'HE WAS MY HERO'

By Howard Chua-Eoan

On Skirball Center Drive, just off the freeway ramp, the body sprawled next to the Mercedes convertible might have been just another victim of random murder and robbery in Los Angeles. Then a strange recognition took place, and America shuddered. The video image was banished from CNN only 20 minutes after it first aired--too horrible to gaze upon, too terrifyingly intimate to contemplate. The body on the roadside was Ennis William Cosby, 27, the only son of Bill Cosby.

In the inexplicable connect-disconnect of art and life, the name that probably came to mind for most viewers was Theo Huxtable, the only son, who was played by Malcolm-Jamal Warner in Bill Cosby's tremendously popular 1980s sitcom. For more than a decade the Huxtables were America's first family and Bill Cosby was everyone's dad. It was almost natural, however, to confuse real and imagined identities, for Cosby had modeled his television family on his own: a brilliantly accomplished wife, four assertive daughters and one diffident but charming son. The Huxtables were warm, cuddly, comfortable, now and then confronted with tough problems that eventually dissolved in peals of laughter. Last week the images of Ennis Cosby dead in L.A. melded myth and reality. The only son of America's premier family had been shot, and the father of a generation of TV viewers was in shock and mourning. The sitcom is over. The laughter has ended. Welcome to the real world.

The country mourned with Bill Cosby because people felt they had known his son through his show. Ennis Cosby, however, was never part of a sitcom, even if his life had helped inspire one. The victim was the real son of the real Bill Cosby, whose real family was in true sorrow and mourning. And while art may hold up a mirror to life, it offers only an imperfect reflection. The story of Bill and Ennis Cosby, for the most part invisible to the public, was of a richer texture, more complicated and problematic, with real joy, with real pain, with private loss, with humble victories.

Every parent dreads the unforeseen disaster, the one you cannot possibly save your children from, the one that will be announced with a phone call or sudden message, one that will change your life forever, "the feeling," Bill Cosby described in 1987, "of your child going out to play, going to the store, going to visit Grandma or Uncle, and not coming back home." On Thursday morning, Joanne Curley-Kerner, line producer for Cosby's cbs sitcom, received disturbing calls from tabloid-TV reporters seeking to verify rumors out of Los Angeles. She tried to confirm them with the l.a.p.d. but couldn't, and so at about 11:30 she had Cosby called out of rehearsals for that evening's taping in a studio in Queens, New York. Told about the reports in his dressing room, the actor picked up the phone and, through his publicist, David Brokaw, got in touch with the l.a.p.d. On the line was police commander Tim McBride: "I have the worst news to tell you, and I'm very sorry."

Ennis' body was found by police at about 1:45 a.m. lying in a pool of blood outside the driver's side of his Mercedes-Benz. The car's hazard lights were flashing, and both the passenger-side door and the trunk were open. He had apparently been changing a tire and had got as far as putting the spare on the car but had not finished replacing the lug nuts when he was killed by a single shot to the head. His body was discovered by a woman who says she saw a white male leaving the area. L.A. police chief Willie Williams said that "the perpetrator was only there for a few moments or a few seconds, but we don't know what was in his mind." The media were asked not to identify the traumatized witness, who was assisting with a police sketch of the suspect.

With the news and mystery of his son's death, Cosby left the studio, climbed into his Range Rover and headed back to his town house in Manhattan. Mobbed by reporters camped outside his home, the actor refused all comment save one. He turned toward the cameras and microphones and said, "He was my hero."

Ennis William Cosby was born April 15, 1969, the middle child of five and Bill and Camille Cosby's only son. As such, he held a special place in the eyes of his parents--particularly his father. Attorney Johnnie Cochran, a friend of Bill Cosby's, says the actor's face lit up every time Ennis entered the room. Though he kept his family out of the public eye, Cosby would let the subject of Ennis drag out a conversation--with his son becoming a loving punch line to jokes. He was always keen to remind people that Ennis was a natural and graceful athlete, interrupting a 1985 Playboy interviewer, for example, to say, "Young Ennis, by the way, is now 6 ft. 3 in. tall." In his 1987 book, Time Flies, Cosby makes a mock complaint about Ennis being a reluctant athlete ("My music is the theme from Chariots of Fire and Ennis' theme is Bidin' My Time"). But he admitted, "I could not resist luring my son Ennis out to the track because I wanted to see how my genes looked in a newer model of me." When Ennis was in high school in Pennsylvania, Cosby would take a break from his busy schedule to catch his son playing football.

Still, it was not easy being a child of Bill Cosby's. The actor-comedian was a born-again family man. He told TIME 10 years ago that in 1979 "if somebody had made me choose between my career and my family, I probably would have let the family go." Later, however, he rededicated himself to them. "I just asked my wife and my kids to forgive me, and ever since then, they've been a part of everything I do." But that conversion brought with it a seriousness about parenting and child rearing. He had already made the weighty decision that his children's names would all begin with the letter E ("to represent excellence," he told Family Circle in 1993). In 1987 he told TIME, "We have plans for each of them. Some of it may be dictatorial, but we think it's a great idea. We take it as far as we can in terms of education and moral behavior."

And what of violations? Cosby was estranged from his second daughter Erinn because she admitted she had used marijuana and cocaine. In an example of what he called "tough love," Cosby told the Los Angeles Times in 1989 that his daughter was "not a person you can trust." He told the National Enquirer that "we love her and want her to get better, but we have to take a very firm, very tough stand that forces her to realize that no one can fix things for her. She has to beat this on her own." Erinn, who reported in 1992 that she had been assaulted by the boxer Mike Tyson, stopped using the Cosby surname at one point. She lives on her own.

Bill Cosby complains that "the press wants children of stars to have problems." He told Family Circle that the media does not "want to see a good, solid, winning family." And by good, solid, winning, he usually had Ennis in mind. The very last episode of The Cosby Show, which aired in 1992, showed Theo Huxtable graduating from college. It was a preview of the graduation of Ennis just weeks later. In fact, before last week's murder, Cosby was pushing to have the character played by Doug E. Doug on his new show go to work at a center for disadvantaged youth, a role that would parallel work done by Ennis. Said Cosby: "I love him. I trust him with my life, with my wife's life, with his own life."

For all Bill's praise, Ennis was not perfect--and therein lies the source of the father's heroic legend of the son. Ennis was, of course, as irascible a youngster as they come. In his best seller Fatherhood, Bill Cosby talked about delivering physical discipline to punish the 12-year-old Ennis' lying in school. As usual, Cosby turned it into a joke for his readers: "I...won't say that this will hurt me more than it will hurt you. That would be true only if I turned around and let you hit me." He concluded, "To this day, he has not lied to me or to my wife."

In the book, however, the incident very quickly segues into Bill and Camille's worries about their son's academic performance. Ennis would tell his dad that he wanted to be a "regular person" and that, perhaps, he didn't need to go to college, since he wanted to start a business instead. His father remembers watching in frustration as his son studied and studied but got nowhere with his grades. Ennis managed to enter Morehouse College in Atlanta, but he continued to struggle with his schoolwork. His mother Camille told Jet magazine in 1992, "We didn't know that Ennis was dyslexic until he went to college."

"He never used it as an excuse," says his friend and schoolmate Clarence Anthony Jasper II. Though midway through college before the learning disability was discovered, Ennis enrolled in a short program that quickly prepared him to deal with his dyslexia and to fully master reading. That relegated his father's old joke about him to the dustbin. ("How can you fail English?" "Yeah," he replied.) He became an informal consultant on his father's show, making a couple of rare visits to the studio to talk about dyslexia--Theo Huxtable was also graduating from college after overcoming that disability. In a paper he would write, cited on Larry King Live last Friday, Ennis said, "The happiest day of my life occurred when I found out I was dyslexic. I believe that life is finding solutions, and the worst feeling to me is confusion."

There seems to be some hint that Ennis was anxious to get his undergraduate degree out of the way. Says Julia Bond, the daughter of civil rights leader Julian Bond and a friend of Ennis' at nearby Spelman College: "I think more than anything Ennis was trying to get the basic part done, so his parents wouldn't have too much to say." He made them proud, making the dean's list on graduation from Morehouse. He headed for graduate school in New York City to become a teacher of children with learning disabilities. Says Jasper: "This was not something his parents or his father forced on him. We both got sent to Dean Rusk School, a lower-income-housing school in Atlanta. And when he was there, he was always talking about how he loved working with the kids. He really loved it." He seemed to thrive on social work. Wearing oversize tennis shoes that made his feet seem gigantic, Ennis would cheerfully come to work at the Covenant Shelter, a way station for drug abusers, even though he was sometimes razzed by residents. ("Where's your daddy? Go see your daddy.") He laughed it off.

There were other careers he might have pursued. At George School, the Quaker prep school Ennis attended in Pennsylvania, he was a good singer and actor. In Atlanta he appeared in a local ad for Fila sportswear. Just before his death, he promised Michelle Hood, a fashion-photographer friend in New York City, that he would pose for her. But she says he never thought of modeling as a serious career, only as a way to make a little extra money for school. Apart from sports cars, he did not have his father's passion for the appurtenances of celebrity. Says Hood: "He was not into being in the spotlight." Julia Bond recalls that as a freshman at Morehouse, Ennis "had a car, but his parents wouldn't let him bring it to the campus, so I ended up driving him up to Lennox [a popular shopping mall in Atlanta] all the time. His parents didn't want him to have it because they didn't want him to be flashy. It was real funny, you know, because people were, like, if you're Bill Cosby's son, how come you don't have a car?"

Ennis' attention turned to his pupils. He was a counselor to many children from all over New York City, but to one young man, he was virtually a father. Ennis Cosby started tutoring Walter Stephen Douglas III three years ago. Says Douglas: "I was 13 and thought I was stupid. Then I was beginning a new school year, and I was sent to meet my new tutor. It was Ennis. We just clicked. Every time I met him, he made me better. Every time I left, I liked him more. My grandmother knew the name and asked him if he was Bill Cosby's son, and he said no. It wasn't until four months later that he said, 'I can't lie to you. I'm his son, but don't tell anybody.'"

Cosby taught Douglas to learn at his own pace, and not to be overly worried that he was slower than his schoolmates. "He taught me never to give up. It was special because I knew he had the same problem, and when he got tired he never gave up." But Cosby helped Douglas with more than schooling. Douglas accompanied Ennis and a girlfriend to New York Knicks' games, sitting in front of the players' wives. Douglas remembers proudly, "They asked me if I was his son." And then there was the terror. "One morning I woke up with a fear of dying. I would lie in bed at night and be afraid to close my eyes, thinking what if I didn't wake up. I was afraid. My mother told him about it. The next time we met we talked about it. My father had been shot and killed when I was three months old. Ennis was comforting. He said, 'You are born into this world, and we all have to leave it sooner or later. It is natural. Everyone has to die. It doesn't help to worry about it. It will happen when it is your time. Hopefully we all go in a nice way.'"

On Dec. 18, 1996, Ennis dropped off a paper at school and took off on a break from the inner-city pressures of New York. He flew to California to stay at his parents' large Tudor-style house in a T-shaped intersection shared by Whoopi Goldberg and Steven Spielberg in Los Angeles' exclusive Pacific Palisades. Shortly after midnight, on Jan. 15, it was his time.

Ennis Cosby died in one of the safest areas in Los Angeles. The northbound Mulholland Drive exit off of the I 405 freeway, which connects West Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley, leads down onto a quiet access road landscaped with rolling hills of green shrubs and small trees. The eastbound road leads to Bel Air, where maps are sold on street corners for tours past the homes of some of Hollywood's biggest stars.

There were other murders in Los Angeles that day. Corrie Williams, a senior at Centennial High School in Compton, was killed riding a bus in South Central in broad daylight, in a place people expect such things to happen. It was allegedly committed by gang members, who, a Los Angeles Times survey found, commit about half the nearly 2,000 homicides in the city each year. As L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan was calling the Ennis Cosby murder "priority No. 1," Bill Cosby linked his son's death to the Compton case. In a phone call, he told police chief Williams he was concerned about Corrie's family. Earlier, the Cosby family released a statement that read, "Our hearts go out to each and every family that such an incident occurs to. This is a life experience that is truly difficult to share."

The investigation must now track several apparent leads. The police have not confirmed newspaper reports that the female witness was the person that Ennis called from a cell phone at 1:15 a.m. for help illuminating the area with the headlights of her car, the better to fix his flat. According to those stories, the witness supposedly left the scene because she saw a man with a pistol, who tapped on her car window. She then returned and found Ennis dead on the pavement next to his Mercedes. She supposedly saw a car fleeing but could not identify the make. The police have announced that something was taken from the crime scene, but Williams would not be specific. On Saturday the L.A.P.D. announced that the motive for killing Cosby was probably robbery. They also released a sketch of a suspect: a white man of average height, 25 to 32 years old. The police also put out a sketch of another white male whom a security guard saw driving away in a blue hatchback. He was being considered a witness. The police said there may be more witnesses.

All murder mysteries get tawdrier with the telling. And probing the netherworld of Los Angeles for Ennis Cosby's killer is unlikely to produce an exception. In the end, the tale of fathers and sons that made it so compelling may be merely a small part of some endless legal epic. But that facet may prove to be the most enduring one. Ennis Cosby was Bill Cosby's legacy. And his son's legacy may be a young man in New York City. When Walter Stephen Douglas heard of the murder, his heart was not really with the celebrity dad most Americans were mourning with. "I cried the whole day. I put a picture of Ennis on the bed and cried myself to sleep. He just went away, and a part of me went with him." Thinking of the man who was like a father to him, Douglas says, "I understand why his dad said he was a hero to him. He was a hero to me too. I wanted to be like him. The way he thought. The way he got over his problem. I thought I could do the same thing. I want to do what he wanted to do--open a school for kids like me. I figure if I put myself to it, I could be a teacher and make it fun." He pauses, in reflection. "Just like Ennis."

--Reported by Sylvester Monroe and Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles, Edward Barnes, Elaine Rivera, Jennifer Steil and Richard Zoglin/New York, Dan Goodgame and Jack E. White/Washington and Tammerlin Drummond/Atlanta

With reporting by SYLVESTER MONROE AND PATRICK E. COLE/ LOS ANGELES, EDWARD BARNES, ELAINE RIVERA, JENNIFER STEIL AND RICHARD ZOGLIN/NEW YORK, DAN GOODGAME AND JACK E. WHITE/WASHINGTON AND TAMMERLIN DRUMMOND/ ATLANTA