Inside me is a wall of my pre-teenage bedroom with TV Week posters of David Cassidy, ABBA, Kate Bush, Blondie and Marilyn Monroe.
photo credit: Allan Warren
Like many girls in the 70s, I yearned for the sweet-faced, hip, young David Cassidy, little knowing of the real-life pressures he faced behind the scenes – a dysfunctional childhood and how Cassidymania only brought him despair.
How he retired shortly after a fourteen-year-old girl died of a heart attack in London at White City Stadium in 1974. Six hundred other girls were injured on the same night when they rushed the stage to reach their idol.
He represents the endless summer of the 1970s, a pre-computer age when everything seemed fresher and the world was free to laugh at itself. When I wore bobby dazzler socks and read Archie comics – but sneaked the occasional Stephen King and any other books my parents disapproved of.
I didn’t know back then that the Twin Towers in New York would fall and a group called the Taliban were waiting ahead.
That trees would become friends, that poetry would evolve into something more interesting than was ever taught in school, that international travel would become threatening. That a product called sunblock would replace the vinegar oil we used to burn our skin brown. That I would discover sea-monkeys were a rip-off. That the oceans were filling with plastic and my teenage poster pin-ups would be forgotten in the pressures of mothering and work. That my daughter would read Archie comics, long for America and laugh over Danny’s wisecracks in the Partridge Family.
In concert in London 1974
I felt sad this week to hear of David’s death – relatively young at 67, a couple of years older than my father when he died. Several girlfriends have described their grief and sense of loss upon hearing the news. We shared our realisations on social media and emails that we haven’t time to fritter on the trivial. The hourglass has turned for us. Trump is the leader of America and David Cassidy is dead.
And to show the Universe likes cosmic balance, David transitioned in the same week as Charles Manson, who only brought to the world pain, darkness and an ego out of control. Manson hungered for fame, which was denied him but given in excess to David Cassidy.
Manson chose to slither on his belly into whatever waited for him, while David carried gifts of Apollo throughout his life despite the suffering he endured in later years.
photo image: Annie Leibovitz
The Times reported David Cassidy in a 1972 interview saying he dreamt of being not famous. His fantasy was to be on an island. The sky is blue, the sun is shining. And I’m smiling, I’m healthy, I’m a family man.
Janice Turner in her Times column described him as the saddest, most tortured celebrity she ever interviewed. He was never allowed to grow old, and being sensitive, hadn’t coped with fame or his beauty. He retired at 24, burnt out and traumatised by the craziness of fame.
He died surrounded by his family and the people he loved with joy in his heart and free from the pain he had suffered from for so long.
Vale, David Cassidy. I hope you found your island. And that the sky is eternally blue and the sun forever shines.