Afterlives of the Rich and Famous (26 page)

At the same time, his personal life was proving to be as turbulent as his childhood, clouded by substance abuse, legal problems, and relationship dramas. There was a tax-evasion arrest in 1974 for which he served ten days in jail. There was his one-year marriage to actress Deborah McGuire in 1977, punctuated by his shooting her car and being ordered into psychiatric treatment after paying fines and restitution. But the most dramatic, frightening, and widely publicized event in his life occurred on June 9, 1980. After several days of free-basing cocaine, Richard poured 151-proof rum on himself and set himself on fire. In flames, he ran out of his house and down the street until the police managed to subdue him, and he spent six weeks in the hospital recovering from burns over 50 percent of his body. It was considered to be a horrible accident at the time, but in his subsequent autobiography,
Pryor Convictions: And Other Life Sentences,
which he wrote with author Todd Gold in
1995
, he admitted that it was the deliberate act of a man in an insane drug haze.

In 1981 Richard married actress Jennifer Lee, whom he divorced a year later. Richard’s fourth child, Steven, was born in 1984 to his girlfriend Flynn Belaine, whom he married in October 1986 and divorced in 1987, shortly after Richard’s sixth child, Kelsey, was conceived—she wasn’t born until October 1987, preceded six months earlier by his fifth child, Franklin, whose mother was Richard’s girlfriend Geraldine Mason.

In 1986, in the midst of this personal chaos and a career that was still showing no signs of slowing down, Richard Pryor was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He continued to work, even after being confined to a wheelchair in the early 1990s, but finally, in 2001, he remarried Jennifer Lee and withdrew with her into the privacy of his home near Los Angeles, where one of his final charitable acts was the establishment of Pryor’s Planet for the benefit of animals and their rights and care.

On December 10, 2005, Richard Pryor was rushed to an Encino, California, hospital with Jennifer Lee Pryor at his side. He died at 7:58
a.m
. of cardiac arrest, leaving behind an extraordinary body of work and an impact on the world of comedy that will continue to resonate for decades to come.

From Francine

Richard remained earthbound for almost four years in your time, in Los Angeles, which he’d come to think of as home.
He wandered back and forth from his Encino house to the backstage areas of the Improv and the Comedy Store, two of the most popular clubs in the area, to watch fellow comedians perform.
He suspects that several employees saw, heard, or sensed him there, and that his voice and presence must have been too indistinct to understand.
Richard’s refusal to acknowledge the tunnel was a deliberate choice on his part, for a common, heartbreaking reason: not for a moment did he believe God would accept him after the flawed, sometimes violent, often self-destructive life he’d lived, especially when he’d been given such an uncommon wealth of gifts. “What a waste,” he kept saying. “What a weak, stupid waste.”

Finally, on Christmas Day
2008
according to your calendar, Richard’s Spirit Guide, Rhima, and his soul mate, a woman named Ashur, retrieved him from his sad, lost state of limbo and brought him Home.
His body and mind were too severely debilitated for him to understand where, or even who, he was.
And, as happens in cases in which more intensive treatment than cocooning is needed, Rhima and Ashur gently guided Richard past the masses of concerned, loving spirits and animals waiting to greet him and took him directly to the Towers.

When spirits arrive on the Other Side from such extreme circumstances as Richard’s physiological illness compounded by his decades of substance abuse, which are beyond the healing therapy that cocooning has to offer, they’re embraced by a team of highly advanced physical and psychiatric experts for a form of what you on earth might call “deprogramming.” The ailing spirit is led through a slow, compassionate restoration process, at the end of which its body is thriving again and its mind has successfully processed and released its darkness into the white light of the Holy Spirit and clarified the full impact of the powerful, inspiring, and positive legacy it left behind.
Richard is still experiencing “deprogramming,” surrounded by infinite love and support, and I’m told he’s making extraordinary progress.

I’m also told that he’s already announced his intention to reincarnate. “Tell everyone I’ll be back,” he’s quoted as saying. “And by the time I’m through, every child will have a safe place to go and someone to believe in them from the minute they’re born.”
He’s hard at work on a book called
The Vanity of Man
in which he’s outlining specific plans for finally making the world a safe, nourishing place for the animal kingdom, and he’ll be activating those plans when he returns to earth.

Bela Lugosi

T
he strange, tragic life of Bela Lugosi, known to the world as the man who brought Count Dracula to life on film, began on October 20, 1882, in Lugos, Hungary, near the border of Transylvania. His banker father, Istvan Blasko, and his mother, Paula, named their fourth child Bela Ferenc Dezso and raised him in a Roman Catholic household. At the age of twelve he quit school, studied at the Budapest Academy of Theatrical Arts, performed in provincial theaters
beginning in approximately
1903
, and went on to join the National
Theater of Hungary (1913–19). He also served in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I and, in 1917, began a three-year marriage to his first of five wives, Ilona Szmick.

After appearing in a number of silent films in Hungary and Germany, Bela immigrated to the United States, settled in New York City, and began touring the East Coast with a small stock company of other Hungarian actors. His first appearance on Broadway was in a
1922
production of
The Red Poppy
. More Broadway shows followed, as well as his first film appearance in a
1923
melodrama called
The Silent Command
.

It was in 1927 that Bela was cast to star in the successful Broadway production of
Dracula,
and he was promptly summoned to Hollywood, where he worked in the new medium of “talkies” and married wife number two, a wealthy widow named Beatrice Weeks, who filed for divorce after four months and named actress Clara Bow as the correspondent.

Universal Pictures released
Dracula,
starring Bela Lugosi, in
1931
, and both a major box-office hit and an icon were born. Bela was immediately signed to a contract with Universal, and marriage number three came along, this one in
1933
, to a young Hungarian woman named Lillian Arch. Their child, Bela G. Lugosi, was born in
1938
, and this marriage lasted until
1953
.

Between his remarkable performance as the world’s most famous vampire and his thick eastern European accent, which served him well for roles as a horror villain, Bela found it difficult to expand his acting career into a wider variety of roles. The titles alone of his next six
films, in which he costarred with fellow thriller movie king Boris Kar
loff, both exemplified and exacerbated the typecasting that stood in the way of more traditional parts:
The Black Cat, The Raven, The Invisible Ray, Son of Frankenstein, Black Friday,
and
The Body Snatcher
.

In
1936
Universal’s new management dropped horror films from its production slate, which reduced Bela to a string of low-budget nonhorror roles and lead roles in some equally low-budget independent thrillers as well as whatever stage roles he could find. His career and earning power predictably declined, as did his own financial stability. He did land and succeed in the coveted role of the hunchback Ygor in
Son of Frankenstein
in
1939
as well as a “normal” and prestigious role in Greta Garbo’s
Ninotchka
. But the stardom he’d achieved in
Dracula
seemed to be gone forever.

Adding to Bela’s troubles, beginning in at least the late 1930s, was the onset of severe sciatica—compression of the sciatic nerve that causes often extreme, radiating back, pelvic, and leg pain. He became dependent on morphine and methadone and, by the end of the 1940s, when he made the last “A” movie of his career,
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,
word of his drug dependence had spread throughout the film industry. Work was sparse and undistinguished through the early
1950
s, and in
1953
his twenty-year marriage to Lillian Arch ended in divorce. By
1955
his life had declined into obscurity, virtual poverty, and addiction. He voluntarily committed himself to a treatment center in Norwalk, California, and was released later that year.

Hope, such as it was, had arrived in about 1952, though, in the form of a filmmaker named Ed Wood Jr., generally considered to be one of the most artless, incompetent directors in the history of motion pictures. Ed Wood was a Bela Lugosi fan; he tracked him down and offered him parts in upcoming films. Bela was in no mental, professional, or financial position to say no, and the Wood-Lugosi collaboration resulted in a brief series of films so inadvertently ridiculous that they’ve developed cult followings:
Glen or Glenda?
in
1953,
Bride of the Monster
in
1956
, and the impossibly bad
Plan Nine from Outer Space
, released in
1958
after Bela’s death.

Bela did find a fifth wife, Hope Linninger, whom he married in 1955, and that same year, after he’d been released from drug treatment, he made one last non–Ed Wood film,
The Black Sheep,
released in
1956
. Bela made several personal appearances to promote the film, despite the fact that in the last legitimate movie of his life, he played the part of a mute, without a single line of dialogue.

On August 16, 1956, Bela Lugosi died quietly of a heart attack in his home in Los Angeles. Out of love and respect, Bela Jr. and his mother, Lillian, insisted that he be buried in his
Dracula
cloak as they believed he would have wanted. His body was interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California, and his grave remains a popular site on some of the more cult-oriented Hollywood tours.

From Sylvia

In the early 1980s I was invited by the late, great paranormal investigator Nick Nocerino and a paranormal photographer to accompany them on a trip to explore the Bela Lugosi house. I admit it, I accepted the invitation for one reason: I leapt at every possible opportunity to work with Nick. As for Bela Lugosi, the truth is, I neither knew nor cared much about him. Not only was he a little before my time—
Dracula
was a hit five years before I was born—but I’ve never made it all the way through any vampire movie without either falling asleep or involuntarily snickering, probably because it’s hard to be frightened of something I don’t believe exists. My loss, I’m sure, and no fault of Mr. Lugosi’s performance. But when Nick, Chuck, and I arrived at the house, I can’t stress enough how underwhelmed I was expecting to be, touring the home of a long-dead actor who was best known for a film I didn’t enjoy, especially when I was in the midst of a crushing schedule and had a million other things I’d rather have been doing.

It was late evening when our van parked in front of the vacant, sadly rundown property. Nick had done his homework on Bela Lugosi and volunteered to tell me about him while he strapped a lot of incomprehensible equipment on me. I stopped him from saying a word—I prefer to walk into a paranormal investigation “clean,” with as little information and as few predispositions as possible.

Once I was fully wired and Nick and Chuck were ready with their amazing battery of devices, we headed toward the main house of the oddly configured compound. The buildings formed a square around a courtyard with a fountain in its center that I imagined might once have been attractive. To the left of the courtyard were stairs that led to a row of rooms accessed by a narrow balcony, creating the effect of a sad motel that had long since gone out of business. The main house was to the right, completely separate from those drab abandoned rooms.

The moment we stepped through the massive doors of the house I felt almost choked by the oppressive distress that still hung in the dead air, some thick aftertaste of depression and hysteria left behind like a force field by someone dark who’d lived there. Nick, Chuck, and I explored every square inch of that house, and while all three of us were resisting an impulse to head back to the car and race to the nearest place we could find where there might be happiness or where it seemed as if someone might have at least laughed once or twice in the last century, we didn’t sense a trace of anything paranormal within those walls. There were no ghosts in the house, no spirits, nothing at all to alert the gauges and sensors we were lugging along with us. After a half hour or so we returned to the courtyard, and as we pulled those huge wooden doors closed behind us, I remember taking long deep breaths of fresh air to try to wash that darkness out of my system.

Next we climbed the stairs to those oddly separate rooms across the courtyard. We didn’t speak a word to each other, but my guess was that after finding the main house so ghost- and spirit-free, Nick and Chuck were expecting as much as I was that we were about to explore nothing but the same musty gloom we’d just trudged through.