KEY POINTS:
When David Cassidy made his debut on The Partridge Family in 1970, I was, well, not actually born yet, but even so, it's impossible not to see the effects of his early career today. He may have been preceded by Elvis hysteria and Beatlemania, but Cassidy was something new - the first true teenybopper idol, on television every week and with the peculiar, pretty, non-threatening appeal that makes 13-year-old girls squeal until they burst.
This, Cassidy's autobiography, is a fascinating insight into what it was like at the centre of that particular cyclone, and the answer - possibly an obvious one to our more jaded generation - is fairly horrible. While his entourage lived large off his success, Cassidy was often whisked secretly out of town after his live shows, to squalid hotels with just the clothes he was standing in, in an attempt to evade the mobs that would have more than likely ripped him limb from limb. And all those other pop star benefits, such as wads of cash, were never as large as they ought to have been, given how many albums and how much merchandise his pretty face shifted. As the first pop idol, he was too young, and his management too naive, to really reap the rewards. Possibly, this should be required reading for those queues and queues of would-be "idols" on fame-farming reality TV shows. The fact that Cassidy came out of it relatively well-adjusted (after years of therapy, mind you), sanguine and, indeed, alive, is remarkable.
The book covers Cassidy's life before and after the madness, and he devotes much time to his fraught relationship with his father, but it's the Partridge years that fascinate most.
What strikes the reader is how naive he seems, and you have to keep reminding yourself that it was a different time, and he really was the first. One of the strengths of this book as an autobiography are the comments, interspersed throughout, from others who were there - Shirley Jones, the rest of the Cassidy clan, magazine editors, friends, contemporaries. This gives a depth and credibility to what could otherwise be just another "fame is hard" cautionary celebrity tale.
* Hachette Livre, $45
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