The last time Shaun Cassidy stood on a concert stage, disco was still king, and his face was plastered across the bedroom walls of millions of teenage girls. Now, more than four decades later, as he prepares to tour again in the fall of 2025, the conversation inevitably drifts to the ghost that has always haunted the family name: his older brother, David. In a rare moment of candor, Shaun recently broke a lifetime of silence about the man who was once the biggest pop star on the planet, revealing a truth about David’s relationship with their mother that has remained buried for decades.

The story he tells is not one of Hollywood glamour, but of a fragile soul shattered by childhood wounds that never healed, and a stepmother who was never quite allowed to be a mother.

The woman who played David’s mother on The Partridge Family was never his mother at all. She was Shirley Jones, Shaun’s mother, and the woman David was introduced to as a small boy under the most painful of circumstances. To understand the depth of the fracture, one must travel back to a quiet, middle-class neighborhood in West Orange, New Jersey, where a little boy named David Bruce Cassidy was being raised by his maternal grandparents.

Born in New York City on April 12th, 1950, David was the only child of Jack Cassidy, a dashing Broadway song-and-dance man, and Evelyn Ward, a dancer and actress. Both parents were perpetually on the road, leaving David in the care of his mother’s parents, a stable and loving environment filled with bicycles and church choir practice.

It was a good, ordinary childhood until the day the neighborhood kids delivered a blow that no child should ever receive from other children. They told him that his parents had been divorced for years, a fact that his own family had kept from him. The revelation was staggering, but the second part was worse: his father had already remarried.

The new wife was Shirley Jones, a rising Hollywood star who had fallen for Jack during a 1955 European tour of Oklahoma. David never truly recovered from being the last to know. He would later say that as far as he was concerned, his father had walked out when he was just three and a half years old, and everything that followed was a desperate attempt to win back a man who was never quite there.

Picture the scene: a boy of six or seven, his heart already bruised, being introduced to the woman he believed had stolen his father. Jack, proud of his new bride, had even taken the boy to see her on the big screen in Oklahoma. David walked into that first meeting fully intending to despise her, but the hatred wouldn’t come.

Years later, he confessed, “I wanted to hate her, but in minutes warmed to her.” Shirley, for her part, left that first encounter convinced the boy couldn’t stand her, as all he seemed to want was to go home to his mother. She was only sixteen years older than he was, more big sister than wicked stepmother, though no seven-year-old in history has ever seen it that way.

Shirley was no ordinary stepmother. Born on March 31st, 1934, in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, she grew up in the small town of Smithton, where her family ran the Jones Brewing Company. An only child who dreamed of becoming a veterinarian, she stopped at a New York audition on her way to college at eighteen and wound up singing for Richard Rodgers himself.

When he introduced himself, she had to ask him to repeat his name. He wanted his partner, Oscar Hammerstein, to hear her too, and when her pianist had to leave, they simply sent the teenager across the street to sing with a symphony orchestra that happened to be rehearsing. She had never even seen a symphony before.

By twenty-one, she was Laurie in Oklahoma, followed by Julie Jordan in Carousel, Marian the librarian in The Music Man, and an Academy Award for playing Lulu Baines in Elmer Gantry. Her father made beer; his daughter made Hollywood history.

With Jack, Shirley had three sons of her own: Shaun in 1958, Patrick in 1962, and Ryan in 1966. David lived with his mother, but on weekends he would turn up at the Cassidy house, and for little Shaun, that was better than Christmas morning. The first order of business was always what Shaun would later call a punishing pillow fight.

In the middle of the battle, David would spin wild, hilarious stories about their father, and then, for the grand finale, he would take a flying leap off the top bunk. Shaun always tried to catch him, and he never once managed it. Decades later, Shaun admitted something remarkable about those visits: David had every reason to hate him.

After all, Shaun was growing up with the father David had lost, in the house David only got to visit. Yet the big brother kept coming back weekend after weekend, pillow in hand, ready for another round.

Shaun has said that his own childhood was no Norman Rockwell painting either. The parents were often away making movies and plays, and the Hollywood kids on the block, Carrie Fisher among them just two doors down, looked after one another like a gang out of Peanuts. Kids are funny that way; they’ll forgive the ones who didn’t do anything wrong before they forgive the ones who did.

Then came 1970, and one of the great coincidences in television history. Shirley wanted steady work closer to home. She had already turned down the part of Carol Brady, reportedly because she didn’t fancy spending every scene in the kitchen making sandwiches.

Instead, she signed on to play Shirley Partridge, a widowed mother of five who joins her children’s rock and roll band. She was the very first actor cast, and then the producers came to her with a delicate question: how did she feel about her stepson David Cassidy? They were thinking of him for the oldest boy, Keith.

Shirley told them he’d be perfect. Apparently, nobody bothered to tell David.

On the day of his screen test, he turned around and there stood his stepmother. As Shirley told the story on public radio years later, he asked, “What are you doing here?” And she answered, “I’m your mama.”

The little boy who once refused to be impressed by her fame was about to become her son five days a week in front of the entire country. Shirley played it cool the way a good mother does, but one has to wonder what went through her mind that night driving home to tell Jack that his son was going to call her mom on national television. There was just one catch: nobody at the studio knew David could sing.

In the pilot, filmed in Las Vegas at the tail end of 1969, the family’s songs were sung by studio singers while the cast mouthed along. Only after the show was picked up did record producer Wes Farrell have David audition with his guitar. Farrell knew exactly what he’d found.

In the end, David and Shirley were the only two members of that television family who actually sang on the Partridge Family records. Think about that for a moment: a young man who had spent his whole childhood not knowing quite what to call this woman, standing beside her at a microphone harmonizing. In the fall of 1970, “I Think I Love You” went all the way to number one on the Billboard chart.

Trivia hounds love to point out that it made Shirley the first woman ever to win an acting Oscar and also score a number one single. Not bad for a brewery owner’s daughter who once planned to spend her life doctoring cows. Her agents warned her that a hit series would make her that character for life and send her film career straight down the drain.

Years later, she admitted, “Which is what happened. But I have no regrets.”

What followed was madness, the kind younger folks today can hardly imagine. David was twenty years old, playing sixteen. He filmed twelve-hour days, recorded at night, flew off to play concerts on the weekends, and was back on the set Monday morning.

His face was on lunchboxes, pillowcases, and bedroom walls from Maine to California. And this is where the stepmother became something closer to a mentor. Shirley had been a star since she was eighteen, and she knew the traps.

David later admitted she taught him a great deal about how to handle the pressure and the fame, but he was restless. He didn’t want to be Keith Partridge; he wanted to be taken seriously as a rock musician. So in May of 1972, he posed for the cover of Rolling Stone in a revealing photograph by Annie Leibovitz, hoping to shatter his bubblegum image once and for all.

More than fifty years later, Shaun still shakes his head at it. He told the Los Angeles Times he thought it was a dumb move, a bullet fired straight into his own career. As Shaun saw it, his brother was a charming young man on a hit show with half the planet in love with him, and somehow he’d decided that was a raw deal.

Only a little brother could get away with saying that out loud. Meanwhile, back home, something darker was brewing. Jack Cassidy was a genuinely gifted man who had won a Tony Award for She Loves Me, but he’d spent years watching his wife become the bigger star.

Now his own son had leapfrogged them both. Shaun has put it bluntly: his father could have simply been proud of his wife and his boy, but instead, Shaun said, “He had resentment which tortured him and us.” Jack also battled alcohol and bipolar disorder.

Shirley later described finding him sitting in a corner of their house without a stitch of clothing on, reading a book. When she reminded him they had a show to get ready for, he looked up and calmly told her, “I know now that I’m Christ.” In December of 1974, he was hospitalized.

That same year, the marriage came apart, the Partridge family went off the air, and David had his own horror to carry. At a May 1974 concert at London’s White City Stadium, fans surged toward the stage, and a fourteen-year-old girl named Bernadette Whelan died. Her parents said publicly that they did not blame him, but it was a weight he carried anyway.

Then came the night that changed everything. On December 12th, 1976, fire swept through Jack Cassidy’s penthouse apartment in West Hollywood. Investigators believed a cigarette had smoldered in the couch cushions.

Jack was forty-nine years old.

By then, he and Shirley were divorced, and David and his father had reportedly not spoken in about a year. Now there would be no chance to make it right. Shaun was eighteen, Patrick fourteen, Ryan just ten.

Shaun has described that day with a clarity that still stings. The four brothers held one another and cried, and together they made a kind of vow that their father would live on in them. In a strange way, Shaun said, “His loss bonded us.”

Shaun has never sugarcoated who Jack was as a parent, but he always adds the same thing: “And yet, I wouldn’t have traded him for the world.” Grief did what fame never could; it brought David home. The boy who had learned about his parents’ divorce from the neighbor kids was at last standing inside the family circle rather than peering in from the sidewalk.

And right on the heels of that loss, the Cassidy family did something no family should be able to do twice: it produced another teen idol. Back when David first hit it big, Shaun, still a boy, had looked at his mother, who begged all her sons to become doctors and lawyers, and told her, more or less, that if David could do it, so could he. He walked out the door and did exactly that.

By the summer of 1977, Shaun had a number one hit with “Da Doo Ron Ron” and was starring as Joe Hardy on The Hardy Boys Mysteries. The posters came down off the bedroom walls, and new ones went up with the same last name. The timing could not have been crueler for David, whose career had hit bottom.

Shaun would ask his big brother what he thought, and he could tell David was torn. “David never gave me advice,” Shaun recalled. It wasn’t that he wished Shaun ill; he simply couldn’t bring himself to enjoy it.

So Shaun quietly stopped bringing it up.

Two brothers, one father, the same kind of fame, and a silence between them that neither knew how to fill. The years that followed were not kind to David. There were three marriages, to actress Kay Lenz, to Meryl Tanz, and later to songwriter Sue Shifrin.

There was a detective series, David Cassidy: Man Undercover, that was cancelled almost before the ink was dry. There was drinking and depression and a long stretch when the phone simply stopped ringing. But in 1993, something lovely happened.

David and Shaun were cast together on Broadway in Blood Brothers, playing twins separated at birth, with Petula Clark as their mother. On a morning talk show, the two of them joked like an old vaudeville act. One cracked that it was the first time they’d ever spoken to each other.

When David was asked how he’d talked his brother into it, he said he told Shaun to forget what it might mean for his career and think of the restaurants in New York. Behind the jokes was something real. Shaun later said the experience was “very cathartic because we both felt connected to our dad.”

Every night the show ended with both brothers lying dead on the stage while the company sang a song called “Tell Me It’s Not True.” Nobody could have known then how that picture would one day come back to haunt them.

There was one more reunion worth remembering. In 2009, Shaun created a sitcom for ABC Family called Ruby and the Rockits, starring David and their brother Patrick. And who should turn up as a guest star?

Shirley Jones, of course. Asked about working with his old television mother again, David couldn’t resist a wisecrack: “We paid her a lot of money,” he said. Then he got serious.

He reminded people that she had won an Academy Award, that she had taught him how to survive fame when he was young, and that he could never ignore her because she was the mother of his brothers. There’s a photograph from that year of Shirley surrounded by all four Cassidy boys, David standing right there among them, grinning like a man who finally knew where he belonged. After all the years of resentment and absence and headlines, there they were, one family in one frame.

Sadly, the last chapter would be the hardest one. Between 2010 and 2014, David was arrested three times for driving under the influence. His marriage to Sue Shifrin ended, he filed for bankruptcy, and he lost his home.

In February of 2017, at a concert in Agoura Hills, California, he forgot the words to songs he had sung a thousand times and stumbled on stage. Soon afterward, he told the world he was suffering from dementia, the same illness, he said, that had taken his grandfather and his mother. It was heartbreaking.

It was also, as it turned out, not quite the truth. Near the end, David admitted there was no sign of dementia at all. The damage, he confessed, came from years of drinking.

“I did it to myself,” he said, “to cover up the sadness and the emptiness.” Shaun, who watched it all unfold, later said it was terribly hard to see, and that he’d seen alcoholism touch every family. But he also pointed to what made David different: his brother, he said, had a very different experience with their father, a different mother, and a very different road.

In November of 2017, David was rushed to a hospital in Fort Lauderdale with liver and kidney failure. Doctors placed him in a medically induced coma while the family prayed for a transplant. It never came.

On November 21st, 2017, David Cassidy died. He was sixty-seven. His family was with him, and Shaun was at his side through those final days.

According to his daughter Katie, his last words were, “So much wasted time.” Afterward, Shaun posted a tribute that brought fans to tears. He wrote about the pillow fights and the flying leaps off the top bunk, about how he had always tried to catch his big brother and never could.

Now, Shaun wrote, he would carry him instead. And then Shirley spoke. Her statement began by reminding the world that long before David played her son on television, he was her stepson in real life.

She remembered his sweetness and his wicked sense of humor as a little boy. And she closed with a line that must have taken real grace to write about the complicated man she once adored and the boy who was never quite hers: “I will also find solace knowing that David is now with his dad.”

Which brings us back to where we began. In 2025, Shaun Cassidy headed out on his first full-length tour in more than four decades, singing hits he admitted he’d had to learn all over again. And everywhere he went, people asked about David.

He was honest. His brother didn’t handle fame well, he said, and carried a chip on his shoulder. But when he talked about what he missed most, the tough talk fell away.

“David,” he said, “was the only person in the world I could talk to about our experience.” Only two people on Earth knew what it was like to be a Cassidy boy on a lunchbox. Now there is one.

As for Shirley, she turned ninety-two this past March. When she turned ninety-one, Shaun took her out to lunch and wrote that he had often felt the sun spun around her. She has outlived the husband she once adored and the stepson she was never supposed to raise.

She played David’s mother for four years on television. In real life, she was something harder to name and maybe just as important: the woman he wanted to hate and couldn’t. So tell us, do you remember where you were the first time you heard “I Think I Love You” on the radio?

And back in the day, were you a David fan or a Shaun fan?