Alicia Keys has revealed that she was so hurt by her father’s abandonment that she wrote him a devastating letter at 13 telling him to stay out of her life.
The Grammy Award-winning singer said she told Craig Cook, who walked out on Keys when she was two: ‘I don’t want anything. That’s the only way you can make me happy.’
In the letter, revealed in a new documentary about her life, Keys made clear how ‘furious’ she was at her father’s failings, which included being absent for her birth.
Cook also weighs in on his own shortcomings in the film and admits he was ‘immature’ at the time of his daughter’s birth in 1981 and unable to take on the responsibility of fatherhood.
The film, titled ‘Alicia Keys: Girl From Hell’s Kitchen’ is directed by Emmy-nominated One 9, whose previous films include biographies of the rapper Nas and the former basketball player Allen Iverson.
The world premiere closed out the Tribeca Film Festival.
Alicia Keys attends the afterparty following the world premiere of her documentary Alicia Keys: Girl From Hell’s Kitchen at the Tribeca Festival
In the documentary, Keys reveals she wrote her father Craig Cook (far right) a devastating letter at age 13 telling him to stay out of her life after years of broken promises and disappointment. The pair have since reconciled and are pictured with her family in 2024
The documentary follows the childhood of Keys, 45, who was born Alicia Augello Cook and raised in Hell’s Kitchen on the West side of Manhattan.
Her mother Terria Joseph Augello raised her as a single mother by working multiple jobs and sacrificing her own ambitions for the theater to pay for piano lessons for her daughter.
Joseph and Cook had been on just three dates when she got pregnant and decided to keep the baby.
‘She [Terria] called a couple of times, told me she was pregnant. I was like OK. It wasn’t in me, I wasn’t there, I wasn’t ready. I was immature,’ Cook says in the film.
‘My father wasn’t there when I was born…on that evening Mommy lay in bed wondering how she would come up with the money for the hospital bill,’ Keys says.
‘The story of that day is, in many ways, the story of my relationship with Craig.
Keys, pictured in her youth, says writing the father-daughter storyline in her Broadway musical Hell’s Kitchen helped her heal old wounds
Keys was raised by her mother Terria Joseph in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, and says her father’s absence fueled both her anger and her creativity
‘He wasn’t there and, once the difficult moments had come and gone he would suddenly show up. Only to vanish again,’ she adds.
Keys said that Cook turned up at his mother’s house and told her, “here’s your grandchild,” handed Keys over, and then left again.
Cook’s father, Joseph Augello, a former police officer, became the ‘main father figure’ in her life and a person she admired for his sharp dress sense and his fedora hats.
But despite growing close to her paternal grandparents, Keys still felt angry at her father’s absence.
‘Mom was (one year) enduring a particularly stressful financial season and would often find herself short on rent,’ she says.
‘Mom worked hours and hours. She would come home and sleep real quick and go back to work.’
Alone at home Keys would work on blues and jazz songs and used her feelings about her father as material.
She tells the film: ‘There’s a lot of promises of different meetings and moments between Craig and I and those moments wouldn’t come, they’d be delayed or deferred.
‘I remember that happening for a long time, I was just like I don’t want to feel like that, I don’t want it to be halfway.
‘I was so furious, I was so over it, I didn’t care any more and I wanted him to know it, I wanted everybody to know it.’
Writing on her kitchen table, Keys told her father: ‘I don’t want anything. All I want is for you to mind your business. I don’t want the phone calls, I don’t want the letters, I don’t want the fake acts that you pull to try and make me think you care. I don’t want anything. That’s the only way you can make me happy’.
Cook says that today ‘I don’t know if I can read it (the letter)’ because it is so painful.
Keys with her mother, who worked multiple jobs to support her daughter’s musical ambitions, and her first piano teacher Margaret Pine in 2008
Terria Joseph and Alicia Keys ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ Broadway Opening Night in April 2024
The documentary closed the Tribeca Festival and explores Keys’ childhood, family relationships and rise to stardom
The impasse between the two lasted until Keys was writing and producing her 2023 Tony Award winning Broadway show ‘Hell’s Kitchen’, which was loosely based on her life.
In the film Keys said that writing the father figure for the character based on her was a ‘big vehicle for healing’.
‘My grandmother’s dying wish was that she wanted family unity,’ Keys says.
‘That really woke me up to something. Craig didn’t have to be my dad but he was my father’, Keys says.
In the film Cook says that there was ‘growth on both our parts’ to get to the point where they could have a relationship.
For his part, Cook was able to say ‘that’s who I was then, that’s not who I am now,’ he says.
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