Cosby: His Life and Times - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Whitaker is the former editor of Newsweek and the first African American to lead a national newsweekly. He then served as Washington Bureau Chief for NBC News and Managing Editor of CNN Worldwide. Whitaker’s memoir My Long Trip Home was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His social histories Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance and Saying it Loud: 1966—The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement were both named among the best nonfiction books of the year by The Washington Post. 

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Cosby

Prologue

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

Thank you for my childhood!” a petite, thirty-something white woman calls out when she sees Bill Cosby in the Richmond International Airport. She does it from a distance and keeps walking, as though she doesn’t want to intrude on his privacy, but she is an exception. Most of the travelers who recognize Cosby as he makes his way from New York City to Virginia for a concert date in Richmond want to come over and meet him, to shake his hand, to have a picture taken with him, to share details of their own lives as though he was a familiar visitor to their homes—which, of course, for much of four decades he was.

Like a walking tour of his career, the encounters recall its most treasured landmarks. In the airport lounge at LaGuardia Airport, a businessman wearing a blue blazer waxes nostalgic about listening to the comedy albums and watching I Spy as a kid. “Lifelong fan!” he says, pumping Cosby’s hand. “What a treat for an old fucker like me!” As Cosby is driven to the gate in a motorized cart, devotees of the Saturday morning cartoon show chant “Hey, hey, hey!” On the plane, a flight attendant blurts out, “Oh my god, I loved Jell-O Pudding Pops!” And at the terminal in Richmond, a smartly dressed black man wants to declare his kinship with his most famous character.

“Mr. Cosby,” he says. “My name is Cliff!”

“No, no, no, you can’t be Cliff,” Cosby responds in mock indignation. “I’m Cliff!”

Others want him to know about more personal connections. A curvaceous blonde woman wraps him in an embrace as he is about to duck into an airport restroom. “Thank you so much for what you’ve done for dyslexia!” she gushes. “I have a dyslexic son!”

As Cosby descends an escalator, a harried-looking mother who is standing below with a young boy in tow suddenly brightens up and breaks into song:

Let others sing of college days,

Their Alma Mater true,

But when we raise our voices,

’Tis only High for you!

Stepping off the escalator, Cosby puts his arm around the woman’s shoulder and joins in:

We’ll ne’er forget those days gone by,

Those glorious days of old,

When we sang the praises of,

The Crimson and the Gold!

The woman still hasn’t announced her name, but she pushes her son forward to shake his hand as if he were an old family friend. “This is Mr. Cosby!” she says. “He went to Central High, just like Mommy!”

Near the door marked “Exit,” three men in pressed green uniforms wait to greet him. Cosby’s airport escort has alerted him in advance, so he calls out: “Where are the Marines? Come over and take a picture!”

“You know I was a marine, too, a merchant marine!” he jokes as the cameras snap.

“Really?” one of the servicemen asks.

“Navy!” he establishes for the record. “Hospital corpsman!”

Now everyone who passes by wants a picture, too, so he spends the next ten minutes posing with all of them, as the driver assigned to take him to the hotel hovers on the curb outside.

“We’re such big fans!” says a woman in a sun hat who pulls her husband over to join the receiving line, and as soon as Cosby hears her bubbly voice, he senses an amusing exchange coming on.

“So I hope you bought a ticket to my concert tonight!” he says.

“You’re giving a concert?” the woman says. “Well, we’d love to come, but we’re just passing through.”

“To where?” he asks.

“We’re going on a cruise!” she says.

“So what three games do you like to play on the cruise?”

“Eating and drinking!”

“That’s only two. What about shuffleboard or blackjack?”

“Eating and drinking and sunbathing!”

“How often do you go on cruises?”

“About three times a year!”

“Do you have children?”

“No.”

“That’s why you can afford the cruise, he-he-he!” Cosby jokes.

In an age of celebrity obsession and cell phone cameras, the sight of fans thronging a famous entertainer is not unusual, yet there is something different about this picture. To begin with, Bill Cosby is in his midseventies now. He is still fit for his age, with the erect posture of a former track star and only a slight paunch. But the balding head and the white stubble and the wrinkled jowls are very much the features of a grandfather, which he has been for a decade.

Still here he is, on the road performing at an age when most men are retired, if they’re lucky enough to still be alive. And he isn’t doing it occasionally, coming out of seclusion for a brief tour every decade or headlining a few charity events a year. The dates he is playing this weekend—an eight o’clock show on Friday night in Richmond and two back-to-back seven o’clock and nine thirty shows on Saturday in Greenville, South Carolina—are three of more than sixty concerts he will give in 2013, and he is already lining up just as busy a schedule for 2014 and 2015.

Despite his age and fame, Cosby is also traveling alone. He has no entourage: no bodyguard, no publicist, not even a baggage handler. He carries his luggage himself—a leather duffle bag and a matching knapsack—and wears the clothes he will perform in this evening: brown lounging pants, sandals and socks, and a white sweatshirt emblazoned with “Hello, Friend” in bright, multicolored letters. The housekeeper of his town house in Manhattan has accompanied him to the airport in New York and helped him get to the gate, and his concert promoter is there to greet him when he gets off the plane in Richmond. But otherwise he puts himself in the hands of employees of the commercial airline industry: the flight attendants (who fuss over or flirt with him), the pilots (who come out of the cockpit to get his autograph), and the security personnel (who ask him to pose for pictures while pleading with him not to tell their bosses).

Even more remarkable, Cosby can barely see these people, or the scores of other facilitators and fans he will encounter on this trip, or the thousands of people in the audiences he will entertain. For two decades, he has battled a rare form of glaucoma that for a while clouded over one eye so badly that he took to wearing dark glasses in public. After multiple operations, the eye looks much better now, and he can go without the shades, which is a huge relief for a man who will tell you: “I perform with my face.” But he still can’t make out objects more than ten feet away. So as he travels across America, for more than thirty weeks out of the year, he has to navigate with other tools beside his vision: his acute senses of hearing, of smell, and of intuition about what lies in the fog beyond his sight.

Although Cosby’s eyesight may be failing, he can already envision what historians will say about him. They will focus, rightly, on his iconic place in the annals of television. They will describe him as the first black man to star in a TV drama—I Spy—and talk about all the other roles for African Americans that the success of that show made possible. They will analyze his contributions to...