CHAPTER 28
Yvonne wants her own business, so I set her up in a juice bar way down on the eastern end of Sunset. We call it Mooney’s Juices Plus, and we name all the drinks after everyone we know. The Richard Pryor. The Rick James. The Eddie Murphy. We throw a grand opening, but Richard doesn’t show up.
He’s pissed off because I didn’t tell him ahead of time that I was planning on opening the spot—like a child, jealous of secrets being kept from him. The whole juice-bar business represents something in my life that he doesn’t know about. I don’t mean to spring it on him, but I’m busy, and it just happens. It’s Yvonne’s thing. It reminds me of the time Yvonne and I buy a brand-new Cadillac. When we drive up to Northridge in it to see Richard, he reacts as though we’ve somehow pissed him off by not telling him about the car beforehand. I think he feels his life is out of control enough as it is. He doesn’t need surprises from his friends.
But Mooney’s juice bar does okay without Richard’s help. A lot of Hollywood folk come by to buy. Denzel Washington, Debbie Allen, Rick James, Diahann Carroll, and Bette Midler are all customers. But in the same way it happens for a lot of couples, the new business marks the end of my marriage to Yvonne. It’s like a cliché. Start a new business, move into a new house—sure enough, it’ll bust up your relationship.
Healthy business: Yvonne in our shop in Hollywood, Mooney’s Juices
Yvonne and I used to live near a rich white couple who have broken up but still live together. They’re separated, but friends. She lives upstairs in their house, he lives downstairs. They invite us over to dinner every once in a while.
Yvonne and I tell each other that’s how we always want to be. Those people are the coolest. Everyone who breaks up and hates on each other—that’s bullshit. We want to be cool with it. No messy divorce-court battles. We stay friends, just like the upstairs-downstairs neighbor couple. We concentrate on our children.
It’s a crazy mash-up of a family, but somehow it works. My daughter Lisa is a big part of our lives. I bring her down from Oakland every summer to live with me. I also get to know my oldest sons, Daryl and Duane, much better than I ever did before. They are living in Los Angeles now, so I see them fairly often. One time, I bring the star of one of their favorite horror films, the rat-based fright flick, Willard, up to their bedroom to wish them good night. When they see Willard himself, the actor Bruce Davison, come into the room, they freak out.
The other kids are all crazy about the youngest member of the brood, Symeon, the last child Yvonne and I have before we break up. Symeon looks more like Yvonne, while Shane and Spring look like me. Symeon, like Symeon the Righteous from the Bible. The other kids always make a big deal of him, he’s their little pet.
One evening we’re out as a family at El Coyote, the famous Mexican restaurant in Hollywood. Five-year-old Symeon solemnly checks out the patio, which is dominated by gay males, laughing and drinking. He turns to me.
“Daddy, where are all the mommies?” The whole family cracks up laughing. Out of the mouth of babes.
All the kids have their daddy’s show business blood in their veins. Duane and Daryl are already making noise that they want to follow their old man into comedy. Right around this time, Shane lands a role in the second-generation Roots series, making his family proud.
This is the hardest period of my friendship with Richard. He goes all scattered and remote on me. Finally, he tells me what’s up with him. The tingly feeling he has in his limbs, which we always wrote off as nerve damage from the fire, winds up being the first signs of multiple sclerosis. The dreaded MS. A disease that slowly attacks the nerve cells in your brain and spinal cord, so that you get more and more messed up, until you can’t breathe, can’t talk, can’t live. There’s no cure.
MS happens at different rates for different people, and Richard is convinced he will have the slow kind. He’s got healthy years ahead of him, he tells me. It doesn’t work out that way. From the middle of the 1980s onward, MS steals a little more from Richard, week by week, month by month. If I don’t see him for a little while, and then I go up to Northridge, I am always shocked by the change. My best friend is falling apart right in front of my eyes.
“MS is a motherf*cker, Mr. Mooney,” he says. “I wouldn’t wish it on Annette Funicello.” There are rumors back then that the Beach Blanket Bingo actress has MS, too.
“I know why God gave me MS,” Richard says. “I was a bad guy. I was into drugs. But how could God give it to Annette Funicello? She never did nothing bad. She’s a Mouse-keteer! I mean, come on, God!”
As Richard is fading, other comics are coming up who idolize him. I first meet Eddie Murphy in New York in 1985, on the set of Richard’s movie Brewster’s Millions. Eddie’s been on Saturday Night Live since the early 1980s. By the time I meet him, he has already broken out as a big movie star in 48 Hrs., Trading Places, and Beverly Hills Cop. He comes onto the set as a guest of Richard’s costar on Brewster’s, John Candy.
Richard and Eddie huddle up right away. Eddie is telling him how he’s been following Richard’s every move since he was a little kid on Long Island. John Candy looks over to them and frets. He’s jealous of their instant friendship.
“Richard hates me,” Candy says.
“Richard doesn’t hate you,” I say to him, although I know for a fact that Richard cannot stand the man. It’s Chevy Chase all over again.
“He never talks to me like that,” Candy says, looking over at Eddie and Richard together.
“You ain’t black,” I say to him, giving him a blinding glimpse of the obvious. I make some excuse and leave the needy fat man to himself.
I occasionally feel resentment from my professional contacts because of my closeness with Richard. Eddie Murphy and I talk about it. “I have Caesar’s ear, and they don’t like that,” I say. I’m one of the few people who can go up and see Richard whenever, wherever.
“I know that I used to hate you,” Eddie says. “I was always seeing you with stars, and I got mad at you.”
“People dislike you when you have Caesar’s ear. They can’t get to the king, so they get pissed at you.”
Later on, Richard asks me about Murphy. “You don’t like him,” he says.
“What’s there to like?” I say. “He’s just a kid.” I harbor a secret grudge because I feel as though Eddie has lifted some of my material, or at least did some shit that was similar to mine. Comics always feel that way whether justified or not. It’s a chronic condition with us.
I wonder if all alpha males hate on one another at the start. Richard and I don’t get along the first time we meet, either, when he tries to lay that orgy shit on me. It takes a while. Same with Eddie. But we go on to become real friends.
“Now Mr. Mooney can get his money from Eddie,” Richard says. He says it sort of mock bitterly, like he’s half-hurt and half-relieved that I don’t have to rely on his broke-down ass for employment.
Meanwhile, Eddie has a beef with Keenan Wayans, another comic who is coming up just then. Keenan gets into Eddie’s shit over some material each of them claims as his own. They talk about suing each other. I step in between them.
“Don’t do it,” I tell Eddie and Keenan both. “It’s black-on-black crime, brothers. Black people fighting, you know white people love the shit out of that.”
They resolve their differences out of court, and I wind up working with both of them. For his Raw tour in 1987, Eddie invites me to open for him.
I say, “I’m a comic, and you’re a comic, and you want me to open for you?”
“That’s right,” he says.
Keepin’ it Raw: Me with Eddie Murphy and his wife, Nicole Mitchell Murphy
It’s never been done before. The hard-and-fast showbiz tradition is to mix music and comedy. If the headliner is a comic, you open with a musical act. Richard always has Patti LaBelle open for him. Elvis headlines, and he puts Sammy Shore as the first act.
Eddie’s on Oprah, and she asks him who his favorite comic is. “Paul Mooney,” he says. I have to laugh at the look of terror, disgust, and fascination that crosses Oprah’s face at that moment. I am always f*cking with her in my act.
Eddie and I go out on the nationwide Raw tour, and we kill. I can tell I am keeping him sharp. He calls the tour “Raw” because Bill Cosby gets down on him publicly, calling his language too raw. Eddie definitely doesn’t tone it down in response. Somebody counts up the number of times f*ck is used in the movie version of his Raw act, and it turns out it’s the most ever in a film since the Al Pacino gangster flick Scarface.
On the tour bus, they nickname me Indian and Vampire because they never see me sleep. “I have to stay awake and watch this white man drive this bus,” I tell them. Any time I close my eyes, I get bus-plunge visions. It’s all from my experience as an eighth-month fetus in the womb, getting roller-coastered on a road in Shreveport, Louisiana.
When the Wayans brothers get their own show on Fox in 1990, they call it In Living Color. Fox is still trying to break the grip of the Big Three networks back then, so it’s open to edgier material than NBC, ABC, and CBS. For the show’s ensemble, the Wayans hire some people who go on to be stars, like Jim Carrey, David Alan Grier, and Jamie Foxx.
I don’t want to come aboard as a staff writer. But the Wayans create the character of Homey D. Clown off a riff of mine. Homey is a children’s party clown who performs the job as part of a prison work-release program. He doesn’t take any shit from kids or grown-ups. He’s the oppressed figure who is comically vocal about his status.
In one sketch, Jim Carrey leads a Boy Scout–style group to a party with Homey.
Jim Carrey (as scout leader): Do you mind if I use a check to pay for this?
Damon Wayans (as Homey D. Clown): Oh, you want to pay me with a check, huh? And have me stand in line at some damned bank in a clown outfit, degrading and shaming myself to cash your little peanuts? I don’t think so. Homey don’t play that.
Damon slurs the line “your little peanuts” so it sounds like “your little penis.”
Homey has a motto, which may as well be words to live by for every comedian who doesn’t want to play the coon. “Homey may be a clown,” Damon says in character more than once, “but he don’t make a fool out of himself.”
In Living Color is a phenomenon for Fox, delivering the young viewers the network craves. “Homey don’t play that” becomes another of my catchphrases to go national. Richard loves the show. We sometimes watch it together at his place in Northridge. It feels as though our pigeons are coming home to roost. The momentum we started on The Richard Pryor Show is playing out with Eddie Murphy, the Wayanses, and other comics like Dave Chappelle. At the same time that the MS slowly takes away Richard’s ability to talk, new voices are coming up.
The black pack: Arsenio Hall, me, Eddie Murphy, Robert Townsend, and Keenan Ivory Wayans