CHAPTER 2
First time I meet Richard Pryor, it’s in the late 1960s at a crowded party in my bungalow on Sunset. The place is full of people.
Richard walks in, and right away I sense he is different. Out of the corner of my eye, I chart his course through the party people. He has a woman with him, but she trails behind as though he has forgotten all about her.
He is smiling and laughing. Everything pleases him. He knows there are lots of women and drugs around, and that fills him with childish delight.
Like a kid in a candy store, I think.
He is the eternal child. That is Richard’s whole secret, right there. A lot of us swallow our childlike side, beat it down, scorch it clean. Not Richard. He speaks with the vulnerability of a child, and that’s what makes people love him.
So he makes his way through the party, and finally he arrives at me, and right away, the first thing out of his mouth, he says he wants to go to bed with me.
Not me, personally. Ain’t nobody straighter and more p-ssy-crazy than Richard. He means he wants to go to bed with me and the women I am with and the woman he’s with and whatever other women he can convince to jump in with us. All of us together.
“Let’s all get in bed and have a freak thing!” he says.
The first words I ever hear out of Richard Pryor’s mouth.
Only, the woman I am with is my half sister, Carol LaBrea. Carol is drop-dead gorgeous. She’s a model, the first black woman ever to make it on the cover of a white fashion magazine, French Vogue. Naturally, Richard is knocked out by her.
Carol knows the woman Richard’s with, a cute little girl who works for pro football Hall of Famer and actor Jim Brown. Carol and she moonlight as go-go dancers in the cages at Whisky A Go Go on the Strip.
Hollywood, 1968. Everyone in town is talking about a new movie being shot at Columbia Pictures. A free-love kind of movie. Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice it’s called when it comes out, but right now everyone refers to it as “the Natalie Wood swingers movie.” Or “Elliot Gould’s thing where he winds up in bed with everybody.”
I always call it Bob & Carol & Ted & Lassie.
Orgies are in the air back then.
I look at Richard, and I’m thinking, Who is this freak?
I laugh and say, “You just say whatever comes into your head, don’t you?”
Richard laughs. “Let’s go, let’s do it, man, look at these ladies!”
Who is this … child? Because that’s how he strikes me right away. A lot of people might come out of the bag at him, get all pissed because he’s suggesting an orgy. I have all the more reason to be affronted, since Carol is my half sister.
But from the very start, from that first meeting, I find it impossible to get angry at Richard. He’s so obviously without guile. He just has no inhibitions. Like a baby—I want the tit, and I am going to grab for the tit.
No other considerations figure into his actions, nothing else other than “I want it.” No ideas like, Well, this might not be cool, or, maybe I’m being rude—nothing like that. The man is short on impulse control.
For everybody else in the world, an attitude such as this comes off as totally insufferable. But Richard makes it work because he’s completely open and vulnerable. Sure, he’s selfish. But he’s selfish with the innocence of a four-year-old. He’s like the way I used to be when I was a child. He makes me feel protective toward him.
I tell him no, I am not going to get into an orgy with him.
Richard slides away from me like the iceberg sliding away from the Titanic. I watch him as he continues on, crashing into other groups and couples at the party. Wanna do an orgy? I have to laugh. I don’t feel any blowback or negativity from him because I refuse. He just moves on to the next possibility. But that brief run-in gives me a strange gut feeling, as though everything in my world is going to change.
“If he keeps that up,” Carol says, “he’s going to get himself a beatdown.”
“If he keeps that up,” I say, “he’s going to get himself laid.”
Two weeks later, I bump into him again at a Trini Lopez concert in West Hollywood. I see him at the after-party backstage, and he runs around pretending to hide from me. When I finally corner him, he fake cowers and says, “Don’t hit me!” I can’t help laughing.
“If I’d a known she was your sister, I never would have said that,” Richard says.
“How’d you do that night?” I ask him. “You ever find an orgy?”
“Oh, I did okay,” he says, laughing. But not before I catch something vague about his response.
“You don’t remember what happened that night, do you?” I say.
“I must’ve been high,” he says. He shrugs.
It’s the first hint I get of Richard Pryor’s Eternal Present. Maybe I should just fade away from him right now, I think. Avoid a lot of trouble. Then Richard laughs, and I know I’m hooked. We have a drink together, and just like that, we are best friends. It’s as though I have known him all my life. It’s that deep, that quick.
Even though I have a feeling that sooner or later it’s all going to crash, I still accept Richard’s friendship. He is irresistible.