Poetic License

When I was young, I was into teen idols for awhile, as most of us were in that era. Although at that age, I didn’t really understand a lot about love and about “forever,” I knew that I wanted to be loved by someone who would protect me. My life was so chaotic. Safety was something I craved. In my young mind, I could imagine all the security someone like that, a famous person, could provide me. Funny how we never think of what a human being – of any or no celebrity or wealth – can be going through. My celebrity of choice was David Cassidy. He was just so beautiful.

His life was anything but easy and secure, though, I found out much later. Born in New York City to Jack Cassidy and Evelyn Ward, he grew up in the care of his grandparents in New Jersey, while his parents were away making a living in theater and movies. He found out they had divorced two years after the fact, supposedly from some neighbors’ kids. Not only didn’t he really know his parents, he wasn’t told anything of any importance about them. Add to this five eye surgeries, all of which failed to correct his strabismus, and you have a pretty miserable beginning. He struggled with eye issues his entire life, once arguing with a crowd at one of his shows because of the flashes from their cameras. But our celebrities are just supposed to take whatever we dish out, right? We really don’t see them as human beings with their own frailties and problems, though of course nowadays you hear much more about celebrities than you ever wanted to know thanks to “reality shows,” gossip magazines, and their own constant spew on social media. Cassidy was of a different breed.

He decided to go into acting, I think mostly as a way to understand and bond with his parents. Perhaps he also thought he had an innate talent that came from his lineage. He was good in a few roles as a teenager on some of the familiar TV programs, such as Bonanza and Marcus Welby, MD, and then the role of a lifetime came along, in which he played Keith Partridge, alongside his stepmother Shirley Jones. By that time he was twenty years old, playing a teenager who sings and plays guitar in a family rock band. Though he spent time with Shirley and Jack, along with his three stepbrothers, Shaun, Patrick, and Ryan, he never had a family like the one in his TV role. It was all smoke and mirrors, make-believe. His father had introduced him to his first manager, but his father could also be competitive and cruel. All David wanted was love and approval from his father, but before David’s career really took off, his father died in an apartment fire at just 49. He had fallen asleep, completely drunk, on a couch with a cigarette in his hand. The fire soon started and took over the apartment and the building. They found Jack Cassidy just on the other side of his front door, appearing to have tried to crawl his way out.

I knew none of this, of course. I was just a kid. When the Partridge Family show appeared on television, I experienced my first crush. It was a quiet crush, but my mother indulged me with teen magazines from the grocery store. The pull-out posters went right up on the wall of my bedroom. Mom understood, I think, because of how she felt about Elvis. There’s this person out in the world who doesn’t know you exist and doesn’t know your name, but you’re sure that if you met him, the world would fade away and he would fall for you. Innocent enough, because what are the chances, but so important to growing up female is the ability to dream about the kind of love you want.

It was later that I realized why I cherished these safe, impossible crushes. Of course I liked girls, as I admitted later, but these boys on my wall were safe. They told a story about me–that I was normal, and that I was into the same things as all the other girls in my life. The feelings I had were more complex, though. While I was incredibly turned on by David Cassidy, as much as I could be as a tween, I think a part of me wanted to feel loved and yes, safe. It’s almost as though I wanted a lover who was also a father figure, someone who could take care of me and shower me with all the attention I craved.

What I didn’t know–what I couldn’t know–was how broken David was. His deep unhappiness was only complicated by fame. Imagine all that love coming at you, but you can’t feel it. You can’t accept it, because it is complicated and comes with so many strings.

In 1972, Rolling Stone interviewed David and put a (cropped) naked photo of him on the cover, taken by Annie Liebovitz. (Of course, this magazine didn’t make it into our shopping cart.) I don’t think I ever saw this issue, and hadn’t read the article until today. By the time of this article, he was already heavily into alcohol and drugs and was working from a place of paranoia and distrust. Even when flying into a place where no one knew he was going, he hid himself.

The excerpt at the top of the article is as follows:

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

(Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/naked-lunch-box-19720511#ixzz3nYW4QRTF)

That dream of his wasn’t to be. He continued playing and singing for crowds into his seventh decade of life, giving up just a year before he died. Of course he had changed. He was no longer young and beautiful. His hair was short and thinning. His voice no longer had the sweet quality it had had in his early days of performing. Something in him was so broken that he still needed to get up on the stage and try to make the crowd love him. Off stage, he drank to excess, and he tried multiple treatment programs to rein in his addiction. Nothing seemed to work.

In his final days, he had tried to go back into the recording studio, but his voice was hoarse. He complained of swelling and pain worse than he had ever experienced before. People who were with him noticed his skin had a yellow tinge. He saw a doctor who told him his liver was failing. His kidneys were also compromised. He was telling his family he was no longer drinking, but that was a lie. He dropped out of the recording sessions and went home to his Ft. Lauderdale condo. He pushed away friends who wanted to see him.

In November 2017, he was taken to the hospital. He was in multiple organ failure. During those days in which he hid himself away, he drank. Maybe he thought, If this is the end, I want to numb myself out and go out in my own way. He spent a couple of days in a coma, intubated. When he came out of it, doctors tried to keep him alive long enough to find a liver for him. His family was with him, comforting him. His daughter Katie, who had grown up without him in her life, said that the last words he said to her were, “So much wasted time.”

Indeed. He had so craved his father’s attention, but then became an absent father himself. Ironic. And at just 67 years old, he was out of chances to be different.

Alcohol is a bitter mistress. She lies. She cajoles. She convinces you to keep killing yourself, because she’ll make everything better. I count myself lucky that, although I drank a fair bit when I was younger, I could just stop and never touch it again. I was not addicted to it. My daughter, on the other hand, had the disease of her father and mine. Once she started to drink, she couldn’t stop. It became a need for her, like breathing. I’m happy that in her final days, she joined AA and got sober, but she wasn’t sober from pills. We were going to work on that. In the end, the pills, in a lethal combination, got her.

I hope there’s really an afterlife, because I would like to think that David found peace and love, and mostly, freedom from alcohol at last.

Have a good Labor Day, and ask yourself, can I do a holiday without drinking? If the answer is no, please seek help at https://www.aa.org/. Don’t come to the end of your life thinking you’ve wasted all your precious moments.

Namaste, Jude