Could It Be Forever? My Story (22 page)

Screen Gems tried to tell my manager that licensing items really wasn’t a very lucrative business, but reports in the press suggested otherwise. I was supposed to get 15 per cent of all revenues from licensing my name or likeness or that of
The Partridge Family
. I never did.

With great fanfare, Kate Greenaway Industries, a reputable, established children’s clothing manufacturer, introduced a
Partridge Family
collection (for which, the press reported, they agreed to pay Screen Gems a licensing fee of
$10,000 a month for 15 months), to be marketed with the message ‘David Cassidy will love you in these Kate Greenaways.’ Greenaway advertising director Alan Jackson noted, ‘
The Partridge Family
is what’s happening in America today.’ Greenaway vice president Neil Goldberger said, ‘David Cassidy is the love object of thousands of ten- to thirteen-year-old girls. We hope these young ladies will be equally as excited by our
Partridge Family
collection as they are by him. After all, if you get a girl at six, she’s a customer ’til ten or eleven.’ And so on.

Companies marketed a
Partridge Family
game for the whole family, a David Cassidy plastic guitar for boys and a Susan Dey sewing kit for girls. Buyers of the latter were encouraged to ‘make an outfit for David Cassidy’. With seemingly any product they could find some way to trade on my name.

I took a little vacation in Hawaii, and while I was there I strung some shells together on a string. I was photographed wearing that homemade necklace. The next thing I knew, magazines were talking about how much I loved to wear those pooka shells and ads began appearing telling kids that if they’d just send in their money, they too could soon be the proud owners of a necklace like mine. At my concerts I’d see thousands of kids who had proudly bought these necklaces, even though by that time I was no longer wearing anything like that myself. I thought it was hysterical at first, all of these kids copying me. Then I thought it was disgusting, the way kids were being conned into buying things they didn’t need. I looked around and thought,
What have I done?

What really pissed me off is that I had no control over
the quality of the merchandise. They could make anything that had my name on it – cheap perfume, an unimaginative toy, even a David Cassidy pillowcase (so girls could, in effect, sleep with me) – and sell it. That was really disturbing. There were massive sales of this stuff all over the world, England, Germany, Belgium, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia. Columbia Pictures and Screen Gems grossed untold millions of dollars. I got a token sum of – are you ready? – $15,000. Once. Yep, that was my share.

My manager tried to get financial statements from them, but with all the clever accounting it looked like no one was making any profit. We were very unsophisticated about merchandising and had no idea how many units of any item were selling.
The Partridge Family
phenomenon was unprecedented, so we had nothing to compare it to or learn from.

The Partridge Family
show first aired in the U.S., Canada and Hong Kong in the fall of 1970. By early 1971 it was also being seen in Central America, the Caribbean, Brazil, Thailand and Japan. By the end of that year, they’d added England, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Peru, Chile, Colombia, Zambia, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand to the list. And by early 1972,
The Partridge Family
was also being shown in Greece and some of the Arab world.

Screen Gems said yes to anyone who wanted to license the use of my name, likeness or
The Partridge Family
name for any product. The gag around Hollywood was that the only opportunity for exploitation that Screen Gems had missed was auctioning off the gallstones I had passed. A
lock of my hair was a more common written request from fans. One company’s proposal to market genuine locks of my hair sealed inside plastic was, I’m happy to say, turned down, I later found out.

The letters I read from young fans often had a plaintive innocence. One girl explained her interest in me this way: ‘I thought you sounded like a nice person. And I really don’t meet up with nice people.’ Another youngster confessed: ‘I always dreamed I was going steady with you, but now I blush whenever I think about it. I heard you are 20 years old.’ Fans vowed their eternal love for me, revealed that they’d written my name with theirs all over their notebook covers and had plastered their school lockers with photos and clippings about me. One fan wrote: ‘I hope my letters have been getting to you. I’m just wondering because I haven’t gotten any back from you. If you think I have a boyfriend, I don’t . . .’

I’d get 20,000 to 30,000 of these letters a week. So many of the fans actually seemed to expect me to write back to them personally. Instead, they’d receive invitations from the Laufer Company to read
The Partridge Family Magazine
(by mid 1972 they were peddling 400,000 copies a month at 50 cents each), join the official David Cassidy fan club (by mid 1972 they had 200,000 members, paying $2 each per year) and purchase assorted photos and posters priced to fit any budget. The company would encourage fans to send an extra 50 cents if they wanted ‘rush handling’ and countless girls in the throes of puppy love, imagining they’d be making contact with me that much quicker, would gladly cough up
the extra four bits. It would have been more honest if they’d simply printed: ‘Please enclose an additional 50 cents for Chuck Laufer.’ All of those extra 50 cents sure added up for him.

Laufer was an interesting character. I didn’t care for him myself because I knew he viewed me as someone to make money off, but I have to admit he knew the teen idol business better than just about anyone. He had quit his job as an English teacher to launch one of the very first teen fan magazines back in 1954 and had soon followed up with others, realising he could just as easily run photos and stories about a pop star simultaneously in four different publications. His timing was perfect. In the mid 50s rock and roll was just coming in and an affluent teen market was emerging in America. Kids were spending money on records, movies, clothes and more. They wanted their own heroes to give them a sense of identity as a generation, and he tapped into their desires. By the time I came on to the scene, he had the business of exploiting teen heroes down to a science. He told me that we were each good for about a two-year run before the magazines started hyping someone new. By then, we’d be overexposed and the readers would be eager to look at a new face.

He explained to reporters, ‘There
has
to be a teenage idol, but girls outgrow them. When they’re 11 to 14, they can have a nice, safe love affair with somebody like Davy Jones, Bobby Sherman or David Cassidy. By the time they are 16, they’re having dates and they don’t need them any more.’

My career still seemed to be building in intensity. In 1972, the TV show was in the top 20 and my concert grosses were huge and growing. I felt like I was
the
guy, yet when I’d talk to Laufer he seemed to be all but anticipating that soon my career would begin to slow down. He’d been running me on his magazine covers every issue since mid 1970. Public interest in me, he admitted, was feverish, but he felt that fevers had a way of suddenly breaking.

Although there were no signs yet that my popularity was beginning to wane, Laufer said he was already looking around to see who might replace me as the next teen hero. And once I’d been replaced, he believed, I’d be history. He’d seen the pattern played out so many times before. He reminded me how Bobby Sherman had been practically created by television. His frequent appearances on
Shindig
had led to a featured role on
Here Come the Brides
(1968–70). But when that TV series went off the air, his concert bookings and record sales dramatically fell off. The producers of
The Partridge Family
tried to revive interest in Sherman by having him guest star on our show and then spinning off a new series for him, but it didn’t work. I thought it was sad.

I told myself my popularity was much bigger than Sherman’s had been. My career was going to last. I mean, Sidney Skolsky, one of the oldest and most respected of the syndicated Hollywood columnists, had declared flatly (5 February 1972): ‘David Cassidy is to today’s youngsters what Elvis was to his generation’s youngsters.’ I believed that to be so.

To any reporter who was astute enough to suggest that Laufer was probably making a lot of money promoting me in his magazines, he moaned that he was also spending a lot of money. In mid 1972, he figured he was paying 30 people to work on me – writing about me, photographing me, opening my fan mail, processing mail-order requests, and probably special folks to just count the money. He had considerable overheads and had to give Screen Gems a cut of everything he made off me.

Laufer’s biggest competitor was the late Gloria Stavers. He used to say to me things like, ‘If
only
we could merge, we could
control
the teen market.’ Her top publication (with a circulation in 1972 of 1.2 million) was the rather classy
16
. She, too, did record-setting business peddling David Cassidy-related products (for which she paid Screen Gems a five per cent licensing fee), hyped via house ads. She had made money off other teen heroes before, but nothing like what she was making off me.

As she told one reporter in 1972, the David Cassidy Love Kit, available exclusively to her readers, was ‘the super-biggest thing we’ve ever had. I ought to know. I created it.’ Costing $2, the David Cassidy Love Kit included one life-sized, full-length portrait of me, one autographed poster which was
three times
bigger than life size, one photo album covering my entire childhood (I loaned priceless original childhood photos to various magazines, most of which I never saw again), the supposed story of my life (considerably cleaned up), no fewer than 40 wallet-sized photos, a special ‘love message from David’ and – Stavers’ master coup for the truly ardent David Cassidy fan – a ‘lover’s card with his name and yours’.

When the
New York Times
asked me why I thought I had become a teen idol, I answered carefully.

‘Who can say why one person is singled out? Maybe because of the way I talk or look. Possibly because I’m uncomplicated, clean. There’s no threat involved.’

Man, that sounded deep, didn’t it?

I got sick of the endless photo shoots and of seeing my
face everywhere. Posters were being hawked outside every arena I played. Most of those posters were unauthorised and I received no money from their sales. Anybody could take a photo of me from the pages of a fan magazine and use it to make posters. One journalist said he could imagine my high-school guidance counsellor taking one look at my face and saying, ‘I’d advise you to go into the teen idol business.’ I grew weary of photographers requesting things like, ‘And now, David, can you give us your pouty look?’ And I’d do my finger-down-my-throat routine.

But I didn’t know how to simply say no. So my body began saying no for me. The skin infections on my face grew increasingly worse. We tried heavier make-up, which didn’t always work. Some days my rather tactless road manager would actually tell the press, ‘David can’t see anybody today. No photos! His acne is really bad.’ And the British press would make little cracks about my ‘spots’, as if to say, ‘He not only sings for teenyboppers, he’s hardly much more than one himself.’

Even I was amazed at how much the interest in
The Partridge Family
and me grew. We were nominated for Grammy and Golden Globe awards, none of which we won. Our show and music weren’t quite credible enough; they were too commercial, too kid-oriented. That I got nominated for Grammys seemed pretty extraordinary to me, considering that before I was hired for
The Partridge Family
I had never even had aspirations of becoming a recording artist.

I
n 1972, I broke the attendance record at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, doing three shows in one very long day. That’s the venue that had been made famous by the diving horse trick years before. It was old and very obviously unprepared for a show like mine and the crowds.

From the time I arrived in town, there were 50,000 kids absolutely jamming this pier waiting for me. There was only one way on and one way off the Steel Pier and security was almost non-existent. They had two guys at the artists’ entrance at the stage. It was a joke.

For the first show, at around midday, I arrived and left via an ambulance. That sort of worked. The crowd parted
enough so that the ambulance, with lights flashing and sirens blaring, could get through. But some fans guessed I was inside. My cover was blown and I got grabbed a few times getting from the ambulance to the backstage entrance. We knew we couldn’t use the ambulance again.

For the second show, we needed to be more creative. I walked the entire length of the Steel Pier, right through the crowd, disguised as a woman. I put on my usual hip-hugger jeans, but instead of my sneakers I slipped into a pair of clogs. I put on a wig, glasses, lipstick, rouge, the whole deal. It scared the hell out of me when I glanced in a mirror and didn’t recognise myself. As I checked myself out in drag, I thought,
Damn, I actually look pretty good.
It worked like a charm, but I nonetheless hated disguising myself as a woman.