“We’ve got to laugh,” Cosby told Dan Rather on the “CBS Evening News,” varying the theme of laughter-as-healing throughout the interview. His 27-year-old son, Ennis, had been shot on a Los Angeles roadside. Autumn Jackson, 22, became a tabloid star days later for claiming to be Cosby’s daughter and allegedly attempting to extort $24 million from him. Cosby admitted adultery (though not paternity), making the sin sound classier by calling it a “rendezvous.” Then, on Friday, he resumed taping his CBS sitcom. And on Saturday he honored a commitment to perform at a sold-out show in West Palm Beach, Fla. “This is not difficult for me,” he told his elderly audience. “Because a part of my lifetime has been you all.” Cosby’s way of dealing with tragedy has been to conduct comedy as usual. Why?
Rather oozed empathy but picked up the key detail from his two-hour session with the Cos (a planned “60 Minutes” segment that was ultimately aborted). When asked on “CBS This Morning” why Cosby had called and requested an interview, Rather said Cosby’s “No. 1” reason was that people who recognized him as he was driving into New York “reacted to him in a sad way.” Sad, as Cosby must know, not only because of Ennis but because of the tarnish on his image as the perfect paterfamilias of “The Cosby Show,” the author of “Fatherhood”–a man so trusted he could sell Jell-O.
Fame sometimes seems like a two-way mirror through which we, the fans, see the famous while they see only a reflection of themselves. Not true, of course. Cosby agonistes is instructive for many reasons, not the least of which is that it proves he needs us as much as we ever needed him.
