Shaun Cassidy, 66, told host Joe Sibilia on Nostalgia Tonight that his father, Jack Cassidy, resented when the spotlight shifted from him to wife Shirley Jones and eldest son David Cassidy.
The singer-actor traced the tension to Jack’s insecurity. “He had taken a backseat to my mother. And then along comes David. And David becomes kind of the biggest thing in the world for a while. And he had a hard time with it,” Shaun explained.
Jack, a Tony-winning performer, married Jones in 1956 after divorcing Evelyn Ward, David’s mother. The couple had three sons-Shaun, Patrick and Ryan-and Jack watched Jones soar in The Partridge Family while David became a 1970s pop superstar.
“That was his shortcoming,” Shaun said. “A lot of parents would have been very proud of their son or their wife, for that matter. But, you know, my father had a big ego, and I think like a lot of performers, had a sort of a core insecurity that he was looking for an audience to fill.”
The family dynamic shifted again in 1976 when Shaun, then 17, landed the lead in ABC’s The Hardy Boys**. The night before Jack died in a December apartment fire, Shaun shared the news.
“The last time I saw my father, I told him that I got the job on The Hardy Boys, and he knew Glenn Larson, who was the producer. And Glenn, back in the day, was like Aaron Spelling,” Shaun recalled.
Jack never saw the series premiere, yet Shaun hopes the outcome would have differed from earlier successes in the family. “I would like to think that having… gone through it with my mother and David, he would have been more accepting of it and maybe even proud of it,” he said.
The younger Cassidy also reflected on the unexpected benefit of losing a parent early. “One of the blessings of losing people when you’re a young person is you get to write the script of how your life with that person would have been had they lived,” he noted.
Shaun chooses an optimistic narrative: “I’d like to just write the story that I would have gotten closer with my dad, he would have been proud of me.”
