C'Mon, Get Happy: Fear and Loathing on the Partridge Family Bus
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I am David Cassidy's age, so (like him) I was too old to watch The Partridge Family during its primetime run. Cassidy never really says if he watched the show while playing Keith, but it doesn't seem as though he would have had the time or the interest once his teen idol status kicked in. Cassidy was exploited by Screen Gems and forced to keep to an inhuman work schedule. Five days of shooting were invariably followed by concerts all weekend until his body and spirit eventually broke under the strain.
Cassidy seems obsessed with 1970-1974 as the defining experience of his life, which in retrospect it must have been. He entered into it with no real preparation for what would happen when he agreed to star in the sitcom. Interestingly, there is as brief mention of Bobby Sherman, the other teen idol of the period. And by the time The Partridge Family picked up the slack, The Monkees had run its course. But it never seems to have occurred to Cassidy to look at Sherman, Jones or Dolenz as Butterick patterns for what he might expect.
He is also bitter about the lack of parenting he received from his father, Jack Cassidy. The elder Cassidy is presented as an unrelieved disaster. His death in 1975 left the issues between him and his eldest son completely unresolved. David skims over this for the rest of the book dealing with his post-Keith life, but it is clear the lack of a relationship with Jack was the greatest influence upon him. His marriage to Kay Lenz is doomed from the start, his second wife rates a paragraph and his third marriage, still strong at the time the book was written, inevitably ended in divorce. Cassidy is complimentary of her, but never conveys why the relationship worked. There is a sad afterword by his co-author that details what happened after the book was published: a spiral of drunk driving arrests, bankruptcies, professional disappointment and ultimate death from alcohol abuse.
The one-star is not for the sadness of Cassidy's story but for the way he tells it. At no point does he demonstrate any self-awareness, other than an occasional perfunctory note that he treated women poorly. But these are buried in descriptions --- graphic descriptions --- of the enormous amount of sex David Cassidy was enjoying on the road. There is an embarrassing account of awkward intercourse with Susan Dey that led to a complete breakdown of their friendship after it was published. Cassidy seems surprised that she would have minded, which says more about him than anything else. Gentlemen do not kiss and tell, teenaged boys do. And that's the nub of what makes this autobiography sad and unsatisfying. It reads as though a teenager wrote it. Cassidy never really matured. There are reasons for it, certainly, but the perspective suffers and as a result, so does the book. I would like to read a good biography, or even an examination of the teen idol phenomenon. Anyone know of one?
Cassidy seems obsessed with 1970-1974 as the defining experience of his life, which in retrospect it must have been. He entered into it with no real preparation for what would happen when he agreed to star in the sitcom. Interestingly, there is as brief mention of Bobby Sherman, the other teen idol of the period. And by the time The Partridge Family picked up the slack, The Monkees had run its course. But it never seems to have occurred to Cassidy to look at Sherman, Jones or Dolenz as Butterick patterns for what he might expect.
He is also bitter about the lack of parenting he received from his father, Jack Cassidy. The elder Cassidy is presented as an unrelieved disaster. His death in 1975 left the issues between him and his eldest son completely unresolved. David skims over this for the rest of the book dealing with his post-Keith life, but it is clear the lack of a relationship with Jack was the greatest influence upon him. His marriage to Kay Lenz is doomed from the start, his second wife rates a paragraph and his third marriage, still strong at the time the book was written, inevitably ended in divorce. Cassidy is complimentary of her, but never conveys why the relationship worked. There is a sad afterword by his co-author that details what happened after the book was published: a spiral of drunk driving arrests, bankruptcies, professional disappointment and ultimate death from alcohol abuse.
The one-star is not for the sadness of Cassidy's story but for the way he tells it. At no point does he demonstrate any self-awareness, other than an occasional perfunctory note that he treated women poorly. But these are buried in descriptions --- graphic descriptions --- of the enormous amount of sex David Cassidy was enjoying on the road. There is an embarrassing account of awkward intercourse with Susan Dey that led to a complete breakdown of their friendship after it was published. Cassidy seems surprised that she would have minded, which says more about him than anything else. Gentlemen do not kiss and tell, teenaged boys do. And that's the nub of what makes this autobiography sad and unsatisfying. It reads as though a teenager wrote it. Cassidy never really matured. There are reasons for it, certainly, but the perspective suffers and as a result, so does the book. I would like to read a good biography, or even an examination of the teen idol phenomenon. Anyone know of one?
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