In his classic study, psychologist Richard Majors (with Janet Mancini Billson) writes, “Cool Pose is a distinctive coping mechanism that serves to counter, at least in part, the dangers that black males encounter on a daily basis.” As Majors notes “Cool pose…exacts a stiff price in repressed feelings and suppressed energy.” There is, perhaps, no better example of the stakes of “keeping cool” than the case of Nat King Cole, who at the pinnacle of his career in the 1950s was a most visible avatar of “Black” Cool and respectability. Cole’s death at age 45 in 1965, is a big cautionary tale for the cost of his public unflappability.
Cole is most well-known these days as the father of late Grammy Award winning Soul and R&B singer Natalie Cole. In the late 1940s and 1950s, Cole was a popular jazz pianist fronting the Nat King Cole Trio, and later a chart-topping crooner and crossover star, with the 1944 hit “Straighten Up Fly Right.” The song, co-written by Cole, was based on a sermon by his preacher father. For a generation of Black men trying to find their way in White America the song served as a mantra, a case that was made in the 1995 HBO film The Tuskegee Airmen, where the lead characters portrayed by Laurence Fishburne and Cuba Gooding, Jr. often used the refrain as a source of inspiration.
There were few homes in America in the latter-half of the twentieth century for which Cole’s rendition of “The Christmas Song” was not a staple during the holiday season. When the Nat ‘King’ Cole Show premiered on national television in 1956, it was one of the first nationally broadcasted variety shows to be hosted by an African American. Though Cole was by no means a political figure, his success resonated for Black America, because amid one of the most tumultuous and transformational periods of race politics in the United States, Cole literally kept his cool. Most were unaware of the price he paid.
The Nat King Show was cancelled after one season, despite its solid ratings, because sponsors didn’t want to alienate and offend their Southern consumers. This was just one example of the racial animus that Cole faced while topping the pop charts. With popular fare like “Route 66,” “Mona Lisa,” and “Nature Boy,” quintessential pop music from 1940s and 1950s, Cole was rivaled only by his label-mate, Frank Sinatra (the two shared an arranger in Nelson Riddle). Whereas Sinatra looked forward to a career that was limitless — film, the biggest and most lucrative venues, close friendships with sitting Presidents, headlining in Las Vegas and eventually his own record label — Cole was always challenged by the limits of his dark skin.
These challenges were as personal as they were professional; When Cole and his second wife moved to Hancock Park, a toney enclave in the Wilshire area of Los Angeles in the summer of 1948, white residents formed the Hancock Park Property Owners Association to force them out. Tactics included posting a sign with the words “Nigger-Heaven” in front of the Cole’s home, burning the word “Nigger” onto the front lawn, poisoning the family dog and finally firing a bullet through their window.
These weren’t the actions of down-home Mississippi or Alabama rednecks, but well-educated upper middle-class folk, in California, no less. How many of those folk might have bought copies of Cole’s commercial breakthrough “Nature Boy” only months earlier? When a lawyer representing the white residents conveyed to Cole that they simply didn’t want any undesirables, Cole half-jokingly responded “Neither do I, and if I see anybody undesirable coming into this neighborhood, I’ll be the first to complain.”
As much of a threat to Cole’s emotional and mental stability was an on-going struggle with the IRS over unpaid taxes. In the backdrop of his IRS issues, Cole was quietly surveilled by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. This was the early 1950s, and the US was embroiled in a social panic about the influence of Communism — the so-called “Red Scare’’ — led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, hence the term “McCarthyism.” Many prominent Blacks were under suspicion, most notably performer and activist Paul Robeson, and scholar and NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois, though the Red Scare was also a shield to investigate Blacks were involved in anti-racist political organizing.
The FBI sometimes used the IRS as a backdoor into the affairs of Black America, and this was literally the case when the IRS raided the Cole’s Hancock Park home, likely in collusion with Hancock Park Homeowners group. Cole wasn’t one to air dirty laundry, even when the laundry was sullied by white supremacy; what Cole kept to himself was likely manifested in the bleeding ulcers that he suffered throughout 1953, which forced him off the road and out of the studio. Stress and tobacco use are among the triggers of stomach ulcers.
In a measure of Cole’s demeanor, he continued to perform in front of racist audiences, particularly in the South, without a hint of rage or regret. In his fine biography of Cole, Will Frieldwald recounts an incident when arranger Nelson Riddle and his son were visiting the Coles. As they chatted, someone purposely rammed into Cole’s parked car and sped off. Frieldwald writes, “The Riddles were furious, but Nat acted like this was an everyday occurrence; clearly he had long been desensitized to these petty, dehumanizing acts of anonymous violence.”
This was the nature of Black life in America; Cole’s fame allowed his white friends and colleagues access to a world they were largely oblivious to. Cole donated to the NAACP and performed benefit concerts for them, but he had little choice in being pragmatic about how he expressed his political perspectives and his anger.
When Cole returned to his hometown of Montgomery, AL in the spring of 1956, as part of Southern tour, and during the legendary year-long bus boycott by Blacks in the city, he became even more of a target. Cole was on stage performing a Whites-only show (he was scheduled to perform a Blacks-only show later that day) when he was assaulted by four members of the local “Citizens Council’’. The intent of the group’s leaders was to kidnap Cole, with the hopes of provoking a race war.
That Cole was not a “rabble-rouser” or “hot head,” but a solidly middle-class family man — think Father Knows Best with Black skin — who performed respectable Pop music, made him a foil to the rantings of Southern segregationist, and thus ironically a logical target of their ire. Cole escaped any real harm (he returned to the tour the following week), and as he had done throughout his career, kept it moving. Cole strategically understood what could be lost personally, professionally and politically, if white America’s favorite Black entertainer “flipped the fuck out.”
Standing six feet tall, dark-skinned, and with a deep baritone voice, Cole might have been a major sex symbol in a later era. A chain-smoker throughout his adult life (Phillip Morris was his cigarette of choice), it was clear by the late 1950s, despite the professional success, that the pressures of crossing over — and keeping his cool — were taking a significant toll on Cole.
In her autobiography, Cole’s daughter Natalie, remembers the stress of being the “Black Kennedys”: “We all understood that no matter what problems or conflicts were swirling around us…The show must go on.” It was another reminder of the extent that her father was always under the glare of the public eye — whites waiting for him to crack; Black’s praying that he wouldn’t — in ways that were largely unprecedented for a Black American to that point. In retrospect, Natalie understood the toll it took on her father. As she wrote, “We learned to make emotional adjustments for the pain we felt, and some of that deferred pain came back to haunt me later in life.”
When Natalie returned home from boarding school for Christmas in 1964, she recalls “there was no mistaking his singular voice, but otherwise I might not have recognized him. He’d lost a lot of weight and looked ancient and skeletal…this person in front of me was but a shadow of my father.”
Two months later, and a week before the assassination of Malcolm X, Nat King Cole succumbed to lung cancer. He was only 45. While the proverbial “cancer sticks” might have caused his death, the weight of being Nat King Cole, of being a Black Man whose public and private lives were fodder for White Supremacy, and the chain-smoking that helped him emotionally navigate this life, were certainly complicit.
Cole’s use of cool to deflect rage, stress, fear…any number of emotions made him neither singular nor exceptional; that he had, in theory, access to financial resources, perhaps marks him among a subset of Black men with similar resources. Yet even those resources don’t matter in a culture, and I mean Black culture here, that doesn’t reward Black men for acknowledging their pain, and at times punishes them for even acknowledging that they are suffering at all. As Cole’s life and death accentuates, the cost of “cool” — the ways that we try to manage or control our emotional wellness — cannot be divorced from our physical wellness.
Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African American Studies and Professor of English and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. The author of several books including Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities and Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, both from NYU Press. His next book Save a Seat for Me: Meditations on Black Masculinity and Fatherhood will be published by Simon & Schuster.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Mark Anthony Neal's work on Medium.