Shirley Jones (20 page)

C’mon, Get Happy

In the beginning, I was slated to be the star of
The Partridge Family
and to sing every number, but David quickly and easily upstaged me. I was happy for him and didn’t mind. If
The Partridge Family
had been my first gig, perhaps I would have minded immensely, but it wasn’t, so I was fine with David becoming the star. My only complaint was that I didn’t get to sing much in the show, but otherwise I was content that I could spend so much time with my real-life kids and also be in the show.

Meanwhile, David was tasting the fruits of his spectacular overnight success. After his fame reached fever pitch, girls stalked him morning, noon, and night, and naturally he often took sexual advantage of them. I would see one girl go into his dressing room at lunchtime and see her leave a little while later, only to be replaced by another girl. And so it would go for most of the day. I didn’t say anything because, as far as I was concerned, David was an adult, and this was his life, not mine.

Despite all the temptations and the sheer number of willing women surrounding him, David did manage to have a serious relationship while making the show. Actress Meredith Baxter, who was three years older than David, met him when she made a guest appearance on
The Partridge Family
, whereupon she and David started dating. She was only recently divorced from her first husband and had two children.

From the first, David was discreet about his relationship with Meredith, but he confided the details to Susan Dey and me. Neither David nor Meredith wanted the tabloids to find out about their relationship, so they evaded them by mostly spending their time in Meredith’s nearby Burbank house, where they had a great time together.

The course of true love might have run smooth for Meredith and David, but after they had been dating for about a month, David had a kidnap threat. The FBI broke the news to him, and from that moment on, his life was turned upside down. The result was that his relationship with Meredith faded, then died.

Around the same time, Meredith was cast in a new series,
Bridget Loves Bernie
, along with David Birney. She and David Birney fell instantly in love with each other. That turned out to be extremely tough for my David as
Bridget Loves Bernie
was filmed in the studio next door to where
The Partridge Family
was being filmed, and David was constantly forced to see Meredith and her new man together, making it patently clear that they were so much in love. Eventually, they married.

Before David and Meredith broke up, she confided in me how she thought David was wonderful. She said that he was always a perfect gentleman and never talked about his romances. I knew that David cared deeply for Meredith, even though girls were still throwing themselves at him continually. I knew that he sometimes still caught them, too.

Throughout the series, Susan Dey continued to be crazy about David, but he didn’t handle her emotions for him particularly well or sensitively. Often, he would come back from his weekend rock concerts and tell her stories about how he had to get security guards to hide him from all the female fans. He would also tell her about all the ones from whom he didn’t hide and the great sex he’d had with them. Susan listened and gave a good impression of accepting the situation stoically, but I knew how hard it was for her because I knew exactly how she felt about David.

Finally, I took him aside and told him that he had to be careful talking to Susan because he was hurting her badly. At first, David didn’t understand. I think he may have viewed Susan as the sister he had never had, but I saw the situation differently. She had a great big crush on David, and he didn’t reciprocate her feelings. But she wouldn’t listen to my advice to stay away from David, and I found myself warning her over and over against getting involved with him. I began to realize that I was sounding exactly the way Sari had when she’d tried so desperately to warn me about Jack all those years ago.

And David was Jack all over again.

During the series, girls besotted with David would come to visit him in Los Angeles, and some of them ended up on my front lawn. They traveled from all over America, and most of them took the train or the bus, as they were too young to drive. I’d wake up in the morning and find one or two of them sleeping on my front lawn.

So I’d go out and talk to them, and they would jump up and say, “I’ve come all the way from Iowa, and I really want to meet David!” Or “I want to move in with you and have you be my mother and David my brother.” Or “I want to join your band and travel around the country in the Partridge Family bus with you and David and the rest of the family.”

I’d patiently explain to them that David didn’t live at my house, and that he had his own place, and that
The Partridge Family
was a fantasy, not reality.

I felt so bad for those kids. They were so crushed, so disappointed, that their dreams didn’t become reality. But I felt worse for their parents and how worried they had to be about their daughters.

“Do your parents know you are here?” was my inevitable first question to them.

The girls would invariably shake their heads, miserable. “I called them along the way and told them I was coming to see David,” they would say.

“Well, you must go right home again because this is TV, this is make-believe and not real life. David doesn’t live here, and we don’t have a band.” I would say in a kind but firm voice.

Then I would call the parents and put their minds at rest that their daughters were safe, and next I would buy the girls a ticket home, and the parents would later reimburse me.

Afterward, I felt bad for the kids who genuinely believed that
The Partridge Family
was real, that I was the mother, had five kids, and we were all in a band together. I had to set them straight, sure, but
The Partridge Family
did indeed have a grain of truth. The writers often came over to my house and spent the day with me and the kids and took notes nonstop. What happened in our family might become the theme of a
Partridge Family
episode.

One time, when Patrick was about six or seven, he went to the store and took some candies, just as I had taken bubble gum all those years ago in Smithton. When I found out what he’d done, I reacted much the same as my mother had and ordered him to take the candy straight back to the store and apologize to the owner. That incident became a
Partridge Family
episode.

Sometimes the show seemed so real to me that even I lost track that it wasn’t. One time, when Danny was acting up, I lost my patience and yelled, “Danny, go upstairs to your room right now and don’t come out till I tell you!”

As Danny cracked afterward, he wasn’t really my kid, I wasn’t really his mother, and we were on a studio set, not in a house, and there was no room upstairs for him to be banished to. It was funny, but it was also indicative of the way in which the show insinuated itself into my life and mind many times.

The Partridge family had now become America’s favorite family. Fortunately, not everyone in the country knew exactly where the kids and I lived in real life. Not that their ignorance always protected us. One time Ryan was out playing in front of the house when a tourist bus pulled up. Out jumped one of the tourists, clutching a “Map to the Stars’ Homes.”

Did Ryan know the address of any stars’ homes? Better still, did he know any stars?

Ryan said, “I sure do. I live with two of them! Park your bus and come on in.”

A whole busload of people came tramping into our house. I didn’t have the heart to punish Ryan, but I wasn’t happy about what he’d done.

Generally, though, the public continued to find it hard to separate the Partridge family from the real-life actors playing them, which could sometimes cause serious problems in our lives. Poor Evelyn Ward, David’s real-life mother, suffered so much because the public persisted in believing that David was my son, not hers. David tried so hard to dispel the rumor and regularly referred to her as his real-life mother in magazine and newspaper features, and during TV interviews to try and make it clear to the general public that Evelyn was his mother, not me. But no matter how hard David tried, and so did I, even today some fans still believe that he is my son, not Evelyn’s.

Early on in the series, I could tell that David was suffering from becoming an overnight teen idol. He is sensitive and always craved privacy, and now he didn’t have a hope in hell of retaining his privacy. Everything in the show revolved around him. He was the star of the show, a rock god, and one of the most famous performers on the planet. He was spending most weekends appearing in rock concerts all over the country, as well as filming the show all week. The wholesale adulation, the mass hero worship—it all soon became too much for him.

He was burning the candle at both ends, and his schedule inevitably took its toll on his work on
The Partridge Family
. Every Monday there would be a read-through of the script and then we would block the show. On Tuesday through Friday we would shoot the show. The days would start at seven thirty—except on Monday, when the show started work at ten—and we wouldn’t finish till seven at night. Afterward, many nights, David would go straight into the studio, where he recorded till midnight.

Most Fridays, he would board his own plane, fly to a venue, and perform in front of up to seventy thousand. It all took a toll on both David and the program.

After he was an hour late for one Monday-morning reading too many, I took him aside and said, “Listen, I know you are busy working and making money and doing well and I am happy for you, but you can’t keep coming in late for the Monday-morning reading. You’re a major part of the show, and none of us want to wait for you. Do your thing on the weekend, star in rock shows, but do your part in the show on Monday morning. And be on time.”

David gulped. “Okay, Shirl.”

He was never late for the Monday-morning read-through of the show again.

Away from the show, David’s career continued to skyrocket. On March 11, 1972, Jack and I and the kids went to see his New York concert at Madison Square Garden, where he performed in front of more than twenty thousand fans, and it was incredible. He strutted and swaggered and had a presence onstage rather like Elvis did. He sang all
The Partridge Family
songs and the audience absolutely loved him, although Shaun and Ryan were terrified by the screaming. David was great, and his dancing and singing, brilliant.

After the concert, to escape the fans screaming for him, David was bundled into the trunk of a Toyota, wrapped in an army blanket, and the car whisked him away to Queens, where he hid out in some cheap motel, with no money, and no family to keep him company.

Every single day of the series, David had to be smuggled in and out of the studio, otherwise crazed fans would have torn him apart. Women turned up at his house 24-7. At a restaurant, he couldn’t take a mouthful of food before someone would come up pestering him for an autograph. Unhinged girl fans would write him love letters, some full of wild threats, telling him that they were going to turn up and see him face-to-face. Once, two girls hid in his trailer for almost twenty-four hours, then jumped out just as he had taken his clothes off and was stark naked. Girls routinely hid naked in his dressing room, and he had to move houses a couple of times because of fans’ mobbing him in his own home.

When he toured Europe in 1973, he flew in his own ninety-nine-seat Caravelle jet.
The Partridge Family Album
had just been released in England, and thousands of fans mobbed him at Heathrow Airport. After he checked into the Dorchester on Park Lane and the fans found out he was staying there, as many as fifteen thousand of them besieged the hotel, then camped out there all night singing all the Partridge Family songs at the top of their voices.

But things went badly wrong after he performed before forty thousand fans at White City Stadium in London, in 1974, and fourteen-year-old Bernadette Whelan was killed in the crush.

David felt dreadful about that. He felt personally responsible for what had happened, and in a way, Bernadette’s tragic and untimely death permanently soured him on being a rock star. It soured him on starring in
The Partridge Family
, as well. The day would come when he would throw in the towel and run away from the show, the rock music, everything. The pressure on him was so heavy that he started seeing a psychiatrist.

Apart from worldwide David Cassidy mania, it seemed that
The Partridge Family
phenomenon, too, was unstoppable. An issue of
TV Guide
in 1972 referred to the Partridge Family brand as “practically a branch of the US mint.” Twelve Partridge Family paperback novels had been published, there were Partridge Family paper dolls, real Partridge Family dolls, Partridge Family diaries, David Cassidy lunch boxes, and a Partridge Family collection of clothes. There was even a Partridge Family game.

By the end of 1971, the show was being seen in Central America, Chile, Colombia, the Caribbean, Brazil, Japan, Thailand, Spain, Portugal, Iceland, England, Peru, Zambia, New Zealand, and Australia, and by 1972, also in Arab countries and in Greece.

By then,
The Partridge Family
magazine was selling four hundred thousand copies a week, and the David Cassidy fan club had two hundred thousand members. To top that, he was nominated for a Golden Globe, although he didn’t win.

By the third season of
The Partridge Family
, David had become the rock star of the century, but that wasn’t making him happy. He became disgusted with singing what he termed “bubblegum songs” and wanted to go on to bigger and better things and sing hard-rock music in earnest, much in the style of his heroes Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. So he decided to leave the show.

If he had asked my advice, I would have told him to be happy with what he’d got, because that was my philosophy of life. (Besides which, I hated hard-rock music.) But he didn’t discuss the subject with me and decided to leave the show.