David Cassidy: Naked Lunch Box

There’ll be a time when this whole thing will be over. I won’t do concerts anymore, I won’t wake up in the morning feeling drained, and I won’t be working a punch card schedule. I’ve had to sing when I was hoarse. I’ve had them with a gun at my head, almost, saying “Record, ’cause we’ve gotta get the album out by Christmas!” I’ll feel really good when it’s over. I have an image of myself in five years. I’m living on an island. The sky is blue, the sun is shining. And I’m smiling, I’m healthy, I’m a family man. I see my skin very brown and leathery, with a bit of growth on my face. My hair is really long, with a lot of grey. I have some grey hair already.
–David Cassidy

Drive over to the Hippopotamus,” Henry instructed.

“Aw, Henry, let’s go back to the hotel,” pleaded David Cassidy, who sat slumped down in the back seat.

“Heeey,” chided Henry. “We’re in the Big Apple. Let’s just see what’s happening.”

David slumped further in the joyless back seat, muttering his consent. He was exhausted, stoned and drunk, and dizzy from the antibiotics he was taking to drive away a flu. It had been a busy day – two hour-long interviews in the morning; a press conference at New York City College; a rehearsal all afternoon; a session with gossip columnist Earl Wilson; and pictures for the Cancer Society. Then an impromptu tap dancing lesson in his hotel room with a lady he’d met at rehearsal that afternoon. Then dinner, dope, wine, and now this climbing in and out of the back seat of a car looking for what? New York action?

Well, he had his action and he wanted to go to sleep. But that wasn’t what the others were into, except for Jill, who sat close to him. The Lincoln limousine pulled in front of the third discotheque they’d been to that evening. They hadn’t stayed at the others because Henry didn’t think they were quite right.

“We’ll just go in and check it out,” said Henry. “Just one more. If we don’t dig it, we’ll leave.”

David mustered a small protest. “Try it,” laughed Henry. “You’ll like it.”

So David was herded into the Hippopotamus.

“Wait here,” said Ron, David’s valet. “I’ll go take a look.”

Ron climbed the steps to a room which poured out music and cigarette smoke, lit purple and pink.

“Where do you think you’re going?” demanded the doorman, who barred Ron’s entrance to the room.

“You don’t understand,” Ron said. His voice had a bitchy edge on it now. “I’m here with Mr. Cassidy, my employer. I have to see if the place is all right. You see, there he is right there, standing with those people just inside the door. David Cassidy.”

“Where?”

“Right there,” Ron was almost screaming. “In the blue coat.”

The doorman squinted at the slight figure in the dark hallway, then looked back at Ron.

“That’s David Cassidy!” Ron said. The doorman looked at David again. He shrugged. “Who’s David Cassidy?”

Only three weeks earlier that same David Cassidy had set an attendance record at the Houston Astrodome, selling 56,723 tickets to two matinees on the same day.

Baboom, Baboom, Boys, and Girls, Zing!

Madison Square Garden was filled five balconies full an hour before the matinee with 20,650 excited females – the same girls who more than 20 years ago would have wept for Sinatra and 10 years ago for Elvis. Average teen age girls who keep diaries, go steady and chew gum. And many younger ones, eight- and nine-year-olds, some with their mothers. David Cassidy’s audience – who never miss a Partridge Family episode, who devote scrap books to him and wallpaper their bedrooms with his face and body.

Now they held up banners reading “David Spells Luv.”

“I hope I brought enough Kleenex,” worried a 16-year-old wearing a tight sweater and hot pants. “I’ll probably cry. I cried when I got my ticket.”

“Ooooh!” cried one small voice inside the hood of a pink and red snow suit. Eight-year-old wide-eyed Amanda Lewis clutched a $2.00 David Cassidy program to her undeveloped bosom. “He’s so sexy.”

One fan didn’t know if David was sexy. “I’m a boy,” explained Elliot Fain, age 11, from Forest Hills. “I think he’s a very interesting person though.”

The girls were there to scream. They screamed whenever so much as an equipment man mounted the stage. One news photographer approached a cluster of ladies. “Scream!” he directed. They screamed. He took a picture.

Aproned vendors coursed through with screams of their own: Posters! Programs! Hot dogs! Popcorn!

When the lights dimmed, the show’s MC – a fave DJ on WABC radio – strutted onto the stage, long-legged and agile as a circus barker. “I just saw David backstage!” he announced.

“EEEAAHHH!” went the crowd.

“Now, when I count to three I want you to say ‘Hi, David!’ One, two, three!”

“HI, DA-VID!” The auditorium shook.

“And now I want you kids to show the world that children your age can behave and not go crazy. Yell and scream, but stay in your seats. Let me hear you say ‘I will.’ One, two, three!”

* * *

In a windowless cinderblock dressing room, all David’s people were assembled. Wes Farell, record producer; Ruth Aarons, manager; Jim Flood, PR man; Steve Wax Erman. Sam Hymen, David’s roommate, Ron the valet, Henry Diltz, pop photographer, Steve Alsberg, road-manager. No Jack Cassidy, David’s father, but Shirley Jones, his stepmother, with two of her three sons, and his mother Evelyn Ward with David’s grandfather, 84 years old, in a grey three-piece suit.

In a corner, a pile of gifts from fans four feet high: stuffed animals, plastic flowers, incense and scented candles, shirts and hand-printed messages of undying love.

David signed autographs for promoters’ and policemen’s daughters, and chatted with well wishers. It was a high moment for him; a triumph, he called it. “Here I am,” he said. “I’ve arrived.”

“Think about it,” said Henry Diltz. “The karma is fantastic. David was an actor, looking for a break, and then this Partridge Family TV show comes along. He wasn’t a singer, but he evolved really nicely into one. Take the Stones, or Cream. After being into folk music, the blues, and rock and roll for 10, 12 years, they fill Madison Square Garden. Well, David’s filling it, too, and he’s only been singing in front of people for a year!“

Minutes before showtime, Ron helped David into his costume, a $500 white crepe jump suit slit to the navel and decorated with fringe, beads, bells and sequins around the waist.

“I wish,” said David, “that anyone who has ever put down someone in my situation – the Beatles, or Presley or anyone – I wish that they could be where I am, could jump into my white suit for just one day. It’s such a rush, they’d never come down to think about it.

“It’s a high going out on that stage. You look around and it’s all there for you, people loving you like that. My friends are there with me, I’m doing what I love to do most, singing and I’m singing for people who would rather have me sing than anybody else in the world.

“There’s one song I do, ‘I Woke Up in Love This Morning,’ and I find a little place where I can sort of point to them. And they each think I mean them, and I do. Whew, I can’t wait. Let me get out there. Let me do it!”

David sang into the mirror as he applied pancake make-up to his face, chest and arms. He said he didn’t think of anything before a concert. “I’m in a state of, ‘Well, here I go,’ like a runner before a race, an athlete before he takes the big dive. The roll of the drums, baboom, baboom, and then, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls!’ And I take the baton and zing…!”

Flanked by his valet and his road manager, David was off and running. He leapt onto the stage, welcomed by a blood curdling screech. The continuous blinking of flash bulbs gave the place a strobelit effect. “I love you, I love you,” David screamed back at them. “I love everybody.”

On stage this mild, quiet guy was transformed into a glistening white superstar. He gave it everything, his 5’7″, 125-poung body had. Like a young and healthy animal of no particular gender he moved as he sang, in a graceful, almost choreographed way.

“I never get tired of watching David’s act,” said his roommate Sam Hyment, looking on from the sidelines. “And I’ve seen it 50, 100 times. Something’s happening out there. The white costume, the big band behind him.” The band played perfectly, wearing sedate matching maroon blazers. “I like to watch the audience, too, they’re so turned on and happy.”

In the first row, Shirley Jones sat with David’s family. “It’s like a revival meeting,” she said, “the way he excites the audience, then calms them down.”

Fans tossed stuffed animals and dolls onto the stage, and one girl managed somehow to elude guards and climb up there herself. Once there, she froze. David jumped when he noticed her, a plump girl in a blue chemise. Gracefully, he took her hand and kissed her cheek.

Though no one fainted, as 24 had in Detroit, the energy was high. The girls went wild in place. The young ones grew restless when David crooned the slower ballads in a small, but soothing voice. Many older girls wept.

If David was emanating heavy vibes, they escaped one 24-year-old observer. Jill watched the show on a backstage TV screen. “It’s so weird,” she said. “Last night, he was really nice. He was a really good fuck.” Jill shook her head. “But seeing him doing his act, I can’t believe it’s the same person. This act is so Las Vegas. He’s like a male Ann-Margret.”

Twenty thousand girls were satisfied, though, transfixed by their idol. When the hour set was over, they sat in darkness and groaned in disappointment. But not for long. When the lights went up, they recovered and set to furious but business-like pursuit of their fantasy. Guards blocked off the backstage area, but some fans were small enough to race under their arms and between their legs, overturning one cop.

Finally, they swarmed through, searching for David, who had made good his frantic escape covered with a blanket on the back seat floor of a Japanese sedan. One vendor sold programs along the escape route, getting in a few last minute sales.