thrilled by them because they had big breasts. I was like their toy. I came close but I didn’t actually have sexual intercourse until I was 13.

There was a girl who lived down the street from a pal of mine, Gary, in Bel Air. One night, when my friends and I were staying at Gary’s house, we all went down the street to see this girl, who was a year or two older. There were six of us. We snuck up to a loft above her garage and asked her to take her clothes off, and she did. I was in awe. For 13-year-old boys, seeing this girl’s tits was the biggest deal in the world. You know, we must have spent hours feeling them. I didn’t want to do anything more in front of
everybody else. In fact, I was already a little self-conscious. I called her up one weekend night and asked to see her by myself. And that was the first time I ever had sex. Once I started, I pretty much lost whatever interest I’d had in playing basketball and baseball.

I fell for a junior high-school girl named Laurie. I still in some way carry a torch for her. She eventually went for an older guy and broke my heart. So I thought,
Well, parents – adults – don’t stay together. Why should we?
I spent my life going through these short, failed relationships. I’d fall in love with one girl for a spell, then, a little while later, I’d just lose interest. I stayed like that until I met my first wife, Kay Lenz.

When I was 16, I dated an African-American girl. I used to go to South Central L.A. and hang out with her and her friends, and I was the only white guy there. It mattered to them more than it mattered to me. She was a fantastic girl and I felt completely at home with her and her circle, but her black friends thought it was unacceptable.
A white boy is taking out my girlfriend
. It was difficult for both of us. We went to see Marvin Gaye together. We saw Wilson Pickett. We saw Hendrix. She loved music and I loved her. But we found ourselves questioning our commitment to one another every day and wondered why we had to be under this kind of constant scrutiny.

In high school I had a new girlfriend every month or two. I can’t imagine what it must be like for teens today, because we didn’t even have the fear of getting a venereal disease back then, much less AIDS. No one worried. There
was no fear of death. Only fear of pregnancy. No one thought about it. Everyone just went out and did it. Sex was the best thing in the world.

This was our code: we smoked pot, got high and went to drive-in movies, because it was the place you could get away from your parents and have sex. God, I loved having sex in a car. To this day, I think it’s one of the hottest things. I’d dream about it all week at school. It got really interesting when it was a double date, when you and your buddy and your girlfriends would all be in the same car. Back in 1966–7, drive-in theatres were like brothels. Everybody was screwing everywhere. You’d drive in, put the audio box in the car, eat popcorn for five minutes, and then
bang
, you’d be doin’ the pop ’n’ gobble.

Eventually I told my mom, ‘Look, I’d like to bring a girl over. Would you mind? I’d like to take her up to my room.’

My mom kind of turned a blind eye and said, ‘OK, you can bring girls to your room, but I don’t want you having intercourse.’

‘Oh, we would never do that,’ I assured Mom.

Well, of course, the girl and I would be going at it within five minutes of closing the door. I’m sure my mom knew what was going on. I’m sure she was just glad I wasn’t out on the street getting into some kind of serious trouble. After all, this was the 60s.

Perhaps because of my physical appearance – my build was slight, my features were sort of on the delicate side, my hair was long – there were some people who assumed I was homosexual. I clearly wasn’t into any macho trip.
My manner was kind of gentle, soft-spoken. At least at that time it was. And I did have some gay friends. When I was 15 and 16, that kind of talk hurt me a lot. I remember overhearing a couple of friends of mine – or guys I had thought were friends of mine – snickering and saying, ‘Ah, David’s a fag,’ and so on. I’d wonder,
God, why do people say that about me?
It disturbed me because I didn’t really know whether I was or I wasn’t.

This is sort of hard to explain, because I honestly wasn’t attracted to men. I hadn’t slept with any men. And I was incredibly active with girls. But I guess we’re all insecure when we’re young. I had some thoughts about homosexuality – I’m sure we all have some thoughts about it as we’re growing up, finding ourselves. I knew gay guys who found me attractive. And there were these other jerks snickering that they could ‘tell’ I must be homosexual. So I was, at times, unsure. It was only when I was actually confronted with the situation – when I had a real opportunity to get into a sexual relationship with a friend of mine who was homosexual and I declined his invitations and felt comfortable about that – that I realised,
Hey, I’m not sitting on the fence. I’m really just not into it.
And I became very secure with my own sexual identity.

When I became famous, through
The Partridge Family
and concert appearances and all of that, I found I had a pretty strong gay following. I kind of liked it. Gay publications ran pictures of me; one named me gay pin-up of the year. I’d get fan letters from gay guys saying things
like, ‘I can tell by the look in your eyes that you’re one of us.’ A gay liberation organisation in London wrote to ask me for my support. I never did anything to encourage or discourage anyone’s interest. If there were guys who found me attractive and perhaps fantasised about me, I was flattered. I found it mostly amusing how much people were discussing my sexuality, like it really mattered if I slept with men, women, snakes or sheep!

There were some people who assumed that because Sam Hyman and I shared a home and travelled together we were lovers. There’s always going to be some talk about guys who are roommates. You can’t control what people are going to imagine. It’s not worth the effort to try.

Through my parents, I had been exposed to a culture and environment that was very open. My parents were very tolerant of homosexuality and I was taught to be tolerant, too. Both my parents had many homosexual friends whom I knew to be really wonderful people. And I’ve always felt very protective of my friends who are gay. I defend them and their right to be who they are. I believe that people should make their own choices about how they live their lives, providing they are not hurting anyone, and I don’t believe the government, the church or anybody else should be able to interfere in those choices.

In my teens I was fortunate to become good friends with the actor Sal Mineo, who had done some television work with my stepfather. Then in his late 20s, this one-time teen star who’d specialised in playing troubled youths was being ill-treated by Hollywood as a has-been. A swarthy,
handsome, black-haired guy, Sal had found fame in Hollywood quite early on, after having been kicked out of school. I could relate to that. He’d been just 16 when he got his first Oscar nomination, for his supporting role in
Rebel Without a Cause
starring James Dean and Natalie Wood. He appeared again with Dean in
Giant
and in other films such as
Crime in the Streets
,
Somebody Up There Likes Me
,
Rock, Pretty Baby
,
The Gene Krupa Story
and
Exodus
,
for which he earned a second Oscar nomination.
And then the work suddenly dried up. Sal Mineo – one of the kindest, most honourable people I’ve ever known – was rejected by most of Hollywood as old news by the time he reached his mid 20s (and, believe me, I can now relate to that as well). Hollywood has a way of chewing people up and then spitting them back out. In the later years of his career, Sal appeared in mostly minor films. He also directed plays, some with gay-related themes, like
Fortune and Men’s Eyes
and
P.S., Your Cat Is Dead.

I knew Sal had some girlfriends. And I knew that from time to time Sal also had guys staying at his house. I didn’t care about that. Sal was just a great friend. He was one of the most incredibly warm, gentle, sensitive, funny and hip people I’d ever met. He had magnetism. There always seemed to be a lot of young people around him.

Over at Sal’s, we would talk about things like concerts that were coming up. Sal had a drum set, guitars and amps and I remember playing guitar and drums, jamming with other guys. It was cool because we were all mostly around the same age – 17, 18 years old. We loved having a place
where we could go to hang out, where no one was going to hassle us.

Sal took a genuine interest in me. Would you believe he actually gave me the set of drums that he used when he starred in
The Gene Krupa Story
?
That was some special gift to give a kid. Years later, when I was moving around a lot, I passed on that drum set to my brother Patrick who had told me he loved it.

It was at Sal’s that I first met Don Johnson and Elliot Mintz. Elliot and Sal shared a place for a while in the late 60s. Elliot, a radio personality on KPFP, a public radio station in Los Angeles, was really into the political movement. He was very much the voice of change and political thrust in the 60s and into the 70s. He was very tuned in and was part of the whole 60s hippie generation, part of the ‘revolution’, and I learned quite a bit from him. Elliot and I were good friends for several years – we travelled together, got drunk together, the whole bit.

I also became pretty friendly with Don Johnson through Sal. Back then he was just another young, good-looking, struggling actor from the Midwest, desperate for a break. He wouldn’t become a household name until he appeared on the TV series
Miami Vice
, which ran in the mid 80s. When I first met him I was still in high school and he had just gotten out. He was very charming and self-centred. I liked him because he had a sense of humour and was interesting. We were contemporaries with the same goal: to make it as actors. Don was always gushingly friendly towards me, although I sometimes
sensed a certain degree of competitiveness under that friendliness.

I’m sure Don believed Sal could help his career. I felt pretty confident that Don was going to survive in Hollywood – which can be pretty rough, especially for a newcomer – no matter what it took. I’ve seen that a lot in Hollywood over the years. You’d be surprised at the lengths that people will go to to be successful in show business.

Don was already a very talented actor when I first met him. Around 1969, I remember going to see him in Sal’s production of
Fortune
and Men’s Eyes,
and he was very good in it. I had every confidence he’d make it.

As my mother and stepfather’s marriage finally ground to a halt, I aligned myself fervently with my mother. At one point in their break-up, I threatened to kill my stepfather if he hurt her. As I grew up, I could clearly see the pain my dad had caused my mom and I hated seeing her go through that again.

My stepfather was respected in the industry. After he and my mom got divorced, he continued directing films, including
A Man Called Horse
,
a Richard Harris film and
The Car
, a popular film about an obsessed car that chases people
.
He eventually went on to spearhead the drive against colourising black-and-white movies. But by the time I was 18, he was essentially out of my life. He was gone. I actually felt relieved that there was no longer the tension between them in the house, but I missed him.

I lived with my mom in my final year of high school. My mom wasn’t happy with the way her life had worked out. She had two failed marriages behind her. And she had given up a promising show-business career to give more attention to a son who appeared to be pretty much going nowhere.

But I always knew I wanted to be an actor and I wanted to perform. I sang mostly theatre stuff as a young kid, music from some of my dad’s shows, like
Wish You Were Here
,
and I learned
The Music Man
when I was around seven. Years later I taught my own son
The Music Man
. Because I could sing, I was always singled out in chorus and music and glee club. I was a soloist in the choir.

I started listening to the radio when I was nine or ten and I was a really quick student. It was easy. I could pick out harmony parts. I loved to sing all the background parts. When I was 17, I joined the Los Angeles Theater Company (LATC). I was the only non-professional that they allowed in and I worked in two productions during my senior year. I also wrote a play and directed it. It was pretty avant garde, an unstructured piece that didn’t have a title. It was part improv, and it was politically driven in a humorous way. Myself, Kevin Hunter and an actress performed it in the closing ceremony of the theatre company’s season.

During my last year of school, my mom did some plays with the same company. I auditioned for and got a couple of parts in the production myself. It gave me a chance to work, for the first time, with some professional actors, including my mom. I liked the experience.

My grades weren’t quite good enough for me to graduate with my high-school class in June of 1968. So I went to one last session of summer school to get the credits I needed. It was important to me to get a diploma. I didn’t want my mom to feel she’d raised a failure. Two weeks later, I moved back to New York with my dad and Shirley to become . . . an actor!