Pryor’s Inferno

A year ago it seemed like such a tidy package, a comprehensive, all-inclusive life-insurance policy — the Pryor plan for happiness and survival. Richard Pryor had been through one of his roughest periods. He’d collapsed with some kind of heart malfunction in Peoria, his hometown. Two months later, after a stormy New Year’s Eve, his fourth wife, Deboragh McGuire, left him after he fired his magnum into her empty Buick. He was arrested, convicted of a misdemeanor and placed on probation. All in all, a nasty business.

Then, with the skill and insight that have established him as one of the greatest comic innovators of our time, Pryor picked up these ugly bits and pieces, this raw material, and whipped them into art, a film called Richard Pryor Live in Concert. In the process, he purged himself of a lot of demons and apparently made peace with himself. “I just am happier than I’ve ever been,” he told Rolling Stone. And he seemed to be saying that anyone, if he looked at his troubles with humor and honesty, could do the same.

Yes, a neat little policy, but I guess I didn’t read the fine print — the clause that says it doesn’t necessarily apply to Richard Pryor. And now the poor guy was fighting a daily battle for his life in the burn center of Sherman Oaks Community Hospital in Los Angeles.

I know that doesn’t sound generous, but that’s the way I felt when I first heard of the explosion. Of course, it was undoubtedly an accident and he shouldn’t be blamed for it. We will probably never know for sure how it happened, whether it was ether or a cigarette lighter or a butane torch, whether he was “free-basing” or not (though from police reports after the accident, it sounds like he may well have been).

A few weeks before the accident, Richard had walked off the set during the shooting of Stir Crazy, a film directed by Sidney Poitier. There had been a series of disturbing incidents, culminating when some cameraman apparently dropped a piece of watermelon at his feet. Richard didn’t return for a couple of days. Not that big a deal, really, but I’d come to expect, rightly or wrongly, that when one thing went wrong with Richard, probably several things were going wrong. The man is no stranger to roller coasters. So I felt angry at the news of the accident — angry that this beautiful and fragile genius had been courting the edge again, and angry at the fine print.

Sure enough, some people close to Pryor said that the explosion had, in fact, been preceded by another rough year. Shortly after the release of Live in Concert, Richard visited Kenya with his new girlfriend, actress Jennifer Lee. He was intrigued by this all-black country in which blackness was not an issue, and the trip, according to one friend, moved him profoundly. Whether it affected his subsequent behavior is anybody’s guess, but when he returned, things apparently began falling apart. He became depressed, erratic, volatile. At some point, he and Jennifer broke up. More and more, those close to him feared he was turning his attention to two old friends, cocaine and alcohol. Most of all, he seemed painfully entrapped by his own guilt, a guilt fed not just by his immediate weaknesses, but by a much more serious and perplexing offense — the crime of being Richard Pryor.

It was the guilt that most touched L.A. police officer Zielinski the night he watched this scorched human being confess to God and plead for mercy. Some cops felt that Pryor got what he deserved, and Richard almost seemed to agree with them. Stripped of his pride, and his skin, he told Zielinski, “This is the way the Lord is paying me back.”

Pryor’s high-powered, hard-nosed attorney and manager, David Franklin, said much the same thing: “The karma culminated on that night.”

I like Franklin. He’s a bouncy, roly-poly, moon-faced guy with twinkling eyes and a devilish good nature. On the other hand, I figured, from his masterful wheelings and dealings for clients like Pryor, Roberta Flack, Peabo Bryson, Cicely Tyson, Andrew Young and Julian Bond, that you might not want to meet him alone in a dark board room.

Franklin is based in Atlanta and has represented Pryor for five years. On Monday night, June 9th, he returned home from a concert tour by Flack and Bryson and immediately noticed something weird about his house. Maeotha Rivers, his children’s nursemaid, had purchased and installed a bunch of smoke detectors. It turned out she had a dream Sunday night in which Franklin suffered third-degree burns over fifty percent of his body. “It’s all right,” he had said in the dream, “I’m alive.” The dream had frightened Maeotha, but Franklin shrugged it off and went to bed. At two a.m., he was awakened by a phone call from concert promoter Quentin Perry. Apparently Maeotha had gotten the characters mixed up in her dream; Richard Pryor was in critical condition.

Tuesday morning, Franklin took the first L.A. flight out of Atlanta. He had his work cut out for him. Already the national press was freaking out over Pryor’s alleged free-basing — a process that, for all they knew, was invented by Richard. Most of the stories were ludicrous, of course, filled with phrases like “drug burns” and “cocaine explosion.” But Franklin was worried because Richard was still on probation from the car-shooting incident; the police wouldn’t need much criminal evidence to cause more problems for Pryor. Even before Franklin landed in L.A., a team of Los Angeles firemen, narcs and policemen, armed with a shotgun and a “verbal warrant,” broke into Pryor’s Northridge mansion. Presumably, the narcs were looking for any evidence that could lead to Pryor’s prosecution on drug charges — on the outside chance the guy might live. (One officer at the Van Nuys division justified the raid by saying, “There might have been a factory up there.”) All the police found were some frightened housekeepers. They immediately closed the case.

Nonetheless, Franklin felt he should let the cops know he was in town, and by Wednesday, he had organized a press conference and news story based on the fact that the police did find rum and broken glass at Pryor’s house. Richard, he told reporters, had a glass of rum in one hand, a cigarette lighter in the other and a cigarette in his mouth. He leaned over and — boom! — something exploded. No one bought the rum line for a minute, but, curiously, the issue was never raised at future press conferences.

With that out of the way, Franklin and I sat down late Friday night in the sumptuous living room of his second house, overlooking the San Fernando Valley, and discussed Richard Pryor.

“Richard is a supremely gifted and talented person,” he began, choosing his words carefully, “who does not believe he should be. Know what I mean? He does not believe he should be, and that, I think, is the root cause of a lot of his problems.

“He’s obviously had several relationships with women that have turned out badly because, I believe, he does not believe that a ‘good’ woman, quote unquote, whatever that means, will put up with him. That’s what he wants, but he’s scared to seek that.

“He’s a person of supreme intelligence — you can see that by his material, by his insights. But because he formally has only a ninth-grade education, he believes he’s not bright.”

And these misgivings, Franklin indicated, are magnified because Richard is a visibly successful member of an oppressed race.

“I mean, Richard is the greatest comedian in this country, in terms of modern comedians, black or white, name ’em all. They know it and he knows it. And yet — it’s a guilt thing. He does not believe that he should have so much, and so he will try to give it away, to reject it. He will constantly try to prove to people who he should cut loose from — the vultures, the hangers-on-that he’s one of them. And he’s not. And the only thing they can do is bring him down.”

What we seemed to be getting at was a pattern of self-destructiveness. Still, weren’t many of Richard’s actions, I asked Franklin, justifiably precipitated by the shit around him?

“I have found,” he said, “that generally when Richard has ‘gone off’ — some big thing prominently reported in the news or at some type of social setting where there’re people and they say, ‘Oh my God, he’s crazy, he’s gone off‘ — on ninety percent of those occasions, there was cause for him to go off. But as I told Richard, what he has to watch is where he takes it.”

How far, I asked, can Richard take it, though? And how many chances does he get to find out? Will the cycle be unbroken, despite the flames of that Monday night?

“If this doesn’t do it,” he said, “if this doesn’t do it…” Franklin leaned forward and whispered, “will anything do it?”