Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him (27 page)

—————

The story is told from the disembodied vantage point of Jo Jo in the aftermath of the freebase incident that nearly kills him. While lying bandaged in a hospital bed, his spirit leaves his charred body and journeys out to retrace the steps of his life, paying ghostly visits to his younger selves at key junctures along the way.

The scenes from Jo Jo’s early life were filmed on location in Peoria (in the movie, they say it’s Ohio), in the actual house where Richard grew up. It took real courage, Rocco says, for him to confront his demons and the pain of his childhood, reenacting actual scenes from his life in his grandmother’s house, directing his younger self to peek over the same transom into the same room where his mother turned tricks.

Jo Jo’s father humiliates him using the same words Richard’s father had: “This boy ain’t shit and his mama ain’t shit, either.” In other ways, he cheated the story. One of his wives—representing Shelley—slaps him and he doesn’t hit back. He sulks. The worst transgression is a scene at the bus station as he is leaving town to chase his dreams. He earnestly begs his first wife to come with him.

When the corporeal Jo Jo invites his alter ego back into his body (“I thought you’d never ask”) at the end of the film, a restored Jo Jo returns to the concert stage, using the voice of Richard’s old-time preacher to eulogize the burned-up corpse of his former self.

The boy was a mess. He run through life like shit run through a goose. And now he rests here with a smile on his face. I guess that’s a smile. I hope that’s his face. You sure that isn’t his ass? It look like his ass! Some people lead with their chin. Life kind of forces you to do that—to lead with your chin. But this man here, he led with his nuts. If his nuts wasn’t in a vise, he wasn’t happy.

The trouble was, Richard tried to make a heartfelt drama from the same material he had, for so many years, been spinning into wild and irreverent comedy gold. Richard knew it would be a hard sell for his fans. “They want laughs—lots of laughs, which it hasn’t got. It could be moving and good, but people may say, ‘Why are you telling us this? We don’t want to know this.’ ”

Writes Pauline Kael:

Pryor doesn’t have the skills to tell his story in this form. As a standup entertainer, he sees the crazy side of his sorrows; he transforms pain and chaos into comedy. As a moviemaker, he’s a novice presenting us with clumps of unformed experience. It isn’t even raw; the juice has been drained away. He was himself—demons, genius, and all—in
Richard Pryor—Live in Concert
and, though to a lesser extent, in
Richard Pryor—Live on the Sunset Strip.
Here, trying to be sincere, he’s less than himself.

“Perhaps the worst thing about
Jo Jo Dancer,
” Julian Upton writes in
Bright Lights Film Journal,
“is Pryor himself.”

In what should have been a primal scream of a performance, a fusion of the electrifying power of his best stand-up with the howling demons that dogged him off-screen and offstage, the actor instead gives an awkward, largely poker-faced turn, occasionally hitting the high notes but generally looking lost in his own movie . . . The disturbing truth of
Jo Jo Dancer
is that it confirms that Pryor’s excitable greatness had vanished. All we see is the laundered Pryor of 1986 trying to imitate the wild, wired, and reckless Pryor of a decade earlier—and as in
Here and Now,
it’s an act he could no longer pull off.

Approximately two-thirds of the way through the movie, we are treated to a progressive montage of Jo Jo, sporting an increasingly voluminous natural, performing snatches of Richard’s now-classic stand-up routines under the sound-track recording of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” Working with some of the greatest stand-up material ever conceived (his own), there is no spark, no volatile clash with audiences that had never before encountered comedy such as this. It’s all perfunctory, performed by rote in front of an accepting audience. Inevitably it falls flat, merely set down for the record, as it might be performed by a Richard Pryor impersonator. Jo Jo’s renditions are stillborn, like museum pieces, empty of the struggle, the chaos, the sloppiness of discovery at the moment of conception in an uncertain encounter with a live audience. Richard knew what he was talking about when he told Mooney that no one could steal his material. As this sequence makes excruciatingly clear, no one but Richard Pryor knew what to do with it. Not even Jo Jo Dancer.

—————

An alarmingly frail and emaciated Richard went on
Th
e Tonight Show
in October 1986 in part to squelch rumors that he had AIDS. He’d lost twenty pounds in preparation for a film role, he said, but then his weight kept dropping.

“I was getting really scared. I was losing weight and my pants were falling down. I said there’s something wrong. I was worried about those diseases around. I thought ‘Richard, it’s finally caught up with you.’ I thought I had one of them and I was going to die. I was very calm about it. I went and got the blood checked. The doctor said I was fine, but the next day my eye went out. My right eye is blind,” he told Carson. “You could hit me on this side and I wouldn’t see it coming.”

Richard knew what the trouble was, in name, at least. A few months earlier, Deboragh had flown with him to the Mayo Clinic.

The diagnosis was multiple sclerosis. He didn’t know what that was. After listening to the doctor’s explanation, he was convinced no one else did, either.

He understood what he was in for, that the incurable, degenerative disease would likely take away his motor skills, balance, and control of his bodily functions. He was determined not to give anything up before the disease took it away. The very next day after that
Tonight Show
appearance, he got married for the fifth time, to a twenty-three-year-old actress named Flynn Belaine. (They separated after two months of marriage and were divorced in January but would remarry following the birth of their son in 1990.)

“I’M FINDING IT HARD IMITATING RICHARD PRYOR”

“Listen, you spoke the truth. They have to make you famous now. That’s how Hollywood deals with the truth . . . They make you so famous that nobody’ll take you serious anymore.”

—Cecil Brown,
Days without Weather

Not counting
Jo Jo Dancer,
Richard Pryor—or someone calling himself that—appeared in the following films, almost always in the starring role.

Critical Condition
(1987)

Moving
(1988)

See No Evil, Hear No Evil
(1989)

Harlem Nights
(1989)

Another You
(1991)

The Three Muscatels
(1991)

Mad Dog Time
(1996)

Full confession: we haven’t seen any of these movies, not all the way through, anyway. But we’ve seen enough. They are unbearable. We never believed that Paul McCartney died in a 1966 car wreck or that Elvis staged his own death in 1977 to live a life of obscurity in northern Michigan, but we can say with fair certainty that the hapless actor passing himself off as Richard Pryor in these movies was an impostor.

Richard—the real Richard—well knew of this doppelganger’s existence and spoke of him often. The terrible irony is that in his prime the genuine Richard believed
himself
to be the impostor. (
Who Me? I’m Not Him
is the title of a 1977 LP of older material issued on the Laff label.) He often said that Richard Pryor the movie star and famous comedian was someone else, living and breathing and walking around out there in the world somewhere while he spent Richard Pryor’s money, slept with his women, lived in his house, and cashed his checks, fearing all the while that one day the real Richard Pryor would show up and kick his ass. He knew he could do it, too.

While in the hospital recovering from the fire, he told his friend, the producer Thom Mount, “I got
real
scared. I was this person that I had inherited in life. And
I
was a person that nobody knew.
Nobody knew me.
All I could keep doing was act like this person, this Richard Pryor, because I was afraid. I was afraid they’d kill me if they found out I wasn’t Richard Pryor.”

Kathy McKee saw him two or three times in the years following the fire and she confirms: “He was not the same person.”

—————

If this usurped Richard Pryor can be said to have a spiritual forebear, it is Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff—the lusty, besotted, conniving, whore-mongering, nose-tweaking, purse-snatching rapscallion and corrupter of the crown who strides the boards in
Henry IV, Part 1
and
Part 2,
and again in
Henry V.
But now observe: this swaggering colossus is reduced to a kowtowing, repentant, subservient tool in
Th
e Merry Wives of Windsor,
a work Shakespeare dashed off at the behest of Queen Elizabeth who wanted to see her favorite character fall in love. Harold Bloom calls his
Merry Wives
incarnation the “pseudo-Falstaff,” a nameless impostor masquerading as Shakespeare’s most sublime creature. Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley catalogs the indignities. The Falstaff of
Merry Wives,
he writes, “is baffled, duped, treated like dirty linen, beaten, burnt, pricked, mocked, insulted.” Worst of all, he repents and begs pardon. “It is horrible.”

As with the pseudo-Falstaff, the impostor Pryor is, in Bloom’s words, “uncomfortable with what he is doing and wishes to get it over with as rapidly as possible.” He “loathes not only the occasion but himself for having yielded to it.”

The spectacle would make us “lament a lost glory” if we did not “know him to be a rank impostor” masquerading as the great man.

Richard’s friend, bodyguard, trainer, and sometime spiritual adviser Rashon Khan confronted him point-blank and asked him why he was doing a “crazy movie” like
The Toy.
Why, when even his costar Jackie Gleason said it was bullshit. “Richard said, ‘The money. I get paid for this one.’ ”

Richard could no more turn down Hollywood’s millions than Shakespeare could refuse his queen.

—————

Like Elvis Presley before him, Richard reached heights of absolute genius when commanding a stage with a microphone in his hand, then squandered his energy and talent on a string of forgettable movies. Greil Marcus could have been speaking of Richard Pryor’s entire postfire output when he wrote this response to Bob Dylan’s
Self Portrait:
“I once said I’d buy an album of Dylan breathing heavily. I still would. But not an album of Dylan breathing softly.”

—————

Writer Andy Breckman (cohost of WFMU’s long-running comedy program
Seven Second Delay
) recalls a full-cast read-through of a screenplay he wrote starring Richard Pryor.

What was it called? It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t
Stir Crazy,
okay?
*
 It was one of the shitty ones he made later, after he started to shrivel up, when nobody could bear watching him.

There was a scene where one of the characters—a senile old lady—takes a crap in the backyard. Shamelessly, in broad daylight. Like a dog. Mr. Pryor felt that scene didn’t work. I respectfully disagreed. We went back and forth. He wanted it out. I thought it should stay.

Finally, the director turned to Pryor and said, “Richard, is this something you feel strongly about?” And this is what Pryor did: he reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun! A real gun. A Derringer—with two short barrels. I’d never seen one before but I could tell it was definitely real. I was so scared I almost blacked out.

Pryor put the Derringer on the table—thunk—and stared at me, sort of defiantly. It was like a saloon scene in a bad western. Everyone gasped and laughed nervously. Nobody said anything for about five seconds. Then I playfully ripped the page out of the script, indicating “Heh, heh, okay Richard, you win!” Everyone tittered nervously some more. Finally, Mr. Pryor put the gun away and the read-through continued. We never saw the gun again. Although, as I recall, everyone laughed at Mr. Pryor’s lines a little louder from that point on.

There was one movie Richard made that apparently no one has seen. Called
Th
e
Th
ree Muscatels,
we can only say that it was ostensibly based on the Alexander Dumas novel of the Musketeers and that it starred and was cowritten by Flynn Belaine Pryor, Richard’s fifth (and sixth) wife.

—————

Richard’s physical condition deteriorated considerably after he and Flynn divorced for the second time in 1991. Deboragh returned and took on the duties of a twenty-four-hour caregiver. Richard managed to make a few more TV appearances and received an Emmy nomination for his role as a cranky MS patient—with Rain playing his daughter—on the CBS drama,
Chicago Hope.
And he turned up in an offbeat part as a garage owner in David Lynch’s movie,
Lost Highway.

Roger Ebert was gracious enough to overlook Richard’s role as “Jimmy the grave digger” in his final movie,
Mad Dog Time,
a film he described as being no more or less engaging than looking at a blank screen for the same amount of time. “Oh, I’ve seen bad movies before. But they usually made me care about how bad they were. Watching
Mad Dog Time
is like waiting for the bus in a city where you’re not sure they have a bus line . . . I don’t have any idea what this movie is about—and yet, curiously, I don’t think I missed anything.”

Directed by Larry Bishop (son of Rat Packer Joey Bishop),
Mad Dog Time
stars Richard Dreyfuss, Diane Lane, Jeff Goldblum, and Ellen Barkin, with Gabriel Byrne, Kyle MacLachlan, Gregory Hines, Burt Reynolds, and Billy Idol. Thus, Richard ended his film career exactly as he began it, playing a supporting role in a star-bloated gangster comedy. Only this time no one singled him out as the movie’s promising bright spot. Instead, they looked away.