Love Is All That I Ever Needed. Chapter 7. 'David. Do His Kisses Mean Danger ?'
At first David enjoyed his fame. The attention, the money, and that a lot of popular beautiful women wanted to meet him.
Already in May and June when the filming of the first episodes
started, fans appeared outside the studio. More and more with each day. Some fans just
wanted an autograph or to have a look at him. But there were also aggressive ones.
Soon
getting to work every morning became a difficult task for David.
He regretted being sincere and telling teen magazines reporters where he lived or shopped.
Fans discovered his house at Laurel Canyon and he stopped feeling safe at home. He couldn’t
rest after working all day long. Just being left alone for a while became nearly impossible.
Neighbors were complaining because of the noise and strangers on the street. That problem
was the easiest to solve. He could afford a bigger and more secure house.
For $1500 a month, David and Sam rented a fully furnished house on Haslam Terrace - high
up in the Hollywood Hills above Sunset Boulevard. They had a swimming pool and beautiful
views. Sam paid the same as at Laurel Canyon - $150. He couldn’t afford more.
For David it
was very important to have his old friend by his side. Someone who he could trust entirely.
Steve Ross lived with them from time to time, They were young and had a lot of fun together.
Some people underestimated David. He was just 20, at the beginning of his career. They had
thought he would have done everything for fame and money. Everything they told him to do.
He smiled a lot but was a complex and serious man. Looked fragile and vulnerable, polite and
soft spoken.
David hated confrontation and rejection. He told ‘Modern Screen’’s journalist,
‘People in the business tend to lose their sense of reality. I think that success and failure are
both hard to take over a long period of time. As an actor I have to face rejection every time I
go out for anything, and it’s very difficult.’.
But he also had a lot of confidence in himself, and knew that the success of the show and the
music was mainly due to him. It was because of him that thousands of girls came to see The
Partridge Family’s cast at the Cleveland Thanksgiving Parade, in November 1970.
It was the
first time David had to run for his life.
There was not enough security. People were screaming
and fighting with each other to reach them. But first of all, they wanted David. Girls tried to rip
off his clothes and his hair. It was scary and dangerous. All his life, David Cassidy knew how
fans loved him, but he was also mobbed by them many times. From 1970 on wherever he
went, he never could forget about security.
He didn't like The Partridge Family’s concert outfits, the velvet suit he had to wear on the set.
For David, like for most of his generation, clothes were very important. They dressed differently
than their parents. Bell bottoms, long hair, and t-shirts were statements. David felt bad that his
friends saw him in those ridiculous suits on TV.
But first of all he hated his pictures which
appeared on the covers of countless teen magazines.
The 70s was a golden age of teen magazines. The average price being $0.50. So young girls
could spend their pocket or babysitting money on them. There were a lot of teen magazines.
The most popular was the US ‘Tiger Beat’, and the British ‘Jackie’.
‘Tiger Beat’ founded by Charles Laufer in 1965, was full of teen idol gossip, articles on music
and fashion, it was famous for glossy covers with saucy shots of teen idols - mostly male, and
many of them shirtless.
Laufer once described the magazine’s content as :’guys in their 20s
singing LaLa songs for 13 year old girls.’ He was also the author of a certain theory, that each
teen idol had a two-year ‘flush’ period for merchandising and idolatry. David hated him.
‘Jackie’, published since 1964 was a weekly ‘Bible’ for teens: fashion, beauty’s tips, the
problem page and pop stars posters. At its peak in the 70s, sales reached 600,000 copies.
The best ever selling issue was with David, the 1973 special edition to coincide with his 1973
tour. More than 40 years later at the ‘Jackie'’’s 50th anniversary, a lot of former readers
confessed they had been buying ‘Jackie’ mostly because of David Cassidy.
Millions of girls in the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and in West Europe bought those
magazines. They waited impatiently for new issues, new information, photographs, and
posters.
They put David’s posters on their bedroom walls. Millions of girls, and in every
bedroom David was looking at them, at all of them, and yet at just them. When they were going
to sleep, they kissed his pics, and his eyes were the first things they looked at in the morning.
At first, David collaborated with teen magazines. Sam Hyman became David’s merchandise
manager and even started writing (actually he didn’t do the writing, only told some stories to
ghostwriters), a monthly column for ‘’Tiger Beat, called ‘Living With David’. David became a
teen idol. His fan base was mostly girls - young and very young. They wanted to know
everything about him, and they got the answers.
‘Where he lives? What does his house look like? What does he eat for breakfast? For lunch?
For dinner? Favorite drink. Favorite food. Favorite color. Favorite singer, song, film, actor.
Hobbies. What kind of girls he likes? Does he like girls with blond, dark or red hair? With blue,
brown or green eyes? Has he got a girlfriend? Why not? What he thinks about..’
Even the titles on the covers became scary. ‘Help! David’s In Danger!, ‘David’s Secret Party!’,
‘Why David Cries And Cries!’, ‘Danger Ahead! David Wants You!’, ‘David. Do His Kisses Mean
Danger?’, ‘Win David’s Love. Find Out How!’.
There were contests. A lot of them. ‘Make seven words out of ‘David Cassidy’ (those two
delicious words!) and win a personally autographed The Partridge Family Album, with a
special message from David.’ (Fave).
New magazines were created, Tiger Beat’s Official
Partridge Family Magazine, and later The Official David Cassidy Magazine.
Screen Gem owned the right to his name and likeness in merchandise and sold it to anyone
who wanted it.
David had nothing to say about what was printed about him. What products
with his name or pics were made and sold. For the owners of his image, he was just a hot
property, a very pretty boy every girl was in love with for a year or two. There was no time to
lose.
He realized there were people who earned a lot of money on him, on his voice. All he
got for his hard work was just $600 a week for playing this boring goofy teen, Keith Partridge.
He was only 20 and naive, and actually met with Chuck Laufer and asked the Tiger Beat owner
not to write about him in Laufer’s teen magazines.
David said : ‘I can’t live like this any more.
I want you to take me out of your magazines. Take me off your covers.’
When Laufer stopped laughing, he told David how naive he was, and that he’d paid a lot of
money for the rights to David’s name. Laufer told him : ‘We’ve waited since The Monkees for you. You can either just strap yourself
in and enjoy the ride or make it difficult for yourself and we’ll do what we want to anyway, and
it will be uncomfortable for all of us.
And Screen Gems might see it as counterproductive. So you make the choice.’
It was so humiliating to hear something like that, to realize how he was used. He had no control
and was just a product to sell. There was nothing he could do about it.
There was also that
unspoken threat that if David stood up to the studio, he would be finished
2 David Cassidy ; ‘Could It Be Forever?’, 2007, p.104
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