‘The Pain Never Goes Away . . . but It Gets Less’

From working class living rooms and the Oval Office of the White House, by phone, fax, telegram and talk radio, condolences poured in Friday to entertainment icon Bill Cosby in the wake of the stunning loss of his only son.

Truckloads of flowers were delivered to the Cosby townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Passersby in Los Angeles left snapdragons on the lonely road where Ennis Cosby was slain. Heavyweight boxing champion Evander Holyfield faxed his sympathies to the office of Cosby’s publicist. Joan Rivers and James Brown and the president of the United Negro College Fund called to offer their prayers.

Parents who had themselves lost children sent notes of consolation: “Our experience has been that the pain never goes away,” wrote the publisher of Ebony Magazine, John Johnson, “but it gets less as time passes.”

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, whose son died at 22 in a scuba diving accident, sent a missive by personal messenger. “As a father who has lost his only son to tragedy, my heart goes out to you and your family,” it read.

President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore called personally, but just as heartfelt were the sympathies of hundreds of people who had never met the bereaved comedian or his son. From her home in Houston, bank secretary Margery Royer tearfully stuffed $5 in an envelope Friday and mailed it off in the hope that it would help jump-start a school for learning-disabled youths that had been the late Ennis Cosby’s brief dream.

The younger Cosby had struggled during elementary and high school, and was in college by the time his teachers traced his difficulties to dyslexia. He was studying for his second master’s degree and aiming for a doctorate in education when he was gunned down by an unknown assailant early Thursday.

Royers said she was deeply moved by accounts of Ennis Cosby’s triumph over his disability and by the violent nature of his death.

“I’m just a big fat, frumpy old white grandmother from Houston, but I just wanted to show my support in some way and to say we will not tolerate this,” she said.

“It’s not much, I know, but . . . my $5 is someone else’s $20, and someone’s $100 and someone’s $1,000, to keep this beautiful young man’s dream going.”

Royer wasn’t alone. By midday Friday, so many people had called to ask how they might best honor the memory of Ennis Cosby that the Cosby family had to set up a foundation to accept their gifts.

The family requested that, in lieu of flowers, memorial donations be made to the Ennis William Cosby Foundation, to benefit programs for the learning-disabled. Contributions, at least for now, are to be sent in care of Cosby’s publicist, David Brokaw, at the Brokaw Co., 9255 Sunset Blvd., No. 804, Los Angeles 90069.

At Columbia University in New York, where Ennis Cosby was a graduate student, and at Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he received his undergraduate degree, friends called to console each other at the news of his death.

At Alfred E. Smith Elementary School near the Columbia campus in Manhattan, where Cosby served as an intern for two years, social workers comforted the grieving pupils he had once taught.

“Everyone’s talking about it,” said Mike Dunham, a friend from Columbia. “Now that everybody knows, we’re all talking. We can’t believe it.”

A Cosby family spokesman said “probably 2,000” calls and letters have come in in the past two days from a nation heartsick for an entertainer long regarded as the embodiment of the American family man.

The switchboard at CBS, the home of Bill Cosby’s current TV sitcom, was flooded with more than 600 condolence calls--so many that the network set up a special voice mail line. “Even more than the president,” psychologist Joyce Brothers told Associated Press, “Cosby means father to us.”

And for fans and friends alike, Bill Cosby’s loss did resonate as if it had been a death in their own families.

“This just feels so personal,” a tearful caller told KABC radio host Michael Jackson Friday morning. “I grew up with Bill Cosby. He is so much more than a comedian.”

Another listener said that, as a father, he felt the deepest compassion for Cosby and his wife.

“I have boys and I almost cried when I heard the news,” the man said. “I can’t imagine what it’s like to raise a child and hold him in your arms and love him, and have an anonymous scumbag blow them away for no reason at all. My kids got a bigger hug last night and they know why,” the caller added.

There was other talk, too--of witness descriptions that indicated that Ennis Cosby’s death was a white-on-black crime, and of the TV crews waiting relentlessly outside the Cosby homes on both coasts that the family on Friday issued a statement begging them to go away.

The caller on Michael Jackson’s show said she had fantasized about going out to Cosby’s Pacific Palisades home and screaming at the assembled journalists: “Why can’t you just leave them alone? Leave them alone!”

And yet, said Joel Brokaw, a spokesman for the Cosby family, numerous expressions of sympathy had come from members of the media who had interviewed Cosby and who also felt compassion for him.

“The country is thinking about you,” a freelance television journalist wrote in a sympathy note to the comedian on Friday. “And complete strangers feel like a part of their lives are gone.”

Times staff writers Sallie Hofmeister, Susan King, Matt Lait, Beth Shuster and Angie Chuang in Los Angeles and John Goldman in New York, and staff researchers Lisa Meyer in New York and Edith Stanley in Atlanta contributed to this report.