Could It Be Forever? My Story (32 page)

Interestingly enough, my brother Ryan inherited that gift and is a successful set designer, working in television and film in Hollywood. So he isn’t on the stage, but he creates it. And he’s great at it. We got to work together when VH1 and Sony partnered to further exploit
The Partridge Family
with a reality-based show in 2005.

Flying to see our parents was the first time all of my brothers and I had been together without either my dad or Shirley. I was the only real adult. Well, sort of. I was 24, Shaun was 16, Patrick around 14 and Ryan 12. We checked into a hotel in the middle of Nowhere, Massachusetts.

My dad was in the restaurant with Shirley, James Cagney and Cagney’s wife, Bill. He stood up and ran across the room to us. Ignoring my brothers, he put his hands around my face, grabbed me, kissed me on the lips and started to cry, saying, ‘Oh thank God you cut your hair. You reminded me so much of your mother before.’

I mean, ‘Hi, Dad! Great to see you!’

My brothers’ mouths just fell open. It was like my dad didn’t even see them there.

He said, ‘Oh God, David, I’m glad to see you again.’ He hugged me, standing in the middle of the room weeping.

In the last years of his life, lots of things were going askew emotionally with my dad. Anytime you tried to get my father to deal with reality, it was, ‘You either see it my way or else you’re off the show.’ Lately, I’d been hearing some weird things about his behaviour. Word would filter back to me. But hearing things is one thing, seeing them for yourself is another.

On the way to the theatre where he and Shirley were to perform that night, Dad pulled out a hip flask, took a swig and said, ‘Let’s forget about the show and go get drunk.’ And then, after a beat, he laughed like he was kidding. He did the show, but I knew he was close to the edge.

What I remember most about that weekend, though, is that I had an instant rapport with one of the girls in the show. We had dinner, went back to my room for drinks and I did what I used to do best. In the afterglow we talked. She went on and on about what a wonderful man my father was and how she thought so highly of him, and a light went on in my head.
Oh, no, she’s been sleeping with my father.
She confirmed
that that was the case and that my father had told her that, although he and Shirley made a good team professionally, they no longer enjoyed marital relations.

In the meantime, who should come knocking at my door but my father? It was five in the morning. I was lying in bed with this girl, and my father – who’d been up all night drinking (and perhaps had gone looking for the girl) – decided to pay me a visit. He was in his robe, smoking and
holding a snifter of brandy. We chatted and he said it would be a nice night for us all to go out for a walk. A walk? Dad, it’s 5 a.m.! I tried to get rid of him, saying, ‘What about Shirley?’ His attitude was,
Who wants to talk to Shirley
? ‘She needs her beauty sleep.’

I couldn’t get rid of him, so the three of us awkwardly talked in my room. When he finally left, around eight in the morning, the girl left with him. He was pretty blatant about what he was up to. I really felt sorry for him. The girl told him she’d had sex with me, which probably sent him further over the edge.

Ruth was as concerned as I was – and, in fact, had been for quite some time. She said that sometimes he’d say things that simply didn’t make sense and he was losing his professionalism, which wasn’t at all like him. There were nights when he would start winging it on-stage, ad-libbing monologues, putting Shirley in an untenable position. We didn’t know what to do. He was a ticking time bomb.

Things reached a head one weekend in Las Vegas. He’d been having terrible vocal problems, which weren’t helped by his smoking several packs of cigarettes a day. He was drinking to excess and had been gambling heavily and losing a lot of money. The pressures were too much. He went mad. After the show, he locked Shirley in her room, perhaps so he could pursue his activities with the girl he was fooling around with, without risk of interference.

He appeared to suffer a complete breakdown, singing things that had nothing to do with anything. He was filming
The Eiger Sanction
simultaneously and the schedule was too much for him. He began taking pills to wake up and pills to sleep. He lost his voice and began missing shows. Shirley found him curled up in the corner of his room – nude – unable to carry on.

Ruth sent an associate, Howard Boris, our business manager, to Las Vegas to deal with the situation and bring my father back home. The hotel removed my father’s name from the marquee. For the rest of the week it would simply be
The Shirley Jones Show
,
which wasn’t easy for Shirley to deal with, since my father had created the show based around the two of them and their marriage.

What happened next, I didn’t witness. Boris had hired a small plane and got my father on to it. They were in the air for 20 minutes without my father acting in the least bit peculiar. Then suddenly he unstrapped his seat belt, leapt over the seats, grabbed the controls from the pilot and started screaming, ‘I’m going to see my father!’

Howard Boris went white and was yelling, ‘Jack! Jack! You’re going to kill us!’ He and the pilot wrestled my father away from the controls and strapped him back in his seat.

The next day he was sighted watering the lawn in the middle of the afternoon – stark naked, sharing himself with his presumably admiring public.

Ruth flew to the house. She found him standing atop a coffee table, pounding on a Bible, saying, ‘J.C. – don’t you get it? Jack Cassidy, Jesus Christ. They’re both J.C. Don’t you see? I’m me, J.C.’ He’d never been interested in the Bible before. He told my brother Shaun to read the Bible
to him, which Shaun did. He had lit every fireplace in the house and refused to put on any clothes.

Ruth sent for the doctor, the one who had prescribed Valium for me. He was ready to sedate my father. When the doctor approached him, my father picked him up and threw him down so forcefully that the doctor dislocated his shoulder. The doctor called the men in white coats who sedated him, put him in a straitjacket and carried him off. This was grist for the tabloids.
The National Tattler
, giving him more attention than he’d ever received during his career, screamed (22 December 1974): ‘Jack Cassidy Cracks Up, Enters Mental Hospital, Wife Shirley Jones Forced to Commit Him.’

They held him in the hospital for 48 hours, which was, I was told, as long as he could legally be held against his will for observation, since once he had calmed down he was lucid, rational and appeared to pose no threat to anyone.

A week or so afterwards, acting as if nothing untoward had happened, he called me up and asked me to have lunch with him. That turned out to be horrible; the most uncomfortable lunch I’d ever endured. He’d been drinking. He was bloated. He started doing the song-and-dance charm routine I’d seen him try so many times on so many people. But there was no way I was going to let him charm me any more. His timing was way off. He tried to act like he was my father and we had this unbreakable father–son bond. He couldn’t manipulate me into helping him. I didn’t really want to be around him any more.

He said, ‘Shirley and I have been having problems.’

I suppose he expected me to feel sympathy for him. I knew something was coming.

‘I need to borrow $10,000 from you.’

I looked at him and said, ‘Dad, I’d love to help you but I don’t have any money,’ which was a lie. I knew that giving it to him would contribute to him spinning further out. That was the last time I saw him alive. He never called me again. I knew him so well.

I stopped seeing my father because I felt I’d taken just about enough abuse from him for one lifetime, although deep down I still held on to the hope that he would change and one day we could have the relationship I used to long for. It was less painful for me to simply avoid him.

New York Post
columnist Earl Wilson interviewed my father on 12 November 1975, as he prepared to open in a new Broadway play. He asked him if he saw much of me.

‘No. His crowd doesn’t even know me. I don’t talk about
him because the interviews with me turn out to be about him. I have another son, Shaun, 16. He’s a singer and composer, and he has a hell of a chance to take off,’ my father said.

Early in 1975, my father and Shirley got divorced on grounds of ‘irreconcilable differences’, although my father continued to insist to interviewers that he still loved Shirley. Shirley began dating – and soon married – comedian Marty Ingels. I stopped seeing her at the time because I didn’t get along with her new husband.

The funny thing is, I thought I was just making up an excuse when I told my father I didn’t have any money. But, surprise, surprise. I was just about to have to swallow a big bad reality pill.

I had never worried about how much money I had. Why would I? I was making a lot and just kept making more. My business managers always spoke glowingly of the wise investment moves they were making on my behalf. That was the only thing that compensated for the hell I’d gone through in the last five years – at least I’d made a lot of money and it was being invested wisely. I believed I was set for life and could stay ‘retired’ for as long as I chose. As far as I knew, I was worth millions. I was so damn trusting and naïve.

I had never kept tabs on how much money was coming in and going out. The bills went to my business manager. I didn’t write cheques. I figured that was what business managers were for. I had no business or accounting education
whatsoever. Nobody in my family had any sophistication when it came to investments; they came from working-class backgrounds. We were all busily making money and putting it in the till, until one day we looked and discovered that the till had been raided.

I really can’t blame Ruth. She came from a wealthy family and, like most women of her generation and socio-economic class, she simply had not been raised to worry about money. After the death of her brother, who had handled the business side of her operation, she’d hired business managers. Unwittingly, she went from one thief or incompetent to the next. That ended up costing my dad, Shirley and me a fortune.

One guy simply ran off with millions of dollars of our money. Another was investing wherever he could get the biggest kickbacks, after apparently skimming off the top. We also didn’t have any money in tax shelters, which meant we needlessly had to pay a fortune to the IRS. I was in the 70 per cent tax bracket in 1971. In one year I paid the IRS more than $400,000. A good business manager could have legally avoided most of that tax obligation.

A light should have gone on in my head that I didn’t have the best business management in the world the day one of the managers showed me I had $1 million in a checking account. If only I’d known then that there was no reason I should have had that much money in an account that didn’t even earn interest.

For three years I invested in heavy oil, or so I thought. I was certain to make a fortune, right? Wrong. Do you
remember the Home Stake Oil deal? That was one of the biggest scams in the history of the United States. Even some members of Congress were among the victims. It resulted in the largest class-action suit in history. It was an operation so fraudulent that at one point the perpetrators were actually painting water pipes orange to convince gullible investors the pipes were filled with oil. In the Home Stake Oil deal I was one of the top ten biggest money-losers in the country. I got burned really badly, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars. My father and Shirley also got burned, but not like I did.

All told, millions of dollars of our money were squandered and lost and invested poorly. It’s a shame that my family and I never had proper guidance. Even Ruth got suckered out of a lot of her money. We all got taken to the cleaners. It’s a sad and too familiar story about Hollywood business managers and their wealthy celebrity clients. Fortunately, I wasn’t cheated out of
all
of my money.

We sued the one business manager who admitted taking kickbacks. He could have gone to prison, but he was an old man and we settled out of court in exchange for his paying back the money he’d taken. We let him off way too easily.

The people who wronged me, taking advantage of a naïve young guy, I can never forgive. The opportunity to earn that kind of money again will almost certainly never present itself. And that harsh reality further fuelled my depression.

With the arrival of disco in 1976, I was considered old news, my music dated. My highly successful former record producer
Wes Farrell was also passé. He didn’t understand it; he couldn’t change with the times. And this man, who had been mega-successful throughout the late 60s and early 70s (his stream of big hits with me and The Partridge Family had earned him the Producer of the Year award) suddenly found that nobody seemed to want him any more. When he had been making the big bucks he had spent lavishly. He bought the house on Sunset Boulevard and put two Rolls Royces in the driveway. He wound up deeply in debt. He married Tina Sinatra, Frank’s daughter, and I heard he somehow managed to fall out with Frank, which was in itself a big mistake. He left town. Broken.

Meanwhile, I was staying home, trying to keep the harsh realities of life outside at bay. But news from outside, too often not good, had a way of invading my sanctuary.

Late on the night of 12 February 1976, a male assailant plunged a knife into the chest of Sal Mineo near his apartment at 8563 Holloway Drive. Mineo was heard by neighbours screaming, ‘Help! Help! Oh my God,’ before he died and his attacker fled. He was 37. Elliot Mintz handled the press, striving to ensure that Mineo’s privacy was respected as much as possible. The police, knowing of Mineo’s lifestyle, originally speculated that the crime had been sex-related, but when the assailant was finally apprehended more than a year later, it turned out that he was merely a common thief and hadn’t even known who Mineo was when he killed him with a five-dollar knife.