by David Henry
Kathy McKee saw him two or three times in the years following the fire and she confirms: “He was not the same person.”
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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 The 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.
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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.”
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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 The Three 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.
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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.
* It was Moving, directed in 1988 by Alan Metter, costarring Beverly Todd, Stacey Dash, and Randy Quaid.
THE LAST TEMPTATION OF RICHARD
“Richard,” writes Mooney, “is a junkie first, a genius second. Always.” Yet “he never bleeds, he never rots out his nostrils like a lot of coke hounds do. He’s got a cast-iron septum.”
Richard didn’t deny it. He gleefully admitted that he loved cocaine, and in copious quantities—but always as though his usage were a thing of the past. He persistently declared himself free of the drug. On his 1975 LP . . . Is It Something I Said?, he says, “I snorted cocaine for about fifteen years—my dumb ass. I must’ve snorted up Peru. I could have bought Peru, all the shit I snorted.” The truth is, he never stopped or even slowed down since taking his first snort in 1965.
Even the “fifteen year” boast was a lie. (Oh, he could tell lies!) The chronology never quite tallied. When he filmed Here and Now in October of 1983, he told the audience at the Saenger Theatre in New Orleans that he’d had no liquor or drugs in seven months.
Richard claimed he had never smoked pot or even been drunk before he turned twenty-two. For all the whoring and payoffs and knife fights and whatnot he witnessed going on all around him, he adhered to a strict upbringing. The change came when he went out on the road.
You’re lonely and you feel rejected, so you take a walk or get in your car and drive around looking for someone to talk to . . . to love you. You run into some man or some lady and they say, “Here, take this. Go ahead. Try some.” So you try it and you fantasize that you’re feeling better, that you’ve found good friends . . . And later you go back and look for that same person, or you look for the person he or she represents—anybody who can make you think you’re happy and not being rejected. And it builds and builds.
You create a new you . . . a much-loved, very happy you. Then you find that you have to start competing with that person you’ve created . . . that image you want to think you are . . . that hip motherfucker who knows everything about life and people and getting high. But, man, I didn’t know shit about it. I didn’t know a damn thing, but I went ahead and did it.
Lots of people battle demons, but few are called to account for them in such a public manner.
“I’ve never seen anyone more messed up over success than Richard Pryor,” says Mooney. “For him, it’s a constant battle between success in the white world and keeping it real for his black self . . . He can’t fight his way out of this bind. He loves the money, he loves the approval and women and celebrity, but it costs him his soul.”
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His personal skills, his relationship skills just for living his life as a human being, they weren’t there. He was a strange person and he had a very dark side. When you were alone in the room with Richard in bed at night, there was no laughing, there were no jokes. He was a completely different person. A very dead personality. If you asked him a question, he would answer yes or no. Not at all a fun person, not a great conversationalist, not somebody you can laugh and talk with. Not at all. When you were alone with Richard, it was very, very, very, very, very, very, very boring, to be honest with you. The only thing that kept you there with Richard was the fact that you knew he was a genius. One live performance with Richard when you were in the wings or in the audience could carry you for a month. The jolt of electricity that you got from being around him when he was on was magnificent. And you also had this feeling that you knew you were part of a legend. There was something about this man that was beyond anybody else.
“If a man is touched by genius, he is not an ordinary person,” Dame Joan Plowright once said, speaking of her late husband Sir Laurence Olivier. “He doesn’t lead an ordinary life. He has extremes of behaviour which you understand and you just find a way not to be swept overboard by his demons.”
“Richard was a genius,” McKee sums up. “You’re not going to have a normal relationship with someone like him. You’re just not.”
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Richard undertook a final stand-up tour in the fall of 1992. He knew as well as anyone that it would be his last.
David Banks called Kathy McKee and invited her to the Detroit show at the State Theatre.
Then he said, “Here, Richard wants to talk to you.” He put Richard on the phone and the first thing he said was, “You got any coke?” and “Bring the bitches.” He’s in a wheelchair, right? He’s looking for drugs and he’s looking for bitches. I said, “I don’t know about any of that, Richard. I don’t have any bitches and I don’t have any drugs, but I will be there.” He said, “Well never mind, then, bitch!” But I went anyway. It was embarrassing. Richard struggled to read his material off of cue cards that were spread out on the floor in front of him. It was a full house. Everybody and their mama showed up to see Richard in Detroit. I was completely humiliated and ashamed for him. Richard should have never been out on that stage.”
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In August of 1993 Richard received the Apollo Hall of Fame award at the Apollo Theater where the man who answered when Richard came knocking at the stage door some thirty years earlier told him he’d have better luck down in the Village. The hallowed Apollo where Chick Webb, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Dusty Fletcher, James Brown, Shooby Taylor—far too many to name—had trod the boards setting the crowds a-frenzy or finding themselves hooted off the stage. Robert De Niro read his tribute off cue cards: “Richard always exposed himself so we wouldn’t have to and, in doing so, made us more aware of who we are.” And concluding with, “Richard, I continue to respect you for the work you’ve done in the past and I look forward to seeing more in the future.”
Richard could barely hold himself upright in his chair.
Then Bill Cosby came out and struck the perfect note, striding across the stage without so much as a pause to acknowledge that an audience was present and, descending the five steps to where Richard was seated on the aisle in the second row, handed him his plaque with all the pomp of a classmate returning a borrowed pencil.
“Richard, here’s your award, man. They told me to give you this. I have no idea why you’re getting it.”
“Bill . . .”
Richard began to choke up.
“Stop it. Stop it. We’re going down to the Village and play our old room again.”
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When Richard received the American Comedy Awards’ Lifetime Achievement Award, Bob Newhart asked George Schlatter, ACA founder and executive producer of their annual show, if he could present Richard with the award. Richard was already confined to a wheelchair so he could not come up to accept it. Newhart narrated a film of Richard’s career highlights and they went to a station break. When they returned, he was standing in the audience next to Richard with the award. Richard looked up at him and said, “I stole your album.” “What?” “I stole your album. In Peoria. I was in a record shop and I put it in my jacket.” “You know, Richard, I used to get twenty-five cents a copy for that album.” Richard turned to the people seated around him. “Somebody give me a quarter!”
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Brooklyn multimedia artist Larry Nathanson was at the Comedy Store in May of 1995 on the night Richard gave his last stand-up performance ever. “Eddie Murphy introduced him. He was very disoriented and unsure of himself. It was like he started a thought and couldn’t carry it through. He started off sitting down, then stood up. He began to waver physically. Everybody gave him plenty of time. Nobody rushed him. People called out encouragement. ‘It’s okay, Richard.’ ‘Go, Richard!’ Under no circumstances should he have been up on that stage. He never made it through a single joke. Eddie Murphy and some other guy came and took him off. He got a big ovation.”
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Before Richard Pryor, few comics, or solo performers, ever took on characters of their own invention without benefit of sets or supporting players. Lily Tomlin, Bob Newhart, Kres Mersky, Red Skelton, Jackie Gleason, Pigmeat Markham, Moms Mabley, Dusty Fletcher, Ruth Draper, Bert Williams all did, but none of these attempted it without either costume, props, scenery, or blackface. And, even then, they assayed but one character at a time.
Richard might populate his stages with upward of eight or ten characters who he permitted to flirt with, mock, con, love, hate, enchant, beat, and begat each other. Like those plate-spinning vaudeville jugglers who passed through Peoria—and perhaps took refreshment at his grandmother’s establishment—who would be waiting in the wings ahead of him on The Ed Sullivan Show, playing out their final days by racing about the stage in time with Ray Bloch’s swirling circus music, sweat glistening their brows as they dashed from pole to pole, giving each, in passing, a frantic twirl to set its wobbling plate spinning aright just before it crashed. For Richard it seemed as natural as breathing.
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Rocco Urbisci was sitting in a car with George Carlin on location in New Jersey waiting to shoot an opening sequence for one of his specials. Out of nowhere, Carlin said, “Rocco. What the hell would we have done without HBO?” If the Richard Pryor of the late seventies had survived into the era of HBO, Rocco says, “he could have done thirty specials without any compromise.” That Richard could have done anything. Onstage. “Richard had such courage. If stand-up is your art, you can go make your movie, go do your sitcom, but you’re going to come back to standup because that’s Where. You. Have. Your. Roots. They can take away your movie, they can cancel your sitcom, but they can’t take away what you created, what you did on stage, what you believed in. They can’t take that away from you.”
On March 1, 2008, Rocco directed George Carlin’s final special, their tenth together. The stage was decorated with rugs and heavy furniture to look like a cluttered and cozy home office: stuffed chairs, bookshelves, lamps, a dictionary stand, a desk, an old Mac Classic, and a picture of Richard Pryor.
“George paid a price,” Rocco says. “Richard paid it. Somebody always has to pay the price. Lenny paid it for George and Richard. There’s no way to rank Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and Richard Pryor. It’s just a matter of personal preference who you’d rank second or third.”
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We asked Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor if she recalled the moment she first realized just how significant and earth shattering her father was. When did she have that epiphany?
“Still haven’t had it,” she said. “This is one of the weirdest things for me about being my father’s child. I don’t know if I can even put this into words. It’s no
rmalized for me in some ways, in some ways it’s totally surreal. It’s fun to be watching Modern Family with my kids and hearing a joke about the father being ‘the Richard Pryor of real estate.’ But it doesn’t make sense to me.” She was floored when a student came into her class carrying a copy of the Mel Watkins book, On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying—The Underground Tradition of African-American Humor That Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor. A book that draws a direct line from African American traditions in slavery times to her father? Transforming American culture? She could not equate such things with the man as she knew him up close. “My mother basically raised me as a Jewish girl from the San Fernando Valley. Nobody ever sat me down and said to me, ‘Why don’t you listen to your father’s stuff?’ There’s still a lot I haven’t heard. So it’s funny. I don’t think I, still, fully realize who he is.
“I’ve told my children, ‘I know you think your grandfather was like a former celebrity, but there’s going to come a time where you realize that he was completely groundbreaking and it’s going to blow your mind.’ ”
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Dr. Cornel West declares, “Richard Pryor is the freest black man America has ever had. He is not just a genius, he exercises parrhesia. He exercises the most plain, frank, honest, unintimidated speech we had in the sixties, even more than Martin and Malcolm.”
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“The subject of blackness has taken a strange and unsatisfying journey through American thought,” wrote Hilton Als, in his 1999 New Yorker profile, “A Pryor Love.”
First, because blackness has almost always had to explain itself to a largely white audience in order to be heard, and second, because it has generally been assumed to have only one story to tell—a story of oppression that plays on liberal guilt.