|
|
|
|
Comedian, actor, writer
In the 1970s and 1980s Richard Pryor was one of America's top comedians, an actor, writer, and stand-up artist whose irreverent albums sold in the millions. Pryor mined both personal and social tragedy for his comic material and peppered his appearances with outrageous language and adult humor. Even at the peak of his popularity, however, he suffered the dire consequences of drug and alcohol abuse a heart attack, a suicide attempt, and the onset of multiple sclerosis. Since the early 1990s, he has lived a reclusive life in his Bel Air home, reportedly almost unable to walk and rarely seeing any but a small cadre of friends.
One of Pryor's ex-wives, Jennifer Lee, told Premiere magazine: "Richard's so isolated from the human race. When you're with him now, you feel a kind of solitude you don't even feel when you're by yourself." Pryor's is indeed the tragic story of a talented personality who took a path of self-destruction, a comic who could draw laughs from his own misfortunes but who was powerless to change his habits until the damage had been done. Premiere correspondent David Handelman theorized: "Like many celebrities, Pryor turned to drugs in part out of insecurity about his fame. But he had the added guilt trip of being perhaps the most successful black man in a country of disenfranchised blacks."
Pryor was not the first black comedian to succeed as a stand-up comic. He followed in the footsteps of Bill Cosby and Dick Gregory, among others. He became unique and a pioneer in his own right when he created a bold new comedy of character, turning black American life into humorous performance art without softening either the message or its delivery. He could glide effortlessly from portraying an elderly wino to mimicking a cheetah poised to bag a gazelle. With an astounding repertoire of accents and body lingo, Pryor often played a predator one moment and a victim the next. His was a comedy forged from life's tragic moments.
Pryor's audience included a number of comics who have since risen to fame. "I just dreamed about being like Richard Pryor," Keenen Ivory Wayans told Premiere. "Pryor started it all. He's Yoda. If Pryor had not come along, there would not be an Eddie Murphy or a Keenen Ivory Wayans or a Damon Wayans or an Arsenio Hall or even a [white comedian like] Sam Kinison, for that matter. He made the blueprint for the progressive thinking of black comedians, unlocked that irreverent style." A Tragic Background Bill Cosby told People magazine: "For Richard, the line between comedy and tragedy is as fine as you can paint it." Given Pryor's background, it is not surprising that he entwined comedy and tragedy so brilliantly. He was born in Peoria, Illinois, in December, 1940, to an unwed mother. He has always claimed that he was raised in his grandmother's brothel, where his mother worked as a prostitute. His parents, LeRoy and Gertrude Pryor, married when he was three, but the union did not last. Ultimately he chose to live with his grandmother, who was not shy about administering beatings.
At the height of his fame, Pryor declared that he had no bitterness about his unconventional upbringing. He revealed to People that his mother "wasn't very strong, but she tried. At least she didn't flush me down the toilet, like some." He added: "The biggest moment of my life was when my grandmother was with me on the Mike Douglas Show." On the other hand, Pryor's former bodyguard and spiritual adviser Rashon Khan told Premiere that Pryor was sometimes sexually abused in his childhood environment and was often "exposed to a lot of crazy stuff." Khan suggested that these childhood traumas helped set the stage for Pryor's drug abuse even before he became established in his career. "The problem that Richard was having with Richard was what happened when he was a kid," Khan said. "It created a void so big, it didn't matter how famous he got."
In school Pryor was often in trouble with the authorities. His one positive experience came when he was eleven. One of his teachers, Juliette Whittaker, cast him in a community theater performance and then let him entertain his classmates with his antics. Years later, Pryor gave Whittaker the Emmy Award he earned writing comedy for a Lily Tomlin special.
Pryor was expelled from high school after striking a teacher. He never returned. Instead he sought work in a packing house and then, in 1958, joined the army. He spent his two-year hitch in West Germany, once again clashing with his superiors. Pryor returned home to Peoria in 1960, married the first of his five wives, and fathered his second child, Richard Pryor, Jr. His first child, daughter Renee, was born three years earlier. Early Career Moves The owner of a popular black nightclub in Peoria gave Pryor his first professional opportunity. By the early 1960s the comedian was performing on a circuit that included East St. Louis, Youngstown, and Pittsburgh. Then, in 1963, Pryor decided to move to New York City. He settled briefly in Greenwich Village, where he performed an act with strong similarities to Bill Cosby's. Pryor told People: "I'll never forget going up to Harlem and seeing all those black people. Jesus, just knowing there were that many of us made me feel better."
Pryor broke into television in New York City in 1964 when he appeared on a series called On Broadway Tonight. Other offers followed, including a couple from The Ed Sullivan Show and the Merv Griffin Show. Pryor pulled up stakes and moved to Los Angeles, where he supported himself with bit parts in movies such as The Green Berets, starring John Wayne, and Wild in the Streets, a teen-exploitation film. He also continued to play to live audiences, especially in Las Vegas showrooms. "In his early days there was a lot of Bill Cosby in Richard's act," Cosby himself noted in People. "Then one evening I was in the audience when Richard took on a whole new persona his own, in front of me and everyone else. Richard killed the Bill Cosby in his act, made people hate it. Then he worked on them, doing pure Richard Pryor, and it was the most astonishing metamorphosis I have ever seen. He was magnificent." Fame Brought Its Own Troubles By the late 1960s Pryor was already indulging in one hundred dollars worth of cocaine a day. While his new, more personal act found followers, it also alienated the management in Las Vegas. Pryor clashed with landlords and hotel clerks, was audited by the Internal Revenue Service for nonpayment of taxes between 1967 and 1970, and was sued for battery by one of his wives. He disappeared into the counterculture community in Berkeley, California, and did not work for several years. Then he resurfaced in 1972 with a new stand-up act and a supporting role in the film Lady Sings the Blues, a drama for which he earned an Academy Award nomination.
Pryor also contributed his writing talents to other comics. He wrote bits for The Flip Wilson Show and Sanford and Son and helped Mel Brooks to write the classic Western film comedy Blazing Saddles. In 1973 he earned an Emmy Award for the special Lily, starring Lily Tomlin. That provocative show also proved a vehicle for Pryor, when he teamed with Tomlin for a skit about a raggedy black wino and a prim, "tasteful lady."
In 1976 Pryor wrote and starred in Bingo Long and the Traveling All Stars and Motor Kings. He made a bigger splash, however, in the film Silver Streak, a mixture of comedy and suspense that centers on a murderous train ride. Even though he had only a supporting role in this 1976 release starring Gene Wilder, Pryor earned the bulk of the critics' attention. The film grossed $30 million at the box office, and it opened new venues for the versatile Pryor. Lonely at the Top Pryor was at the height of his form as a live comedian by the late 1970s. He had earned Grammy Awards for the 1974 album That Nigger's Crazy and the 1976 work Bicentennial Nigger. Both of the albums went platinum in sales. In all, Pryor earned five Grammy Awards for best comedy album, but the 1979 movie Richard Pryor Live in Concert remains his "indisputable moment of glory," to quote Handelman. In the New York Times Magazine, James McPherson claimed that Pryor was creating a whole new style in American comedy, a style born more of the theater than of traditional humor. The characters, McPherson wrote, "are winos, junkies, whores, street fighters, blue-collar drunks, pool hustlers all the failures who are an embarrassment to the black middle class and stereotypes in the minds of most whites. The black middle class fears the glorification of those images and most whites fear them in general. Pryor talks like them; he imitates their styles.... He enters into his people and allows whatever is comic in them, whatever is human, to evolve out of what they say and how they look into a total scene. It is part of Richard Pryor's genius that, through the selective use of facial expressions, gestures, ... speech and movements, he can create a scene that is comic and at the same time recognizable as profoundly human."
Some of those "profoundly human" comedy scenes were based on unhappy events in Pryor's life. He had a serious heart attack in 1978 and underwent yet another divorce after a violent episode on New Year's Eve that culminated in his riddling his wife's car with bullets. These two grave incidents are given the full comic treatment in Richard Pryor Live in Concert. At a point in the act, Pryor "becomes" his heart itself during the attack, with asides from other parts of his body. He also "becomes" his ex-wife's car under attack.
The theme would be recreated two years later after an even more dangerous event. By 1980 Pryor was freebasing cocaine, using volatile ether to help light the drug for smoking. No one is clear about exactly what happened on June 9, 1980. At first Pryor claimed the fire was started during the freebasing process. Later he stated that he poured rum on himself and set himself on fire. At any rate, he nearly burned himself to death, suffering severe injuries to half his body. Early reports told of his untimely death, but he survived and underwent an anguishing rehabilitation.
The healing process did not speak to his addiction, however. He took painkillers in the hospital and returned to freebasing when he was released. Nevertheless, he began to see the fatal consequences of drug use, and this attitude is evident in his final concert movie, Live on Sunset Strip. The film contains the well-known Pryor routine about his accident, his drug use, and his stay in the hospital. New York magazine contributor David Denby called Live on Sunset Strip "a perfect entertainment." The critic added: "Richard Pryor works directly with the life around him, and he digs deeper into fear and lust and anger and pain than many of the novelists and playwrights now taken seriously. Like any great actor, he dramatizes emotion with his whole body, but his mind is so quick and his moods so volatile, he's light-years ahead of any actor delivering a text. Working from deep inside his own experience and understanding of what a human being is and is capable of, he can shake you to your roots." A Second Chance Live on Sunset Strip was released in 1982. The following year Pryor made concerted efforts to clear his system of drugs and alcohol. He joined a rehabilitation program and worked with other addicts to overcome his problems. He also tackled a project that was daring indeed he co-wrote, directed, and starred in the 1985 film Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling. A thinly veiled autobiography, Jo Jo Dancer stars Pryor as a comedian who relives his life immediately following a near fatal accident. Critics praised the intentions of the movie especially the fact that Pryor hired black workers for every aspect of the production but the film was not a hit. Detroit Free Press critic Catherine Rambeau, for instance, cited the work for its "honorable premise," but faulted it for a "lack of focus."
Los Angeles Times reviewer Peter Rainer speculated that, as far as movies in general are concerned, Pryor "seems to have taken a wrong turn." A number of Pryor's movies did brisk business at the box office, but in Rainer's words, they led Pryor "into creative oblivion." Films such as The Toy, Brewster's Millions, Stir Crazy, and Bustin' Loose show a Pryor who "is resignedly bland.... Anything malign or threatening has been bleached out," to quote Rainer. Pryor's ex-wife Jennifer Lee told Premiere: "Don't bother looking for a pattern to Richard's movies.... He's lazy, he took the money, he doesn't care." Fans Remained Loyal Others held greater respect for Pryor, however. Eddie Murphy asked Pryor to co-star in the 1989 movie Harlem Nights and more recently organized a huge comedy concert in Pryor's honor. Commenting in Premiere on the restrictive social atmosphere that existed during Pryor's rise to fame, comedienne Lily Tomlin expressed astonishment over his ability to achieve anything at all. "Richard lost jobs, was blackballed and everything else," Tomlin said, "because people thought he was too hard to deal with or incorrigible or out of control. Now people's careers are built on drug use or rehab. And I can't imagine anything happening to Eddie Murphy like what's happened to Richard. Richard paid the price for using language on the stage, ... and Eddie has been celebrated for it. And I don't think Eddie would ever be conflicted the way Richard was about playing [Las] Vegas, playing white clubs with white managers and taking white money. It was a different consciousness."
The pioneer of that change in consciousness is now in virtual retirement. Doctors diagnosed Pryor as having multiple sclerosis in 1986, and his later movies show him to be thin, frail, and weak. Pryor's ill health has been compounded by further heart trouble he has had triple bypass surgery and is often confined to a wheelchair. His most frequent visitors are his four children, his ex-wife Lee, and Jan Gaye, widow of singer Marvin Gaye.
Pryor's current ill health does not detract from the body of work he has left behind, though a half-dozen million-selling albums, two classic concert videos, several creditable dramatic performances, and of course the daring live routines with their uncensored social and psychological commentary. Progressive contributor Michael H. Seitz noted that Pryor grounded his comedy "on human feelings, often the most intimate sort." Handelman concluded: "Even though his best work had nothing to do with one-liners, Pryor is unquestionably still the most important and influential stand-up comedian of the past 25 years. Using raw street language, he [turned] black American life into breathtaking one-man theater, his rubbery face, multioctave voice, and lithe body physicalizing every situation."
|
|
|
|
|
|
Home
