Could It Be Forever? My Story (14 page)

I inhaled my tuna fish sandwich as quickly as possible, facing the wall and trying to look down. The girls kept looking in our direction, whispering and giggling, because they’d spotted a couple of young guys.

I put my hands up to cover my face and started coughing and sneezing. I kept pretending to sneeze as I hurried all the way from the back of the room and out the door. By the time we were safely 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 become a charade. I’ll never even be able to go camping again!

The fans weren’t just hanging around the studio any more. They’d found my house. We had so many fans hanging around the place, neighbours were complaining. We had 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 stay with us. Somehow, the fans found out the new address pretty quickly. Some would sleep outside my gate all night. I had to draw the line. I was extremely hostile. I had so little privacy, I needed to protect it.

I
must have played the role of Keith Partridge pretty convincingly, because everyone believed I really was that guy. Keith was a happy-go-lucky 16-year-old with no bigger worries in life than which girl he could get up to his favourite make-out spot, Muldoon’s Point. He was carefree, relaxed and shallow. Throughout the course of the show, he never really seemed to grow older or more mature (although by the final season, I finally persuaded the producers to let him go to college).

We shot the show on the Columbia Ranch, which has since become the Warner Ranch, on Sound Stage 30. Almost everything was constructed on the sound stage: all the bedrooms, the kitchen, the living room, the stairs that led
to nowhere, and any new set we might have needed. The performance sequences were shot there as well; they would just change the backdrop and we’d put on our crushed velvet outfits.

The Partridge Family
house is still on the Warner lot in Burbank, near the house where the TV series
Leave It to Beaver
was shot. Down the street, the building that was supposed to be the public library on that show served as our school on
The Partridge Family.
VH1 did a
Behind the Music
in 1998 and we took a walk around
The Partridge Family
house. I had nothing but good memories.

Even though I wanted to, I didn’t suggest a storyline until the end of the first year, when I still only had six lines an episode, which seemed ridiculous since I was getting 25,000 fan letters a week. It took the producers and writers a while to figure out what to do with me beyond singing one song a week.

Keith evolved as the airhead that Danny took advantage of. I was the straight man for Danny Bonaduce. He and Dave Madden, who played our manager Reuben, were the comedy, Shirley was the conscience and Susan Dey was the feminist, Laurie, who believed in causes and was committed to social change. Laurie and Keith had a love–hate relationship – she was always taking up causes and all Keith did was make sure his hair was cool, play guitar and, therefore, get chicks. The show inspired a lot of guys to play guitar.

The essence of
The Partridge Family
is family. Playing together. Travelling together. Simple conflict. Simple
resolution. The simplicity and innocence of the show and the portrayal of a close family is what appealed to audiences. It made people feel good. I think every kid fantasised about having a family like that.

My own existence was hardly as carefree as Keith Partridge’s. From 1970 to 1974 I worked like a machine. On Monday we’d rehearse the TV show, do a read-through and block. Tuesday and Friday we’d shoot. Most mornings, we’d come in at half-past seven (though on Mondays they let us come in at ten). We wouldn’t be finished until seven at night. Photographers were often on the set, shooting us for magazines while we rehearsed or filmed. During our so-called lunch breaks, I’d have to do interviews; I couldn’t just relax and eat. For most of the year I’d go straight from the sound stage to the recording studio, where I’d work until about midnight. In 1971 I started recording solo records under my own name for Bell Records, while still making Partridge Family recordings.

Almost every Friday night or Saturday morning I’d fly to wherever I was doing my weekend concerts. By then, I had my own airplane, flying all over the world and playing to 60,000–70,000 people at a time. I was out of town until late Sunday night or very early Monday morning. So I’d often get to
The Partridge Family
set a little late. If I could steal even 15 extra minutes of sleep, it was worth it.

Because of the younger kids and the nature of what we were doing, we’d be behind all the time in the first year. By the second year, they had it down, and the network had given us enough money to film the musical number on a fourth day. Thus
The Partridge Family
cost more than any of the other shows on television. Most half-hour shows done at Screen Gems and Columbia Pictures at the time were three-day shoots – shows like
Bewitched
,
I Dream of Jeannie
,
Leave It to Beaver
and
Father Knows Best
. The performance day, when there were extras and the audience, was my favourite
because there were young, beautiful girls who would come and visit me in my dressing room afterwards.

It was the musical numbers that ultimately made the show unique and more than just a sitcom. But it cost the studio, and to say they were cheap would be an understatement. They wouldn’t spring for a seven-dollar pair of sunglasses for me. They had a budget and you couldn’t go two dollars over it. It was like pulling teeth getting them to pay for anything.

A lot of the time, they would use an Arriflex camera, which didn’t have the capability to match my lip-synching to the music. I looked like an idiot and it would drive me crazy. It was bad enough that I had to play with people who couldn’t play.

It was all so ludicrous. Here I was working with studio session greats and on the set I would have to show Susan Dey and Danny Bonaduce how to look like they were playing. The first thing I said to Danny was, ‘You don’t
strum
the bass. You play notes.’ To make it even worse, he was given a bass that was obviously way too big for him, but the producers never cared about details like that. None of the others knew anything about their instruments, through no fault of their own. They were actors, not musicians. The strings on the guitars I was given were seven years old and rusted. There was never any thought about having me play live, so I didn’t have them change the strings, so they didn’t think I’d use it. When I did, though, it sounded terrible. Screen Gems wound up giving me all of the guitars that were left from
The Monkees
.

Within the cast there was a love and an appreciation for each other that was very deep. Shirley Jones created an exceptionally warm atmosphere on the set. If many of us came to feel we really were part of a family, it was because of the tone that Shirley set. She taught me how to accept fame at such a young age and how to deal with it. She set an example by how she conducted herself and how she treated people. Everyone revered her – not just because she was an Academy Award-winning film star, but because of her personal qualities. Even the crew treated her with obvious love and respect, and we’re talking about hardened veterans who’d worked on one TV show after another. She’s as warm and genuine in real life as she appears to be on TV. She kept me grounded.

To some of the crew I was just some punk actor who was making their lives more difficult because of all the screaming girls trying to get on to the sets. I’m sure I was kind of cocky in those days. They thought I was demanding. One of them called me S.S. – Super Star. I can hear him now: ‘Certainly, S.S . . . Yes, sir, Super Star . . . Whatever you say, Super Dave.’ If someone was hassling me, I just figured it was because I was skinny, young, rich and successful. I knew a lot of people hated me because of my success, including some critics.

I had received some great reviews for the dramatic work I’d done before
The Partridge Family
, but as soon as I became a sitcom star, the critics dismissed me. They’d say, ‘Pretty face, no talent.’ I took a lot of lumps. The more popular you become, the more they put you down.

I made guest appearances on TV shows including Dick Clark’s
American Bandstand
and
The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour
. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about being invited to guest star on a Bob Hope special, but we sang together, joked around, and traded mock insults. What could you expect? After all, he played golf with Spiro Agnew. But the show turned out OK.

I was on hand when
This Is Your Life
saluted Shirley Jones.
They brought on both her real family (my dad, my brothers Shaun, Patrick and Ryan and me) and her TV family. And my dad and I appeared on the
The Merv Griffin Show
, singing
Danny Boy
together. I suspect it irked him that both his wife and his son were now bigger TV stars than he ever was, perhaps partially because he had turned down the role of Ted on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
, which had become one of the biggest hits on TV. When he did guest appearances on talk shows, he was as likely to be asked about his famous wife and son as about himself. After working so hard all his life, I think he began to resent that. And me, in fact.

As my own career took off in various directions, I also found I had less and less time available to study the scripts. With concerts, guest appearances on other television shows, promotional activities, recording sessions and whatnot, my schedule was absolutely jam-packed, so I’d learn my lines in the mornings, during my 10 or 15 minutes in the make-up chair.

And as I became more successful, I did more and more screwing around on the set. I had so little fun in my life, I needed some outlet. I was working all the time. I would get punchy towards the end of the day. I’d say things like, ‘Are we rolling yet? We are? Can you see I’m picking my nose?’