Audition (92 page)

“Richard, how did it happen?” I asked as gently as I could.

“It was stupid,” he replied, laughing. “Me and my partner had been drinking this Jamaican rum and it spilled and he went to get a towel out of the bathroom to wipe it up and I lit a cigarette and the next thing I knew, I was on fire.”

“Were you on drugs?” I asked.

“No,” said Richard, almost offended that I had asked.

Six years later we talked again. There had been enough rumors so that I knew that the last time I had talked to him, Pryor had looked me right in the eyes and lied.

“I asked you about the accident and you carried on and said, ‘Oh, it had nothing to do with freebasing, it had nothing to do with drugs.’ In short, you lied to me.”

“That’s true,” Pryor said sheepishly. “One reason that I like to lay it on is this. My lawyer at the time had made a statement to the press about how it happened. He didn’t really know what happened, and he was trying to cover my ass. By saying it wasn’t freebasing, I was trying to cover his ass. Inside I’d be screaming. I wanted to tell you the truth.”

M
E:
It was no accident.

P
RYOR:
Yes. To tell the truth, I got crazy one night and went mad and tried to kill myself.

M
E:
You really did it deliberately, didn’t you?

P
RYOR:
Yes. I was crazy. I had gone over the top. So I don’t really even know how I did it. I remember pouring rum all over my clothes and lighting a cigarette lighter.

M
E:
Knowing that you wanted to die. No accident. Why did you want to kill yourself?

P
RYOR:
I was ashamed.

M
E:
Of what?

P
RYOR:
I was ashamed of myself. I had come to this. God had given me all this. And what did I do with it? I could only end up in a room alone, smoking a base pipe. All day long, I couldn’t stop. I put the pipe down. It jumped back into my hand. I couldn’t stop five minutes. Do you understand that? Five minutes. I said to myself, all right, five minutes. I won’t smoke anymore. It wasn’t a minute that would go by. I had to pick that pipe back up. I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell anyone.

Pryor tried to put the pieces together again. But it was never the same. Jennifer had left him after the fire. Nothing in his life seemed to be working out. Then he got multiple sclerosis. From time to time I called him and we talked about this and that, but we never did another interview. He didn’t want to. I didn’t want to push. Jennifer, who had always loved him, came back. They finally married and she took care of him until his death. Jennifer knew how fond I was of Richard, and she called me herself in 2005 to tell me that he’d died. He was sixty-five. Even though he had lied to me, I still think he may have been the most painfully honest man I have ever interviewed.

Now I am going to take a huge leap from a man who destroyed his own life to a man who has tried to uplift the lives of others. I speak of the Dalai Lama, whose words have affected not only me but millions around the world. I met and interviewed the Dalai Lama in 2005 for an unusual two-hour
Special
we called
Heaven: Where Is It? And How Do We Get There?
(By the way, we were originally going to call it
Heaven: Does It Exist?
but we were told we shouldn’t because some evangelical Christians have no doubt that heaven exists and might boycott the program. Not that we were threatened, but why offend if we didn’t have to? After all, we wanted the evangelicals to watch the program, too.)

I had briefly met the Dalai Lama some years before in the most improbable place—the boardwalk at Venice Beach, California. I was married to Merv. We’d decided we weren’t getting enough exercise so off we went at 6:30 a.m. to bicycle. The only person we saw was a man walking his dog until a car drew up and six monks in saffron robes emerged to look at the ocean. One of them was the Dalai Lama. I went up to him, said something inconsequential like, “Good morning, Your Holiness,” to which he responded in kind (well, without the “Your Holiness” part). Then the monks got back in their car, and Merv and I went off on our bikes, leaving behind the man and his dog. I can only imagine what his wife thought of his mental stability when he went home for breakfast and said, “Guess what, honey? I just saw Barbara Walters and the Dalai Lama on the boardwalk.”

It was harder getting to the Dalai Lama this time. Physically. I flew to New Delhi with my producer, Rob Wallace, and a camera crew, then on to a small airport an hour or so outside Dharamsala, the little mountain sanctuary given to the Dalai Lama for his government-in-exile in 1960 by Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. This followed the Dalai Lama’s expulsion from Tibet by the occupying Chinese. We timed our visit to coincide with his annual two weeks of teachings to his monks and pilgrims. We should have looked at the weather report.

The air got colder and colder as we drove up into the mountains, where monkeys looked down at us with surprise from the trees and we looked up at them with our own surprise. Rain added to the cold when we finally reached the narrow, cobblestoned streets of Dharamsala. Our hotel had no heat or hot water, and I slept fully dressed under a lot of blankets. Still, the chill went right through you.

The Dalai Lama didn’t seem chilled at all as he sat outside in the rain, wearing his one-shoulder red robe, chanting for hours to his young monks. There were a few headphones for translations into different languages, but they were hard to come by. Evidently he occasionally said something funny because his students would laugh and he would giggle. It really was a giggle, not a laugh, and quite infectious.

We did our interview after he was through with his teachings. It was still damp and cold, but everything about the Dalai Lama was warm. Including his hands. When I extended my hand to shake his, he took it in both his hands and just held it. His eyes were warm, too, and merry.

Our subject was heaven, remember, and Buddhists have a unique concept of what heaven is. “Ten directions,” the Dalai Lama told me. “East, south, west, and north, and above and below.” Buddhists don’t believe in heaven as a final destination, but as a place to further develop spirituality. “For Buddhists, the final goal is not reach there, but become Buddha, one’s self,” he said in his accented, imperfect English. Buddhists believe in reincarnation. The better you have lived your life, the happier your life will be when you’re reborn. Conversely, the Dalai Lama said, “If someone do very bad thing, kill or steal, he could be born even with an animal body.” (Gives a new meaning to “bad dog.”)

The Buddhist religion is far more complex than my brief explanation, but the Dalai Lama, who told me that he considers himself a teacher rather than a god as some feel he is, was deliberately trying to make his belief accessible. In fact, to some degree, reincarnation makes sense to me. I’m certainly not a Buddhist, but part of me believes that someone like my sister, Jackie, or others who had very difficult lives, could come back to something better. They may have done something in a former life that reduced them to a not-so-happy existence but they have paid that price and earned a chance at happiness. On some spiritual level that reaches me.

What touched me the most about the Dalai Lama was his definition of the purpose of life. It was, he said, “to be happy.” How does one accomplish that? I asked. “I think warmheartedness and compassion,” he replied. “Compassion gives you inner strength, more self-confidence. That can really change your attitude.”

It was that simple. I compared his definition with those of some of the other great religious leaders I had interviewed for the
Special.
The brilliant Catholic archbishop I’d talked with, Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, archbishop of Washington, had said the primary purpose of life for Catholics was to go to heaven. Muslims shared a similar goal, said Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the spiritual leader of the Masjid al-Farah Mosque in New York. We also talked with a noted evangelical leader, Pastor Ted Haggard of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs. The purpose of life, he told me, was to be born again and to accept Jesus into your life. Otherwise, he said, you (and also, I) would probably not get to heaven. Pastor Haggard was smiling and pleasant. Unfortunately he was later defrocked by his own congregation due partly to revelations of homosexual offenses. To me this didn’t diminish his beliefs. It only accentuated the hypocrisy of his character.

Members of the Jewish faith had a different goal than going to heaven. According to Rabbi Neil Gillman, a professor of philosophy at New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary, Jews put more emphasis on living a “decent” life on earth for its own sake, not for any reward.

And here was the Dalai Lama saying that the purpose of life was simply to be happy. And achieving it was as easy as being warmhearted and compassionate. I was so affected by that simplicity and by the sweetness of his personality that when the interview ended, I asked the Dalai Lama if I could kiss him on the cheek. He smiled and suggested we kiss as they do in New Zealand. And so we rubbed noses like the Eskimos. He then put a white scarf around my neck and the necks of my camera crew and my producer, giggled, and walked away.

But his message lingered. As I told you before, after the visit concluded, as a special treat, I took my small staff on a whirlwind tour of several cities in India, including the dazzling pink city of Jaipur and Agra, where we saw the Taj Mahal at dusk and again in the early hours of sunrise. Magnificent. For that week I was the most adorable person. I never got angry, I never raised my voice, and nothing bothered me. I was devoid of jealousy and ambition. I was also slightly boring. But then came the plane trip home and our return to the Western world. Little by little the old emotions seeped back in. Still, I continue to remember his simple formula for the purpose of life and I try to practice what he preached. Compassion. Warmheartedness.

Finally Christopher Reeve, a mountain of a man who took his once-strong life, diminished by a tragic accident, and found a new strength that inspired the world. It was not just that I admired Chris’s dignity and courage, I got to care about him as a person for his spirit, his humor, his determination. He had suffered an affliction that would have made most people withdraw from life. Instead he confronted it and changed the way people looked at quadriplegics.

Most everyone is aware of Christopher Reeve’s story. The handsome actor, best known for his role as Superman, was paralyzed from the neck down after a freak horse-riding accident. The fall occurred on May 27, 1995, during a cross-country competition when Reeve’s horse stopped suddenly at a jump. Reeve, an experienced equestrian, pitched forward, caught his hands in the horse’s bridle, and was catapulted headfirst onto the ground. The fall crushed his spinal cord. He was barely alive.

In a way I became Christopher’s television chronicler. He talked for the first time about his condition on
20/20
in September 1995. We did our last of many interviews in November 2003, eleven months before he died. But we regularly saw each other as friends off camera. It turned out we shared the same birthday, September 25.

I had met Reeve only once, very casually, before his accident. There were journalists he knew far better than he knew me, but he had watched a good deal of television and seen many of my interviews during his hospitalization and the long months later at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in New Jersey. I seemed not to interrupt my subjects, he eventually told me. This was important to him. He could only talk for minutes at a time, because a tube in his throat was connected to a respirator that sent air into his lungs and also released air over his vocal cords. He could speak as long as the breath held. Then he had to wait for the respirator to generate another breath before he could speak again. It was a slow process, and the interviewer had to be patient. Because I seemed to listen, Reeve chose me to be the person to whom he would tell his story.

We met at the rehab center four months after he’d been paralyzed. I had no idea what to expect. I had discussed the interview with David Sloan, my executive producer on
20/20.
We decided that a proper amount of airtime would be about fifteen to twenty minutes. We thought the interview would be too painful for viewers to listen to much longer than that. We were also concerned with what Reeve might look like. Would he be disfigured, difficult to look at? Would he be like someone from an Edgar Allan Poe horror story? Yes, I know that sounds crass, but I had to think in television terms.

When we came face-to-face, however, there he was, sitting straight up in a wheelchair, handsome, with a big smile on his face. His paralyzed arms and hands were strapped to the arms of the chair so they wouldn’t flop, and his head rested between two black pads to keep it straight. He wore slacks and a sweater. The collar of his sweater had an ascot tucked in. The ascot covered the air hose, which, in turn, was attached to his respirator. If the respirator got turned off or the air hose was disconnected even for a minute, Reeve would die.

Sitting next to him, lovely and calm and also wearing a big smile, was Dana, his wife and the mother of their three-year-old son, Will. And so began Reeve’s recollection of his first days in the hospital.

“In my dreams, I’d be whole, riding my horse, playing with my family, and we’d have a beautiful boat that Dana and I had worked on together. We’d be making love,” Reeve said. “Then suddenly I wake up and it’s two in the morning, and I’m lying in bed and I’m on a ventilator and I can’t move.”

His story was not just about him; it was also a love story. His relationship with Dana had grown and flourished after the accident in spite of the fact that Chris had very little physical sensation. He could feel her kisses and touches to his face. There was some sensation at a little spot by his left rib and at the sole of his left foot, but nothing more. He felt neither hugs nor, mercifully, pain.