Natalie Cole – Unforgettable

Natalie Cole had an incredible set of pipes. Her voice was smooth as honey, rich as dark chocolate, powerful as a freight train, sensual like your man’s lingering caress, warm as a sip of brandy, and divine like flying with angel wings.

Music was in Natalie’s genes. She inherited her talent from her father, the great Nate King Cole, who she adored. After he died from lung cancer in 1965 at the age of 46, Natalie was sent to boarding school by a mother she wasn’t close to. Being only 15-years-old and away from home, it was a difficult time for the teenager to deal with such a devastating loss.

That may explain why Natalie turned to drugs later on to numb the pain.

Since coming on the music scene in 1975, she mesmerized audiences with bluesy, jazzy ballads, just like her idol Ella Fitzgerald. Her hits included “Mr. Melody,” “Inseparable,” “Our Love,” and “I’ve Got Love On My Mind,” as well as “Unforgettable,” the duet she sang (thanks to film and audio splicing) with her father, and the finger-snapping, toe-tapping, tongue-twisting, “This Will Be” (An Everlasting Love) co-written by her ex-husband Marvin Yancy, who died of a heart attack at 34 in 1985.

A Tribute To Her Dad, Nat King Cole

Here is  a clip of Natalie singing “Unforgettable,” for which she won a Grammy in 1992 for “Song of the Year.”

My husband Steven and I first met Natalie when she performed at the Las Vegas Hilton from 1985 – 1989. Steven, who was the head audio engineer at the time, mixed her shows while she was there, and occasionally went out on the road with her. 

Steven had a reputation as one of the best sound men for live shows, and Natalie knew and appreciated that. Unlike some engineers, who believe louder is better, who have damaged not only their own ears, but the ears of those in the audience, Steven could mix a 26-piece orchestra with meticulous finesse. Every string, horn, percussion, guitar, every tinkling of the ivories was perfectly clear and layered to perfection, never overpowering Nat’s voice.

Whenever she came to town for a week-long engagement, I would sit in the sound booth every night and watch her perform. I never tired of hearing her sing a mix of contemporary, upbeat songs like “Pink Cadillac” and “Miss You Like Crazy,” along with the old beautiful standards like “The Very Thought of You” and “When I Fall in Love.”

Natalie Cole was a master at singing scat – an art form of vocal improvisations with wordless syllables and riffs that few artists attempt. Each song she sang either had me gyrating in my seat or silently spellbound.

After each show, we would hang out backstage in the Green Room with Nat, her two backup singers and her band members—David Joyce, Charles Floyd, Rich Campbell, Robert Shipley, and her cousin, Eddie Cole—who have all had extraordinary careers playing with many great musical artists, bands, and orchestras.

It was magical when Steven and I joined Natalie and the band on the road for three days at the Paul Masson Winery in Saratoga, California, a lovely venue in the foothills of the Bay Area.  We were also invited to her second wedding on September 17, 1989.

Unfortunately, after Natalie stopped performing at the Hilton we lost track of each other. We saw her at Caesars Palace in 1999, but it wasn’t like those intimate days a decade earlier.

In 2008 we heard she was diagnosed with Hepatitis C— which she contracted 25 years earlier while she was using drugs—right around the time she won her first Grammy for Best Female R&B Performance for “This Will Be.”

The doctor explained that even though Natalie had quit using drugs, the Hepatitis C virus, which attacks the liver, can remain dormant in the body for decades.

The diagnosis came while she was in the middle of making her “Still Unforgettable” CD, so she postponed treatment for months. When she finally started getting weekly interferon (chemotherapy) injections, she said they made her feel like she was dying. In a matter of weeks, Natalie went from looking and feeling healthy to being incredibly sick, losing twenty pounds and looking emaciated.

Despite pleas from friends and family, she refused to cancel her trip to Japan in 2008. She didn’t want to disappoint her fans. Somehow she managed to do all ten shows before returning to the U.S.

LIFE LESSON: We all do harmful things to our bodies. Maybe not heroin or cocaine, but millions of people are addicted to prescription pain killers, sleeping pills and over-the-counter medication.

We consume too many processed foods with chemicals, artificial sweeteners, and food coloring. We smoke, drink too much alcohol, don’t get enough sleep or exercise, and we’re stressed out.

We ignore our bodies until it’s too late, not wanting to think about the consequences of our actions.

Our bodies are amazing machines, but we only get one. When they break down, we can’t trade them in for a new model. If we’re lucky, we might get a new liver, kidney or heart, but there’s a shortage of donors.

Ultimately it makes more sense to take care of our bodies in the first place. They are more precious than anything in the world.

An Organ Transplant

In September 12, 2008 Natalie was admitted to the hospital, where they found her lungs were filled with fluid and her kidneys were rapidly deteriorating. The interferon treatments, which saved Natalie’s liver, may have caused her kidneys to fail.

In March 2009, it was announced that Natalie was on dialysis. She sat down with people on TV like Mary Hart and Larry King, and said she needed a new kidney.

She talked about having to undergo arduous three-hour dialysis sessions three times a week, no matter where she was in the world. She had to be hooked up to a machine that washed her blood clean, then pumped it back into her body.

She said she wasn’t angry and didn’t feel like a victim. “Hell, it was my dope addiction that created this mess,” she said knowing that waiting for a kidney could take up to three years.

In May 2009, Natalie’s older sister Cookie was diagnosed with lung cancer. Two weeks later, Cookie slipped into a coma. Natalie was at her bedside when she received the call that they found a matching kidney.

IA 32-year-old Latino woman named Jessica, who suffered from pre-eclampsia, died shortly after giving birth. It also happened that the young woman’s aunt was Natalie’s nurse during one of her dialysis treatments. The aunt recalled how she and her niece had seen Natalie on Larry King Live and they’d talked about wanting to help her, never imagining the tragedy that lay ahead.

LIFE LESSON: There are no coincidences. We never know where a solution to our problems may come from; how a chance meeting or an encounter with someone could change our life.

“I can’t deal with this now, I’m here with my dying sister,” Natalie told the woman from the transplant unit. With only two hours to decide before the kidney would be given to someone else, friends and family convinced Natalie it was what Cookie would have wanted. On May 22, 2010, Natalie was on the operating table receiving the life-saving organ when her beloved sister passed away.

Natalie has known the loss of many people close to her—her father, her ex-husband, her brother, and the nanny who took care of her son Robbie, but she said losing Cookie was the hardest. “There’s a part of me that’s missing now. I don’t expect I will ever totally get over it.”

Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have – life itself.”

– Walter Anderson

With a healthy liver Natalie had a new chance at life. She seemed to make a miraculous recovery. She said she didn’t understand it, but she knew God had her back, even when she was screwing up. He had a plan for her.

After her transplant, Natalie became an advocate for kidney research and organ donation. “We are born with two kidneys, and we only need one to survive,” she said. “Maybe God gave us the other one so we could give it away.”

Fifteen months after her operation, in October 2010, Natalie performed at the David Foster & Friends concert at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. She looked gorgeous in a skin tight black and white gown, and sounded just like we remembered.

On May 21, 2011, we saw Natalie play at The Cannery. Our seats were close to the stage, and we could see that she looked frail when she walked on stage. After a couple of slow-tempo ballads, she reached for a high-back stool that was nearby. “I have issues, so I hope you don’t mind if I sit down,” she said.

Of course the audience understood. It was bittersweet as Steven and I remembered those special times we shared with her.

I wanted to understand the journey she’d been on, so the next day I got her new book, Love Brought Me Back: A Journey of Loss and Gain. In it, Natalie wrote an honest account of where she’d been, what she’d gone through, and what she learned.

There are so many things in this world I don’t understand. But I know in the core of my being that love sustained and uplifted me during a fragile and frightening time in my life. Love led me when I couldn’t see my way out. Love carried me when I couldn’t take another step. When my hunger was insatiable, love fed and filled me. Love comforted me when I was sick and hurting. Love kept me sane, focused, and steady – all day long, all night through. Love brought me back.”

Natalie Cole

Sadly, Natalie Cole passed away December 31st, 2015. She brought joy and pleasure to everyone who heard her sing. She truly was a gift. And she will remain Unforgettable!