"I Do Believe in Control"

It is midmorning in Las Vegas, and already the desert heat is shimmering wetly on a running track not far from the casino strip. Here Bill Cosby is hurling himself through a series of sprints, his sturdy 6-ft. frame showing the form that won collegiate championships three decades earlier. The stride is long and smooth, and the pace is brisk through 300 meters (43 sec.) and 600 meters (1:48). Cosby beats his target times and beams with satisfaction. He rewards himself with a Cuban cigar the size of a relay baton and sets a faster goal for tomorrow.

At 50 Cosby is, as he would pronounce it, waaaaaay out front and still running hard. Already the most beloved and best-paid entertainer in America, he still works like a hungry journeyman: jetting from a movie set in San Francisco to a weeklong casino gig in Las Vegas to the taping of his TV series in New York to a benefit for black college students in Los Angeles. "Sure, sometimes I think I'm stretched thin," Cosby muses, pausing to pinch off the end of his Connoisseur Geant. "But I remember how my mother worked twelve- hour days cleaning other people's houses before coming home to take care of her own house and kids," and "all the things I did in college: running track, playing football, bartending, doing stand-up comedy" -- and still making the dean's list. By comparison, he concludes, "this is easy."

Cosby's drive, like much of his comic material, flows from his tough and tender upbringing in a north Philadelphia housing project. His family endured poverty and prejudice but did not surrender to illiteracy. The Cosby home echoed with the sounds of people making up funny stories and listening to others on the radio. Bill's mother Anna would tuck him and his three brothers into their pajamas, the kind with booties sewn in and flaps in the back, and read aloud from Twain and Swift, the brothers Grimm and the Bible.

Anna Cosby also passed along her eccentric way of viewing the commonplace. "She would tell me that if I swallowed the seeds along with the grapes, branches would grow out of my ears and the neighbors would hang laundry on them," Bill recalls. "She would warn that if I kept playing with my navel, it was going to pop out and all the air would spew out of my body and I'd fly around backwards, flopping around the room."

When Bill was nine, his father, a welder, joined the Navy and left home, returning only occasionally at first, and then not at all. The main man in the youngster's life became his maternal grandfather Samuel Russell. "He loved to tell stories that had some moral point about getting an education, working hard," Bill recalls, "but you'd hardly notice because he'd be so funny and ramble around so much." Russell encouraged the yarns of his precocious eldest grandson. At the end of a session, he would fish around in a sock full of change that was tied to his belt and reward him with the then princely sum of 25 cents. Already Cosby was learning that comedy could pay.

Feeling energized, Cosby returns from the track to his hotel at the wheel of a tan BMW. At a traffic light, a pair of adolescent girls stand rooted to the sidewalk, staring at Cosby. He mugs at them with that marvelously mobile mask of a face, flashing through half a dozen expressions, from idiocy to alarm, in as many seconds. The girls crack up, the light turns green and Cosby speeds away, chuckling with pleasure at his easy ability to make them laugh.

Unlike most comedians, who are "on" only when performing, Cosby is naturally funny for much of his waking day. In his 20s and 30s, he was notorious for his smoldering anger; he bristled at interviewers and once decked Comedian Tommy Smothers at a Playboy mansion party. But with age and prosperity, "he got a lot calmer," says his younger brother Russell, 44, a Delta Air Lines service agent in Atlanta. Even today Bill can be pedantic or short-tempered, but most of the time he is simply fun to be around.

Cosby's conversation is peppered with improvised comedic bits, and his anecdotes are dramatized with hilarious faces and voices. On the phone to the Los Angeles surgeon who is treating his 74-year-old mother, Cosby deadpans that "while you've got her in there, we'd like you to fix as many things as you possibly can, so maybe we can get her a boyfriend." He loves practical jokes. Sheldon Leonard, the producer who gave Cosby his first TV role on I Spy, chuckles at the memory of his arrival last year at the chic Grand Hotel du Cap on the French Riviera, where he was to meet Cosby, who vacations there each summer. Checking into his room, Leonard ordered the bellman, who had his head ducked down, to put away the luggage. The distinctly un-French reply: ! "Yassuh, boss. I be puttin' it up." It was Cosby in the bellman's uniform.

As a boy, Cosby learned that he could make people like him, and get his way, by making them laugh. He would con his mother out of a cookie by reprising a humorous radio show, and amuse his brothers by cooking breakfast with imaginative dashes of food coloring: purple waffles, green scrambled eggs. At school he would charm the teachers and tell tall tales. An early report card said, "William should become either a lawyer or an actor because he lies so well." Cosby starred in class plays and displayed both a talent for mimicry and a prodigious memory. He scored high on intelligence tests, and was assigned to a high school for gifted students. There he enjoyed clowning and playing football, but his classwork suffered. He flunked the tenth grade twice, returned to a regular school, flunked again and finally dropped out. His mother was bitterly disappointed. But even in failure, she says, "Bill was determined to be somebody."

Still clad in his running tights and a free south africa T shirt, Cosby sweeps into the ballroom of the Las Vegas Hilton, where the orchestra is warming up for his evening performance. A onetime amateur jazz drummer, Cosby pays special attention to the beat. "It should go like this," he instructs. "Blippa-da-blappa-da-bloom !" At first the drummer thinks this is a joke, but Cosby does not let up until it is played his way. Later, in his sumptuous "Elvis Suite" atop the Hilton, Cosby asks his valet to make cappuccino in the espresso machine on the bar. He begins chatting with a guest, but a few moments later doesn't hear a noise that he was expecting; he interrupts to shout at the valet, "Be sure to shake the milk first."

Among those who have worked with Cosby, his many admirers describe him as "very hands-on," "intensely loyal" and a "perfectionist." Actress Gloria Foster says that "if you do the job for him, you travel first-class. If you don't, you don't stay around him for long." Cosby seems to have few detractors, in part because of his clout in the entertainment business. Those who do criticize him usually call him a "control freak," who feels compelled to make every decision and does not trust subordinates' judgment. As the taping of his television show ran overtime one recent Thursday, with Cosby demanding a third take and redirecting a scene, a crew member grumbled, "Nothing is ever right until he fixes it personally."

Cosby does try to let go on occasion: backing down on a wardrobe change he requested or letting a producer talk him out of an unusual choice of theme music. He concedes, however, that "I do believe in control because, ultimately, it's the Bill Cosby Show. I'm responsible for making it work." He adds, with that it's-my-money glare, "If I have to rewrite, redo it to make it work for me, then I do it."

Even Cosby's lifelong aversion to alcohol and drugs is described in terms of control: "After one drink, I wasn't in control anymore, and I didn't like that feeling." (Today Cosby collects fine wines to serve to friends, but he does not partake.)

Much of Cosby's vaunted self-reliance dates from his stint in the Navy, after he dropped out of high school. "In boot camp, the force and the discipline were devastating to me," Cosby recalls. "For the first time, I wasn't able to argue or make an excuse for why I didn't do something." Cosby rekindled the desire for learning that his mother had sparked. His younger brother Robert, now 40, a Los Angeles teacher, recalls that when he would write to Bill, his letters would return with the spelling and grammar corrected, accompanied by a letter grade. "I'd usually get a C-plus." Cosby completed high school in the Navy, and at the end of his four-year hitch won admission to Temple University on an athletic scholarship. His track and football coach, Gavin White, recalls that Cosby, then 23, was a leader among his teammates and friends. He was by then a conscientious student but also the team jokester, responsible for "keeping the guys loosened up."

The Hilton ballroom is sold out, and Cosby, after starting slowly, leaves the crowd howling at his routine on trifocal eyeglasses. In his spacious dressing room between shows, he wolfs rigatoni puttanesca and taps his toe to a jazz tape by Slim Gaillard while entertaining a stream of callers. A casino manager from Reno has flown in with a wholesale price book for sterling flatware; Cosby wants 70 place settings, and he wants a better price than the $98,000 he was quoted retail. He takes a call from a wine merchant about some cases of Chateau Petrus, but tells the man that " '76 isn't a good enough year." An elegantly suited young woman strolls in with a folder of things for him to sign: bills, checks, a customs release.

Almost every working day, wherever he is in the world, Cosby receives an express-mail packet or a courier bearing checks: for the dentist, for college tuition, groceries, sculptures; he personally signs them all. Almost unique among major entertainment couples, Cosby and his wife Camille very seldom grant power of attorney to their business managers. This practice dates from Cosby's acrimonious breakup with a manager in the mid-'70s. At restaurants and shops, Cosby pays cash. Even on major purchases like real estate, he shuns financing. "For people from a lower economic background," he explains, "it means a lot to know something is paid for." The Cosbys' considerable investments are conservative (blue-chip stocks, mutual funds) and are managed for the most part by Camille.

The Cosbys invest heavily in comfort and aesthetics. They own houses in Manhattan, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, as well as a 265-acre estate near Amherst, Mass. (their primary residence); 22 fine cars, including two Rolls- Royces and a 1937 Aston Martin; an extensive collection of black American art; antique English and Shaker furniture; four cellars of vintage wines; and a seven-passenger Mitsubishi jet (a second jet, a 13-passenger Gulfstream IV, is on order).

Returning to New York City, Cosby goes into rehearsals at a historic studio in Queens, where his show has transferred from its base in Brooklyn during a technicians' strike against nbc. About 7 p.m. Wednesday, after the final run- through, the cast is dismissed. Cosby still wants to pore over the script and fix a couple of scenes that eight-year-old Keshia Knight Pulliam is finding troublesome. But he will do that at home, after dinner.

The Cosby brownstone, in Manhattan's East 60s, is similar to the one inhabited by TV's Huxtables but more distinctively furnished: with Persian carpets, mahogany sculptures and displays of exotic cut flowers. Cosby invites a stranger to the town house only when his wife and five children are away. He is fiercely protective of their privacy; they decline all requests for interviews. It is known that Son Ennis, 18, is studying prelaw at a black college in the South near his sister Erinn, 20, who studies psychology. Eldest Daughter Erika, 22, is an aspiring artist, painting in New York. The two younger girls, Ensa, 14, and Evin, 11, attend public schools in Massachusetts.

Camille Cosby, 43, has exerted a quiet and powerful influence over Bill ever since they met on a blind date in 1963. Born in Washington, she studied psychology at the University of Maryland and became a full-time parent shortly after marrying Cosby. Those who know her describe her as classy, reserved, feminine and stubborn. She has used her leverage sparingly but decisively at key points in her husband's career: most recently by encouraging him to create a family TV series and then siding with the producers, who wanted the show's husband to be a physician and the wife a lawyer. (Cosby originally wanted to play a chauffeur married to a Hispanic plumber.) "Camille thought the educational themes would work better with the parents as professionals, and I was glad to agree," Cosby recalls, pressing his knees together demurely, folding his hands in his lap and giving his best henpecked smile.

On their rare nights out in public, Cosby treats his wife with the adoration of a nerdy schoolboy who cannot believe he landed the prom queen. He admits, however, that their life together was not always the stuff of warm situation comedy. About eight years ago, he says, "if somebody had made me choose between my career and my family, I probably would have let the family go."

He took his family for granted, Cosby says, and this attitude led to "selfish behavior" that he will not describe, except to say that it was particularly hurtful to his wife. Speaking cautiously in the second person, with uncharacteristic somberness, he says, "When you're younger, you want to be sure that by the time you're 80 years old you can sit on the bench and look back and say, 'Man, I did it all. I didn't miss a thing.' What you never meant to do was to hurt anyone, but then you see the look on the face of the person you didn't mean to hurt, and then you realize that what you stand to lose is worth so much more . . ." He pauses. "I just asked my wife and my kids to forgive me, and ever since then, they've been a part of everything I do."

Since then, Cosby has worn a silver bracelet that he bought for himself inscribed CAMILLE'S HUSBAND. It matches the silver Rolex he wears on his left wrist and the stopwatch he always takes to the track.