When my mother and I got back from Tahiti, Daddy suddenly offered to buy us a house. There was no explanation—“I want to buy you a house”—and we didn’t push for one. We were over the moon about it. We were finally going to make the leap from renters to homeowners, and it was a big, joyous leap.
After several weeks of looking at real estate, we found a place on a quiet cul-de-sac in Studio City. It had a big fenced-in yard that pressed up against a dense grove of trees that for some weird reason reminded me of Sherwood Forest, where—as legend has it—Robin Hood hung out with his merry brothahs. When the realtor showed us inside the house, however, I took an immediate dislike to the place. I told my mother that the house had a bad vibe, and that the previous tenants had hated the place. I don’t know what made me say that, but it was a strong feeling, and I thought I should share it with her.
My mother didn’t listen. She thought the place was perfect. “It’s just right for a nice, classy, well-to-do family,” she said. “I’ll even get you a dog.”
I didn’t understand what she meant. If it was right for a nice, classy well-to-do family, what the fuck were we doing there?
When Mom called Daddy to tell him about the house, there was a major glitch. “I ain’t gonna buy you that house unless it’s in Rain’s name,” he said. And when I got on the phone he repeated the same thing: “I’m not putting it in your mother’s name, baby, because I don’t want her getting it.”
My mother was very upset. She didn’t want to put the house in my name because she was sure I’d kick her out the moment we had our first argument. I told her she was wrong, but she wouldn’t listen. She wasn’t willing to live with that kind of uncertainty. She kept badgering Richard to be reasonable, but he refused to change his mind, and our short-lived dream of homeownership came to an abrupt end.
For me, it was no big deal—I was just a kid, about to start freshman year at the infamous Beverly Hills High School—but for my mother it was a complete disaster. As far as she was concerned, the whole world was against her, and she was condemned to spend the rest of her miserable life in low-rent housing.
She was depressed for weeks, but she emerged from the fog, briefly, to help me get ready for school. “It’s going to be a lot of fun,” she said sarcastically. “Get ready for all the bitch shit.”
Bitch shit? I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I found out soon enough.
With my friend Sheila (center) and another girl. Note the fabulous eighties fashions.
My goal, even then, was to become an actor, as it had been for many years, but I knew I had to get through high school first. I imagined it was going to be a lot fun, but I imagined wrong.
The “bitch shit” my mother was referring to—adolescent mind games—had been raised to an art form by the girls at Beverly Hills High. Every girl had an opinion, and they weren’t shy about expressing it.
Here was the assessment from one of my Jewish classmates: “Oh my God, Rain! Your hair is HUGE. I can barely see myself in the mirror through your BIG HAIR. Like what do you keep in there, anyway? Like is it true that you people put plastic on your couches because you’re afraid the grease from your hair might stain the upholstery?”
And after I had the audacity to ask about a cute boy in our class, this was the choice response from another of the Chosen: “You like Joshua? You can’t be serious, Rain. He likes Jewish girls, and, like, duh, I’m Jewish and you’re not.…No, you’re not. Just because you know all the songs from Fiddler on the Roof doesn’t make you Jewish. What? You say your mother’s Jewish? Well, first of all, Jewish women don’t marry blacks, and, second, there’s no such thing as a black Jew.”
I guess she’d never heard of Sammy Davis.
Once again, I was quick to get the message. In grade school, I’d also been told that I wasn’t neither Jewish enough nor black enough. Now that the Jews had been so quick to reject me, I pinned my hopes on the sistahs and figured the only way to win them over was to be totally street.
The first two sistahs I met, Page and Sheila, were on the drill team, and they urged me to join.
“You gotta be on drill team,” Sheila told me. “Get your black back. All the movin’ and groovin’ will set you free.”
So I joined the drill team, wowing everyone with the skills I’d honed in grade school, but the sistahs weren’t impressed. I wasn’t black enough. I was barely as brown as a paper bag. “Girl,” Page told me one day, “you so bright I need sunglasses just to look at you!”
That fall, my daddy came to school to watch me in a play, and for a brief period the sistahs stopped giving me a hard time. To know I was Richard Pryor’s daughter was one thing, but seeing him in the flesh, in the audience, laughing his big laugh, was something else altogether.
For a while, Sheila and I actually became quite close. We would go visit Daddy—she got to see Richard Pryor, in his own house!—and she was understandably starstruck. But that passed, too, alas. Before long, Sheila was saying, “Well, your daddy’s famous. Don’t make you famous.”
Fuck her. Someday, I was going be famous, too.
But I had to get through high school first, and so far I wasn’t having much fun. I hadn’t found my place in kindergarten or in grade school, and these kids were worse—bigger and meaner and even more exclusionary.
For a time, in a desperate bid to be accepted, I played chameleon again, and at one point I tried dressing like some of the girls. At first, I went for the freshman preppy look: pleated skirts, button-down shirts, and knee socks with loafers. Didn’t quite cut it, though.
Then I morphed into an eighties girl: big hair, leggings, and off-the-shoulder Flashdance-style tunics. Sorry, girl. Try again.
I had fun, briefly, as a neo-trash hooker: skintight tank tops, tube shirts that doubled as micro-miniskirts, and high heels that would have looked good on my father’s whores. Local construction crews seemed to like the look, but the girls at school didn’t respond.
Finally, I gave up. I figured nothing gave a girl cachet like a genuine boyfriend, so I decided to find myself a man. Gabe Bologna was one of the very first guys who took the time to talk to me, and I thought I was in love, but he told me he wasn’t interested in me “that way,” and so I decided to settle for his friendship. We remained close all through high school, and I spent so much time at his house that his parents—Renée Taylor and Joseph Bologna, the actors—became like second parents to me (although “second” implies that I had real parents, and to describe Richard and Shelley as parents would be a disservice to decent parents everywhere).
Sophomore year, I developed a mad crush on Gabe’s friend, who also wasn’t interested in me, not in “that way,” anyway. Then I fell for Adamo, who was as uninterested as the other guys. It hurt, of course, because I was young and insecure and desperate to be loved, but the friendships survived, and I realized that they obviously liked something about me, so I couldn’t be all bad.
Slowly, I befriended a number of girls in my class. We weren’t the coolest clique in school—quite the contrary!—but we were certainly cool enough for each other.
I came to rely on my high school friends. Whenever things with my mother became unbearable, I always had somewhere to run. You know the kid in high school who’s always looking to crash at the homes of other kids? Well, I was that kid.
One day, out of the blue, and for no apparent reason, my mother took me to a roller rink in Reseda, in the San Fernando Valley. I remember wearing spandex pants and a red tube top that kept slipping down because I had no boobs, and I remember that I was grinning the whole time—skating and grinning and laughing. For years afterward, my mother made a special effort to take me skating from time to time. I guess she had seen how happy it made me, and that made her happy, too, so she’d put her troubles aside and we’d pile into the car and off we’d go, and sometimes we’d invite friends to come along. Cher came once or twice. So did Jim Brown, who was friendly with both my parents. And once in a while I’d even bring a friend from school. Sometimes, if she was busy, she’d drop me off at Flippers, in West Hollywood, just like a regular mother, and I’d skate on my own,
One night, senior year, we went to a Valley disco and danced together. I’ve got to admit, she was a pretty good dancer. The place was also open on the weekends, and sometimes I’d beg her to drop me there when it opened, at eleven in the morning, and I’d stay and dance till six at night. One thing I know about myself for sure: when I’m dancing, nothing can trouble me. When I’m dancing, everything’s right with the world.
One of my best high school memories has nothing to do with high school at all. It was my Sweet Sixteen party, which was held at the Del Rey Yacht Club, in the Marina, on May 19, 1985.
My mom was relatively together by this time, having worked to make it happen, and my grandparents helped out, too. Herb and my father covered the expenses, and Grandma made sure it was catered.
We had the party two months before my actual birthday, before my friends scattered for the summer, and for some crazy reason I decided to turn it into an all-girl party. The night of the party, though, when the guests began to arrive, I suddenly had second thoughts. “I wish I’d invited the guys,” I told my mother.
“But honey,” she said, “you said you wanted a very girlie sweet sixteen!”
“I know,” I said. “But it seems silly now.”
It was fun, anyway. My girlfriends were all there, along with my half sister Elizabeth, and we spent the first hour inspecting each other’s outfits, giggling insanely, and eating everything in sight.
At my sweet sixteen birthday party. The lovely girl behind me is Gabe in drag.
Then I got the surprise of my life: Somebody cranked up the music—Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”—and three girls I didn’t recognize sashayed their way through the door, shaking their booties. They were terrible dancers, and, as it turned out, they weren’t even girls. They were my three best male friends, Gabe, Jason, and Adamo, “crashing” the party in full drag (at my mother’s request).
My dad came, too, of course, and I sang a little song I’d written for him, accompanying myself on the piano, which actually moved him to tears, and when it was over my mother asked people to sign the little guest book she’s set on a table near the door. She wanted to remember, and I have that book to this day.
“Rain, today is but YOURS,” my father wrote. “Sweet 16. I love you. I wish I could spell, Baby, so I could write all the fine things about you this day.”
Elizabeth wrote, “I want you to know that no matter what, I’ll always be here.”
The boys also weighed in: “I’m not a transvestite,” Jason assured me. “You’re the only one I’ll dress like a woman for!”
Gabe said, “I look like a putz in girl’s clothing. I love you. I hope you still like me even though I am a lesbian.”
And Adamo fessed up: “It is true. I AM a lesbian…I think you are a great lady and you deserve the best.”
My mom also wrote in the book: “Rain, beautiful Rain, I love you so. I am so proud of you—on this day my heart is so full. You have the magic…you have the music…You can have the world if you want it. Rain, in all my secret dreams, I couldn’t even dream up a daughter as wonderful as you.”
It was a rare and perfect day, and I will never forget it. It reminded me that there were times when my mother and I were everything a mother and a daughter could be. You seldom see those things when you’re a kid, but you see them later—when you grow up. But you can’t go back in time and tell them, I know you loved me, Mom. I know you did your best. I love you too.
That summer, I went to Idylwild, another performing camp, this one closer to home, right there in Southern California. I was cast as Anita in West Side Story and came away from the experience determined to make it as an actor.
Junior year I got cast in an elaborate Beverly Hills High production of Peter Pan, as Tiger Lily, and it was such a professional production—down to the wires and harnesses that let us fly through the air—that I just knew I was going to spend the rest of my life acting. It also helped that my father attended the performance, and praised me to no end. “Good work, baby,” he kept saying. “Real good work. You obviously got the stuff.”
After an academically dismal junior year, Daddy pulled some strings and arranged several auditions for me, including a stab at a part in The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, which he was in. I didn’t even land a walk-on, and I figured I must have been pretty bad if Richard Pryor couldn’t get me a part in one of his own movies!
By senior year I was barely scraping by academically, but I was still pouring my heart and soul into acting. I got the plum role of Rizzo, in Grease, but got pulled from the production at the last minute because of my failing grades. That was a very painful and humiliating experience.
I found myself spending more and more time with the bad-ass black girls. We’d go down to the ’hood, and share that sickening fortified wine with some genuine gangbangers, until “the shit put us on a tilt.” I swear to God, that wine was evil. I remember falling asleep on my feet!
The girls and I also spent a little time in Venice, entering dance competitions at the famous pier, and on weekend nights we’d hit the clubs and drink and buy a little dope. One night, some friends and I made the forty-five-minute drive to Magic Mountain, the amusement park, and one girl got pretty stoned. She wanted to go to a gang party in Compton, and I refused. She called me a pussy and worse, and I left.
The next morning, at school, the argument escalated, “I’m gonna kick your ass, bitch, and then I’m going to kill you.”
What the hell?!
“You gonna kill me?” I said. “Well come on, then, bitch!”
I had a little pocketknife with a one-inch blade, and I whipped it out and went hard-ass on her.
“You’re crazy,” she said.
We ended up in the principal’s office, and I got endless shit from my mom as a result, but it turned out to be a good thing. I figured girls were nothing but trouble. They either rejected you or got you into shit you had no business getting into. Maybe it was time to give the boys another chance.
Within a few weeks, I was dating Larry, a gorgeous half-Mexican guy, and one day I took him out to Parthenia Street to introduce him to my father. Daddy walked into the living room with a shotgun in his hand and looked Larry in the eye and said, “What are your intentions with my daughter, young man?”
Larry turned a little pale—well, pretty pale for a half-Mexican guy—and a moment later my father was laughing. Larry didn’t find it all that funny, though. He said my father had a weird sense of humor. “That’s what he’s known for!” I said.
Not long after that, I got into another in a series of horrible arguments with my mother, about God knows what. I decided I should kill myself, so I swallowed half a bottle of Tylenol and immediately called Larry.
“I’ve taken a bunch of pills,” I said dramatically. “It’s all over!”
Larry came to the house but didn’t know what to do with me, so he drove me back to his mother’s place. “Rain, Rain—chew moost trow up dee pills!” she said in her broken English. “Chew moost try to bomitar!”
I tried to vomit, but nothing came up. “I’m actually not feeling all that sick,” I said.
She was still very worried, though, so she called my mother and they agreed to meet at Cedars Sinai. Mom was waiting for us when we got there, outside the emergency room, looking terrified. I remember thinking to myself, in my addled, adolescent way, that maybe she loved me after all.
The doctors, unimpressed, sent me home and told me to sleep it off, and Mom called Daddy that night to tell him what had happened.
The next afternoon, Dad phoned and told me to come over. When I got to his house, he asked if I’d seen what was in the driveway.
“Not really,” I said.
He took me outside and pointed at a brand-new Nissan. “That’s for you,” he said. He never said a word about my little suicide attempt.
“Wow,” I said. “A car? For me?”
“All yours, baby.”
“What should I do with it?”
“What do you mean, baby? It yours. Drive it home!”
I had been taking driver’s education, so I knew how to drive a little, but I didn’t actually have a learner’s permit. This didn’t seem to bother Dad in the slightest, though, so I thanked him, gave him a little peck on the cheek, and drove home in my new car.
I didn’t hit a single person and didn’t even have a single near miss, but when I got home my mother went absolutely ballistic. She called my dad and screamed at him. “She tried to kill herself! She doesn’t need a car. She needs help!”
I don’t think my father really understood this business about “help.” Didn’t the car help? Wasn’t that a nice thing? Would it take a cooler car to keep Rain from wanting to kill herself?
My father could only really relate to his own needs. Where other people were concerned, gifts and money did the trick. He didn’t realize that a nice solid hug would have done a lot more for me than a new car.
In 1986, while I was still a senior, my father married his new girlfriend, Flynn Belaine, whom he’d met on the set of a recent movie. In a matter of months, he and Flynn would divorce, but they remarried again a few years later, and their rocky relationship provided two new siblings for me, Steven and Kelsey.
Once again, my father had never even bothered to tell me that he was going off to Hawaii to get married. I had to read about it in the local paper, along with the rest of the world, and I didn’t always like what he said—especially when it was about the family. In one recent interview, for example, he told a reporter that he wasn’t crazy about the way his kids were turning out.
Man, that hurt.
I remember sitting down to write my father a letter, to tell him exactly how I felt about all of this, and I remember crying as I wrote the letter, but I never had the courage to mail it. I kept it, though. And here it is:
Dear Father,
Things at home are o.k. but life is not.
I cannot believe that you didn’t call me back or even give me your new number. You treat me like a stranger. I am your blood, (even if I was a misfortune), not a fan.
I could care less about your money. All I ever asked for was your time and love. But no, you gave up and gave in. You didn’t even try. You seem to always find time for women. You have yourself a hell of a rep…. You write about us (in the paper). Here’s a quote: “I don’t like the people my children are becoming.” Or this one: “I want to get married again some day and I want me and my wife to decide on when we have kids.”
It’s funny how you never take responsibility for your actions. You just blame everything on the women or your drugs. Now that you don’t take drugs who are you going to blame now? Don’t you know every time you point at somebody or something you’ve got three of them suckers pointing right back at you?
I have spent 17 years hurting inside from you. You really haven’t given me anything to let me know that you care. I may mess up sometimes but I’ve never really screwed up. I’ve never O.D’d. on drugs or gotten kicked out of school for cheating. I’ve messed up normally. Like not doing well in school or being obnoxious at home. But never once have I really been falling down…. I am Rain: musician, actress, singer, dancer. Stop trying to avoid my existence on this planet.
I mean, when are you going to get down off of your high horse and get involved? I’ve been there for you. I was willing to try. I gave you my love but never once did you give your love to me.
I don’t know what makes you think you’re so damn special. Sure, you’re a star, but so is Rob Lowe. You’re not all that great to me. That’s only because as a person you are not special. It’s funny how a stranger falls in love with you but someone who really knows you wouldn’t dare take the chance. Yeah, and you’re a great actor. But the show you’ve been putting on for the last 17 years of my life has drawn its last curtain.
Have a great marriage and maybe if she doesn’t see the real you she’ll stick around.
—Rain