Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him (24 page)

“WHEN YOU GET OFF THAT STAGE, THERE’S A LONELINESS THAT COMES OVER YOU”

Comedian Thea Vidale continues: “It’s like all the love is gone. So you can see why comics have demons. You’re trying to fill that void until the next stage time you get where you’ll find your love.”

Back home in Northridge, with the concert tour completed, the movie in theaters, and the companion double-LP
Wanted
in record stores, Richard had time to feel the full weight of the reality that the woman who raised him, had always been his rock and his anchor, was gone for good. In the wake of Mama’s death, Richard’s drug consumption only escalated, the violence got worse, and his behavior grew increasingly bizarre.

Richard’s daughter Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, now a professor of nineteenth-century U.S. history and race at Smith College, believes it was a source of torment for her father that he often told painful truths about other people in his stand-up.

He always told the truth in a childlike way, without calculation or guile. He simply didn’t know any other way to be. But I don’t think he liked the aftermath of telling that truth—of feeling exposed, and feeling inside out, and maybe having hurt people. I don’t think he liked that, but he couldn’t help doing it any other way. I think he just spewed out his truth, and he did it beautifully onstage, and then he’d feel horrible. Maybe alcohol helped that feeling go away. And I think the crazy people helped it go away, too. That may have been an alternate addiction. He liked being around people who told him the truth. Now, the truth was that he was brilliant and kind. But the ones who told him he was a fucking asshole, those were the ones he believed because that’s how he felt about himself. He tended to surround himself with dark and devious people.

Jennifer Lee had been Richard’s live-in girlfriend for nearly a year, moving in soon after Deboragh left. Her devastating diary-cum-memoir,
Tarnished Angel,
published in 1991, chronicles being beaten to a pulpy mess on a nearly daily basis, either by Richard’s hands or emptied champagne, vodka, and Courvoisier bottles. No matter how bruised or lacerated her face became, all it ever took, by her own account, was a call from Richard—an “I love you,” or a “baby, I need you”—and her heart would melt. Page after page, chapter after chapter, she forgives him with renewed hopes and swollen smiles. Rain Pryor, in her 2006 memoir
Jokes My Father Never Taught Me,
archly recalls that her dad must have really loved Jennifer “because he would beat the shit out of her, and she must have really loved him—because she always took it.”

What was that advice his father had given him? When you hit a woman, one of two things will happen. She will either pack up and leave or she’s yours for life.

If that’s the love Richard wanted, he had found it.

—————

In February 1979 Jennifer wrote that even though producer Ray Stark had been sending scripts to the house on an almost-daily basis, Richard didn’t have much interest in anything but cocaine. What follows is a not-unusual entry from her diary at the time:

Richard is doing a benefit with Muhammad Ali, which entails staging a fight. He dreads it and drinks many glasses of vodka before he even gets dressed. When I suggest that he “cool it,” I become the object of his rage. All hell breaks loose. He grabs my diary and my phone book and chucks them into the living room fire. Then he runs into my closets and slashes all my clothes. Not satisfied with murdering my wardrobe, he rips the watch off my wrist and smashes it. Then he comes after my diamond studs, trying to tear them out of my ears. Just as suddenly, he calms down and leaves. I inspect the gashes and rips in my Armanis, Basiles, and my thousand-dollar, worn-once, Cracked Ice pants.

Hours later, Jennifer got a call from her old friend Waylon Jennings who happened to be performing at the same benefit. Richard, he told her, had “just been raving about how much he loves you. Damn, I should’ve known he was with someone like you. He’s lookin’ good. You’re takin’ real good care of him, Jen.”

“Music to my bloody ears,” she writes.

Odd, that after so much insanity, it took Richard shaving off half of his mustache while taking a bubble bath to convince him that he needed professional help. He was on his way to visit a female coke dealer he’d been spending more and more time with when Jennifer stopped him at the door and told him to just look at himself. He was wearing a red Adidas jogging suit, silver Nikes, a top hat, and half a mustache.

Richard checked himself into a hospital under the care of psychiatrist Dr. J. Alfred Cannon, an active champion for advancing mental health care in minority communities who had been instrumental in establishing the Drew Medical School in south-central Los Angeles.

Submitting to a hospital stay and daily sessions with a psychiatrist was difficult for Richard. Talking about his life was too personal, too painful. Doing it onstage was one thing, but one-on-one with someone trained to see into the workings of the human psyche was something else. Dr. Cannon asked him why he liked cocaine. He recounts their conversation in
Pryor Convictions.

“Do you see how it removes you from reality? Mentally as well as physically? You spend days and even weeks isolated in your house alone in your bedroom, getting high.”

“Yeah, but that’s okay.”

“Why’s that? Why’s it okay?”

“I don’t see any need to be in reality because I’ve seen how ugly the world is.”

He didn’t buy that shit. Not for an instant. Wanted to know how I was so confident of the world’s ugliness when I wouldn’t venture into it to check things out.

Dr. Cannon suggested that he make a trip back home.

But now that Mama was gone, he had no home to go back to.

No. He meant
home
home. Everyone’s home. Africa.

Richard has decided to drive himself and a girlfriend from the city of Nairobi out across the sprawling bush to a safari resort seventy miles to the south. Already he has been shaken by the autonomy and casual dignity of the Kenyans in the capital city, the specter of black people truly occupying every position of a society. In truth, he hardly notices their blackness; its every variant is so vividly on display that it ceases to signify anything in particular, much less demark the limits of anyone’s opportunity.

Racing across the scorched plain, Richard feels electrified by the possibility of being truly liberated, of owning his soul in a way that he never has; of fully growing into his skin and loving it; of living beyond it.

The wide dirt road narrows abruptly and dips into a valley; and where a small stand of trees throws shade across the path of the now slow-moving car, six grown lions lay dozing in the hot afternoon.

Richard slams on the brakes, and out of the crunch of gravel and stirred dust, one of lions stands and stretches, squaring off with the grill of the car.

Richard grips the wheel in a stunned silence, feeling elated, oddly free of fear and in alliance with the lioness, who lowers her head, seems less sleepy and more guarded as the moments pass.

“I’m an African,” Richard says under his breath and as he begins to climb from the car. “These are my lions.”

“Jesus Christ, Richard!” his girlfriend begs, sinking lower in her seat—“get back in the fucking car! Fuck—
RICHARD
!”

“These are my lions,” Richard says again, meeting the lion’s reproachful eye.

As Richard takes a single step from behind the open car door, the lioness follows a yawn with a deep groan that rouses the other five, who have now all come to their feet.

“My lions,” Richard repeats, even as he slams the door and dives headfirst through the open window and back into his seat, quickly finding reverse.

Richard and Jennifer began their three-week trip on Easter Sunday, flying to Nairobi where they made a connecting flight to Mombasa. For the first few days, Richard sulked. Jennifer writes:

I ask him to please stop whatever it is he’s doing and just let us love each other. Says Richard, “I don’t love you. I love Deboragh.”

“Do you mean it?”

“With all my heart!”

Two paragraphs later:

I start packing my suitcase. Every time I put something in it, he dumps it on the floor. This mean slapstick routine continues until I figure out that all I really need is my pocketbook. As I’m walking out the door, he rips the bag off my shoulder and empties it onto the floor. We both dive for it and end up wrestling over the contents. He gets hold of my passport and starts ripping it page by page while I futilely try and rescue it. I go into my full-tilt stubborn mode. “Fuck it! I’ll go to the U.S. Embassy and get a new one!”

As I start out the door, Richard flings himself at my feet and grabs my ankles holding on for dear life. “Please, don’t leave me, I love you so much.”

When I look down at him my heart melts. I’m his once again, and all else is forgotten

And so on.

—————

For the next several days, Richard was sullen and moody. Most days he slept while Jennifer wandered the open-air markets and drank in the scenery.

Richard had read Richard Leakey’s
Origins
in preparation for the trip. When they returned to Nairobi, Jennifer dragged him to the National Museum. It was an amazing visit, Jennifer reports. It wasn’t until later that afternoon, as Richard sat in the lobby of the Nairobi Hilton, that it really hit him.

I was sitting in the hotel and a voice said to me, “Look around. What do you see?” And I said I see all colors of people doing everything.” And the voice said, “Do you see any niggers?” I said, “No.” It said, “You know why? Because there aren’t any.”

And it hit me like a shot, man. I started crying and shit, you know, sitting there. I said, “I’ve been here three weeks. I haven’t even said it. I haven’t even
thought
it.” And it made me say, “Oh, my God, I’ve been wrong. I’ve been wrong. I got to regroup my shit.” I said, “I ain’t never going to call another black man ‘nigger.’ ”

Although many fans applauded his disavowal of the
N
-word, Richard was stunned by the reactions of those who viewed it as a sellout, that he’d gone soft, turned his back on the community, the movement. In Richard’s mind, his epiphany had been on the order—if not the magnitude—of Malcolm X’s awakening in Mecca, where he saw Hajj pilgrims of all colors and understood that white people were not devils, that white is a state of mind.

“But I wasn’t Malcolm or Martin, or anybody else,” Richard wrote in his memoir. “I was a drug-addicted, paranoid, frightened, lonely, sad, and frustrated comedian who had gotten too big for his britches.”

The doorman lifts his head but averts his gaze when they enter the lobby, the party upstairs is already raucous and troublesome enough without more leather-clad hipsters packing the place, their shaded eyes already dim and drifting ahead of nightfall. Richard and his date glide into the elevator that rises some fifteen floors and opens on to loud music, a rumble of talk and deep laughter. The couple push inside to hoots of recognition and snake their way through to the bar. Within moments, Richard is quietly steered into a back bedroom, the door closing behind him.

Cocaine is scarcely a secret indulgence on the scene, but something in here certainly is. Richard wants the good shit—jokes that it costs him six hundred dollars a day just to get his dick hard, the full freeze long gone.

“Well, what—you ain’t read Pilgrim’s Progress? You have to stay current, my brother, got to go higher up the mountain if you wanna talk to God.”

The skinny man produces a small rock and a glass pipe, sparks his lighter, and offers it to Richard who for laughs drops to his knees as if at a communion rail.

“Easy now, Rich, take it easy—like sucking a chick’s dick,” the man coos, and then Richard is in; off; gone.

Hours do not become less than hours but feel as if they are all running concurrently—the whole expanse of the evening viewed in a single frame, its scale abstracted and made disproportionate as if something close at hand were viewed through a long and cracked telescope.

Richard’s girlfriend, having gone to look for him, slips into the back room where Rich and a small circle have remained sequestered and peers through the same lens. She passes out on the floor but in time is brought weakly to the surface by the weight of a man’s body, moving over and then within her.

“No, Richard . . . no, stop—not here,” she mutters, trying to work her way from beneath the man who only pushes himself deeper in between her thighs.

There is a whirring sound, then laughter, as the woman finally finds Richard’s eyes within her fleeting focus; but the grinning familiar face floats past her, circling, and she realizes it is not attached to the body of the man now having sex with her.

“Smile, bitch,” says Richard as he snaps Polaroid pictures of her assault. “Smile!”

The whirring sound continues, as gray-and-white squares slide from the camera and fall to the floor, the girl’s astonished face not yet developed enough to recognize.

“MY MIND’S THINKING ABOUT SHIT I DON’T WANT TO BE THINKIN’ ABOUT”

Richard, for all his fearless, self-revelatory truth-telling, consistently lied about one thing, and that was cocaine. In every interview, performance, or personal encounter, he cheerfully reported that he was off drugs for real this time.

Early in 1980, David Brenner had finished doing an afternoon talk show at CBS and was on his way out to his car when he saw Richard in the parking lot wearing a baseball cap. They greeted and hugged. Brenner asked him how he was doing.

He says, “Oh, I’m great, man. I got the shit out of me. I’m done with all the shit.” He says, “I’m straight and I’m cool and I’ve got it together and I know what’s what and I know where I’m going and I’m cool.”

I said, “I’m glad to hear that,” because you know you were always afraid with him that there was going to be a disaster, like with Freddie Prinze, who was a good friend of mine—that there would be that kind of an ending. So it was always with great trepidation when you saw him because you thought, “God, I hope he doesn’t go home and kill himself.” And a few times, we know, he almost did.

And he says, “Come on over, we’ll sit around, we’ll bullshit, we’ll have some fun . . .”

I said, “I’d love to do it, Richie, but I’ve got another TV show. I’ve got to go.” I said, “We’ll hang again.” I gave him a big hug and he takes off his cap and he has his hair tied up in well over one hundred tiny little bows of different-colored cloth. I just said, “Hey, Richie, I am really happy that you’re off the shit and you’ve got it together,” and he said, “Thanks, man,” and walked away. And I thought, “Oh my God, is he fucked up.” It was hysterical. It would’ve made a great routine of two guys meeting and that happening. Of one guy trying to convince the other that he’s off the drugs and he’s straight? It was wonderful. Wonderful.

—————

During their long drive up to Berkeley in the spring of 1971, between the Motown tunes and swigs of Courvoisier, Richard confided to Paul Mooney that sometimes he saw devils. Actual ones. “I’m in a meeting in motherfucking Hollywood, Mr. Mooney, and I ain’t kidding, all I see is horns and tails! Really! All these folks around me got cloven feet and forked tongues!”

When freebase first swept through Hollywood, Richard insisted it was a line he would never cross. Then he casually mentioned to David Franklin one day that, when you stop and think about it, freebase is actually a purer form of cocaine, free of contaminants. Franklin had warned Richard from the very start of their association that he didn’t represent drug addicts. He recognized the rationalizing voice of a junkie when he heard one. He realized, with alarm, that he was hearing one now.

—————

Richard began freebasing in November 1979 and did little else during the next seven months, except costar with Gene Wilder in
Stir Crazy.

A popular YouTube video (an earlier audio version had circulated for years on a bootleg cassette of celebrity meltdowns) captures Richard giving a coked-out interview on the set. He simultaneously boasts about and mocks the amount of money he has been paid for his role in the film. “Two million dollars! My grandmother never saw that much money in her whole life,” he tells someone standing to his right, just out of view, “and she was a better woman than you are a man . . . you know how much a million dollars is? I can’t even count to a million. You’d need an accountant—a Jew!”

And on it goes, for more than thirteen minutes.

The movie sucks. I don’t care ’cause I got paid . . . Gene Wilder is a fag . . . All I want is to leave Tucson alive . . . I didn’t get caught yesterday buying seven pounds of cocaine in front of eight policemen. They can’t catch me! I’m a lucky, black,
greasy
motherfucker . . . I’m happy because Sidney Poitier is directing a ten-million-dollar movie and it don’t mean shit. They spent
four billion
dollars on the Americans who went to Iran, and they crashed. Eight people died and they was all black.

Even when he seems on the verge of giving the desired answer to a question, he renders the take unusable by slouching in his chair and throttling his cupped hand above his crotch, miming jacking off. There is plenty of laughter on camera and off. Even though the day is wasted, everyone is having a jolly time. Even Richard, although his eyes say he is dying inside.

Jennifer Lee accompanied him to Tucson for location filming at the Arizona State Prison. As usual, he rented a private house several miles away from the rest of the cast and crew. At this point, he prized any and every opportunity to be off by himself so he could smoke.

Jennifer read aloud to him from the Alcoholics Anonymous “Big Book” while he refilled his pipe and kept a wary eye on the demons that prowled the room where they slept. It freaked her out the way he would point to them, show her where they were, and describe in such calm and precise detail exactly what they looked like and what they were doing. She watched with growing alarm as his bloodshot eyes followed their movements around the room. Soon enough, because she was sharing his pipe, she began seeing them, too. And they were exactly as he had described them.

Richard and his friend Charles Weldon, who was also in
Stir Crazy,
kept the party going once they got back to L.A. After an especially debauched night with perhaps a half-dozen hookers—including a pair of twins who couldn’t keep up with them, Weldon remembers—they decided to give AA a try. They sat through part of a meeting, listening to people weep and talk about the degrading things they’d done in exchange for drugs or drug money. One woman told of stealing her parents’ television. Richard had a routine about that. At one point they just looked at each other and said, in effect, “Shit, we ain’t got no problem. Not compared to these people.” They got up and left, went out and scored.

—————

One night at the Northridge house, Jennifer looked out the window and saw all these caped dwarves and goblins—a whole army of them—moving through the bushes, coming after her. She became so terrified, she called the police and frantically led the bemused officers on a search of the area outside the house. Jennifer actually grabbed the flashlight away from one of them and shined it underneath the bushes to show them where the goblins were. “But my dark creatures have disappeared,” she writes, “and so, obviously, has my mind.”

Weeks later, she and Richard were clutching each other as they made their way through the house in a paranoid delirium. They saw—they
both
saw—the orange face of the devil glowing in the dark at the top of the stairs outside Richard’s office looking down at them.

In what would become an almost-nightly ritual, Richard swore off smoking, smashed his glass pipe, then went out the next morning to buy a bigger and better one.

—————

By springtime, Richard was unable to go five minutes without freebasing. He tried. He set down his pipe, looked at the clock, and told himself, “I’m not doing anymore freebase for the next five minutes.” But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t wait that long. If he couldn’t go five minutes without freebase, what
could
he do? What was left? He’d come to the end of something he couldn’t see past.

On June 7, Richard confided to Jennifer that he’d seen himself as the devil. An orange-colored skeletal creature came walking through the wall like a ghost. It looked just like him. Richard spoke to it. He asked the apparition if it really was his own self he was seeing. “Yes, I’m you,” the devil said to him, then walked back through the wall.

—————

Late in the day of June 9, 1980, after weeks of nonstop freebasing, Richard doused himself with 150-proof rum and flicked his Bic lighter, resulting in third-degree burns over more than half his body. Put bluntly, after he’d smoked every bit of cocaine he could find, he smoked himself.

Friends were called to the house throughout the earlier part of that day to come do something—anything—to help him. Jim Brown, Paul Mooney, and Jennifer Lee all found him cowering in his bedroom like the Kafka character Gregor Samsa, scurrying from the light they let in, racing for the dark places, and hissing at them to get the fuck out and leave him alone.

—————

Kathy McKee doesn’t remember who called her to come over that day. Probably Rashon, or maybe his housekeeper, Mercy, or Richard’s aunt Dee. They were all there.

Kathy always had a calming effect on Richard, but on this day he was too far gone. She walked into his room and there he sat “with that damn base pipe glued to his hand. He was completely one hundred percent out of his mind. It was terrible. You couldn’t communicate with him anymore. You know that if he doesn’t put that base pipe down and go to the hospital and get some help, there’s no way he’s coming out of this. You have to understand,” she says, “freebase isn’t like doing cocaine. You can’t think of it that way. Everybody at that time was doing coke. Sammy Davis did coke. Johnny
Carson
did coke. Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, everybody did. But once he got on that damn base pipe”—the anger still rises in her voice some thirty-five years later—“that was it. There’s no coming back from that. Like AIDS in the gay community, base took people down. People died.”

Kathy described for us how Richard used a cotton swab on the end of a wooden stick—like the throat swabs they use at the doctor’s office—and he would dip that into 151 rum or 200-proof grain alcohol and light that with a lighter.

He would light the swab and use that as a flame torch to light the pipe. I really don’t know the reason behind that, but I would imagine it’s because it wasn’t toxic to light the pipe with rum like it would be with lighter fluid. You’d be inhaling lighter fluid. Richard was dipping that cotton flame torch into the rum bottle—151-proof rum! Plus he’s high, he’s out of his mind. And, you know, after three days on a binge, or whatever it was, that’s a pretty risky thing to do, because if that torch is hot, or still lit by mistake, and you dip it down in that bottle, you’ve now got a molotov cocktail.

“I told him—the last thing I said to him was, “Richard, at least pour that rum in a cup.”

—————

Richard, in his book, describes descending into serious dementia, a surreal darkness of hallucinations and voices—people from his past outside his window, on the other side of his door, taunting him, mocking his weakness. When he ran out of dope, he debated his options, then reached for a bottle of rum and doused himself. It seemed like a good idea. He wasn’t scared. Neither did he feel inner peace. “I was in a place called There.”

It took three tries for his Bic to catch—just as his cousin opened the door to look in on him. Richard says he tried to wrap himself in a comforter to put out the flames, but he couldn’t pick it up. It wouldn’t move. “I must have gone into shock,” he writes, “because I didn’t feel anything.”

His aunt Dee came in and yelled at his cousin to “Smother him!” In his delirium, Richard thought she meant “Suffocate him” as in “Put the sorry motherfucker out of his misery.”

He could have rolled on the floor, says Kathy McKee. The shower was right there off the bedroom. But there was also a window. He crashed through it and headed toward the street.

—————

Officers Richard Zielinski and Carl Helm, responding to a call just after 8:00 p.m., saw Richard running along Parthenia Street, trailing smoke. The identity of the burning man had been confirmed.

Officer Zielinski jumped out of the patrol car and began jogging alongside him. He noted that the weave of his polyester shirt had melted into his raw flesh.

“Richard, we’ve got to get you to a hospital.”

“I’m
going
to the hospital. Just show me where it is.”

“Why don’t you just stop and wait for—“

“I can’t stop. If I stop, I’ll die.”

Zielinski didn’t argue the point. He simply assured Richard that help was on the way and that he would stay with him until the ambulance arrived.

“I really fucked up, man. Please, God, give me another chance. I know I did wrong, but there’s a lot of good in me. Haven’t I brought happiness to anyone in this world?”

“Sure you have,” Zielinski told him. “We all love your stuff.”

Richard paused briefly in front of the San Fernando Valley Christian School, nearly a mile from his house, then took off again, turning the corner and heading south on Hayvenhurst Avenue where, some time later, an ambulance caught up to him.

—————

Richard gave multiple accounts of how the fire started, most of them attempts to vouch for the well-meaning explanations put out by his friends and management—covering for those who were covering for him.

In one, Richard admitted that he
had
been freebasing the day before but had run out of base. (Think we’ll be freebasing tonight? We’re not? Well, what the heck.) So he and an unidentified “partner”—perhaps Rashon, perhaps some phantasmal character, the product of a hallucination—were drinking the highly volatile rum he generally used to fire up the base. He went to light a cigarette and—
POOF
!

Tony DiDominico, chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department, confirmed that overproof rum, properly atomized, with a very hot ignition force, would indeed ignite. “But a violent explosion? A flash fire? I don’t think so.”