Becoming Richard Pryor (63 page)

Sometimes, as at the Hollywood Bowl, Richard slammed into the fact that he wasn’t in Peoria anymore and that he had lost that community; that no matter how large his estate in the San Fernando Valley, he would continue to feel out of place; that no matter how high he rose in Hollywood’s pecking order, his sensibility would never match up with that of its right-thinking, liberal precincts. The debacle at the Bowl left him reeling, besieged. Several days later, he continued to justify himself to the
Sentinel
, LA’s black newspaper, by emphasizing how poorly the Lockers had been treated: “My feeling is that they cannot pay me enough to keep quiet when something is wrong. And this was wrong.” (The Lockers, for their part, kept out of the fracas.) As the controversy raged on, Richard did not calm the waters by issuing an apology of his own.

Instead, Richard continued to act out the polarities of his Hollywood
Bowl performance in his own life. In the week following the gay rights benefit, he made two impulsive and startling commitments. The first was to Deboragh McGuire, whom he proposed to and married within the space of a few days. The second was to an experimental piece of gay theater, which he included in his prime-time TV show in total defiance of NBC.

Los Angeles, New York City, Peoria, 1977–1978

W
hen a star in a galaxy takes on too much mass, it begins to collapse into itself. Its core becomes weaker until it can no longer support the weight of its outer layers, which fly into the core and crush it. Sometimes, though, in one of nature’s mysteries, the star’s life does not end there: the collapse touches off a fresh nuclear reaction, a process of runaway fusion that flings the outer layers back out into the universe. A supernova is born, a galaxy illuminated.

This seems a fair description of Richard Pryor’s life starting in mid-September 1977. He was consumed in the flurried motions of his own collapse: he married one woman while falling in love with another; he finished off his TV show with two episodes that careened between slapstick, satirical diatribe, experimental theater, and the most tender of pantomimes; he wasted himself on drugs to the point of hospitalization and near death. And then, through a chain reaction that remained mysterious even to him, he produced a brilliant account of his life in the form of a low-budget, seventy-eight-minute film that dispensed with all the frills of Hollywood moviemaking in favor of giving the audience a single man alone on a stage with just his microphone, his talent, and his demons for company.
Richard Pryor: Live in Concert
defeated
Superman
at the box office and gave birth to more comics, good and bad, than any other film in history. It even gave birth to a new Richard.

R
ichard’s wedding, on September 22, 1977, was both a product of his inner chaos and an attempt to manage it. For over two years, he
and the twenty-five-year-old Deboragh McGuire had been on-again, off-again lovers. In August, during one of their frequent “off” periods, Richard had dreamed of prying her from the grip of her other lovers, of possessing her once and for all. Yet he was curiously passive, relying on the mechanisms of his celebrity to reconnect with her. In a late-summer interview with
Jet
, he used the magazine to put out a feeler in her direction. “There is a very special lady out there who I’m still really in love with. It’s tough trying to get over her,” he said, hoping that Deboragh might read the interview and discern that he was talking about her.

In the meantime, Richard was drawn to the sharp, tough-minded Jennifer Lee, who was supervising his home renovation. He felt that she’d “seen things,” that she’d tapped into experiences beyond him. In fact, Jennifer had grown up in an affluent pocket of upstate New York, the daughter of a lawyer father who defended civil rights workers and a mother who traced her lineage back to white abolitionist John Brown. Jennifer came by her tough-mindedness honestly. During her childhood, her mother had suffered violent mood swings, and self-medicated with Miltown and cocktails. In the early 1970s, the family had fragmented, her mother institutionalized after a psychotic break, her father traveling to Europe to find himself. Jennifer had been floating since dropping out of Manhattan’s Fitch College—a little modeling here, some acting there, and, according to her memoir, a full dose of the freedom and heartache that arrived with the sexual revolution. In her film work, she carried herself with a hard-won, slightly aloof intelligence.

Richard approached Jennifer gingerly. For their first date, he invited her to a political fund-raiser for UN ambassador Andrew Young at the Beverly Wilshire hotel, a subdued and high-class affair; the two held hands under the table. On the limo ride home with David Franklin and his black date, the evening turned sour when Franklin’s companion questioned whether Jennifer could ever truly understand a black man like Richard. At the door to Jennifer’s bungalow, Richard tried to make things right. He brought her closer, kissing her, and
opened up: “I’m sorry for what she said in the car. I don’t know what you’ve heard or read about me. But I don’t see colors. I don’t believe in prejudice. We’re all people, you know? That’s hard enough.”

At summer’s end, Richard’s thoughts on the state of his love life were captured in a question-and-answer session with the audience of his TV show. Asked if he had plans to marry in the near future, he felt free to be indecently casual: “If the pussy good,” he quipped. When a black woman asked him to divulge one of his “wildest dreams,” he replied—perhaps with his budding romance with Jennifer in mind—“One of my wildest dreams is to be able to fuck a white woman and y’all don’t fuck with me.” Deboragh did not appear to be on his radar.

Then, around the time of the Hollywood Bowl benefit, the issue of
Jet
carrying Richard’s appeal to a “very special lady” arrived on newsstands—“like a drumbeat going out,” in Richard’s words. Deboragh heard the drumbeat and phoned him. “I told her,” Richard said later, “we couldn’t go on any longer the way we had been and that we had to get married.” Deboragh hesitated at Richard’s proposal; she felt she needed to think it over. Richard hung up, got hammered on cocaine and vodka, worked himself into a lather, then drove to her home and banged on her door. When he got no answer, he screamed for her through it. The door opened a crack; Deboragh refused to let him in. Several days later, she yielded. “Okay, you win,” she told him over the phone. “I’ll marry you.”

The wedding was scheduled in a few days’ time, as if both of them were uncertain they could hold together their engagement for much longer. Richard worried about disturbing the fragile equilibrium that had led her to agree to marry him. Slated to start filming the title role on Motown’s
The Wiz
just after his scheduled wedding, he told
Wiz
producer Rob Cohen that he had to back out of the upcoming shoot in New York; he needed to give his bride her honeymoon. Cohen, who had befriended Richard on
Bingo Long
, begged him to reconsider: “We can’t shoot without you. If you don’t show up, that’s a week down on the movie. We’re so over budget. We’re all going to die.” Richard refused to budge. Cohen promised to get back to him with some sort of workaround.

While Richard played the devoted husband-to-be in his conversation with his producer, his commitment to Deboragh wavered in the company of Jennifer Lee. The night before his wedding, he stood in his bedroom with Jennifer, the two of them admiring an antique child’s desk she had placed there. The desk made him feel like a happy kid, he told her. Their eyes locked in silence. “I’m feeling something dangerous I shouldn’t be feeling,” he confessed, then pulled her into their first kiss since his engagement to Deboragh.

She asked, with genuine perplexity, “You’re getting married, right?”

“Supposed to be,” Richard said.

“So how come you’re kissing me like this?”

“I guess I want it all.”

Soon the two were kissing in the bathroom, with Jennifer pressed against the black marble. The bell at the gate rang, the intercom crackled, “It’s me, Deboragh”—and the electric circuit of their connection was broken. Jennifer ran out of the bathroom and through the living room to the kitchen, where she collided with a tetchy Deboragh, who was absorbed in her own woes. “I’ve got the worst hangover,” she complained. “Never again.”

A sudden affair: Richard Pryor and Deboragh McGuire at their post-wedding reception. (Courtesy of AP Photo)

The next morning, bride and groom were joined in holy matrimony, and in total intoxication. Richard showed up drunk; Deboragh arrived an hour late and, according to Richard, “had to be revived after taking too many Quaaludes.” One of Richard’s daughters wore black to convey her thoughts on the union. The ceremony took place at his home, with little effort made to disguise the fact that it was a construction site. Richard and Deboragh recited their vows surrounded by unfaced cabinets, torn-up floors, and stacks of lumber. “Thank God you were drunk when I got there,” Richard remembered Deboragh saying afterward, “because if you’d seen what I looked like . . .”

For their wedding reception, Richard and Deboragh traveled to NBC studios in Burbank, where Richard was responsible for wrapping up the third episode of his TV show. Earlier, producer Rocco Urbisci had made preparations for a party with confetti and a cake; he’d assumed Pam Grier was the bride, so the cake carried the frosted message “Congratulations Richard and Pam.” Apparently Grier, too, had thought she was in contention to be the bride: Urbisci recalled fielding, on the morning of the wedding, a phone call from an incensed Grier, in which she explained that she was going to visit a certain “motherfucker” and “shoot his ass.” Urbisci notified security; Grier was kept at bay. But he forgot about the infelicitous inscription on the cake. When the bride and groom arrived at the studio and the cake was brought out, Urbisci had to grab some roses from a prop table and hurriedly scatter them over the cake to cover the name “Pam.”

On the occasion of his third formal marriage, Richard told the cast members of his show, “This is the first time I’ve been married—in my heart.” Deboragh, a first-time bride, owned up to her bewilderment at the speed of things. “I’m still in shock,” she said, her eyes glassy. “It’s unbelievable . . . I got him.”

After finishing the taping of his show, Richard went with his bride to the airport, where they were treated to the workaround that
Wiz
producer Rob Cohen had orchestrated, with Richard’s permission. A private jet stood waiting for them, its cabin transformed into an
airborne honeymoon suite. Seats were cleared out to make room for a large bed; candles, white balloons, and white chocolate set the mood; curtains were closed. The newlyweds took off on a red-eye for Oz, via LaGuardia Airport.

The next day in New York City, Cohen telephoned Richard about picking him up for rehearsal, and got no answer. He ran over to Richard’s hotel room and pounded on the door, and received the same nonresponse. At last, a bleary-eyed Richard arrived at the door and joined Cohen for the drive over to the rehearsal space at the Hotel St. George, in Brooklyn Heights. In the limo, Richard brooded; his wedding night hadn’t lifted him out of his dark mood. He vented to Cohen about how NBC had promised him freedom and yet censored him to bits.

Cohen tried to convince Richard that
The Wiz
would be different, that there was fabulous energy on the set, a wildness of ambition. The producer had plenty of material to work with: the day Richard arrived in town, the
New York Times
reported that
The Wiz
was laying down twenty-six miles of yellow-brick vinyl across the city’s boroughs and remaking the World Trade Center’s plaza into the Emerald City’s main square, with a dance sequence that required four hundred dancers, twelve hundred costumes, and thirty-eight thousand colored-lightbulbs. Richard shrugged at Cohen’s patter.

Then Cohen had an idea. When they reached the St. George, he didn’t hand Richard over to
Wiz
director Sidney Lumet. Instead he promised to show Richard how much everyone appreciated his presence, and led him through the corridors of the hotel. Richard followed, exhausted to the point of docility, incognito in a baseball cap and T-shirt.

Cohen arrived at the hotel’s ballroom and opened its doors, revealing an astonishing scene: four hundred dancers sashaying and pirouetting to the burbling funk of Quincy Jones in a rehearsal of the Emerald City sequence. Four hundred lithe, black bodies, clothed in unitards and tights that advertised just how beautiful they were. It was a pageant of black grace.

“Welcome,” Cohen said to his star.

Some of the dancers in the front row noticed the man in the baseball cap next to Cohen, and stopped dancing. Another five stopped; another twenty, fifty, one hundred stopped—until the entire would-be population of Emerald City stopped to stare at their Wiz. A ripple of applause swelled into the cascade of a standing ovation.

Richard nodded and smiled at the dancers. When the applause died down, he switched into character to address the crowd. “We are gathered here today,” he declaimed in the voice of his silver-tongued reverend. Before he could finish his sentence, the dancers fell down on the floor in laughter. They knew the character, the routine, the wicked wit to come, and they tingled with anticipation. Richard stretched out into an impromptu monologue, preaching to a congregation that delighted in his every turn of phrase. The dynamic was the opposite of that at the Hollywood Bowl a week before. The worries he had carried within him—a TV show on the rocks, a marriage that seemed to be spinning off course from its very first moments—melted away as he met an audience that loved him as one of their own and, in loving him that way, put him back in the flow of character, the flow of life.