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And what of violations? Cosby was estranged from his second daughter Erinn because she admitted she had used marijuana and cocaine. In an example of what he called "tough love," Cosby told the Los Angeles Times in 1989 that his daughter was "not a person you can trust." He told the National Enquirer that "we love her and want her to get better, but we have to take a very firm, very tough stand that forces her to realize that no one can fix things for her. She has to beat this on her own." Erinn, who reported in 1992 that she had been assaulted by the boxer Mike Tyson, stopped using the Cosby surname at one point. She lives on her own.
Bill Cosby complains that "the press wants children of stars to have problems." He told Family Circle that the media does not "want to see a good, solid, winning family." And by good, solid, winning, he usually had Ennis in mind. The very last episode of The Cosby Show, which aired in 1992, showed Theo Huxtable graduating from college. It was a preview of the graduation of Ennis just weeks later. In fact, before last week's murder, Cosby was pushing to have the character played by Doug E. Doug on his new show go to work at a center for disadvantaged youth, a role that would parallel work done by Ennis. Said Cosby: "I love him. I trust him with my life, with my wife's life, with his own life."
For all Bill's praise, Ennis was not perfect--and therein lies the source of the father's heroic legend of the son. Ennis was, of course, as irascible a youngster as they come. In his best seller Fatherhood, Bill Cosby talked about delivering physical discipline to punish the 12-year-old Ennis' lying in school. As usual, Cosby turned it into a joke for his readers: "I...won't say that this will hurt me more than it will hurt you. That would be true only if I turned around and let you hit me." He concluded, "To this day, he has not lied to me or to my wife."
In the book, however, the incident very quickly segues into Bill and Camille's worries about their son's academic performance. Ennis would tell his dad that he wanted to be a "regular person" and that, perhaps, he didn't need to go to college, since he wanted to start a business instead. His father remembers watching in frustration as his son studied and studied but got nowhere with his grades. Ennis managed to enter Morehouse College in Atlanta, but he continued to struggle with his schoolwork. His mother Camille told Jet magazine in 1992, "We didn't know that Ennis was dyslexic until he went to college."
"He never used it as an excuse," says his friend and schoolmate Clarence Anthony Jasper II. Though midway through college before the learning disability was discovered, Ennis enrolled in a short program that quickly prepared him to deal with his dyslexia and to fully master reading. That relegated his father's old joke about him to the dustbin. ("How can you fail English?" "Yeah," he replied.) He became an informal consultant on his father's show, making a couple of rare visits to the studio to talk about dyslexia--Theo Huxtable was also graduating from college after overcoming that disability. In a paper he would write, cited on Larry King Live last Friday, Ennis said, "The happiest day of my life occurred when I found out I was dyslexic. I believe that life is finding solutions, and the worst feeling to me is confusion."