Could It Be Forever? My Story (24 page)

I wrote
Two Time Loser
about a relationship that I had that was never really a relationship, but I imagined it was. It was the first song I wrote on the piano that went on to record.

I loved The Young Rascals’ song
Lonely Too Long
and I asked to cover it. Eddie Brigati and Felix Cavaliere from The Young Rascals are two of the great musical influences of my teenage years. I thought they were just about the best American ‘pop’ band. They were called a pop band only because they had pop hits, but they were heavily into R&B and soul.

Some Kind of Summer
, written by Dave Ellingson, was a big hit. Kim Carnes, Dave and I were hanging around one day and he picked up a guitar and started playing it. And I said, ‘That’s a great song.’ I still love it.

Song for a Rainy Day
is a nice song that Kim and I wrote.
Song of Love
and
Soft as a Summer Shower
were Wes Farrell additions to the album, in an effort to try to lock me into
The Partridge Family
bag.

I chose to cover
Go Now
by The Moody Blues. When Denny Laine sang that song, it was so soulful. The song itself has a really British, soulful rock sound and I’ve always loved it.

How Can I Be Sure?
is another Young Rascals song. It wasn’t a hit outside the U.S. when they cut it in 1967, but it brought back so many memories of that era for me. It was a pretty big hit for me – Top 20 in the U.S. and Top Five virtually everywhere else it was released in the world. I love the song, still sing it, and will probably continue to do so. It’s a singer’s song. Eddie Brigati is one of the great American vocalists, in my opinion. If he and Felix Cavaliere had been born in another era, they would have been like Mario Lanza. They had such great chops. Their voices together were magic, kind of like Paul McCartney and John Lennon. They had this unique quality together that was extraordinary.

I knew that what I was doing was more important than
my more cynical critics realised. Sure, I could find flaws in the music myself. I felt wrenching conflicts about having made it as a music star without having picked, much less written, most of the songs I recorded. This pang grew. But I was also aware I was bringing light into a lot of people’s lives. And while I didn’t always feel worthy of all the adulation I received, didn’t always feel I was the best person the fans could have picked to worship, I also knew I was far from the worst. It was better that they were placing me on a pedestal rather than some hostile, anti-social jerk. Privately, I may have complained that I was more complex than the image the public had bought into but, if kids had to have a hero, it was a good sign that they responded to one perceived as positive and honest.

Critically, it was impossible to win acclaim. But the appreciation of the fans spoke volumes and kept me going. To a point.

Playing Madison Square Garden, the biggest indoor venue in America’s biggest city, New York, may have been my most prestigious public appearance to date, but one thing that made it especially important for me was that among the 20,000 people in attendance was my 83-year-old grandfather, Fred Ward. I still get choked up when I think about how proud he was when he saw how popular I had become. He got so carried away with the audience reaction and my show that he stood up, this old man in his 80s, and started clapping and cheering for me. It breaks my heart that he’s no longer with me and yet it thrills me to think that he got to see
that. For his last birthday, I sent him $5,000 in cash, which is probably what he made in ten years. He worked during the Depression and he made very little money. He couldn’t speak when he got the money; he’d never seen anything like it. And my mom, I knew how proud she was of me. It blew them all away.

The Madison Square Garden concert was a huge event. Bell Records put up billboards in Hollywood announcing to the world at large (and the entertainment industry in particular) that I would be playing the Garden, 3,000 miles away, and then almost immediately plastered on to the billboard the message: ‘Sold Out!’

The concert took place on 11 March 1972 and received extensive media coverage.
Life
magazine’s managing editor, Ralph Graves, noted that before I appeared there was a one hour warm-up period featuring other singers. Those singers, whom he didn’t seem to feel were worth mentioning by name, were Kim Carnes and Dave Ellingson. He added that having a warm-up for me ‘was about as necessary as warming up an arena full of starving tigresses before throwing them a single Christian’. Graves said he’d never heard anything like the audience’s frenzied response to my performance. ‘You have to imagine the roar of a crowd at the moment Frazier knocked down Ali, while at the same moment Bobby
Thomas was hitting his famous home run that put the Giants in the World Series, while simultaneously George Blanda was kicking a game-running field goal in the last five seconds, just as Ben-Hur was on the last lap of his chariot race. Now put all that sound together on tape and play it without respite for an hour, not forgetting to raise the pitch . . . The young girls in America have absolutely perfected the pitch up to a high C shriek. My middle-aged eardrums were in shock after the first five minutes.’ Graves added that his 12-year-old daughter told him, ‘I’ll remember this day all the rest of my life.’ It made me smile, that one.

The showbiz bible
Variety
got to what it considered the most significant thing about the event in the first paragraph – from that one concert I had grossed a whopping $130,000. In 1972 that was a huge take. As for my performance,
Variety
’s judgment was that ‘Cassidy’s well-choreographed act consisted mainly of waving his rear (in tight white pants) to his adoring public.’ They said I fronted to the orchestra for one instrumental number at my ‘wiggling best’. But they admitted the squealing teen and pre-teen girls seemed thrilled by every moment, even my mumbled introductions to songs, like when I told the audience that
I Think I Love You
described ‘how I feel about you’.

Lillian Roxon of the
Daily News
noted that at the Garden I was ‘wiggling like Monroe in
Niagara
’, although she felt I ‘was not one half as comfortable with it as, say, Michael Jackson . . .’

The
New York Post
’s pop music writer, Alfred G. Aronowitz, fumed about my performance: ‘There is
something obscene about selling sex to pre-pubescent little girls as if it were apple pie . . . The way David swung his torso around, there was no question that he knew what those girls wanted to see.’

The
New York Times
assigned both a feature writer, Angela Taylor, and a music critic, Don Heckman, to cover my concert. Taylor reported that Madison Square Garden security guards had never seen anything like my frenzied fans. She noted it was startling to hear a second grader yelling, ‘I don’t care if he’s old. He’s beautiful. Give him to me!’

Heckman declared the event was ‘less a concert than a symbolic announcement of what pop music might become’. He described me as ‘the current idol of almost every 13-year-old girl in America’ and said, ‘Cassidy is a still-developing singer with a pleasantly bland voice and notable absence of rhythmic vitality . . . But the significant element here is sensuality and theatre, not music.’ He said I left 20,000 fans thoroughly satisfied, but added he suspected that their devotion to me ‘had more to say about the manipulative powers of television and recording than it did about David Cassidy’. Maybe so. But here’s my take.

In America, performing at Madison Square Garden is the pinnacle for any artist, and apparently I sold it out faster than anybody. It’s even bigger than the Melbourne Cricket Ground, at which I broke box-office records. I was the highest-paid person ever to play there. I sold more merchandise than anyone had ever sold. But to me, the show was a personal triumph only because of the people
who were there for me – my mom, my grandfather, my dad, my brothers.

I remember ‘my people’ were thrilled by all the publicity the Garden concert generated, not to mention the huge box-office gross. Of course, we had some unexpected expenses to contend with. My frenzied fans managed to destroy six limousines.

When the concert was finished, I ran off the stage and two burly security men wrapped me in an army blanket and threw me in the trunk of a Toyota. They sent limousines out which fans followed, while the Toyota headed off, unnoticed, in another direction. By the time the fans realised they’d been tricked, it was too late; I was gone.

About four blocks later, we stopped. I hopped out of the trunk and got into the back seat. All the hotels in Manhattan were swarming with fans looking for me; none of the good hotels in Manhattan would take me any more, although my band still stayed in them. I, on the other hand, was driven instead to some dump out in Queens, a cheap motel, where a room had been reserved for me under an alias. Fifteen minutes after starring in the most publicised concert in the world, I was dropped off – still wearing my white jumpsuit, which was drenched in sweat – at a shabby motel. I didn’t know where I was. I had no money and no clothes except for what I was wearing. I stayed in the bathtub for an hour and a half, alone. I waited for someone to call or come and get me. I didn’t know where anybody was. I understood why Marilyn Monroe couldn’t get a date on Saturday nights. I lay there and thought,
What am I doing this for?

T
he perception that Shirley Jones was my mother drove my mother crazy. She was tortured by it. Shirley had nothing to do with it; it was the media. A couple of times I had her included in articles to say, ‘This is my mom,’ to appease her, so she wouldn’t be so distraught all the time. She would read these articles about me and my family that were, of course, completely untrue. So my fame became torture for my mother as well as my father.

My mother was more embracing of my success than my father. But being around either one of them was very uncomfortable and unpleasant for me. My parents wanted success for themselves so desperately that they couldn’t be
happy for me. The way they felt and behaved towards me made me feel rejected. I spent a lot of my life trying to make both of them happy, trying to be a good boy, trying to be someone they would be proud of, trying to get their unconditional love. But I couldn’t make them happy, no matter what I did.