CHAPTER 12
When I first meet Richard, before we ever go to Berkeley together, he’s still hanging with his then-wife, Shelley Bonus. Shelley is his second wife out of six or seven or seventeen or a hundred (Richard is a marrying fool).
I like Shelley because she’s a dancer, a crazy hippie girl with a huge head of curly hair. Big eyes, bigger breasts—a Jewish Cher. I always call her the White Lady, though she hates it when I do. It makes Richard cackle. Maybe he laughs because she hates it.
They hooked up on the set of a movie called Wild in the Streets. It’s Richard’s first movie. Shelley Winters, one of the most cock-hungry actresses in Hollywood, gives him a job. Richard is happy to pay the price of admission to Winters. They get wild in the sheets.
It’s the first time I encounter Richard’s Hollywood jones. He wants to be a movie star more than anything. He grows up idolizing John Wayne. Give Richard the choice between being a stand-up star and a movie star, and he goes for the Hollywood bullshit every time.
The other Shelley, Shelley Bonus, is a hippie chick extra in Wild in the Streets, and Richard has a small part. He gets them to hire me to do all his stunts.
During the shoot, Richard and I encounter set decorators on the crew who are spraying a liquid substance on the streets to make them look like it has just rained.
“What’s that stuff?” Richard asks.
“It’s called ‘nigger-size,’” the union guys tell him, not even bothering to notice if we’re offended.
“Nigger-size?” I ask, incredulous.
“Yeah, it’s what we nigger-size the streets with,” the crew explains. Richard and I look at each other and shake our heads. It’s 1968 in Los Angeles, but it may as well be 1920 in the Deep South.
Richard’s wife, Shelley, is Hollywood, even if she comes from New York. Her daddy is Danny Kaye’s manager. Daddy gives his daughter a typical L.A. gift—a $40,000 Maserati. This drives Richard crazy. He hates the car because he didn’t buy it. I wind up hiding it in the driveway of my house in the Exposition Hills.
Richard and Shelley have a child, Rain. Richard is big on fathering children but not too keen on behaving like a father. He and Shelley alternate between knockdown, drag-out fights and flower-child dreamy-ass shit. I see them out in the yard of their house in Beverly Hills, and the two of them are literally hugging trees and kissing rocks.
“You see this rock?” Richard says to me. “Its name is Forgotten. We named it. We named a motherf*cking rock, man.”
For a little while it’s Yvonne and me and Shelley and Richard. We go around on double dates, like white people. Richard is a drinker and Yvonne and I don’t put anything like that into our bodies. We are the odd couples.
Dressed to the nines: Yvonne and me ready for a night out
Right after they have Rain, we have our first child, a boy, who we call Shane. Rain and Shane. They’re born six months apart. Yvonne has her baby shower at Richard’s. Later on we have a girl and name her Spring. Every summer I bring Daryl and Duane to live with us, and have Lisa down from Oakland, too. Yvonne is a great stepmom to them all. They adore her.
In his stand-up during this time, Richard doesn’t talk as much about black and white as he does about men and women. Or pricks and pussies. Or bitches and sons-of-bitches.
I got a wife, and it’s really funny to have a wife, man, because we were in love like a bitch until we got married. It’s true. We used to have fun things to do together. I used to bring her a rock, and she’d go, “Oh! A rock! A rock, for me?” Now it’s more like, how big is that rock that she hit me with?
For a little while Yvonne and I live in the guesthouse Shelley and Richard fix up behind their house. We sit there and listen to the two of them fight in the big house. They rattle the walls.
Most artists aren’t good with day-to-day business. The more talented the artist, the higher the level of insanity, like Van Gogh. Richard doesn’t cash his paychecks. He leaves money around the house. When he gets tired of driving a car, he parks it on the street and just leaves it. Shelley does the same thing. Practicality ain’t a strong suit for either one of them.
Richard burns to be a movie star. “Mr. Mooney, I want to be an actor,” he says to me, over and over again. He’s always doubting himself. He’s like a little kid, needing to be reassured. “What do you think, Paul? Do you think I can be an actor?”
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “You’re the best actor.”
“I am?” Richard says.
“You got everybody convinced you’re not crazy,” I say, laughing. “That’s the best acting job I’ve ever seen.”
Richard decides that if Hollywood won’t make a film with him as the star, he will do it himself. Richard’s film Bon Appétit is a project conceived and executed in a drug haze. The plot centers on a black man accused of raping a white woman. Richard doesn’t plan out the movie. He just buys an expensive 16mm movie camera and simply starts filming. The script is handwritten in a spiral notebook with torn pages, but no one pays any attention to it.
At different times, Bon Appétit is called Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales and The Trial. Richard is helpless to finish it. The story changes so often that no one can follow the action. He hires a twenty-three-year-old UCLA film student named Penelope Spheeris to make sense of the reels and reels of footage he has shot.
Spheeris tries. She actually moves into the house with Richard, Shelley, and baby Rain in order to work on editing the raw material. But it’s an impossible task. Bon Appétit never does get released. Penelope Spheeris goes on to be a big film director, making Wayne’s World.
Another big idea, lost in the haze. With all the cocaine he’s doing, Richard’s mind jumps from subject to subject like one of those Mexican beans with worms inside them.
Whenever I read reviews about what a comic genius Richard is, I have the same response: I know him too well. Yeah, Richard Pryor is the funniest man America has ever seen. (Mark Twain is runner-up. Richard is Dark Twain.) But I know he is a junkie first, and a genius second. That’s cold, but it’s the hard, sad truth. It’s the reality of Richard’s life, but not many of his idolizers want to hear that shit. It’s the fundamental, up-front thing you have to say about him. You talk about genius afterward.
When you’re as tight with someone as I am with Richard, you can’t avoid his faults. You can’t gloss over them. Critics and commentators who look from a distance at Richard the movie star–comedian-celebrity can do that. I’ll never have a closer friend than Richard. I don’t love him because he’s a comic genius, and I don’t hate him because he is a degenerate drug user. I love him because he’s Richard.
Best friends: Richard and Yvonne
Around this time I meet another Carol—Carol Brooker, a beautiful girl from Chicago. Carol B. shows up in Los Angeles with a huge natural. It stops traffic. No one has ever seen a huge Afro like that. Her hair must be three feet wide. She has to go through doors sideways.
Carol B. becomes our style maven. She’s like Mr. Blackwell, telling us what’s in and out. She sits down in front of the makeup mirror and doesn’t get up for three hours. But when she does, she looks wonderful.
We all stay in a big duplex at Highland and Wilshire. When the rent collectors come around, we pretend we live in the apartment next door. They knock on one door of the duplex, we answer the other. “Oh, those people? They’re in Europe.”
We don’t have any money, but we do have style. Carol B. makes sure of that. The first time I get a pair of platform shoes, I head over to see Richard. He can’t figure out what’s different.
“You are always smaller than me, motherf*cker,” he says. “What the f*ck did you do, grow?”
I lift up my bells and show Richard my snakeskin platforms. He goes nuts. “Oh, man, we are going to go get mine tomorrow.”
Pretty soon, everybody is wearing them. We always call them “Crenshaw pumps.” I see Jim Brown in a pair of platforms, a big 275-pound man teetering along in heels. Every-body’s walking around like they’re just in from planet Jupiter. The world slides off the deep end. People don’t dress, they costume. Richard grows a natural, the kind of big, Wookie-ass ’do that everybody back then calls a “freedom cap.” I develop a theory that the wilder the times, the more whack the outfits. The bigger the social upheaval—and the 1960s is the biggest—the crazier the clothes. The style fits the scene.