He made us so proud. I was too young to see him on late-night TV in those first years, and my family didn’t buy comedy albums; but I heard them at the homes of Negro friends where they were proudly displayed, at a time when the howlingly funny but raunchy standup comedians Redd Foxx and Moms Mabley were adult- and black folks-only pleasures half-hidden from the children. Articulate and relaxed, suave and sophisticated, Bill Cosby, even more so than our beloved Temptations, was what we called “ready”. That was, ready not just for integration, but ready to succeed in the white man’s world. Bill Cosby wasn’t just ready: he was killing it.
Dissolve a few years, and my suburban teenage world was rocked to its core by the barrier-smashing spy show I Spy. Inspired by Cosby’s character Scottie, I resolved to James Bond my way out of the racially constrained doldrums of Fairfield County, Connecticut. Television became less of a thing during university years dominated by battles for black liberation, but Bill Cosby was very much there. Not just with us, he was again breaking ground with a militant documentary, Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed, that ripped mainstream cultural exploitations of black people to shreds.
I was a member of the Directors Guild of America when I moved to Los Angeles in 1975, but as a New York member was unable to work until the LA branch saw fit. I was therefore supremely grateful to get a job on Let’s Do it Again, the third of Sidney Poitier’s hugely successful comedies stuffed to the gills with black stars, Cosby among them. After the overt, ass-grabbing harassment of some of the sets I’d worked on in New York, Sidney’s world was for the most part a congenial, collegial delight.
A misstep meant I got fired, but the next day I returned to set dressed in my best skirt and copper-coloured heels that rendered me 6ft 2in. When the crew broke for lunch I remained behind in the semi-dark trying not to burst into tears, when a familiar voice intoned: “A bit of overkill, don’t you think?” Mr Cosby had stayed behind, and was studying me from his cast chair. “Well, yes, but …”
“What do you want?” he asked.
“I want my job back.”
He asked how I’d provoked my nemesis. I admitted culpability. He said he’d take care of it, which he did. I thanked him sincerely but avoided him afterwards, because I’d detected a darkness. I didn’t know what it was then, but there was something about his banter and enjoyment of power games. But since his beautiful wife, Camille, and four adorable children sometimes visited the set, I thought it couldn’t be sex.
In 1989 Poitier asked me to be his first assistant director on the Cosby vehicle GhostDad. While Sidney’s films had continued to make reasonable money, Cosby was both America’s Dad and one of Las Vegas’s heaviest hitters. His self-produced film Leonard 6 had been a hubristic disaster but there was talk of his buying NBC. He knew he was a god, and made sure that all around him knew that as well. He had earned a PhD in education and, save for his “peers” (Sidney, Quincy Jones), we all had to address him as Dr Cosby. Ghost Dad included a plethora of flying sequences that required secure harnessing of his lower torso. He declared from the rafters that riggers “Respect The Captain!”
For the next eight weeks we [the entire crew] were submissive witness to the trials of his Captain. A steady stream of young women visited him on set, sometimes with what appeared to be their mothers. The good doctor was always legs wide-spread, an obese cigar rolling between his lips. Knowing that I desired to move from assistant directing into writing and proper directing, he enjoyed toying with me, sometimes cruelly, but we came to a reasonable rapprochement. Which is just as well, because who would have believed me?
I might not have liked him; but he was Bill Cosby, champion of African-American culture, celebrant of jazz, collector of art. He and Camille gave $20m to the historically black Spelman College, where four generations of my family had been schooled. He MCed the benefit dinner of a friend’s educational foundation for decades. When asked what he was like to work with, I described him as “complex”.
Given the women, I assumed there was some arrangement with gossip purveyors to keep his transgressions private, some winking quid pro quo that was part of this great game and far easier to control in those analogue years; but I had no idea of the scope, the sheer number, the brutality, the megalomania, the somnophilia.
Dr William H Cosby’s downfall is long overdue and more than deserved, but I take little pleasure in it. Because, once upon a time, he made us all so proud.
• Candace Allen is a writer and a film-maker
