You want to know my most vivid childhood memory?
It’s early 1956. I think I’m five, nearly six, and I’m playing with a couple of my friends out in the street in front of our house at 23 Elm Street in West Orange, New Jersey. They begin to taunt me with that casual cruelness kids can have: “Hey, Wartie, your parents are divorced.” They called me Wartie because my grandfather’s last name was Ward. And at this time in my life, that’s with whom I was living. And with my mom as well. But they just hadn’t gotten around to telling me about the divorce.
“No, they aren’t,” I respond, unnerved. I had never heard the word “divorce” before, but somehow I knew what it meant. “Maybe in a play they are, but not in real life.” My parents, Jack Cassidy and Evelyn Ward, were actors—not very successful ones—but they’d done plays and musicals, sometimes together, mostly apart.
“They’re divorced,” one of my friends assures me, like it’s a well-known fact. But nobody I know has parents who are divorced. That just doesn’t exist in my world. A world that suddenly has an uneasiness. I think that was the first time I can remember feeling naked. I remember running into the house for assurance.
Even though I’m sure my mom will say, “Don’t be silly,” I ask her hesitantly if she and my dad are divorced. She takes a long breath and says, “Why don’t you ask your father that? You’re going to see him next weekend.” I say okay. That was enough for me to feel whole again, at least until I saw my dad.
I don’t see a lot of my father lately. He’s usually “on the road,” doing plays, as my mother often explains to me. The plays keep him very busy—so busy, in fact, that even when he promises he’s going to come visit me, he isn’t always able to keep his promise. I’m used to that. After all, this is Jack Cassidy we’re talking about, folks.
My mom and I live with my grandparents at their house, where they’ve lived since 1918. My grandfather is more of a father to me than my own dad. Born in 1889, he’s worked for public service all his adult life, reading meters. My grandmother Ethel never missed a Sunday at Holy Trinity Church. (Neither did I; they had me singing in the choir as soon as I was old enough.) She and my aunt Marion and other relatives have had factory jobs.
Our neighborhood is purely middle class, very much white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Very church-oriented. Elm Street has unpretentious, closely spaced single-family homes, with the clotheslines in the back. 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. They have all been going to Our Lady of Lourdes, the Catholic elementary school across the street. It’s a small solid kind of a place. My mom never worried about me walking to Eagle Rock Elementary School or running off to play at Eagle Rock Reservation. Although, 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 am.
I remember waiting for my father to visit that weekend so I could ask him the important question. And him driving up in grand style in a shiny new Cadillac. So Jack. Even if he didn’t have much money, he looked the part. If he had fifty dollars, my mother used to say 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.
We lived less than twenty miles from New York City. We drove there—we were on Route 3, passing the marshlands of Secaucus, before I finally asked him the big question. I knew he would say no and then everything would be exactly the way it was before my friends started taunting me. But instead he paused, drew his breath, and said yes.
Whatever problems I have today in trusting people; whatever problems I have in 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 he said that he and my mom were divorced, I could hardly pull myself together. It felt like every part of my body came unglued at that one moment and 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. I’ve never completely recovered from that. I still walk around feeling abandoned and deceived. They had been divorced for over two years.
It couldn’t have taken much time to drive the rest of the way into Manhattan, but in my memory it took four hours.
He said he would still come to see me. But throughout my growing-up years, he never did come around very much to see me again. I felt shunned—like I did something wrong. I was a very sensitive kid. My father made some serious, dark imprints on me that I still to this day stumble over.
My father got married again in August of 1956, to actress Shirley Jones, whose career was going much better than his. She had starring roles in the films 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. And he began getting some guest shots on television.
My dad and Shirley lived quite comfortably, even 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, for which she won an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress (1960), Two Rode Together (1961), and The Music Man (1962). After she won her Academy Award, they moved into a forty-room mansion, on five acres in Bel Air, that had belonged to Merle Oberon; it must be worth $20 million today. I remember visiting my father once in the early sixties 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.
Yet, for all his flaws, I worshipped him. He could be an incredibly affectionate man. And I’ve never known anyone with as much charisma. 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. I had known since I was three and a half, when I saw him in the Broadway show Wish You Were Here—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.
As a child, I always loved going into New York to see him appear in Broadway shows. I have wonderful impressions of show business inextricably linked in my memory with him—as bright and gay and buoyant. My primary childhood memories of West Orange—colored by my dad’s absence so much of the time—are that it was gray and drab. As a boy as young as six or seven, I secretly felt that I belonged much more in that bright-lights world of my father’s in New York than in West Orange. My mother felt that way, too. That’s why she left home and headed to Broadway.
A lot of people I’ve met over the years seem to 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 was my stepmother in real life. Even today, I’ll meet fans who assume that I had this fabulous showbiz upbringing, growing up in the home with movie stars Shirley Jones and Jack Cassidy. They don’t picture me back in West Orange. My father balked at paying child support, claiming he couldn’t afford it. My mom had to take him to court a couple of times; he had washed his hands of us. (But when he and my mom had first gotten married, he had thought nothing of sponging off my mom’s parents, living with them rent-free.)
I was sort of scrawny and looked young for my age. I had to wear corrective lenses for a while, due to a wandering eye caused by two deformed eye muscles. Eventually, when I was eleven, I had an operation to fix it. But 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 center of attention. Like being a fuckup.
I always felt somehow “different” from my classmates. Beginning in West Orange. It wasn’t just that I was the only kid in school whose parents were in show business (that was weird enough to my friends), or the only kid I knew whose parents were divorced (which carried a stigma in the fifties); I just remember feeling “different” in some way I can’t fully explain.
Shirley Jones remembers: “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 behavior. 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.
What other early memories of my father do I have? Well, I can remember him taking me to a restaurant and downing seventeen 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. You felt good being around him. As I got older, though, I realized 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 to me, “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 would all suffer various scars that are the consequences, over the years, of his habitually putting his own desires first. My dad had such a vivid presence, such great flair. I don’t think my mom ever got over him. And even though my dad’s marriage to Shirley Jones also eventually ended in divorce (in 1975), I don’t think Shirley ever really got over him, either. 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’ve spent at least five years of my life—three and a half of them intensely, three times a week—in psychoanalysis, trying to heal myself, to rid myself of some of the darkness and pain I’ve felt through the years as a result of my father’s selfishness. Oh, God, this is beginning to sound so damn depressing. Honestly, it ain’t all like this, folks.