The girls would invariably shake their heads, miserable. “I called them along the way and told them I was coming to see David,” they would say.
“Well, you must go right home again because this is TV, this is make-believe and not real life. David doesn’t live here, and we don’t have a band.” I would say in a kind but firm voice.
Then I would call the parents and put their minds at rest that their daughters were safe, and next I would buy the girls a ticket home, and the parents would later reimburse me.
Afterward, I felt bad for the kids who genuinely believed that The Partridge Family was real, that I was the mother, had five kids, and we were all in a band together. I had to set them straight, sure, but The Partridge Family did indeed have a grain of truth. The writers often came over to my house and spent the day with me and the kids and took notes nonstop. What happened in our family might become the theme of a Partridge Family episode.
One time, when Patrick was about six or seven, he went to the store and took some candies, just as I had taken bubble gum all those years ago in Smithton. When I found out what he’d done, I reacted much the same as my mother had and ordered him to take the candy straight back to the store and apologize to the owner. That incident became a Partridge Family episode.
Sometimes the show seemed so real to me that even I lost track that it wasn’t. One time, when Danny was acting up, I lost my patience and yelled, “Danny, go upstairs to your room right now and don’t come out till I tell you!”
As Danny cracked afterward, he wasn’t really my kid, I wasn’t really his mother, and we were on a studio set, not in a house, and there was no room upstairs for him to be banished to. It was funny, but it was also indicative of the way in which the show insinuated itself into my life and mind many times.
The Partridge family had now become America’s favorite family. Fortunately, not everyone in the country knew exactly where the kids and I lived in real life. Not that their ignorance always protected us. One time Ryan was out playing in front of the house when a tourist bus pulled up. Out jumped one of the tourists, clutching a “Map to the Stars’ Homes.”
Did Ryan know the address of any stars’ homes? Better still, did he know any stars?
Ryan said, “I sure do. I live with two of them! Park your bus and come on in.”
A whole busload of people came tramping into our house. I didn’t have the heart to punish Ryan, but I wasn’t happy about what he’d done.
Generally, though, the public continued to find it hard to separate the Partridge family from the real-life actors playing them, which could sometimes cause serious problems in our lives. Poor Evelyn Ward, David’s real-life mother, suffered so much because the public persisted in believing that David was my son, not hers. David tried so hard to dispel the rumor and regularly referred to her as his real-life mother in magazine and newspaper features, and during TV interviews to try and make it clear to the general public that Evelyn was his mother, not me. But no matter how hard David tried, and so did I, even today some fans still believe that he is my son, not Evelyn’s.
Early on in the series, I could tell that David was suffering from becoming an overnight teen idol. He is sensitive and always craved privacy, and now he didn’t have a hope in hell of retaining his privacy. Everything in the show revolved around him. He was the star of the show, a rock god, and one of the most famous performers on the planet. He was spending most weekends appearing in rock concerts all over the country, as well as filming the show all week. The wholesale adulation, the mass hero worship—it all soon became too much for him.
He was burning the candle at both ends, and his schedule inevitably took its toll on his work on The Partridge Family. Every Monday there would be a read-through of the script and then we would block the show. On Tuesday through Friday we would shoot the show. The days would start at seven thirty—except on Monday, when the show started work at ten—and we wouldn’t finish till seven at night. Afterward, many nights, David would go straight into the studio, where he recorded till midnight.
Most Fridays, he would board his own plane, fly to a venue, and perform in front of up to seventy thousand. It all took a toll on both David and the program.
After he was an hour late for one Monday-morning reading too many, I took him aside and said, “Listen, I know you are busy working and making money and doing well and I am happy for you, but you can’t keep coming in late for the Monday-morning reading. You’re a major part of the show, and none of us want to wait for you. Do your thing on the weekend, star in rock shows, but do your part in the show on Monday morning. And be on time.”
David gulped. “Okay, Shirl.”
He was never late for the Monday-morning read-through of the show again.
Away from the show, David’s career continued to skyrocket. On March 11, 1972, Jack and I and the kids went to see his New York concert at Madison Square Garden, where he performed in front of more than twenty thousand fans, and it was incredible. He strutted and swaggered and had a presence onstage rather like Elvis did. He sang all The Partridge Family songs and the audience absolutely loved him, although Shaun and Ryan were terrified by the screaming. David was great, and his dancing and singing, brilliant.
After the concert, to escape the fans screaming for him, David was bundled into the trunk of a Toyota, wrapped in an army blanket, and the car whisked him away to Queens, where he hid out in some cheap motel, with no money, and no family to keep him company.
Every single day of the series, David had to be smuggled in and out of the studio, otherwise crazed fans would have torn him apart. Women turned up at his house 24-7. At a restaurant, he couldn’t take a mouthful of food before someone would come up pestering him for an autograph. Unhinged girl fans would write him love letters, some full of wild threats, telling him that they were going to turn up and see him face-to-face. Once, two girls hid in his trailer for almost twenty-four hours, then jumped out just as he had taken his clothes off and was stark naked. Girls routinely hid naked in his dressing room, and he had to move houses a couple of times because of fans’ mobbing him in his own home.
When he toured Europe in 1973, he flew in his own ninety-nine-seat Caravelle jet. The Partridge Family Album had just been released in England, and thousands of fans mobbed him at Heathrow Airport. After he checked into the Dorchester on Park Lane and the fans found out he was staying there, as many as fifteen thousand of them besieged the hotel, then camped out there all night singing all the Partridge Family songs at the top of their voices.
But things went badly wrong after he performed before forty thousand fans at White City Stadium in London, in 1974, and fourteen-year-old Bernadette Whelan was killed in the crush.
David felt dreadful about that. He felt personally responsible for what had happened, and in a way, Bernadette’s tragic and untimely death permanently soured him on being a rock star. It soured him on starring in The Partridge Family, as well. The day would come when he would throw in the towel and run away from the show, the rock music, everything. The pressure on him was so heavy that he started seeing a psychiatrist.
Apart from worldwide David Cassidy mania, it seemed that The Partridge Family phenomenon, too, was unstoppable. An issue of TV Guide in 1972 referred to the Partridge Family brand as “practically a branch of the US mint.” Twelve Partridge Family paperback novels had been published, there were Partridge Family paper dolls, real Partridge Family dolls, Partridge Family diaries, David Cassidy lunch boxes, and a Partridge Family collection of clothes. There was even a Partridge Family game.
By the end of 1971, the show was being seen in Central America, Chile, Colombia, the Caribbean, Brazil, Japan, Thailand, Spain, Portugal, Iceland, England, Peru, Zambia, New Zealand, and Australia, and by 1972, also in Arab countries and in Greece.
By then, The Partridge Family magazine was selling four hundred thousand copies a week, and the David Cassidy fan club had two hundred thousand members. To top that, he was nominated for a Golden Globe, a
lthough he didn’t win.
By the third season of The Partridge Family, David had become the rock star of the century, but that wasn’t making him happy. He became disgusted with singing what he termed “bubblegum songs” and wanted to go on to bigger and better things and sing hard-rock music in earnest, much in the style of his heroes Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. So he decided to leave the show.
If he had asked my advice, I would have told him to be happy with what he’d got, because that was my philosophy of life. (Besides which, I hated hard-rock music.) But he didn’t discuss the subject with me and decided to leave the show.
There was no replacement for him because David was the show. We were all sad, but we were also aware that it was just a matter of time before the show was canceled anyway. For some unknown reason, in 1975, ABC had scheduled us against All in the Family, which was an edgy adult hit, and The Partridge Family, which was primarily made for kids, didn’t have a chance to win the ratings battle against it.
Throughout 1972 and 1973, our third season, we had been on top of the world. We had tied with The Waltons as the nineteenth most popular show that season.
But during our fourth season, from 1973 to 1974, our numbers started to tumble dramatically.
March 23, 1974, was the last broadcast of The Partridge Family. I was sad to see the show end. If it hadn’t been canceled, I would have been happy to carry on playing Shirley Partridge for another four years. For me and all the rest of the cast, this was the end of an era.
Just after the wrap party, David took Susan Dey out for dinner. As he said afterward, he fondly imagined that they would stay friends forever. After dinner, the two of them went for a drive together and reminisced about how they’d first met when she was an inexperienced actress, and they both started crying.
Afterward, David put Susan in touch with Ruth Aarons, who became her manager, and also with Lenny Hirshan, his agent at William Morris, who became Susan’s agent. For a few years after the show ended, David and Susan stayed friends. She went on to make a great success in L.A. Law, in which she appeared as Grace from 1986–92. By then, she and David had grown apart, and nowadays they are completely out of touch, which hurts David tremendously. I was also hurt that out of everyone on the show, only Susan consistently refuses to take part in any TV reunions of The Partridge Family.
As for the rest of the cast, Brian Forster went on to study zoology and became a professional race car driver. Suzanne Crough, who played Tracy Partridge, went to college and afterward ran a bookstore; and Dave Madden became a great success in the sitcom Alice.
For a time, David and Danny Bonaduce became best friends, and Danny opened for David at some of his concerts. But because Danny sometimes didn’t show up on time, David stopped using him. Nowadays Danny has his own radio show and is successful in his own right.
I wasn’t mad at David for leaving The Partridge Family, but for some reason we hardly talked to each other at the wrap party. Afterward, he took a year off, went to Hawaii, and hung out on the beach, playing his guitar and chilling out. In retrospect, I realized that he’d earned his time alone and time in which to savor his freedom from all the fame and fortune that had been showered on him so suddenly.
I had no regrets about my time on The Partridge Family. David and I had worked together on The Partridge Family for four and a half years, for sometimes as long as twelve hours a day. During that time, we got to know each other pretty well and grew closer, which was wonderful, and that closeness endures to this day.
The Partridge Family was a marvelous experience for me, not only as a hit show, but because it gave me so much time in which to focus on my boys.
Sadly, though, the stratospheric success of the show took its toll on my marriage to Jack.
As the months went by and The Partridge Family became an American phenomenon, and Shirley Partridge became America’s favorite mother, Jack embraced the role of Norman Maine to my Esther Blodgett of A Star Is Born even more wholeheartedly than before. Not that he was ever suicidal like Norman Maine, but his overriding sense of inferiority in the face of my success drove him into the arms of other women even more often than before.
One night, at the height of the show’s success, I was having cocktails at Café Escobar with my good friend Betty Cantu and her husband, Fred, when all of a sudden Jack walked in with his arm around a beautiful young girl and the two of them sat down in a booth on the other side of the restaurant.
As they did, Jack never once took his eyes off his beautiful companion for long enough to notice me. Seeing my husband so enthralled with a young and beautiful girl (who I knew was currently working with him on a show) just tables away from me was devastating for me. I froze.
Betty, Fred, and I were sitting in the booth nearest to the small stage, on which a three-piece mariachi band along with a pianist strumming show tunes were performing.
Observing my shock and anger at seeing Jack with another woman, Fred Cantu leaned across the table and said, “Shirley, why don’t you get up onstage and sing a song, just to see how Jack reacts?”
Almost like a sleepwalker, I got up onstage and in a whisper introduced myself to the band, and they struck up the song I requested, “It Had to Be You.”
The moment I sang the first line of the song, Jack looked up and blanched. But—in quintessential Jack Cassidy fashion—he retained his sangfroid and carried on chatting extremely flirtatiously to the young girl with him. So I launched into a second song, “Blue Moon.”
But I had also been drinking and was so upset that I threw caution to the wind, stormed off the stage, and stalked over to the booth where Jack and the girl were sitting.
“Fancy meeting you here, Jack. Just one of those things, is it?” I said, alluding to one of the songs we loved to sing together.
Jack didn’t bat an eyelid and calmly said, “Shirley, this is—”
“I don’t care who she is.”
I stormed out of the restaurant.
To my surprise, Jack finally lost his fabled composure and rushed out of the restaurant after me. Right there, on the pavement in front of the restaurant, I let loose. For one of the few times in our marriage, I let him have it. “You son of a bitch!” I screamed.
But even though he’d been caught red-handed with another woman, Jack wasn’t about to admit anything and immediately spun me a risible story about the girl and why he was having dinner with her. She wasn’t just an actress, he said. She was also a secretary and had just finished helping him with some correspondence. Afterward, he said, she claimed to be starving, and he had taken pity on her and invited her for a quick dinner at Café Escobar. And so on. I knew he was lying, so I just walked away from him and went home on my own. Then I did my best to calm down and put aside my anger, so that when he came home a short while later, I didn’t mentioned the incident to him or ever refer to it again.
In my heart, I did believe that the Café Escobar incident meant nothing to Jack, and that the girl he was with really was “just one of those things,” another girl in a long line of girls with whom he dallied briefly, then discarded.
At the time, The Partridge Family was on hiatus, and Jack and I were considering touring in our own show, The Marriage Band, a musical celebration of marriage, which took a couple through their first meeting, their wedding, their first child, and finally their harmonious life together.
Some irony . . .
In January 1972, out of the blue, Jack asked me to have a pizza with him at a little local Italian restaurant. I’ll never forget what happened next.
With little preamble, he announced, “I think we need a separation, Mouse.”
I genuinely thought I’d misheard him. “A separation? Did you say we need a separation? But why?” I said, fighting back the tears.
Jack shifted in his seat. “Mouse, I need to live by myself right now. I don’t want a divorce. I just need to be by myself. I just can’t be here for the kids and for you anymore. It’s an age thing,” he said lamely.
>
I blurted out the first thing that sprang to mind. “So is there another woman, Jack?”
Jack shook his head. “There is not,” he said adamantly. “I just think we ought to try a separation and see what happens.”
At that point, we had been married for fifteen years, and despite Jack’s eternal craving for attention, his lack of jealousy, his excessive drinking, and his constant infidelity, I truly loved him and was happy with him. I was devastated.
“I don’t understand, Jack, but if that’s what you want, fine,” I managed to stammer, after a while.
“Just give it time, Shirley.”
I choked back my tears and left the restaurant, alone.
I only lost control when I arrived home and burst into floods of tears. Then, for some inexplicable reason, I switched onto a strange type of automatic pilot. I took down all the scrapbooks of our life together, put them on the dining-room table, and kept adding more and more new pictures to them. I pasted picture after picture into the album as the tears coursed down my cheeks.
Jack had followed me home a little later, and by the time I had stopped crying, he was in his office, crying his heart out, as well.
He said, “I’m moving into an apartment, but I don’t really know why.”
“You have to do what you want to do,” I said.
Soon after, on January 15, 1972, Jack did move out. The kids were angry with him. David stopped talking to him altogether. My mother, though, said, “I feel sorry for you, but maybe it is a good thing.” She’d always hated Jack.
I knew Jack was living in an apartment in Hidden Hills, but neither I nor the kids ever visited him there. Then he called and told me that he was going into therapy and suggested that I do, too. So we both went to see the same therapist, only separately. At the end of the therapy, I didn’t feel as if I’d received any lightning bolts of wisdom.
But I did learn that the moment I had started to grow up, Jack had been unable to handle it and probably never would.
Shirley Jones: A Memoir Page 14