I Think I Love You (38 page)
Read I Think I Love You Online
Authors: Allison Pearson
The fate of the teen idol is the fate of beautiful girls down the ages. The idol has to be seen as virginal but highly desirable. Desirable, yet untouched.
Mind you, Cassidy was still alive, older and wiser with some sharp things to say about his condition, and good luck to him. He had gotten married, Bill knew that much. Two times, maybe three. The first must have been when he was still in his decompression chamber, recovering from global celebrity. Kay someone. A small blonde with cheeks like a peach. “Peachy-creamy,” as Bill’s Aunt Rita used to say, when asked how she was. Rita, in summer frocks for two-thirds of the year, married to Uncle Douglas, who used to stoop down, as if his waist were hinged, and gravely present Bill with a birthday fiver. One year, the banknote rustled a little as he placed it in the boy’s grateful hand. A year later, the
rustle was a shake, the paper trembling and rattling against Bill’s palm, and then Douglas was not there anymore; his tall frame confined to a chair, and finally a bed, the spasms—so Bill heard from a whispering cousin—grown uncontrolled. Rita, by then, was a ghost of a woman, soot dark around the eyes, exhausted by the love she had given to her man, once lofty, now quaking and unhinged. Yet still, at Christmas, unaccompanied, she wore butter yellow or Mediterranean blue, and smiled as she handed round the plates. “Peachy-creamy, thank you, Bill,” she would say.
Who had Bill loved? Who did he want to take care of, once Ruth had disappeared? He had
made
love, God knows, sometimes not for weeks, or even months, and then in a fever of entanglements and three-timings; dressing quietly at dawn, in an Edinburgh hotel, while one woman slept, in order to catch a train to London and a lunchtime tryst with another, who stood in her hallway as he came in, wearing court shoes and nothing more, and received him there, pulling him into her, against the rain-damp coats. Then dinner with an old friend, unhappy now, requiring consolation. Bill had gone to bed that night, alone, feeling like an exhausted oil well, and slept for thirteen hours.
Or that Italian beauty, too beautiful for him, no name; maybe she hadn’t seen him well, maybe that distracted mist in her violet eyes had been a myopic blur; finding themselves in front of the same painting, in, where was it? Milan, perhaps, when he had ninety minutes of museum-graze between meetings? Talking sotto voce about the picture, as you do, as if in church, she in her halting English, Bill in his backward Italian; then a pause, a look passed back and forth, then downstairs, don’t rush, quiet marble corridors, heels clacking, finally an unlocked room, found and opened and locked from inside, Bill knocking over a mop or a broom, the beauty trying not to laugh out loud, then turning her face to the wall and raising, almost primly, the hem of her dress. What was it, seven, eight years ago? Didn’t feel real, now, from this distance.
That was the thing with making love; over time, it took on the finished feeling of a story, or the gleam of a film, like something that had happened to someone else. (With love itself, the true love of legend, the opposite was true; as it grew, you could no longer imagine yourself
without it. The love made you.) Sex opened up a rift from the world, rendered it redundant for a minute, or a month. Three days on the trot, once, in London, 1981, missing the royal wedding completely; getting out of bed to pee in the basin, hungry as lions, with no time to eat; who had been that devourer? Mary, that was it, saintly Mary, with the haircut of a principal boy, like Peter Pan, who had been with him for six weeks in all, and had never met any of his friends.
Then there was Melody. Lord help us, Melody. Bill still smiled, when he thought of his mate Pete the Pimple, informed over a pint that Bill had met a girl named Melody.
“You have
got
to be kidding,” Pete said. “Bill, that’s not a girl. That’s a record label. That’s a shampoo. That’s half a fucking
magazine.
”
In those days, everyone, but everyone, read
Melody Maker
and
New Musical Express
, and so, of course, from that day in the pub to the end of the relationship, Pete and all his mates had called Melody NME. To her
face
.
“How’s it going, NME?” they would chorus as she drifted in, long skirt frilling the floor, and drank her barley wine. One time she came to a football match carrying a flute. Melody believed that in a previous life she had been an Egyptian cat, and her lovemaking was certainly feline, all sensual, selfish ease mixed with mad voracity. “Sleeping with the NME,” as Pete observed. Bill, despairing of her finding a job, had forced her to fill in a careers questionnaire, only to come back three hours later and discover that, under the heading, “Where do you see yourself in ten years’ time?” she had written the single word
Waterfall
.
Melody had wafted off, like a cirrus cloud, one afternoon, and such had been the relief that it wasn’t until two weeks later that Bill, checking his bank balance, realized she had taken the lot.
By then, Bill was busy working for
Puzzle Time
, which sold more solidly, and made more money, for Nightingale Publishing than all but three of its other titles. He managed six months before moving sideways to another journal, and then, a year later, to another, but always within the same parent company. He was becoming a corporate child. And still, on dank Friday evenings, without even time for a bath, he would lug his guitar case from behind the sofa, or from under the vacuum cleaner, and hurry to Kentish Town or unfindable church halls off
Tooting Broadway, to play in bands that seemed to change name, identity and purpose even more frequently than he changed jobs.
The most enduring, from 1975 to 1978, and still the most inexcusable, had been Green’s Leaf, Bill’s one and only foray into prog rock. He had been bandless and uneasy for a year, with Ruth gone and his other love, Spirit Level, cast to the winds. Spirit Level had lasted so long, and weathered so much, and put such heroic effort into never improving, despite an unceasing change of cast, that Bill presumed it could never die; for him, it was like playing in goal for a hopeless but venerable football club that would never rise beyond the Fourth Division. Then came the news: not one but two of its members, secretly and independently, had decided to sit accountancy exams, and had in fact met, face-to-face, at the door of the municipal sports hall where the exams were being taken. Both wore suits. The horror of this coincidence had, not unnaturally, finished the band.
And so Bill had drifted, and played Hendrix records, until introduced one day to a trio of private-school boys. Of
course
they were private-school boys: that was the deal, with prog rock. It was easier to fantasize about mystical England if you could look out of your dormitory window and see Glastonbury. Or Wenlock Edge. Bill’s secondary school had been directly opposite a pet-food store called Rruff Trade.
The private-school boys were the same age as him, but still boys; still looking, behind their sheepish manes, as if waiting to be told to get their hair cut. When only fifteen, with voices barely broken, two of them, Roger and Miles, had formed a folk duo by the name of Pen-dragon. Then a third, Piers, had come in the sixth form, with his own drum kit, and they had grown—or “matured,” as Miles liked to say—into Stone Circle. Now, with Bill, their pet proletarian, on bass, they were Green’s Leaf, and none of their songs lasted less than nine minutes. Sometimes Miles would go away in the middle of one of Roger’s yowling, interminable guitar solos and change costume, reemerging for the finale dressed as an ash tree. For “Golden Bole” he hummed the middle eight with a lightbulb inside his mouth, switched on. Bill would be at the side of the stage, defiantly clad in T-shirt and jeans, twanging along, his mind continents away. “David Cassidy was better
than this,” he said to himself, out loud, to the mirror in the backstage toilet, and then bowed his head in shame. Because it was true.
For one thing, Cassidy kept it short. Maybe not always sweet, but short. Say what you like about “Cherish,” it was all over inside two and a half minutes. No wonder a pop song was called a number. Green’s Leaf didn’t have numbers, they had equations; and the sum of those equations was, as Pete the Pimple pointed out, “zero shagging.”
By now, the room was nothing but shadow. Bill groped back to his computer.
Life can be brutal for the teen idol who tries to grow up. His job is to remind his fans of lost innocence, not their advancing years.
Donny Osmond recalled that, once the posters were torn down and “Puppy Love” had faded, he was ridiculed for his lack of cool. Desperate to shed a goody-goody image, Donny engaged a publicist who suggested faking a drug bust to establish some street credibility. The problem was, Donny didn’t do drugs or caffeine or even premarital sex.
“Do I need to make mistakes to be thought of as interesting?” he asked. “In my mind, I’ve been to the darkest places you can possibly imagine, but physically I don’t want to go there.”
Teen idols can still go on touring into their thirties, forties and even fifties, but, as the hairline recedes and the waist thickens, the venues diminish in grandeur from stadium to concert hall to school gym to pub.
It would be a mistake to think that David Cassidy was something new. He was, for a heartbeat, the biggest thing in the world, but, when he stopped beating, others replaced him, just as he himself had followed earlier beats. When millions of girls screamed for Cassidy—and, trust me, this was real screaming, cavegirl-crazy—they thought that there had never been or ever would be anyone like him, just as their desire for him was unique and unrepeatable, every girl’s howl and sob as particular to her as her own sneeze or—still to come—her orgasmic cry.
Whereas, of course, the poor bloke was perched uncertainly, in his spangly catsuit, on the shoulders of giants. Before him there had been—to take only the unembarrassing examples, and leaving aside the Monkees and Johnnie Ray—the Beatles, and then Elvis, and then Sinatra.
The bobby-soxers who waited in line for the young Sinatra felt the planet tipped in their favor by his presence. There was a day in wartime, October in New York, when they were allowed to keep their seats, for an all-day session of Frank on-screen and Frank in person, as long as they continued to occupy them. This was not a wise ruling; most of those girls would happily have stayed in those seats, leaned back, given birth, raised mini-Franks and died there. And so, of the thirty-six hundred who began the day, only two hundred and fifty departed. You don’t walk out on Frank. To their eyes, and on the evidence of their ears, he had been put on earth to pitch his woo at them, and they were born with a view to catching it, and hugging it close, and yelling back that, yes, they were all his.
And David Cassidy? Same deal—with a fraction of the Sinatra voice, but with the same Bambi appeal. The screams remained the same. And what if David had stopped and turned round, mid-chorus, and pointed a finger at some likely lass and said, “All right, then. If you’re mine, can I have you?” What would she have done, apart from swooned? Well, as a matter of fact, we know the answer to that.
I was one of the few male buyers, I suspect, of Cassidy’s autobiography,
C’mon, Get Happy …
, when it came out in 1994. That makes me, I would also guess, one of the few readers who were undismayed. It seems safe to presume that most of the people who rushed to get the book were fans of the artist formerly known as David; they didn’t particularly want to know about his marriage, or his comebacks (which they would avidly attend, nevertheless, in any city, anytime); they weren’t interested in now. They wanted then. They wanted reports from the front line of 1973, when the battle for David was in full spate. They wanted reassurance that their love had been,
though unrequited, worth every tear, every sleepless night beneath the giant poster and every scream.
And what did they read? Stuff about how David was fascinated with women who really enjoyed the art of oral sex. That he rarely had any emotional connection with the girls he slept with, even comparing it to masturbation.
Forget unrequited love. The guy was requiting all over the shop. He was requiting backstage, in his hotel suite, on the hoof. And what I longed to know was this: What was it like for the women who crossed the threshold? Were they disillusioned to the core, devastated by the brief reality, or did they realize that this was, logically, where all the illusions he sang about were bound to conclude?
It’s important, at this point, to get our demographics right. Cassidy confesses to a great deal of action, most, if not all, of it from people down on their knees, like worshippers; but he also, by his own admission, went for older fans—women of the world, not young girls new to it. He recalls turning down a beautiful fourteen-year-old who wanted her first time to be with David Cassidy. For a deity, he was remarkably kind and considerate. So maybe the mystery is doomed to be unsolved; we never can know what the teenage fans, the readers of my magazine, would have done if presented with the flesh of true romance, because they never had access. They were free, in other words, to shout out their desire, because it would never be satisfied. Their screams were dreams.
Beyond this point, I find myself in the dark. No man has ever known a woman’s thoughts …
Bill stopped. Once you find yourself admitting defeat in a piece, it is always time to stop. And if you don’t, he thought, his tired mind twisting back on itself, you get Clare. Clare, light of my life, fire of my loins; “waste of your time, more like,” as Pete preferred to call it, once the whole thing was over.
Brisk and bracing as a walk on a frosty day; Clare with her portfolio of international clients and her regulation three orgasms, one before,
thank you, one during, one to finish, together if possible please. Hair pinned up with no need of a mirror as she spruced herself in the morning, catching the Tube to Bank before Bill was even awake. An affair, yes; a stretch of efficient pleasure, in the capable hands of Clare; but
married
, for
ten years …
How had that happened? How had Bill allowed it to happen? Even now, he could barely summon the era, re-create its contours in his head; it was less of an event, more of an absence, a desert where two people, compatible enough, were said to have been together, by no means unhappily, but where they seem to have left no trace.