“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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“Richard was not able to live his own life as a man,” says Kathy McKee.
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 normalized for me in some ways, in some ways it’s totally surreal. It’s fun to be watching Modern Familywith 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.
Richard Pryor was the first black American spoken-word artist to avoid this. Although he reprised the history of black American comedy—picking what he wanted from the work of great storytellers like Bert Williams, Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley, Nipsey Russell, LaWanda Page, and Flip Wilson—he also pushed everything one step further. Instead of adapting to the white perspective, he forced white audiences to follow him into his own experiences.
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Even Richard’s most triumphant LPs deliver but a slice of Richard’s genius as a stand-up comic. So much of his performance is physical—his facial expressions, contortions, his mimicry/mimetic movements. If not for Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, the full glory of a Richard Pryor performing at the height of his powers and firing on all cylinders would have been lost to posterity, the stuff of legend. But the movie exists. It is proof that on the night of December 28, 1978, in Long Beach, California, at least, no one could touch him.
But what of the countless unrecorded and vaguely recalled routines Richard conjured up in clubs, on the road—settings where his genius most reliably took wing—that lived only in the space of a moment, never to be seen or heard again? Like other true artists—Bob Dylan, for example—even on his major tours when he performed the same bits night after night, he never did them the same way twice.
We sometimes come across tantalizing scraps of recollected performances, such as the one sociologist and jazz enthusiast Joan Thornell saw at the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C. Richard did a series of one-man skits, concluding with his portrayal of Richard Nixon as the devil. “The transformation visually was something, and he was right on it . . . The lights went red, and he got into it as an actor would get into a role. He out-Laurenced Olivier.” Thornell attended the show with a psychiatrist friend who declined the opportunity to meet Richard after the show. “That man is so disturbed that he frightens me,” was his diagnosis. “I fear for him. I fear for his safety. He doesn’t have any personal defenses. These have left him. He’s very interesting, but very frightening.”
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Fortunately, David Brenner was at the Improv in New York the night Richard did this bit about a nine-year-old kid on the roof of a tenement building, stoned, and threatening to jump off and kill himself. Here’s Brenner’s re-creation of the scene:
So a crowd gathers. There’s the white priest and the black minister and the white cops and the gang members and the people screaming for him to jump . . . I think he even put the mayor in there somewhere. And of course Richie played all those parts, plus the nine-year-old kid. It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen or heard in my life. He was such a great actor. When he became these people, he was those people. When he became the white cop who goes up and tried to talk him out of it, he was this white cop. You know how Richie could do those great white voices: “Well, uh, what are you doing, son? Do you really want to jump?” And when he became that nine-year-old boy, he was a nine-year-old boy on the precipice of a roof in Harlem ready to jump. And the kid was hysterically funny. The lines he came up with for this kid . . . The routine went on for fifteen minutes . . . twenty minutes, whatever it was. And then Richie stops talking. He stares down like he’s up on top of this roof at the edge of the stage. And he jumps.
He jumps.
It ends with the nine-year-old boy, stoned, leaping off the roof and killing himself. He lands hard with both feet on the floor and then walks off down the aisle, through the audience, in dead silence. Richie took an audience where there were people wiping their faces with tears from laughing so hard, to people actually crying, all in a millisecond. It’s still the most devastating thing I’ve ever seen a comedian do.
A late-afternoon sun pushes in through the drawn Venetian blinds. The room is crowded with a hospital bed, vital function monitors, and a rolling table scattered with prescription bottles. Richard wears a plush dressing gown open at the neck revealing savage scars from extensive third-degree burns, scars that have grown hard and leatherlike. A large console television occupies the opposite wall, and the fizzy revelry of a game show seems to mock the convalescent gloom of the waning day.
Richard squints his eyes against a harsh light, peering out through the blinds. His hands are unsteady as he fumbles for a cigarette and a plastic butane lighter that repeatedly sparks but fails to ignite. He finds a match.
Richard nods, half dozing through a TV newscast, the cigarette smoldering between twitching fingers, as a news anchor interrupts with breaking news and announces the death of comedian Richard Pryor.
It takes a few moments to fully grasp what’s being said. Richard tries to call out, but is unable to speak. He frantically pushes the Call button on the controls next to his bed, but there is no immediate response.
Richard fumbles in his nightstand, scattering pill bottles and overturning a water glass. He lifts a Magnum pistol from the drawer. It wobbles, heavy in his shaking hands, as he aims it in the direction of the TV.
The first shot is wild, missing the screen but splintering the corner of the cabinetry. Using both hands to steady his aim, Richard fires again, this time blasting out the TV screen, shattering the image of Eddie Murphy, standing at the gate outside his home in Beverly Hills, having begun a spontaneous eulogy.
Rocco Urbisci recalls that Richard was in a panic while preparing for Live on the Sunset Strip. He had an hour and a half to fill and he didn’t know if he could do it. He had the married-to-a-honky-ass-bitch routine, the trip to Africa with the gazelles and the lions, the funky-smelling hack driver, his realization that there are no niggers, and his whole freebase-inferno thing, but the pressure was on and he was still coming up short. Everybody was rooting for him, but he knew they would be secretly delighted if he fell on his ass.
He had this one other bit, too, about the one time he’d truly been brave. He pulled a gun—a starter’s pistol, really—on Mafioso club owners in Youngstown, Ohio (Dean Martin’s cousins, probably, from over in Stubenville), when he was touring the Chitlin’ Circuit with Satin Doll and the man said they weren’t going to get paid. He had the accent down, but he didn’t know any Italian words. He called Rocco.
Ring, ring, ring . . .
“Rocco? It’s Richie.”
“Hey, Richie. What’s up?”
“What’s the funniest word for a kind of food in Italian?”
That’s easy. “Scungilli.”
Perfect.
“It means squid.”
Richard didn’t give a fuck what it meant. It was funny.
He went out there and made up four or five words just riffing on the word scungilli. “Hey, Carmichael, give him a plate of sunninio, some fugazi, sprinkle a little scuggi on it, some guzolli . . .”
“If George Carlin had asked me about scungilli,” says Rocco, “he would have done three minutes on the etymology of the word and done it exactly the same way every night. And both bits would have been genius.”
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And then there was the afternoon Richard called Rocco up, speaking in a whisper, all conspiratorial-like, the way he always did when mischief was afoot.
“Rocco,” he said. “It’s Richie.”
“Oh. Hey, Richie. What’s up?”
“Come over to the house for dinner, but don’t bring your wife.”
“Okay. I won’t bring my wife.”
“I’m not being disrespectful, it’s just guys.”
Richard could have called anybody, but this was for Rocco. He knew Rocco would love this, and he needed a witness.
“I’m sitting there at his table,” Rocco told us. “I’m the only white guy. Across from me is Miles Davis. At the other end of the table is Oscar Peterson. I don’t say a thing. There’s nothing for me to say. Then Miles Davis says, ‘Rich, who’s the cracker?’
“Richard told him who I was. We went in his den and Oscar Peterson played for an hour.
“Now,” he said, his voice catching with emotion, “you tell me how much that’s worth.”
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People we’ve spoken with in the course of writing this book have, one after another, expressed regret that they had not gone to visit Richard in the confinement of his final years. One who did visit him often was Robert Townsend. He sprang from his chair at Joe’s kitchen table one December morning and enacted for us a scene he had witnessed in Richard’s living room. A highly animated Hispanic caregiver was giving a tour of the house to a newly hired employee. She pointed to the framed photos of Richard posed with his famous pals, attempting in vain to impress upon her the magnitude of the man it was now her job to attend. There was a glazy-eyed Richard posing with a glazy-eyed Robin Williams. Richard with Jack Nicholson, Dave Letterman, Mitzi Shore, Eddie Murphy . . .
“Sí, sí.” Townsend nodded, in character as Richard’s new caregiver, then smiled and said, in practiced English, “Nice family.”
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In 2002, Pryor and Jennifer Lee married for a second time, a bond they entered into primarily for the purpose of granting Jennifer the authority to oversee his care and manage his affairs. She dug in and fended off all comers, especially children and ex-wives. Their visits—those she allowed to visit—were strictly limited and closely monitored. Even at Richard’s funeral, Jennifer’s guest list was strictly enforced. Deboragh Pryor and Janis Gaye, wife of Marvin and Richard’s dear friend of more than thirty years, were turned away.
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On a Christmas getaway to Hawaii with his children in 1983, Richard experienced what he described as a moment of clarity. It was December 20. His daughters begged him to come with them to the beach, but he stayed back at the house by himself so he could smoke his base.
“I looked at myself. I was alone in the house. I said, ‘Richard, how did you end up back here? Alone.’ It was like myself going, ‘You schmuck, what are you doing?’ ” He had smashed or thrown pipes away so many times before. “This time was different because I wanted it so bad. I dropped it all in the garbage. And I went to the beach and I found my kids.”
An avid fisherman who never learned to swim, he allowed Rain to lead him into the water. It was, says Rain, “an expression of trust, almost unheard of for him.”
She cradled his body, keeping him buoyed on his back in the supportive salt water out beyond the breaking waves. It was beautiful.
“I’ll tell you,” he wrote. “It was that instant, man, something happened to me. Something really big . . . It was like in the hospital when I started feeling grateful that I was alive.”
He opened his eyes and understood he was alone. Rain had let go. It was just him and him alone, floating on the surface. That sound of the ocean’s water lapping at his ears may have been his children, back on shore, clapping.