For once, David was lost for words. Fortunately for both of us, and for the series, our first scene together turned out to be wonderful. As we worked together in the series, David became more and more aware of me. He would come up to me after we’d finished for the day and say things like “Wow! How do you do it? You are so good in every scene.” He began to respect me as an actress, and our relationship blossomed on a professional as well as a personal level.
Jack, however, was extremely jealous that David was in The Partridge Family with me. To be fair to Jack, he said from the start that he thought David was taking a wrong career path, that he’d be far better off taking singing and acting lessons and working on Broadway instead.
I didn’t necessarily agree with Jack, but as a stepmother, I always tried to remain outside of the arguments between Jack and David.
The pilot of The Partridge Family was filmed in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. I played a widow who hears her children sing in the garage, where they have formed a band, and they convince her to join, although she can’t sing a single note. The precocious young genius, Danny (played by Danny Bonaduce), the middle child of the family, slips a recording of them singing under the toilet stall occupied by agent Reuben Kincaid, played by Dave Madden, a rubber-faced comedy star who had appeared in Camp Runamuck and Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.
Kincaid (who was to become the comic foil to Danny Bonaduce’s character) plays the disc and is impressed by what he hears and decides to represent the Partridge Family. By some miracle, he books them to play Las Vegas, and they travel there on a bus that they have painted in garish colors. They make their debut at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, and are an overnight sensation.
From then on, the original intention of the series was that it would follow the Partridge Family’s adventures in show business. That changed down the line to more of a focus on the domestic and private life of the family—whose members didn’t resemble each other in the least! The fans neither noticed nor cared.
I had top billing in the show, which aired on Friday nights at 8:30 p.m. The initial plan had been that I would be the band’s lead singer on the show, but then Ruth Aarons suggested David for the part of Keith Partridge and informed the producers that he could sing and play instruments, as well, and would be terrific singing all the songs, which were happy-go-lucky, light, and positive. Once the producers heard David sing and play, they decided that he was perfect and would make a wonderful lead singer for the band. I was happy for him.
I had a strong sense that the show would be a hit. It was new and funny and the music was good, and David had a chance to make it as a teen idol. The music wasn’t my thing, but I felt that it could succeed with the kids of this new generation.
The Partridge Family pilot was shot on the Columbia Ranch, now the Warner Ranch, on Sound Stage 30, with the entire Partridge home constructed on the set. After the first episode aired on September 25, 1970, the reviewers were anything but ecstatic. The Christian Science Monitor sniped, “The show stacks implausibility upon implausibility from the hit record to the psychedelic bus they tool around in.”
Audiences, however, liked the show from the first. We, the cast, were all elated about the audience response to our show. In particular, David loved appearing on The Partridge Family. The months before he became a rock-star sensation were the best time of his life. Suddenly he was acting, he was in the company of people whom he respected. He did all the jokes in the show, he got all the laughs, and for the first time in his life he was winning the respect of his peers, and he loved it.
When we all started working together on The Partridge Family, we were a happy family, although nine-year-old Jeremy Gelbwaks, who played Chris Partridge, turned out to be a handful. He would zoom around the studio making the sound of a jet plane and crash into people.
Jeremy lasted one season as Chris Partridge. He was replaced in the show by eleven-year-old Brian Forster, whose step-grandfather, Alan Napier, played the butler in the TV series Batman. Brian was a good actor and a team player.
Ten-year-old Danny Bonaduce was a completely different kettle of fish from Jeremy or Brian. Highly talented, he had perfect comedic timing. He was really, really smart and a natural comic. But he was still a kid and would do kid things like get a dish of food and throw it across the room or have a pillow fight. Danny was a wild child who came from an unhappy home. At eleven, he started smoking. At thirteen, he lost his virginity with a girl who visited The Partridge Family set one day, searching for David, but ended up with Danny.
Fortunately, Danny respected me, and I used to have him over to my house where he would play with my kids. However, oftentimes David, Susan Dey (who was seventeen and played Laurie Partridge on the show), and I were worried about Danny because of his unhappy home life and talked about him a great deal. But much as we loved and appreciated him, we couldn’t deny that he was snotty at times. Once, when he was getting too big for his boots, we all ganged up on him and convinced Susan to pour a pitcher of milk over his head, just to put him in his place. That incident found its way into a subsequent episode of The Partridge Family, in which we did exactly the same to David for the identical reason.
Danny also had a hard time remembering dialogue, and once it took him thirty-six takes to get the words right in a scene.
Susan Dey was a teenage model who’d appeared on the covers of Seventeen and Glamour. She came from Mount Kisco, north of New York Ciy in Westchester County, and was beautiful, naïve—and skinny, but not by accident.
Susan was so dedicated to keeping thin that, during one season of the show, aware that she was now one of the most celebrated teenagers in America, she tried to lose weight by going on a carrot diet. To her horror, her skin turned orange because she ate so many carrots a day.
When she started out on The Partridge Family, she had no acting experience. She didn’t even know what a close-up was. Her agent was on set constantly, chaperoning her, but that didn’t help when she first met David. She took one look at him and fell hard. Later on in the series she even came to me and confided, “I could be so in love with him.”
I said, “Well, he is a little older than you and has been around a little more, and he has had lots of girls, so be aware of that.”
Nonetheless, Susan tried everything to woo David and, whenever she could, put her arms around him and gave him little hugs, but David manfully resisted her advances. I think he would have had an affair with her if he hadn’t been working with her and therefore thought it a bad idea. I agreed with him.
One of the joys of working on The Partridge Family was the guest stars. The young Farrah Fawcett had a bit part in the second episode of the show, “The Sound of Money,” and everyone noticed what a great looker she was and predicted that she would go on to be a big star.
Ray Bolger, who played the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, made a guest appearance as my father on the third episode of the show, “Whatever Happened to the Old Songs?” This was one of Ray’s later performances, and he couldn’t wait to do song-and-dance routines for us between takes. Otherwise, he was a bit irritable and insisted that everything had to be his way.
Jodie Foster appeared on the episode, “The Eleven-Year Itch,” (episode 73), when she was only eleven years old, and I thought she was one of the finest child actresses I had ever worked with. She was right on the money with every line. Danny just adored her, and fell madly in love with her.
Dick Clark appeared in the “Star Quality” episode, and I didn’t like him very much. But it was great when Richard Pryor and Lou Gossett appeared in “Soul Club,” episode 18 of season 1. It was obvious to me that Richard was on drugs the whole time he was working on The Partridge Family. He took me to lunch one day and never stopped talking about his life, what he was going to do, where he was going to go, and was so drugged up that he never asked me a thing about myself. In contrast, Lou Gossett was wonderful and we are still great friends today. Rob Reiner was also great when he appeared in the episode, “A Man Called S
nake,” and was fun to work with, as well.
Some of the episodes in the show were filmed on location. The prison episode, “Go Directly to Jail,” was extremely realistic because we shot it in a real prison in the San Fernando Valley. Real prisoners attended our show, and we had to perform in front of them. But luckily they were polite and tame and took pictures of all of us afterward.
In “The Last of Howard,” episode 81, and one of the final episodes of The Partridge Family, we all went on an actual cruise to Mexico, in steaming temperatures of 120 degrees. Beforehand, I was very nervous about going on a cruise, as I was prone to seasickness, even if I just stood on a dock. So before we started shooting, I underwent hypnosis seven times for my seasickness and, since then, have never been seasick again.
My favorite episode of all was episode 31, “Whatever Happened to Moby Dick?” in which I had my solo “The Whale Song.” Everybody loves that song. We shot it in an aquarium and featured whales in the episode, as a way of promoting them.
Making The Partridge Family was fun for all of us. In particular, I remember “But the Memory Lingers On,” the episode when we discovered a skunk on the Partridge Family bus. They used an actual skunk for the episode, one that we were told had been de-skunked. Unfortunately for all of us, it still sprayed some kind of liquid over us, and afterward, each of us had to sit in a bath of tomato juice to get the skunk stink off our bodies. Not fun at all. Except for one thing: David sang a song called “I Think I Love You” on that episode, which aired on November 13, 1970, and, of course, the rest is history.
As everyone who has ever watched The Partridge Family knows, “But the Memory Lingers On” would become the most seminal episode of the entire series, as “I Think I Love You” became a gigantic hit and immediately catapulted David Cassidy to global stardom. Determined to be independent, before he sang the song on the show, he didn’t come to me or to his father for any guidance, but sang it perfectly on the first take, and I was extremely proud of him.
After “I Think I Love You” was released, for a few weeks none of the DJs wanted to play it on-air, and one of them even turned down $100 to play it. But it became the biggest-selling record of 1970, selling three million records in the United States and five million worldwide. Before that, none of us had any inkling that David would soon become one of the most famous rock stars in the world, and that America would fall well and truly in love with him.
By the fall of 1970, generally forty or fifty girls a day clustered outside the studio after the show, waiting for David. Eventually, their numbers would swell into the hundreds. David soon began receiving thousands of fan letters a week. He gave his first rock concert in Seattle and was paid $8,000 for it. As he gyrated all over the stage, eight thousand kids aged seven to seventeen screamed with passion for him. Eventually he was making $50,000 a concert and had become so much more popular than Elvis Presley that Elvis actually asked his agent at William Morris who David Cassidy was.
Patrick and Ryan were happy about David’s and my being on The Partridge Family, but Shaun came on set a couple of times and often asked why he couldn’t appear in an episode as well. Neither Jack nor I wanted our kids to go into show business, but to get an education instead, so at that stage, we refused to let Shaun take part in the show.
Starting the week of October 31, 1970, and for sixty-eight weeks after that, The Partridge Family Album remained on the Billboard pop charts. When Susan and Danny joined David in Cleveland for the Thanksgiving parade there, they were mobbed by eighty thousand people.
Sadly, at the time when David and I started working in The Partridge Family together, and David’s career hit the heights and he attained instant stardom, Jack’s career was downward spiraling. Too many of the Broadway shows in which he’d appeared had closed early, through no fault of his own, and he was feeling a failure and all washed-up.
As David became an overnight sensation, Jack’s bitterness reached a crescendo. Perhaps his helping David so much at the start of his acting career only embittered Jack more when David failed to follow Jack’s advice and become a jobbing actor and became a rock star instead.
When David became the rock star of the century, Jack was the prophet of doom, telling him, “Rock stars blaze, but then they burn out very quickly, and if you follow this route, your career will be over in a year.”
David was making hit record after hit record and didn’t want to hear it. Without actually saying it to Jack, David made it eminently clear that he was cleaning up financially and becoming a bigger star than Jack ever was—or ever would be.
David assumed that Jack’s attitude was purely motivated by jealousy, but in the end Jack was right. He prophesied that David would end up with money, but that would be all he would have. And Jack was ultimately vindicated.
As The Partridge Family soared in the ratings, and David went on to sell twenty million records, he would grow to hate and despise what he was doing.
TEN
C’mon, Get Happy
In the beginning, I was slated to be the star of The Partridge Family and to sing every number, but David quickly and easily upstaged me. I was happy for him and didn’t mind. If The Partridge Family had been my first gig, perhaps I would have minded immensely, but it wasn’t, so I was fine with David becoming the star. My only complaint was that I didn’t get to sing much in the show, but otherwise I was content that I could spend so much time with my real-life kids and also be in the show.
Meanwhile, David was tasting the fruits of his spectacular overnight success. After his fame reached fever pitch, girls stalked him morning, noon, and night, and naturally he often took sexual advantage of them. I would see one girl go into his dressing room at lunchtime and see her leave a little while later, only to be replaced by another girl. And so it would go for most of the day. I didn’t say anything because, as far as I was concerned, David was an adult, and this was his life, not mine.
Despite all the temptations and the sheer number of willing women surrounding him, David did manage to have a serious relationship while making the show. Actress Meredith Baxter, who was three years older than David, met him when she made a guest appearance on The Partridge Family, whereupon she and David started dating. She was only recently divorced from her first husband and had two children.
From the first, David was discreet about his relationship with Meredith, but he confided the details to Susan Dey and me. Neither David nor Meredith wanted the tabloids to find out about their relationship, so they evaded them by mostly spending their time in Meredith’s nearby Burbank house, where they had a great time together.
The course of true love might have run smooth for Meredith and David, but after they had been dating for about a month, David had a kidnap threat. The FBI broke the news to him, and from that moment on, his life was turned upside down. The result was that his relationship with Meredith faded, then died.
Around the same time, Meredith was cast in a new series, Bridget Loves Bernie, along with David Birney. She and David Birney fell instantly in love with each other. That turned out to be extremely tough for my David as Bridget Loves Bernie was filmed in the studio next door to where The Partridge Family was being filmed, and David was constantly forced to see Meredith and her new man together, making it patently clear that they were so much in love. Eventually, they married.
Before David and Meredith broke up, she confided in me how she thought David was wonderful. She said that he was always a perfect gentleman and never talked about his romances. I knew that David cared deeply for Meredith, even though girls were still throwing themselves at him continually. I knew that he sometimes still caught them, too.
Throughout the series, Susan Dey continued to be crazy about David, but he didn’t handle her emotions for him particularly well or sensitively. Often, he would come back from his weekend rock concerts and tell her stories about how he had to get security guards to hide him from all the female fans. He would also tell her about all the ones from whom he didn’t hide a
nd the great sex he’d had with them. Susan listened and gave a good impression of accepting the situation stoically, but I knew how hard it was for her because I knew exactly how she felt about David.
Finally, I took him aside and told him that he had to be careful talking to Susan because he was hurting her badly. At first, David didn’t understand. I think he may have viewed Susan as the sister he had never had, but I saw the situation differently. She had a great big crush on David, and he didn’t reciprocate her feelings. But she wouldn’t listen to my advice to stay away from David, and I found myself warning her over and over against getting involved with him. I began to realize that I was sounding exactly the way Sari had when she’d tried so desperately to warn me about Jack all those years ago.
And David was Jack all over again.
During the series, girls besotted with David would come to visit him in Los Angeles, and some of them ended up on my front lawn. They traveled from all over America, and most of them took the train or the bus, as they were too young to drive. I’d wake up in the morning and find one or two of them sleeping on my front lawn.
So I’d go out and talk to them, and they would jump up and say, “I’ve come all the way from Iowa, and I really want to meet David!” Or “I want to move in with you and have you be my mother and David my brother.” Or “I want to join your band and travel around the country in the Partridge Family bus with you and David and the rest of the family.”
I’d patiently explain to them that David didn’t live at my house, and that he had his own place, and that The Partridge Family was a fantasy, not reality.
I felt so bad for those kids. They were so crushed, so disappointed, that their dreams didn’t become reality. But I felt worse for their parents and how worried they had to be about their daughters.
“Do your parents know you are here?” was my inevitable first question to them.
Shirley Jones: A Memoir Page 13