Pubdate: Sat, 09 Dec 2000
Source: Lubbock Avalanche-Journal (TX)
Copyright: 2000 The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
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Author: Rashod D. Ollison, Knight Ridder

'LIVIN' FOR LOVE' TELLS STORY OF ADDICTION

She was an elegant addict. She wore feather boas and sequined gowns on
stage, and freebased cocaine in her mansion. She scored back-to-back
platinum albums and multiple Grammys, then celebrated with champagne
and blow. Before coke, it was heroin. Before that, LSD.

Natalie Cole says she kicked drugs in 1983. But it has taken longer
for Nat "King" Cole's little girl, now 50, to go public about her
self-destructive life and 25-year recording career.

The singer's surprisingly candid autobiography, "Angel on My
Shoulder," hit stores on Nov. 14, the same day as her CD "Greatest
Hits Vol. I."

And next on Sunday she stars in "Livin' for Love: The Natalie Cole Story," 
a telemovie loosely based on the book (8 p.m. on KCBD).

Despite her pedigree, says the pop/rhythm-and-blues performer, "I'm an 
ordinary person under extraordinary circumstances." And ordinary people are 
whom she hopes to reach with "Angel: "(It's) not for folks who take life 
too seriously or not seriously enough. I was just telling the truth, what 
I've learned."

Though it's true, it will probably sound disingenuous "if I tell you
that God told me it was time to write the book," says Cole, a devout
Baptist since the mid-'80s.

"The idea for the book was actually approached 10 years ago. ... (But)
I don't believe you can write this kind of book and still be in the
storm."

That "storm" was the relationship with her volatile husband, producer
Andre Fischer, whom she married in 1989 and divorced seven years
later. In her book, Cole charges that he regularly beat her, once
smashing her face with a Bible, another time pushing her through a
wall. (Fischer has not responded publicly to Cole's tell-all.)

Cole's account of her marital woes are far from the most sensational
in "Angel's" torrent of revelations. The child of one of America's
most beloved vocalists made headlines with her confession that, as a
23-year-old heroin addict, she worked as a "come-on" girl for a pimp
in Harlem. And she spares little detail about her alleged childhood
sexual abuse (fondled by an unnamed family member), her arrests in the
late '60s and early '70s (shoplifting, counterfeiting checks, heroin
possession), and her estrangement from an imperious mother who hid the
fact that Cole, her brother and three sisters shared in their father's
estate and, when found out, worked tirelessly to block their claims.
(In 1995, 30 years after Nat Cole's death, the children gained control
of their inheritance.)

"It was very difficult to write about my mother," the eight-time
Grammy winner confides from her Beverly Hills home. "There's a lot of
love in this book, but it takes two. ... We're still not talking,"
reports Cole, who has said that she sent her mother an advance copy of
"Angel" and got no response.

In the late 1960s and early '70s, while other students at the
University of Massachusetts were smoking weed and dropping acid, young
Natalie played for higher stakes. The child psychology major who hoped
some day to open a clinic for "underprivileged kids to help shape and
expand their minds" developed a heroin habit.

The cultured young woman whose mother shipped her off to boarding
school in New England was confronted by African American classmates
who doubted her blackness. Before that, she had been colorblind: Her
godparents were Jewish, Frank Sinatra was "Uncle Frankie," and her
father was a close friend of President John F. Kennedy. Her family was
the first to integrate Los Angeles' tony Hancock Park in 1948.

So Cole set out to find her own identity.
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