Express and News from San Antonio, Texas • Page 131

Comedian With A Mission By RICHARD K. SHULL awhile I'm going to take away that partition and let the guests attack you. They'll spray dope on you and throw you out in the street so the cops will come along and bust you," Bill Cosby threatened. As in most things Cosby says, it was a wild facetious exaggeration. We were in a little corner of the dining room of his Cafe Figaro in West Hollywood, separated from his regular clientele by a screen.

And Cafe Figaro is one of those places where someone in a suit, shirt and tie looks rather bizarre compared to the habitues, HAIR, BEARDS, granny glasses and the weird garb of the young hip are the usual uniform of patrons in the coffee house which Cosby and some partners bought and transported complete with junk decor from the East Village in lower Manhattan to West Hollywood. The comedian was a compromise in his own dress: bell-bottom slacks, a USC windbreaker, an outsized tweed cap and a huge cigar. He had gone to Figaro to relax a little after a day at the studio working on his TV series. And that's really what he wanted to talk about. His message was that this coming season he's going to be his own man on TV, now that he has enough savvy and enough muscle to know what he wants to da and how to get it.

LAST YEAR, he said, lie was handicapped by the usual Hollywood presumptions, namely that his was a half-hour show and he was a comedian. Therefore, situation comedy writers ground out limp comedy for him, '-This year, NBC gave me some extra money, so I asked for writers who'd won awards and got eight of them. These writers are not from situation comedy, but guys who'd done good drama. I gave them my concepts, most of them are things that have happened in my life. "The stories don't look too funny on paper, but the humor comes out.

This year, the show will be 900 per cent better. "I don't have to have a whole story to make a point on something. For instance, there might be this Chinese couple in a supermarket. Now there might be a guy watching out in Nebraska who'd never seen a Chinese couple and it might never have occurred to him that Chinese couples fall in love and marry and go to supermarkets. That's what I mean," Cosby said, dotting all the i's in his conversation with his cigar.

"THERE ARE things a guy working in a muffler shop might want to see. I'll try 1o think of them. I'm going to try to be more a to let the hero make mistakes. If the positive approach doesn't make a point, maybe the negative one will." Among other things, Cosby, who has become ferociously independent since his repeated successes on TV, revealed he never reads his mail. "Why should I want to read a letter from some character who says, 'In your show last Sunday in that scene where you got out of bed, your hair was all Or a letter from somebody saying, 'You're the greatest and I want an autographed Or from somebody saying, 'Loan me I don't need the adulation or'the antagonism, so I don't read it." Cosby said.

A sore point with Cosby, guaranteed to get a quick rise from him is any mention of the integrated cast on his show, any hint of a color line. Mere mention of the fact that he had two whites playing, broad caricatures last season, a sort of reverse Stepin Felchit and Willy Best movie roles of the 1930s, brings Cosby to a quick boil. "THE WHITES get all upset when they see those characters on the show. This season I'm going to drop them and get on to other things. "But it is strange how the whites nolice.

It's like when I take over for Johnny Carson on the 'Tonight 1 show, the whites in the audience are very good at counting to see how many black guests are on the show. How come they never count to see how many blacks are on Andy Griffith's show?" There's an answer to that, of course, but no one Would like to hear it. Cosby said he wasn't tooupset at this year's Emmy awards show where he was the Hollywood host and he and his show were contenders in six categories. He won none. "The only loss I felt was when the show didn't win for best comedy.

The others I didn't care about. William Windom was going off the air, so I was glad he won the best comedy star. It will help him, "All I did was keep coming out and coming out after every award. I told the guys they ought to rip off a sleeve or a pantleg for every one I lost," he wheezed, indicating he would have been left in his BV0s by the end of the show. Express-News Sunday One July 12, 1970.