I was walking around in the front yard and something say, “Don’t breathe!”
“Huh?”
Richard looks from side to side, like, who said that?
He twists his fist into his chest.
Said, “You heard me motherfucker, I said don’t breathe!”
Richard’s face contorts in pain.
“Okay, I won’t breathe I won’t breathe I won’t breathe.”
“Then shut the fuck up!”
“Okay, I’ll shut up. Don’t kill me don’t kill me don’t kill me . . .”
“Then get on one knee and prove it!”
Richard tightens his fist and drops to one knee on the stage.
“I’m on one knee, don’t kill me don’t kill me . . .”
“You thinkin’ about dying now, ain’t you?”
Another twist. Richard curls up in a fetal position on his back.
“Yeah, I’m thinkin’ ’bout dyin’ I’m thinkin’ ’bout dyin’ . . .”
“You didn’t think about it when you was eatin’ that pork.”
Funny as a heart attack.
Everyone marveled that here was a man who could turn a very real brush with death into an uproarious stand-up routine. It wouldn’t be the last time.
The bit ended with Richard sitting up and saying, “I woke up in the ambulance, right? And there wasn’t nothing but white people staring at me. I say, ‘Ain’t this a bitch? I done died and wound up in the wrong motherfuckin’ heaven. Now I got to listen to Lawrence Welk for the rest of my days.’ ”
The bit was a perfect illustration, critic Mel Watkins wrote, of Richard taking an audience to the peak of emotion and then letting them off with a nice laugh.
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In December, Louie Robinson of Ebony magazine visited the Northridge estate to write a cover story on newlyweds Richard and Deboragh, with full photo spread. The triumphs of 1977, he wrote, had made Richard “a folk hero to millions of Blacks (they mob him wherever he appears, tugging at him, wanting to touch him)” and “one of the wealthiest of the ‘new breed’ of actors in Hollywood.”
His marriage to Deboragh was his third “on paper,” Richard said, but insisted it was his first real marriage, the first time he’d married for love.
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Sometime in the first hours of New Year’s Day, 1978, things went awry at the Northridge house. Paul Mooney and his wife, Yvonne, had been there earlier but left when he saw the pentagram begin to glow on Richard’s forehead. “There’s going to be some shit happening here,” he told his wife.
“Richard never lays a hand on a woman when I am around,” Mooney writes. “It’s like he is afraid of my judgment. Then again, when I see the werewolf in Richard about to come out, I know enough to get gone. So I’m never present to witness him turn violent. But I see evidence enough that he abuses his wives and girlfriends horribly.”
The fuse was lit, according to actor D’Urville Martin, when Richard became convinced that Deboragh had been more than just friends with one of the women at the party. Richard got his .357 Magnum, then told Deboragh and her two friends, Beverly Clayborn and Edna Solomon, they had five seconds to get out of his house.
Richard fired in the air, shattering a ten-thousand-dollar Tiffany chandelier as he herded them out. The three women took shelter in Clayborn’s Buick. Richard rammed the Buick repeatedly with his Mercedes. When the women took off on foot, Richard walked over to the abandoned car and shot out its tires and windshield, executioner-style.
On January 19, Beverly Clayborn, wearing a neck brace, filed a personal suit against Richard in Los Angeles Superior Court for seventeen million dollars. “If she gets it,” he quipped, “I’ll marry her.”
When Deboragh filed for divorce on February 3, the January issue of Ebony was still on newsstands with the cuddling newlyweds smiling out from the cover.
It took Richard a long time to come to terms with what he had done—how quickly he’d managed to ruin the marriage he swore would last. The sad part (yes, there’s a sad part to this story) is that Richard and Deboragh were still in love, they said, still wanted to make their marriage work, but vile and hateful things had been said that night that could not be unsaid or swept aside. Such things fester, lurk in the house like dozing demons, liable at any time to awaken in fury.
In November, Richard pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of malicious mischief, was fined five hundred dollars, and ordered to seek psychiatric help. By that time, he was opening his sold-out concerts with a reenactment of the incident, though amending certain details. “It seemed fair to kill my car to me, right? Because my wife was going to leave my ass. I say, ‘Not in this motherfucker, you ain’t. Uh-uh. No, Lawd. If you leave me you be driving those Hush Puppies you got on, ’cause I’m gonna kill this motherfucker here.”
More frequently on stage, Richard was giving voice and personality to all manner of animals, body parts, bodily functions, and inanimate objects. Here he is shooting out the tires: “I shot it. ‘Fooo-whoom!’ Tire say, ‘Aahhhh-aaaahh.’ It got good to me, I shot another one. ‘Bwooom!’ . . . Aahhhh-aaaahh.’ And the vodka I was drinking said, ‘Go ahead, shoot something else.’ I shot the motor, motor fell out the motherfucker, right? The motor say, ‘Fuck it!’ ”
As Mel Watkins notes, the device “enriched his performances with a resonance that transcended race . . . Routines in which dogs, monkeys, pipes, or automobiles spoke in black voices called forth images of antebellum animal tales and the oral techniques of black storytellers or ‘liars.’ ”
It wasn’t just the voices. Richard had developed an almost eerie ability to transform himself physically to mimic physical characteristics, body types, and facial expressions. One of the most moving segments of his 1978 concert program comes when Richard describes walking in his backyard, grieving the accidental deaths of his pet spider monkeys,* when a neighbor’s usually ferocious German shepherd jumps the fence to console him. Richard’s face takes on not just the attitude of a German shepherd, but one feeling confusion and pity.
David Brenner has said that “Pryor’s routines were really more like plays; one-man theater where he plays all the parts.” And, we would add, he plays the props and the scenery, too.
The tour was cut short when Richard got the news that his grandmother Marie had suffered a stroke. Richard rushed to her bedside at his house in Northridge where she had been staying.
He had to face the fact that it was time to take her home to Peoria.
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Marie died some weeks later, in mid-December, at Methodist Medical Center. Richard fell apart. Relatives struggled to pry his hand loose from hers as he cried and shook “like a rag doll.” When they had succeeded in dragging him out of her hospital room, he broke loose and ran back, crying, “Everything I’ve had and everything I’ve got is gone.”
Mama Marie had been the one person he could always turn to. Even after he got to be a big star, she always called bullshit on him. She never tried to flatter him or win favor. But neither did she ever relinquish her role as his “mama.”
Richard unnerved his young daughters, Elizabeth and Rain, on the trip back to Los Angeles. “I just don’t see how I can go on,” he told them. “Nothing means shit no more.” (Probably not the best thing to tell one’s nine- and eleven-year-old daughters, Rain allows, “but I guess he needed to tell someone and we were handy.”)
It took him years, according to friends, to come to grips with Mama Marie’s death. Rain is not certain he ever got over the loss.
Yet it could not have been more than a week or two after she died that Richard, at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach, California, on December 28, 1978, gave what is considered the greatest performance of his life. Or, if you accept the judgment of critic Pauline Kael, the greatest performance of anyone’s life.
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Cameras were rolling as people milled in the aisles and chatted in the lobby during the intermission that followed Patti LaBelle’s opening act. Without introduction and the house lights still up, Richard bounded out across the stage and, with a great leap, seized the microphone from its stand as he landed on both feet with a loud thump that sounds, on film, to our ears, like the signal rim shot that opens “Like a Rolling Stone.”
Richard performed the act he had honed to perfection on tour the previous autumn. He began by goofing with those in the audience as they scurried back to their seats, and he never let up or even settled into anything that felt like a practiced routine. The one time he paused to catch his breath, Richard asked that the house lights be turned up so that he could introduce an old friend in the audience. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “Mr. Huey P. Newton.” Maddeningly, the camera did not pivot to capture the moment when Huey half stood and waved to the crowd, in the unlikely event he actually did.
For an hour and fifteen minutes Richard riffed on his troubles with the law, his recent heart attack, and how his machismo was undone by the mysteries of the female orgasm. Richard relied on none of his seasoned characters—there was no Oilwell or Big Bertha, no sermons from Reverend Du Rite or Mudbone monologues to fall back on—just pure, uncut Richard Pryor. Working entirely without props, gimmicks, or excuses,” Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “he creates a world so intensely realized and richly detailed that it puts most million-dollar blockbusters to shame.” When the resulting movie, Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, was released to theatres just one month later, David Handelman, writing in the New York Times Magazine, called it his “indisputable moment of glory.” Not only is Richard Pryor: Live in Concert the crown jewel of stand-up comedy movies, it was also the first. Never before had a feature-length stand-up concert film received a theatrical release. Which seems fitting, in the same way that Henry Aaron, the last major leaguer to have played in the Negro Leagues, remains the first player listed in the alphabetical Encyclopedia of Baseball.
New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael wrote that it was “a consummation of his years as an entertainer” and “probably the greatest of all recorded performance films. Pryor had characters and voices bursting out of him . . . Watching this mysteriously original physical comedian you can’t account for his gift and everything he does seems to be for the first time.” In sum, she deemed it the greatest performance she’d ever seen or ever hoped to see.
* In the routine, Richard claims the monkeys died while he was out of town. He’d left them in the care of a friend. The curious monkeys turned the knob on a gas stove but, having no matches to light it, asphyxiated and died. “He said what?” Penelope Spheeris said when we told her about this routine. “No! He fucking starved those monkeys to death! They forgot to feed them.”