Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him (25 page)

—————

In the version Rashon told, he and Richard were in the living room, in a haze, drinking the high-octane rum and watching something on TV about the Vietnam War. A monk sat down in a public square, doused himself with gasoline, and set himself ablaze.

Said Rashon to Richard, “You have to have a lot of courage to light that shit.” To which Pryor replied, “You have to have more courage not to flinch when you light it!”

Rashon laughed. He got up, went to the kitchen, then heard a scream. “I opened the door and out comes this ball of fire. And I sidestepped it, because I seen a knife in his hand, and I know when you’re in that state, there’s nothing I could do. But he did pour the shit on himself, and he did light it. It was no accident.”

—————

Late that night, the waiting area in the Grossman Burn Center at Sherman Oaks Hospital was overfilled with Richard’s children, aunts, uncles, and an assemblage of ex-wives and girlfriends, all of whom rose in unison when a hospital rep came out and called for “Mrs. Pryor.”

Jennifer Lee was shut out. Richard refused to see her and she found herself ostracized by his family members camped in the waiting area because she told the doctors that Richard had been freebasing earlier in the day. That information, one doctor told her, according to her own account, saved his life.

No charges were filed. Someone had gone into Richard’s house and cleared out any drug paraphernalia before investigators arrived. The only apparent evidence of what had taken place in that room consisted of a singed bedspread and a patch of scorched paint on one of the walls.

—————

Richard’s “accident” prompted an article on the dangerous new drug craze in the June 30 issue of
People,
written without byline by Peter Lester, a friend of Jennifer Lee’s who telephoned her days after the fire, quizzing her on the basic mechanics of freebasing and Richard’s consumption habits. He failed to inform her until the end of their conversation that he had been taping it. Freebasing—or baseballing as the article claims it was also known—derives from the process of using ether to “free” the alkaloid cocaine (or “base”) from the additives and impurities typically found in drugs sold on the street. Powdered cocaine is dissolved in ether to separate extraneous matter, leaving a rock-hard piece of pure coke. Users then apply a flame to the pure coke and inhale the vapors.

A hit of freebase delivers a thirty-second rush followed by a minute or two of what is described as unimaginable euphoria. The high ends with a crash and an insatiable desire to get it back. The high is frequently followed by depression. The urge to have more grows stronger and stronger the more one smokes.

“Freebase gets into the brain and produces a maximal high, and that is what’s so compelling about it,” said Dr. Sidney Cohen, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA. After repeated use, freebase can cause critical changes in consciousness such as paranoia or schizophrenic psychosis. “Some people think they’re more creative when they freebase,” Dr. Cohen said. “Certainly they get ideas in their heads that they normally wouldn’t.” Chronic users often become delusional. UCLA research psychopharmacologist Ronald Siegel said he had witnessed a delirious freebaser clawing the skin off his own arms in the belief that they were host to a nest of slithering white snakes.

Siegel estimated that some users freebased up to thirty grams of cocaine in a single day—with a then-street-value of approximately $2,500—and it wasn’t unusual for some to spend $250,000 a year. One other thing: while alcohol, pot, even snorted coke tend to be casually shared in convivial settings, freebase, Dr. Seigel warned, is a loner’s drug.

—————

Doctors Richard Grossman and Jack Grossman, resident plastic surgeons and burn specialists at Sherman Oaks, initially gave Richard a one-in-three chance of survival. His entire upper body, including his torso, back, chest, arms, neck, and parts of his face, had been severely burned.

As soon as the risk of infection had subsided enough to allow visitors, Mooney went to Richard’s room and found his friend lying unbandaged so as to allow his oozing third-degree burns sufficient time to air out in preparation for the coming skin grafts.

“We managed to save his face,” Dr. Jack Grossman told Vernon Scott of United Press International, “but the burns on his ears are so extensive the cartilage is visible.”

Said his brother Dr. Richard Grossman, “There is virtually no skin on his torso. You can see the raw muscle tissue, fat tissue . . . If you saw our patient without his dressings, you would faint. Most people would.”

Paul Mooney did not.

He had his own theory about the fire, which was this: Richard’s money and success made him feel so white that he had tried to burn himself black. One might just as reasonably argue that he had tried to dispense with the skin issue altogether. Either way, it was a bust.

Mooney put on his bravest face and his most solemn German accent.

“Dr. Frankenstein,” he said, “the operation did not succeed.”

It hurt to laugh, but when did it not?

After all of it—the spent shell of self-loathing, the match and fire, the smoldering streak from Parthenia Street to Hayvenhurst Avenue, the months of denial and therapy and recuperation—Richard returns to his home in Northridge. It’s like he’s a ghost returning to a place he is vaguely certain used to be his. His friends and family, having given him up for gone, have looted the place of everything they could carry: stereos, television sets, jewelry, furniture, family pictures, lamps, and rugs. “Motherfuckers had a fire sale,” is what it looks like.

The hollow rooms, airless and hot, echo his footsteps. Dust bunnies stir in his wake as he tosses aside a pile of rumpled sheets, steps over an abandoned extension cord. He goes to the back room, into the rear closet. Its ill-fit molding gives way at the floor and he pries up a short corner board with his boot, as easy as a kid’s thick puzzle piece to reveal his secret, secret stash, still there. He closes his eyes and offers up a prayer . . . Of thanksgiving? For deliverance? He makes himself comfortable on the floor and begins one step at a time. Pipe. Rock. Rum. Lighter. Light.

PART
FIVE

“THE PART OF ME THAT WANTED TO DIE DID”

For me, the three geniuses of comedy are Jonathan Winters, Woody Allen, and Richard Pryor before the fire.

—Franklyn Ajaye

Several times a day doctors and staff at the Grossman Burn Center in Los Angeles lowered Richard into a whirlpool bath where hot water and antiseptics washed over his body. Next they painted his torso with a silver sulfa cream to fight infection. Twice a day, for up to two hours at a time, they slid him into a cylindrical hyperbaric chamber that tripled the normal atmospheric pressure, thereby forcing pure oxygen into his body to speed the healing process.

Despite the excruciating treatments, Mooney reported that Richard was happier at Sherman Oaks than he had been in quite a long while. Having (presumably) no access to vodka or cocaine, his demons were malnourished, had grown too weak to intervene.

After six weeks of skin grafts, plastic surgery, and physical therapy, Richard was released on July 24 and taken directly to do an interview with Barbara Walters for ABC’s
Good Morning America.
Sitting there, nearly bald, his skin patchy and discolored with fresh scar tissue, he repeated the ridiculous story that he and his partner—did no one ever ask who?—were in his bedroom, talking bullshit, talking about life, drinking overproof rum. It spilled. His partner got up to get a towel from the bathroom to wipe it up. Richard lit a cigarette, igniting the spilled rum and himself along with it.

“Were you on drugs?”

“No. I do drugs. I’ve done drugs, you know that. I’ve talked about it, but I wasn’t on drugs then.”

“People think that you were freebasing co—”

“Yeah, but you can’t blow up yourself freebasing.”

Not until their follow-up interview in 1986 did he admit that he had been lying to her, that the fire had been the culmination of a weeks-long freebasing binge, and that, no, it had not been an accident. He admitted, too, that within three weeks of leaving Sherman Oaks he was back freebasing again.

Walters leaned forward with a furrowed brow like a scolding mother.

“Richard! Why?”

He needed it, he said. Starting a new life was scary.

—————

The cover of
Ebony
’s October 1980 issue shows Richard perched on the hood of a Rolls Royce in a baggy white sweat suit with a pink towel around his neck, his arms raised in a flaccid pose as though flexing his muscles but not really. His smile is empty, his eyes are blank. The headline “I’ve Been Tried by Fire—Now I’m a New Man” recalls his line (and variations attributed to both George Carlin and W. C. Fields) “Cocaine made a new man out of me. And he wanted some, too.”

The photos accompanying the interview by managing editor Charles L. Sanders show Richard with bandaged hands and a cigarette dangling as he leafs through a pile of get-well cards sent in by fans, shares a light lunch with his aunt Dee, and plays chess with David Banks. The article trumpets his newfound love of life. He has straightened up, he says, and is starting fresh, cleaning house, getting rid of the people who pulled him down.

Richard was furious. Furious with his weak-ass self for what he had done. Disgusted with the people he thought he could trust, who said they loved him and then came in and looted his house. Took everything. Things Mama gave him. The crinkly old hundred-dollar bills her people carried upriver when they got run out of New Orleans that she never would spend so she would never be broke. Those were gone, too. He felt like crying.

He had given up jokes, and now he was one. Dudes would strike a match, bob it up and down, and say, “Check this. You know what this is? Richard Pryor running down the street.” (Okay, that was pretty good. He might use that one.) But all the supermarket tabloids and People magazines with their inflammatory, pun-happy headlines about how he was the hottest thing in show business. Even Film fucking Comment. Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote a deep, moving piece about him and they had to go and change the title to “The Man in the Great Flammable Suit.” Motherfuckers. They call themselves educated. Didn’t they know fire was the only way he could save himself? The only thing that could purify his soul? Didn’t they teach the basics anymore?

It’s everybody’s favorite story: Somebody dies and comes back to life. Jesus did it best, returning for a few hours, perhaps—no more than a day judging by scriptural chronology—then ascending forthwith to glory. But what kind of hero plays the fool by returning from the dead and then lingering around for another twenty-five years, a pitiable imitation of his former self?

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s time, there were no second acts in American life. Now, it seems, the second act is all. The years of hard work and achievement that bring fame or stardom merely count as the qualifying round, a setup for the crash and burn. That’s the show everybody wants to see.

In this, too, Richard Pryor was a pioneer.

After the fire, Richard perversely turned the myth of the hero on its head. When offered a way out of his devil’s bargain, he took it. He exercised the escape clause and never looked back.

Richard Pryor the revolutionary, game-changing artist was pretty much finished. But Richard Pryor the celebrity movie star was just getting started. When Richard walked out onstage as a presenter at the 1981 Academy Awards ceremony, he was greeted with a standing ovation.

Today, Richard’s rightful legacy as the world’s most brilliant stand-up comedian—even as he kicked to pieces the very notion of what stand-up comedy could be—has been largely overshadowed by the string of mostly mediocre movies he churned out in the 1980s. This is a travesty of the same magnitude as the fact that Frank Sinatra is now identified with “My Way,” the most un-Sinatra song in his catalog. There’s no drinking to forget, no blues in the night, no angel eyes, no ring-a-ding-ding. Or like Louis Armstrong, who, after setting the skies ablaze in an outpouring of work that almost single-handedly defined the shape of jazz, has come to be known for a straightforward cover of a middling show tune (“Hello, Dolly”) and a sappy ballad (“Wonderful World”) on which he doesn’t even play his horn. So Richard now is best known as Gene Wilder’s sidekick and for such atrocities as
The Toy.

Richard Donner’s queasy remake of the French film
Le Jouet
(1976, starring Pierre Richard),
The Toy,
writes Julian Upton, is “a witless and degrading farrago that casts Pryor as an expensive plaything for a spoiled little white boy.
The Toy
could have had allegorical potential, not just regarding Pryor’s career but for all those ethnic actors in Hollywood, but it fell far short of any such insight, and existed solely to show Pryor freaking out and looking scared.”

One such scene early on in
The Toy
has Pryor caterwauling in bulging-eyed fright as he goes rolling head over heels down a department-store toy aisle in an inflatable Wonder Wheel. (This comes approximately eighteen minutes into the movie, which is as much as anyone enamored of Richard Pryor’s genius can comfortably watch in a single sitting.)

“It’s a horrible, post-pro-slavery movie,” says Richard’s daughter Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor. “There are people who come up to me and say their favorite movie is
The Toy,
and I feel like saying, ‘Well, you’re racist.’ It’s very disturbing. I have not let my children watch that movie.”

Elizabeth had been there on the set when her father and Jackie Gleason were filming
The Toy
. Richard always brought the family, says Elizabeth.

Family was important to him. He made it a priority. He brought his children with him to things. We were on the set; we went to premieres and plays. It astounds me in retrospect, that he was able to do as much as he did, knowing what kinds of drugs he was using and the amount of alcohol.

My father was such a sweetheart, but he could be horrible and he was attracted to horrible people, he really was attracted to some dark people, and I don’t just mean that in a drug-addicty sense. I never knew who was doing drugs and who wasn’t. My sister [Rain] is so different from me. She always understood what was going on around her. She would say to me, years later, things about “all the whores Daddy had around him,” and I was like, “What!” I was like, “You mean his friends that he would have over named Tiger and . . . ?” My brain doesn’t work like that. I just thought my father had a lot of different girlfriends. Some of the nicer people were prostitutes that he had around him, but some of the people he brought into his life were just truly terrible people.

—————

A little more than a year after the fire and four years into their brutal on-again, off-again relationship, Richard and Jennifer Lee were married August 16, 1981
,
in Hawaii, in an intimate ceremony attended by a few friends, including Richard’s lawyer Skip Brittenham, who greeted Jennifer with a pen and a prenup. Alone in their room that night, Jennifer slipped into her wedding nightgown. Richard rolled over, turned out the light and told her good night. “Richard? Why the hell are you giving me the freeze on this night of all nights?” A glass Richard grabbed up from the nightstand barely missed her head, shattering against the wall with such force, a triangle-shaped shard lodged in the wood. “I can’t believe you just did that!”

Richard leaped out of bed, grabbed her by the neck, slammed her head against the wall, and threw her on the floor. “Believe this, bitch. I’ll fucking kill you.” Jennifer ran outside and fell sobbing into the wet grass. She ripped her nightgown to shreds, stuffed it in the trash, put on a T-shirt, and cried herself to sleep on the living room couch. The next morning, she awoke to hear Richard on the phone in the next room asking Skip Brittenham if he could have the marriage annulled.

“We patch things up,” Jennifer writes, “but the first blood has been spilled on our clean slate of matrimony.”

The marriage continued in much the same vein for the next four months. In January 1982, once filming for
Live on the Sunset Strip
had been completed, the couple chartered a fully staffed hundred-foot-yacht for a belated two-week honeymoon cruise in the Caribbean. We’ll spare you the details. They are more of the same: glassware hurled, faces lacerated, deaths threatened, heads pummeled, hearts melted. Suffice it to say, the honeymoon brought their marriage to a swift end. “I’ve never met a man who needed love so badly and resisted it so much,” Jennifer writes.

Not to say that Richard Pryor wasn’t loved; he simply could not trust anyone who said so. Those who knew him up close saw a man who felt undeserving of love, undeserving of most everything good that came his way. Richard at times mocked, abused, and pushed away those who loved him most. It’s as though he put them through hell as a test: You say you love me? Then here, take this. Let’s see if you love me
now,
motherfucker.

—————

Live on the Sunset Strip
was filmed over two nights in December of 1981. The first night was disastrous. There were problems with the sound system and the lights were set overly bright to accommodate cinematographer Haskell Wexler and his crew. Richard relied on Paul Mooney for cues—and reassurance—but couldn’t locate him in the audience. (An easy solution would have been to let Mooney wear the Day-Glo red tuxedo a friend of Jennifer’s had designed especially for Richard. Even Jennifer conceded that it made him look like “a monkey on acid.”)

Richard walked onstage the first night and right away began talking about the fire and his freebasing, which cast a pall over the eager audience, packed with invited friends and well-wishers. Richard started shaky and never really found his groove. Less than halfway through his planned performance, Richard put himself and the audience out of their collective misery. He stopped midsentence. “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” he told them. “I’m not funny anymore. It’s better if I leave.” He set the mic down on the stool and walked off.

Friends from the audience followed him out to his dressing-room trailer where they all held hands while the Reverend Jesse Jackson led them in a prayer for Richard in his hour of need. Richard, standing among them, looked shell-shocked and embarrassed.

The experience left Richard badly shaken.

He’d tried to come back too soon after the “accident,” everyone agreed in retrospect. Still, the producers had a movie to make. They talked him into giving the concert another try. It went much smoother the second night. Meticulous editing helped pick up the pace and eliminated the missteps and false starts that had marred the concert itself.

Richard’s reenactment of the weeks-long freebase binge that led up to the fire contains some of his most fearless and personally revealing material ever. He turns his freebase pipe into a character that offers him refuge and assurance: “Time to get up, Rich, time for some smoke. Come on, now, we’re not gonna do anything today. Fuck your appointments—me and you are just gonna hang out in this room together.” Soon enough, the pipe gets the upper hand in the relationship. “You let me get a little low last night. I don’t like that.”

“Only gradually,” Roger Ebert wrote in his review, “do we realize that the pipe is speaking in the voice of Richard Nixon.”