Could It Be Forever? My Story (4 page)

As recently as four or five years ago, I reached out to Elliot and basically poured my soul out to him. I told him how much I missed him and how much his influence, love and care meant to me, and how much I had appreciated all that he did for me as a stepfather. We bonded again and he is someone whom I have the utmost respect for. He doesn’t have a family of his own; I’m his family, and my family is his family.

It’s hard even now to compare my father with other dads. I know he wasn’t great in a lot of ways; he was terrible. He wasn’t there for any of my Little League games. He promised he would be, but only showed up once – for half an hour. I can still hear his voice, telling me over the phone, ‘Honey, I’m not going to be able to come to this one, but, remember, I’ll be there in spirit.’ Gradually Shirley and I became a little closer. I came to see that she was really a warm, giving and consistent person and that she recognised how unreliable my father was and didn’t want me to get hurt. She knew who he was; he was the same with her kids.

Around Christmas 1962, when I was 12, my father went on an overnight father–son camping trip with me. My mom and Shirley nagged him until he had to make the decision to go with me. It was a camping trip in the snow, at a Boy Scout camp up in the San Bernardino Mountains. Now, my dad was used to staying in digs like the Plaza and the Sherry Netherland hotels when he was in New York. He lived in a huge mansion with a pool, guesthouse, servants’ quarters, the works, in Bel Air, California.

He showed up for the trip dressed like David Niven. He was wearing a brand-new outfit – sheepskin gloves, boots, silk scarf. He must have bought them at the most expensive store in Beverly Hills. His hair, as always, was absolutely perfect. Everybody else’s dad is just, ya know, dad. Flannel shirt and jeans. But not Jack. We drove up to the mountains, to the forest, and we built our tents, and then sat around the campfire listening to the Scoutmaster tell stories. About nine o’clock we said goodnight. It was freezing. All the fathers went into the cabin together. I just couldn’t imagine my father in that funky cabin.

At about six a.m. we all got up. The other dads start coming out of the cabin. The first thing they do is look at me, smile, pat me on the back and say, ‘Your dad. What a guy! He kept us up all night telling jokes and stories. What a father! It must be great growing up with him. I’ve never met anyone like him! Your dad’s in there holding court.’

And I’m thinking,
Yeah, that’s really great. I’ve seen him like four times this year and he can’t even spend this time with me!
Somebody said, ‘Oh, by the way, don’t get concerned when you see his hand. He picked up a hot poker in the middle of the night. He was building a fire for us.’ Pure romance, my dad.

Apparently he’d brought some booze with him. He was passing the Scotch around while the kids slept. My dad sat by the fire telling show-business stories. Just being one of the guys. He could do that for days! He had such a cunning wit. He knew, seemingly, everybody in the business, from Cole Porter to Stephen Sondheim. I was proud of him, but
our one big weekend wound up becoming
his
big weekend. I don’t remember the ‘us’ part. He had a need I couldn’t quite understand: always to be the centre of attention, an insatiable need always to be ‘on’.

My father began taking me with him on summer stock tours for maybe a week at a time, when he could, which sure beat hanging around Los Angeles over the summer vacation. I not only got to see more of my dad, I saw different parts of America and different aspects of show business. I became a savvy, sophisticated kid.

Looking back, I’m sure it bothered my dad that his career was then so greatly overshadowed by Shirley’s, although he wouldn’t have admitted it. She was in demand for films; he wasn’t. In Hollywood he was still, in effect, ‘Mr Shirley Jones’. That began to change when he starred in the Broadway musical
She Loves Me
in 1963–4 and won a Tony Award; after that, his career began to take off. But in 1962 Jack Cassidy was not considered a star. However, he expressed great pride to me in being what he termed a ‘working actor’. It was an honourable profession, he stressed, just not an easy one. He always said that I could expect a similarly long, slow struggle to master my craft and gain respect and recognition from my peers. I accepted that reality.

He was doing enough guest roles on TV shows by then that people were beginning to know his face. In 1961 and 1962 alone he appeared in episodes of the popular TV series
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
,
Wagon Train
,
Hawaiian Eye
,
Bronco
,
Hennessey
,
Maverick
,
The Real McCoys
,
Cheyenne
,
Surfside 6
and
77 Sunset Strip
,
and also lent his distinctive and
cultured voice to the soundtrack of a cartoon special,
Mr Magoo’s Christmas.
That’s a lot of work.

My dad didn’t have to tell me that he had become a credible actor; he was always acting – and quite grandly. The Jack Cassidy persona the world saw was probably his finest performance of all. If you remember any of his talk-show appearances with Johnny Carson, Mike Douglas or Merv Griffin, I’m sure you saw him as this ultra suave, charming, refined man. But in reality, as I’ve said, he came from a tough, working-class background and simply invented the man you’ve seen.

As I spent more time with him, I came to realise there was one person whose opinion he valued, whose esteem he sought even more than Shirley’s. And that was Ruth Aarons’. He worshipped her. And she him.

Ruth was my dad’s manager, and Shirley’s manager too. It’s as if she was almost always part of our family. And she always took an interest in me. I found her entertaining and engaging with a great sense of humour. She was attractive, but looked kind of tomboyish. She was almost always by herself. People presumed she was gay; only at the very end of her life was I aware there was a man in her life. When I was a kid, she could talk to me easily about things that really interested me – music, sports, and so on – in a way that other adults couldn’t.

And there didn’t seem to be anything about show business she didn’t know, which shouldn’t have been surprising, since both her father, Alex Aarons, and her grandfather, Alfred Aarons, had been famed theatrical producers. Her father,
in partnership with Vinton Freedley, had produced such smash Broadway hits as
Lady, Be Good!
,
Oh, Kay!
,
Funny Face
,
Hold Everything
and
Girl Crazy
and had built and owned New York’s Alvin Theatre, though he lost his fortune in the stock market crash of 1929. As a little girl, Ruth sat under the piano at parties at which the likes of George Gershwin and Cole Porter entertained. When she was in her teens, she had become a table tennis world champion. By the late 40s she had become a theatrical manager and I believe she may have been the first female to accomplish that. She had very few clients, but didn’t need many. They were all successful. She was so personally involved in the development and maintenance of her clients’ careers that most stayed with her forever. They knew her touch was golden. And she would do anything for them. By the early 60s, she was working with Celeste Holm, George Chakiris, who later found huge fame in
West Side Story
, Janis Paige, Shirley, and my father.

She was vibrant, wise and sophisticated. Class, real class. Someday she would be my manager and, consequently, one of the most important people in my life. But that was still a half dozen years or so in the future. Back then, she was still just Auntie Ruth.

M
aybe I should have been in school that day, but I used to cut class pretty often. Bored, mostly. I was walking through Westwood Village in Los Angeles, when I heard the news that President Kennedy had been shot. I was 13 years old on 22 November 1963. That day still carries a certain weight for me. It’s the sense of loss again. I couldn’t believe we didn’t have our President any more.

As people heard the news, the streets emptied. People who’d been out shopping quietly went home. I’d never seen Westwood totally deserted like that.

That date marks the beginning of what we think of as the 60s – those turbulent years when everything in our society seemed to be changing. Up until then, it had been
damned near inconceivable that anyone would kill a president. And then Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and Malcolm X were all assassinated.

Did the shooting of JFK make it easier for the others to carry out cold-blooded murders? Did it somehow make it easier for many of us – in ways large or small – to consider breaking laws or codes of conduct? Did it contribute to the unravelling of the social fabric? Back in the 50s it was as if nobody except real criminals broke the law. We all stayed in line. Butch haircuts, pressed shirts. And now, in the 60s, all laws, all rules, all codes of conduct seemed suddenly open to question. Restraints were loosening throughout society. A lot of the changes in those years were excessive. There was an element of madness loose in our culture – think of the killings, the lives lost to drug overdoses. Tune in, turn on, drop out.

But to me, the 60s were about freedom. There was the Free Speech Movement and, of course, the struggle for civil rights. The 60s also saw the birth of the modern feminist and gay rights movements. Everyone was seeking freedom and justice. Drugs were perceived as something that would help liberate us, expand our consciousness.

Did I feel a part of that growing movement, the counterculture? Was I anti-war? You better believe it! I, like many others, didn’t understand what America was doing in Vietnam. My mother and I were both strongly opposed to the war; she said if I was drafted, we’d move to Canada. I couldn’t imagine myself going to Vietnam; I wasn’t exactly the military type. There was a draft lottery
to select those who would be called to go to Vietnam. Fortunately, at 19, I lucked out. I was not selected, so I was not called to serve. The peace symbol really meant something to me, to all my friends. I was, at the time, considered totally unpatriotic. To me, a child of the 60s, a patriot was somebody who blindly supported the government’s increasingly militaristic policies.

The establishment was trying to keep the younger generation in line, to keep the lid on all of the growing pressures for change. Back then, wearing your hair long – and I was the first in my school to start doing so – symbolised some degree of allegiance to the counterculture, which seemed to make adults feel threatened. Adults wanted to control how kids wore their hair, as if, by doing that, they could control the kids’ thinking. If everyone’s hair was cut short and matted down with Brylcreem, then rebellious impulses would be similarly under control.

My stepfather didn’t approve of me letting my hair grow longer. He got even more upset when I later dyed it blond. The gap between us grew wider and wider as the 60s wore on.

When I started University High School in 1965, I was ordered to the vice principal’s office because the length of my hair was questionable. He made me shake my head in front of him, saying that if a single hair on my head moved, I wouldn’t be allowed to enrol. And it wasn’t even that long then. But that’s how seriously they were cracking down. They were drawing a line.

I was already someone who was anti-establishment. So
was my good friend Kevin Hunter. We’d hang out in Westwood Village every day after school with some other guys – Ross Nogen, David Greene. We were wild. We were the rebels. We started wearing bell-bottoms because everyone in the older generation wore straight pants. It was all about freedom, about self-expression.

We didn’t like that we had to dress the way they dictated if we wanted to get an education. So when we first heard about ‘love-ins’ – celebrations for hippies and people who aligned themselves with the philosophy that any behaviour or form of dress (or undress) was acceptable – you can bet they sounded more attractive to us than school.

As far as I was concerned, California was
the
place to be in the 60s. It was really the hub in terms of the whole social/sexual revolution. What people in the Midwest were reading about in magazines or following via radio and TV, we were witnessing and experiencing. My appetite to be a part of the culture, the new social culture, the new musical culture, was really keen.

I tuned in to watch the Beatles
on
The Ed Sullivan Show
and the next day I said, ‘Please, Mom, let me get an electric guitar.’ At that time, I was playing drums and had just begun to play the guitar. I’d play in garage bands and little combos. We’d get together and play Beatles songs. But I didn’t want to be a professional musician, I just loved to play. What the Beatles did for me when I saw them on
Ed Sullivan
was make me want to be in a band with three other guys and do what I eventually ended up doing with
The Partridge Family
–
influence millions of people. I’m not
comparing the two in any way. It’s just that the Beatles inspired people.

My musical heroes through the 60s also included the Beach Boys, Eric Clapton, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, B.B. King, Albert King, Albert Collins, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding. And, of course, Jimi Hendrix. He was the greatest performer of the era. I went to see him with my friends Kevin Hunter and Sam Hyman when I was in high school. He played the Hollywood Bowl, opening for The Monkees. We watched him from up in the trees to get the best view. He was electric and angry. He was not enjoying the fact that he was playing to a bunch of teenyboppers.