Becoming Richard Pryor (67 page)

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 Pryor 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 Richard was temperamentally different, more reticent and withdrawn, after the trauma—a situation that, on a personal level, he interpreted as a change for the better.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
).

While it’s difficult to generalize about a decade of filmmaking that produced
E.T
. and
Blade Runner
,
Red Dawn
and
Platoon
,
Friday the Thirteenth
and
The Shining
, one trend bears noting: the decline of a certain sort of “1970s movie” that sat uneasily within its supposed genre. There were fewer films that danced on the line between entrancing spectacle and affecting drama, like
The Mack
and
Saturday Night Fever
; fewer films that infused moments of jittery laughter into otherwise bleak stories of working-class life, like
Blue Collar
and
Mean Streets
; and fewer films that mixed low comedy and high politics, like
Blazing Saddles
,
Car Wash
, and
Little Big Man
.

As these examples suggest, Richard thrived in precisely the sorts of films that became increasingly rare in the 1980s. For another index of the changes afoot in Hollywood, one might compare him to Eddie Murphy, his successor as the big marquee name among black actors after 1983. Murphy was clearly a comic in the Pryor mold: a talented physical comedian radiating a certain streetwise sass and cool, his mouth his weapon of choice. But Murphy, in 1980s roles like Axel Foley, had little of Richard’s bottom notes—his fragility, tenderness, or openness to emotional confusion. Or one might compare the two showbiz biopics,
Lady Sings the Blues
and
Jo Jo Dancer
, that framed Richard’s career in Hollywood. Both films, notably, were parables about the perils of being a black entertainer. In the first, the young Richard injected levity and some moral complexity into a movie that otherwise risked becoming a formula melodrama. In the second, the older Richard stripped out the complexity from his
own life story. The character of his grandmother was made over as a simple, warmhearted soul full of the milk of human kindness—a far cry from the prickly, forceful woman whom Richard had known. Meanwhile, Richard largely erased from view his own capacity for violence and self-sabotage, portraying himself as the sad-faced victim of drugs and women.
Jo Jo Dancer
desperately needed the irreverent spirit of the young Richard Pryor to save it from itself. After 1980, that actor was unavailable.

One would like to assign a happy ending to Richard’s acting career. Perhaps if he had stayed healthy into his sixth decade, his fearlessness might have come back, like a sleeping virus awakened, with the arrival of the post-Reagan era in entertainment. His TV series, though short-lived, was yet the godfather of cable comedy shows like
In Living Color
,
Chappelle’s Show
, and
Key and Peele
, and it’s easy to imagine a middle-aged Pryor as a wildly avuncular guest on them, goosing along the young’uns and stepping into a new version of himself. Perhaps, too, a healthy older Pryor might have fulfilled his dream of being a character actor—on the cast of
Homicide
or
The Wire
, say, or in the films of black-oriented directors like Spike Lee, John Singleton, or Lee Daniels. Between 1967 and 1986, Pryor’s work in Hollywood was largely split between cameos and starring roles, and it would have been nice for him to find his stride, at the end of his career, as an ensemble player.

Yet Richard never had the chance to age gracefully in public view. In August 1986, after experiencing some trouble with his motor control and eyesight, he went to the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis for tests. The diagnosis that came back: multiple sclerosis, or MS, a degenerative disease of the nervous system. One of his first responses was to wonder if the MS was karmic payback. “[A]t the outset of life God gives you a certain number of angels,” he speculated. “They hover above you, protecting your ass from danger. But if you cross a certain line too many times, they get the hell away. Say, ‘Hey, motherfucker, you’ve abused us too many times. From here on, you’re on your own.” Part of the medical community might agree, in a way, with Pryor’s
conjecture. Recent studies have suggested that, while MS has a strong genetic basis, individuals who engage in risk-associated behavior such as alcohol use, drug use, and smoking are more susceptible to the disease. In Utah, non-Mormons are roughly four times more likely to get it than Mormons—and Richard was no Mormon in the years preceding his diagnosis.

MS is a cruel disorder for anyone: it slowly strips the sufferer of the ability to walk, to talk, or to control his bowels. But there was an extra layer of cruelty to Pryor’s coming down with it. From an early age, Richard had, like any number of humbly born athletes, actors, and dancers, made a future for himself by discovering and exploiting the resources of his body. His native expressiveness—the emotions he made instantly legible on his face, the energy he concentrated in his gestures—had always been at the foundation of his act. Now he felt his physical grace slipping away: he told one interviewer that the hardest part of having MS was not being able to jump around as he used to. By spring 1991, he was emaciated—a mere 115 pounds—and, though barely able to walk ten yards without help, living alone in a rented mansion at the summit of Bel Air. He spent his days holed up in his bedroom, clutching a .357 Magnum and worrying that, if he tried to move around, he might crack his head on his Spanish marble floor. He was close to broke from all his medical bills. It was, he later reflected, “the lowest point of my life.”

With the help of old friends and lovers, Pryor shook off his solitude and rallied in 1993 for what became his farewell tour as a comedian. Sitting in an easy chair at center stage, he floated through a set of riffs on his life with MS. For the great part of Pryor’s career, he had seemed preternaturally youthful, the vulnerability of a child never far from the surface of his performances. Now he was prematurely aged: ancient at fifty-two, his legs giving out from under him, vulnerable because his frailty put him uncomfortably close to death’s door. “I don’t want to be alone when I die,” he said onstage at one point, and the audience knew that this was no idle conjecture. Then, Pryor-style, he cut the solemnity with a sacrilegious confession: “I want
some motherfuckers fighting over my money.” The old, discomfort-inducing honesty was still there, charged now with a nearly unbearable pathos. One critic observed that when Pryor’s audience gave him a standing ovation at the end of his short set, it was “as emotionally drained as the comedian himself.”

After that tour, itself abbreviated because he became too fatigued, Pryor kept an exceedingly low profile. When asked if he still saw himself as an entertainer, he spoke of that part of himself as if it were a ghost: “It’s not gone, but it’s
fa-a-ar
away. Like it’s through this veil and I can’t see it. I know where it is, but I can’t reach it.” “I’m going through a humbling experience these days,” he told another interviewer. “There was a time in my life when I thought I had everything—millions of dollars, mansions, cars, nice clothes, beautiful women, and every other materialistic thing you can imagine. Now I struggle for peace.”

In 1994, he asked Jennifer Lee to return to him, and she did, taking on the roles of caretaker and, in the words of one journalist, “general aide-de-camp.” It was a time for looking backward and taking stock. Richard published his memoir in 1995, and then, in 2000, Jennifer helped pull together the boxed set . . .
And It’s Deep Too!
, a retrospective of his recording career as a stand-up. The following year, the two were married in secret—without the knowledge, even, of Richard’s children, several of whom had never warmed to the idea of Jennifer as a stepmother. As the MS took its remorseless course, Richard often withdrew into himself, the burden of company more weight than he wished to bear. He might take in a movie once a week, but rarely went out otherwise. He saw his children just once a month as his condition deteriorated—a limitation that frustrated them. His daughter, Rain, concluded that her father had become Jennifer’s “prisoner,” locked up in his own home. For her part, Jennifer maintained that she was just trying to protect Richard from undue stress.

On December 10, 2005, nine days after his sixty-fifth birthday, Richard suffered a heart attack in the early morning. He was pronounced dead later that day at a nearby hospital. Newspapers and
magazines mourned his passing in terms befitting the death of an icon. (Former senator and presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy died the same day, and Pryor’s death trumped his on front pages across America.) “The comic voice of a generation,” judged the
Washington Post
. In the
New York Times
, Mel Watkins underlined how Pryor had transformed black and white America both: “He unleashed a galaxy of street characters who traditionally had been embarrassments to most middle-class blacks and mere stereotypes to most whites. And he presented them so truthfully and hilariously that he was able to transcend racial boundaries and capture a huge audience of admirers in virtually every ethnic, economic, and cultural group in America.”

For all the glory of Pryor’s achievement as an artist, his funeral was a small, private affair at Hollywood’s Forest Lawn Cemetery. Mourners lit candles to help guide Richard’s passage to the spirit realm; Diana Ross broke spontaneously into a rendition of “Amazing Grace.” Richard’s casket was covered with sunflowers—flowers that he’d loved ever since, as a child, he discovered a patch of them in a vacant lot near his grandmother’s brothels. “I don’t know how they got started or who watered them, but every summer they headed up toward the sky as if they were trying to escape the ghetto,” he’d written in his memoir. “After realizing they couldn’t get out, they bloomed. Big. Like giant sunbursts.” Those hardy sunflowers spoke to the beautiful side of Richard, the side that brought startling radiance to places where few expected to find it.

Of course there was another side to Richard, one darker and messier, and that lived on after his death, too. He had declared, on his 1993 concert tour, that he hoped to have “some motherfuckers fighting over my money,” and he got his wish. Upon discovering that Richard had named Jennifer as his executor and principal heir, his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, charged Jennifer, in civil lawsuits, with forging Richard’s name on their marriage license, committing elder abuse as his caretaker, and exploiting his frailty to gain control of his assets. Jennifer fought the allegations in court and prevailed. Unsurprisingly, the legal battle left a rift between Jennifer and several of Richard’s
children: four years later, only Richard Jr. agreed to participate in
Omit the Logic
, the documentary Jennifer produced about their father. Richard Pryor had never led an uncomplicated life, and he did not die an uncomplicated death.