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The untold story of Natalie Cole's comeback tribute to her father, Nat King Cole - interview - Cover Story
Ebony, Oct, 1991 by Laura B. Randolph
IT was all one big hoax. A sham. A farce of such mammoth proportions even Natalie Cole can't remember all the details. "I out and out lied to the press," she can admit now, only now, reflecting on the numerous interviews she gave in 1983, claiming to be-once and for all-clean and sober.
She wasn't. Far from it. What she couldn't admit then was that her much-publicized three-week stay in a drug rehab center had not been enough to exorcise what she calls her "demons."
No, she hadn't made it because, like so much of the rest of her life up to that point, she had done it for the wrong reason. "The first time I went in [for rehab treatment]," she confesses, "I did it for everybody but me. And as soon as I got out, I went right back to doing what I was doing before I went in. "
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What she was doing before she went in was slow-dancing with death. In addition to the coke, she'd started abusing prescription pills and alcohol. Then, drunk or high, she'd slide behind the wheel of her car and head for the L.A. freeways. It was a drag race with the devil. Only after walking away from what should have been a fatal accident with nothing more than a scratched finger did she begin to see the light.
Months of counseling would finally reveal-to her that the drugs were just a way of silencing the little voice-"the demons"-inside her that told her she wasn't good enough. Ever since she was a little girl growing up in the exclusive Hancock Park section of Los Angeles, she had always wondered if her own brilliance was just a reflection of her father, the legendary Nat King Cole; if the glory of his talent somehow dim med her own; and, most disturbing of all, if it was her heritage, not her, that people were drawn to.
"It started with something I couldn't control and that was the family I was brought up in-never really knowing if people liked you for yourself, or because of who your father was, " she says of what, with therapy and counseling, she has come to recognize as her early "self-hatred. "
That is why Unforgettable, her most successful album to date, is more than a tribute to her father. Hauntingly beautiful, it certainly is that. But more important, it is a badge of triumph in her lifelong battle to learn to love herself; to come to terms with her father's legend, his death from lung cancer in 1965, just nine days after her 15th birthday, and the profound effect both had on her life.
It is the perfect symbol really. It is a made-for-the-movies emblem of her newfound security: standing toe-to-toe, mike-to-mike, with the father who never even knew she wanted to sing; harmonizing with the parent she lost before she had a chance to say goodbye; singing the virtues of the music she once ran so far and hard from out of a fear that if she performed it, she might never be respected as an artist in her own right. "I spent the first part of my career rebelling against it," Cole says of her father's music. Always in the back of my mind I was trying to stay as far away from that stigma as I possibly could. "
How ironic, then, that this 22-song album of her father's hits should be her first-and only-No. I album, even though between 1975 and 1979 she had five consecutive gold records. How paradoxical that it wasn't until she stopped running from the legend of Nat King Cole that she became secure enough to embrace it and, in the process, prove to herself that she had what it took to live up to it. And how bittersweet that, 26 years after his death, his songs would give her the chance, at age 41, she never thought she'd have to tell her father "thanks and goodbye. "
"When you lose a parent in your early teen years, it's like you are still a child, " she muses. "I never got to make that transition from little girl to young woman ... and that really screws you up. Doing this project gave me an opportunity to create a dialogue between me and my dad. And all the things that a young girl might never have had a chance to say to her dad, and all the things she wished he could have said to her are on this album. That's really what the duet, Unforgettable, is all about. As far as I'm concerned, he's singing to me."
If she was looking for a sign from beyond that she had her father's blessing, Natalie certainly got it. During the three months she spent recording the album, his spirit, she believes, was right there with her, not just singing with her, but filling her with his magic, guiding her every step of the way. "I felt my father everywhere, " she says of the recording sessions at Capitol Records, where her father had cut his unforgettable hits when she was knee-high to a piano. "It was like we'd really pulled his spirit in," she says. "There was a guidance I felt from him and I never felt at a loss. I'd been waiting to do this for so long, I knew exactly what to do. I knew exactly what was going to work and what wasn't. "
Watching her as she speaks, it's clear that this woman knows exactly what will and won't work for her-in a recording studio, in her life. It is, in fact, what makes it so hard to believe that this Natalie Cole, this poised and elegant woman who earned three Grammys, five gold records and a star on Hollywood Boulevard before she was 30, would ever see herself as so "unworthy" that she would try to drown herself in drugs to numb her pain. For me, drugs were the only option because there wasn't any way I could try and face whatever my demons were sober," she reveals.
