If Donny represented the safe sexless side of teen superstardom, then David was definitely its dangerous flipside. Just as pretty but without the virtuous glow of pre-adolescent Mormonism, he was eight years older and already a TV star through The Partridge Family, so while Donny was still 14 when he sang Puppy Love, David was 22 when he had his first solo hit with Could It Be Forever / Cherish in April 1972.
He could do all the things Donny couldn’t – and not just drinking, driving and voting. Crucially, his voice had broken.
This cover of a 1967 tune by The Young Rascals went to No.1 a few months later. But he was already uncomfortable with being a teen idol, and began taking drastic steps to try and shake free from the stifling constrictions that came with that fame.
Around this time he posed nude for Annie Leibovitz for the cover of Rolling Stone. The article accompanying it described him riding around New York “stoned and drunk” in the back of a car. It was the kind of thing that could kill careers back then. But it didn’t work.
You can’t exaggerate how huge his superstardom became. He had the biggest fan club in the history of pop and his stadium concerts would sell out in minutes. The turning point came a London show, at White City Stadium in 1974, prompted a stampede where a 14-year-old girl died in the crush and hundreds more were injured.
by the incident, he took the courageous decision to abandon all live performances, just as The Beatles had done nearly a decade earlier, and to return to acting. But it’s hard to inhabit a role when your photo is on every girl’s bedroom wall.
By the Eighties he was broke. By the Nineties he was back onstage, in a successful Vegas stage show, The Rat Pack Is Back, and ready to talk about the dark side of fame in his tellingly titled autobiography C’mon, Get Happy … Fear and Loathing on the Partridge Family Bus.
In 2008 he publicly admitted having an alcohol problem, saying her drank “to cover up the sadness and the emptiness”, and in 2017, his life and looks destroyed by alcohol, he was suffering from dementia. He died later that year at the age of 67.