The silence lasted for two decades, a wall of privacy so absolute that even death could not breach it. But in the summer of 1994, Susan Dey finally broke her quiet, and the words she chose were as sharp as a shard of glass. When asked about David Cassidy’s memoir, which had laid bare a private night between them for millions to read, she did not soften the blow.
“I found it to be a tremendous, terrible violation,” she told TV Guide. “And tacky. Real tacky.”
The statement was brief, cold, and utterly unforgettable, a stark contrast to the sweet, tambourine-shaking girl who had once pretended to play a cardboard keyboard on national television. It was the closest she has ever come to telling her side of a story that has haunted two generations of fans, and after those words, she retreated back into the silence that has defined her post-Hollywood life.
To understand the weight of that accusation, one must travel back to a small town in central Illinois, where Susan Hallock Dey was born on December 10th, 1952. Her father, Robert, was a newspaper man, a reporter and editor for Gannett papers who understood the power of the printed word. Her mother, Ruth, was a nurse who cared for other families with the same devotion she showed her own four children.
But in 1961, when Susan was just eight years old, Ruth died from complications of pneumonia, leaving Robert to raise the children alone. The family eventually moved east to Westchester County, New York, settling in the commuter town of Mount Kisco. Susan grew into a tall, quiet teenager with large eyes and an open, unguarded face that photographers adored.
She began modeling for teen magazines while still in high school, earning money that most of her classmates could only dream of, and she graduated from Fox Lane High School in 1970.
That same spring, producers were searching for a young actress to star in a new musical comedy about a family pop band. Susan had never taken a real acting class in her life, yet they cast her anyway as Laurie Partridge, the bright and sensible eldest daughter. The Partridge Family premiered on September 25th, 1970, with Shirley Jones as the mother and Jones’s real-life stepson, David Cassidy, as the eldest son, Keith.
By November, the song “I Think I Love You” had climbed to number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Suddenly, the girl from Mount Kisco was on lunchboxes, paper dolls, posters, and the covers of fan magazines in every drugstore in the country. Years later, Susan described those days on Rosie O’Donnell’s talk show with more humor than anyone expected.
“It was like going to college,” she said of the set, giving credit for her education to Shirley Jones. “I learned everything about the business, everything. The only thing I didn’t learn was I didn’t learn how to sing.”
The keyboard was a separate problem, and she told the story with a laugh at her own expense. “I asked for piano lessons and they sent me a cardboard cutout of a keyboard,” she said. “I was dumb enough to use it.”
There were other surprises on that stage, including the braces the writers decided Laurie should wear. The studio sent Susan to a dentist to have a mold made, and the prop braces, while not real, were made of real metal. Nobody had explained how to take them out, and at the end of the shooting day, she found herself stuck, finally prying them loose with the handle of a spoon.
When her rented house fell through between seasons, she moved in with the family of Danny Bonaduce, though she said she hardly saw him because he was always outside playing. Behind the laughter, the pressure of sudden fame was taking a quieter and more dangerous toll on her.
In a 1989 interview with the Washington Post, she tried to explain the strange position of a teenager whose face belonged to the whole country. “You feel like an adult but you are not an adult,” she said. “And society does not treat you as an adult.”
During those years, she developed anorexia, an illness few people discussed openly in the early 70s. Looking back, she described how food had become one of the few things she could still decide for herself. “One of the choices you do have is what you eat and what you don’t eat,” she said.
There was another feeling she kept to herself, and it involved the young man who sang nearly every lead vocal on the records. David Cassidy was funny, restless, and adored by millions of girls who mailed letters to the studio by the sackful. To Susan, he was simply David, the friend who sat beside her through endless rehearsals and long days under hot studio lights.
Years later, Shirley Jones wrote about what she had seen from her place at the center of that television family. “Cassidy didn’t reciprocate her feelings,” Jones wrote in her memoir. “He didn’t treat her well during that time, and it broke her heart.”
Cassidy’s own world was spinning faster than anyone on the set could follow. On May 26th, 1974, at a concert at White City Stadium in London, a surge toward the stage crushed hundreds of fans, and thirty were taken to hospitals. A fourteen-year-old girl named Bernadette Whelan died four days later, and Cassidy would call her death the worst thing that ever happened to him.
The Partridge Family ended its run that same spring after four seasons and ninety-six episodes. Soon afterward, he walked away from the screaming crowds that had defined his youth, while Susan began searching for a life that belonged to her alone.
Around the time of the final shoot, the two of them sat together for hours at Cassidy’s old high school, talking as they never had before. In his memoir, he remembered that conversation in vivid detail. “She told me in great detail,” he wrote, “We must have spent three hours sitting there, how long she had loved me, and how difficult it had been for her.”
He remembered, too, how frightened she seemed about what the end of the show would mean for the two of them. Not long afterward, Susan visited Cassidy at his ranch, and the two of them spent a single night together. For her, it seemed to be the beginning of something she had waited years to say out loud.
For him, it was a confusion he never quite resolved, and he later wrote that he found her attractive but never felt that kind of hunger for her. The romance ended almost as soon as it began, and both of them walked back into very different lives, carrying very different memories of the same evening.
Susan’s next battle was against the girl she had played for four years, because Hollywood saw Laurie Partridge every time she walked into a casting office. She had already appeared opposite Charlton Heston in the airline thriller Skyjacked in 1972, but the parts that followed were often small. In 1977, she starred in the romantic drama First Love, and that same year, she played a troubled young mother in the television film Mary Jane Harper Cried Last Night.
In 1978, she took on Jo March in a television version of Little Women, each role a careful step away from the sweet sister with the cardboard keyboard. Her personal life moved just as quickly during those uncertain years. In 1976, she married Leonard Hershan, a powerful Hollywood agent who was twenty-five years her senior, and their daughter Sarah was born in 1978.
The marriage did not last quite five years, and the couple divorced in 1981, the same year she appeared in Michael Crichton’s science-fiction thriller Looker.
Susan was now raising a little girl largely on her own while still trying to convince directors that she had grown up. The breakthrough came in 1986 when she joined Steven Bochco’s new NBC drama L. A.
Law as Grace Van Owen. Grace was a tough Los Angeles deputy district attorney who would later become a judge, and audiences who remembered the tambourines were stunned by the steel in her voice. Susan earned Emmy nominations for outstanding lead actress in a drama series in 1987, 1988, and 1989.
In 1988, she won the Golden Globe for best actress in a drama series, a prize that would have seemed unthinkable for Laurie Partridge. She was also fiercely protective of the woman she played, especially when the writers kept steering Grace into troubled romances. “I’m tired of being in a relationship that is not working,” she told the Washington Post in 1989, speaking about the character with a wry smile.
Away from the cameras, her own life had finally found steady ground. In 1988, she married Bernard Sofronski, a television producer with no interest in the spotlight, and the two have remained together ever since. In the fall of 1990, something happened that delighted fans who had grown up with the Partridges.
On September 6th, Susan Dey and David Cassidy walked onto the stage of the MTV Video Music Awards together to present an award. It was their first joint public appearance since the Partridge Family bus had been parked in 1974. Cassidy told reporters that week that he had stayed in touch with her over the years.
For one evening, Keith and Laurie stood side by side again, and the audience cheered them like long-lost friends. The early 1990s brought harder headlines, and they began with work. In 1992, she joined the CBS sitcom Love and War, but after a single season, she was replaced by Annie Potts.
Then the supermarket tabloids discovered that she had been attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. In a 1993 interview with Parade, she explained why she had never spoken about it publicly. “I usually don’t talk about it because I feel it’s my business and nobody else’s,” she said.
And what wounded her most was how the story had been found. “After I had been sober for a year, I was given a cake at a meeting,” she told Parade. “And the tabloids ran a big story about it.”
Then came the detail that explains almost everything about her later silence. “I was furious that they had planted an informant in my AA group,” she said. A woman who had already given her teenage years to the public now learned that even a room full of strangers in recovery was not a safe place.
That lesson would shape every interview request she received for the rest of her life.
Less than a year later, Cassidy’s memoir arrived in bookstores across the country. Much of it was a candid account of drugs, fame, and loneliness on the road, written by a man who had clearly suffered. But the passage about Susan was the one reporters quoted because it described their night together in plain language.
“Susan lacked the aspect of a female that I always found so attractive,” he wrote, by which he meant she was too good for the life he was living. To Susan, it read like a private moment sold for a chapter. Her full response to TV Guide in August 1994 remains the closest she has ever come to telling her side of the story.
After calling the book a terrible violation, she offered a revealing detail about her own choices. “My first reaction was that poor desperate soul,” she said, “because I was asked to write a book like that years ago.” She had been offered money to tell her own secrets, and she had turned it down.
Then she closed the subject with four quiet words. “There is no relationship.”
Cassidy seemed genuinely surprised by how deep the cut went, and he tried to make amends in the old-fashioned way. He wrote her a letter of apology, and then he waited for an answer that never came. “I never heard a response, and I don’t know why,” he told the Deseret News in 2000.
That same winter, he told the Orlando Sentinel he was disappointed that Susan Dey can’t embrace the fact that she was sixteen years old and millions of people loved her. Even in his frustration, he never stopped describing her with affection. In one television interview, Cassidy spoke about her almost as if she were a sister who had moved far away without leaving an address.
“I was very close with her,” he said. “I loved her. She loved me.
We were brother and sister, and I have a sense of sadness about it.” He added that nobody he knew from the show, including Shirley Jones and Danny Bonaduce, had seen or spoken with Susan in years. To him, the silence remained a mystery, but to her, it may have been the only privacy she had left.
Susan’s own career was winding down, and by every account, it was winding down by her own choice. She produced and starred in the 1993 television film Lies and Lullabies, playing a pregnant woman fighting a cocaine addiction. In 2002, she returned as Grace Van Owen for the L.
A. Law reunion movie, a final bow for the role that had remade her career. Her last screen work came in 2004 in two episodes of the NBC drama Third Watch.
There was no farewell tour and no tearful press conference because she simply stopped accepting parts and went home. Home was far from Hollywood with her husband and the quiet life she had always wanted but rarely been allowed. She continued to support the Rape Treatment Center at UCLA Medical Center where she had served on the board for years.
She also co-narrated a documentary about campus rape with her old L. A. Law colleague Corbin Bernsen.
In 2013, she sat down with WSKG, a public broadcaster in Upstate New York, and spoke about the work she had left behind. “I miss acting as much as I miss my mom, as much as I miss my little girl, as much as I miss my first home,” she said. Then, in the same breath, she explained why she had no intention of coming back.
“I do miss acting, but I’m really happy with what’s going on in my life right now,” she said. “It’s full. It’s so full.”
The girl who had lost her mother at eight had built the kind of home she once lost, and her daughter, Sarah, had grown up and gone out into the world. Susan, it seemed, had finally learned to keep something precious entirely for herself. The Partridge Family kept calling, and she kept politely declining every invitation.
In her 2013 memoir, Shirley Jones described Susan as the one cast member who consistently refused to take part in reunions. When fans gathered online for the show’s fiftieth anniversary on September 25th, 2020, the guest list was long and her name was not on it.
Danny Bonaduce later admitted he did not understand her choice at all. “She just doesn’t want to be famous,” he said. “It was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.
Why?” David Cassidy’s later years were difficult in ways his old fans found painful to watch. He struggled with alcohol and money troubles, and in February 2017, he announced that he had been diagnosed with dementia.
That November, he was hospitalized in Florida with organ failure, and he died on November 21st, 2017, at the age of sixty-seven. His daughter, the actress Katie Cassidy, later shared the last words he spoke to his family. “So much wasted time,” he said.
Tributes poured in from around the world, many from women who had once taped his picture above their beds. Shirley Jones and Danny Bonaduce spoke warmly of the boy they remembered from those long days on the set. No public statement from Susan Dey was ever reported, and her silence became one more chapter in the story.
Some fans read it as lingering anger, while others read it as a private grief that she simply would not perform for strangers as so many others had done that week. What remains on the record are the words she had chosen twenty-three years earlier. So what was the truth Susan Dey told about David Cassidy?
It was never that she hated him, and it was never that her feelings for him had been imaginary. What she called a violation was the book, the turning of a private night into a paragraph for strangers to pass around. She had been offered the chance to write that same kind of book herself, and she had refused it.
Her silence reads less like a door slammed on David than like the last private room she owned. And she never turned her back on the show itself, no matter how firmly she declined the reunions. Sitting across from Rosie O’Donnell, who confessed she had practiced Laurie’s moves on her bedroom bed as a child, Susan smiled.
“It was great, absolutely extraordinary,” she said. “You’re with a group of strangers that got along really, really well.”
In another interview, she marveled that people still connected her with Laurie. “When you appear in people’s living rooms, they feel a connection with you,” she said. “That connection is still there.”
Every time the old bus rolls across a screen somewhere, and every time a grandmother hums the theme song to a grandchild who has never seen it, a seventeen-year-old girl is pretending to play a cardboard keyboard, and the boy beside her is singing “I Think I Love You.” They were never really brother and sister, and they were never quite sweethearts, either. For four seasons, though, they were a family to millions of people who needed one.
That part of the story, at least, contains no wasted time at all.
