Shortly after we returned from our honeymoon, I connected with my old business manager and again began making the Hollywood rounds. My father, meanwhile, continued to deteriorate, but even as he was falling apart he always tried to put a happy face on things. Don’t worry about me, baby. Everything’s good. I feel fine.
In early 1994, when Daddy was already beginning to find it difficult to walk, Jennifer Lee came back into the picture. Initially, this seemed like a good thing. I figured she still loved him, and that she had returned in an hour of need to do what she could to help. But by 2001 I started having my doubts about Jennifer.
When I was alone with my father, I expressed my misgivings about her, but he assured me that Jennifer was only there in the capacity of an employee—to help him manage his various business enterprises, and to juggle his increasingly frequent medical appointments—and that there was no emotional component to their relationship. “That woman and I are ancient history,” he told me. “She’s just here to help.”
So you could imagine my confusion when I was told by Jennifer that they had married in June of that year. I was crushed. Obviously, Jennifer had a real hold on my father, and this worried me.
As Daddy got worse, she began to take total control, and before long their roles were completely reversed. Now she was the one with the power, not Daddy, and it looked like that’s the way it was going to be until the bitter end. Before long, I was informed that I couldn’t simply stop by the house at my leisure, but that I had to schedule appointments in advance. Since I had never made any secret of my feelings for Jennifer, I wondered if she was simply going out of her way to make things as difficult as possible for me.
When I finally did make it over to the house, my concern over my father’s health only increased. On one occasion, sick with worry, I went to see him with my half sister Elizabeth, to talk about the situation. He told us he was afraid, although he didn’t say why, and I could see the fear in his eyes.
A week later, I went back to find him looking absolutely haunted.
“Are you still afraid?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
“Then we need to do something about it, don’t we?”
“What can we do?” he said, shrugging his shoulders helplessly.
“We can get you out of here,” he said.
“No,” he said “No. No. This is my home. I’m not going anywhere.”
I began to wonder if he was playing games with me, or if his mind was playing games with him, and if these little dramas were somehow designed—consciously or not—to keep life exciting and make him feel more alive. I couldn’t imagine what it was like, sitting in that house, deteriorating by the day, waiting for the end.
Then I began getting unsigned letters telling me that I was causing my father undue stress and that I needed to stay away from him. I assumed they were from Jennifer, but she was still in control, so I couldn’t confront her without the risk of being banished.
The next time I went to the house, Daddy refused to talk about the situation, and the staff seemed equally tight-lipped.
I came home one afternoon to find a message from a friend on my answering machine: Have you looked at your father’s website lately?
I had not, so I logged onto richardpryor.com. The site was managed by Jennifer, so perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but I was completely floored by the hateful, ugly things she had written about me and other members of the family. She said that she, Jennifer, was the only person who truly loved Richard, the only one who cared enough to take care of him, and the only one who tended to his interests, and that the rest of us were simply out for ourselves.
“I am very sorry these girls didn’t ever have a relationship with their father,” she wrote in one posting, referring to us as “low-life bitches,” then she went on to describe the “Herculean tasks” she performed on Daddy’s behalf.
Within a few months, Richard Jr. sued Jennifer, unsuccessfully, for the right to become Daddy’s conservator. He claimed that Jennifer was refusing to take proper care of him and had been misappropriating his money. Jennifer countersued and dragged me into it. I was deposed by a team of lawyers, and I told them that Jennifer had hired some good people to take care of my father. This was the best I could do without lying. The truth is, I wasn’t comfortable with her being in charge of Daddy’s care, but she had the power to keep me from ever seeing him again, and I didn’t want to alienate her.
After that experience with the lawyers, I called my mother to talk about it. “Everything is going to hell,” I told her.
She wasn’t particularly sympathetic. “Richard did this to himself,” she said. “He let that bitch back into his life. If your father loved you, he wouldn’t be putting you through all of this shit.”
Thanks, Mom. That really helped.
At one point, shortly thereafter, Daddy took a turn for the worse, and he ended up in the hospital, on a feeding tube. I talked my mother into going to visit him with me because I wanted her to get a firsthand look at what was going on. Daddy didn’t say much, though. He smiled and was pleasant and generally tried to put on a good show, but he wouldn’t talk about his condition or about the situation at home. I don’t know what I expected. He couldn’t have talked if he wanted to.
Mom looked at me, then at Daddy, then back at me. She may have acted tough, but it was evident that she still had feelings for Daddy. “This is the best thing you and I ever did in our lives,” she told him.
He looked over at me—I was trying not to cry, but the tears were already spilling down my cheeks—and nodded: You got that right, Shelley.
I had to leave the room to compose myself.
That was a big turning point for me and my mother, and today we are closer than we’ve ever been. I don’t know what did it exactly, but we’d been through so much drama together that I guess we decided we’d had enough for several lifetimes. The only recent argument I can remember was about the writing of this book. “I wish you wouldn’t do it,” she said. “I’d like my private life to stay private. But what the hell, if you don’t write it, somebody else will.”
After that visit to the hospital, Daddy took another turn for the worse, and so did Jennifer. She made it increasingly difficult for anyone to schedule appointments, which, ironically, helped bring us kids back together. But there really wasn’t much we could do; Jennifer was in control.
Then the tabloids got into the act, writing all sorts of stories about the various family feuds, all of them largely inaccurate.
I spoke to Elizabeth, I spoke to Deborah, I spoke to Flynn, and they were as upset as I was. I even talked to a private detective at one point, and he began asking some questions, but he seemed to be making little headway.
Kevin noticed that all the stress and worry was taking its toll on me, and he urged me to begin taking better care of myself. “You’ve got a career to pursue, remember? Please don’t let this take over your life. It will destroy you.”
I went to see Melvin van Peebles, who was shooting Panther, an independent feature, and he cast me in a small role. One day, while he was setting up a shot, he told me, “Rain, you’re a talented girl. If Hollywood doesn’t give you a career, create your own.”
I broadened my horizons and landed a small role in The Vagina Monologues, which was being staged at the Coronet Theater. As a result of that performance, a friend invited me to do a cabaret show at his small, local restaurant. I thought of Wanita, again, and of old Mamma, whom I’d been talking to in my head, as Daddy had done, and I thought of all the other crazy characters who existed only in my mind, and I invited them to perform with me. I was a hit. Even my business manager was bowled over. “Rain,” he said. “You’ve got to turn this into a solo show.”
I sat down and worked on it, fleshing out the various characters, and I showed Kevin the result. He was so impressed that he took the script to a friend of his, and the guy ended up hosting a backer’s audition at the Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills. Suddenly, Kevin was back in the business—as a producer.
More than forty potential backers showed up to watch the show, which became the basis for Fried Chicken and Latkas, and when the curtain dropped, I was given a standing ovation. People told me I was destined for Broadway and other, unimaginable heights, but within two weeks everything had fallen apart. No backers. No venue. No one-woman show.
Unbowed, Kevin and I decided to produce the show ourselves. We scraped together ten thousand dollars and took it back to the Canon Theatre, playing to sold-out crowds six weekends in a row. The Los Angeles Times gave the show glowing reviews, and a friend of Kevin’s—a producer at CBS—got the network to do a story on me. Less than twenty-four hours after the segment aired, I had more than a dozen offers to perform in theaters across the country.
Kevin was now on board as both producer and manager, and he deserved to be, of course, but it created some friction for us. He was my boss, and I honestly didn’t like it. I wanted the old Kevin back, the guy who loved me and supported me, not the one who was telling me how to write my show.
Why is it so hard to get things right? I wondered. My love life was fine, and my career was in the toilet, and now my love life’s in the toilet and my career is taking off. Why can’t a girl have EVERYTHING!
It was a tough time for us. We were still the same people we’d been when we were married, but not exactly. Like other people, we had changed, and our needs had changed, and if we weren’t careful these changes were going to tear us apart. I didn’t want that to happen to us, but I began to find myself pulling away from him.
Within a year, I had taken the show on the road, and I was away from home three out of four days, so in a sense I had left the marriage. Kevin and I communicated, but only sporadically, and I poured my energies into the show. I loved performing, and I loved bringing my characters to life, and I especially loved bringing audiences to their feet. I also loved the fact that Jews embraced me as a Jew, blacks embraced me as a black, and that the rest of the audiences saw me as a Citizen of the World…. Funny, that’s exactly what my mother had dreamed of when she first saw me. My little biracial baby. My little peacekeeper. My little harbinger of things to come.
Whenever I was back in Los Angeles, I went to see Daddy, of course, and I’d tell him all about the show. “I’m out there channeling Mamma night after night,” I said. “And the audiences love her.”
“Sort of like Mudbone,” he said, his voice scratchy and barely audible.
“Yes,” I said. “Sort of like Mudbone.”
There was a difference, though: Mudbone had been Daddy’s own creation, a composite of characters from his long-ago youth, while Mamma was real. But there were similarities, too. We were both channeling characters, bringing them to life onstage. Mamma had been his living, breathing grandma, yes, but—as they say in Hollywood—I was making her my own. It was Mamma’s voice I heard above all others.
I built dat whorehouse, the first of its kind in Peoria, ’cause I KNEW there was money to be made offa those white men. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with giving up honey from the honey pot when whitey is putting cash on the table. Shit, he been stealing it all along, so it’s time he began paying for it…
Yes sir, Richard Pryor—boy comes from a long, prestigious line of pimps, madams, and whores. I should know. I’m the one done raised his black ass….
Like Mudbone, Mamma told it straight. Like Mudbone, Mamma cut through the shit.
Richie, Richie, Richie. He love dat pussy too much. Women—they gonna be the death of him.
Mamma got that right for sure.
With Dad and Elizabeth. He was always happy to see us and never wanted us to leave.
By this time, Daddy was so gone that there were days when he couldn’t speak at all, so Elizabeth and I communicated with him by blowing kisses. We would say, “I love you Dad,” and blow him a kiss, and he’d smack his lips and pucker up. He loved us, too, but there wasn’t much left of him. He’d never been much of a dancer, but I remembered the man who could swagger and strut.
And God knows I missed that man.
At about that time, through the show, I met a man who was affiliated with a company that was working on a cure for MS. He told me that they were still a long way from a cure, but that they were doing their best, and he wondered if I would be interested in helping.
“Me?” I asked. “How can I help?”
“You can help us by making people aware of the disease. You’re Richard Pryor’s daughter, and an actress yourself. You could speak for him.”
I was bowled over. He was absolutely right! I could become Daddy’s voice.
That led to other meetings, and to still more meetings, and before long I was made “Lifelines Ambassador for MS.” When I wasn’t working on the show, I was flying across the country, talking about MS and helping raise money for research. My father was losing his voice, but I was doing everything in my power to stand up and make sure people heard him. This is what it’s like to have MS. This is how it destroys you, an inch at a time. Please help us find a cure.
By the summer of 2005, Jennifer decided that I could only visit my father once a month, saying that the stress had become too much for him. When I showed up for my next visit, I found him in his chair, in his room, watching the Comedy Channel. He didn’t look happy. I went to change the channel, but one of the caregivers warned me against it. Jennifer doesn’t like him to watch anything else, she told me.
“Why?”
“Because it’s too stressful.”
I wondered when Jennifer had become such an expert on stress.
I subsequently wrote a letter to Jennifer’s attorney, Brian Colligan, outlining some of my concerns, and asking that we children be allowed to visit more frequently. “Mr. Colligan, your client Jennifer Lee has no legitimate reasons for keeping us away from our father,” I wrote. Jennifer may have believed she was bringing order to his life, but I couldn’t understand why it had to be at his children’s expense.
Nothing changed. The next time I called to schedule a visit, Jennifer said I could see Daddy, but not at the house.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“I don’t think it’s healthy, your coming here. You need to meet somewhere else.”
She gave me the name of a hotel in the San Fernando Valley, not far from the house, and I met him in the lobby. He was in his wheelchair, with one of his regular caregivers. He smiled when he saw me, but he couldn’t talk, so I did all the talking. I talked about my work for MS, and I talked about the show, and I talked about some of the problems at home, and then I was pretty well talked out.
I went back the following month, and the month after that, and then I went back one more time in November. I got to the hotel early and settled into a remote corner, so we could have a little privacy, and he arrived a few minutes later. He was wheeled into the lobby by one of his caregivers, and a second caregiver followed close behind, and the minute I saw him coming I felt the blood rushing to the back of my throat.
He was wearing one of those bizarre velour sweat suits you see on old men in Miami Beach, and I felt like saying, Wait a minute! I’m the Jewish one, not you! I checked the urge, though. I wasn’t sure he was coherent enough to get the humor.
As he got closer, I noticed that he looked very bloated—his kidneys had begun to shut down, and he was on dialysis—and his face was so puffy that he was virtually unrecognizable. I looked into his eyes and he looked back at me. The eyes I still recognized, and I loved those eyes. He could smile with those eyes, and in fact they were smiling at me then.
“How you doing, Daddy?”
He didn’t answer. I knew he wasn’t going to answer, but you never give up hope.
“Daddy, listen to me, I know this is going to seem weird to you, but I went to see a healer yesterday, to talk about you, and he thinks he might be able to help.”
He blinked his eyes. I’m listening, he was saying.
“He’s a very gifted healer. A lot of people swear by this guy. He said he’d have to meet with you in person, of course.”
My daddy shut his eyes, and they stayed shut for almost a minute. When he opened them again, I could see he was exhausted.
“Would you rather talk about this some other time?”
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t grunt. He didn’t blink.
“You tired, Daddy?”
He nodded.
“You want to go home?”
He shook his head.
“You want to come home with me like I’ve been asking?”
He nodded.
“You want to live with me?”
He nodded again.
I fought the tears. “Daddy,” I said, “listen close now. I’m going to make some calls. I’m going to try to figure out how to get you out of this situation.”
He nodded and stared off into space. Maybe his mind was gone. Maybe I’d just been having a conversation with myself.
Then he conked out again, and his chin fell against his chest. I looked across at one of the caregivers, standing by on the far side of the lobby. She could see that I was very concerned, and she hurried over.
“Look at him,” I said, fighting tears. “He can’t even hold his head up.”
Daddy opened his eyes.
“I love you,” I said.
He tried to shape the words—I love you, too—but even his lips had betrayed him.
I watched as his caregivers wheeled him outside and lifted him into the van, then I got in my car and drove home, weeping all the way.
That was the last time I saw my father.