I had never read the fan magazines, the teen magazines. I knew some, like Tiger Beat, had been around for ages. Others seemed to come and go. But I let them take all the pictures they wanted. At first it was kind of a kick to see myself on a magazine cover. And, of course, I answered all their questions: Where did I live? Where did I shop? And on and on.
That seemed fine, until I walked into the Canyon Country Store after work one night and they told me they’d been inundated with nearly a thousand fan letters addressed to me care of the store, simply because one magazine had just printed that I shopped there. And some of the letters the fans wrote me were alarming: “I’m your long-lost brother …,” “You were adopted; I’m your real mother … ,” “I have to have your penis …” Twisted shit.
Once the show went on the air, it was becoming hard for me to even get into the studio in the morning. In the fall of 1970 there’d routinely be forty or fifty fans crowding the entrance. Some of the more aggressive girls would bare their tits to me, some would follow me when I’d drive home after working all day. There were girls who’d spend day and night outside the studio—they’d live there, sleep there. I’d try to smile pleasantly while thinking, Go home, do something with your life, don’t stand here all day every day waiting for me.
It quickly reached a point where it became impossible for me to go to a store. People would stop in the streets when they’d see me. I had the number-one record in the country. I was on TV, radio, magazine stands. At first, I enjoyed the sheer novelty of having fans. I was twenty years old.
The teen magazines, whipping interest in me to a pant with their articles, were also running ads telling kids to send in their money and join the official David Cassidy Fan Club. Or buy David Cassidy’s love musk. Or David Cassidy love beads. There’d be pictures of me wearing a little necklace of shells I’d made—I’d strung together some shells in Hawaii one time—and suddenly countless teens would decide they had to have necklaces like that. In fact, I’m embarrassed to admit, it was I who started the pooka shell craze. Someone else—not me—made money marketing them. A whole group of these teen magazines were beating the drums, informing the youth of America that David Cassidy was now it, the new star they should idolize. Watch his show! Buy his records! Buy anything associated with his name or likeness!
I was flattered by all the attention. But I didn’t exactly feel unworthy of it. My first reaction was simply, Huh, well, this is interesting. And yet underneath, I sensed problems coming.
I went to talk to one guy, Chuck Laufer, who ran a bunch of these teen magazines. His magazines were publicizing the Partridge Family in general—and me in particular—so heavily, so relentlessly, I was growing uncomfortable. I asked Laufer if he wouldn’t mind not running pictures and stories about me anymore. Maybe he could give somebody else the attention; I was sure they’d appreciate it.
He actually laughed at me. He put his feet up and went, “Ha, ha, that’s good. That’s funny. Sit down, kid. Ya see, we don’t work that way.” He wasn’t running the photos and stories about me for my benefit. Or the ads for the David Cassidy fan clubs and the rest. He explained, “We paid a lot of money for rights to your name. You can either cooperate with us and we’ll make it fun and enjoyable, or you can not cooperate with us and we’ll do what we want to anyway, and it will be uncomfortable for all of us. And Screen Gems might see it as counterproductive. So you make the choice.”
He was using his group of magazines to build me up, to fire up further interest in me, because he’d acquired certain marketing rights from Screen Gems. All of those readers of his magazines who sent in money to join the new David Cassidy Fan Club were—whether they knew it or not—putting money into his pockets, not mine. I never saw a cent. If he could help create enough interest in me to justify publishing whole new magazines devoted exclusively to me or to the Partridge Family—and he had acquired the rights to do just that—it would mean that much more income for him. If fans were willing to pay their good money for David Cassidy bubble gum or beads or anything else, that was all right by him. If kids were convinced they had to be David Cassidy fans to be “with it,” he would reap the rewards. Essentially what he said to me boiled down to, “Look, David, I’m a flesh peddler. You happen to be the flavor of the month.” Little did he or I know that month would last three years.
We had other talks as the hype about David Cassidy kept building. This man, I felt, was a parasite, growing rich off of public interest in me. He eventually told me, “Since I’ve been in the business, you are the biggest single money-earner for us. You’ve generated the most mail of any single person who has been in the business.” He’d been through Elvis and the Beatles, and all that. The Elvis Fan Club was the biggest at one time, then the Beatles Fan Club became the biggest, and then I was the biggest. Eventually, I think, it was the Bee Gees that knocked me out.
Considering all the publicity I was getting, I’m sure a lot of people assumed I was making a bundle. But in the fall of 1970, as a star of a popular TV show, I was receiving just $600 a week—out of which, of course, my agent took 10 percent, my manager took 15 percent, and so on. That was it. (I received no advances or royalties for making the records.) I was contractually obligated to work for Screen Gems for seven years, if they opted to continue using me for all those years. The only guaranteed work I actually had at that point, though, was one half-season—thirteen episodes—of The Partridge Family. As public interest warranted, the show would be extended, one half-season at a time.
At the studio I certainly wasn’t given star treatment. If I complained about one thing or another—and I’m sure the execs considered me “difficult”—their attitude was summed up by this remark: “You’d better get in line or we’ll go out and pull another David Cassidy off the rack.” They made it perfectly clear they considered me—initially, at least—just some interchangeable cog in the grand machinery that they’d built. But I knew the public was responding to me, to what I had to offer. I wanted to be shown a certain amount of respect.
I balked about some of the songs they wanted me to sing. I didn’t think “Doesn’t Somebody Want to Be Wanted” was a good song at all. And I hated the idea that they wanted me to talk—not sing—in the middle of it. That talking-over-the-music routine was old when Elvis did it on “Are You Lonesome Tonight.” I said, “This is crass commercialism. It’s hype. It’s jive. It isn’t me.” Wes Farrell freaked out. “You can’t do this!” he shouted. Like I had no say in what I was to perform; I was just supposed to follow orders. Hell, I’d never been good about following orders when in school. Now I was supposed to be an adult. Wasn’t I to have any say about the direction of my career?
I swore to them I’d never talk on a record. I almost quit the show over the issue. They brought my manager and my agent down to the studio. It turned into a fucking nightmare. I’ll never forget the conversations. They’d stop the shooting of The Partridge Family so my manager could talk to me. She’d insist, “David, you’ve got to go over and do that spoken thing.” I’d say, “I’m not doing it.” “Fuck that, it’s the kiss of death.”
Everybody got involved—the head of Bell Records, the head of Screen Gems, the head of Columbia Pictures Industries. It’s like suddenly I’m some big problem to them because I don’t want to do this one little thing. I’m saying, “Look, I don’t believe in it, I don’t think it adds anything to the record.” And they’re saying how many more copies they’ll be able to sell if I’ll talk; that was the bottom line.
They put the pressure on me until I caved. I recorded it exactly the way they dictated. Even after we finished making that record, though, I begged them not to release it. It was horrible. I was embarrassed by it. I still can’t listen to that record. And Farrell used his trick of altering the tape speed to make my voice sound higher than it really was.
But the public loved it. That record wound up on the Billboard charts for twelve weeks, peaking at number 6. And Cashbox, the competing trade publication, had it on the charts for thirteen weeks, peaking at number 1. Bell sold nearly 2 million singles with it. I still get requests to sing the song today.
A sitcom with music is more complicated to film than a standard sitcom. And the presence of so many young and inexperienced actors in our cast meant the show took even longer than normal to shoot. In the beginning it would take us six or seven days to complete shooting one episode, and then the cycle would start right up again. I was glad when we seemed to find our stride and could complete an episode in five days. I imagined I’d have weekends free. Yeah, right!
If I had any free time, it soon became clear, I’d be expected to work to promote the show and the records. In the fall of 1970 I went to my first autograph-signing, in a store about an hour from L.A. Until I stepped through the door, I couldn’t see that there were thousands of kids waiting for me. The screams they let out, the moment they saw me, I’ll never forget. That was the first time I’d ever heard screams like that. I was stunned. I spent three hours signing autographs and only got to half of them.
My manager was impressed, too. Ruth didn’t know anything about the record business or the teen-idol business; she’d had no experience with that. Her clients were all respected, established figures in the industry. None of them had ever elicited screams from fans. Ruth felt that young teens were reacting to me in a way that was unique. From those screaming fans at that first autograph-signing, she began to realize just how big my career could be. The $600 a week I was receiving for the TV show was insignificant, she concluded. She began focusing on the rock-concert business as a potentially greater moneymaker for me.
With hits like “Proud Mary” and “Bad Moon Rising,” in 1970 Credence Clearwater Revival was the hottest American rock group around. One day Ruth told me, “Credence Clearwater just gave a concert that was huge—they got fifty thousand dollars for one night. I’m going to get you fifty thousand dollars a night.” I thought, What, was she crazy? I’d never even sung in public. And with the TV show eating up all my time, I wouldn’t even have time to prepare an act.
The first concert booking she got me—an 8,000-seat auditorium in Seattle, in October of 1970—was for $8,000. True, that wasn’t $50,000 but it sounded astronomical to a guy who was making just $600 a week. I couldn’t help thinking, My only previous rock performing experience has been limited to friends’ garages and rooms, jamming on the blues and numbers by Led Zeppelin, Cream, Hendrix—absolutely nothing like what I’ll be expected to do now. What am I going to play? Other bookings began pouring in, unsolicited, due to the popularity of my TV show and records. My first album was platinum in two weeks. Ruth said I could count on spending every weekend doing concerts—two a day.
Ten days before my first concert I didn’t even have a band. I asked Steve Ross, my old garage-band cohort, to join me. I told him he’d have to start learning Partridge Family songs fast. No problem! I figured it would be great to have buddies on the road with me.
A guy named Richard Delvy, whom I’d met through Bell Records, was hired to save the day, and he became my musical director. He hired some studio musicians, including drummer Ed Green and bassist Emory Gordon—really great players—to back me up. We put together a good-sized road band, including a few horns, plus three backup singers who also could serve as a warmup act for me, if need be: Kim Carnes, Dave Ellingson, and Brooks Hunnicut. Between the musicians, singers, a road manager, and an equipment guy, we traveled to our first concert dates with sixteen people. I thought sixteen people was a lot to carry; eventually, however, we wound up carrying some thirty people on my tours, including security guys.
I was too busy working on the TV show to work on an act. I figured we could do every number from The Partridge Family Album (which enjoyed a phenomenal sixty-eight-week run on the Billboard pop albums chart, beginning October 31, 1970). To fill out the bill, I could do songs popularized by Crosby, Stills, and Nash and Buffalo Springfield, and maybe a little blues. I figured the kids would be going, “What’s that? And who cares?” because that material would be from before their time. But I really only had about an album’s worth of Partridge Family material to use, so what choice did I have?
For the first date, Ruth Aarons, Wes Farrell, and seemingly everyone from the record company flew up. It was a big event. I was nervous to begin with, and it didn’t help that Seattle was hit that weekend by the worst storm in ten years. For a while, we weren’t even sure any planes would be flying into the area.
I remember the emcee addressing the audience, which ranged in age from about seven to seventeen (with most around thirteen), like it was some junior high school pep rally: “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls: Give me a D! Give me an A! Give me a V! Give me an I! Give me a D! What does that spell?” and all of these kids screamed, “DAVID!” And generally went berserk.
I bounded out on the stage and was hit with so much light, for a moment I couldn’t see anything. All those kids had cameras and they all wanted pictures. It created a startling, spectacular effect for several minutes—thousands and thousands of those big old Sylvania flashbulbs popping off.
My energy was really flying. The first song was “Heartbeat.” It’s a song I do first now, too. A good, rockin’ song—high energy, and it builds. Just three minutes long—perfect for an opener. I needn’t have worried about how the kids were going to like me. They were screaming—and in some cases, fainting—before I got my first note out. I rushed through the show. Everything was going 150 miles an hour. I couldn’t really hear myself, or the band. Just those screams. I felt overwhelmed by the strength of the reaction I was getting.
The voices were extremely shrill. That’s the thing about that age. They’re out of control with their emotions. It’s insane. When they love you, they let you know it. (If they don’t love you, they let you know that, too.) They never stopped screaming. I never stopped flying. That’s all I remember.
I think there were some parents in the audience, but not many. It was too loud for them. The parents were out in the parking lot, waiting for it to be over. So many kids were stomping their feet to the beat, and jumping up and down, you could feel the vibrations. The hysteria hit me like a drug. My adrenaline was working overtime. I could hear from maybe five feet from me, these girls screaming at the top of their lungs, “David, fuck me!” and “I want your baby!” They began throwing stuff at me. And in a spotlight you can’t see anything until it hits you.
I didn’t say much more than “Thank you, thank you very much.” I just raced through it, from one number to the next—in a style a lot funkier and a lot faster than on the album.
I would never ordinarily be flat or sharp when I sing. But that night my pitch was all over the place. Was I out of tune? Yes! Probably because I couldn’t hear the band. Or myself.
By night’s end I was hoarse, from trying to scream over the audience’s screams. I was really drained; my whole body started feeling sore, because I’d expended so much energy. I gave everything I had. You know, I was skinny to begin with. But I must have lost three or four pounds every time I went out, back in those days. I still lose weight when I perform, although of course I give concerts much less frequently nowadays.
The next day I had to go to Portland and do it all over again. Ruth patted me on the back with an almost maternal pride, as if to say she knew that her boy could do it. I discovered I enjoyed performing “live” more than anything else.
The die was cast. In a matter of days, my guarantee went up from $8,000 to $10,000 to $12,500. Eventually I got as much as $25,000 and $50,000 for bookings—gigantic figures for the early seventies. At one point, after the second or third year, I was getting as much as Elvis, and in some cases, even more. I knew it, and Elvis knew it, because we had the same agents. Elvis called Sam Weisbord (who relayed this to me) and said something like, “Who’s this kid stealing all my thunder? I hear he’s making as much or more than I am.” I eventually talked on the phone to Elvis myself, by the way. I found he had a great sense of humor.
On weekends I’d often fly out to dates in the Midwest. I remember being picked up at the airport for one Ohio date in a 1959 Cadillac hearse; I think the local mortuary owner was the only guy with fancy cars for rent. We played big auditoriums—which got bigger as time went on. I couldn’t have worked any harder than I was working. Every minute of every day of my life was booked. And I wasn’t even sure how much I was really making, for it was expensive carrying all of the people I carried. But money wasn’t why I was doing it. I didn’t know or care.
On Monday I’d get back to the Partridge Family set and tell Danny Bonaduce and Susan Dey how the concerts had gone. They were both popular as well—Danny, because he played such a feisty, wisecracking kid, and Susan, because she was so great-looking and idealistic—but it was a much different thing than I experienced. They didn’t have the screaming fans and all of these magazines going gaga over them.
The first time they got to share in what I was experiencing came when Susan, Danny, and I flew out to Cleveland to serve as grand marshals of that city’s Thanksgiving Day parade. We’d been booked as grand marshals before our TV show went on the air.
We got to downtown Cleveland and started in this parade, riding on a fire truck at the end of it. The event turned into sheer pandemonium. We had to get on our hands and knees and duck because people were trying to grab us. By the end, an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 kids were following us down the streets of Cleveland, screaming and yelling. No thought had been given to security, to how we were supposed to make our exit when the parade was over; no one had anticipated there’d be any fuss over our appearance. The kids loved Susan and Danny, too, of course. But they had David Cassidy posters. Ah, the power of television and records!
At the end, when we had to run twenty feet from this fire truck to a waiting room, it was really dangerous. People were nearly trampled.
There were actually times, during my tours, when I was afraid for my life, because I saw fans turn into a mob, and a mob can’t easily be controlled. I knew the fans loved me—they didn’t want to kill me—but their emotions were at fever pitch. And they all wanted a piece of me.
That parade was the first time I’d had my clothes ripped. That was the first and last time I ever went someplace without people whose job was to get me in and out safely. I think the parade was sort of a turning point for Danny. That’s when he saw me as having the fame he wanted. He started really looking up to me from that time, I think. He was very young, maybe eleven or twelve, so it made an impression on him.
And the fan madness just kept escalating. It had seemed like a lot when there were forty fans crowding around the studio every morning. It grew to where there were hundreds or more. Where were all these people coming from, getting up at six in the morning just to see me? I couldn’t really go anywhere in public anymore without being hassled.
I needed to get away from that situation. So I took a week off. Steve Ross and I hiked back into the forest of Big Sur by a stream. We spent three days doing absolutely nothing but getting in touch with nature, living au naturel. It was really cool, the antithesis of Hollywood. We lived off the land, bathed in a stream. For several days we were literally naked.
When it was over, we hiked back to our car and drove down to the Big Sur Lodge, a rustic place that had no customers when we arrived that afternoon. We had beard growth, our hair was filthy. We got in the bathroom and washed the dirt and mosquito oil off our hands and faces, so we could at last sit down and have something proper to eat. Oh baby, was I ripe!
We sat in a back corner of this huge, empty cafeteria. Because of fans bothering me, I had become completely paranoid about being in public. So I sat facing the wall, reading the menu, thinking how I didn’t want the waitress to notice me; I just wanted to be a regular guy. I kept my shades on even though it was dark in this joint.
Steve ordered for us. I breathed a sigh of relief at not being recognized. I turned—and saw that a camp bus was pulling up in front of the lodge: a hundred or more Girl Scouts who’d been camping that weekend.
They poured into the room and I was about to crawl through the back wall. There’s no way these girls are not going to notice us. We’re the only patrons. We’re twenty-year-old males. These are eleven- and twelve-year-old girls, who would notice any twenty-year-old males—especially hippies with long hair, and my friend Steve was an attractive guy; any girl would have called him “cute.”
I kept thinking that if I was recognized—aside from the pandemonium that would create—all of these girls would leave there thinking, and telling everyone they knew, “We saw David Cassidy in person, and he’s really gross!” I was thinking, David Cassidy simply cannot be this person. He cannot be seen like this. I’d built up the persona of this David Cassidy guy that the public knew from TV—and now I had to protect him!
I inhaled my tuna fish sandwich as quickly as possible, facing the wall and trying to look down. It must have looked stupid. The girls kept looking in our direction, whispering and giggling because they’d spotted a couple of teenage guys.
I put my hands up to cover my face and started coughing and sneezing, “Achoo! Achoo!” I kept on sneezing as I hurried all the way from the back of the room and out the door. By the time we were safe in the car, we were laughing hysterically—so glad to have escaped with our lives. And I kept thinking, This is insane. My whole life’s becoming an insane charade. I’ll never even be able to go camping again!
The fans weren’t just hanging around the studio anymore. They’d found my house. We had so many fans hanging around the place, neighbors were complaining. We’d have to move. We found a house off Sunset Plaza Drive that cost us $1,500 a month. Sam paid the same as before—around $150 a month. He couldn’t afford any more. I knew he’d contribute more when he was able to. Sometimes Steve lived with us, too. He would be in and out. He’d go off for a while, to check out an Eastern religious guru or something, then he’d come back and live with us.
Somehow the fans found out about the new address pretty quickly. Some would sleep all night, just outside my gate. It became a zoo. Believe me, I did not treat people cordially if they invaded my privacy. I was extremely hostile. I had to draw the line. I had so little privacy, I needed to protect it.