CHAPTER 27
Richard’s in the burn center, and I’m back and forth visiting him all the time. The problem is, when we’re together, we can’t help ourselves from cracking each other up. We cannot not laugh.
Say that Richard in another lifetime is hiding in the river thicket from the Klan, and he knows that if they hear him, he’s one lynched black man. But he sees a doodlebug that looks at him funny and he laughs out loud. He’s discovered and strung up by the Klan, all because it is impossible for him to keep a laugh inside.
He laughs more than anyone I ever meet. His laughter is as contagious as a goddamn hospital. When I am with him, everything is funny. A fat man bending over a sandwich case at a deli, sticking his big ass out a mile wide into the aisle, cracks us up. Everything’s funny.
When Richard is recovering in Northridge, I tell him a joke. I light a match and pass it in the air in front of me. “What’s this?” I ask him. He shakes his head, but he looks as though he knows what’s coming. “Richard Pryor running.”
He stares at me out of that scarred face. His lips and one ear are all burned, he’s getting grafts off his legs and ass to transfer skin to his upper body. He looks at me and, even in the sorry shape he’s in, he laughs. He laughs because it’s funny. Sick, but funny.
I witness Richard’s toughness during his burn treatments, procedures where the dead skin has to be scrubbed off with a rough sponge. It’s one of the most painful procedures in all of medicine. Richard bears up under it. When I talk to him, it’s like a paradox. He’s as happy as I’ve seen him in a long while. He can’t drink and drug, so those demons are laid to rest, at least for a little while. He is full of future plans.
He wants to tell his life story in a movie. He wants to do it all, growing up in Peoria, the chitterling circuit, the marriages, Hollywood. “I want you to help me write it, Paul,” he says.
I tell him what he should do is a children’s show. He needs a new image after the fire, as far away from drugs and freebasing as he can get. “You think they’ll let me?” he asks. On the face of it, Richard hosting a children’s show is not a slam dunk. People know him for his mouth, with “motherf*cker” coming out of it every other second. And they know him as the star who lit himself on fire with the rum he was using as a freebasing solvent.
But kids love Richard. In almost every episode of The Richard Pryor Show, we have a kid’s segment. He’s a child himself, so he has a natural rapport with children. And actually, the top-grossing Richard Pryor film, beating out even Silver Streak, is The Muppet Movie, where he has a cameo as a balloon vendor.
CBS loses their long-running Saturday morning kid’s cartoon from Bill Cosby, Fat Albert, so they sign on for Pryor’s Place. It’s an inner-city Sesame Street–style live-action thing with puppets, and we have a good time writing characters for it. My favorite is Chill the musician, who Richard plays in his finest rasta jazzman style. The theme song has a funk groove: “Whoa, oh, let’s get on over to Pryor’s Place/Whoa, oh, we’re gonna party so don’t be late.”
In later days, when he is back at the bottle, the pipe, and the cigarettes, I hear Richard singing the chorus of that children’s song as he pulls the mirror toward him. He gives me a sly sideways look and laughs. I’m probably the only one present who knows where that line comes from. The rest of the people Richard parties with never get up before noon, so they would never have seen Pryor’s Place.
But our real work in those days is always on Richard’s biopic. Rocco Urbisci, Richard and I settle into his upstairs office, just down the hall from the bedroom where he set himself on fire, and write the script together. Even though I learned to type in high school, it’s easier for us to have a stenographer in the room. It’s how we work on the Pryor Show, and that’s how we work now. We fling bits around, situations and one-liners, trying to crack each other up. The stenographer lady has a hard time keeping up. If we can make her laugh, we know we’re in the right place.
Richard is golden in Hollywood because of his concert films. Richard Pryor: Live on Sunset Strip and Richard Pryor: Here and Now both hit big. Audiences are still looking for the same laughs they found when they watched Live in Concert. People love them some Richard Pryor, but they love him best only one way—behind the microphone. His dramatic features, like The Toy (his comeback film after the suicide attempt), don’t do as well.
His pet project through all this is the movie of his life. What comes out of our script sessions is Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling. We come up with a freaky way to put the film together, approaching it as though Richard is cut loose from time, drifting through episodes of his life while he lies dying from burning himself up.
On set: The producer Rocco Urbisci, Richard, and me during the filming of Jo Jo Dancer
It’s some of the bravest shit I’ve ever seen anyone do on film. During the shoot, Richard puts himself through the whole fire episode again. The audience actually gets to witness his suicide attempt on-screen, watch him pour the rum over his head, see him light himself on fire.
Watching him act out that scene in Jo Jo Dancer, I am floored by the level of pain Richard had to be feeling in order to do something so extreme. That is some horrible misery he is in. It’s like he wants to transfer the emotional pain inside of him to physical pain on the outside. When he’s all scarred up and burnt to shit, we get to see what it’s like on the inside of Richard’s skin.
Not all the scenes are as scarifying as the fire. My favorite parts of the movie are the childhood episodes in the whore-house in Peoria. Richard has so much juice in Hollywood that he packs up the whole production to film on location in his old hometown.
I put a lot of myself into Jo Jo, too. In the scene at the whorehouse where Richard’s mama talks to her friend the psychic, I name the friend Miss Amerae and give her the vibe of my own mama’s voodoo-spell-casting best friend.
Once again, Richard hands over casting duties to me. I bring in one of my favorite singers, Carmen McRae. Billy Eckstein plays another singer, one with whom the young comic Jo Jo shares a burlesque-show stage. The beautiful Dianne Abbot, Robert DeNiro’s wife, plays Jo Jo’s mother. Paula Kelly acts the part of Richard’s fantasy figure, the Satin Doll, the hooker with a heart of gold, the same character we also put into his TV special. There’s a montage sequence tracked by Richard’s Berkeley theme song, “What’s Going On,” which plays over street scenes and Jo Jo’s rise as a comic.
But it’s all too close to the bone. Scoey Mitchell is Jo Jo’s father, who puts him down with the exact words Richard heard from LeRoy Pryor during his youth: “This boy ain’t shit and his mama ain’t shit, either!”
We watch Richard rob his way out of a mob nightclub, destroy the car of one of his wives (“That car’s going to need a tune-up,” cracks his alter ego character, after Richard drives the Cadillac off a cliff), and crawl on his hands and knees trying to pick bits of rock cocaine out of the carpet in his bedroom.
Richard and I get to write his obituary in Jo Jo Dancer. In the last scene, he puts on his preacher-man voice and does a stand-up riff around his own funeral, pretending to gaze down at his own burnt-up corpse.
He tore his ass on the freeway of life. The boy was a mess. He run through life like shit run through a goose. And now he rests here with a smile on his face. I guess that’s a smile. I hope that’s his face. You sure that isn’t his ass? It look like his ass! Some people lead with their chin. Life kind of forces you to do that—to lead with your chin. But this man here, he led with his nuts. If his nuts wasn’t in a vise, he wasn’t happy.
Only Richard could burn himself up and still be able to crack jokes about how his ass resembles his face. When we’re writing the script, I keep thinking I am going too far, that Richard will draw the line somewhere. He never does. That’s some ballsy shit. Richard is fearless all the way through Jo Jo Dancer, confronting the episodes of his life that dog him. Nuts in a vise.
This boy ain’t shit! That line has to be what is echoing somewhere in Richard’s head, right at the moment when he pours 151-proof rum over himself. It’s an awful curse to give to a young child. As f*cked-up as Richard is from his child-hood—and his craziness runs long and deep—I always think the real miracle is that he can laugh at his life at all.