A Childhood Filled with Music : Part 1

Angel on My Shoulder: An Autobiography
by Natalie Cole, Digby Diehl

Sizzlingly talented, yet fragile... achieving, yet insecure... responsible, yet reckless-Natalie Cole has been there and done it all. Her comeback album won an unprecedented seven Grammys as her marriage collapsed into jealousy and abuse. She has known both glittering privilege as a member of one of Hollywood's most famous families-and poverty on the streets of Manhattan.

Now Natalie tells her uniquely insightful, deeply personal story. As the daughter of legendary singer Nat King Cole and an elegantly reserved, upwardly striving mother, Natalie was a tomboy who delighted in mischief and music. As a little girl, she unexpectedly wandered onstage during one of her father's performances and often sneaked into his casual jam sessions with Louis Armstrong and other celebrated artists. As she grew older and after her father died, her love of music and sense of adventure led her to risk a singing career of her own-even as unresolved grief helped drive her into heroin and cocaine addiction and homelessness.

Through sheer stubbornness and, in Natalie's words, "the grace of God," she managed to forge a career, marry, and have a son. But the roller-coaster ride was far from over. Divorce, a return to drugs, and a devastating career crash lay ahead. Then, after a six-year struggle to finally get clean, she released her smash comeback album, Unforgettable, made Grammy history, and reintroduced her father's music to a new generation. Yet amid her good fortune, life would hand her several more overwhelming challenges: another terrible family tragedy, another divorce, and a very public dispute with her mother over her father's estate.

Unsparingly honest and irreverent, Angel On My Shoulder will both turn your head with its revelations and make you laugh out loud from Natalie's irrepressible sense of humor. It is a book that shows you the incredible life of an artist and addict, daughter and mother, lover and wife, singer and star-story of a woman always struggling to become the best she was meant to be.

Chapter 1

Singers are often asked about their musical influences, and for someone with a famous musician for a father, this question is one of the most common. But when people ask me if my father sang for me as a child, they seem disappointed by the truth: He never sang us romantic ballads like "Mona Lisa." He sang gibberish songs that gave us kids a bad case of the giggles, and crazy rhyme-and-sound songs, like the ones I learned later at summer camp. These all had the kind of completely silly lyrics that children have loved forever. There was one about an elephant that jumped so high, high, high over the sky, sky, sky, and another one that started "Miss Sue, Miss Sue, somebody's in your cellar." He did sing one little nonsense I-love-you song that he'd recorded, called "Kee Mo Ky Mo" (which was the flip side of "Sweet Lorraine"). Before I was born, he actually did an entire album, King Cole for Kids (1948), that was nothing but children's songs.

I cherish these memories, and I love the fact that when he was home, he was just being Dad. He wasn't performing. I think that because he was so serious with his career, when he was with us, he just wanted to play. That's part of the blessing and the burden I inherited as a birthright. The blessing was that when he was home, he really spent what has become known as quality time with us. The flip side of that was that he was gone for weeks, sometimes months, at a time. When you make your living as a singer, you have to go where the gigs are.

I don't remember him once singing seriously at home with just the family, but it was always a special treat when he'd bring home acetates of new recordings he had just worked on in the studio at Capitol that day. (Capitol Records headquarters is on Vine Street in Hollywood, in a building that looks like a stack of LPs. To this day it is known as "The House That Nat Built.") Dad would play them in the library on his beautiful custom-made Seeburg Selectomatic sound system. This was a very frou-frou home jukebox, ultra-high-tech for its day, the first of its kind. Once you selected what you wanted to hear, it played it automatically. It was all in gold, with a big glass you could see through. We were never allowed near it, but after dinner, Mom and her sister, my Aunt Charlotte, and some friends would join him to sit around and discuss the new songs he brought home. When I got invited to listen, I felt very grown-up.

Dad's music was great, but then there were so many great sounds that came into our ears when I was a child, so much wonderful music. There was always music playing at our house in one room or another. Every afternoon, my mother would go into the library and select something to listen to. It might be Sarah Vaughan, or Nancy Wilson, or the Jackie Gleason Orchestra, or Billie Holiday. My parents wanted us to have this cacophony of musical styles-jazz, classical, Broadway, rock, opera, pop, you name it. And we would catch every note of it. Early on I was madly in love with Elvis Presley. Dad wasn't into it at all, at least not for himself as a performer. He used to say, "Mr. Cole does not rock 'n' roll." But Baba, my Aunt Charlotte, knew how much I loved Elvis (and his music), and took me to one of his shows at the Palladium. After that I slept with the souvenir booklet from the concert under my pillow. I really feel so fortunate that my mom and dad didn't censor our musical experience, because it has had a strong influence on my life and career.

Dad would bring home all kinds of music for us in his eclectic manner. He made a point of driving to a small record store in the poorest, blackest part of South Central Los Angeles, where he could purchase records by Moms Mabley, Redd Foxx, blues singers, and other performers who were only available on "race records" that were not sold in the regular record stores.

Capitol often gave him copies of their latest releases- sometimes in the candid hope that he would like a song and record it himself. That was one place where we really lucked out-Capitol was also the Beatles' label, and I was thrilled when Dad came home from work with the one album every teenage girl coveted: Meet the Beatles. I was a head-over-heels Beatles fan. (Back then every teenage girl had a favorite Beatle. Mine was John.)

So I was the first on my block to have the Beatles album, and, honey, it was one helluva block. We lived at 401 South Muirfield Road in Hancock Park, one of the most exclusive neighborhoods of Los Angeles. This was where the Shells of Shell Oil lived, the Chandlers (who owned the Los Angeles Times), the Van de Kamps, the family that owned the Von's supermarket chain, and Governor Pat Brown and his family. It was also where the Los Angeles chapter of the John Birch Society held its meetings.

How exclusive? So exclusive that the neighbors tried mightily to exclude my parents when they first bought the house in 1948. It was a mansion by anyone's definition of the word-all brick, twelve rooms, three fireplaces, very East Coast-looking and just what my mother wanted, but there was one teensy problem. It seems that there was a restrictive covenant that went with the title to every house in Hancock Park, limiting ownership in the neighborhood to white folks who celebrated Christmas. Negroes, Jews, people of "ethnic persuasions," and other "undesirables" were barred.

When the Hancock Park Property Owners Association heard that my parents had bought it, they called a meeting. The neighbors graciously invited my father to attend, but only to inform him why he couldn't live there. They actually told my dad that they didn't want any undesirables moving in. "Neither do I," he responded in the oft-repeated family story, "and if I see any, I'll be sure to let you know." After a great deal of legal maneuvering and a letter from my mother to Eleanor Roosevelt about the unfairness of it all, and despite a couple of shots fired through the front windows and a sign hammered into the lawn that read "Nigger Heaven," my parents moved in. Well, there goes the neighborhood.

All this was before I was born. By the time I arrived, the neighborhood had adjusted to us, more or less, but we were still the only black people for miles around. I was born Natalie Maria Cole at 6:07 P.M. on February 6, 1950, at what was then called Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. I weighed in at seven pounds eleven ounces. I was my parents' firstborn child, but I have an older sister, Carole, also known as Cookie, and that takes some explaining.

My mother, Maria, had two sisters, Carol and Charlotte. Carol married and had a daughter, but died of tuberculosis in May of 1949. Since her husband had died the year before, her four-year-old daughter, Cookie, was an orphan. My parents adopted her and brought her home to Hancock Park right about the time my mother realized she was pregnant with me. Carole got the nickname "Cookie" from my father's favorite comic strip, Blondie-Cookie was Dagwood's daughter. After I was born, my mother's other sister, my Aunt Charlotte, also came to Los Angeles and was instrumental in raising us. Cookie and I called her Baba. We all loved the comics and we referred to Mom and Baba as black versions of Betty and Veronica from Archie.

A singer and poet, Baba was the free spirit on my mother's side of the family. Since Mom traveled so much with Dad, Baba was like a mom to us when we were growing up. She didn't have to be a disciplinarian, she could just be the favorite auntie, and that's what she was. Baba also handled the family business affairs and correspondence, made Dad's appointments, and kept his calendar. She had her own home and didn't live with us when they were touring-we had nannies and maids for that-but Cookie and I saw her every day. Most important of all, Baba was a great cook and we loved to hang out in the kitchen with her.

Mom and Dad took Cookie into their hearts as well as their home, and the two of us were truly raised as sisters. We were pals, but we were different in many ways. She was the little lady, and I was the tomboy. For much of my childhood, we had Mom and Dad to ourselves.

Copyright © 2000 by Natalie Cole

About the Author

Natalie Cole has made numerous TV appearances, including her own PBS special. In addition, she has been featured in People, InStyle, and Entertainment Weekly, among others.

Digby Diehl is the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller The Million Dollar Mermaid, as well as several other notable celebrity biographies.