Love Is All That I Ever Needed. Chapter 9. David and Keith
Not everything also was going smoothly on The Partridge Family set.
In many teen magazines,
there were a lot of interviews, photo stories and information about young actors. How they
liked each other and that they had a lot of fun doing the show.
A new magazine was launched, Tiger Beat’s Official Partridge Magazine, just for fans of the
show. Full of exclusive information about actors who played the Partridges; Shirley Jones,
Susan Dey, Danny Bonaduce, Suzanne Crough and Jeremy Gelbwaks, but first of all about
David.
It was true. There was a fantastic atmosphere on the set, and Shirley Jones was a
great credit for this. She was warm, calm, very professional and treated young actors like they
were her real family.
David became very good friends with Susan Dey. There was also a mutual physical attraction,
and at the beginning they even dated for a while.
Susan was born in December 1952, still a
teenager, and her agent always accompanied her on those dates, obviously not trusting David.
At the end of April 1971, all the Partridges met with Shirley Jones’ real family, her husband
Jack Cassidy and their three sons, Shaun, Patrick and Ryan, on the set of a popular ‘This Is
Your Life’. It was a program in which the host surprised their guests and took them through a
retrospective of their life. In that episode Shirley Jones was honored.
It is the only ever
opportunity to see David with his step brothers and their father together. There is not a single
photograph with Jack and all his sons. Only screenshots from that program.
Jack and David
didn’t hug. They only shook hands and sat on the opposite sides of the sofa. They were both
so much alike with such strong similarities: dimples, cheekbones, eyes, and even voices.
The work on the set of The Partridge family wasn’t easy. The schedule was very demanding, especially in the
first year when they were behind all the time. The reasons were music scenes and younger
kids. They were not very experienced and first of all didn’t play instruments.
Paul Junger Witt,
the show’s producer and director : ‘We had to film the musical sequences in a very short
amount of time, with a lot of relatively inexperienced kids (..) We spent a great deal of camera
time on David and Shirley for those sequences because they knew what they were doing, but
we had to go to the other kids occasionally and it was tricky stuff.’.
The budget for the show was very tight and everything was saved. David got an old guitar with
rusted strings, and the props were the cheapest kind.
He was frustrated when those savings
affected the quality of the show. Old type cameras which didn’t match his lip-synching to the
music in the music scenes. Insufficient number of extras. His stand-in, Jan Freeman, appeared
on at least 3 episodes as an extra.
There were troubles with the younger children. Danny Bonaduce was so natural and funny on
screen that many episodes were written just for him. Off screen, he was a wild kid. His father
was violent and beat Danny, so sometimes Shirley took the boy to her house for the weekend.
When the show wasn’t filmed, Danny went to regular school but didn’t feel well there. He
wanted to be regarded as cool, and started smoking when he was 13.
Everybody worried
about Danny. They really cared, but sometimes working with him wasn’t easy. David lost patience with him several times too. Danny forgot his lines, fooled around or fought on the set
with Jeremy Gelbwaks, who left the show after the first season. A new Chris Partridge, Brian
Forster, was hired. Bob Claver, the show producer, said that no one really had noticed that
change.
But the main star of the show was David Cassidy. It’s fascinating watching how he kept
changing during those four seasons.
In the first episodes filmed in spring and summer of 1970,
David was just one of Shirley's children. There were long sequences without him, or some
songs were performed off screen (‘Sound Of Money’ S1E2, or ‘Danny And The Mob’ S1E7).
Later, such things didn’t happen.
Throughout Season 1 there was a lot of work on Keith Partridge's image. The producers were
experimenting with David’s hair. In each episode it looked different, with fringe or without, with
parting in the middle, with uncovered ears or not. He had quite long hair in Season 2. In
Season 3 a classic, iconic shag hairstyle was achieved.
In Season 4, Keith looked like a
rockstar, like David in real life. He wore very tight jeans and had the longest hair on set. David
refused to cut his hair, and only did it after the show ended.
Keith also evolved as a character. The more famous David was, the more Keith was a loser.
David was a perfect teen idol, so the character he played on the show couldn’t be perfect if
the audience was to identify with him. Keith was very pretty and a lead singer, but not very
smart and had bad luck with girls. He had a lot of problems at school, was insecure and
sensitive, very easy to hurt, and manipulate.
David was excellent as Keith Partridge. He had a great sense of comedy, and personally a
great sense of humor. He also knew how to show Keith’s confusion and uncertainty. All that
was achieved as if without effort. He could project any feeling just by the movement of his
body or change of the timbre of his voice. And he could have changed into someone
completely different like in the episode called ‘Whatever Happened To Keith Partridge’
(S3E11).
It was just a family sitcom, but David Cassidy’s performance was really outstanding.
He was
truly mesmerizing in the music scenes. They made the show unique. On stage it wasn’t Keith
Partridge singing. It was always the superstar, David Cassidy. Those were magical moments
when he was performing as Keith, each time, regardless of the songs. The close-ups of his
face in the dimmed light, the way he was filmed to make him look taller than the rest of the
Partridges. No one paid attention to what the other band members were doing behind his back.
He had the TV audience in the palm of his hand.
David Cassidy was The Partridge Family.
David Cassidy ;;Could It Be Forever?’, 2007, p.127
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