Angel On My Shoulder - An Autobiography (Hardcover)

Also Available as a Time Warner AudioBook

Smoke poured under the door to my hotel suite. It was so thick that it was getting hard to breathe, but it was worse in the hallway. I was trapped in the room with my bodyguard.
"It looks bad-real bad. This is it," my bodyguard said. "Natalie, I love you. We ought to make love here and now, because it's the last chance we're going to get."
"No thanks," I said. "If I'm going to go, I'm not going straight." I fished my freebase kit out of my purse and started cooking cocaine

ANGEL ON MY SHOULDER

Sizzlingly talented, yet fragile...achieving, yet insecure...responsible, yet reckless-Natalie Cole has been there and done it all. Her comeback album won an unprecedented seven Grammys as her marriage collapsed into jealousy and abuse. She has known both glittering privilege as a member of one of Hollywood's most famous families-and poverty on the streets of Manhattan.

Now Natalie tells her uniquely insightful, deeply personal story. As the daughter of legendary singer Nat King Cole and an elegantly reserved, upwardly striving mother, Natalie was a tomboy who delighted in mischief and music. As a little girl, she unexpectedly wandered onstage during one of her father's performances and often sneaked into his casual jam sessions with Louis Armstrong and other celebrated artists. As she grew older and after her father died, her love of music and sense of adventure led her to risk a singing career of her own-even as unresolved grief helped drive her into heroin and cocaine addiction and homelessness.

Through sheer stubbornness and, in Natalie's words, "the grace of God," she managed to forge a career, marry, and have a son. But the roller-coaster ride was far from over. Divorce, a return to drugs, and a devastating career crash lay ahead. Then, after a six-year struggle to finally get clean, she released her smash comeback album, Unforgettable, made Grammy history, and reintroduced her father's music to a new generation. Yet amid her good fortune, life would hand her several more overwhelming challenges: another terrible family tragedy, another divorce, and a very public dispute with her mother over her father's estate.

Unsparingly honest and irreverent, ANGEL ON MY SHOULDER will both turn your head with its revelations and make you laugh out loud from Natalie's irrepressible sense of humor. It is a book that shows you the incredible life of an artist and addict, daughter and mother, lover and wife, singer and star-story of a woman always struggling to become the best she was meant to be.