Women. Drugs. Movies.
It doesn’t matter. One of the scariest things in life is to get what you wish for.
Toward the end of 1976, producer Hannah Weinstein asked me to go through the script for Greased Lightning, a film based on the life of black stock-car driver Wendell Scott. As I sat on her living room floor, she ticked off the film’s different characters as well as the actors she had in mind to play them, including Cleavon Little. I heard his name and assumed he was going to play Scott.
“Who do you want me to play?” I asked.
She looked at me as if I was stupid.
“The lead,” she said. “You’re going to play Wendell Scott.”
Well, that fucked me up. Although I complained that the only reason I made stupid films like Car Wash and Silver Streak was because they were the only scripts offered, I was blown away when a movie that seemed to have substance came along and the producers wanted me to star. Was I ready to carry a film?
Said you were, motherfucker.
Yeah, but...
I was going to be cool for about four weeks (back when I was a kid), hanging with my man Matt. Matt was bad. Knockin’ motherfuckers out. Bam! Bam! He was killer, Jack.
Henry Hanson, though, he’d knock a motherfucker through a brick wall. Matt backed off. Then I was standing there all alone. Henry say, “What you got to do with it, little nigger?”
“I was just—I come home with Matt. I wasn’t doing nothin’. I was gonna play some basketball. Can I go now?”
The movie was shot in Madison, Georgia. It got off to a rocky start when the original director, Melvin Van Peebles, tried stirring up shit about there not being enough jobs for blacks on the production. His effort fizzled when I refused to support him.
I said, “Man, I got a job. What the fuck are you talking about?” He was replaced by Michael Schultz, who’d directed Car Wash.
It was a nod toward keeping me in line. Though I hadn’t been involved, the studio worried about my volatile reputation. I was more concerned about doing a good job, and to that end I vowed to stay clean throughout the entire movie. I rented a farmhouse on some of the prettiest property I’d ever seen, and flew my grandmother out from Peoria to take care of things.
Through thick and thin, Mama was like a security blanket for me. She knew the real Richard Pryor. There was no need to pretend around her. I don’t know how she felt about hanging around a movie set, but she liked fishing, and we spent a lot of time together casting our lines in a beautiful freshwater lake out in the field. One day she caught the biggest bass of her life. Started to scream as if she wanted to tell Jesus himself.
That was nice, Mama, wasn’t it?
Meantime, I hooked my costar Pam Grier. The first scene we shot was a romantic one with both of us in the bathtub. I tried to be truly amazing. The director yelled “Action.” Pam sang “Amazing Grace” in my ear. It was quite a scene.
Pam and I stayed together for about six months. After the movie, we went on a romantic getaway to Barbados, where she got deathly ill after eating shellfish. Back home, we enjoyed a much healthier life. We shopped, played tennis, watched TV, and hung out.
Unfortunately, our relationship wasn’t able to survive Hollywood. Of the two of us, I became the star, but I was put off by how much I thought Pam believed that stardom belonged to her. In my head there was only one Numero Uno, and it wasn’t her.
White women take more shit. You be home and shit and you be ready to go out. You say, “I’m going out, baby. Take it easy.”
She say, “Okay, toodle-loo.”
You say that to a black woman, the bitch starts dressing, too. Says, “Yeah, nigger, me too. Shit. What the fuck. You can’t go out without me.”
After Greased Lightning, the pieces fell together. Everyone in town wanted to be in business with me. David Franklin negotiated separate multimillion-dollar deals with Warner Brothers and Universal, where I set up offices in a bungalow next door to Telly Savalas. I also had projects going with Paramount and Columbia.
As befitted my new stature, I spent $500,000 on a Spanish-style hacienda on three and a half acres in Northridge, a rural suburb outside of LA. An electronic gate kept unwanted visitors out, while its guesthouse, tennis court, pool, orange groves, and a stable—home to a miniature pony—made it seem as if I never had to leave.
On the downside, the estate was in utter disrepair inside and out. The rambling grounds were overgrown and forlorn. The interior was shabby and old. In a way, the house was very much like me. It looked good. It had tremendous possibilities. But it needed work.
I got some money and finally bought a house. First house I ever had. And them motherfuckers who come to fix it, boy, they can kill you. Everything’s five hundred dollars when they come to your house.
“What do you want? It’s five hundred dollars.”
I said, “I ain’t told you what I want.”
“I don’t give a fuck. It’s five hundred dollars.”
I hired Lucy Saroyan, the daughter of writer William Saroyan and Carol Matthau (she’d remarried Walter Matthau), to redecorate from top to bottom. Some blond actress introduced us. Lucy was smart, energetic, and friendly with everybody in Hollywood. She played with life as if it were a toy. I think she thought working for me was going to be a continuation of the party.
But by the time I finished Which Way Is Up? in February, Pam and I were sailing on rocky seas. I was pursuing Deboragh again, obsessed with prying her from her older lover. And then I started up with Lucy.
It was a circus. Pam was telling people that we were getting married. I was fantasizing about marrying Debbie, and in the meantime I was fucking Lucy.
One time when my grandmother was visiting, all three women came by to see her at the same time. They sat in the den, talking as if they were friends. Pam, Debbie, and Lucy. Unable to deal with this, I hid in the bedroom and listened to them make small talk.
Finally, I called my grandmother in to see how things were going.
“Mama, which one of them should I marry?” I asked.
She looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.
“I wouldn’t give a nickel for any of those bitches,” she said.
My grandmother refused to see me as anything but the little boy she helped raise. That same visit she tossed the housekeeper Mercy and the cook and all their helpers out of the kitchen and made dinner. Afterward, she washed dishes and then called me over to help dry. I shook my head as if she’d told a joke. I was watching TV.
“Mama,” I laughed.
“You didn’t get too big for that, did you?” she asked.
“Mama, I don’t want you doing that. I got ladies who do that stuff for me. I pay four people, you know?”
“Does that measn you ain’t gonna help?”
A moment later, she stood over me, and I swear to God I never saw the skillet that was in her hand. But I felt it, that’s for damn sure. She whacked me good, right over my head like in one of those cartoons. I might as well have been nine years old as she grabbed my collar and led me into the kitchen. I dried everything, too—dishes, counters, floors, chairs, tears.
The press said many things about me being the new black superstar; only one thing was certain: it wasn’t easy being Richard Pryor. After the movie Blue Collar, which Paul Schrader wrote in about two days especially for me and Harvey Keitel, I went straight into preproduction on my own weekly comedy-variety series on NBC.
When I committed to do a ten-week comedy-variety series, I thought I could do something significant. I saw only the possibilities of TV as a way of communicating. I mean, one week of truth on TV would blow people’s minds. You got twenty to fifty million people listening to the real shit every week, there’s going to be a revolution in the way everybody thinks.
But the reality of what the network censors allowed on prime time undercut all my enthusiasm. Because I didn’t want to sell out completely, I walked into one of the earliest meetings with the show’s writers—headed up by Mooney and David Banks—and quit the show. I had no heart for the censors, I explained.
“You want to see me with my brains blown out?” I ranted. “I’m gonna have to be ruthless here because of what it does to my life. I’m not stable enough.”
I wasn’t stable, but it had nothing to do with the censors. In August, Lucy hired her friend Jennifer Lee to assist her while decorating my house. Jennifer was a dark-haired flower who blossomed right in front of my eyes one night as she sat on the edge of a bed and played the guitar and sang.
I encouraged her to hang out more often. She had depth and intelligence. She seemed to understand me more profoundly than anyone I’d ever met. I’d catch her watching me, our eyes would lock, and I knew that she knew the shit I was thinking.
She was in the guest room the night Lucy and I broke up following a deranged night of cocaine and violence. The next morning, Lucy tried to persuade Jenny to leave, too—which would’ve fucked me over since my house was completely torn apart—but something possessed Jenny to stay. Maybe she knew the trouble had been coke-related. Maybe she wanted me. Maybe she thought she could help me. Or maybe she simply felt safe in the morning light.
In any event, I realized that she could handle herself when our first date—an Andrew Young fundraiser at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel—ended in potential disaster. We’d gone with a friend and his girlfriend. In the limo on the way back, the girlfriend laid into Jenny about being white and dating a black man.
Sisters look at you like you killed your mama when you’re out with a white woman. Why should you be happy?
Outside the door to Jenny’s quaint bungalow in West Hollywood, I took her hand and gave her a gentle kiss.
“I’m sorry for what she said in the car,” I said. “I don’t know what you’ve heard or read about me. But I don’t see colors. I don’t believe in prejudice. We’re all people, you know? That’s hard enough.”
And that’s the truth.