Drugs are a waste of time. They destroy your memory and your self-respect and everything that goes along with your self-esteem.
—Kurt Cobain
Rick’s dope habit, combined with hot groupie sex, almost ruined his appearance on the TV show The A-Team in 1985. Rick told a writer for the A.V. Club that his performance on this show was so bad he was embarrassed. Before the taping, Rick said, he’d been up all night with two women, “getting high and having ferocious sex.” When he arrived on the set, he said, staffers had to write out big cue cards for him because he couldn’t remember his lines. One of Rick’s costars, George Peppard, walked off the set in disgust. “Not only was I loaded, but I forgot the shit,” Rick told the A.V. Club. “I hate it when I don’t do a great job on something.”
In the same interview, Rick said he tried to atone for the A-Team debacle when he subsequently performed on the soap opera One Life to Live, reading the script in advance, going to sleep on time, and “kind of redeeming myself.” He also said his good behavior in this instance was motivated by the fact that One Life to Live was his mother’s favorite soap opera.
But Rick’s continued drug use prevented him from fighting successfully against his declining popularity. He realized this, and as his record sales fell, his efforts to free himself from cocaine increased. He tried to avoid drug dealers, but as Rick’s accountant Dick Romer notes, “Drug dealers are like leeches when you’re Rick James. Everyone wants a piece of you. It’s just one big party. As soon as people heard he was coming, the dealers would line up for an opportunity to get their foot in the door.”
People not only sold him drugs, they gave them to him. Richard Wesley, a screenwriter who worked with Rick, talks about an actor he refused to name who showed up at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles when Rick was staying there. “Rick was sick and exhausted and not at his best,” Wesley says. “He needed rest, but this guy showed up, and instead of saying, ‘Rick, How you doin’? What’s goin’ on?’ the first thing he did was bust out some cocaine for Rick to snort. That was the last thing Rick needed.” Wesley says that the next morning “Rick was worse than he’d been the night before.”
By 1985 Rick’s habit began nudging him toward death. Shortly before Reflections was released, a friend found him unconscious in his Buffalo home around midnight, and an ambulance rushed him to Erie County Medical Center to recover. Before Rick began producing his next album, his accountants and attorneys, alarmed at his now continuous drug usage, said they would resign unless he entered a rehab program. So in March 1985 Rick agreed to enter the drug dependence treatment unit at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, for treatment of his cocaine addiction.
According to court records introduced by Motown’s attorneys during that company’s later suit against him, Rick stated he had been “lackadaisical” and neglectful of his business “while high” during the months preceding his hospital admission. He said he felt responsible for various adverse events and believed these were “signs from God,” or forewarnings to change.
After the arrangements had been made with McLean, Johnson called Levi Ruffin to ask him and his wife, Jackie, to help get Rick there. When the Ruffins walked into Rick’s room, Ruffin said, “Rick was sick, with [imagined] bugs on his body, and he was scratching them. . . . Jackie saw him, and she cried.”
At the last minute, according to Ruffin, Rick decided he didn’t want to go. “Me and Jackie went in there and we drug his ass,” Ruffin said. “He was kicking and screaming like a little child, not wanting to go to the goddamn drug spot. We got him in the van, he finally calmed down, and we drove him there and we just prayed and hoped that when he came back he would be all right.”
Rick was never all right. He repeatedly returned to drugs after pledging fealty to clean living. On one occasion, after McLean, his staffers had arranged a showcase performance by the Mary Jane Girls for record company executives that unfortunately coincided with one of Rick’s many stays in the Betty Ford Center. Managers at the treatment facility allowed Rick to attend the performance provided two guards stayed with him to ensure he did no drinking or drugging. On the way to the show, Rick announced to the two busloads of staffers and performers that no one, including himself, would be allowed to ingest any drugs or drink any liquor at the nightclub where the performance was to take place. But an hour into the performance, Rick evaded the two guards and disappeared for the rest of the night. No one had any doubt about what he was doing.
His addiction to drugs would plague him until his death.