It's a page from the catalog of Grown-Up-Teen-Star Indignities: After briefly addressing the Wilmington, N.C., Chamber of Commerce, Shaun Cassidy shakes hands and heads for the door. Just outside, he's left alone for only a moment when -- oh, no! -- two women in their 30s accost him with pens and paper scraps in hand.
''I used to have your poster on my bedroom wall!'' gushes one.
''And I had your lunch box!'' chimes in the other.
The object of this adulation thanks them and gamely signs his autograph. It's not exactly the kind of writing he'd like to do today. Cassidy -- as in David's Kewpie-eyed baby brother, as in Joe Hardy of The Hardy Boys Mysteries, as in ''Da Doo Ron Ron'' -- would rather be at his desk scripting a grisly accident for the new CBS Friday-night series, American Gothic, the show that may finally -- and radically -- alter his image. Gothic, which films in Wilmington, is a creepy cross between The Andy Griffith Show and Twin Peaks, featuring an evil, violent sheriff (Gary Cole) who controls almost everyone and everything in a small Southern town except a boy (Lucas Black) who gets messages from the dead. Cassidy not only created this macabre morality play, he also serves as supervising producer and has written or worked on each of the first six episodes.
Earlier on this August day, before the meet-and-greet with local merchants, Cassidy, 36, ponders his younger, satin-clad self with resignation. ''People have a tendency to not want to let go of that,'' he says over a breakfast of poached eggs on toast. ''I've always had a dark side. But the image that everybody was pushing was the lighter one. And early on, I was conscious of keeping the darker stuff in check, because I felt like Santa Claus to a lot of kids. I was an 18-year-old young man who had this audience that was 10 years younger. Children. Now that they're older I can...'' His voice trails off into a mischievous laugh.
The son of the late character actor Jack Cassidy (The Eiger Sanction) and Partridge Family mom Shirley Jones, Shaun experienced childhood as a prep school for stardom. He watched as his half brother David bounded to pop fame in the early '70s as a Partridge -- and soon matched him almost note for note, fan for screaming fan. In 1977, Shaun set little girls a-swoon when he starred with Parker Stevenson in The Hardy Boys and topped the charts with his cover of the oldie ''Da Doo Ron Ron.''
During his two-year heyday as a Hardy sleuth, he investigated the craft of television. ''I'd bug the writers all the time,'' he recalls. ''And I'd rewrite my dialogue. Really pissed them off.''
Cassidy tried buying movie rights to such books as Ordinary People and The Falcon and the Snowman and the Esquire story that became Urban Cowboy, but lost out. ''I'd tell my agent, 'I want to produce stuff.' He'd look at me, this 18-year-old kid who looked 12. 'Yeah, okay. Go do another concert.'''
After the music stopped and his next TV series, Breaking Away (1980-81), broke down, Cassidy -- who had married model Ann Pennington in 1979 and had two kids -- essentially took the rest of the '80s off. ''By the time I was 21, I was like, 'I just want to stay home with my wife and my kids. I don't want to do anything. I just want to go to the grocery store and...live,''' says Cassidy (he divorced Pennington in 1992 and last year married actress Susan Diol, with whom he lives in L.A.). ''I did my Michael Jackson/Graceland thing of locking myself up in a house and not going out for a while. But in my case, it was a healthy transition.''
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