Could It Be Forever? My Story (37 page)

Once I re-connected with Sue, I really began to shift my life from the dark side into the light. Just being around her made me feel better – she was so positive, so supportive, so caring, so loving. Her whole attitude was
I don’t care that you’re a drunk, David; I don’t care that you’re a mess. And I don’t care that you have no money.
When someone embraces you at your lowest point, it really means something. It carried a lot of weight with me.

With Sue’s support, I made the decision to go into analysis. Emotionally and professionally, I had pretty much bottomed out. I found my analyst through Sue, who had benefited greatly from analysis herself. Even though the process is painful, it’s not anywhere near as painful as living with the kind of misery I was experiencing. I just couldn’t stand it any longer. I knew I must find a way to change, to be happy with myself again.

So I began to concentrate on healing myself. I had to feel whole as a person. My hope was that, through analysis, I could rebuild my life. I didn’t hold out any hopes for my career, which seemed, to all intents and purposes, dead. I really didn’t begin changing as a person until the late 80s, when I began analysis more intensely. What a difference it made for me. Three and a half years, three times a week. Every week, a little more light.

I was standing at a crossroads. I tried to keep Sue away from my life at that point; I didn’t want to involve her in the difficult journey that was facing me. How do you bail yourself out of a million dollars of debt? How do you try to reconstruct an image that was so vividly ingrained in
everyone’s mind and change people’s false perception and see the real you? And how do you become humble enough to start over after having had that level of professional success? It was humiliating in many ways. I don’t believe that experience builds character. I believe you have to have the strength of character in the first place.

Sue continued to pursue me in a loving, caring way and we still saw each other. She wanted the relationship to evolve and I told her that I was incapable of that at that time. ‘Why would you want a broken-down piece of junk like me when you can go out and get a shiny, new machine?’

I knew that the only way for me to heal and wake up in the morning and feel good about myself was to continue on my path alone. So I ran – literally and figuratively. Every day. Everywhere. I would drive to Mulholland Drive, Santa Monica, Venice Beach and run for miles. All I could think was,
Run, boy, run
. I ran past the homeless and thought,
I’m one step away from that
. Ran past mansions on Sunset Boulevard and thought,
I’m one step away from that
.
Just keep runnin’, boy.
And so I did.

I guess that thinking that we can choose just one perfect mate to spend our lives with is innately flawed. There’s no person that’s going to fit you like a glove, who’s going to share all your likes and dislikes, who’s going to be 100 per cent compatible in every way. The bottom line is, would you climb a mountain with them? Do they love and care for you and your needs? Do they put themselves second sometimes? Do they accept your flaws? Can you embrace the things that you don’t like about them?

Sue is so talented and so naïve, which is something that’s still endearing about her to this day. Her naïvety is so innocent and so pure. She’s the most solid, kindest best friend one could ever have. We have an incredible bond that has lasted for 20 years now. We’re partners, friends, business associates and co-writers, yet we have our own friends, our own lives, our own interests, and that’s very healthy.

It wasn’t long after Sue came back into my life, maybe a couple of months, when I received a call regarding an offer for me to replace Cliff Richard in a musical in London’s West End, at the Dominion Theatre, entitled
Time
. I listened to the music, they sent me the book. The music was pretty good. The book? Oh God, dreadful. Not just poor, absolutely dreadful. And I thought,
Hmm, let’s see – go back to theatre, move to London. I don’t know
. They increased the offer. I still wasn’t sure. They increased the offer again. I sat and waited.

Even though I had less than a thousand dollars to my name, I turned down the first three offers the producer of
Time
made to me. I really played this poker hand well. As if I was still rich. And that’s the only way that I’ve ever negotiated. I’ve always been willing to walk away from a deal if I didn’t get what I felt I deserved. I began to regain a sense of power, once I had someone to support me, someone who loved me – Sue.

Finally they said, ‘This is our final offer.’ I looked at the money that they were offering me – a lot of money. I looked at the opportunity that it would present and thought,
Can
I make something out of this?
I took a deep breath, signed the contract and I was on the next plane to London to do
Time
.

I must say that, even though it was successful, I thought
Time
was a bad play – no real story, no substance. It was just a poorly written star vehicle for anybody who could sing and had a little charisma. But it had incredible sets, lights and special effects. And it was promoted extremely well. So, even though the play was really a piece of fluff, I had great success with it. My fans came in droves. Business was terrific. It was the first step of a real comeback. I was finally being treated as an adult.

About three weeks after I arrived in London, I was in rehearsal when I met one of the great theatrical actors of all time. Yes, it was me and Sir Laurence Olivier’s head. What a fine, fine predicament this was.

So what was it like working with Laurence Olivier, David?

It was absolutely marvellous.

We met, Sir Laurence and I. I found him to be kind and very funny. He was very respectful; very complimentary. And very old, with gout. Were we going to look at his career and think that the man has no credibility because he appeared as just a head in Dave Clark’s
Time
? I think not.

So I thought,
I can make the best of working with his head every night
.

I found myself working 15, 16 hours a day in rehearsals. As always when you’re preparing for an opening, the rehearsal period is the most difficult time. You have no time for anything else, it’s all encompassing. So, it was a bit of a shock when, about three weeks into rehearsals, there was
a knock on my front door. I had a little apartment in Knightsbridge, near Montpelier Square. Two bedrooms, a little balcony; a nice little place.

I opened the door and there stood Sue, with a big smile on her face – and 15 pieces of luggage.

‘Oh,’ said I, ‘coming to stay for a few days, are we?’

‘No. Actually, David, I’m moving here. Isn’t that a fantastic coincidence? I’m joining Emerson, Sue and Palmer.’

‘Emerson, Sue and Palmer?’

‘Yeah. Carl Palmer, Keith Emerson and I are working on material. We’re putting a band together.’

‘No kidding? Well, come on in. The bedroom’s upstairs. I guess you’ll need a little help with those bags.’

Need I say any more?

The seven months I spent performing in
Time
were very good months for me and Sue. We got a place together a couple of months later, a little mews house in South Kensington. I would go to work. She would go to work. I’d finish the show and have my driver take me back to our little house. She’d make a late dinner. We got on well. We had no connection with the real world. I was dealing with a lot of my problems, so it seemed. I was repaying banks and some of my other debts every week. I had very little money but we had a great time.

It was, arguably, the time that we were able to do the most healing and bonding because we had no distractions. We had a single telephone line. There were no cell phones at that time. We didn’t have an answering machine. So I was virtually cut off from the rest of the world. I was working
and enjoying life. We began writing songs together and we proved to be quite a goldmine of creativity.

Thanks to analysis, I stopped drinking during the run of
Time
. I stopped smoking cigarettes shortly afterwards. I woke up one day and realised none of my vices were working for me; I realised how much I loved myself and my life. How blessed I was.

I can’t drink any more. I certainly can’t do drugs. I hate the thought of them. I guess the only things left for me are cookies and milk. But I feel better now than I did before I gave up those old habits. I mean, I look at what I am: pretty clean, pretty light – and pretty lucky.

I’ve been a chronic insomniac for as long as I can remember. It comes and goes, is more or less intense depending on what’s going on in my life. I lie awake in bed at night and think about choices I have to make. But if that’s the worst of my problems these days, all right, I can live with that. I’m doing meditation at night now.

I eat healthy foods, though I’m not completely vegetarian any more – I eat fish and fowl. I feel good. I really believe I owe it to myself to wake up every morning and feel good. And I’ll do whatever it takes to get me there.

When my contract for
Time
was up, they asked me to stay on, but I knew that I had to go back to America and face the realities I had left behind. I didn’t want to perpetuate the mid-80s success I had in the U.K. and I didn’t want to continue to try to be a rock star. I wanted to find my way. I’m an American, after all. I wanted to move back home
and spend time with my brothers, my mom. I wanted to rebuild my life there.

Sue and I came back from the U.K. together at the end of 1987 and realised that I had nothing. I no longer owned a home in Los Angeles. Sue had a house there and invited me to stay with her. I moved into her lovely little house in Studio City. Small but very quiet. She had a pool and a Jacuzzi. Sounded pretty good to me. I thought,
Hmm, I guess that means we’re living together now.

The weather was as we remembered it. The city was as we remembered it. And the baggage was still there. It was time for me to face the music. And face it I did.

The first thing I did was call my brothers, then I called my two other best friends. And I found an analyst. At that point I resumed self-exploration through intense work, three times a week. The ensuing two years were financially a struggle, but creatively quite fertile. I started writing a lot, alone and with Sue, and I received an offer for a music publishing deal for my material.
Just do the work, kid. The rest will follow.

One day, shortly after that, I heard about these guys on the radio, Mark and Brian on KLOS. They had what was becoming the most popular morning show in Los Angeles. Apparently, they had been talking about me for a couple of days, saying that they were fans of mine. So I called them and they invited me on the show. They asked me what I’d been doing. I told them I had been writing some material and making some demos and some artists had cut songs of mine. The following week, I accepted their offer to come
back to the studio and was on air all morning with them. By the end of the show, I had played three or four demos and had three offers of recording contracts. Ah, Los Angeles, how sweet it is.

I went with an offer from Enigma, a small, credible record company, almost the antithesis of a mainstream pop label, which is what I felt I needed. Do the things that people don’t expect. Don’t be predictable. There was great enthusiasm for me and my material at the label. They were a young, upstart label but were seemingly carving out their own little niche. I believe they had quite a bit of success with a band called Poison. Who’s on our label? David Cassidy and Poison. Yeah, that sounds right.

It was an experience that, in retrospect, was a good one for me. I began recording with a very, very good engineer–producer named ‘ET’ Thorngren, who produced and engineered a couple of Robert Palmer’s great records. We worked on a new album,
David Cassidy,
for six or seven months in 1990 and spent a lot of time promoting it. The single that Sue and I wrote,
Lyin’ to Myself
, was released to radio and it was the number one added single on AC (adult contemporary) and pop radio the first week. People in the business were shocked; I guess they thought I was dead. It looked like I had a real hit in the making. But by the time the single was a bona fide hit on the
Billboard
AC charts, the record company had unexpectedly closed its doors. It went belly up. And without a strong company behind you, pushing your record, stores aren’t going to stock it and disc jockeys aren’t going to play it. It was devastating.

Ah, show business. You gotta love it. So now what do I do? I’ve just invested a year and a half of my life with a record company that doesn’t exist any more.

I really wanted to get back to playing live. I knew that I could control things when on the stage, something I couldn’t do in the record business. I called a couple of friends to see if they wanted to join me on what I called the ‘credibility tour’. I wanted to give my fans and the people who cared about me and my music an opportunity to see me again.

So I began a three month bus tour. Trust me, folks, this wasn’t exactly like having my own plane and 15 security guards. It was me, the four guys in the band, the bus driver and a drunken Danny Bonaduce, my old buddy from
Partridge Family
days. Oh yeah. Let’s get back on the bus, Danny.