On Skirball Center Drive, just off the freeway ramp, the body sprawled next to the Mercedes convertible might have been just another victim of random murder and robbery in Los Angeles. Then a strange recognition took place, and America shuddered. The video image was banished from CNN only 20 minutes after it first aired--too horrible to gaze upon, too terrifyingly intimate to contemplate. The body on the roadside was Ennis William Cosby, 27, the only son of Bill Cosby.
In the inexplicable connect-disconnect of art and life, the name that probably came to mind for most viewers was Theo Huxtable, the only son, who was played by Malcolm-Jamal Warner in Bill Cosby's tremendously popular 1980s sitcom. For more than a decade the Huxtables were America's first family and Bill Cosby was everyone's dad. It was almost natural, however, to confuse real and imagined identities, for Cosby had modeled his television family on his own: a brilliantly accomplished wife, four assertive daughters and one diffident but charming son. The Huxtables were warm, cuddly, comfortable, now and then confronted with tough problems that eventually dissolved in peals of laughter. Last week the images of Ennis Cosby dead in L.A. melded myth and reality. The only son of America's premier family had been shot, and the father of a generation of TV viewers was in shock and mourning. The sitcom is over. The laughter has ended. Welcome to the real world.
The country mourned with Bill Cosby because people felt they had known his son through his show. Ennis Cosby, however, was never part of a sitcom, even if his life had helped inspire one. The victim was the real son of the real Bill Cosby, whose real family was in true sorrow and mourning. And while art may hold up a mirror to life, it offers only an imperfect reflection. The story of Bill and Ennis Cosby, for the most part invisible to the public, was of a richer texture, more complicated and problematic, with real joy, with real pain, with private loss, with humble victories.
Every parent dreads the unforeseen disaster, the one you cannot possibly save your children from, the one that will be announced with a phone call or sudden message, one that will change your life forever, "the feeling," Bill Cosby described in 1987, "of your child going out to play, going to the store, going to visit Grandma or Uncle, and not coming back home." On Thursday morning, Joanne Curley-Kerner, line producer for Cosby's cbs sitcom, received disturbing calls from tabloid-TV reporters seeking to verify rumors out of Los Angeles. She tried to confirm them with the l.a.p.d. but couldn't, and so at about 11:30 she had Cosby called out of rehearsals for that evening's taping in a studio in Queens, New York. Told about the reports in his dressing room, the actor picked up the phone and, through his publicist, David Brokaw, got in touch with the l.a.p.d. On the line was police commander Tim McBride: "I have the worst news to tell you, and I'm very sorry."