We are in a taxi heading for Los Angeles airport when the publicity woman calls. Could we, by any chance, have taken David Cassidy’s make-up bag? The Times photographer and I exchange glances and snigger. But the PR persists. Could it, perhaps, have got packed up with all the lights and lenses? Her teeth-clenched politeness suggests she’s dealing with a situation here: David has another photo-shoot today. And having witnessed how reluctantly he faces the camera with his cosmetics, I dread to think what he’s like without them.

All the way home I think about David Cassidy hunting for his “stolen” make-up bag. The image encapsulates so much about him: his defiant vanity, his (well-founded) paranoia that everyone is out to take from him and, above all, his awful, aching vulnerability. If ever there was an illustration that fame is a cruel and capricious bitch, it is a 56-year-old man, who for five years was the most desired person on the planet, with an entourage of 30 to primp his pretty face, now alone, dabbing on foundation and a slick of kohl to bring out the green of his weary eyes.

To corrupt Scott Fitzgerald’s aphorism, there are few third acts in showbusiness lives. And those like Cassidy brave enough to stick around for Act III are scorned for it. “I could have killed myself and been like Monroe, Elvis or James Dean,” he says, knowing how much tidier that would have been. “A legend. But I chose life.”

In the age of 1,000 digital TV channels, when the music industry is fractured into a gazillion markets, it is hard to recall a time in 1972 when British girls had one simple choice: Donny or David. The Osmonds were too cheesily American, toothsome and God-bothering for sassier teen tastes. Besides, how would you and Donny ever get alone-time without the dozen other members of Team Osmond butting in? David Cassidy, however, was more with-it in his pooka-shell necklace, his hair long but not unkempt, a cheesecloth shirt unbuttoned on to an androgynous torso. He was safety and sweetness but with a homoeopathic dosage of free love. He was hippy-lite.

And Cassidy’s Act I, between 1970 and 1974, was a turning point in showbusiness history. He has sold 35 million records, including three British number ones – How Can I Be Sure (1972), Daydreamer and Dreams are Nuthin’ More Than Wishes (both 1973) – but the music isn’t the point. I am a child of that age and can only recall – vaguely – the chirpy theme tune of his TV show The Partridge Family, I Think I Love You. Cassidy is remarkable as the first celebrity to be globally merchandised, the original one-man brand. Around $500-million worth of David Cassidy lunch-boxes, pillowcases, bubble-gum cards, even dresses were sold worldwide to a multitude of love-crazed girls who formed the biggest fan club any artist – including the Beatles – has ever had. But since his then standard contract meant he didn’t own the rights to his own likeness, Cassidy received just $15,000.

The man I meet at his manager’s house in Laurel Canyon is still angry about being so royally shafted. “There is no conscience in the corporate world,” he says. “I was the commodity. I was the thing people were buying. But no one has ever come forward to me and said, ‘Y’know, you made this company worth 100 times what it could have been. And for that you didn’t make any money. So we’re just going to write you a cheque. Here’s $5 million, here’s $50,000, here’s five dollars…’”

A fairer settlement would have meant he needn’t have worked so relentlessly hard in the past 15 years, doing eight to ten shows a week in Vegas throughout the Nineties. He’s comfortable financially now, lives with his third wife Sue in a Hello! mansion on the waterfront in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, but I have never met anyone who seems so profoundly exhausted. Our interview is split into fragments: he can only focus for 15 minutes before he gets frazzled, wants to just chill out and smoke a cigar, his “one remaining vice”.

Cassidy is 5ft 8in, but his frame is elfin. The spangled dungarees he wore on stage in the Seventies, and has brought to our shoot, fit a child-size mannequin. He had a 28in waist then (all his statistics down to his size 6 ring finger were documented for fans) and is almost as lean now. He claims not to have had plastic surgery and while the eyes seem untouched, there is a tightness about his lower face which runs out around his collar bone with a ring of loose skin. He admits dyeing his hair. I can see why he prefers doing his own make-up, not wishing to let strangers share his mortifying rituals.

What a bad fairy curse to have once been the most beautiful boy in the world. Especially since Cassidy didn’t even enjoy his days of glory. Wasn’t it fun to be worshipped? “That lasted about five minutes,” he says, recalling the day the craziness began. “I walked into a record store at a signing before I’d ever been on TV but already my record was starting to happen. And the store expected 200 to 300 people. But there were 5,000 there and they crashed through barriers and windows. Chaos! I found it amusing for the first hour or two. But they were like ‘Aaaaggghhh!’” he waggles his hands violently in my face.

Cassidy was already 20 when he signed to play Keith, the 16-year-old son in The Partridge Family, a TV show about a clan of fatherless musicians who, with their mother (played by Shirley Jones), travel America in a psychedelic van. Right from the start Cassidy felt an imposter. Keith was virginal, half-orphaned, played saccharine rinky-dinky pop. But Cassidy was a proper hippy, politically radical, a wild only-child of a bad divorce who played in rock’n’roll bands, was 17 in the Summer of Love. Growing up in LA, he picked up girls on Sunset Strip, smoked pot, hitched up to Haight-Ashbury to see the Velvet Underground and Jimi Hendrix. It tormented Cassidy that America fell in love with Keith, not David.

On YouTube there is a clip circa 1974 of him playing Rock Me Baby, where you glimpse a different David Cassidy, the one he so wanted to be. The song is raunchier than earlier hits and his voice (often speeded up slightly on his records to sound higher and younger) is deep and throaty. And peering knowingly from beneath heavy lashes, he is blatantly sexy. Does he regret The Partridge Family for taking him down the wrong path? “No longer,” he says quickly and firmly. “But there was a time.”

()Fame turned his life into an awesome schedule. All week Cassidy recorded his TV show, scribbling songs in his lunch break which he’d record through the night. At weekends he flew across the US or abroad to give concerts.
The TV studio was his safe haven: once he stepped off the sound stage he was prey to his fans. In his first trip to Britain in 1972, 5,000 girls camped on Park Lane, serenading him with his own hits, while he remained trapped in his suite at the Dorchester. “It was insane,” he says. “Surreal.”

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