Singer Natalie Cole Shares Her Grief, Faith, and Renewal Javascript must be enabled to use this site. Please enable Javascript in your browser and try again. × Search search POPULAR SEARCHES SUGGESTED LINKS Join AARP for just $9 per year when you sign up for a 5-year term. Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine. Leaving AARP.org Website You are now leaving AARP.org and going to a website that is not operated by AARP. A different privacy policy and terms of service will apply. Close

Natalie Cole s New Life

As her sister lay dying Natalie Cole faced her own health crisis She shares her unforgettable tale of grief faith and renewal

Photo by Kwaku Alston Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine. Just hours earlier, Natalie herself had been hooked up to IVs, with a machine pulling the toxins from her blood that her failed kidneys could not. She was on a long waiting list for a donor kidney, but until a match was found, regular dialysis treatments were keeping her alive. When she received a call that spring day at her Beverly Hills treatment center about her sister's deteriorating condition, Natalie—a multiple-Grammy-winning singer and daughter of Nat King Cole—began yanking out the dialysis tubes. She rushed to her car and sped to Providence Tarzana Medical Center, in southern California's San Fernando Valley. But by the time she got to her sister—who was also her lifelong best friend—Cookie was unresponsive. "I was just devastated," Natalie says. Natalie and other family members, including her only child, Robert Yancy, waited in Cookie's hospital room well into the evening. Natalie's cell phone, tucked away in her purse, rang again and again, but she ignored it. Finally, Yancy, a 32-year-old drummer, took a call on his cell. It was the transplant center at Los Angeles's Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He handed the phone to his mother. "Ms. Cole," the woman said, "we think we've found a kidney for you." "I can't talk to you right now," Natalie responded. "I've got a situation here. My sister's dying. I can't talk." She hung up, turned back to Cookie, and continued her vigil until midnight, when a nurse urged her to go home and rest. Natalie Cole, 59, didn't think about that call during her drive home to Westwood. She didn't think about her own incurable hepatitis C, diagnosed the year before. She didn't think about the nausea and mind-bending fatigue the initial dialysis treatments had caused, nor the inconvenience of sandwiching singing gigs in between sessions hooked up to a machine. She didn't think about how many of her loved ones—Cookie among them—had offered to donate a kidney but proved not to be a match, nor did she think about the long odds of a healthy cadaver kidney becoming available. On that lonely drive through the dark and starless San Fernando Valley, Natalie Cole didn't think about saving herself. Instead, she prayed for her sister. "God, you can make a miracle. You can bring her back. I know you can." Cookie, whose real name is Carole, was actually Natalie's cousin, the daughter of her mother's sister. But when Cookie was orphaned at the age of four, Nat King Cole, the iconic jazz pianist and baritone, and his wife, Maria, adopted her. Natalie, or Sweetie, as her loved ones call her, was born about nine months later, in 1950, followed by brother Kelly, adopted in 1959, and twin sisters Casey and Timolin, who arrived in 1961. Of all Nat King Cole's children, Natalie was, arguably, the one blessed most generously with his gift of music. Her voice was like honey, silky and smooth, and like her father, she made everyone in the audience feel she was singing just to them. As a kid, she performed a few times with her dad, and to this day she wonders whether he foresaw her success: hit singles (such as 1977's "I've Got Love on My Mind"), gold and platinum albums (her first was Inseparable, in 1975), accolades, and awards. Natalie credits her dad, who she says inspired by example rather than words, for much of it. In 1991, when she performed a series of outdoor concerts that included her "Unforgettable" duet with her long-deceased father (thanks to innovative film and audio splicing ), she swears that a butterfly would routinely fly across the stage. Natalie believes the butterflies, which she loves, were sent by her dad, one of the many angels in her life whom she references in her 2000 autobiography, "Angel on My Shoulder." Natalie—and the world—lost her father when she was only 15; a heavy smoker, he died of lung cancer in 1965 at the age of 45. For years she struggled with the loss, as well as a difficult relationship with a mother she viewed as emotionally distant. After finishing college, while playing local clubs, she accepted a boyfriend's invitation to try heroin—and by the age of 23 was mainlining. In 1976, just before winning her first Grammy for Best Female R&B Performance for "This Will Be," she quit her heroin habit cold turkey, and she went on to marry gospel musician Marvin Yancy and give birth to Robbie. But in 1984, after divorcing Yancy (a Baptist minister who died suddenly of a stroke the following year), she spent several months in Hazelden rehab center to treat an all-consuming addiction to crack cocaine. Natalie attributes her hard-won sobriety to her religious faith (though raised Episcopalian, she became a Baptist in her mid-20s). But it took more than that to restore all she had lost. The music industry showed little enthusiasm for her comeback efforts, and she went from being a headliner to playing lounge acts in places such as Las Vegas. In 1989 Natalie got married a second time, to record producer André Fischer, but they split in 1997; their divorce papers indicated he was abusive. Her brother, Kelly, who came out of the closet at age 19, died of HIV-related causes in 1995. And in 2000 Natalie wed once again, this time to Kenneth Dupree, a Baptist bishop from Nashville. Natalie ended the marriage less than three years later because, she says, "I had problems with the way this man was conducting his life." For the next few years Natalie concentrated on her music, making plans for a follow-up to her multiplatinum album of her father's standards. Early in 2008 she recorded "Still Unforgettable." She was happily single, spending time with friends and family. Her life was finally back on track—or so it seemed. In the early-morning hours of May 19, 2009, Natalie arrived at her high-rise condominium, slipped into her pajamas, and crawled into bed. At 3:00 A.M. the phone rang. It was the nurse from the Tarzana hospital, who said things weren't looking good for Cookie. Natalie pulled a jogging suit over her PJs and raced back to the hospital. "When I got there, Cookie's holding on," she says. "I'm thinking God's going to take care of everything." Just then, Natalie's cell phone buzzed. It was the woman from the transplant unit again, giving Natalie one more chance: "We know you're dealing with a situation in your family, but we have a kidney that's a match, and we really need you to get here by 6:00 A.M." Natalie said, "I'll call you back." She looked around the waiting room, where Robbie as well as Cookie's husband, John, and their three children had gathered. "I was in dire straits," she says. "It was a really bad situation, as far as I was concerned. Because everybody was so in shock about Cookie, they didn't have real good sense." Numbly, they each told Natalie she should go. But she needed more nudging. She called her longtime business manager, Howard Grossman. Waking him out of a sound sleep, Natalie updated him on Cookie's situation and said, "They've got a match for my kidney; what shall I do?" "Go for it," Grossman responded. She turned to her family. "They don't wait to do this operation," she said.
"It was crazy, so crazy, to think that my mother was going to get a kidney while her sister is down and out, on life support," says Robbie. "But it was something she had to do." "It was like God's hand was orchestrating the whole thing," Natalie says, "and all we could do was watch." Entertainment $3 off popcorn and soft drink combos See more Entertainment offers > Natalie's closest friend, Tammy Engelstein, was equally shocked. "She was a gym rat," says Engelstein, who had met Natalie in Lamaze classes during Natalie's pregnancy with Robbie and Engelstein's with her daughter Meredith. "She was always very healthy." Natalie accepted the diagnosis as "God's will." She told Robbie the news in a matter-of-fact manner, he recalls: "I think she was ready to take it on. My mother is not afraid of a challenge." In May of 2008 Natalie's hematologist started her on weekly injections of interferon to help reduce the likelihood of liver failure, which hepatitis C frequently causes. He told her that typical side effects from the drug include fatigue and flulike symptoms. Engelstein, who routinely spent nights at her girlfriend's house, where the two of them would eat sushi and watch "Law & Order," says that about 12 hours after the initial shot "it hit both of us that, hey, she was sick." "It just felt like I was dying," says Natalie, who was practically knocked flat by the treatments. She lost more than 20 pounds in a matter of weeks. "She was just skin and bones," Robbie says. "It was tough to watch." She was, however, determined to continue working, and in June 2008, despite pleas from Engelstein and Cookie to cancel the trip, she flew to Tokyo, where she was scheduled to perform 14 shows in eight days. "I love it there," Natalie says, "and I didn't want to let my Japanese fans down." A tour doctor who'd met Natalie on previous visits to Japan took one look at her and said, "You need to go home." She refused. Natalie received IV fluids in her dressing room to keep her hydrated, and she traveled to the stage in a wheelchair. "As miserable as I was, once I started singing, I felt better," she says. Many of her Japanese fans, watching her perform, applauded and wept. But crew members kept asking, "Why are you doing this? We shouldn't be here." "Natalie loves her audience and doesn't want to disappoint them," Engelstein explains. "If you've never seen her perform, go. You'll walk away with everything she is about." "It was tough," Natalie admits, "but I felt if I didn't push myself, I would probably either die or just crumble." She performed ten shows before finally heading back to the United States. "Still Unforgettable" was released in early September 2008, and once again Natalie rallied, flying to New York City for a series of interviews. When the cameras were rolling, she struggled to appear healthy and animated. But in between, she was experiencing shortness of breath, a result of fluid buildup caused by poor kidney function. On the morning of September 12 she spoke by phone to a New York friend, the songwriter and socialite Denise Rich. Alarmed by Natalie's gasps, Rich sent her own physician to check on her. He did a quick examination and said, "You have to go into the hospital right now." "Had Denise not called her doctor," Natalie says, "I might have died that day, alone in my hotel room. I owe so much to her." At Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, tests showed that Natalie's kidneys were barely functioning, and she soon began dialysis. While her liver function remained healthy—thanks, most likely, to the interferon—it is possible, according to Mittleman, that the same drug hastened the failure of her kidneys, already compromised by years of high blood pressure. Her doctors stopped the interferon treatments. Ten days later Natalie returned to Los Angeles. After a few more trips to the hospital, she was placed on a list for a donor kidney and began a three-hours-per-session, three-times-weekly outpatient dialysis regimen. "They told me the average wait for a kidney was three years," Natalie says. "At first I thought, 'There goes my life.' " But after determining that she could tour as long as she received dialysis at each stop, she got back on the road. Says Engelstein: "She'd go into the dialysis center with her books, her cell phone, and her leopard blanket, and she was the belle of the ball." Those centers were in places such as Turkey, Italy, the Philippines—wherever she was performing. "I'd sometimes fly for 14 hours, then go straight to dialysis," Natalie says. "I spent a little time being tired, but we managed. I'm not a pity-party person." AARP NEWSLETTERS %{ newsLetterPromoText }% %{ description }% Subscribe in the July & August issue. 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