Cosby: No Laughing Matter

It seems that every time some heinous act against society is committed by the kid next door, the neighbors come out in droves to express their shock and dismay to the assembled media.

“I never would have thought…” they say. “Who knew?” they say. “He was such a nice…” they say.

Right now, I am one of those stricken and dismayed neighbors trying to digest the unthinkable, one of those neighbors in denial, one speaking those words after the conviction last month of Bill Cosby on three criminal charges whose unvarnished meanings are that he drugged and raped a woman. Testimony offered during the trial clearly suggests that she, Andrea Constand, wasn’t the only one. Allegedly, she is but one in a long, sad parade of unwitting and unwilling victims whose trust was betrayed by a sexual predator.

Those allegations dating back many years now ring true.

I have known Bill Cosby for almost forty years and I honestly must say that I never saw it coming.

We first met at the Playboy mansion in Holmby Hills, California, at an intimate gathering where we were enjoying a picnic lunch while watching an exhibition tennis match of professional players whose names I’ve long forgotten. Plans were being finalized for the second edition of the Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl, of which he was to continue his role as emcee, and whose festival magazine I had been named editor. There were world-class jazz musicians there that afternoon and press people and Hef, working the small crowd and awkwardly telling the jazz stories that I would come to write for him in the ensuing years.

Cos, who I always called Bill, was a lifelong jazz fan and an ardent supporter of education with demanding standards of deportment and behavior that were frequently seen as controversial. A high school drop-out, he pursued his education after a stint in the Navy while he pursued his career as a stand-up comic. He told jokes while he tended bar, plied his comedic trade at local nightclub showcases, and got noticed by the Hollywood producer Sheldon Leonard who gave him co-star billing with Robert Culp in a ground-breaking television show, “I, Spy,” that debuted in 1965.

Along the way Cosby earned both master’s and doctorate degrees in education from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Geri and I were newlyweds that long ago. She and Bill hit it off that sunny afternoon in early spring, delving deep into conversation about education and how that alone would be the best hope to offer salvation to the disenfranchised and the economically impoverished, many of whom held minority status on the American landscape.

He was serious, thoughtful and articulate, though his ghetto-speak “Hello” in response to one of Geri’s more salient points in their discussion confused her at the time.

Over the years we met Camille on several occasions and we watched their five children grow up. Our children grew up knowing Cosby as Uncle Bill. On occasion he would babysit Courtney while Geri and I grabbed some backstage dinner in the festival’s press room. Ennis, their only son, was murdered in 1997 on the side of the 405 freeway in Los Angeles. That same year, my great friend Mike Melvoin and his wife, Sandra, lost their son to an accidental drug overdose, and another friend lost her son, a Gulf War veteran, in an off-road motorcycle accident. Mike and Jonne-Marie and Bill happened to know each other in passing and they had occasion to share their tragic stories.

At twilight on Father’s Day that year, Bill, cupping his face in his hands, fought back tears as we sat next to each other on a wooden bench backstage at the Bowl and talked about that most unfathomable of losses. We agreed that parents should never have to bury their child.

Another year, sitting on that same bench and puffing on the cigars we still smoked then, two attractive young women approached us and proudly, enthusiastically announced, as they pointed at my friend, “You’re Bill Cosby!” He smiled and shook his head.

“Who are you?” one of them said to me.

“I’m Cliff Huxtable,” I answered.

Bill spun to his right, catching himself with his hand on the ground as he fell from the bench and lurched forward.

In this life, there are few things more gratifying than making a legendary comic laugh.

The rumors in those days had it that by traditional matrimonial standards, Bill was not a good boy. At the Playboy mansion, girls stood in line outside his second-floor apartment door, or so it’s been said. I didn’t know and I wouldn’t care to know as it was none of my business. One might only assume that if any or all of that were true he must have had some sort of agreement or understanding with Camille regarding his alleged serial infidelity.

Although it was a subject we never discussed–I am bored to death by stories detailing the sex lives of others–I also assumed that his apparent penchant for extra-marital sex might have been driven by mere opportunity.

I’ve come to believe that I am sadly wrong.

The stories that have come to light over the past few years provide darkly disturbing accounts that indicate something was awfully, tragically awry inside the psyche of a man whose observations about the human condition could be so deftly rendered as grand comedy. His comic brilliance made us laugh at ourselves, our neighbors and our families without our ever imaging that any of us were victims.

I never thought of Bill Cosby as “America’s Dad”–that iconic father figure for a seemingly wanting, if not needy culture. That was a title never cultivated by him but rather bestowed by others upon a comedic actor whose role in a sitcom as a physician married to a lawyer drew the racist ire of some who thought such a scenario was an unrealistic portrayal of African-Americans.

I also had never heard the stories that I’ve heard lately of his bragging about the supposed conquests of his victims. He certainly never bragged to me about such things. But then again, we had better things to talk about.

Over the course of many years, Bill and I joked a bit and we talked about family, race and politics, music and literature. Mostly we talked about jazz music and its players–a love we shared that deserved and owned our respect and reverence. His ideas were always thoughtful, his observations astute, his words measured. I took our friendship into my re-reading of James Baldwin and Richard Wright.

My admiration for his body of work will never change, and I will forever cherish the memories of a friendship. But everything else has  changed.

I’m sorry, old friend, that your life will probably end in a prison cell.

But I’m sorrier, so much sorrier, for the women you defiled with your heinous actions, whose trust you betrayed, whose bodies and souls you so wantonly violated. You betrayed your own sense of decency, and your sentence is only fitting.

By any measure you had everything, and for whatever reason it wasn’t enough. In the end and at your own doing, the tragic of your being outweighed the comic.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska