by Scott Saul
A new act in the making: Jennifer Lee and Richard Pryor in 1978. (Courtesy of Jennifer Pryor)
Then, starting in the summer of 1978, Richard righted himself by returning to stand-up. He had been mandated, by the judge in the car-shooting case, to submit to psychological counseling, and in tandem with those private therapy sessions, and with Jennifer at his side, he used the stage of the Comedy Store to retell the story of his life. After a month of woodshedding—a fever of lucidity—he had come up with a new act: over an hour of fresh material, which he then performed in concerts across America.
Richard’s account of his heart attack sat at the core of a show that, as Rolling Stone’s David Felton noted, was something of a departure from his earlier concerts. Previously, Richard had let his imagination wander into woollier characters like Mudbone, his preacher, or his wino—a fact that gave those shows a wild, centripetal energy. In this show, which became the film Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, Richard flowed centrally into the character of himself. The concert was a set of riffs on the trials of his life: the trials of becoming Richard Pryor. Its sketches ranged from the primal memories of his childhood—being beaten by his grandmother and father—all the way to the more recent tribulations of his heart attack and his New Years’ Eve shooting of the Mercedes. Yet the show was clear-eyed and free of self-pity. Out of his suffering, Richard had extracted the story of a man who, having been pained into self-knowledge, did not rue the foolishness of his past selves or begrudge those who had walloped him into wisdom.
In the stage version of Richard’s heart attack, his wife and family in Peoria were pared away to make room for a different story of crime and punishment. The heart attack opened onto a fable about cosmic payback. The setting: a backyard, not a bedroom. A heavy voice ambushes Richard from out of the blue, like a sadistic mugger: “Don’t breathe.” Richard’s right fist strikes the left side of his body with an uppercut.
“Hunh?” Richard says. His eyes search for his invisible assailant.
The heart is a disciplinarian tougher than Marie or even Buck: “You heard me, motherfucker, I said don’t breathe.” It lands another heavy blow to his chest.
Richard is unmanned by his pain. His voice tightens into a quick, high-pitched rasp: “Okay, I won’t breathe, I won’t breathe.”
“Then shut the fuck up!”
“Okay, okay, don’t kill me, don’t kill me.”
“Get on one knee and prove it!”
“I’m on one knee, I’m on one knee, don’t kill me.”
“You’re thinking about dying now, aren’t ya?”
“Yeah, I’m thinking about dying, I’m thinking about dying.”
“You didn’t think about it when you was eating all that pork!” A crushing punch—the punch of comeuppance—belts Richard to the floor. (In other performances, the heart adds Richard’s drinking and drugging to its list of offenses.) Richard grimaces in agony, flat on his back. The routine slows. Richard’s mouth opens and closes in a silent howl. His body cramps up in the form of a writhing question mark.
Richard sits up, shifts into his normal voice, and says, laughing, “You be thinking about shit like that when you think you’re gonna die. You put an emergency call into God, too, right?”
The desperate voice again: “Can I speak to God right away, please?”
The call makes it to heaven but gets stuck at the celestial switchboard. An angel with the soul of a bureaucrat sniffs in a very white voice, “I’ll have to put you on hold.”
“Was you trying to talk to God behind my back?” the heart asks, suspiciously.
“Nooo . . . ,” Richard says.
“You’re a lyin’ motherfucker!” the heart says, and slams Richard on the ground one last time.
Richard sits up, no longer in the moment of agony, and speaks of his reprieve from pain: “I woke up in an ambulance, right? And there wasn’t nothing but white people staring at me. I say, ‘Ain’t this a bitch? I done died and wound up in the wrong motherfuckin’ heaven. Now I got to listen to Lawrence Welk the rest of my days.’”
The sketch delivered a happy ending with a tart twist. Richard was no longer in the clutches of death, but he was still in the clutches of race. Saved, he was still left seeking. Perhaps it was the trickster’s fate to slip from one snare only to be faced with another.
For seven years, Richard had tried to crack the code of the Hollywood film, to bend the industry around the shape of his talent. From Lady Sings the Blues to Blue Collar, he had aimed to infuse his films with the same spirit of creative improvisation that fired his stage act, and when he had met the right collaborators, he produced some remarkable successes. But Richard Pryor: Live in Concert suggested a cruder yet more elegant solution: set up a few cameras, point them at the stage, and create a new genre in Hollywood entirely. Rather than crack an old code, write a fresh one. Critics experienced Live in Concert as the shock of the new. The Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris called it “one of the most exhilarating experiences of my movie-going life.” Jonathan Rosenbaum compared the film favorably to The Deer Hunter (on a trajectory to win the Best Picture Oscar): “Working entirely without props, gimmicks, or excuses, [Pryor] creates a world so intensely realized and richly detailed that it puts most recent million-dollar blockbusters to shame.” The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael was moved, by Richard’s performance, to name him “the only great poet satirist among our comics.” When the film went on to gross thirty-two million dollars off a tiny budget (it had been put together in a month, with little in the way of postproduction), it seemed a sort of box office miracle, too, one that might change the calculus of Hollywood. Rolling Stone’s David Felton named it a “low-budget, short-order masterpiece, a powerful argument for spontaneity in mass entertainment.”
For Richard, Live in Concert was a miracle for a reason completely separate from its critical raves or box office returns. His beloved grandmother Marie had died from a stroke three weeks before filming, leaving him with a prophetic warning: “Son, you just don’t know. It’s ugly out there. You’ve got to protect yourself from it now. You’re on your own now, Richard. Be careful.” He had managed to ride the momentum of his concert tour into the making of the film, and it had launched him definitively as an artist. But from now on, he had to stare at the haunting question: Who was he without the woman who had grounded him—loved him, beat him, braced him, and, by her own account, shielded him from the true ugliness of the world?
EPILOGUE
* * *
When, early in the morning of December 9, 1978, his grandmother Marie drew her last breath, Richard Pryor was not ready to let her go. He’d been holding her hand in her hospital room at Peoria’s Methodist Medical Center, and four people “couldn’t pry him loose without a struggle,” his aunt Maxine recalled. “They couldn’t get him out of that room and when they did, he broke and come right back in there. . . . And when the wagon table came to take mamma to the morgue, they had to pull Richard out.” In the hospital lounge afterward, Richard was gutted with grief. “Everything I’ve had and everything I’ve got is gone,” he cried to Maxine. Then, calling out to the woman he’d lost: “Mama, I did everything I could for you. Everything! I prayed and I prayed, and I prayed, Mama. I prayed so hard. I didn’t even know I could pray.”
The coming days brought the rituals of mourning—a night funeral at Peoria’s Morning Star Baptist Church, presided over by the reverend who had helped inspire Richard’s grandiloquent stage minister; a second funeral the next day, at Decatur’s Church of the Living God, the ministry that had sanctified Marie’s first marriage to Roy Pryor sixty-five years earlier. On December 14, Marie Carter Pryor Bryant was interred under cloudy winter skies at Decatur’s Greenwood Cemetery, her body returning to the city where she had acquired her depth as a woman.
With Marie no longer there to exert her influence, the post-funeral gatherings took on a looser air. Richard played host by filling a bowl with cocaine and setting it on a table next to a full complement of reefer;
guests were invited to snort or toke to their hearts’ content. The party was on, with Richard leading by example.
The post-funeral festivities opened onto eighteen months in which Richard did not dwell in his grief so much as lose himself in it, aided by his cocaine and, starting in November 1979, the freebasing pipe that, by heightening the rush of the drug, drew him into a fevered form of oblivion. Often in his life, a phase of personal confusion had yielded a moment of artistic discovery. In 1968 he had spun, like a whirligig, from his crack-up at the Aladdin into a period of onstage experimentation that produced the multi-character sketches of his first album and the breakthrough ghetto playlet “Hank’s Place.” In 1975 he had emerged, out of the debris of his wrecked relationships with Patricia Heitman and Ron DeBlasio, with the triumphant invention of Mudbone and his inspired work on Bingo Long and Saturday Night Live. The success of Live in Concert, following upon the emotional chaos of the previous year, continued the pattern. But the depression that followed the death of Marie was different. It led Richard, in an instant, to sear away a crucial part of his artistic self: the love of experiment that had pushed him through his changes as a performer.
In the early evening of June 9, 1980, Richard had been, by his own account, awake for somewhere in the vicinity of five days straight, much of that time spent locked in his bedroom with the essentials for freebasing—cocaine, pipe, and Bic lighter—and a bottle of hard liquor. A paranoid dementia overtook him: “Voices swirled in my head so that I wasn’t able to tell which came from me and which were hallucinations. My conversations became animated, like those crazy people on the street. I heard people who had worked for me talking outside the bedroom window. They were loud, rude, laughing, angry. They made fun of my helplessness. I yelled at them, louder and louder, and still they refused to answer.”
Into this inner pandemonium came the flash of an idea. What transpired next was not, as many continue to think, a drug-related accident. It was more akin to a terrible act of improvisation—one that, horribly, killed the urge to improvise. According to Richard’s bodyguard Rashon Khan, Richard was sitting in the living room watching a program that showed scenes from the Vietnam War, including footage of a Buddhist monk setting himself on fire. “You have to have a lot of courage to light that shit,” Khan said to Richard. “You have to have more courage not to flinch when you light it!” Richard replied. In his memoir, Richard recalled that the precipitating event was a dialogue he was trying to have with God—the one voice he couldn’t find in the swirl of voices. He repeatedly asked, “What do you want me to do?” Receiving no answer, he boasted, “I’ll show you” and laughed with a demented sense of giddiness.
Richard poured the liquor over his head so that it soaked his hair, his neck, and a shirt that, fatefully, was a polyester weave. He flicked a cigarette lighter once, twice—no spark. The third try was a success: his shirt blazed into flames that reached up to his head. In an instant, Richard no longer wished to toy with death; he felt himself burning up and wanted desperately to stay alive. When Khan and Richard’s aunt Dee threw a sheet on him to smother the flames, he resisted, because he thought they were trying to smother him, not the flames. Then he shocked them by bolting, in a delirium of pain, out of the house, down the estate’s long curving driveway, through its ten-foot-high iron gates, and into the street.
A gathering mass of drivers on Parthenia Street were baffled by the pedestrian they beheld. A man who bore an uncanny resemblance to Richard Pryor was walking briskly on the sidewalk. Most of his polyester shirt had melted onto his skin; the rest of it had been reduced to a few singed tatters. To the cops on routine traffic detail who came across him, he appeared to be wearing some strange makeup. When one of them, Officer Richard Zielinski, approached him on foot, he caught the stench of scorched flesh and burnt polyester. Zielinski asked Richard, gently, to stop. An ambulance’s siren pealed in the distance.
Whether because he was never one to welcome policemen into his life or because his rational faculties had deserted him, Richard refused Officer Zielinski’s entreaty. “If I stop, I’ll die,” he said, then broke into a jog. According to the Los Angeles Times, he continued jogging for a full half mile, Zielinski and the police car following alongside him as he raved and pleaded, loud enough for neighbors to hear him, “Lord, give me another chance. There’s a lot of good left in me. Haven’t I brought any happiness to anyone in this world?” He had to be physically subdued to be lifted into the ambulance that arrived on the scene, and was in deep shock by the time it had carried him to the burn unit of Sherman Oaks Community Hospital.
This book is about the shaping of a talent until it rose to the level of its full genius, and for that reason the thrust of its story ends with the film Live in Concert and the harrowing depression that followed it. Of course, the era of Richard Pryor’s greatest commercial success still lay ahead of him. Stir Crazy, his first full-fledged pairing with Gene Wilder, became the third-highest-grossing film of 1981; the family feature Bustin’ Loose made him the only star to have two films in that year’s top twenty. Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip, his follow-up to Live in Concert, earned five times its budget in its first three weeks and bested the returns of the earlier concert film. “Whatever happened to the black film?” the Los Angeles Times asked rhetorically in 1981. “It seems to reside these days in the person of Richard Pryor.”
At the height of Richard’s stardom, it could seem that the future of Hollywood itself was bound up with the riddle of his appeal. Time commented in 1982 that “In a troubled period for movies, when attendance is slipping and not even the presence of Burt Reynolds or Clint Eastwood can guarantee box office gold, Richard Pryor is the one actor whose name spells HIT.” The great director Billy Wilder quipped that studio executives had a surefire formula for making a box office smash: they “approach it very scientifically—computer projections, marketing research, audience profiles—and they always come up with the same answer: Get Richard Pryor.”
Yet the arrival of Richard as a Hollywood star coincided with a new artistic cautiousness on his part. Arguably there are more jaw-dropping surprises—more moments of off-kilter ingenuity—in the last episode of The Richard Pryor Show than in all his 1980s comedies combined. His work in the 1970s could be raw to the point of being sloppy or outré to the point of being almost indigestible, but even its sloppiest, most indigestible moments seemed to derive from Richard’s integrity as an artist, his unwillingness to settle for easy jokes and prefab emotions. By contrast, his oeuvre in the 1980s seemed too concerned with hitting the expected marks. For those who knew his earlier work, the delights these later films offered were familiar pleasures rather than uneasy or deeper ones. And as the decade wore on, even these familiar pleasures started wearing out their welcome.
It was the odd film critic who, after 1982, didn’t muse on the disheartening disconnect between the power of Pryor as an artist and the feebleness of his latest film. After The Toy (in which Richard plays an unemployed reporter who becomes a rich boy’s plaything), Michael Sragow asked, “What’s wrong with Richard Pryor?” and answered that he was “becoming the Toy of the studios,” his raw energy processed into unthreatening corn. After Brewster’s Millions (for which Richard instructed its screenwriters to write his character without any racial cues), Vincent Canby wrote that the experience of watching Richard in the film was “like watching the extremely busy shadow of someone who has disappeared. The contours of the shadow are familiar but the substance is elsewhere.” By the time of the semiautobiographical Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling in 1986, the tone of critical disapproval had slipped into a harsher register. The Boston Phoenix called Richard “a victim of the very screen personality he forged in more than a dozen wearyingly mediocre comedies,” and offered that Richard had “come close to turning himself into a media-age minstrel show: a cross between the early Woody Allen and Buckwheat.” Pauline Kael, a great booster of Richard since Lady Sings the Blues, lamented, “If I’d never seen Richard P
ryor before, I couldn’t have guessed—based on what Jo Jo does here—that he has an excitable greatness in him.”
What had happened to that greatness? A simple and not untrue answer would be that the fire burned a good deal of excitability out of him. Richard was temperamentally different, more reticent and withdrawn, after the trauma—a situation that, on a personal level, he interpreted as a change for the better. When asked, on a movie set in 1981, where he was born, he replied, “The Sherman Oaks Burn Center.” Director John Badham, with whom Richard had feuded on the set of Bingo Long, described the new Pryor as “gentle” and “mellow”—adjectives that would have been absurd to apply to the comedian at any earlier point in his life. In 1983, Richard observed, “People call me up and say, ‘You’re not like you used to be.’ I say to them, ‘That’s right, but do you know what I was really like then? Do you know what kind of insanity I was into, with the drugs and liquor? I’m not going to start doing that again. I’m going to be nice to myself. I don’t have the same desire to succeed any more. I don’t have that push, push, push I used to have. I think I had it until I burned up.” Three years later, he reflected on the general mellowing effect: “Sure, my moods go up and down, but at least I know where I’m at . . . I’m not waking up saying, ‘Oh, no, did I kill someone last night?’ ” Whatever the personal benefits, the artistic benefits were more minimal. The new Richard was less brave and open—less willing to improvise, or wander into strange terrain, or risk the red-hot act of creative aggression that makes an audience howl in shock and astonishment.
Yet it wasn’t only Richard who became more risk-averse after 1980. Hollywood itself struggled through a transition that, according to one of its foremost historians, was as wrenching as the coming of sound in the 1920s. Between the release of the first Star Wars movie in 1976 and the third Indiana Jones movie in 1989, Hollywood evolved from an industry that produced movies to an industry that generated entertainment-related “product.” Theater distribution became just one revenue stream among many. Home video sales and cable licensing fees, tie-ins with everything from videos games and amusement park rides to fast food, toys, and pajamas—these new sources of profit changed the industry calculus, pushing studios to invest in films that could be exploited in as many ways as possible. Often this meant blockbusters on the model of the movies of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Sci-fi and fantasy films boomed in the 1980s, dominating the box office. Those films that weren’t fantasy-driven blockbusters tended to fit snugly into other genres, like comedy (Ghostbusters, Porky’s), horror (often of the slasher variety), or action-adventure (Rambo, Top Gun).