Show Business: He has a hot TV series, a new book – and a booming comedy empire

The bedroom is pitch dark. Two young brothers who share a crowded bed are busily not going to sleep. As one of them, Bill Cosby, describes it years later in a classic monologue, the night is an extended comedy-drama of horseplay, taunting and hand-to-hand combat: “I’m tellin’ Dad, I’m tellin’ Dad . . .” “I never hit you, I never hit you . . .” Each outburst is followed by a visit from their father, who thunders like Zeus, “If I hear any more laughing . . . I’m going to KILL YOU!”

Flash forward. Cosby is the father now, presiding over a brood of five children on TV’s top-rated series. When he arrives home in one episode, three of his daughters begin fawning over him. “What’s blown up or on fire?” asks Dad skeptically. The youngest, it turns out, has cut photographs out of some of his favorite books to make a report for school. But Dad neither explodes nor affixes blame, just leafs resignedly through her handiwork. “Very good report,” he comments. “Very expensive.”

Slow dissolve. Cosby has just celebrated a notable birthday, prompting new thoughts — and a new medium — for America’s most famous father. “I recently turned fifty,” he writes at the outset of his book Time Flies, “which is young for a tree, mid-life for an elephant, and ancient for a quarter-miler, whose son now says, ‘Dad I just can’t run the quarter with you anymore unless I bring something to read.’ “

Perhaps no performer in history has chronicled his life cycle so thoroughly, or so publicly, as Bill Cosby. Certainly no one has been so successful at it. Even Cosby, a man fond of outsize cigars and outlandish hyperbole, would have trouble overstating the scope of his popularity. As main attraction and chief architect of The Cosby Show, television’s No. 1-rated program for three straight seasons, he dominates the medium as no star has since the days of Lucille Ball and Milton Berle. And he has parlayed his TV success into a multimedia empire that seems to grow like the tall tales the young stand-up comic once spun out of his Philadelphia childhood.

The Cosby Show, whose fourth season begins on NBC this week, has already earned a chapter in the TV history books. Its overall rating last season — 34.9, representing 63 million viewers — was not just its best in three seasons but the best for any TV series since Bonanza in 1964-65. The show’s success has created its own bonanza on the syndication market: Cosby Show reruns, currently being sold to local stations, have earned a record-smashing $600 million, and the total could eventually top $1 billion; a third of that will go to Cosby himself. Meanwhile a Cosby Show spinoff, A Different World (starring Lisa Bonet as Cosby’s TV daughter Denise, now off at college), debuts this week on NBC. With the coveted time slot following Cosby on Thursday nights, it could easily be another huge hit.

Everything Cosby touches these days seems to turn to gold, if not platinum. Enjoying the highest Q rating in history (the definitive show-biz gauge of audience appeal), Cosby has long been one of TV’s most sought-after commercial pitchmen; he currently does ads for Jell-O, Kodak and E.F. Hutton. His stand- up performances draw packed crowds everywhere, from the showrooms of Las Vegas to Radio City Music Hall. (His going rate for one-nighters: $250,000.) A videocassette, Bill Cosby: 49, sponsored by Kodak and produced by Cosby’s wife Camille, has sold 200,000 copies so far, more than any other concert video yet released. His first feature film in six years, a James Bond-esque spy caper called Leonard Part 6, will appear in theaters around Christmas, and he plans to start shooting another movie in the spring.

And now comes Cosby the publishing phenom. Three years ago Paul Bresnick, a senior editor at Doubleday and newly expectant father, came up with the idea for a book about being a dad. After his first two choices to write it were “thankfully not available,” Bresnick approached Cosby, whose NBC series was just starting to take off. The result was Fatherhood, a collection of humorous anecdotes and observations, which spent more than a year on the best- seller list and sold 2.6 million hard-cover copies, edging past Iacocca to set a modern-day record. Naturally, that called for a sequel. Time Flies, a lighthearted look at the woes of growing older, has just arrived in stores with a huge first printing of 1.75 million copies — yes, another record.

Clearly, Bill Cosby is more than a show-biz success story; he is a force in the national culture. Like Ronald Reagan, another entertainer with a warm, fatherly image who peaked relatively late in life, Cosby purveys a message of optimism and traditional family values. At a time when real-life families are weathering problems of drugs and divorce, the Huxtable clan on The Cosby Show is the very model of a strong, close-knit, parent-dominated unit. The fact that the family is black, without making a particular point of it, is an encouraging sign of maturity in matters of race. For whites as well as blacks, The Cosby Show is a weekly source of comfort and wisdom. “I hear white working-class families quoting The Cosby Show as though it were the last church sermon they heard,” says Harvard Psychiatrist Robert Coles. “It’s a pastoral quality.”

This pastor, however, is a man of sometimes jarring contradictions. Onstage he comes across as an average guy commiserating about the little trials that face us all; yet, with earnings estimated at $57 million this year, he makes more money than any other entertainer on the globe. He is TV’s best-loved family man, yet he firmly shields his own wife and five children from publicity. He shies away from the praise of peers by refusing to accept Emmy nominations; yet he flaunts his doctor’s degree in education, earned at age 39. As a performer, he radiates childlike charm and clownish exuberance; with co-workers, he can be demanding and difficult (see following story).

Perhaps the most puzzling question surrounding Cosby is why, after a long career that seemed to have plateaued somewhere short of superstardom, he suddenly found himself the proprietor of TV’s biggest hit of the decade. By most objective standards, The Cosby Show is an unlikely candidate for through- the-roof success. In contrast, say, to the Norman Lear comedies of the early ’70s, it breaks little new ground in style or subject matter. It has none of the gag-writing brio of The Mary Tyler Moore Show or a half a dozen comedies that followed it. Indeed, The Cosby Show might be a classic illustration of ex-Network Programmer Paul Klein’s theory of Least Objectionable Programming. With its gentle humor, upbeat message and crosscultural appeal, The Cosby Show has nothing to offend anybody.

But the series stands well apart from most other current family shows, with their contrived plots and wisecracking tots. Parents on The Cosby Show are figures of calm authority, not boobs, and episodes revolve around the realistic trivia of everyday family life: Dad goes out to buy a new car, or a daughter tries to explain her bad grades. Such plots, of course, are simply a throwback to slice-of-family-life shows of the ’50s and ’60s like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, and Cosby’s success may partly reflect nostalgia for those simpler old times.

But The Cosby Show outdoes even those ancestors in presenting an antiseptic portrait of family life, a comforting parable for parents. This “realistic” family has petty squabbles and conflicts, but they are resolved easily, without pain or embarrassment for anyone. Dad may look beleaguered at times, but in a pinch he always reacts with just the right mix of firmness and compassion — and never a hint of self-doubt. (Even Jim Anderson agonized in the kitchen over his fatherly duties.) Children may misbehave, but their disobedience only provides an opportunity for the parents to demonstrate how to deal with such matters — or better yet, for the kids to show how they have internalized their parents’ values. When a friend of 13-year-old Vanessa lights up a cigarette in the house, the Huxtable children take turns berating the girl; even little Rudy comes on like an ad for the American Cancer Society.

Whatever the explanation for Cosby’s magic touch, it seems to work just as well in print as on TV. In Fatherhood, Cosby sympathized with every dad who has ever been pestered by a child for money or got Soap on a Rope as a Father’s Day present. Time Flies has the same broad appeal, with wry, wistful comments on every middle-aged trauma from the onset of love handles around the midsection to the embarrassment of searching for glasses that are sitting on top of one’s head.

Most of these bite-size chunks of Cosbyana are little more than stand-up material set down on paper, without the flair that Cosby brings to them in live performance. (His unbilled collaborator on both books was Humor Writer Ralph Schoenstein.) But the quips are frequently funny, and pure Cosby. Noting that underwear keeps getting tighter as one grows older, he observes, “It is a point of pride for the American male to keep the same size Jockey shorts for his entire life.”

Unlike Fatherhood, which felt obliged to interrupt the jokes for a few passages of banal “advice” to parents, Time Flies makes no claim to great significance. That job, as in the earlier book, is left to a plodding introduction by Alvin Poussaint, a Harvard psychiatry professor who is a consultant on Cosby’s TV show. And if the kvetching starts to grow wearisome, Cosby manages to end on a note of uplift: ” ‘Dee-fense!’ I am crying to joints that need 3-in-One Oil, to intestines that are begging for custard, and to eyes that are proud of their ability to distinguish day from night. However, I am also counting my blessings and not my time with a pointless pining for yesterday because I keep telling myself, ‘The older I get, the luckier I am.’ “

Cosby has a lot to feel lucky about, starting with the amazing resiliency of his career. While still a student at Temple University, he got his first taste of performing by doing jokes and impressions at parties. Soon he was picking up nightclub gigs in Philadelphia and New York. Juggling comedy stints with school and sports grew more difficult, and the inevitable clash came during his junior year. The football team (for which Cosby played second- string fullback) had to travel out of town for a Saturday game; Cosby had booked himself into a $225 club engagement on Friday night. He sought permission to join the team late, but the school’s athletic director refused. Forced to choose between comedy and college, Cosby opted for laughs and dropped out of school. Within a year he had landed a guest spot on the Tonight show, and by early 1964 he had recorded the first of what would eventually be more than 20 comedy albums.

Cosby emerged at the peak of the 1960s civil rights ferment, and he was unique among black comedians of the time (such as Dick Gregory and Godfrey Cambridge) in not using race as a subject. That was not always the case, however. “Racial humor was about 35% of my act when I first started,” recalls Cosby. “But I realized that it was a crutch. What brought it home was when another comedian said to me, ‘If you changed color tomorrow, you wouldn’t have any material.’ He meant it as a put-down, but I took it as a challenge.” Ever since, a color-blind approach has been a basic tenet of Cosby’s comedy philosophy: “I don’t think you can bring the races together by joking about the differences between them. I’d rather talk about the similarities, about what’s universal in their experiences.”

Cosby developed his style by studying such comics as Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, whose 2,000-Year-Old Man routine “taught me that if the audience knows you can be funny when you want to be, they will be willing to wait for that payoff.” Among his early routines was a famous bit in which God tries to convince a skeptical Noah that he should build an ark. But Cosby soon gravitated toward a more fertile subject: his childhood. In vivid, richly textured narratives, he told of cutting up with neighborhood characters like Old Weird Harold and Fat Albert, sharing a bed with his younger brother Russell, going to the hospital to get his tonsils out. No comic has ever entered a child’s mind with so much empathy and gusto.

Though Cosby’s comedy was color-blind, the comedian was not. In 1964, when Producer Sheldon Leonard invited him to audition for a role in a new TV series called I Spy, Cosby struck Co-Star Robert Culp as the “angriest young man I’d ever met.” Cosby does not dispute the characterization. “You have to remember the times. It wasn’t so much because of any racism directed against me. It was because of the March on Washington and how the press tried to ignore it, and the Red-baiting going on. I felt that my country had betrayed its black citizens.” He got the role nonetheless — the first black actor to co-star in a network dramatic series. The event was a Jackie Robinson-like breakthrough. “I remember being totally overjoyed about it,” recalls Actor Robert Guillaume. “When Cosby hit, it was like a Second Coming.” Cosby went on to win three Emmys for his performances; he and Culp have remained friends ever since.

I Spy was canceled in 1968 after three seasons, and Cosby’s TV career took a long time to recover. He starred as a high school gym teacher in The Bill Cosby Show, an engaging series that was nevertheless canceled after two seasons. A comedy-variety series called The New Bill Cosby Show lasted only one; another effort, Cos, failed in less than two months. Cosby landed a few movie roles in such films as Uptown Saturday Night, California Suite and Hickey and Boggs (a rare and surprisingly effective dramatic performance). But his film career failed to ignite. Cosby refuses to characterize the time as a career slump but admits it was a “period when I was being ignored by some people.”

Two groups of people, however, were not ignoring him at all. Children, for one, seemed to love him. While struggling in prime time, Cosby became a frequent guest on The Electric Company and Sesame Street, and created the critically acclaimed Saturday-morning cartoon series Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. His other major fans were advertising executives. Attracted by his rapport with children, Jell-O hired Cosby in 1974 for a series of commercials in which he talked and mugged with youngsters eating Jell-O pudding. He was soon in demand for other TV spots, hawking products for Ford, Texas Instruments and Coca-Cola, among others. His latest client, E.F. Hutton, reportedly paid him more than $5 million for a long-term deal. “The advertising business was looking for universality that shatters the color image,” says Fred Danzig, editor of Advertising Age. “Cosby does that.”

In the meantime, Cosby, who had once vowed to quit show business at 34 and become a teacher, sought to finish his education. The bachelor’s degree that he did not complete at Temple was belatedly awarded to him on the basis of “life experience.” Then he enrolled in a part-time doctoral program in education at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He was awarded an Ed.D. degree in 1977, a credential that Cosby proudly displays every week in the credits for his TV series (“William Cosby Jr., Ed.D.” is listed as one of the show’s three creators). His degree, however, has been attacked by a former professor who was on Cosby’s dissertation committee, Reginald Damerell. In a 1985 book critical of the nation’s education schools, Damerell noted that Cosby took virtually no classes, got course credit for appearing on Sesame Street and The Electric Company and wrote a dissertation that analyzed the impact of his own show, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. Degrees like Cosby’s, Damerell charged, “do not attest to genuine academic achievement. They are empty credentials.”

Cosby bristles at the accusation. “All I can tell you is that I completed every requirement that I was asked to complete,” he says. Though later students at the school admit that Cosby’s program was “not the most rigorous in the world,” university officials insist he was given no special treatment. Cosby’s dissertation, says Professor Louis Fischer, who was acting dean at the time, “was a very, very thorough, defensible study of the impact on children’s values of the systematic watching of the Fat Albert program.”

Cosby’s now fabled return to prime time was still years away. Tom Werner and Marcy Carsey, two ABC program executives, had approached Cosby’s agent, Norman Brokaw, several times about creating a sitcom for the comic but had generated no interest. Early in 1984 that changed. Cosby says he had spent some time watching TV and was appalled at the “lack of anything you could feel good about watching with your family. It was all car chases and breasts and characters yelling at each other and saying Yowie!” Carsey and Werner (who had since left ABC and formed their own production company) revived their idea and took it to NBC, where Entertainment President Brandon Tartikoff had been thinking of putting Cosby in a family series after seeing one of his monologues on the Tonight show.

“You have to remember how different a show we were proposing,” says Werner. “Instead of getting laughs from arguments and conflicts between the husband and wife, we were going for subtler humor.” NBC decided to take a chance on it, with no expectations of a blockbuster hit. But the show’s debut episode hit the Nielsen top ten, and by midseason had taken firm hold of the No. 1 spot. The Cosby Show’s huge success boosted NBC’s entire Thursday-night schedule, helped lift the network from last place to first in the ratings and has given nightmares to opposing-network executives ever since.

In an industry where faceless collaborations are the rule, Cosby is an auteur involved in nearly every aspect of his series, from editing scripts to selecting theme music. The Huxtable family is modeled closely on Cosby’s own, and many of the episodes are drawn from ideas he suggests. While filming his movie, for example, Cosby heard Ray Charles’ recording of It’s Not Easy Being Green. He asked the show’s writers to build an episode around the song. Result: in one of this fall’s segments, a sulking Rudy goes into her room for a wordless sequence set to Charles’ music. Many of Cosby’s ideas are the merest kernels of plots, which a staff of six writers must work to flesh out into 30-minute episodes. “We’re concerned about structure,” says one writer, Gary Kott. “But if Bill has an idea for a scene, he doesn’t care how we get there as long as it is logical and fun.”

Cosby’s influence is also seen in the show’s frequent, but uninsistent, references to black culture. When Son Theo has to read a book for school, chances are it will be Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man; when Denise is considering colleges, all-black schools are the topic of discussion. Each script is reviewed by Poussaint to ensure psychological credibility and avoid negative stereotyping. His sanitizing hand can be as heavy as a network censor’s. In the original script for one Halloween episode, Vanessa and a friend were to dress up as a witch and Captain Hook. Poussaint vetoed both, arguing that witches perpetuate an offensive image of women and that the captain’s hooked hand reinforces the idea of handicaps being evil. The youngsters wore more innocuous costumes instead, with Vanessa dressing up as an African princess.

The upbeat, sometimes preachy tone of the series has annoyed some. “Bill seemed to want the family to be good, and to me, good isn’t funny,” says Earl Pomerantz, head writer for the show’s first eight episodes. Others complain that the series slipped a bit last season, with some segments being especially flimsy and plotless. A few critics have raised more substantive issues. One charge is that the well-to-do Huxtables are hardly representative of the vast majority of black families in this country. (Or many white ones, for that matter; no problem with child care in this two-income family.) Critic Mark Crispin Miller has claimed that the show provides the white audience with false reassurance that racial troubles have vanished. “On The Cosby Show, it appears as if blacks in general can have, or do have, what many whites enjoy,” he writes. “And there are no hard feelings, none at all, now that the old injustice has been so easily rectified.”

Cosby heatedly defends the Huxtable clan against these attacks. “To say that they are not black enough is a denial of the American dream and the American way of life,” he says. “My point is that this is an American family — an American family — and if you want to live like they do, and you’re willing to work, the opportunity is there.” Others rush to the show’s support. “One of the unfortunate things about television is that the black middle class is never seen,” says Sidney Poitier. “We see an awful lot of guys pushing dope on street corners.” For Anne Roiphe, co-author of Your Child’s Mind, the show’s idealized picture of family life is healthy for both blacks and whites. “The show demonstrates what Americans wish the world was like,” she says. “This is what is missing in our lives — the strong support of a family.”

Wish fulfillment or role model, Cosby’s TV family shows no sign of losing its appeal. The star himself may be the one who finally calls a halt to the program’s fabulous run. He says he will wrap up the series after just two more seasons, in order to spend more time on other projects. Plans for a third book, on love and marriage, are in the works; so are more feature films. And, of course, the seemingly endless commercials, concerts and other public appearances.

Indeed, if anything threatens the fortunes of Cosby, Inc., it is overexposure. Cosby is not worried. “The measure of overexposure is not how many times people see you on TV or in the bookstores,” he says. “It’s whether you can maintain the quality of your entertainment. If you can, people will always be glad to see you.” Such pronouncements may seem risky in the fickle world of show business. But Cosby hasn’t been wrong yet.