A Childhood Filled with Music : Part 2

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

(Page 2 of 2)

Even though they nicknamed me Sweetie, I wasn't altogether an easy kid. I didn't consider myself a particularly rebellious child, but I think if you asked my mom, she would probably choose her words very carefully and say that I was very independent. Independent and sassy and my own person: That's me. Early on, if you compared my behavior with my sister's, I was the one who would challenge my mother, and that was something you just didn't do. Especially in the era that we were brought up in, you just didn't do that. But I made friends easily, I was a sociable person, a pretty good kid, and I did well in school. She really didn't have a lot of discipline problems with me.

Not that I didn't have other problems. Ever since I was born, I've been allergic to almost everything. My allergist once told me I should live in a bubble. I was allergic to milk when I was born, and had to be fed on soy and goat's milk. Even so, I was a fat, happy baby. I was so fat that I didn't walk until I was nearly one and a half years of age. After that there was a conga line of substances that left me scratching, sneezing, and wheezing. I was allergic to chocolate, and I was allergic to acids like orange juice or anything citrus. I was allergic to wool; I was allergic to mohair; and I was super-allergic to weeds and pollens. I still am to this day.

I was allergic to the boxer dogs that my father loved dearly. I really don't remember the day when the renowned CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow "visited" us for his television show, Person to Person, but the boxers were just puppies, and they were on TV with us. What most people don't know is that although Murrow seems to be having a conversation with us, we were in Hancock Park, and he was in a studio in New York. He couldn't see us and we couldn't see him. I do have a photograph of the four of us-me, Cookie, and Mom and Dad-with the four adorable little boxer puppies in our laps. On the tape, Mr. Murrow asked me which of them I wanted to keep, and I gave the three-year- old's predictable response: "All of them!"

I was also allergic to our cat. One day, a cat just showed up on our doorstep. He was a good-looking black and white alley cat, and we named him Handsome. He and I were inseparable, despite the fact that I was severely allergic to him. I just kept popping my asthma pills and tried to ignore my wheezing. Handsome slept with me and ate with me and did everything except take baths with me for about six months. Then, one day, the front door was open and he just sauntered out, more or less the same way he had arrived. My mother called him, and she said that he stopped in the driveway and looked back at her as if to say, "Ta-ta. It's been lovely. Thank you very much. See you later." And we never saw him again.

I had a happy childhood, in the sense of creature comforts- Cookie and I were indulged not just with cats and dogs, but with pretty clothes, ice skating lessons, horseback riding lessons, piano lessons, and all the trappings befitting a cultured household. This came from my mother's side of the family, specifically from my Great-Aunt Lala.

Great-Aunt Lala was Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown, and she was somebody. The granddaughter of slaves, Lala is a significant figure in black American history. She was born in Henderson, North Carolina, in 1883, moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a child, and was educated at the Salem State Normal School. Returning to North Carolina as a teacher, in 1902 she founded the Palmer Memorial Institute, one of the first prep schools for African-Americans, in Sedalia, North Carolina. (The school was named for her friend and patron Alice Freeman Palmer, the first woman president of Wellesley College.)

By the time she died in 1961, Charlotte Hawkins Brown was a nationally recognized educator, lecturer, and religious leader. She was a friend and colleague of Eleanor Roosevelt, Langston Hughes, W. E. B. DuBois, and Booker T. Washington. Mom and Baba attended Palmer and stayed with Aunt Lala at her home, which she called Canary Cottage. When the Hancock Park neighbors didn't want my family to move in, my mother didn't just take it into her head to write to Eleanor Roosevelt out of the blue-when she was a girl, Mrs. Roosevelt had been a familiar visitor to Aunt Lala's home.

Great-Aunt Lala was also the author of a book on etiquette, The Correct Thing, and she was a powerful influence on my mother's thinking about manners, proper dress, social status, education, and general behavior. Proper is the operative word here. Under Lala's tutelage, Mom was trained to be a lady, to be comfortable in sophisticated social surroundings. She knew how to sip tea, and how to set a table. She had excellent posture and dressed in quiet good taste. Her English was (and is) impeccable-no bad grammar, no oozy Southern drawl, no vulgarity. By the time she was finished at Palmer, whatever rough edges my mother might have had were all sanded off. She had better manners than anyone else in Hancock Park-hell, she had better manners than 99 percent of the folks on the planet. You might think of Lala as the quintessential Henry Higgins, and like Eliza Doolittle, my elegant mother would have passed for a duchess at any snooty patootie society ball, even though her father had been a mailman.

I really looked up to her. She was very much a lady, and I loved getting into her dressing room and being surrounded by all her perfumes and makeup. She always smelled good and she was bigger than life to me, which is ironic, because when I think of my dad I don't think of him the same way. She was very organized, and she was very formal, yet she loved to host parties, and she didn't mind too much if we were around. She didn't cook, but we had great meals. My mom gave me all the femininity and all the prissiness that I have, and her wonderful taste and class, most of which she herself learned at Lala's knee.

Lala was big on culture, and young ladies were supposed to develop their talents in the arts. It seems to me that I always had a big box of pastels, but I liked it better than I was good-couldn't draw worth a lick. I was always buying new chalks and a big canvas and going at it, even though I was never really good at it. Reading was another matter. As soon as I learned how to read, I devoured books like a lunatic.

We had a set of the Childcraft books in our library when I was a child, and I loved browsing in them. My favorites were the poetry volumes. There were some wonderful, sweet poems in those Childcraft books, and I recall the feeling of how innocent and refreshing they were. I would read those poems hour after hour. I even wrote my own poetry sometimes. At some point Dad gave me my first tape recorder-it was one of those beige reel-to-reel Wollensaks that weighed a ton, even though it was no bigger than a toaster. I'd read the Childcraft poems or my own poetry into the tape recorder. I don't think that I ever used more than one reel of tape. I just kept erasing and re-recording. It never occurred to me to change it.

Sometimes I would put music to the words. I'd find my favorite poems in the Childcraft books, and then I would make up little melodies to go along with them. This is when I started driving my mother crazy, because I'd recycle the same melody over and over for every poem. The hardest part was singing and playing at the same time, so I would end up with maybe four chords and all my songs would sound the same. For a grown-up with sophisticated musical taste, it must have been like fingernails on a blackboard, and one day she snapped, "Can't you come up with anything else!" I was not discouraged-I loved to sit at that piano and take those little poems and try to make a melody- even if it was always the same. That's where a little bit of the desire was planted in me to write songs. I don't know whether it was the music or the stories, but the process was interesting to me. I would sing into the microphone and listen to the playback. It was a big giggle for me, but I certainly wasn't dreaming of a career as a singer.

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.