The King

The coronation took place in a Los Angeles saloon. The proprietor slipped up to the bandstand, playfully popped a tinseled paper crown on the young singer's head, and decreed: "King Cole!" The title stuck. And so, for the next quarter of a century, did Nat King Cole, right at the top as one of the most captivatingly popular crooners of all time. No one was more amazed at his enduring success than Cole himself. "My voice," he would say wonderingly, "is nothing to be proud of."

Indeed, it was more a condition than a voice--something like three parts fog to one part frog. A doctor, upon hearing him for the first time, rushed up to caution: "With a throat like that, you should be home in bed." But that hoarse, honey-cured quality carried a certain tranquilizing caress that was his vocal signature and sustained him admirably through the years while legions of belters and bleaters flourished and died. With moistened lips and a flashing, yard-wide smile, he let a song uncurl from his cavernous mouth with the nonchalance of a man blowing smoke rings. He savored each vowel until it whispered in the ear. He excelled at romantic ballads--Too Young, Unforgettable, Somewhere Along the Way, Pretend, Answer Me, My Love, Ramblin' Rose--which made up the bulk of his $50 million record sales.

Barefoot Hermit. Born Nathaniel Adams Coles in Alabama, he was brought up in Chicago, where his father was pastor of the True Light Baptist Church. The future king began appropriately as "the Prince of the Ivories," leading the high school dance band.

He also played first base well enough to be approached by minor-league baseball teams. At 18, he opted instead to tour the vaudeville circuit, played jazz piano in small West Coast barrooms for $5 a night, later added a bassist and guitarist to form his own trio.

He never thought of singing until one night, at the insistence of a club manager, he reluctantly intoned Sweet Lorraine to placate a free-spending drunk bellowing requests from the bar. In 1943 he recorded his first vocal number, Straighten Up and Fly Right, which flew right up the bestseller charts. He followed in 1946 with The Christmas Song ("Chestnuts roasting on an open fire . . ."), which became an alltime Yule classic.

Meanwhile, Cole was also topping the jazz polls for his "floating swing" style of piano in the tradition of his idol, Earl ("Fatha") Hines. Cole became a strong force in jazz, influenced the styles of such greats as Bill Evans, Ray Charles, Oscar Peterson. The event that helped turn him permanently into a singer was the unlikely appearance in 1948 of a bearded, barefoot hermit-songwriter named Eden Ahbez, who smuggled one of his songs to Cole through his valet. It was called Nature Boy, and Cole's haunting version of it became a runaway bestseller. He soon broke up his trio to charges of "artistic sellout" by the jazz critics. "Critics," countered Cole, "don't buy records. They get them free."

No Successor. During a concert in Birmingham in 1956, five white men leaped onto the stage and knocked him down. Cole was unhurt. That is, until later, when the Negro press scalded him "for kneeling before the throne of Jim Crow" by playing before a segregated audience. In Harlem, some juke joints ceremoniously smashed his records. "I'm an entertainer," he answered, "not a politician. I'm crusading in my own way. I feel I can help ease the tension by gaining the respect of both races all over the country."

That he did to a degree rare in any profession. When he died last week of cancer of the lung in Los Angeles, at the age of 45, men of both races mourned. The city council adjourned a session in his memory; the flags at the new Music Center were lowered to half-mast. And perhaps the best tribute of all came from his fans. On the day following his death, Capitol Records was deluged with orders for more than 1,000,000 of his records--the legacy of an uncommon King who would know no successor.

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