Show Business: I Do Believe in Control

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It is midmorning in Las Vegas, and already the desert heat is shimmering wetly on a running track not far from the casino strip. Here Bill Cosby is hurling himself through a series of sprints, his sturdy 6-ft. frame showing the form that won collegiate championships three decades earlier. The stride is long and smooth, and the pace is brisk through 300 meters (43 sec.) and 600 meters (1:48). Cosby beats his target times and beams with satisfaction. He rewards himself with a Cuban cigar the size of a relay baton and sets a faster goal for tomorrow.

At 50 Cosby is, as he would pronounce it, waaaaaay out front and still running hard. Already the most beloved and best-paid entertainer in America, he still works like a hungry journeyman: jetting from a movie set in San Francisco to a weeklong casino gig in Las Vegas to the taping of his TV series in New York to a benefit for black college students in Los Angeles. "Sure, sometimes I think I'm stretched thin," Cosby muses, pausing to pinch off the end of his Connoisseur Geant. "But I remember how my mother worked twelve- hour days cleaning other people's houses before coming home to take care of her own house and kids," and "all the things I did in college: running track, playing football, bartending, doing stand-up comedy" -- and still making the dean's list. By comparison, he concludes, "this is easy."

Cosby's drive, like much of his comic material, flows from his tough and tender upbringing in a north Philadelphia housing project. His family endured poverty and prejudice but did not surrender to illiteracy. The Cosby home echoed with the sounds of people making up funny stories and listening to others on the radio. Bill's mother Anna would tuck him and his three brothers into their pajamas, the kind with booties sewn in and flaps in the back, and read aloud from Twain and Swift, the brothers Grimm and the Bible.

Anna Cosby also passed along her eccentric way of viewing the commonplace. "She would tell me that if I swallowed the seeds along with the grapes, branches would grow out of my ears and the neighbors would hang laundry on them," Bill recalls. "She would warn that if I kept playing with my navel, it was going to pop out and all the air would spew out of my body and I'd fly around backwards, flopping around the room."

When Bill was nine, his father, a welder, joined the Navy and left home, returning only occasionally at first, and then not at all. The main man in the youngster's life became his maternal grandfather Samuel Russell. "He loved to tell stories that had some moral point about getting an education, working hard," Bill recalls, "but you'd hardly notice because he'd be so funny and ramble around so much." Russell encouraged the yarns of his precocious eldest grandson. At the end of a session, he would fish around in a sock full of change that was tied to his belt and reward him with the then princely sum of 25 cents. Already Cosby was learning that comedy could pay.