Bill Cosby: the downfall of ‘America’s dad’
As a new documentary on the US funnyman’s rise and fall airs, we speak to two of his accusers to examine how that public persona may yet lead to his ruin
When I was expecting my first child, my husband arrived home with a parenting book. Looking out from the cover, resplendent in a jazzy 80s sweater, was Bill Cosby twinkling confidently under the title, Fatherhood. Who, he seemed to be asking, wouldn’t want advice from “America’s Dad”?
Plenty of people today. In 2005, Cosby was accused of drugging, then sexually assaulting the director of a women’s basketball team. When the prosecutor declined to take it further, the 30-year-old launched a civil suit, in which 13 other women lined up to testify that Cosby had assaulted or raped them, too. Then the case was settled out of court and, somehow, Cosby’s reputation was barely dented. Cosby himself has repeatedly denied any misconduct.
In the years that followed, the comedian was given awards, went on talkshows, and had a weighty biography written about him, with little notice of the number of allegations made against him. Today, as he once more faces a criminal trial for sexual assault, and the number of women accusing him of sexual misconduct has spiraled to almost 60, this seems inexplicable. Which is why a new BBC documentary, Cosby: The Fall of an American Icon, asks accusers, colleagues and journalists how the silence continued for so long.
Cosby is hardly the first well-loved star to be accused of stomach-churning crimes. Yet his artistic and political achievements – and what the case says about race relations in the US – make the story unique, according to director Ricardo Pollack. The 79-year-old actor, he points out, is not just a “comedic genius”, whose 50-year career influenced generations of performers from Richard Pryor to Chris Rock, but a “role model and pioneer” who kicked down racial barriers .
It was in the early 1960s that Cosby made his name in standup. As the civil rights movement unfolded, the Philadelphia-born son of a maid and an alcoholic naval steward father somehow managed to entrance black and white audiences alike with his funny, perfectly crafted stories.
In 1965, this won him a part in I Spy as a secret agent, making him the first black actor to star in a network TV drama. He won three consecutive Emmys for the role, and a generation of fans. Movies, the animated series Fat Albert and commercials followed. In Pollack’s documentary, Richard Pryor’s wife, Jennifer Lee, notes: “He had made it – and a black man making it in America was a big deal.” Then, in the 1980s, came The Cosby Show. It was an instant hit, and a revolutionary one. Against a backdrop of what Pollack calls “Reagan and crack cocaine” with negative portrayals of African American communities flourishing in the media, the sitcom offered up an alternative vision: an aspirational, stable, upper-middle-class family.
Joseph C Phillips, who played Cosby’s son-in-law on the show, tells me it was something that had not been seen on US TV before. “She [Clair Huxtable, played by Phylicia Rashad] was a partner in a law firm, he [Cosby’s Cliff Huxtable] was an obstetrician,” he says. “They lived in Brooklyn Heights, their daughter went to Princeton, they were good looking. The kids weren’t all getting As, but their parents ran the household.”
With “universal issues of parenthood” rather than race at the heart of The Cosby Show, it became one of the most popular sitcoms of all time. That white audiences grew to love this black American family also helped to foster the idea that racial tension in the US was a thing of the past. As Phillips points out, the fictional Huxtables “became everyone’s family”. By election night 2008, George Bush’s former strategist Karl Rove was claimed the sitcom had paved the way for a black family in the White House.
For Cosby, the show not only cemented his wealth and power, it bound him in the mind of the public with his paternal, authoritative on-screen persona, Cliff Huxtable. After all, the Huxtables were said to be based on Cosby’s own brood. As Jelani Cobb put it in the New Yorker, Cosby was seen by many as “the embodiment of black dignity, a walking refutation of the worst ideas about us”. Off screen, he championed black causes, including donating $20m to a black women’s college in 1988, while on screen he raised the profile of Historic Black Colleges and Universities with the spin-off series, A Different World (1987-1993).