Even from 3,000 miles away, the beauty and elegance of Maria Hawkins Cole was impossible to miss when we spoke on the phone last year.
She was 88 then, and we spoke about her late husband, Nat "King" Cole, and the pending iTunes release of episodes of her late husband's groundbreaking television show from the 1950s, the first network TV variety show to star an African American.
Her love for Nat came through, undiminished by time. She spoke sweetly about how smitten she was with him when they met, and demurely of how the attraction was mutual.
She also recalled how self-effacing he was of his considerable musical gifts -- this coming from a woman who'd sung with Duke Ellington, Count Basie and other kingpins of the big band era, before she and Cole married.
'Nat would talk like he wasn't that good,' she told me. 'But I did meet [pianist] Art Tatum once.'
I'll preface the next part with a comment from jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, one of the most universally respected musicians in all of jazz, who once said that the only musician who truly terrified him with his talent was Tatum.
'We weren't married then,' Cole recalled. 'He said, 'I hope you know that he [Nat] is a genius.' I met a few people with Nat. I met Billie Holiday like that.'
As happy as they were together while raising Natalie Cole and their other children, Nat and Maria Cole weathered considerable racial tensions. Some white residents resisted when they went house shopping in the tony Hancock Park neighborhood. After I wrote about "The Nat King Cole TV Show" becoming available on iTunes last year, a longtime reader and L.A. resident wrote and shared the following anecdote:
'One of my Nat King Cole memories was the following story about Mrs. Cole. The Nat King Cole family had moved into their home, on Rossmore Blvd. The rear of the house overlooked the country club's Golf Course greens. The Hancock Park homeowner's association started circulating a petition for neighbors to sign, upon learning that 'blacks' were planning on purchasing inside the area. The petition, to the effect, homeowners' signatures to protest allowing any blacks from purchasing and moving into the Hancock PARK neighborhood.
'A caucasian female homeowner walked up to the Cole's front porch early one morning, rang the doorbell, and waited. Mrs. Cole opened the door. The homeowner representative explained her purpose: Was the homeowner home, and would the homeowner please sign their petition to prevent and keep blacks from buying in the Hancock Park neighborhood, therefore preventing any [blacks]. moving into the neighborhood?
'Mrs. Cole replied, 'Why yes, I'll sign that petition, give me your pen!' She signed the petition, handing the petition back to the housewife, and thanking the neighbor for keeping the neighborhood safe... and the visit ended! True story!'
Maria Cole told me about some of the trips she accompanied her husband on through the segregated South.
'When we traveled on the road, a lot of it was by car, and when we went to hotels, he would never let me go in until he knew they had a room,' she said. 'They were afraid of being refused. So I never experienced that [racism] directly.'
Cole also was the victim of a racially motivated attack in Birmingham, Ala., in 1956, an event that had its own surreal repercussions.
'He was chastised a lot about the attack in Alabama because he didn't go crazy about it,' she said. 'But that wasn't his nature. He did it his way -- he didn't yell and scream.
'We were opposite in personalities,' she added with a gentle laugh. 'He was a very elegant man, and he's very sorely missed, by his family and by his fans too.'
The same surely will be said today of his equally elegant bride.
More on her death: Maria Hawkins Cole, Nat 'King' Cole's widow, dies at 89
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