The fallout from the issue was, as Cassidy himself puts it, “seismic.” Coca-Cola pulled its sponsorship of a Cassidy television special. Then I realized he was asking, ‘Can I get some help over here?'” He implied that he wanted me to perform some sex act on him. We shot it at my house in Los Angeles.”Īdds Leibovitz: “People always ask me, ‘Where’s the picture of his penis?’ I never shot that far down. “I didn’t tell my management I was doing that,” Cassidy said. Perhaps even more controversial than the text was Leibovitz’s cover shot in which a nude Cassidy lies on his back in the grass, the barest tuft of pubic hair visible just below his navel, next to the headline “Naked Lunch Box.” But I wasn’t.” (Counters Green: “I’m not sure why I would’ve put that in if he hadn’t been doing it.
“I thought it was a very good piece,” Cassidy later told Rolling Stone in 2006 while he was on tour, though he insists, “I wasn’t getting high at the time.
The piece details five days on the road with the young star, during which he smokes pot, encounters bisexual groupies, talks about the “sticky seats” left by his excited fans and impersonates an interviewer: “‘Being as you have an influence on young folks today, what advice do you have for them about drugs?’ Aw, shit, man, take drugs.” However much Cassidy hoped to shake up his career, Green’s hilarious article may have been more than he bargained for. “It was a very conscious decision to shed his image and become hip,” recalls Robin Green, who wrote Cassidy’s controversial 1972 cover story.