Jack Cassidy - Personal Life

Personal Life

Cassidy was married twice. His first wife was actress Evelyn Ward. Together they had a son, David Cassidy. After divorcing in 1956, Jack married actress Shirley Jones. David and Shirley later starred together in the sitcom The Partridge Family. Jack and Shirley had three sons, Shaun, Patrick, and Ryan, and divorced in 1974.

In his 1994 autobiography, C'Mon, Get Happy, David wrote that he became increasingly concerned about his father in the last years of his life. He suffered from alcoholism and displayed increasingly erratic behavior. In 1974, his neighbors were shocked to see him watering his front lawn naked in the middle of the afternoon. Shirley Jones described a similar incident when she found him sitting naked in a corner, reading a book. Jones said to Cassidy that they had to get ready to do a show, and he calmly looked up and said, "I know now that I'm Christ". In December 1974, he was hospitalized in a psychiatric facility for 48 hours. At that time, Jones found out that he had been previously diagnosed with bipolar disorder. David wrote about his father's bisexuality in his autobiography, a fact he discovered only after his father's death.