Sisters Carole “Cookie” Cole and
Natalie Cole in 2004. Opposite, from
left: Cookie, mother Maria, father
Nat, and Natalie in the 1950s, with
two of Nat’s beloved boxers.
Y THE TIME NATALIE COLE GOT TO THE HOSPITAL
late one afternoon in mid-May, her sister Cookie, who two weeks
earlier had been diagnosed with lung cancer, had slipped into a
coma. Natalie sat on the edge of Cookie’s bed, rubbed her feet, and
quietly urged her to
fight. “I love you,” she
said. “Everything is
going to be all right.”
Valley. But by the time she got to her
sister—who was also her lifelong best
friend—Cookie was unresponsive. “I
was just devastated,” Natalie says.
Natalie and other family members,
including her only child, Robert Yancy,
waited in Cookie’s hospital room well
into the evening. Natalie’s cell phone,
tucked away in her purse, rang again
and again, but she ignored it. Finally,
Yancy, a 32-year-old drummer, took a
call on his cell. It was the transplant
center at Los Angeles’s Cedars-Sinai
Medical Center. He handed the phone
to his mother.
“Ms. Cole,” the woman said, “we
think we’ve found a kidney for you.”
“I can’t talk to you right now,” Natalie
responded. “I’ve got a situation here.
My sister’s dying. I can’t talk.”
She hung up, turned back to
Cookie, and continued her
vigil until midnight, when a
nurse urged her to go home
and rest.
Natalie Cole, 59, didn’t
think about that call during
her drive home to Westwood. She didn’t think about
JOHN SCIULLI/ WIREIMAGE
She fought back tears as she whispered
in Cookie’s ear, and the hospital monitors beeped steadily in reply.
Just hours earlier, Natalie herself had
been hooked up to IVs, with a machine
pulling the toxins from her blood that
her failed kidneys could not. She was
on a long waiting list for a donor kidney,
but until a match was found, regular
dialysis treatments were keeping her
alive. When she received a call that
spring day at her Beverly Hills treat-
ment center about her sister’s dete-
riorating condition, Natalie—a
multiple-Grammy-winning
singer and daughter of
Nat King Cole—began
yanking out the dialysis
tubes. She rushed to her
car and sped to Provi-
dence Tarzana Medi-
cal Center, in southern
California’s San Fernando
her own incurable hepatitis C, diag-
nosed the year before. She didn’t think
about the nausea and mind-bending
fatigue the initial dialysis treatments
had caused, nor the inconvenience of
sandwiching singing gigs in between
sessions hooked up to a machine. She
didn’t think about how many of her
loved ones—Cookie among them—had
offered to donate a kidney but proved
not to be a match, nor did she think
about the long odds of a healthy ca-
daver kidney becoming available.
EXCLUSIVE VIDEO
Go behind the
scenes on our Natalie
Cole photo shoot at
aarpmagazine
.org/
entertainment.
COOKIE, WHOSE REAL NAME IS
Carole, was actually Natalie’s cousin,
the daughter of her mother’s sister.
But when Cookie was orphaned at the
age of four, Nat King Cole, the iconic
jazz pianist and baritone, and his wife,
Maria, adopted her. Natalie, or Sweetie,
as her loved ones call her, was born
about nine months later, in 1950, fol-
