The Squeaky-Clean Teen Dream

Shaun Cassidy sings, shakes, makes a million

Why is your daughter screaming? At eleven, she is probably too old for nightmares. Maybe her four-color poster of Shaun Cassidy (life size, $6; smaller version supplied gratis with $5 membership in the fan club) is curling at the edges. Maybe the battery in her portable radio has failed right in the middle of the station's 14th daily airing of Shaun Cassidy's latest hit. Maybe the family mastiff took a nap atop Shaun's two albums (combined sales: 5 million copies), warping them into a couple of vinyl flapjacks. Maybe the picture tube in the TV blew out, and she will miss Shaun in this week's installment of The Hardy Boys. Maybe she has heard Shaun announce that because of assorted pressures, "I may never be able to have a relationship that lasts more than a few months."

Or maybe she is just practicing for the Shaun Cassidy concert.

Your daughter, your friend's daughter, and several million others. Girls--pre-teen, just-teen and a few lustfully maternal moms--have made Shaun Cassidy, 19, into a top-selling recording artist, a high-wattage TV personality, and the kind of turn-away concert star who can provoke riotous rites of weepy nubility every time he bats his well-turned lashes. Admits Shaun gamely: "Yes, it's a dirty job. But someone has to do it."

Say this for Shaun, though. He has a good, sidelong sense of humor ("There's always a job for me on The $20,000 Pyramid") and a startling foundation of hard sense. "I'm being sold from here to Tim-buctoo," he admits. "But I'm doing the selling." He watched the jet-stream parabola traced by the career of his half brother David Cassidy and learned some hard lessons. "The average length of a career like mine is five years."

Shaun pulled down a cool million last year--including hefty licensing fees to reproduce his milk-fed good looks on everything from wristwatches to pajamas. He works for it, though, spending long days churning out a new episode of The Hardy Boys, weekends on concert tours and the remaining free time writing songs or laying down vocals.

Shaun's writing efforts may lack the wit of the Beatles or the harmonic invention of the Beach Boys (two groups to whom Cassidy declares himself devoted), but lyrics like "Now you know I'm really glad/ I listened to my Mom and Dad" will go far to assuage parental anxiety. Nothing about Shaun is calculated to intimidate or offend. As Joe Hardy, boy sleuth, he is absolutely hygienic. In concert, he adorns himself in requisite skin-tights and shakes his tail at the yearning throngs, but the distinct outline of his briefs pressing through the clinging fabric is disarming and reassuringly boyish, like a kid who has got all the moves down but not quite mastered the fine points.

Shaun learned the moves early. Father Jack Cassidy and Mother Shirley Jones were trouping with their nightclub act until two days before Shaun was born. Later, Mom won an Oscar for Elmer Gantry; Dad appeared in Broadway musicals like Superman. Although Mom and David made their mark in TV's long-running Partridge Family, growing up in the Cassidy household actually bore a few parallels to the early history of the James Tyrone clan: Jack Cassidy made stinging, self-mocking jokes about his career. "God, it's lonely at the middle," he liked to sigh. He complained that the producers of one Broadway show hired him just to cast his wife. He suffered bouts of severe depression. He and Shirley split up, reconciled, then were divorced. Just before Christmas of 1976, Cassidy burned to death in a fire in his Los Angeles apartment. At the services, Shaun read aloud from a play his father had written about being ringside at his own funeral.

Shaun appears to have emerged from such turmoil with both psyche and ambition reasonably intact. His most serious complaints at the moment are over fan hassles (despite tight security, fans have been known to climb over high balconies for an intimate glimpse of their idol), and not being able to go to McDonald's for a Big Mac without causing a riot. Mindful of the fleeting rewards of pop success, he is already laying plans for a more substantial career. He has eyes to be a producer-entrepreneur "like Robert Stigwood, or something along those lines." To this end, he is trying to upgrade The Hardy Boys. "We get a lot of lame scripts and a lot of lame actresses," he notes. He also meets "at least once a week with my business manager, to find out where the money is going."

Well, shopping centers for one thing. For another, development of Shaun Cassidy's first film project, a prospective hybrid, he says, "of Shampoo and 40 Carats. " He wants Jacqueline Bisset to be his costar. Then some of the screaming may start to subside. Maybe he will even be able to tell if Big Macs taste the same.

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