ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, January 18, 1997 TAG: 9701200032
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: MITCHELL LANDSBERG ASSOCIATED PRESS
THE NATION ADOPTED Bill Cosby's gentle TV family; now the murder of his son is striking us right where we live.
At a bookstore in New York City on Friday, a well-dressed, middle-aged man in a fedora blanched at the sight of a customer carrying Bill Cosby's ``Fatherhood.''
``It's a difficult day to be buying that,'' he said, shaking his head in horror. ``Wow.''
The news that Cosby's only son, Ennis William Cosby, 27, had been shot dead on a Los Angeles roadside Thursday somehow struck home for many Americans.
``Even more than the president,'' psychologist Joyce Brothers observed, ``Cosby means `father' to us.''
A friend who went to help Ennis Cosby fix his flat tire told police she drove off when she saw a suspicious man. When she returned minutes later, she found Cosby dead with a head wound, a newspaper reported Friday.
The woman told police Cosby was on his way to see her when he phoned to say he would be delayed because of a flat tire, the New York Daily News reported.
She went to see if he needed help and spoke to him briefly. As she returned to her car to keep warm, she saw a man walking along the road toward Cosby, the newspaper said.
Police refused to comment on published or broadcast reports, citing safety concerns for the witness, a 47-year-old screenwriter. The telephone went unanswered at her home Friday.
The premature death of a celebrity's child is not uncommon. Carroll O'Connor's son committed suicide two years ago. Paul Newman's son died of a drug overdose. Francis Ford Coppola's son was killed in a motorboat accident. Dean Martin's son died in a plane crash.
But the murder of Bill Cosby's son may strike Americans in a more visceral way. Not only has Cosby made a career out of fatherhood, but he has played an especially benign and gentle version of the role.
Life's little problems may have intruded humorously on the world of Dr. Cliff Huxtable, Cosby's reassuring television persona, but grisly, real-world tragedy was simply not part of the program.
Karal Marling, a University of Minnesota professor and the author of ``As Seen on TV,'' a book about the blurring of lines between television and real life, noted that ``The Cosby Show'' held out an ideal image of American family life.
With so many families struggling in the 1980s, she said, the nation appeared to adopt the ``Cosby'' characters as a surrogate family.
``There was this overpowering sense of universality about them that is also a reason why there would be a great outpouring of sympathy toward him,'' she said.
Brothers, the psychologist and syndicated columnist, said that when she heard the news of Ennis Cosby's death, ``the hair on my arm stood up.'' Bill Cosby's television persona, she said, is an ideal representation of ``the strict father, but the helping father, the father with a sense of humor.''
The death of his son reminds people that ``the father cannot protect us from the randomness of life, and that's terrifying.''
Bill Cosby got his start as a comedian by humorously describing his own life as a child, particularly his relationships with his brother and father. By the early 1980s, his own children were his primary source of material, both through the exploits of the fictional Huxtables and in the real-life depictions that filled his best-selling book, ``Fatherhood.''
In the book Cosby wrote poignantly, if comically, about his son's early difficulties in school. Ennis was 15 at the time.
```No problem' has been my son's philosophy of life,'' Cosby wrote. ``Two years ago, he was one of the top ten underachievers in our state, and whenever you asked him how he was doing in school, he always said, with simple eloquence, `No problem.'
``And of course, his answer made sense: there was no problem, no confusion about how he was doing. He had failed everything; and what he hadn't failed, he hadn't taken yet.''
Then, in a passage that seems chilling in hindsight, Cosby wrote about ``the five worst words a parent can hear.'' These, it turned out, were the words spoken by teachers to the parents of children who exhibit high potential and low achievement: ``He can do the work.''
Condolences to the family and memorial donations may be sent to the Ennis William Cosby Foundation, to benefit programs for the learning disabled, in care of Bill Cosby's publicist, David Brokaw: The Brokaw Co., 9255 Sunset Blvd., No. 804, Los Angeles, Calif. 90069.
LENGTH: Medium: 85 linesby CNB