On the morning of December 12th, 1976, a deputy sheriff named John D. Mateo forced his way into a burning penthouse on North Kings Road in West Hollywood and found near the front door a body so totally consumed by fire that the coroner could not at first even say whether it had belonged to a man or a woman.
There was an untouched wallet on a dresser, a religious bracelet, and a heavy signate ring engraved with an Irish family crest. And it was the ring finally that returned a name to the ashes. The man who had lived there alone was John Joseph Edward Cassidy. Known to four decades of Broadway audiences and television viewers as Jack Cassidy, he was a Tony winner, a matinea idol, the most elegant murderer ever to torment Lieutenant Colbo, and the father of two of the most shrieked over teen idols of the 1970s.
He had spent his last evening drinking his way across the bars of West Hollywood. The rest of the story is truly alarming. Welcome to Hollywood Mysteries. He came from the least glamorous possible address for a guy who would spend his life manufacturing glamour. John Joseph Edward Cassidy was born on March 5th, 1927 in Richmond Hill, Queens, the youngest of five children of William Cassidy, an engineer on the Long Island Railroad, and Charlotte Kohler, a woman of German stock.
The father was Irish, and in later life, Jack would lean almost entirely on that half of his blood, the half that came with associations of romance and brogue and the suggestion of fallen aristocracy. while quietly retiring the German half that came mainly with brewing vats, war, and good sense, at least in New York’s opinion of the day.
It was the first of a lot of editorial decisions he would make about himself. The Cassides were respectable working people who pretty much assumed that a boy born into a family of railway men would naturally become in the fullness of time a railway man. Jack had other intentions and he had them early. By the time he was 16, he had reportedly held some 15 jobs.
And it was a resume of honest American druery that he would later recite kind of like a man describing his scars. Bellhop, cashier, dishwasher, chauffeur, salesman, postal clerk, hotel clerk, stable boy, and a delivery man of coal and ice. He had also faithfully fallen under the influence of an uncle, a former vaudevilian and circus contortionist who performed under the remarkably fruity name Benova.
A man who could fold himself into improbable shapes and who knew which doors in the theater district were worth knocking on. Uncle Ben, as we’ll call him for now, arranged a few auditions. Then a singing teacher named Paulie Robertson polished his voice and the boy who had quit school in his various careers at 15 walked into a Broadway chorus at just 16 years old.
The show was Cole Porter Something for the Boys, a 1943 vehicle for Ethel Murman, and Jack Cassidy stood at the back of it and watched the front of the stage as a general studies a country he wants to invade. The 1940s were his apprenticeship and being patient. He worked the chorus relentlessly. One show into the next. Sadi Thompson, Around the World, Music in My Heart, Small Wonder, Inside USA.
He was a tall, gleaming baritone with a kind of bone structure that made directors stop talking mid-sentence. And he learned in those years probably the most important lesson of his life, which was that the difference between the chorus and the spotlight was not only about talent, it was about conviction. Cassidy began to construct the necessary conviction with discipline, the carriage, the half smile, the heir of a man for whom the universe was a slightly disappointing supporting cast, a star, in other words. Decades later, his son
Shawn would put it a little less charitably. He basically invented this public persona with an accent that didn’t exist in any country ever, Shawn told People magazine. And the children hearing it deployed on television talk shows would look at one another in bafflement because it bore no relation to the voice they heard at home.
It seemed so phony to us, Shawn said. And that wasn’t like who he was. I’m not sure he ever really figured out who he was. In full flower, the manufacturer, Jack Cassidy, was a genuinely dazzling person to be in a room with, which is also why the people he hurt kept forgiving him. He was witty and immaculately turned out, a connoisseur of clothes and wine and conversation, the kind of guest who would make a dinner party feel like an event and a chat show feel like a salon.
Television variety producers loved him. He turned up, grinning on the celebrity panels of Password and Match Game and the Hollywood squares, where the same face that could make a Columbbo killer smile curdle into menace could with no apparent effort switched warmth. That was the uncanny thing about him, the speed of the switch.
He could be Deonire and Deadly in the same breath, charming the host and unnerving him at once. And audiences never quite knew whether they were watching a nice man play a CAD or a CAD play a nice man. The honest answer, it turned out, was that even Cassidy did not always know either. The persona had started swallowing the person.
The accent that existed in no country had become the only voice some of his oldest friends had ever heard him use. He was bisexual. The fact his sons would not learn until after his death. And the rumor that has clung to his early Broadway years like cigarette smoke is that the very old, very rich, very famous Cole Porter, who had written the score to Jack’s first show, took a romantic interest in him.
Shirley Jones, who became Cassid’s second wife in his most cleareyed witness, confirmed it without flinching in her 2013 memoir and again on television. Well, Jack was. He did it with men and women, she told ABC. I mean, he had an affair with Cole Porter, and he told me about all of this, by the way. I was very aware of all of this, but he loved women.
So, as was surprisingly often the case in that era, here was a man whose whole career was built on being desired by women in the orchestra seats, conducting a parallel romantic life he could never talk about, so he could have a career in an industry that would have ended him for it.
The performance, in other words, was never only on the stage. His first marriage took place in this period of climbing. In 1948, he married the actress and dancer Evelyn Ward on April 12th, 1950. She bore him a son, David. Jack was not built for fatherhood. He was built for the version of himself he could see in mirrors, and a baby son is a poor mirror.
The lead roles finally arrived in the early 50s. He was Chick Miller and Wish You Were Here in 1952, his first true leading man. And a year later, he took the part of Johnny O Sullivan, the Irish immigrant sandhog, tunneling beneath the Hudson in 1954’s Sandhog. It was a star- makingaking turn, and it confirmed what the chorus years had only promised, that Cassidy, blessed with a rich baritone and a face at the camera and the balcony both adored, could carry a show.
He had become in the parliament a leading man of choice. What he had not yet become and never would was a star of the order he believed he deserved. It was the state department of all the extremely unlikely matchmakers that handed him the great romance of his life. In 1955, the government underwrote a European tour of Oklahoma, and Cassidy was cast as Curly opposite a 21-year-old from Smithton, Pennsylvania named Shirley Jones, who had already become a screen sensation in the film versions of Oklahoma and Carousel. She was a small
town girl and a virgin. He taught her almost everything she came to know. I learned about life with Jack, about parties with Jack, drinking with Jack, design with Jack. she remembered. He was bright, well read, smart. He was also 9 years her senior, married, and the most glamorous creature she had ever stood next to.
They fell into each other on the road, the older sophisticate and the anenu, and the affair survived the divorce from Evelyn Ward, which became final in 1956. Cassidy proposed during a production in which they were both appearing, slipping the question to her between acts as though it were a costume change. They married on August 5th, 1956.
For a stretch of years, they were genuinely one of the great couples of the American stage, a glittering double act of recordings and tours and matching publicity. They cut some albums together, including Speaking of Love, A Brigadeon, and the frankly titled Marriage Type Love. They had three sons of their own.
Shawn in 1958, Patrick in 1962, and Ryan in 1966. And to the readers of the Fan magazine, they looked like the answer to a prayer. Jones, who had spent the rest of her life refusing to file a tidy verdict on Jack, called him, quote, “My dream man, my white knight, my sexual spengali.” She also, with the same breath, recorded some of the things that did not fit on a magazine cover.
for example, that he was the proud owner of 104 pairs of handmade shoes, and that quote, “His image always meant far more to him than anything, or anyone else in his life.” Living with Jack Cassidy, one comes to understand, required holding two contradictory facts in the hand at the same time, and learning not to drop either. The marriage was also a long education and a kind of worldliness that the wholesome screen on Janu had never imagined for herself.
The woman America would soon adore as a cardigan-wearing matriarch of the Partridge family was, she would insist decades afterwards, nothing like the part. I am nowhere near as breezy and uncomplicated as Mrs. Partridge, she wrote. And the man who had complicated her was Jack. He introduced her to a smart, sorberitic, decadent show business set in which the ordinary domestic rules were treated as quaint and boring.
In her memoir, she described an evening with another famous couple, Anthony Newie and Joan Collins, that drifted with alarming smoothness toward a foresome. Newly, she recalled, proposed that they all undress and watch a porn film together. It was clear what Tony was leading up to. She wrote, “Swing Joan says she declined that particular adventure, though Collins, when the book appeared, was sufficiently insensed to reach for a lawyer.
The point is not the gossip, but the climate she found herself in. Cassidy lived at the center of a sophisticated, sexually unbothered demanded decades before the general culture caught up to it, and he moved through it with the serene entitlement of a man who assumed the world had been arranged for his pleasure.
The early 60s delivered the work that should have made everything bearable. In 1963, he was cast as Steven Codily in She Loves Me, the lush, intricate Bach and Hornik musical and as the silken philandering shop assistant. He was magnificent. He won the 1964 Tony Award for best featured actor in a musical and shared in the Grammy for the cast recording, which preserves the performance for anyone who doubts the reviews.
There followed a run of roles that would have looked to a psychiatrist like a man compulsively auditioning his own diagnosis. In 1964’s Fade Out, Fade In opposite Carol Bernett, he played a pining matinea idol and sang a number called My Fortune is My Face, a song so close to autobiography that it hardly counted as acting.
In 1966, he was Max Menin, the vain newspaper columnist in It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman. He gathered four Tony nominations across the decade. A tally that places him near the top of the most nominated musical actors in Broadway history, and he kept being cast again and again as the gorgeous narcissist, the likable Cad, the man too in love with his own reflection to notice the knife coming his way.
For all the silken cads and pining columnists, what he hungered for underneath was to be taken seriously, and now and then the work let him prove he could be. In 1968, he returned to Broadway in Maggie Flynn opposite Shirley, a husband and wife billing that drew yet another Tony nomination and stands as the last time the Golden shared a stage in a book musical.
Two years later, he took the role of the prosecutor Otis Baker in a television production of the Andersonville trial. The courtroom drama about the commandment of the Confederacy’s most notorious prison camp, and his coiled, intelligent performance earned a second Emmy nomination. He was in truth a more complete man of the theater than his matinea idol surface advertised.
He wrote too there was a musical review of the marriage band built as a showcase for his wife and a play of his own called a waltz for Willie Ryan. He directed late in life staging a production of Wait Until Dark in Chicago that brought him a regional award nomination. He designed the couple’s houses.
The tragedy was never that Jack Cassidy lacked gifts. It was that no quantity of them could fill the particular hole he was carrying. The one his son Shawn would name as a core insecurity forever in search of an audience large enough to plug it. What he wanted though was never quite what he had. He wanted the movies. The towering screen fame that would put his face on a marquee the size of a building.
And the movies declined to want him back with the same intensity. He had television instead and television loved him which in fact only sharpened the insult. In 1967 he landed the sitcom he and she and played Oscar North a pompous pining television actor another part so well suited to him that it reads like a documentary.
There was a slice of immortality in another corner of the medium. In 1962 he had voiced Bob Cratchet in Mr. Magcoo’s Christmas Carol, the first animated Christmas special ever made for American television. So that the warmest, humblest performance of his career is the one in which he is not even visible. Then came the decision he would spend the rest of his life regretting.
The producers of a new ensemble comedy offered him the role of Ted Baxter, the vain, blustering, gloriously stupid anchorman on the Mary Tyler Moore show. The part had reportedly been written with Cassidy in mind. He turned it down, judging it beneath him and too similar to Oscar North and watched Ted Knight win two Emmys in a kind of permanent national affection in the role.
Cassidy later appeared on the show as Ted Baxter’s even vainer brother, Hal, a guest spot that is the queasy flavor of a man auditioning for the life he had refused. The other regret, and sadly it’s the one without a clever ending, was his eldest son. David Cassidy grew up largely with his maternal grandparents.
Chip Dea, who co-wrote David’s memoir, remembered the boy’s first sight of his father, barely more than a toddler, and the audience at a Broadway theater with his mother and Jack stepping into the light to sing and the small boy crying out across the house, “That’s my daddy.” The pos of that scene only deepens with what came after.
David told Dea that Jack spent his childhood, quote, making endless promises to get together with his son and then breaking them. Shirley, who had tried to mother all four boys through it, said simply, “When David was nine or so, I’d often see him crying in the corner because of something Jack had said or done to him.
And yet David also told anyone who would listen that the greatest performance he ever saw a human being give was his father’s codily and she loves me which he watched transfixed and wounded at the age of 13. The wound and the worship never separated. Then the universe arranged the crulest possible joke.
In 1970, David Cassidy, 20 years old and almost criminally pretty, was cast as Keith Partridge in the Partridge family opposite his own stepmother, Shirley, who played the family’s mother. The single I Think I Love You, sold in the millions. David’s face went up on the bedroom walls of an entire generation of wholesome girls, and the boy, whose father had never managed to crack the movies, became within a year, more famous than Jack Cassidy had ever been or would ever be.
For a narcissist who measured the world in column inches, it was an unbearable calculation. Cassidy could not do the gracious thing. Jack would tell his son that he had earned his own success. Whereas, quote, “You’re only a success because a network puts you on TV every week. People see you whether they want to or not.
You have nothing to do with it.” Shan Cassidy, watching the whole thing as a teenager, later diagnosed it with a clarity his father never managed about himself. My father had a big ego, Jean said, and I think like a lot of performers had a sort of core insecurity that he was looking for an audience to fill. By 1975, the breach was total.
I’m in communicado with my old man, David told an interviewer. I’ve never known him and I never will. The bitterest part of the estrangement was how plainly David was his father’s son in the gifts and in the curse alike. Shirley said it simply enough. It’s clear to me that David is extremely like Jack.
The youngest of Jack’s sons, Patrick Cassidy, who would grow up to play codily in She Loves Me on the very boards his father had owned, came to understand the inheritance from the inside. Jack, he observed, possessed a rare gift for making a womanizing scoundrel lovable. You want to be a likable CAD because at least he’s charming and fun.
David had inherited the looks, the prematurely graying hair, the velvet mannerisms, the whole devastating package, and he had also inherited the bottomless need for approval and the difficulty when fame arrived of surviving it. Patrick would say of his brothers years later that David carried so much of my father in him, all of his mannerisms, his facial gestures.
The father and the eldest son were two recordings of the same haunted song, and they could not stand to be in the same room while it played. It was on the screen, ironically, that Cassidy finally found the role that would outlive everyone’s memory of his Tony’s, and it was a villain. Beginning in 1971, he played three separate murderers on Columbbo.
And in doing so, he invented a template that every subsequent killer on that series would be judged against. as Ken Franklin in Murder by the Book, a 1971 episode directed by a young Steven Spielberg from a script by a young Steven Boxco. He was a vain, smiling, faithless mystery writer who murders his own collaborator.
And he was perfect, suave, snide, deadly, and so obviously delighted with himself that the audience half-rooted for Peter Fox rumpled detective to puncture him. He returned as a predatory publisher Riley Greenleaf and publisher Parish in 1974 and a third time as a stage magician and escape artist The Great Santini and Now You See Him a couple years later.
Faulk reportedly adored working with him and the verdict of the show’s most devoted fans had hardened into doctrine. Cassidy is the greatest of all Columbombo killers, the gold standard. The parts asked him to play an immaculate man with a rotten core who believes he is too clever to be caught. And he played them with the ease of a man not entirely acting.
His film career when it finally came was a procession of oddball roles rather than the stardom he crave so badly. He menaced Betty Davis and Bunny O’Hare. He played the efeat treacherous Miles Melo trailing a small dog in Clint Eastwood’s mountaineering thriller The Iger Sanction. And then in 1976, he was handed the part he had spent his entire life rehearsing without knowing it.
John Barrymore in WC Fields and Me. To cast Cassidy as Barrymore was almost too perfect, a kind of cosmic typ casting. Here was the great profile, the doomed self-regard, the magnificent talent corroded by drink and vanity, the matinea idol who could not stop performing even in private. He played the dying Barrymore with evident understanding because he was playing a prophecy of himself.
There is a strange cruelty in an actor being handed the perfect role at the moment he can no longer tell acting apart from literal autobiography. John Barrymore had been the most beautiful and gifted leading man of his generation. A hamlet of legendary power who drowned his talent in alcohol and self- mythology and ended as a slurring caricature of his former magnificence.
trading on a profile that had once caused automobile crashes on the boulevard. To watch Cassidy inhabit that decline in 1976 is to watch a man hold up a mirror and refuse, even then to recognize the face in it. By his own admission, he had turned reclusive in these last years. The gregarious salon host of the 60s curdling into a solitary drinker in an expensive apartment.
still impeccably dressed, still performing the accent for an audience that had largely gone home. The performance had outlasted its occasion. He was a man playing a star playing a man, and somewhere in the hall of mirrors, the original had quietly slipped away, leaving only the immaculate surface and the rising tide of the drink.
The Barrymore picture was in the most literal sense available to an actor the role of a lifetime and he gave it everything because there was almost nothing left over to keep for himself. The prophecy was already coming true off camera and it had a clinical name. Cassidy suffered from what was then called manic depression and is now called bipolar disorder compounded and disguised by heavy drinking.
And in the mid70s, the illness began to surface in episodes too strange to hide. His neighbors were startled in 1974 to see the elegant Mr. Cassidy standing on his front lawn in the middle of the afternoon watering the grass entirely naked. Shirley came home around the same period to find him sitting nude in a corner of the house, calmly reading a book.
When she reminded him they had a show to get to, he looked up without alarm and said, “I know now that I’m Christ.” In December of 1974, he was hospitalized in a psychiatric facility for 48 hours. And it was only then, deep into the marriage, that Jones learned he had been diagnosed as bipolar years earlier and had told her nothing.
A psychiatrist she was seeing put the matter to her without sentiment. “You are never going to change that man. Don’t go back into this marriage thinking you can. She knew he was right. Shirley Jones, who had fallen so deeply in love with Jack Cassidy so many years ago, she wrote, wasn’t prepared to relinquish her dream man.
She relinquished him anyway. They divorced in 1975 after 18 years and an exhaustion that no amount of love had been able to outrun. There had been an earlier separation, an 8-month estrangement after which she had taken him back against every piece of advice she was given because the gravitational pool of the man was simply stronger than her judgment.
She wrote of the final reckoning that was the maddening physics of loving him. The truth about the man I loved and about our marriage was penetrating my consciousness at last. so that I finally started to come to terms with the harsh reality that my life with Jack, my dream man, my white knight, my sexual Svengali, might well be ending forever.
It is worth pausing on the fact that she could write the phrase sexual sengali about a man whose secret affairs with other men she had long known about and apparently forgiven, a man she nonetheless remembered in the franker passages of her book as physically magnificent and tender in the marriage bed. She was not naive.
She was simply like everyone who got close to him, unable to look away. The illness, of course, made the genius and the cruelty harder to disentangle from each other, which is the particular horror of an untreated mood disorder in a charismatic man. The same ang that produced the dazzling and defhaticable performer, the man who could write a musical review for his wife and design their houses and read his way through any subject that caught him, also produced the grandiosity, the spending, the affairs, the conviction that the
ordinary rules were for ordinary people. Jones, looking back, refused to file him under villain. He was an ideal husband. He did everything and he taught me everything, she insisted. and then in the next breath located the fault line that finally cracked the marriage. I was always the movie star and the bread winner in the family and that was always hard on him because he wanted that more than anything in the world.
A man who cannot bear that his wife earns more, that his eldest son is more famous, that his German blood is more practical than his Irish blood is poetic, is a man condemned to be perpetually robbed by the people he loves. By 1976, he was living alone, by his own admission, something of a recluse, in a fourthf flooror penthouse at 1221 North Kings Road in a fashionable stretch of West Hollywood.
The work was still coming. He had finished the Barrymore picture and shot a final film, The Private Files of Jay Edgar Hoover, in which he played the writer Damon Renan, and which would not reach screens until after his death. But the man inside the Immaculate Apartment was unspooling. His youngest sons found his invented public accent stranger than ever.
The eldest would not speak to him at all. Shawn, by a small mercy, had one last good exchange with him. The boy on the cusp of his own teen idol fame, told his father he had just been cast as Joe Hardy in the Hardy Boys, and Jack, who knew the producer, received the news warmly. It was the last conversation they would have.
The final night was the awful symmetry of something he might have scripted. On December 11th, 1976, Cassidy telephoned Shirley Jones and asked her to come over for drinks. She declined. He then arranged a date with the singer and actress Donna Theodore, and the two of them went out to a nightclub where, by Theodore’s later account, his behavior grew erratic.
At one point, he started running around the club. She asked to be taken home, and he obliged her. He ate dinner alone at an Italian restaurant and drank his way through a sequence of West Hollywood bars. And at some point in the small hours of December 12th, he let himself back into the penthouse, drunk and alone, and sat down on his Nagahide couch with a lit cigarette.
He fell asleep, the cigarette dropped, the synthetic upholstery caught, and the fire climbed the apartment and then the building. The fire department would note afterward that the place was littered with cigarette butts, as though there had recently been a party, though Cassidy had come home alone. A little after 6:00 in the morning, the deputy sheriff was banging on doors of the four-story, 33 unit complex, and 100 tenants were stumbling out into the December dark while the flames did their work above them.
Investigators concluded that Cassidy had awoken and tried to crawl to the door and had got nearly there before the smoke pulled the oxygen out of the air and out of him. He was found in the front hall, burned past recognition. He was 49. There was a stretch of hours in which his family allowed themselves to hope.
His car was missing from its place, and he had spoken of driving out to Palm Springs the next day. So perhaps the body in the apartment belonged to somebody else and Jack was on the open road. Shirley Jones went to the building early and could not bring herself to go upstairs. I’m praying it’s not him, she told a reporter. Then the car turned up.
A friend named Mike Tassley had simply borrowed it. The dental records were checked and the heavy signant ring with the cassidy crest was recovered from the ashes. And the praying ended. I’m very sad, Joan said. What other reaction can anyone have? We were very close. His remains were cremated and the ashes were scattered on the Pacific, which is about as close to a vanishing act as a man can manage.
The great Santini would have approved. It is almost unbearable in hindsight how thoroughly he had played his own ending. There was the 1965 episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour, the photographer in the Undertaker, in which he portrayed a killer who incinerates an apartment to fake his own death and pass off another body as his.
There was a final Columbbo, Now You See Him, in which he did indeed play the great Santini, a stage magician and escape artist whose entire art was a manufacturer of Vanishing, and in which fans recall him idly toying with the lighter on set. A few frames of footage that curdle in the memory the instant you know how the story closes.
A magician who specialized in disappearing. An arsonist who burned a building to erase a man. A Barrymore drinking himself out of existence. He had made a long glittering career out of beautiful men who play with fire and assume the flames are meant for other people. And then he had gone home one December night and proved himself wrong.
To say that the way he died rhymed with the way he lived is not to make him a parable. It is only to notice that the man who could not stop performing the role of the doomed, dazzling egoist had stopped being able to tell where the role ended and the body began. What lingers finally is not the scandal, but the strange honesty of the children he failed.
Shan Cassidy, asked to sum up the father he barely understood, refused the easy eulogy and the easy condemnation alike. He was not a good father and I don’t say that with disrespect, he said. I just say it with objectivity. And then because the truth about Jack Cassidy was never one thing, he added the line that does the man more justice than any obituary.
And yet I wouldn’t have traded him for the world. The performance ran its full length. The applause arrived too quietly and too late, and the most elegant villain in the house turned out to be one part he could never put down. Thanks for listening. Let me know in the comments which role you remember Jack in best. I’ve been Ava.
Until next time, sweet dreams.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
