Who was your teen crush? British author explores hers

Admit it, you had a crush on someone famous when you were a teen.

Or maybe you still do.

I, for one, had lots of minor infatuations on some of the stars who graced the pages of my beloved "Seventeen" magazine back in the day.

MTV videos furthered my hankering for pop stars Rick Springfield (a la "I've Done Everything for You") and Simon LeBon of Duran Duran ("Rio") and Larry Mullen Jr. of U2 (any U2 video ... I'll take "Sunday Bloody Sunday" live at Red Rocks).

I even had a poster of Patrick Swayze in "Dirty Dancing" on my bedroom wall when I was 16. (Along with a poster of a kitten, claws dug into a tree that said "Hang in there!" ... didn't everyone have that?)

Cheesy, yes?

Author Allison Pearson also had a giant teen crush. Hers was on David Cassidy - aka Keith Partridge on "The Partridge Family."

In honor of unrequited love this Valentine's Day, I'm posting an Associated Press story about Pearson's aptly named new book, "I Think I Love You" (that's her below with David Cassidy on a recent "Today Show"):

Author relives teen crush in 'I Think I Love You'

By JOCELYN NOVECK

AP National Writer

NEW YORK — So it's Valentine's Day — time to celebrate your wonderful relationship. Unless, of course, it isn't so wonderful right now, or it doesn't even exist. Wouldn't it be better, women out there, to celebrate a love that's so much less complicated: the teen idol crush?

Think about it. Was there ever a love so pure, so ardent, so idyllic and yet so painfully real as the love of a teenage girl for Paul McCartney, Davy Jones or Bobby Sherman in the '60s, or Justin Bieber or Robert Pattinson today?

Take British novelist Allison Pearson, whose devotion at age 13 for David Cassidy, aka Keith Partridge (of the feathered mullet and "The Partridge Family") was so intense, she wore the color brown for 18 months because she'd read it was his favorite.

"Almost my entire wardrobe was brown — brown bell-bottoms, brown platform shoes," says Pearson. "I actually look malarial in brown. But somehow, I thought it would give me some competitive advantage over the other fans."

Like most lovestruck teens, Pearson, now 50, eventually recovered from the shock that she would never be Mrs. Cassidy. She reached adulthood, got married, had kids, became a prominent newspaper columnist in Britain and then a best-selling novelist with the 2002 "I Don't Know How She Does It," now being made into a movie with Sarah Jessica Parker as her working-mom heroine, Kate Reddy.

But she never forgot her David — and she reckons many of us haven't forgotten our teen idol crushes, either. Her new book, "I Think I Love You," which hit stores this week, is not only a paean to Cassidy but an exploration of the fragile emotions and fraught relationships of the teenage years.

"People may think it's silly, but the teen idol crush is really, really powerful," said Pearson, sipping a cappuccino Thursday afternoon in Manhattan. "It's a dress rehearsal for love. You're in love with the IDEA of being in love."

If the author seemed to be glowing a bit, the reason may have been her experience earlier that morning. Appearing on NBC's "Today," she'd been surprised on set by none other than Cassidy himself, now 60 and still performing. Luckily, she'd dressed right — she was wearing a ribbon-trimmed David Cassidy photo on her lapel, close to her heart.

Afterward, the two talked, and Cassidy even agreed to appear in the jukebox musical she's writing based on the book — as long as it makes it to Broadway, Pearson says. (She's collaborating with her husband, New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane, on the script.)

Who knows if it will actually happen, but imagine growing up to write a musical about your teen idol that your teen idol actually appears in? Talk about your full-circle moment.

But how did Pearson arrive at the subject in the first place? A book about a teen crush would seem quite a departure from her previous book, which, though very funny, was based on the serious issue of working mothers and their often futile struggle to achieve a balance between career and kids.

That book sold more than 500,000 copies in the U.S., according to Random House, and was translated into 32 languages. Women saw echoes of their own hectic lives in Kate Reddy, named of course after singer Helen Reddy, who famously sang "I am woman, hear me roar."

There's no burning social issue this time around, but Pearson thinks women will also identify with her newest heroine, Petra, whom we meet first as a lovestruck teen and then later as an adult, facing personal heartbreak, and with a 13-year-old girl of her own who's in love with Leonardo DiCaprio (Pearson's own daughter, 15-year-old Evie, has a crush on Pattinson, of the "Twilight" series.)

"I think we carry our younger selves with us our whole lives," Pearson says. "Something we find — an old photo, a concert ticket — can take us back with surprising force to the person we once were. And my, how we envy the passion of that younger person."

The book mines the comic potential of that passion, but also the danger of it, giving a detailed account, pieced together from news reports at the time, of a 1974 Cassidy concert in London where crowd control issues led to the death of a concertgoer.

She also provides an occasionally searing look at how hard it is to be a teenager, especially female, with the pressure to be liked and to belong snuffing out one's better instincts.

"To improve your image, you made yourself more stupid and less kind," she writes, after young Petra has betrayed a friend. "The shutting down of some vital part of yourself, just so you could be included on a shopping trip into town, not have to sit on your own at lunch or have someone to walk home with."

The idea for the book came to Pearson years ago in Norway, during the publicity tour for her first book. At dinner with some women, the subject of teen crushes came up, and Pearson related hers, on Cassidy. A woman who'd been quiet the entire meal said, in a strikingly serious tone: "But he was mine."

Pearson felt she was onto something. She went onto eBay and started acquiring Cassidy memorabilia. A tiny office at the top of her home in Cambridge, England, became Cassidy central. It looked, her husband commented, "like a serial killer's lair."

The book took a long time, long enough that she was sued by publishers for non-delivery. The suit has been settled now, Pearson says, and movie rights are already being actively discussed.

Though Cassidy's representatives had given the book a green light, Pearson never knew how he felt about it — until Thursday, on the "Today" set. She told him she hoped he didn't hate her for writing the book. On the contrary, he gushed.

It wasn't the first time the author had met her subject. In 2004, she was assigned by the Daily Telegraph's Saturday magazine to interview Cassidy, then 54, in Florida, unrelated to the book idea. She appends the transcript to the end of her novel.

At the end, the reporter confesses to the teen idol that she had sacrificed her fashion sense as a girl to swathe herself in his favorite color, brown.

He laughs at her teenage cluelessness.

"Allison, it was all made up!" he says. "Do I look like someone whose favorite color is BROWN?"

AP Finance Bookshelf: Orman's latest, career games

AP's personal finance team has reviewed three new books.

The first of them is by the eccentric and a little ... annoying Suze Orman. But she IS kind of entertaining in a "look at my bad haircut and Chico's wardrobe" kinda way. Snide comments aside, Orman's money advice is usually quite practical and easy to understand, and she has published a new book, "Action Plan," which is nicely priced at under $10 in paperback to help you get over bad economic times.

Here they are:

AP Finance Bookshelf: Orman's latest, career games

By The Associated Press

Teachable moments often arise from painful experiences. One example is the recession, which has inspired books about what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again.
Suze Orman updates her "Action Plan" with fresh advice on taking charge of your finances. This time, there's an emphasis on recovering from hard times.

If you're not afraid of challenging long-held beliefs, check out "Don't Buy the Bull: Dispelling Disastrous Investment Advice and Money Myths in Our New Economy." The author, Cassandra Toroian, takes issue with common notions she argues have been exposed as obsolete in this recession.

Recent graduates or mid-career professionals may want to pick up "Your Career Game: How Game Theory Can Help You Achieve Your Professional Goals." It shows how the skills that reality TV show contestants use to best their rivals can be applied in the workplace.

The new titles:

TITLE: Suze Orman's Action Plan
AUTHOR: Suze Orman

PRICE: $9.99 (paperback)

SUMMARY: The ubiquitous personal finance guru Suze Orman has updated her 2009 book aimed at helping readers pick up the pieces from the recession and get their financial lives in order.

The book's chapters focus on credit; retirement; saving; spending; real estate; college; protection through planning and insurance; and kids and money. It concludes with a few inspirational pages dubbed, "The Right Way."

Each chapter depicts financial scenarios, and Orman offers ways to fix the problem. She also uses her typically direct approach to push readers into taking control of their finances. Orman offers practical advice and proven strategies in plain language that takes much of the mystery out of money.

QUOTE: "A welcome outcome of the financial crisis is that it has made very plain the need to return to the values of acting responsibly when it comes to your money. You now understand why it's important to have an emergency savings fund at a federally insured bank or credit union. You now know you need to shift your retirement savings into high gear. You now truly appreciate the urgency of getting out from under the credit card industry and paying off your balances once and for all."

— Eileen AJ Connelly

TITLE: Don't Buy the Bull: Dispelling Disastrous Investment Advice and Money Myths in Our New Economy

AUTHOR: Cassandra Toroian

PRICE: $19.95

SUMMARY: Cassandra Toroian, chief investment officer with the money management firm Bell Rock Capital, seeks to debunk 23 financial and investing myths that she says have become pervasive. Toroian faults other personal finance experts for perpetuating outdated advice. For example, she argues that buy-and-hold investing for the long-term doesn't work in an era when many blue chip names like Lehman Brothers and General Motors can collapse or end up in bankruptcy court.

She also challenges the notion that dividend-paying stocks are almost always a good long-term play. And, contrary to conventional wisdom, not all debt is bad. The book is written in a conversational style. So even if you don't accept her provocative arguments, you can zip through the 128 pages and decide for yourself without investing too much time.

QUOTE: "The old-world myth of buy and hold for a long, long time — no matter how great of a company we are talking about — is just a bad idea. Technology advances too quickly; it is impossible to say today's high-flying tech company will be tomorrow's superstar."

PUBLISHER: Sterling & Ross

— Mark Jewell

TITLE: Your Career Game: How Game Theory Can Help You Achieve Your Professional Goals

AUTHORS: Nathan Bennett and Stephen A. Miles

PRICE: $24.95

SUMMARY: Game theory is a discipline usually applied in warfare and reality TV shows like "Survivor" and "The Apprentice," where rivals try to outsmart one another. Nathan Bennett, a management professor at Georgia Tech, and Stephen Miles, vice chairman of the executive search firm Hedrick & Struggles, argue game theory also holds important lessons for professionals climbing the career ladder. The authors have advised top executives, and found that even their seemingly accidental career moves had a certain logic behind them. The book features interviews with those executives, who explain how they got where they are, and the lessons learned. One recurring theme: Think several moves ahead about how your next career step might help you reach your ultimate goal. Despite the currently tough job market, the authors advise against haphazardly jumping at the next career opportunity. First, evaluate your competitors for the position, identify potential mentors, survey the job marketplace, and consider where your career niche is heading.

QUOTE: "Game theory helps us frame the career game — to understand its rules, boundaries, and ways of winning. Then, understanding career agility — a characteristic that individuals can develop — is explained as the key ability to playing the game well. Each is necessary, and neither is sufficient on its own, to win at the game of your career."

PUBLISHER: Stanford University Press

— Mark Jewell

AP review: The End of Wall Street

The Associated Press reviews a biz book with a flair for the dramatic:

Writer doesn't spare criticism in Wall St. book

By Carl Hartman

Associated Press Writer

"The End of Wall Street (The Penguin Press, 364 pages, $27.95), by Roger Lowenstein:

"The End of Wall Street" is a good book: witty, well-written, heavily researched and often dramatic. But a more accurate title might have been "Mistakes and Misdeeds of American Private Finance Over the Past Few Years and First Attempts to Rectify Them, Which It's Too Soon to Evaluate."

That's not catchy, but "end" is an awfully final word in public affairs; just as America's connections with Britain haven't come to an end despite all the grievances in the Declaration of Independence, neither of two widely differing views on Wall Street means that business people have ended or should end trading or investing.

There's View A: Wall Street is an institution that has helped over more than two centuries to build the financial framework of the richest and most powerful country the world has ever seen. It deserves support to go on doing so, despite stumbles.

View B: Wall Street consists of greedy speculators who have enriched themselves by manipulating bits of paper, which they sometimes misunderstood. Most recently they've done it at the expense of millions of people in the U.S. and abroad. These people, sometimes through their own greed or ignorance, have lost or risk losing jobs, homes, savings, visions of a comfortable old age and the means of giving their children a good education.

In a capitalist economy, financiers will nevertheless go on making deals, even if stricter government regulation hampers them. If they flee from Wall Street, they'll still be much the same people with the same jobs.

Author Roger Lowenstein, veteran of over a decade on The Wall Street Journal, tries to keep an even hand, but doesn't spare criticism.

"Less than a generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall," he writes. "The United States was compelled to socialize credit and mortgage risk, and even the ownership of banks on a scale that would have made Lenin smile," an allusion to the leader of the Russian communists who overthrew a moderate government and socialized virtually all of Russia's industry almost a century ago. "The massive fiscal remedies (applied recently in the U.S.) evidenced both the failure of an ideology and the eclipse of Wall Street's golden age."

Wall Streeters may draw cheer from recalling that President Barack Obama's government wants to sell off to private interests the stocks it has acquired during the recession. Eclipses don't last long. The weekly Economist calculates that on the March 9 anniversary of a low point in the Standard and Poor index of 500 stocks, the level had risen by almost 70 percent over the past year.