Love Is All That I Ever Needed. A David Cassidy Biography. Chapter 2
David Cassidy wrote a lot about his father, Jack, in his second autobiography, ‘Could It Be Forever? My Story’. The book was published more than 30 years after Jack Cassidy’s death in a fire in 1976, but David still felt the pain of that loss and his memories were very emotional. He adored Jack and was proud that his father was such an extraordinary man and artist, but also blamed him for many things in his life, and was scared that he himself could have been like Jack.
David didn’t spare his father and wrote that Jack was alcoholic, bipolar and bisexual. He was never present when David needed him, was emotionally unbalanced and self-indulgent. Jack was Cole Porter’s lover, and it helped him in his career. He gambled and was terribly vain. Jack cheated on Shirley and In 1974 David had sex with a girl who also slept with his father. He envied his own child’s success and never told David that he was proud of him.
David Cassidy tried to justify his father. He knew his psychological problems had origins in Jack’s terrible childhood, his mother rejected him, and his father was an alcoholic. The way he wrote about his dad showed that it was Jack who was the most important person in his life. Always.
David was sure his father envied his fame. All his life, it hurt him that Jack didn’t appreciate his enormous success in the early 70s because in his opinion it was achieved without effort and hard work. Thirty-five years after Jack's death, David still felt the pain :
“He (Jack) never said I was worthless, but his resentment would come out in these little mean ways. Then when The Partridge Family came along, he said in an interview that I got lucky with my success and that just broke my heart'.(1)
It’s hard to say if he’d had a chance, a mature David Cassidy would have ever understood and forgiven his father. Both were men with big egos and both sacrificed private lives for their careers. Two alpha males.
When he was a young boy David wanted to be like Jack. But a teen idol experience changed David’s attitude towards show business and his own father. In 1974, he was so disillusioned by it that he seriously was thinking about quitting show business for good and became a horse breeder. In May 1976 Colin Dangaard wrote about a former teen idol :
“The new David Cassidy is looking at Hollywood with horror, and his own father with indifference, admitting, ‘My dad has always been into show business and parties and all that, and it makes me sick. I just can’t relate to Jack. He and I are about as 180 degrees as you can get.” But that was not everything, because in a way David blamed his father for his career and what his fame did to him. He said, ‘By bringing us into show business the way he did, he put me in a position where I am very successful in some areas and unsuccessful on other levels.’ (2)
It seems that Jack’s other sons didn’t suffer as much because of their father as David did. But, of course, all of them had to deal with it. Ryan Cassidy, 10 years old when Jack Cassidy died, said, “What my father left behind was so strong that there remains so much of him, in different ways, in David, Shaun, Patrick and myself. It’s as if he lives on through us.” (3)
David's step brothers were much younger than him, and they had to witness the breakdown of their parents’ marriage. Jack left the family several times before finally divorcing Shirley in 1975. The boys saw their father's strange behavior when Jack had a breakdown a year before he died. 16-year-old Shaun had to watch how Jack, in a straitjacket, was taken to the hospital for observation.
The next day it was national news and in every tabloid across the country.
And yet this legacy proved to be the most difficult for David.
Jack Cassidy was a self-made man, a very hard working and extremely ambitious actor and singer. He also had a lot of issues because of his horrible childhood and difficult first years of his career. Life taught him to be tough and count only on himself. Did he love his oldest son, so talented and so like him in many ways? Jack tried to be a father. From time to time. He bought David expensive gifts to make up for his absence in the boy’s life. Sometimes they sang together, and David loved the songs his father used to sing
David saw Jack more when Evelyn moved with his 11-year old son to California in 1961. She thought it would be good for her career, but first of all for David. He was 11, quite wild and without discipline. She hoped that contact with Jack who was a disciplinarian would be something he needed at this age. Jack lived in California from the mid 50s.
Evelyn and David moved into a small house on Crest View Court in West Los Angeles. David began fifth grade at Fairburn Elementary. He spent more time with his dad and his new family. Jack began taking him on summer stock tours when he could and David loved it. It was a great opportunity to watch his dad at work, see different parts of America and learn about aspects of actors’ life. About show business. The ups and downs of this profession. He talked with performers and technical people. He asked questions and wanted to know everything.
Jack saw how his son was talented and how he wanted to become an actor. When David, at last, graduated in 1968, he came to New York to live with his father and his family. Jack had rented a grand house there and David lived in a guest house situated on the grounds. Jack seriously started helping him. He paid for his first professional photos, and asked Ruth Aarons, his and Shirley Jones’ manager, to take care of David’s career. Jack wanted to teach his son that he should earn his own living, that everything was achieved through hard work. He could afford to completely support David, who expected it, but instead found him a part-time job - uninteresting, boring and not well paid.
Later in life, David Cassidy complained many times about that job. He hated this work in a mailroom of a textile company and long commuting hours. After work, he did acting classes and countless auditions. Jack tried to be a real father and discipline David. But David was 18-years old and always did what he wanted. They both were very stubborn and quarreled a lot.
It’s interesting that in some early interviews from 1970, it’s obvious that David appreciated Jack’s efforts, “My dad was laying on the fatherly advice which I didn’t want to hear. But he made me get my own self-discipline, because he had some trouble himself. He made me see how irresponsible I was and how dependent on everybody else. I wasn’t looking after myself. I was looking for people to do it for me.” (4)
In that same interview David said that getting his first professional job (on Broadway, in the fall of 1968) had improved the relationship with his father. “That was the beginning of my growing up. It was the beginning of my communicating with my father - just the fact that he’s come to respect me to an extent - we had something else to communicate on rather than being a father and son. None of that. We don’t talk at each other. We talk with each other.”
But everything changed when David became a teen idol. Jack, at first, was surprised and astonished like everybody - how fast his son became a superstar. Since Shirley Jones got an Academy Award in 1960, he was often called in the press - Shirley Jones’ husband. In 1970 he became David Cassidy’s father. It didn’t help their relationship.
Also the times changed enormously. Even though Jack in the 70s was only in his 40s, and at the peak of his popularity, appeared three times on ‘Columbo’ and in a Clint Eastwood’s movie, he was someone who belonged to the past. His was the world of swing, big bands and old style glamorous Hollywood parties. The gap between him and David was not only generational, but also became cultural. David no longer wanted to be like his father. In the 70s, Jack began to bore David and arouse his pity.
Jack Cassidy never had time to watch his young son playing Little League. Never was there when David most needed him. Elliot Silverstein, a very respected film director, who was David’s step father for a few years in the 60s, tried to be a real parent for his step son. He genuinely liked David and thought the boy was curious, smart and sensitive.
Evelyn Ward and Elliot Silverstein married in 1962 and the three of them started living together in a nice, big house on Glenbarr Ave in Cheviot Hills in LA. It was quite a posh place. A lot of actors and filmmakers lived in the area.
Elliot was very educated, intellectual, and an artist, but, first of all, was a warm and very good man. He wanted to give David more confidence and teach him responsibility. He saw that David’s conflicted relationship with his father was very bad for him and made the boy doubt his abilities.
Elliot Silverstein said, “His mother told me that when Jack used to wrestle with David, he’d never let David win. He was very competitive with David. So I tried hard when we were together to let David win at least part of the time.”(5). But Elliot appeared too late in the boy's life to make his influence on him more significant.
David liked Elliot, and in 1970 he said “One of the brightest men I’ve ever known, he wanted to know the way and how about everything - some of that rubbed off on me. He was so knowledgeable..”
In 1964 Elliot directed an episode for Kraft Suspense Theatre with Sal Mineo, who became a family’s friend, and a very important person for David. In 1965 Elliot achieved great success when his movie, Cat Ballou got an Academy Award. At the time David started living on the edge: experimenting with drugs and sex, completely neglecting school and challenging adults’ authority. Evelyn and Elliot divorced in 1968.
Jack and David. A father and his oldest son. All his life David Cassidy tried to get to terms with his father’s legacy. He was scared that he was like Jack. Many people told him so, and he knew it himself. Even as an adult, David felt that maybe he wasn’t good enough and his father abandoned him because he was a failure. He tried to understand and forgive, and remember what was good. “Talent survives” - those words spoken by his father after one of David's Wembley’s concerts in 1973 helped him in difficult times when he was without work and in debt.
And yet, in 2012, 36 years after Jack’s death, at the age of 62, David Cassidy said :
“My dad was a boot-camp sergeant - we work until our fingers are bleeding - that’s how we rehearse - until we get it right, even if that takes 16, 18 hours a day. I thank him every day for that. But he didn’t take it well when I became this very famous guy.(..) All I wanted was for him to put his arm around me and say he was proud of me. I never got that.’(6)
When David Cassidy died in 2017, his son Beau was 26 years old. The same age David was when his father died in a fire in December 1976.
1. https://www.davidcassidy.com/fansite/InPrintPages/Web2011March25.html
2.https://www.davidcassidy.com/fansite/InPrintPages/News1976May30_Green_Bay_Press_Gazette_Part2.pdf
3. David Cassidy : Could It Be Forever?, 2007, p.315
4. https://www.davidcassidy.com/fansite/InPrintPages/Mag1970Dec_MOdernScreen.html
5. David Cassidy ‘Could It Be Forever?’, 2007. p.20
6. Modern Screen, December 1970
7. https://www.davidcassidy.com/fansite/InPrintPages/Web2012Aug18.html
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