C'mon, get happy

D. Cassidy, C. Deffaa

Star of the hit Partridge family, Cassidy saturated the bubblegum market in the early 70's, even as his own personal tastes ran more towards hard rock and the counterculture (like many baby boomers then). Reportedly, he was getting more fan mail than the rest of the show combined and selling out more concerts than the Beatles. The meteoric rise to fame was accompanied by a string of personal issues that were not considered appropriate to air at the time-consequently he was more glum than one might think. The book chronicles his relationship with the rest of the cast (especially co-star Susan Dey) his agent and especially his father, actor Jack Cassidy. Despite the liberated premise of the Partridge family, Cassidy's real life experience was more ambivalent. Because dysfunctional family had not entered popular culture at that point in time (and references to those families were invariably slanted towards lower economic classes) Cassidy did not have the words to describe what he was feeling at the time, except he understood that he was frustrated about the past and the bizarre dichotomy between his public and private personas. At the end of the day, he was a person who was simply looking for somebody to truly love him for himself and not as his on screen alter-ego Keith Partridge. Unfortunately, he did not quite know what else he wanted yet, and this book does an excellent job of taking the reader through that sometimes painful and difficult journey.