Nat King Cole: A play and a biography

Earlier this year, in May, I saw the play I Wish You Love at the Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul. Written by Dominic Taylor, directed by Lou Bellamy, it portrays the very brief period—from November 1956 until December 1957—when Nat King Cole tried to make it on television.

Cole was by then an international jazz and pop star with many hits  ("Nature Boy," "Mona Lisa," "Unforgettable," "Too Young," "The Christmas Song," to name a few), a family, and a mansion in an old-money white neighborhood in Los Angeles, where he had lived (when he wasn't on the road) since 1948.  He had sold millions of records and earned millions of dollars for his label, Capitol.

But America wasn't ready for a black person with his own variety show, even if Mel Torme, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr., and Tony Bennett showed up to perform. NBC funded it, then bounced it around the schedule. No national companies would sponsor it. "For 13 months," Cole later wrote, "I was the Jackie Robinson of television. After a trail-blazing year that shattered all the old bug-a-boos about Negroes on TV, I found myself standing there with the bat on my shoulder. The men who dictate what Americans see and hear didn't want to play ball."