[quote_box_center]
lived in a 20-room mansion in Los Angeles’ swanky Hancock Park, where they regularly threw lavish, celebrity-studded parties in a guesthouse fitted out with a grand piano. The children were sent upstairs to play with elaborate dollhouses or entertain themselves at the soda fountain.
By then, Nat King Cole had established himself as one of the most recognizable voices in music.
[/quote_box_center]
[quote_box_center]
But Clarke would also learn of the call her biological mother, Cole’s oldest daughter, Carole, would make to that Hancock Park mansion from a pay phone at New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital the day after her baby was born. She begged to be allowed to keep her child.
[/quote_box_center]
Maids, mansions, chauffeurs, prep schools, and debutante balls . . . what are the chances that this is all true?
[quote_box_center]
Carole — nicknamed Cookie — was refused, but she still wouldn’t sign the papers surrendering her infant daughter for adoption even though it meant she had to return to the painfully named Washington Square Home for Friendless Girls where she had been shipped cross-country to live out her pregnancy in secrecy.
It was there that Carole heard the news report that her 45-year-old father was dying. Nat King Cole was in the final stages of lung cancer. Carole signed the papers and rushed home, where Nat would die on Feb. 15, 1965.
“I lost my baby in December. I lost my father in February. I lost my soul,” she wrote in her journal.
[/quote_box_center]
[quote_box_center]
The baby, whom she had named Gretchen, went home to Wilson Ave. in the Bronx with a loving couple — Robert and Vera Clarke, who called her Caroline. Her mother taught high school and her father was a chemistry professor at the City University of New York.
She was an only child, but it was a happy childhood marked by huge festive dinners with a large extended family. Summers were spent at her uncle’s home in Sag Harbor, L.I., where she met her husband-to-be, John Graves, at the age of 7.
[/quote_box_center]
‘I lost my baby in December. I lost my father in February. I lost my soul,’ Cookie wrote in her journal.
[quote_box_center]
Clarke, in fact, married into a prestigious family that owned Black Enterprise, a media company that encourages African-American entrepreneurship. She had two children, Veronica, 7, and Carter, 4, and her life felt complete when recurring joint pain prompted her to track down her genetic background in 2002.
As a young woman she was never interested in learning about her biological parents, and wasn’t now. She only wanted the facts that pertained to her health and thought the interview at Spence-Chapin would be routine. Instead, she left in complete shock.
On the drive home when she was hit by another realization.
“My mouth goes dry and tears flood my eyes as I hear a frantic voice rising: ‘Oh, my God’…
[/quote_box_center]
