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.
Read more about this topic: Jack Cassidy
Famous quotes containing the words personal life, personal and/or life:
“The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people. To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The historian must have ... some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“Nothing goes sour more easily than the life of pleasure.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)