'LIVIN' FOR LOVE' TELLS STORY OF ADDICTION She was an elegant addict. She wore feather boas and sequined gowns on stage, and freebased cocaine in her mansion. She scored back-to-back platinum albums and multiple Grammys, then celebrated with champagne and blow. Before coke, it was heroin. Before that, LSD. Natalie Cole says she kicked drugs in 1983. But it has taken longer for Nat "King" Cole's little girl, now 50, to go public about her self-destructive life and 25-year recording career. The singer's surprisingly candid autobiography, "Angel on My Shoulder," hit stores on Nov. 14, the same day as her CD "Greatest Hits Vol. I." And next on Sunday she stars in "Livin' for Love: The Natalie Cole Story," a telemovie loosely based on the book (8 p.m. on KCBD). Despite her pedigree, says the pop/rhythm-and-blues performer, "I'm an ordinary person under extraordinary circumstances." And ordinary people are whom she hopes to reach with "Angel: "(It's) not for folks who take life too seriously or not seriously enough. I was just telling the truth, what I've learned." Though it's true, it will probably sound disingenuous "if I tell you that God told me it was time to write the book," says Cole, a devout Baptist since the mid-'80s. "The idea for the book was actually approached 10 years ago. ... (But) I don't believe you can write this kind of book and still be in the storm." That "storm" was the relationship with her volatile husband, producer Andre Fischer, whom she married in 1989 and divorced seven years later. In her book, Cole charges that he regularly beat her, once smashing her face with a Bible, another time pushing her through a wall. (Fischer has not responded publicly to Cole's tell-all.) Cole's account of her marital woes are far from the most sensational in "Angel's" torrent of revelations. The child of one of America's most beloved vocalists made headlines with her confession that, as a 23-year-old heroin addict, she worked as a "come-on" girl for a pimp in Harlem. And she spares little detail about her alleged childhood sexual abuse (fondled by an unnamed family member), her arrests in the late '60s and early '70s (shoplifting, counterfeiting checks, heroin possession), and her estrangement from an imperious mother who hid the fact that Cole, her brother and three sisters shared in their father's estate and, when found out, worked tirelessly to block their claims. (In 1995, 30 years after Nat Cole's death, the children gained control of their inheritance.) "It was very difficult to write about my mother," the eight-time Grammy winner confides from her Beverly Hills home. "There's a lot of love in this book, but it takes two. ... We're still not talking," reports Cole, who has said that she sent her mother an advance copy of "Angel" and got no response. In the late 1960s and early '70s, while other students at the University of Massachusetts were smoking weed and dropping acid, young Natalie played for higher stakes. The child psychology major who hoped some day to open a clinic for "underprivileged kids to help shape and expand their minds" developed a heroin habit. The cultured young woman whose mother shipped her off to boarding school in New England was confronted by African American classmates who doubted her blackness. Before that, she had been colorblind: Her godparents were Jewish, Frank Sinatra was "Uncle Frankie," and her father was a close friend of President John F. Kennedy. Her family was the first to integrate Los Angeles' tony Hancock Park in 1948. So Cole set out to find her own identity.
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