Playboy Interview: Bill Cosby

During this decade, no comedian--black or white--has come close to achieving the superstardom Bill Cosby has fashioned for himself in the short space of seven years. CAt 31, he commands a fee of $50,000 a week for night-club dates; and on concert tours, he often earns three times that figure. Cosby has also vaulted to the top of two industries: He won four consecutive Grammys for his comedy albums and three Emmys in a row for his co-starring role as secret agent Alexander Scott on NBC's "I Spy," his first attempt at acting. In 1967, Cosby recorded two albums of rhythm-and-blues vocals, with the perhaps predictable result that one of his cuts, "Little Old Man," was a top pop hit for more than two months. And in April of this year, Cosby began filming his first movie, a remake of "Here Comes Mr. Jordan," in which he enacts the comic gangster role originally played by Robert Montgomery. So great is the demand for his services that NBC recently signed him to a five-year contract that will net him anywhere from $15,000,000 to $50,000,000; it calls for, among other things, an annual Cosby TV special, two cartoon specials based on his subteen superheroes, Fat Albert and Old Weird Harold, and "The Bill Cosby Show," beginning next fall, in which he will be featured each week as a San Francisco schoolteacher who moonlights as a detective.

Speaking of moonlighting, Cosby is also becoming as adept an executive as he is an entertainer. He and business partners Roy Silver and Bruce Campbell are assembling an entertainment conglomerate, based in Beverly Hills, whose net worth has already approached the $50,000,000 mark. Among their properties: a record company (Tetragrammaton, which released the controversial John Lennon-Yoko Ono LP "Two Virgins," featuring a frontal nude photo of the loving couple), a cartoon-animation studio, a public-relations firm, a talent-management corporation, a projected chain of Fat Albert hamburger stands and a motion-picture-production company that already has a five-film, $12,000,000 contract with Warner Bros.-Seven Arts.

To everyone's surprise but his own, Cosby's emergence as a one-man industrial giant has had no adverse effect on his personality. On stage and off, he is informal, unpretentious and, to use his favorite adjective, cool. Married, the father of two daughters and with another child on the way, Cosby maintains that he's perfectly willing to sire as many as 20 girls before he stops trying for a son. The Cosbys live in a huge Spanish-style home in Beverly Hills, where Bill spends a good deal of time informally entertaining friends, most of whom, like trumpeter Miles Davis and Boston Celtic player coach Bill Russell, are either black entertainers or black athletes.

Sports are a prime passion of his: Cosby watches as many televised football games as his wife will put up with and, during the year, plays charity exhibitions with a pickup basketball team--often on behalf of local black groups--throughout the Los Angeles area. No stranger to ghetto residents, Cosby gets a special kick out of working with youth. He sponsored a group of young Watts musicians in 1967, called them the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band and featured them as accompanists on a couple of his TV guest shots. To Cosby, it represents the way he can--and does--help other black people. His prospects in life not too many years ago, as he himself is the first to point out, were even dimmer than those of the Watts group before he aided them.

The eldest of three sons, Bill was born on July 12, 1937, in an area of Philadelphia that Time magazine once christened The Jungle. Bill's boyhood was typical of many a black youth's: He shined shoes, played street football and schoolyard basketball, took part in teen gang wars and compiled a lackluster academic record from the moment he set foot in school ("William would rather clown than study," his sixth-grade teacher noted on a report card Cosby now keeps framed in his home). At Germantown High School, he was captain of the track and football teams, which took up most of his time; after he had to repeat his tenth year because of poor grades, Bill dropped out of school to join the Navy as a medical corpsman. "I read the Geneva convention and it says you can't shoot a medic," he explained later. "And we were very popular--first thing wounded guys in the field would shout was 'Medic!' 'What do you want?' I'd ask. 'My leg! My leg!' 'Sorry, but I don't make house calls.'"

All his kidding aside, Cosby felt that the military life was largely a waste of time. "The thing I really hated," he recently recalled, "is that a guy with one stripe more than another cat thinks he has the power of God over him--and he does. After my first few days in the Navy, I knew I'd have to make it as a civilian. And for that, I needed an education." Accordingly, Cosby enrolled in correspondence courses conducted by the Navy and soon earned a high school diploma. Just before his tour of duty was completed, he competed for the Navy in a track meet at Villanova University. Gavin White, at that time the track coach of Villanova's city rival, Temple University, was in the stands that afternoon. Cosby was introduced to White and asked if Temple would consider offering him a track scholarship when he got out of the Navy. White replied that it could be arranged, and it was.

A versatile college athlete, Cosby participated in more than a half-dozen events for Temple's track team, winning the Middle Atlantic Conference's high jump competition with a leap of 6 feet and running the 100-yard dash in 10.2 seconds. As a second-string fullback on the varsity football squad, he was scouted for the New York Giants by Emlen Tunnell, who rated him as having a good chance to make the National Football League as a defensive safety.

Cosby decided to earn spending money by taking a job tending bar in a small Downtown Philly cocktail lounge, where his comedy career began--inadvertently--when he found himself entertaining customers to pass the time. After trying out a few bits at campus parties, Bill did occasional stand-up routines in other bars and, on weekends, would journey up to New York's Greenwich Village in search of better-paying gigs, where he finally landed a $60-a-week job at the Gaslight Club in the summer of 1962. By autumn, Cosby was commuting regularly from Philadelphia to New York for weekend appearances in Village clubs. It wasn't long before comedy and college became incompatible. "Bill wanted to travel to a football game in Ohio by himself," recalls Temple athletic director Ernie Casale. "He couldn't make the team flight because of a show-business commitment. I told him that, realistically, he'd soon have to choose between Temple and show business. He made the choice right there and then."

Though he made the right decision, he wasn't too sure at the time; his mother didn't want him to leave college, and neither did he. "But I was making as much as $300 on weekends," he remembers, "and even though I wasn't sure how long it would last, I was determined to see it out." By 1963, Cosby had graduated to top Village spots such as The Bitter End; and that summer, Allan Sherman, who was guest-hosting the "Tonight" show for vacationing Johnny Carson, caught his act and put him on network TV for the first time. A few weeks after that, Sherman coproduced Cosby's first album, "Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow... Right!" His career has been straight up ever since.

Over the years, Bill has been the subject of a series of limpid interviews; perhaps with the misguided intention of boosting a black comic who wasn't skewering whites on stage, writers and editors have often deleted his more trenchant offstage observations about the black man's place in America--almost to the point of making him seem an Uncle Tom. As a result, he roundly dislikes the press. "One magazine sent a guy out to spend three or four days with me. That cat and I talked for hours about what's happening to black people in this country, and I couldn't wait to see the issue. But it was really stupid, man. They were more interested in showing me playing basketball with my press agent than in what I had to say."

In an effort to reveal the real Cosby, Playboy dispatched Associate Editor Lawrence Linderman to accompany him on a series of one-night stands in the Midwest. Reports Linderman: "Cosby's life is incredibly departmentalized; aside from his personal appearances, he's constantly hopping across the country to show up for business conferences, TV guest shots, his friends' first nights and assorted film commitments. This schedule literally knocks him out. It isn't unusual to walk into Cosby's dressing room between performances and find him dozing in a straight-backed chair, a long-dead cigar propped between his lips. He stays that way until it's time to go on, then snaps awake instantly and gets himself 'up' on the way to the stage. Once there, he turns on and works as hard--physically--as any comedian I've ever seen. But the most impressive thing about watching Cosby perform is to realize how wide the appeal of his humor has become: The same routines that make him a hit in Harlem's Apollo go over just as big with all-white crowds in Las Vegas and Des Moines." The universality of Cosby's comedy provided the opening for our interview.

[Q] Playboy: Both fans and critics often call your humor "color-blind." Do you think that's an accurate description?

[A] Cosby: Well, I think there are some people who are disappointed when I don't tell my audiences that white people are mistreating black people. White critics will write about Cosby not doing any racial material, because they think that now is the time for me to stand up and tell my audiences what color I am and what's going on in America. But I don't see these people knocking the black elevator man in their building just because he isn't doing anything for civil rights by running that elevator; it wouldn't sell newspapers or magazines. The fact that I'm not trying to win converts on stage bugs some people, but I don't think an entertainer can win I've never known any kind of white bigot to pay to see a black man, unless the black man was being hung. So I don't spend my hours worrying how to slip a social message into my act; I just go out and do my thing.

[Q] Playboy: How would you describe it?

[A] Cosby: My humor isn't jokes as much as situations. I tell stories and play the characters in those stories, like the one I wrote for you guys. This isn't something that came to me overnight. I don't think I hit my stride until my third album; up until then, I'd been doing what amounted to cartoon ideas. Some of my humor comes straight out of the newspapers, in a way. Take Noah and the ark. I once read about a mass murder; and when they captured the guy and asked him why he did it, he said, "The voice told me to do it." You'd be surprised at how many killings there are where a guy hears a voice that says, "Take up thy rifle, go out and slay!" Now, this is a country built on Christianity; if a guy sees a bolt of lightning, hears a crack of thunder and then a voice saying, "Go and smite thine enemies!"--which was always happening in the Bible--how many cats do you know who wouldn't go along with it? So I started to think about what would happen today if a guy was told by the voice to go build an ark. First of all, he'd doubt that the voice was real. So there's got to be conversation between him and the voice. Second, what are the neighbors going to think? And third, no rain has been falling and it's hard to build an ark, so Noah, who's a totally rational man, is going to be angry at himself for doing it. As he's hammering away, he's going to be thinking, "What the hell am I building an ark for?"

[Q] Playboy: The recorded version of your Noah story is a tightly constructed and highly polished comedy routine; yet during night-club performances--as with so much of your material--you vary the dialog and often the plot from night to night. Why?

[A] Cosby: Well, I think I'm similar in my comedy to the way jazz musicians work. After you play a song through once, the solos start. I treat each of my characters as a song, and I start soloing when the character comes into the plot. I have certain notes to follow, but I can do different things with them--like chord changes. For instance, in my LP To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With, there's a scene where the kid lies to his father about how his bed broke. On the record, the kid cries when he does it. But there are nights when the kid doesn't cry. It all depends on how I want the kid to explain it to his old man. And also, to an extent, I want my live performances to be different from my records. I can't stand to have somebody sitting out there with his lips moving with mine.

[Q] Playboy: Most of your humor has to do with your childhood. Was it as happy as you make it seem?

[A] Cosby: Are you kidding? The thing I most remember about being a kid was being poor. I remember the eviction signs, especially; they were doubly hard to take. I had buddies who'd tell me, "Hey, man, like, you're really poor; you didn't pay your rent." Now, I'm not saying my life was harder than anybody else's; I'm just telling you the way it was. I remember a Christmas when we had no Christmas tree, and you just can't get lower than that. We had an orange tree and there weren't any presents. And I remember taking a girl to the junior high school prom and I didn't have money to cover cab fare; I was hoping she'd ride the trolley car with me, in her gown. But something great happened: Her mother gave me six dollars to help with the cab fare, because somehow she knew I didn't have any money. Maybe it wasn't all that tough to guess; I was wearing a blue double-breasted suit coat and a pair of black slacks. I wanted to keep my raincoat on, because I knew when I took it off, I'd be the only guy there who hadn't been able to come up with the bread to rent a tux. One house we lived in had no bathtub; my mother used to take out this big tub, put water in it and put it on top of the stove to heat up.

But when you're young, you have all kinds of energy and you forget the bad things and get on with the good: playing ball, going downtown with your friends to shine shoes and sell shopping bags, making two dollars and coming back home. In that neighborhood, we never had an image to look up to, aside from a minister. Anybody else who came around was either the white insurance man or the white bill collector who was looking for his two dollars for the plastic lamp he sold that was shaped like a cat with sparkling red eyes and a pink bottom. I know I didn't look up to any grownups. I would envy certain guys whose fathers had a sense of humor, whose fathers showed they cared for them.

[Q] Playboy: What about your own father?

[A] Cosby: Well, I love my father and he loves me, but the old man wasn't the outstanding part of my life. My parents got married in Philadelphia and my father started out with a middle-class paying job. But he was a heavy drinker when they married, and through booze and his own particular personality, he cared more about his buddies and what they thought of him than about taking care of his wife and kids. Somebody always seemed to rob my father on pay days between work and the house. So when he got home, I heard these terrible arguments between my mother and my father about where the money was. He'd say, "Well, you better take this, because that's all I have." And my mother would say, "But, Bill, you got paid today." And then he'd say, "Well, this is all I have, so don't ask me for any more." Then there were times when he'd come back the next day and say, "Gimme ten dollars." And Mom would tell him she needed the money to buy food. And then an argument and maybe a fight. I remember my father beating my mother up three times. I was too small to do anything about it. These things are very, very painful to think about today.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have any pleasant memories of those years?

[A] Cosby: Well, I dug cars, and still do. But I didn't actually have one until I was 24 years old, when I bought an old Dodge for $75, and I loved it, loved it. It had the baldest tires in the world. A cue ball has more grip than those tires did. I called it the Black Phantom. I did everything with that car! When I was a teenager, it was a big thing when one of the guys in the neighborhood got a set of wheels. There was a guy named Charley Wades, whose father gave him a car. Now, Charley was almost like a cabdriver; if you wanted to go to a party with him, you had to have some money to chip in for gas. Charley would say, "You can bitch about me charging you for the gas. but that's the only thing I'm charging you for. You're only giving me a quarter for gas, but what about my tires and my sparkplugs? What about my seats that you're rubbing your ass on? Where were you when I had to reline my seats? I didn't charge you nothing for that. So you're getting away clean, man."

And then there was the time Andy Patterson's father gave him a 1946 Olds, which, by the time Andy got it, was the saddest and slowest thing in north Philly. One night we double-dated and Andy had put old Army blankets over the car seats. I don't know what kind of rodent eats foam rubber, but Andy had two of the biggest holes I ever saw in his front seat; and when he forgot to tell a chick about them, she just about disappeared when she sat down. The covers went over her head and her can hit the bottom of the car. We all laughed about it, pulled her out and then drove into a gas station. It's raining and cold and the gas-station guy is sitting in his little office when Andy honks the horn. The guy gets up, puts on his raincoat and hat and comes around the car, slips and falls flat on his behind. And we start laughing again. The guy gets up, soaking wet, and limps up to the window. Andy rolls it down and says, "Gimme nineteen cents' worth of regular." And the guy walks away, goes back into his office and just sits there, shaking his head, just shaking his head. Those were the days when, to us, almost nothing mattered except cars.

[Q] Playboy: Did you continue your romance with cars when you became successful?

[A] Cosby: Three years after I bought the Black Phantom, I started appearing in big night clubs and on TV shows, and the first thing I did was go out and buy a 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SL for $5000. I put a down payment on it and drove across country, from Philadelphia to San Francisco. I figure I paid about $6000 in garage bills to keep it going, because each mechanic I met would say, "Umm, the car don't sound right, Bill," and I'd say, "OK, fix it." And I would ride the buses again, waiting for the car to be fixed, because parts had to be flown in from places like Egypt and San Diego and Mars.

One night, I was playing the Crescendo in Los Angeles and Theodore Bikel came to see me--we'd been good friends in Greenwich Village--and he invited me to go out for coffee. So Theodore's car comes up and it's a Corvette with We shall Overcome and Freedom now bumper stickers plastered all over it--so many you couldn't even see the chrome. Then up comes my Mercedes and he says to me: "What the hell did the Nazis ever do for you?" The next day, I sold it for $2500 and bought a Chrysler Imperial. But that was too heavy a car, so I went to a Chrysler station wagon, then a Plymouth station wagon, and I didn't like either of them. Finally, I said to my wife, Camille: "Every car we get, we're trying to get away from the stereotype of the Negro with the Cadillac; but I don't care what anybody says, the Cadillac is the best car in the world, and I'm buying one." So I went and bought an Eldorado and it was great.

But it so happens that most of my friends are either entertainers or athletes, and Bill Russell came to the house when we had this two-door Eldorado, a $7500 car. My wife and I are up front and Russell and his girl are like two pretzels in the back. So we decided to get rid of it and I bought a Rover, which has a little more room in the back. Later, I owned a Rolls-Royce limousine for a while and drove it myself; but I got rid of it pretty quick, because a Rolls looks weird without a chauffeur up front and I didn't want anybody driving me around. I've always loved Ferraris, so I have one of those now. I gave my wife an Excalibur, and I also have a 1934 Aston Martin, but I wouldn't take that car out on the road. I got rid of the Rover, so now I own only three cars; I think I'm starting to come out of it.

[Q] Playboy: Your success came quickly. Did you spend the bread as fast as it came in?

[A] Cosby: When I really started making it, I did. Everything had to be gold--tie clips, cuff links; I even went through the diamond-ring bit--the whole thing, but only for a couple of months. That's all it takes to take the edge off your desire to own things. I don't think this is necessarily a phase for most people who start earning a lot of money; but if you've come from a poor neighborhood, you tend to start buying like there's no tomorrow. There are stores that thrive on that kind of thing, stores that challenge you to walk in. It's almost like that store is saying, "I don't think you can afford it." So a guy goes in and he says, "I can too afford it." Dunhill's is that kind of store. I bought ice buckets, all kinds of expensive ashtrays, a humidor, lighters and a clock that tells the time all over the world; it takes me about an hour to find out what time it is in California. I put most of that stuff in one room, which my wife calls Cosby's Dunhill.

[Q] Playboy: Is being rich as much fun as you thought it would be?

[A] Cosby: I don't really think of myself as being rich. To me, a rich cat is somebody who can retire and live off his money any time he wants to, and I can't. I'd like to wind up with an income of $50,000 a year when I retire; but with the tax structure the way it is, that's almost impossible to do, unless I make investments in things like land that over a long period of time will take good care of my money. I wouldn't blame you, though, if you said, "What's he complaining for? He's a millionaire."

[Q] Playboy: Are you?

[A] Cosby: Last year, I earned $2,000,000--but that isn't $2,000,000 in the pocket. There's an agent fee, a manager, press, a building for my corporation--and an accountant from whom you learn you're really broke; that now, in fact, you're worse off, in a way, than if you'd just taken a gig as a schoolteacher. Almost every cent is spent; and every penny you make, you got Uncle Sam taking out 70 percent after expenses. And now there's cats coming to me because they've read some bullshit article about me, like Newsweek's, saying I'm going to get $50,000,000 from CBS for 20 years and that my record albums have earned, like, $3,000,000. So, as soon as cats hear this, they all got business deals to propose.

[Q] Playboy: Do many of them try to put the touch on you?

[A] Cosby: All of them--and they don't just ask for five bucks, either. They want it all. First time a guy says to me, "Hey, you got a minute?," right away I know I'm being hit for bread. It used to take me a while to get up the nerve to say it, but now I can do it automatically: "Here's my card. See me at the office and I'll listen to you." I usually have to shout this over the sound of the band at some jazz joint, because that's where they've decided I've got to hear their plan. Well, 90 percent of these cats, when you say that to them, come back with, "If you don't want to hear it now, man, then forget it, 'cause I got a good thing going." But let's say a cat has something legitimate; if I tell him the bread isn't there--which it isn't--he won't believe me, and he's going to wind up putting me down. But let me tell you that in 1968, I had to scrape up--and get a loan from the bank for--$833,000 in taxes.

[Q] Playboy: In spite of the tax bite, you still have what most people would consider a lot of money at your disposal. How do you spend it?

[A] Cosby: Quickly. My home cost $250,000, plus $100,000 worth of furniture. But it's a home, not a palace with chandeliers hanging and white rugs and things you can't walk on or sit on. You come into my house and you can sit on my sofa and take your shoes off and plop your feet up on the table. People live there, not a maid and a butler--people. It's comfortable; nothing is closed off. My Ferrari cost $17,000, and it's air conditioned, because I remember Philly summers riding around with friends of mine in an old 1946 Chevy; we would be sweating and we'd have to drive fast to make some breeze. I like groovy steaks; I like to serve a great wine to my friends when they come by, even though I don't drink. I remember one time when I was a kid and read that Mitzi Gaynor was going to get $50,000 for playing a week in Las Vegas and saying to myself, "God, that's a lot of bread." It was so totally out of proportion to what I dreamed of, even when I started making $400 a week. There's a tremendous gap between where I used to live and what I used to do and where I am now. And I dig it.

[Q] Playboy: In the midst of your own luxury, do you ever feel guilty when you think about the poverty in which most black Americans are forced to live?

[A] Cosby: When I first started making big money, I felt guilty, I guess. But now I feel that I've really put together a hell of a one-man antipoverty program. I took my talent and I put it to work, and today, I've brought up, by the bootstraps, the economic conditions of a mother, a father, two brothers, aunts, uncles, grandfathers and other family members, and then reached out to help close friends. The next step is to help out other black people. This doesn't simply mean giving them $500,000--although I give plenty. But to me, reaching out to black people means to open up my particular part of the industry. My production companies will have black apprenticeship programs and will use black actors, directors and stagehands. After they've demonstrated their talents and people dig 'em, they can then go on their own, which is why I tour with talented black performers like the Pair Extraordinaire and Leon Bibb. When they meet my audience, the people remember their names. So I don't feel guilty about having bread. Now, when I meet a guy in the ghetto, of course he's going to be envious, but he doesn't necessarily resent me for it; there's a whole lot of cats in the ghetto to whom I Spy was something to be proud of, in a way. I certainly was, and I can only thank one man for making it happen: Sheldon Leonard.

[Q] Playboy: How did you meet him?

[A] Cosby: It was really funny, man, and it wasn't funny. I went into this business after hearing Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner do their 2000-year-old-man routine. I loved their flow of humor, the looseness of it and the fact that any second, a piece of greatness could suddenly be created. So I decided to go into show business to do this kind of comedy. I figured I'd eventually need a partner, but then I go on television, do two or three guest shots, and suddenly I'm playing at the Crescendo in Los Angeles. Remember, now, I'm in show business for two years, and Carl Reiner comes by to see the show and afterward he says, "I loved your show, man." Well, of course, I'm stunned. Like, Carl Reiner--one half of the 2000-year-old-man thing--came to see me! Now, this is before militancy and Watts and Detroit, when it was still something else for a white star to come see a black man. And he says, "My producer, Sheldon Leonard, wants to see you. He couldn't be here tonight, but he loves your work."

The next morning, I went to Sheldon's office, hoping that perhaps he would give me a guest shot on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Now, mind you, I couldn't act at all; I'd never done any acting, except a couple of lies to my mother. So I walked into Sheldon's office and he talks to me, not about doing a Van Dyke Show but about a new series that would co-star a black man and a white man. They're going to be spies and they're going to travel to Hong Kong. Now, here I am, my first time in California, only the third time I've ever been out of Pennsylvania, and this guy is talking about Hong Kong. That knocked me out of my chair more than the series. I said, "Travel to Hong Kong? This program is going to pay my way to Hong Kong? And Sheldon is telling me he thinks I've got the particular personality that will work for his show and that all I have to do is put the same thing on TV that I do in my stand-up act, and that'll be my job. Then he says, like, "Can you act?" And I say, "You must be high. You didn't see me when I did Othello in Central Park last year, did ya?" And he smiles and all I'm thinking about is, "Hong Kong, Hong Kong, man. I'm gonna see the original Chinese people, the ones I've read about." So I get back to my manager, Roy Silver, and I tell him, "Don't let this cat off the hook, 'cause if he's blowing smoke, we're not letting him get out of it." Well, Sheldon said he'd get in touch with me a year later. And he did.

[Q] Playboy: Before the show actually got under way. it was reported that you didn't want to play a hip valet, since no matter how hip you were, you'd still be a white man's servant. Was this true?

[A] Cosby: I had to find out a lot of things from Sheldon before I signed. Like, was I going to carry a gun? I wanted to make sure that I didn't have to go off into the bushes when an I Spy fight started. They said I didn't. So Bob Culp and I fought the international Communist conspiracy on an equal basis. I must tell you, though, that the show wouldn't have been what it was if it hadn't been for Bob.

[Q] Playboy: Had you met him before you started working together?

[A] Cosby: No. I met him when the show began filming. But he did send me a letter not too long after Sheldon had first talked to me, when I was playing Mister Kelly's in Chicago. The letter said that two guys going to do a series must get married, that they are married. Right away, this was actor talk, and I had only been in the business around three years. Here was an actor telling me I have to marry him. That upset me a little.

[Q] Playboy: How did it go when you finally got together with Culp?

[A] Cosby: The first time I saw Bob was the first day we read for the series; I walked in and we shook hands, but we didn't really have a chance to talk before they gave us scripts. Then it was the moment of truth for me: All of the fears, anxieties and apprehensions were bubbling and boiling, because now I had to prove myself. Although the producers were with me, they were really listening to see if I could act. I'd never read a single line for Sheldon Leonard--and when you think about that, about a producer banking half a million dollars on a guy whose comedy routine he liked, it becomes a hell of a gamble. Well, they listened, and I was embarrassed, because I was no good--really no good. I fumbled and mumbled and couldn't concentrate or do anything right.

But afterward, Bob and I got together and talked and, at Bob's suggestion, we agreed to make the relationship between the white character, Kelly Robinson, and the black man, Alexander Scott, a beautiful relationship, so that people could see what it would be like if two cats like that could get along. Bob's a fine actor and a fine human being. He could have made it rough for me; he could have made me paranoid with criticism, because my ego came into play. At the time, I was a pretty well-known, up-and-coming comic; and if he'd been rough on me, it would have been too easy for me to say to myself, "What do I need all this for?" In other words, if Bob hadn't been the great guy he is, I might have copped out.

[Q] Playboy: Were you still nervous when the filming actually began?

[A] Cosby: It was really weird, man. As a comedian, I can walk out in front of 5000 people and not worry about a thing. Not a thing, believe me. But to stand up and face a camera and crew of maybe 15 guys and get up tight about it--to me. that's weird. It took a lot of weeks before I felt relaxed and able to do my thing without being self-conscious.

[Q] Playboy: How did you feel about playing and, in a real sense, glamorizing a CIA agent?

[A] Cosby: Well, actually, the CIA never let us say we were CIA agents.

[Q] Playboy: But, in effect, you were, weren't you?

[A] Cosby: In effect, yes. But the important thing to me, man, was to get a black face on the screen and let him be a hero. I would have done it regardless of what the CIA's image was at the time--and the series was conceived and drawn up well before the CIA got to be a heavy. I was very, very happy--forget the CIA--that a black man was able to be on an equal basis with the show's white hero.

[Q] Playboy: One continuing criticism of the show's stories was that Bob Culp always got the girls, which seemed to make him a little more equal than you. Did you resent that?

[A] Cosby: If you weren't a steady viewer, you might have missed some of Scotty's love stories. But that concerned me less than the fact that Sheldon Leonard didn't hire me as a token. He said he wanted to use a Negro. Now, at that particular time, how was the black man accepted by the public? I'll tell you: Before we even got the first show on the air, writers and poll takers had picked us to wind up 97th out of 100 shows. We originally were going to work I Spy like a funny Lone Ranger and Tonto, where in I would supply the humor. I accepted that, man, because that's the way it was; there was nothing else going. I felt I could surely bring some things out in this character, because here was a guy who carried a gun and knew karate, so at least he was going to be able to shoot and fight. As long as Scotty wasn't going to let the other cat beat up the bad guys after he got knocked out, as long as he wasn't going to be carried home so he could do the paperwork, I felt it would be OK. Bob, by the way, wrote the first I Spy script in which I was interested in a woman--who turned out to be Eartha Kitt.

[Q] Playboy: How did you develop the character of Scott?

[A] Cosby: Well, the first thing I decided was to make this guy, who was so intelligent on paper, a real human being. If you know a guy who has a Ph.D. or a master's, you know he kind of respects what he has, but he doesn't talk as if he's always conscious of the degree. He'll say "ain't" and "got" and "I'm gonna," all the time knowing technically, grammatically what's going on. So I decided to make Alexander Scott this kind of guy--a guy who grew up in the ghetto, who went to school and took on middle-class values, who was trying to live like the white middle class. But he always knew he was black, with a real degree of black pride.

[Q] Playboy: When did you feel you had Scott really pegged?

[A] Cosby: After about the seventh story, I felt I could kind of walk into it. It was almost as if I just woke up one morning, went to work and knew it was cool

[Q] Playboy: Did you feel, as many critics did, that I Spy's scripts were often secondary to the banter between you and Culp?

[A] Cosby: Bob and I--and the producers--wanted the shows to have stronger stories, but we never really got them. They became watered-down mystery plots. And in our third year, a couple of the shows turned out to be walking National Geographic magazines; our backs would be to the camera and you could see the Aegean over our shoulders. Or we'd be looking over the edge of a beautiful cliff on the Mediterranean.

[Q] Playboy: Were you relieved or disappointed when the show was canceled after its third season?

[A] Cosby: Both. When I first got the news, I felt, like, "I'm free"; but after a few minutes, I started thinking about all those hours I would have off. I started thinking about our producers--Sheldon Leonard, Morton Fine and David Friedkin--and how unhappy they had to be. About all the grips and people who made a living from the show. And then I wondered about all the things we could have--and should have--done on the show. But that isn't the way TV is set up. We were there to make the dollar. The only way I can look at it is that we were in 74th place after three years and to go into a fourth season wouldn't have made much sense. So NBC decided to shoot a brand-new show that went an hour and cost only half as much as I Spy. Finally, it was just a matter of economics. But we had some new things in mind for the fourth year, and I'm kind of sorry we didn't get a chance to do them.

[Q] Playboy: What were they?

[A] Cosby: Well, our producers had opened their eyes and ears to us. It was easier for Bob and me to kidnap a producer and lock him up in his room than for Columbia students to get their grievances taken care of. We got Sheldon to agree to more love stories for me in the fourth season, also to more scripts for Bob carrying a whole show by himself. And, for dessert, we wanted to bring the boys together in a couple of stories where there'd be no script, no nothing; they'd just walk around kind of improvising. So it would have been a new show.

[Q] Playboy: To a very real extent, your role in I Spy helped open up the television industry to black performers. Do you think the representation of Negroes on TV has improved enough since you began the series in 1965?

[A] Cosby: Well, we've certainly come a long way from black cats who were bug-eyed, afraid of ghosts and always saying things like "Feet, don't leave me now." Guys like Mantan Moreland, Stepin Fetchit and Willie Best never hit anybody, never fought back and were always scared white. And we don't see the mass stupidity of Amos 'n' Andy anymore. That show still gets to me, man. Each time I name an Amos 'n' Andy character, try to imagine these guys as white, and you won't be able to: You had Lightnin', who was slow in every possible way; Calhoun, the lawyer who never got anybody out of trouble and never went into court prepared; Kingfish, the conniver, who was always saying, "Yeah, but brother Andy..."; and Andy himself, who wasn't too bright, either. Like, nobody on that show was bright except Amos, the cabdriver, who we hardly ever heard from. And then there was Kingfish's wife, Sapphire; every time he came through that door, she'd be chewing him out for something. Now, audiences weren't supposed to laugh with these people; they were supposed to laugh at them, because they were so dumb. And while that show was on, there was nothing else on the air to counterbalance these stereotypes. It was almost as if Poles were exclusively presented as characters in Polish jokes. Well, you're just not going to believe that all Polish people are really dumb; but if that's all you got to see about 'em, you might start to believe it. And they'd understandably resent it. Or the same thing about Jewish people hoarding money. You have to show things besides stereotypes.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think that a series with a nonstereotyped all-black cast could be successful on TV today?

[A] Cosby: Probably not. The kind of show you mean would have to be about the life of a black family, with all its struggles. But if you're really going to do a series about a black family, you're going to have to bring out the heavy; and who is the heavy but the white bigot? This would be very painful for most whites to see, a show that talks about the white man and puts him down. It would strike indifferent whites as dangerous; it would be called controversial and they probably wouldn't want to tune in. But when there's a right and a wrong, where's the controversy? The white bigot is wrong. The indifferent person sitting on the fence is wrong. Instead of having occasional shows that present the black viewpoint on educational channels, the networks should be in there pitching now.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't the widening employment of black actors in featured roles on various series a hopeful sign that television's racial stereotyping is coming to an end?

[A] Cosby: I think it's a positive thing that most of the new shows have a black member of the cast; when I started I Spy, about the only blacks on TV were maids and butlers. It's still tokenism, but I would rather see a cat who is standing tall as a token than nobody at all. And the acceptance of black people on television means that when enough shows are seen by enough whites, they'll get used to it, with the result that black people will be able to do more things in this society. There's also the important matter of black identification. Let's forget hatred and bigotry for the moment; let's pretend they don't exist. Now, I have black skin. When I look at TV, I have to identify with what I see, and all I saw when I was growing up was the white upper class. or white middle class or white lower class. So it was white America that I identified with, that I studied and tried to emulate as I grew up. Now, a black kid can try to act like a white American, but there's just no way he can be a white American. So when TV begins to feature black people, it's performing a great service to the black community; that's the way I felt about being in I Spy.

[Q] Playboy: You won three consecutive Emmys for I Spy, and your comedy LPs won you four consecutive Grammys. Which meant more to you?

[A] Cosby: They all mean the same to me: that I'm a winner; that I've been chosen by the people of my profession, regardless of who they are, as the best. I think if I could take the awards and do what I really wanted with them, I'd probably Scotch-tape them onto the hood of my car and kind of drive around with a little smile on my face. Because I'm really proud of them, man. But you're supposed to be very cool about these things and tuck the Emmys and the Grammys away in the corner of some room, so that nobody will think you're vain and conceited. The greatest moment of an award, though, is when they announce your name, the moment when you're expected to say thank you. Then it's on to the next thing; you can't hang around bathing your body in the reflection of a trophy.

[Q] Playboy: One of the things you seem to be going on to next is singing. You have two vocal LPs out, and one of your singles, Little Old Man, was a pop hit two years ago. Are you going to try to make it as big in singing as you have in comedy?

[A] Cosby: No; singing is just something I like to do. I like rhythm and blues and I'm thinking about cutting another blues album, but I don't even come close to having any kind of a voice. It's just a hobby--like some guys like to golf. They don't play a good game, but they're out on the course every morning. I don't shoot a good game of rhythm and blues, but I got my cap and clubs and shoes, and I go sing.

[Q] Playboy: Your first film--a remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan--will be released sometime this fall. Do you have the same trepidations about going into movies that you did before you became a television star?

[A] Cosby: Not as many as then, but I'm entering a new field, and that means I've got a new audience to win over; it doesn't matter about past awards or that when you play a city, you draw 17,000 people for a one-night stand. This is a new thing and you've got to make a new impression. But I hope to have better scripts than I did on TV, and I hope to do things that have broader scope.

[Q] Playboy: At this point, how would you assess yourself as an actor?

[A] Cosby: I think I have a personality talent. I can play a sensitive guy and also a funny guy, caught in a funny situation. You won't see me going into Brandoish depths or trying to compete with Sir Laurence Olivier on Shakespeare. But I feel I have the intelligence and the talent to be a big star; I really believe that. This isn't conceit; it's just that I know what I can do and, by this time, I also know that by doing things the way I want to do them, people will be for me.

[Q] Playboy: Do you ever worry that your popularity will wane and that you'll no longer be able to earn the kind of money you're presently pulling in?

[A] Cosby: I have a great fear of winding up broke; I guess that would be about the most embarrassing thing that could happen to me. Because, if I do wind up broke, my mother will blame it all on the cigars I smoke; my father will say it's because of all the expensive things I bought at Dunhill's; and my wife will say it's from all the charitable organizations I've given to. So to avoid all that, as I said before, I'm involved in long-range investments--like land--that will eventually bring me an income of about $50,000 a year. Maybe one day, I'll have made such heavy bread that even Sam won't be able to penetrate it, and then I hope I'll be set for the rest of my life. Because I really do plan to get out of show business within five years or so.

[Q] Playboy: Completely?

[A] Cosby: No, I'm not going to make a total break with show business, because, to me, that would almost be like castration. I think I'll be doing occasional TV specials and appearances, a little less than the kind of thing Bob Hope does. I'm going to just take my little bundle and let all those handshaking, graft-taking $30,000-a-year politicians know they won't have to worry about me standing in any unemployment line.

[Q] Playboy: What will you do with yourself?

[A] Cosby: I plan to teach in a junior high school, which is where kids become glandularly aware of being male and female. Early adolescence is a very difficult time of life for ghetto kids, because people to look up to, like I said earlier, are scarce in a poor neighborhood. In middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods, kids have their fathers to look up to--college graduates or skilled workmen. In lower class neighborhoods, kids look up to the gambler's skills--skills that work openly against the law. Poor kids have no image that teaches them the value of education. It has to do with what they're taught in history classes, too; I'd want to show kids there are black heroes to be proud of, so they have a different kind of cat to look up to. Because, let's face it, most of the black people we admire are running that race or hitting that ball or dribbling it down-court. And so black girls hope to marry a guy who'll become a professional athlete. And the guy hopes to become a pro, goes to college without knowing about or being ready for college, plays ball and often never graduates. Without teaching a subject in particular, I want to help put those kids on to finding out what they really want to do in life.

[Q] Playboy: But schools aren't set up for classes without any particular subject.

[A] Cosby: No, they're not--but that doesn't mean they won't be. In small towns, the church and the school are the center of things; functions are held at both and the pastor and the teacher know all the parents. No school is like that in the big cities. Instead, school is the building whose windows you break in the summertime; it's the building with the yard where you play penny poker games. It isn't the connecting ground it should be for kids. Children grow up thinking that all teachers are Ichabod Cranes, but teachers are just underpaid human beings who aren't supposed to strike. For every successful human being, there are at least three or four teachers who inspired them to become what they are today; but the teachers never get any of the credit. When I was in school, I remember a teacher telling me I'd better study or else I'd grow up to be a garbage man. If you look at what the average garbage collector makes and what the average schoolteacher makes, I think the garbage man is probably telling his kids they'd better not study or else they're going to wind up as schoolteachers.

[Q] Playboy: In last December's Playboy Interview, Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver said that unless black demands for equality are quickly met, the result will be "a second Civil War... plunging America into the depths of its most desperate nightmare." In view of your plans to teach black children, form black production companies and continue your entertainment career, it would seem that you don't agree with Cleaver's evaluation of America's future.

[A] Cosby: I'm not in favor of raising guns, but I don't think Cleaver would be, either, if he thought there was any other way to solve the racial situation in this country. A lot of black men feel that way, and I can't say they're wrong, because America's resistance to giving the black man a fair shake is almost unbelievably strong. And when black people keep butting their heads against the stone wall of racism, there are those who feel they have to become violent.

Look, there can't be an argument over the fact that we should have equality in America. But the white man doesn't want us to have it, because then he'll be giving up a freedom of his--to reject us because of color. I really believe that black people could march until the end of the world and the majority of whites still wouldn't want to give up what they see as their precious right to be racists. Whites should realize that, under these conditions, it's only natural for some of those marchers to finally say, "Shit, man, this ain't gettin' us nowhere. The best thing to do is throw a goddamn bomb into the building." When Martin Luther King was murdered, I felt that his death made the nonviolent approach appear irrelevant to many black people.

[Q] Playboy: Stokely Carmichael and others said that Dr. King's murder marked the passing of nonviolence. Do you agree with them?

[A] Cosby: Martin Luther King was a good teacher of the nonviolent philosophy and a great leader. I think his philosophy is still as meaningful today as when he was alive. It was well before his death that Stokely broke away from nonviolence, and it was well before his death that violent, militant groups came into being. But I don't think people can arbitrarily be put into neat categories of violent or nonviolent. I can tell you that I don't believe in letting black people get pushed around when they're in the right. If a lot of black people no longer believe in nonviolence, it's because they've lost all faith and trust in white men. Black people have lain in the streets and they've let whites hit them in the head with everything from clubs to ketchup bottles. They've let themselves be called niggers and have still somehow managed to walk tall and show that they still believe in nonviolence, that this philosophy makes them better than those who torment them. But they've taken all this abuse, and for what? How far has it really gotten them? Many intelligent and educated black people are tired, just plain tired, of being noble, of not striking back. And I think that a lot of white people secretly hope that the Negro will renounce nonviolence.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Cosby: Because it would give whites an excellent reason to go ahead and strike; they think force is the easiest way to solve the problem. Not necessarily a war, but some law that would quietly march us off into concentration camps until we learned that this is their country.

[Q] Playboy: As you know, most whites think the concentration-camp theory is a myth.

[A] Cosby: Look, it's possible to have concentration camps in Chicago--or in almost any large city--by simply blocking off the ghetto, putting barbed wire around it and not letting anybody in or out. This isn't going to happen until we give the whites a little more of a reason for putting us in a concentration camp, but it isn't too far away. Black people are not going to stop burning their own neighborhoods for a while, but if nothing is accomplished as a result of this, they'll become even more desperate; and when there's nothing left to burn in black neighborhoods, they're going to spread out--into white neighborhoods, into downtown districts, to hit those stores. Farfetched as it may sound, black people will actually go to war if they're driven to it. Not all black people, but the ones who feel they're willing to give up their lives in order to mess up this country, to bring America to its knees. I'm not talking about just burning some buildings but about black guerrillas cutting wires, darkening the cities, ending communications. All-out war.

[Q] Playboy: Of course, black people couldn't possibly win such a war. Don't you think it could result only in massive repression and bloodshed?

[A] Cosby: Yes, I do, and there's just no arguing that point. The terrible thing is that there's no way the troops are going to be able to distinguish between the bomb throwers and people who are peacefully sitting in their homes.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think this war can be averted?

[A] Cosby: That's up to the white man. He's at the point now where he will either have to allow the black man his civil rights or try to wipe him out. History has shown, I think, that in order for the black man to achieve a positive response to his protests, he has to keep escalating his methods of dissent, not because he wants to but because the white establishment forces him to. We have been forced to go from singing to sit-ins to marching to letting them beat us up, to watching them burn and bomb our churches and assassinate our leaders and, now, into being coerced into burning our own neighborhoods. The next step is to start slaughtering us en masse, and the step after that is out-and-out war.

[Q] Playboy: Malcolm X often claimed that "the squeaky hinge gets the oil"--that America redresses black grievances only in response to violence. But if shooting were to break out tomorrow on a national scale, do you think it's likely that the white establishment, with its domestic order threatened, would respond by ensuring equality for black people?

[A] Cosby: Well, this much is certain: It'll be the hinge's loudest possible squeak. But I really think that, all along, the white man has been oiling the hinge with the secret intention of slamming the door. And when he finally slams it shut for good--and has his genocidal war--he won't have to worry about the squeak anymore. What will be left won't exactly be a country, but at least the place will be well run. Except that America will have to find someone else to dance to its music. The Mexicans will folk-dance for a while, and then there's the Puerto Ricans, and then the Chinese people will be dancing; but soon enough, that squeaky-hinged door will be slammed shut, too--and padlocked.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think the world will sit by and quietly watch while all this is happening?

[A] Cosby: As long as most of the world powers are white, why not? When the French, Poles and Czechs come off the boat, they're welcomed to America, "the land of the free, the home of the brave." The Statue of Liberty welcomes them, but it doesn't welcome the man who was born here--the black man. There's no lamp lit for him; so the black man has to climb up there and light it himself. World opinion? If all these European countries are so groovy, then how come when their guys get off the boat, they turn out to be bigots?

[Q] Playboy: If the world is ready to passively witness genocide in the U.S., doesn't black violence, as preached by militants like Rap Brown, strike you as ill advised, to say the least?

[A] Cosby: Rap and the other militants all speak the truth when they let America know that the black man is not going to take any more bullshit; we've been here for 300 years and we've had it with waiting. But when Rap makes a speech and says we should get guns and use them on Whitey, it doesn't strike me as a cool move tactically. I, for one, would never let people know I was planning to shoot at them. If you mean it, you just don't talk about it. This goes back to my street-corner days. Unless he's got another card to pull out, it's not the brightest cat in the world who stands around telling a guy, "I'm gonna get a gun and blow your head off." When the guy sees you don't have that gun yet, he pops you right in the teeth or, if he's got a gun, he uses it on you.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think the easy accessibility of firearms in America heightens racial tensions?

[A] Cosby: The way I look at it is that guns are sold to protect whites against blacks. The leaders of bigotry have got to keep the poor, ignorant white cat really upset and nervous, so that their friends the gun manufacturers can sell him some guns and maybe even some bazookas as well.

[Q] Playboy: But you'd have to admit that the black militants' threats are at least one of the reasons whites are buying guns.

[A] Cosby: Yes, and you have to admit that every time the black man has made a nonviolent move to gain acceptance, he's been laughed at or cursed or hosed down or killed.

[Q] Playboy: You seem to be saying that race war is inevitable. Is that what you believe?

[A] Cosby: I hope it's not inevitable, but I don't know. I think if we really want to make sure nothing like it ever happens, we have to get on the stick now, and just maybe it can be avoided. Because we know the answers.

[Q] Playboy: What are they?

[A] Cosby: Well, if it's not too late already, one answer is through black political power, such as what happened in Cleveland with Carl Stokes and in Gary with Richard Hatcher being elected mayor. But that doesn't solve the problems even in those cities, because if the administration doesn't have black people on its board of directors or as city planners, there's very little that a mayor can actually do. Supposedly, the mayor has power, but he's only as powerful as the various city boards that go along with him.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think that elected officials such as Stokes and Hatcher will be able to persuade white city board members to go along with them on plans for improving black neighborhoods?

[A] Cosby: If they're not able to, it won't be because they haven't tried. They were elected by black people; and if they want to be re-elected, they'll have to produce. But the black politician of today knows that his people don't really trust him. Especially if he has a white man over him, in which case he'll be called the white man's politician.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think that many black legislators are white men's politicians?

[A] Cosby: It used to be like that because of a policy that dates back to the days of slavery, when one black man on a plantation would be allowed to work indoors. He was called the house nigger and lived and ate well, and wouldn't do anything to make the boss angry, or else he'd wind up in the fields pickin' that cotton. Black politics has always had a little of this house-nigger mentality, but now it's changing. You can see it in a cat like Julian Bond, who could have been a house nigger but who, in effect, said, "Now, look, I don't mind working in the house, but I just want you to know a couple of things," for which they tried to throw him out of the house--Georgia's Statehouse. But there's still a lot of resentment and envy of the black politician, because the guys working in the fields know that the cat in the house is eating real good. They know he's not getting chitlins or the last part of the pig thrown to him.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel that the majority of recently elected black Congressmen are working as hard as they can to advance the cause of black equality?

[A] Cosby: I'd rather see guys like S.C.L.C.'s Jesse Jackson or even Rap Brown in Congress than some of the black cats who are there now. I think Rap would make one hell of a Vice-President; to use Dick Gregory's line, nobody would shoot the President then. Most black Congressmen seem like they're just trying to belong. But here again, what they may be doing is walking that tightrope to prove it can be done, to make it easier for other black men to get elected. You can never tell what a guy's philosophy may really be, because while we're putting him down, he might just be quietly paving the way for other black legislators. That's sometimes in the nature of a great sacrifice, especially when we, as selfish individuals, tend to look only at immediate results. So I'd really like to believe that a man like Senator Brooke is giving the cats in the Senate a fast shuffle, so that he can clear a path for more black Senators. If he's doing that, then beautiful. But if he's really into the whole Republican thing, if he was genuine during his campaign for Nixon and for that great friend of the black man, Spiro T. Agnew, then Brooke hasn't done a thing for us.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think is the single most imperative issue that should receive top priority from black legislators?

[A] Cosby: Justice. Police forces and the courts have to be overhauled and improved--really improved. I no longer expect a white policeman to jump in and protect a black man from being struck by a white, because I think their sense of white brotherhood--another way of saying racism--prevents them from identifying with the black or from just remaining objective. Police will turn their heads away when bricks, rocks or fists are thrown at a black man by whites. Not long ago, a white Chicago woman kicked a black man in the behind and punched him in the neck because he wanted Negro kids bused to school; when the guy defended himself against her, the cops arrested him. In that case, as in so many others, law and order protected the white aggressor.

[Q] Playboy: Surely you don't think all white cops are racist.

[A] Cosby: Look, let's first talk about what a very difficult thing it is to be a policeman. And let's talk about a policeman who is straight, who goes about his job with an open mind. But because he's a cop, he's got a problem, because he is being judged the way we black people don't like to be judged; in other words, when you see a policeman, he's a cop. And if he's a white cop, he has a white family and he identifies with white people; cops aren't machines, you know, when it comes to race relations.

[Q] Playboy: Is there any way you see that white cops and black people could begin getting along better?

[A] Cosby: I think relations would improve if a scientist could invent a mechanized helmet cops could wear, which would see to it that they enforced the law equally for all and which would get them working to wipe out crime and corruption in every part of society. Then the policeman would really be the upholder of law and order; he'd be a fighter for justice; he'd be what we want him to be--Batman. But a cop can't command a neighborhood's respect when he accepts bribes that range from petty cash to some fairly heavy bread.

[Q] Playboy: Wouldn't police forgo bribes if cities raised their salaries; and wouldn't they be better equipped to deal with black people if they were also required to have special schooling in community relations?

[A] Cosby: Sure, but a better answer for me is to put black cops in black neighborhoods. Black cops may be hated as much or even more than white cops by a lot of people in the ghetto, but I still think it's advisable for at least two reasons: Kids could grow up seeing black men in positions of authority, and ghetto streets wouldn't wind up in charge of a scared white cat who thinks the answer to problems is to hit people in the head because he's "tired of letting them get away with it," which is how white cops talk among themselves. Listen, if a guy doesn't want to be arrested by the police, it's easy for two cops to get the cat into a car without punching and beating on him with a night stick. I once saw a policeman stop a harmless old black drunk who was mouthing off at him, and the cop just punched him out. Now, this to me is not law enforcement, because I don't think a guy learns anything when he's beaten up--except to hate. He certainly doesn't learn respect for the law; and when he gets to court, if he has any respect for the law left, the judges finish that off.

[Q] Playboy: Are you saying that the courts are prejudiced?

[A] Cosby: Cats with dough don't commit armed robbery or most of the crimes poor people commit. Yet rich guys' crimes--like embezzling a bank or moving a million dollars' worth of heroin a year--hurt a hell of a lot more people than some guy who sticks up a candy store and gets away with $12; so I think something's a little wrong there. When the rich man comes to court, he's got the best lawyers money can buy. But the poor man, the black man, gets a lawyer who's not necessarily interested in the case and may even consider it a pain in the ass. And then there's the whole thing about under-the-table payoffs to judges, which I won't attempt to document but which exist. What I'm saying is that there are two kinds of justice in this country: one for the rich and one for the poor--and blacks are poor. When the black people keep getting shafted by cops and courts, how can they have respect for people who are supposed to represent the law? So justice is first on my list. After that, I think white people will have to show us they believe that a policy of segregation is wrong--and that'll mean giving the black man an equal shot at decent housing, jobs and education.

[Q] Playboy: You say segregation is wrong, yet many civil rights groups now restrict their membership to blacks only. If whites want to help and are rejected by Negroes, where do you suggest they go?

[A] Cosby: Into their own communities to teach their own people what they feel.

[Q] Playboy: Doesn't that still add up to turning away committed whites?

[A] Cosby: All the unkept promises and half-truths of whites to blacks have resulted in a great deal of justifiable distrust. I think it's right for the black man to be in charge of his own organizations, even at the risk of alienating white friends; if those white friends resent that, I wonder about the sincerity of those friendships. But I'm not really worried about black bigotry, because it started only recently, when we finally understood that it was impossible to live anywhere in America without encountering racism. As soon as some real progress is made, it'll be hard to find a black bigot, because the black man won't have the time to be hating anyone. He'll be too busy going after that trade apprenticeship or skilled job.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel that the present generation of young whites is at odds with its parents on the race issue?

[A] Cosby: I think that the white college radicals we read so much about are a very tiny percentage of the young people. Most white kids grow up listening to their parents call black kids niggers, and they learn to do the same thing, and quickly. Which is why I think white kids who want to help black people should work in their own communities. Blacks (continued on page 170)Playboy Interview(continued from page 88) don't have a chance to wipe out the ignorance that's responsible for a lot of prejudice.

[Q] Playboy: In line with that thought, a recent poll indicated that most white people believe there's no real difference in the way they grow up and the way blacks grow up--and conclude that blacks themselves are totally responsible for all their social and economic problems. Do you think that if whites had more information about actual ghetto conditions, racial harmony would improve?

[A] Cosby: It couldn't do any harm, but I find it hard to believe that white people don't know what life is like for the average American black. If a white guy sat down and objectively thought about the situation for a minute, how could he possibly think that blacks are growing up the same way he grew up? Did his mother have to pay more than $200 for a couch that costs white people $125? A guy in the slums buys a car for $150 and has to pay $400 a year insurance on it. The ghetto supermarkets sell food you can't find anywhere else; did you ever eat green meat and green bread? How many winters have white people spent with rats scurrying around their apartments at night, with windows boarded up but not keeping out the cold, and with no heat? Try to get a ghetto slumlord to fix up an apartment and you'll know what frustration and bitterness is.

[Q] Playboy: Haven't a number of city governments begun cracking down on slumlords?

[A] Cosby: Yes, but it doesn't do any good. It's fine to have a law on the books, but what good is it if a slumlord can get around it? If he can pay a city official $150 or $500 a year to keep his mouth shut when inspection time comes around, the law is worth nothing. And if the landlord is prosecuted, he'll hand money under the table to someone higher up than the city inspector. Or maybe he won't even bother to bribe anyone; after all, what difference will it make whether he spends $200 bribing a cat or paying that amount in the form of a fine? Here, again, black people wind up powerless, because they have no capital.

[Q] Playboy: Then you advocate black capitalism?

[A] Cosby: That's right. I think whites should begin to understand how personally destructive poverty is. Drive through Harlem sometime; if a cat's got no bread, he's just not going to look good. He'll look bad enough not having a job and having no money coming in; but if he comes out of a one-room apartment with three or four brothers, and his father has no job, how can he possibly look good? And when you're poor, nobody wants to have anything to do with you. This used to happen to me, even among black people. Before I became "somebody," I had my problems getting dates with girls. I had black girls reject me because I had only a glen-plaid suit and striped shirt and striped tie to wear on a date; that was all I owned in the way of dress-up clothing. That was all I could afford. There's a whole string of chicks in Philadelphia who are bread-conscious and turned me loose because I was hoping to become a schoolteacher, which would have given them a cat who was making $130 a week--if he made it through college. Chicks would put that down: "Schoolteacher? Nope, you're not in my bracket." There's probably girls today think, "Gee, I could have had him and I let him go. I sold Bill Cosby short at $12, and now he's $432 a share. Damn!" The point is: The poorer you are, the uglier you are. And that poverty creeps into every part of black people's lives: poor education, poor housing, poor sanitation, poor medical care and, as a result of all these, poor jobs. When society keeps on showing that it's more interested in property rights than in human rights, the result is looting and riots.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think, as many law-enforcement officials have alleged, that looting and rioting are ever planned, in the same way that a civil rights march is planned, with the intention of forcing whites into remedial concessions?

[A] Cosby: Looting and rioting are spontaneous things that happen with a crowd. They're not planned, coordinated actions. It all boils down to the fact that when the opportunity comes to get a free pair of pants or a television set, people go along with the crowd. If you were walking down a street and saw people running in and out of stores, getting away with things you never had--getting away clean, too--why not go in there and get that bicycle or sofa yourself? As far as rioting is concerned, let me put it to you this way: If a guy is walking along and all of a sudden a crowd of people comes up and they're shouting, the first thing he'll want to know is what they're yelling about--right? Then he hears what they're yelling about; maybe a cop shot an unarmed black kid or police turned off fire hydrants black kids were using to beat 90-degree heat in the ghetto. Things like that have actually caused riots. The man may get pulled into that mob and listen to their statements and he may well join them. Now, a mob is like a pack of animals, man, and things like sniping and arson are liable to happen when a bunch of people, who are justifiably bitter and frustrated, are set off by an incident that finally exhausts all of their patience. But in riots where there's sniping going on, how come the cats who wind up getting killed are all unarmed black bystanders?

[Q] Playboy: Do you think looting and rioting will stop as soon as black people acquire a fair share of America's wealth?

[A] Cosby: Absolutely. You know, when doctors have to treat a wound, they don't heal it by putting bacteria on it or by applying dirty bandages to it. The powers in this country know how to heal the race situation and they also know that, by doing so, they'd be solving the problems of our cities. When white people move out of the city, they're moving to better homes, better schools. Cities have no attractions to make people change their minds and move back. And even if the people do move back, where do they wind up living? In a lower-class ghetto area or next to one. So let's clean up the city's sores. And to clean them up, we need to make jobs available to the people who live there, who suffer and die there, who, like the middle-class whites who leave, also want to get out and live in better surroundings. If it means that we build factories in ghettos--forget smog and air pollution and all that other crap for the moment--then that's what we'll have to do. We'll have to build more hospitals and schools to improve the quality of ghetto life. That's the only way the city will be able to offer both its blacks and its whites the same things that are available in the suburbs; that's the only way people will stop leaving the city.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think urban-renewal programs can help?

[A] Cosby: Urban renewal usually means that buildings are torn down, people are moved to another area and then, for years, all you have are empty lots. That's a fact. And black people ask themselves the same questions whites would ask in the situation: Where are the homes we were promised? Why did you chase us out of there in the first place? How can any neighborhood become stable with this kind of thing going on?

[Q] Playboy: But some new public housing does get built in ghettos. Aren't these suitable places to live?

[A] Cosby: Well, a project is a little better than that apartment you've lived in where the landlord won't fix anything. But you can build low-rent housing without having it look and feel like a steel-and-brick concentration camp. You can put more elevators in and make sure the elevators work, so that little kids playing in the street who have to go to the john don't have to wait ten minutes for an elevator and wind up urinating in the lobbies.

[Q] Playboy: As you know, there are millions of whites who can't understand why a majority of black neighborhoods are so run-down and littered.

[A] Cosby: Look, take a simple thing like garbage collection. You may have eight families living in what was once a one family house--because rents are high and because the jobs available to ghetto blacks don't pay well. You're going to get an awful lot of trash from this house, because all these people are living there. Each family goes out, does its shopping and contributes its share of garbage, so you'd expect there'd be at least twice as much collection as there was before. But there's usually half as much garbage collection and, at that, those eight families have it good, compared with most of the people who live in black neighborhoods.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think these conditions can be corrected through the poverty program?

[A] Cosby: They could be, but they won't; I don't think that the poverty program can mean much when 70 percent of its bread goes into the pockets of the people who get paid to give it away. And now that poverty-program funds are under local supervision, it's become just another piece of political patronage. That's almost criminal.

[Q] Playboy: How do you think Federal funds should be used to help clean up and eventually eliminate the ghettos?

[A] Cosby: The first thing we should do is study the findings and recommendations of the Kerner Commission. I don't think any recent Government study has been more valid--or more ignored by the Government--than that report. The fact is that if certain buildings went up in the ghetto, they would supply jobs for thousands of black men. The second move also has to do with jobs; I think we should discontinue the summer work programs for kids and concentrate on men.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Cosby: White legislators think that as long as a kid's energy is spent and his time taken up, he'll be too tired to throw a bomb. But that's bullshit, because a kid's got more energy than a grownup. And I know, man. I used to play basketball from nine in the morning until the sun went down. But the truth of the matter is that no parent can command a kid's respect if the parent doesn't have a strong game going for himself--if the father doesn't have a job. The kid will hear his mother chewing the old man out because he's not working. Or he'll hear them both moaning and groaning because there's no money coming in.

Listen, summertime should be when a kid can go out and hit that ball and swim and go hiking. Summertime is no books, no sitting in a classroom, and the biggest worry for parents is that their kid doesn't knock up somebody's daughter. I see summer as a time to have a ball, not a season to burn off energy so that you won't burn up the city. If the kid's working and the old man isn't, he's not the father, man; he's just an older guy who can beat you up. He can beat you up because he's bigger and stronger, but he certainly isn't anybody you can use as an example of what you want to be when you grow up.

So I believe all the job emphasis should be directed toward industrial corporations giving job-training programs to fathers who are out in the streets. If you take care of the father, then the kid has somebody to look up to. Black men don't need those dumb civic programs that send entertainers to perform in the ghetto every summer. Maybe they expect the cat in the audience to say to himself, "I enjoyed that show so much I'm not going to be militant anymore. As a matter of fact, that was such a good program that I don't care if I'm poor and can't get a job for the rest of my life. I'm gonna come early and get a better seat for next year's show. That is, if I don't starve to death between now and then."

[Q] Playboy: Do you think a guaranteed annual income might be one answer to the poverty problem?

[A] Cosby: I'm in favor of a guaranteed job; no man, black or white, really wants to be given a pay check or handed a loaf of bread or a book of stamps. Men want to work and they want to be paid decent salaries. When I look at myself as a young man who can retire in a few years and receive an income from my investments, I still know that I could no more sit on my ass and let that check come in than I could lie paralyzed in bed for the rest of my life. I've got to do something with my hands, my feet and my brain. To me, it won't make any difference if it's a job as a part-time schoolteacher, paying $30 a week--because I'll still have that big dividend check coming in every week. But I'll be working. Jobs are what the black man wants. But if I'm washing down hospital wards, or sweeping floors in a restaurant, and if my pay check at the end of the month is smaller than a relief check, why work? When a guy on welfare gets a job, he no longer gets welfare; would you work to lose money? We could set up better plans that would cost a lot less and be more helpful to this country if we really wanted to.

[Q] Playboy: Have you any in mind?

[A] Cosby: Sure. Men on relief should be taught skilled jobs. That's only half of it, though, because it isn't enough just to teach skills. We must also make sure there are jobs available to use the skills. And all of us also have to be grown-up enough and intelligent enough to realize that all people are not the grooviest in the world and that even after you teach a guy a skill, he may not be able to hold a job or really want it. We have our con men and our criminals. No matter how cool your society is, you'll still have people who'll kill and rape and steal, regardless of color.

[Q] Playboy: While we're still on the subject of color: Perhaps for the first time in America, the awareness of skin color is being used constructively in the "black is beautiful" concept. What does that phrase represent to you?

[A] Cosby: With me, it isn't a matter of black is beautiful as much as it is that while is not all that's beautiful--which is what black men are taught. We need a self-love to throw off all that bullshit that's been laid on us for the past 300 years. And this is a groovy way to teach our kids to be proud of what they are. We black people have our own culture, which has always been laughed at because it's different from the white man's. I remember when I was in junior high school at Christmastime, and we'd been allowed to bring records in. I never owned any, but a couple of colored girls brought Mahalia Jackson's version of Silent Night, while the white kids brought things like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing Hallelujah and Bing Crosby's White Christmas. Well, the black treatment of a Christmas carol was something the white kids snickered at, because of their own ignorance; and, at the same time, we were embarrassed because it wasn't white. Mahalia just didn't sound like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and Clara Ward didn't sound like Bing Crosby. But this no longer happens, because of the black-is-beautiful re-education, because of the fact that our culture, our music is something to be proud of. We're into a different style, a different way of doing things, and we're not going to let anybody laugh at it just because his face is white. And we're not going to be ashamed of it. What we are is beautiful--what we are is black.

[Q] Playboy: After centuries of being told they were inferior, have black people themselves had difficulty in accepting this new self-pride?

[A] Cosby: It hasn't been easy to throw out all the brainwashing, but we're doing it. Let me give you a personal example: Black people from the South have a common accent; it's almost a foreign language. I can't speak it, but I understand it, because my 85-year-old grandfather speaks it. I remember hearing him use the word "jimmin" and I had to go up to my grandmother to find out what he was saying. She told me he was saying "gentlemen." That was black; it's the way my grandfather talks, the way my Aunt Min talks, because she was down South picking cotton while I was in Philadelphia picking up white middle-class values and feeling embarrassed about hearing people talk like that and wanting to send them to school to straighten them out. I now accept this as black, the same way I accept an Italian whose father from the old country has a heavy accent. I accept it as black the same way chitlins and crab fingers and corn bread and collard greens and hush puppies and hog jaws and black-eyed peas and grits are black. This is what we were given to eat; this was our diet in the South, and we've done some groovy things with it. Now even white people are talking about Uncle So-and-So's sparerib place.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you think black food and black music have become so fashionable in much of white society today?

[A] Cosby: White people are trying to get a little soul--which has to do with sentiment and sorrow, sympathy and guilt. It's like the hippies who go around dressed as if they're poor, although their parents live in big suburban homes. A lot of white people want soul and they think they can get it by eating the food, learning the dances, digging the music. Many white chicks feel they'll get soul if they ball a black man they don't even care about.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think that's a major motivation for interracial sex?

[A] Cosby: I can't really say. While soul is the attraction for the white person, I feel that the black goes to the white because of the white's status in this society; the black person is supposed to in some way gain from making love to a white. And the white is giving up status to make love to a black. It's almost like a materialistic thing now: If a white chick is with a black guy, she's saying, "Look at me, look what I'm giving up, look how I'm going against society. Man, am I brave!" Now, I'm not talking about love, just balling. If he or she wants to have soul, like, go on ahead and ball, but that ain't gonna make you soulful. I've been with white cats who've looked at black chicks I wouldn't be seen with anywhere and heard them say, "Man, she is fantastic-looking." And, by the same token, I've seen white girls look at a black man and say, "That guy's really beautiful." But what they mean--and I'm talking about whites who have a desire to make love to a black--is that they dig that African or extra blackness that says this person is 100 percent black. To them, this blackness represents soul.

[Q] Playboy: Doesn't it represent the same thing to black people?

[A] Cosby: Of course not. Ever since America was founded, we've been trying to overcome the dumb idea that skin color, of its own nature, determines the character of the person who's inside it. After all that's happened to the black man in this country, it would be even crazier for us to believe in racism than for whites to. Up until six years ago, black people, because of their identification with white society, didn't want to be black. In cities like Washington, D.C., in fact, there are many Negroes who still feel a great deal of resentment if a dark Negro comes to date a light-skinned girl. The parents of that girl want to keep breeding lighter, so they can finally get rid of that badge and walk free. But most black people have finally discovered they've been deluding themselves.

[Q] Playboy: About what?

[A] Cosby: Through the civil rights movement and through Martin Luther King, Jr., America's racism was forced out into the open, so the world could see it. Black people found out that most whites just didn't want them to have a growing place in America's future. Once we found that out, we turned to ourselves for help, as we had to. It's like when a cat leaves home to see the world but gets robbed and can't find a job; the only place for him is back home. Well, we need to make a place for ourselves, a place where we can be received and accepted, and this is happening through black identification--realizing that one is black, not white, and being proud of it. But many black people today go to extremes in their rejection of white power, white imperialism and white values.

[Q] Playboy: Which white values?

[A] Cosby: The main white value--greed. Through greed, whites have been fooled into thinking that freedom for black people means they'll lose their jobs, their homes, even the clothes off their backs. Certain ideas have been laid on the white man to exploit his greed, and the windup is that whites, because of greed, think all black men are lazy and shiftless and everything else represented in racist stereotyping. But this has all been the result of lies, and white people now have to listen to the truth: Freedom, for any man, is a need like food and water. The black man needs his freedom and he is determined to get it--now. If white America chooses to withhold equality from the black man, the result is going to be disaster for this country. But if whites allow the black man the same civil rights they themselves take for granted, then they're really in store for a shock; this country will turn into the coolest and grooviest society the world has ever seen.