I think I love you: How a teenage crush on David Cassidy became a true friendship
As a Melbourne schoolgirl, she idolised David Cassidy. In later life, Jane Reaburn became one of his inner circle.
Love comes in many guises. For Jane Reaburn, a 14-year-old schoolgirl living in suburban Melbourne, it was a striking if unattainable package: a slightly older man, boyishly attractive and with a penchant for Hawaiian shell necklaces. He was 23, lived on the other side of the world, and as more than one contemporary would mournfully attest, he had no idea that she was alive.
It was 1974, and like millions of others around the world, Reaburn was fixated upon a man she had never met. Yet he was the first and last face she saw every day. The walls and ceiling of her suburban bedroom, her haven from the family life she shared with her parents and two older brothers, were covered with posters of David Cassidy, the superstar American singer and one of the biggest celebrities of the early ’70s. Thanks to the TV sitcom The Partridge Family and the musical career that was spun off it, he became the focus of countless fantasies, his appeal described as “a combination of the sweet-faced charm of the young Paul McCartney and that of an untarnished Mick Jagger”.
Like most fads, his star eventually waned. Yet, nearly 50 years on, invoking his name, let alone the memory of his revealing photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz for a sell-out 1972 edition of Rolling Stone magazine, continues to evoke gleeful nostalgia, especially among women of a certain age. And if you are Jane Reaburn, now 62, a retired school teacher who lives with her husband on a semi-rural block near Bendigo, there is a bonus and unexpected chapter to these reveries. Because never in her deepest adolescent musings did Reaburn imagine that in her midlife, in a quiet Antipodean corner, her teenage idol would become her employer and her friend, that he would contact her regularly and laud her publicly, and that she would eventually become the custodian of his memories.
“Do you want to see?” Reaburn asks reverently as she produces a large plastic storage box and releases the lid to reveal the first of many artefacts from her personal catalogue of devotion to David Cassidy. Onto the carpeted floor of her tidy house she lays the contents: scrap books and albums, key rings, banners and photographs. “I never threw anything away,” she says solemnly as she produces a short strip of black paper, “a streamer that he threw back into the crowd” at his 1974 Melbourne concert. There’s a photograph of a youthful Cassidy from this same period wearing a Keep Australia Beautiful T-shirt and ticket stubs for each of the 21 concerts that Reaburn attended.
In a storage area of her house she has five more boxes of paraphernalia, plus 32 scrap books and dozens of albums. And then there are the personal photos: Cassidy in Canada in June 2009 with his arm around a beaming Reaburn. “I was nervous, shaking, but couldn’t wipe the smile off my face.” And another backstage with her in Los Angeles after a television show recording that same year, this time with her head almost resting on his shoulder. She was almost 50 by then, but the 14-year-old inside her was imploding. “There was never anyone else,” she says, with affection, recalling the gravity of her adolescent infatuation that began around 1971.
Then life moved on. She finished school, attended university, married. As her family grew, she lost track of the precise movements of Cassidy, who stopped touring later in 1974, dissatisfied with his career’s divergence from serious acting and concerned about the mass hysteria wherever he went. “I was pigeonholed as a teen idol [and] there’s no credibility,” he said in the 1980s. “I paid a tremendous personal price – it’s a very empty, isolated, lonely existence.”
After some successes in Broadway and West End musicals and performances in Las Vegas, he returned to Australia in 2002 to audiences that were by then middle-aged or on its cusp. While Reaburn, with her husband, was up the front again at the Melbourne concert – “I was at the stage and I was touching his [Cassidy’s] hand” – this time the singer stirred something else in her. “I was a teacher of IT and science and I wanted to teach myself how to make a website,” she says of the unlikely path that emerged not long after that performance. Building on the contents of a small website devoted to David Cassidy made by a fellow fan in New Zealand, Reaburn set about learning how to construct her own. In the process she became a veritable encyclopaedia of all things Cassidy, from the guitar plectrums he would give away at concerts to his gall bladder removal surgery in 1971. “If I’m doing something I’ve got to do it well,” she says. “So I wanted to make the website as complete as possible.” By the time she had amassed 10,000 pages of content, including references to every book in which he had ever been mentioned, she knew Cassidy almost as well as he knew himself. Then Reaburn opened this email in November 2007.
Dear Jane,
I just had an opportunity to see the site that you built for me and my fans. I can’t tell you how flattered and impressed I am by all the time, effort and love that you have put into being supportive of me. The site is truly remarkable. I saw things and learned things about myself that I had forgotten. I can’t express my gratitude or my appreciation for the commitment you’ve made any more than saying “I love you for being there for me”. God bless you and please contact me and let me know personally that you have received this email…
I would be most grateful if I could include some of the fantastic content you have gathered on my website and link my site to yours.
Much love and thanks, D.C.
“I was so shocked I couldn’t really think straight,” Reaburn says now, grinning at the memory. “I was incredulous. I wondered what the young teenage Jane would have thought.” A few years later, Cassidy emailed again. Could Reaburn merge her information with his – and manage his official website?
Could Jane Reaburn work for David Cassidy? So many of his hit songs seemed to suit this moment. No Bridge I Wouldn’t Cross. Could It Be Forever? For the Melbourne teen who had spent so long imagining a connection with her idol, one song – Daydreamer – seemed particularly sweet.
Over the next six years, Reaburn would speak to Cassidy up to several times a week. “It got easier and more normal but I still pinch myself,” she says of their many conversations which expanded from finessing the website to discussions on family and life. By mid-2017, her phone was filled with hundreds of messages. “God Bless you sweet Jane!! Nite!” Cassidy texted in July 2017. On September 12 that year he wrote: “You are a wonderful human being and have represented me in every possible way. This is why I consider you my friend, also my employee. But I trust you xo.” At a concert at BB King Blues Club in New York in March 2017, Cassidy told his audience: “I have a fantastic friend and assistant in Australia called Jane and she takes care [of me] every day – give her applause, she is amazing. She does Facebook, she does davidcassidy.com – and I talk with her every other day. She is an amazing human being and loves you all like I can’t even tell you, and has just been such an asset to me.”
It was a moment of acclaim recorded for posterity – in what would be Cassidy’s final concert.
By the time Cassidy appeared on that stage in New York City, Reaburn was one of his few employees and his fortunes were faltering. Between 2010 and 2014 he had been arrested three times for drunk driving and had been ordered to spend 90 days in rehab. He had also declared bankruptcy and was forced to sell his home. During a chaotic performance in southern California in early 2017 he had slurred his words and fallen. Soon after he had announced that he was suffering dementia – although subsequent reports revealed that this was temporary and brought on by alcoholism. At his final concert in New York, he rambled frequently and his voice was husky.
On November 14, 2017, Cassidy messaged Reaburn on the way to hospital; he was in pain and was feeling sick. A week later, he died.
Reaburn, who heard the news from one of Cassidy’s closest friends, was bereft. “I knew he wasn’t well and I couldn’t do anything about it. That was the hardest thing,” she says. “I found his death really, really hard.” In the four years since, she has continued to work on his social media presence voluntarily, and often prolifically: 71 different items on what would have been his 71st birthday in April this year. She continues to upload information daily, for the benefit of the many friends she has made among fellow fans around the world.
Unlike those other fans, however, her improbable connection to the man to whom they are all hopelessly devoted continues to be deeply personal. “I miss just being able to call him up and hear his laughter,” says Reaburn, who still has Cassidy’s number, and his many messages, in her mobile phone. “I guess he was unattainable as a teenager. But as I got to know him he was just a human being – with wonderful talents and human flaws.”