That hair! That voice! Cassidy was loved by millions but soon grew sick of the manufactured world of fame. His career mapped out a path for the teen idols who followed

It is so poignant, when a heart-throb’s heart stops throbbing. Poor David Cassidy. Dead at 67, even though he still makes the early 1970s seem like yesterday. Back then, he was everywhere: Cassidy’s lustrous, silky feather cut, framing his fine-featured, smiling face, framing its perfect, perfect teeth. Even Cassidy’s signature was familiar, looping white out of a headshot in stacks of magazines for teenage girls, underneath a message such as “Lonely without you”. Maybe with a little heart beside it.

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Cassidy had been a young jobbing actor for a while when the television show The Partridge Family made him world famous at 20. The show itself wasn’t such a massive hit. It was a marketing vehicle for the songs, the merchandise and most of all, as it turned out, David. Cassidy’s most enduring solo hit, Daydreamer, played everywhere that muzak was played. Which didn’t, at that time, include lifts, supermarkets or telephone lines.

It was an odd programme, really, straddling fiction and the reality the fiction had been designed to gush into. I found it confusing, even weird that for the purposes of the show, David went by the name of Keith, even though his mum was played by his real stepmother, Shirley, known on the show as Shirley.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Cassidy (third from left, back row) in the 1970s TV show The Partridge Family. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock

Cassidy, of course, was best known as one of the young men who made teenage girls scream and faint. As a teenage girl, I thought all that was silly. I loved Enid Blyton, although I liked to imagine that I loved the Brontës more. When a fellow Girl Guide asked me who I preferred: David or Donny [Osmond], I plumped for David. When a sneer of judgmental disappointment crossed her face, I hastily added that I liked Donny, too. That provoked sheer contempt. “You can’t like them both.” David Cassidy. Donny Osmond. Choose. A girl can only choose one man.

I wish now that I had joined those teenage girls in their mass hysteria. I see now that there is something quite healthy about letting yourself become safely powerless before a man whose power over you is totally abstract, getting it all out of your system, nice and early. Cassidy himself preferred the adulation when it wasn’t too real. Because whether this modern rite of childhood passage is good for the objects of such simulacrums of devotion is quite another matter.

In 1972 in the New York Times, a 21-year-old Cassidy said of his fans: “Oh, they’re cute. They get flustered and I get flustered, and it’s all kind of fun. But it’s no fun when they rip your clothes and take rooms next door in hotels and keep pounding on the door and slipping notes under it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Cassidy on TV show The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour in 1971. Photograph: CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

Cassidy, like many people who believed they could manipulate the new pop culture, was uncomfortable with evidence that the role he was playing wasn’t all about girl’s stuff, like romance and longing, but also about desire, lust and female orgasm. Things were expected of Cassidy, and his own slender, barely toned, 70s body. There was a lot going on, not least a huge effort to put the lid back on the 60s and nail it down, by the unwise technique of lifting a corner a bit, and letting everyone have just a peek.

The 70s saw the century’s second and last concerted cultural attempt to control youth, especially female youth. The first mad dash to make a liberated youth culture came after the first world war, in the form of the roaring 20s. The greatest heartthrob of that time was the silent film star Rudolph Valentino. His death at 31 reportedly caused some women to kill themselves. His funeral in New York City was attended by 100,00 people, and attempts to see his body laid out at a funeral home, descended into a day-long riot.

By the 30s, the whole caboodle – the flappers, jazz, the bright young things, the shingle, the bob, the new woman – had been largely suppressed. Economic depressions can be good for cooling ardour for novelty, difference and rebellion.

For a while, anyway.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A publicity shot of David Cassidy, c1970. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Another youthquake hit hard after the second world war, accompanied by girls screaming at Elvis, the Beatles and sundry other alluring and dangerous young men. So, the sight of teenagers mooning after Cassidy and the Osmonds must have appeared relatively harmless to the stubborn denizens of the established social order. Let silly young girls moon over clean-cut, healthy young men who seemed alarmed by the idea of groupies. They’ll grow out of it. No one could possibly know then that baby boomers would take to the media decades on, to declare, as the fashion designer Bella Freud did on Instagram, how much they loved and adored him.

The emotion, it turned out, was real, and the memory of it enduring. Yet, Cassidy’s career as a teen pinup was entirely manufactured. The Partridge Family was conceived by the television arm of Columbia Pictures, just like the Monkees, and the two manufactured band bandwagons shared much backstage talent – songwriters such as Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, Diane Hildebrand, Bobby Hart and Gerry Goffin supplied material to both groups.

Cassidy himself was cheesed off with the whole thing by as early as 1972. He took the somewhat counterintuitive step of signalling his musical seriousness by appearing nude on the cover of Rolling Stone, as photographed by a young Annie Leibovitz.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fans at a David Cassidy concert at White City Stadium, west London in 1974. Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty Images

Not long after that, reports started appearing in the press, warning of trouble, saying Cassidy had taken to being driven by a chauffeur around New York City, while drunk and stoned in the back. Cassidy’s life from then on, despite real talents as an actor and a musician, was a struggle against substance abuse, which has ended now with liver failure. It must be hard to come to terms with the fact that you were loved by millions, not for who you were, but for who the marketing men sold you as being.

Not that this was news either. Among the first manufactured youth bands was Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, who had international success with their 1956 hit Why Do Fools Fall In Love?. Frankie was 15 when he played the London Palladium and 25 when he died of a heroin overdose on his grandmother’s bathroom floor. The troubled lives of child stars tend to be well examined but little learned from.

Nevertheless the manufactured boy-band, filling stadiums with screaming girls, has been a pop staple ever since. The rest of the culture usually comes in at the point when they all go solo and we find out who is who. A relatively short stint in a boy band can provide a lifetime of wealth and fame. Or a lifelong identity crisis that you never can quite shake. Or both. David Cassidy. RIP.