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  Contents

  Prologue: On the Road Again

  PART ONE

  1. Granddad Samuel’s Bible

  2. A Place in the Projects

  3. Lost in Germantown

  4. The Navy Way

  5. The Bar at Temple

  6. “Noah” in the Village

  7. Two Blind Dates

  8. “Riggie” in Chicago

  9. “Sheldon’s Folly”

  10. “Television’s Jackie Robinson”

  11. Mr. Crosley and Mr. Cups

  12. A World of “Wonderfulness”

  13. Bigger Than I Spy

  PART TWO

  14. Black Is Beautiful

  15. Bust in Beverly Hills

  16. More Situation Than Comedy

  17. Fat Albert’s New Home

  18. Playboy of the West

  19. The Art of Jell-O

  20. “Meet Your New Family”

  21. The Serfs of Flatbush

  22. The Master at Work

  23. “It’s Not an Invention”

  24. “A Vein of Gold”

  25. Ennis and Theo

  PART THREE

  26. A Gift Marked Tiffany

  27. Nightmare Off the 405

  28. The Trials of “Job”

  29. A Death in the TV Family

  30. Prophet of Pound Cake

  31. “The Cosby Effect”

  Epilogue: The Long-Distance Runner

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  Cosbyography

  About Mark Whitaker

  Notes

  Photo Credits

  Index

  For my mother, Jeanne Theis Whitaker

  And in memory of my grandmother, Edith McColes Whitaker

  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 children’s educational television with his early appearances on Sesame Street and The Electric Company, as well as his own creations Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids and Little Bill.

  Most of all, cultural historians will measure the seismic impact of The Cosby Show on the entertainment industry and on American society. They will document how it revived the situation comedy format and laid the groundwork for other shows built around comedic personas, such as Roseanne and Seinfeld. And they will point out how, by implanting such a positive image of black family life in the national consciousness, it helped Americans envision sending a black president and his wife and daughters to live in the White House less than two decades later.

  If you ask Cosby about them now, he will tell you how proud he is of his groundbreaking shows. But he will also say the same thing about many other TV and movie ventures that were deemed disappointments or flops. He is grateful for the extra measure of fame and wealth that television has afforded him, and he still likes to think that he has another show or two in him. As he waits to board the flight to Richmond, he imagines a prime-time drama about a Good Samaritan swat team that turns around the lives of troubled inner-city kids, and within months he will be pitching a new sitcom in which he would play grandfather in a multigenerational family to NBC and also developing a Fat Albert project with the Henson Muppet dynasty.

  For all the attention TV success won him, however, Cosby has always known that it is fleeting. What has lasted is what he is doing now, and has done consistently for more than fifty years: stand-up comedy. (Or more precisely, sit-down comedy, since he began his career perched on a chair at the end of a Philadelphia bar and still prefers to perform in a seated position.) Stand-up is what lifted Cosby’s sights beyond becoming a junior high school gym teacher. It’s what led to his biggest breaks in television and sustained him through his worst stumbles. And it’s what first made him rich and still earns him millions of dollars a year, even though with a personal fortune in investments and real estate and artwork valued at close to a half billion dollars, he hardly needs to work.

  Which raises an interesting question: why does Cosby continue to perform so much? (Beside the fact that it gets him out of the house and gives him the satisfaction of meeting and entertaining so many fans?) Is he is trying to retire the all-time record for stand-up, perhaps?

  “No idea,” he says with a dismissive shrug when asked if he knows how many comedy concerts he’s given in his lifetime.

  Then can he think of anyone else who has given more?

  This question interests him, and he takes a minute to ponder the possibilities. (How many performers have lasted for a half century? And of that small number, how many have had the desire and the fortitude and the fan base to continue to tour successfully?)

  “Victor Borge?” he ventures finally. “He was out there for a long time! Don Rickles, maybe . . .”

  He thinks a bit longer.

  “Liberace!” he says. “Remember what they said about him? Liberace sold out wherever he went, but they said it wouldn’t last. They said his audiences wouldn’t be there next year. Then he’d come back, and he’d still be sold out. So I guess they kept making new old people!”

  As Cosby nestles into an aisle seat on the flight to Richmond, he confesses that business over the last decade hasn’t always been easy. Ever since the 1960s, he has worked a circuit of venues that seat 1,500 to 3,000 people, his preferred size. (Less than that, he says, and it’s hard to make real money; more, and audiences in the back come away thinking, I might as well have had an 8-by-10 glossy.) The venues include the casinos of Las Vegas and concert halls of New York and Washington, DC; but most are the college auditoriums, regional playhouses, and athletic arenas found in smaller cities and towns, and sometimes it’s been hard to pack those houses.

  Some in the concert business have whispered that Cosby’s age was a factor in the falloff, or the intimidating sunglasses he wore for a while, or uneasiness with the outspoken stands he’s taken on the failures of parenting and personal responsibility in parts of the black community. But he blames the impact of economic policies in Washington on his core audience of baby boomers. “After Clinton, the bottom fell out, and the weight was particularly heavy on the fifty-five-year-olds,” he says. Things got even worse once the Great Recession of 2008 hit—“the last four years have not been pretty,” he says—although lately the tide has turned, and ticket sales are up again. Still, he says, “The golden age is over.”

  If Cosby seems so sensitive to how well his concerts sell, it’s not just a matter of pride. Like most star entertainers, he gets paid up front, so he makes a good living whether his promoters do or not. But he is famous—or notorious, among agents—for going into his own pocket to bail out the people who put up the money to stage his concerts if they stand to lose money. It’s partly because he knows what a tough business it is. “I tell promoters, ‘I didn’t go into this so you could go broke,’ ” he says. But he also sees it as a way of winning their loyalty and protecting his own mystique.

  He tells the story of a benefit concert he gave to help fund a new wing for a children’s hospital in the 1980s. He was the biggest star in America at the time, with the top-rated show on television, a book at the top of the bestseller list, a ranking as the most highly paid celebrity in the country and his own private G4 jet that took him wherever he wanted. But the promoter of the concert was a “grunt,” the son of a rich businessman who had fronted him the six figures to book Cosby. He didn’t know what he was doing, and when Cosby arrived, he learned that a quarter of the house would be empty.

  “Bring the kid in,” he told his agent from William Morris. “I want to talk to him.”

  “Don’t give money back!” the agent warned. “This is his fault.”

  Dressed in his tuxedo, the promoter appeared in the dressing room minutes later. Cosby could see his agent fuming, so he kicked him out.

  “Sit down, son,” he said to the promoter. “How are you doing?”

  “We’re a little short,” the promoter confessed.

  “Well, I want you to go the box office and find out exactly how short,” he said.

  The promoter did as he was told, and as he left the room, Cosby could see his agent hovering outside, his face flushed with anger.

  “Fifty-five thousand dollars,” the promoter reported when he got back.

  “How much would it take to make you whole, given your other expenses?” Cosby asked.

  “Probably sixty thousand dollars,” the promoter admitted.

  “Okay,” he said, “here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to let you cut sixty-five thousand dollars out of my fee, so you come out even and can tell Daddy you made a profit.”

&nbs
p; When the promoter left, Cosby’s agent came back into the dressing room, still fit to be tied.

  “You shouldn’t have done that!” he said. “The kid needs to learn a lesson!”

  “Listen!” Cosby snapped. “What is this benefit for?”

  “A children’s hospital?” the agent said.

  “Well, think about this,” Cosby said. “William Morris can’t pay to get back the bad publicity I would get if I were to take the entire fee you negotiated, get on my private plane, and fly home while leaving this hospital more than fifty thousand dollars in debt. There’s no way I can win here.”

  In the car from the airport to downtown Richmond, Cosby explains why he gravitated toward the kind of mass-appeal observational humor that is his specialty and didn’t go in for the kind of clubby, cerebral comedy that was fashionable when he was starting out in Greenwich Village—the kind designed to show audiences how smart the comedian is. “People forget that the second word in show business is business,” he says.

  The fact that he never has—that he’s a master of the show and the business—explains why Cosby has risen so far and lasted so long, but it’s also a lesson he learned the hard way. In his early thirties, just when he had become a huge star, he almost went broke when his manager squandered millions of dollars of his money on a mismanaged production company. He had to pull out and turn over supervision of his financial affairs to his wife, Camille, and ever since, he’s been prepared to do legal battle with anyone—business associates, would-be copyright infringers, even personal employees—whom he suspects of trying to take advantage of him.

  Experiences with the media have only compounded his wariness. As far as Cosby is concerned, it’s been annoying enough that for fifty years reporters and critics have persisted in dwelling on the presence—or lack—of racial themes in his work, when he’s always viewed himself as searching for universal humor that can touch anyone. But in recent decades, he’s endured invasive coverage of a devastating family tragedy and an embarrassing personal scandal. He’s had to respond to what he sees as deliberately mean-spirited questioning of his lavish philanthropy and his advanced academic degrees. He makes no secret that he doesn’t trust reporters, and in return some of them have spiked coverage of him with words like angry and difficult to insinuate that there’s another side to his personality besides the soft and playful one so openly on display with fans and friends.