My schoolmate, Shaun Cassidy

When I returned from Christmas break I noticed a palpable buzz on campus. Somebody famous had just moved in. Nobody knew who, but the word was it was someone huge.

Not long after that, confirmation arrived in my section of the boys’ dorm. It was none other than Shaun Cassidy.

Actually, that still several years before Cassidy had his 15 minutes, starring in The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries and charting four Top 40 hits, including the Number One “Da Do Ron Ron.” But even in early 1974 Cassidy had already begun appearing in teen magazines eager to exploit the fact he was related to not one, but two stars of the Partridge Family (David Cassidy was Shaun’s half-brother and Shirley Jones was his mom).

Taking pity

You’d think my fellow students would have been tickled pink to have a budding star among them, but it was actually quite the opposite. Most of them thought of themselves as hippies and rebels and wanted nothing to do with this “Joe Hollywood.” OK, nobody actually called him that, but you know what I mean. Within 24 hours a badly mauled picture of Shaun from Tiger Beat found its way onto the cafeteria bulletin board and remained there for several days.

What somebody at Solebury was doing with a copy of Tiger Beat in the first place is a mystery better handled by the Hardy Boys than some dork like me.

Shaun was actually an interesting guy. Despite the teenybopper image created by his handlers and (I guess) his parents, he had very good taste in music and used to jam on the weekends with two older musicians with whom he was trying to start a band. One of the, Ivan Kral, joined the Patti Smith group as its bassist shortly thereafter. Shaun and his buddies liked to go to New York and hang out in the then-halcyon punk scene; he's even mentioned in Legs O'Neil's very good oral history, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored History of Punk.

Although Shaun was hardly a pariah at Solebury, he wasn’t exactly welcomed with open arms either. I felt bad for him and tried to strike up a friendship. I can’t say we became fast friends, but we did hang around from time to time. I thought he’d be impressed that I wrote lyrics, and he was. He even mentioned it from time to time. “You write lyrics, right?” he said once.

Of course, I was lying my ass off. I had wanted to be a writer since I was five. But songwriting was never my thing.

Like Gable and Colbert

As the weather turned a little nicer, Shaun mentioned that he wanted to check out New Hope. Remember, this was the early ’70s, when hitchhiking was still permitted. I suggested we use our thumbs to get into town. And off we went.

New Hope was pretty crowded on the weekends, so at day’s end we had no trouble getting a ride back. Unfortunately, the driver dropped us off at Phillips Mill Road, several miles from Solebury. We waited a good half hour for a ride. None came.

You’ve probably seen the classic 1934 comedy, It Happened One Night. In one iconic scene, Clark Gable thinks he’s teaching Claudette Colbert how to hitchhike, and it’s not going too well. Claudette’s character, who knows nothing about hitchhiking but plenty about men, takes matters in her own hands and displays a little leg to the next car that comes by. The driver screeches to a halt.

Showing some ankle

I was a bit of a jokester in those days, and once in a while I would break out my best Claudette Colbert imitation when thumbing a ride. Not in a drag queen kind of way—I’d just show some ankle at the right time. It rarely worked, but when it did, it provided fun conversation for most of the ride. After all, if you knew It Happened One Night, chances are you knew plenty of other movies too.

I assumed Shaun, coming from a show business family, would know the movie and get the joke. He didn’t know the movie and didn’t get the joke.

Shaun didn’t exactly avoid me after that, but any chance of a real friendship was ruined by my comedic high-wire act. Which was fine by me. If you didn’t get my jokes, you didn’t get me.

And as a grownup….

Shaun never really achieved his predicted superstardom. After a while he stopped making records and acting. Today he’s a respected TV producer known for producing high quality, risk-taking shows that tend to get cancelled early. The well regarded, David Lynch-influenced “American Gothic” was his show. So was “Blue Bloods,” an intelligent cop show starring Tom Selleck. It was cancelled after one year.

At least it lasted longer than our friendship. The funny thing is, Shaun at 16 probably didn’t deserve, or even crave, all the fuss that was being manufactured about him. But now, when the spotlight has passed him by, maybe he does.