I’d never been higher than I was in Hawaii one day toward the end of 1980. After ten hours’ worth of flying lessons, I took over the controls of my single-engine Grumman Tiger and piloted the plane myself from Oahu to Maui. It was a transcendental moment. My whole life I’d wanted to fly. As a kid, I’d told one of my teachers about my dream and he’d laughed at me. I could still hear him say, “Richard, you can’t do that.”
Yet at age forty, I was doing just that. Likewise, plenty of people doubted whether I’d be able to refrain from my self-destructive ways. Privately, I was among them. But as I soared above the lush, emerald-green island, banking to the right, then to the left, and then slowly circling the island’s crystal-blue perimeter, I was overwhelmed by the freedom of being above it all, and I felt as if I could prove them wrong, too.
Any doubts I had about how the public would react following the accident were quickly erased. After its December release, Stir Crazy went on a tear at the box office, grossing more than $100 million. In April, the Hollywood community showed their support with a standing ovation when I presented an Oscar at the Academy Awards. Then Bustin’ Loose, which I finished after recovering from my burns, continued my winning streak that summer.
In Hawaii, the high life was replaced by a healthy, isolated life in Hana. I retreated into the slow lane of my newly completed, modern, Japanese-style home, which was situated on a hill overlooking five plush, gorgeously landscaped acres of flowers and trees. Every room had its own deck. I looked outside, into the gardens and then out beyond, to the ocean, and one word came to mind:
Yes.
But fruit juices, jogging, and shoji doors didn’t ensure life would be as sweet as the orchids in my garden. The affection I craved was still damn elusive. I tried Deboragh. I dallied with a Korean actress. I coerced my cute Japanese maid in Hawaii. I pretty-pleased Jennifer back into my life. I tried all thirty-one flavors, whatever I felt like at the time, but when it came to womens, relationships, trying to satisfy the urge to get loved, I couldn’t find the right prescription.
It’s not that I lacked for love, but what I was able to feel was as momentary as the high I got sucking on the pipe. My therapist plumbed my childhood for reasons. Motherfucker made some points that were hard to accept. But true.
“That’s why life stinks,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“To me, this life stinks because all we want is love,” I went on. “That’s all anybody wants. Black, white, orange. Race, nationality, none of that shit matters. We’re all human beings and we all want love. That’s all.”
“I think you’re right,” he said. “How does that make life stink?”
“Because the motherfucker’s fleeting, you know? It won’t stay put.”
Was that the problem, Rich?
Or was it that you didn’t love yourself?
In February 1981, I returned to the mainland to prepare for work on Some Kind of Hero. Drug-free until then, my Northridge house was filled with the ghosts of when I wasn’t clean. They’d waited around like ghoulish fans for my homecoming, but instead of wanting my autograph, they asked, “When we gonna smoke, Rich? When we gonna get high, man?”
The big house had been vacuumed and cleaned of all my old drug paraphernalia eight months earlier. The day of my accident, the stuff had been thrown out. Not on account of me. No, nobody wanted the police to find it. But as soon as I walked inside that place, I knew there was some shit around. I sensed it. Sniffed it like a bloodhound.
After waiting till the house was quiet and I was alone, I went to where I kept my super-secret stash. A little drawer. Lo and behold, I had the exhilarating rush of a prospector who pans the river, sifts through the silt, looks down, and sees a golden nugget sparkling in the sunlight.
Eureka!
There was a little rock.
One perfect little rock.
I picked it up and marveled at its whiteness. Brightness. A star in the night sky.
Make a wish, Rich.
A few minutes later, I found a glass pipe.
Locked in the bedroom, I flicked my Bic for the first time since the fire.
“Oh, Jesus,” I sighed as the rush began. “Oh, God.”
Though I appeared to be in fine form as Some Kind of Hero filmed that summer, I’d climbed aboard the old self-destructive roller coaster without anybody knowing it. I wanted so badly to prove that I was the same old Richard Pryor that I actually became him. I kept a tiny pipe in my trailer and got loaded whenever I could get my hands on some coke. By August, I was back in the same rut.
So was my personal life. My six-month affair with Hero costar Margot Kidder ended just before the movie did, when she discovered that I was cheating on her. She didn’t get mad— much. But she got even by coming over to the hotel where I’d taken up permanent residence and scissoring the Armani wardrobe hanging in my closet.
Thank God that’s all she cut.
In the meantime, I repaired old ties. Before Hero ended, I’d proposed to Jennifer. It took three tries, including a final proposal at a pool party in Hana where I smoked some Maui Wowie pot that was as powerful as an LSD trip, before she finally accepted.
Our marriage took place in a backyard ceremony on August 16, 1981, and Jenny looked resplendent in white and flowers, but the event was short on celebration. As for a reception, Margot sent an angry telegram. My pretty Japanese maid, who’d taken to keeping a bottle of vodka by the Mr. Clean—using one to mop and the other to mope—got sloppy drunk and cried that she was losing me. And in the morning, having sobered up, I called my attorney in LA and asked him to get the damn marriage annulled.
“I woke up and realized what I’d done,” I explained. “I said, ‘Shit, I don’t want to be married.’”
By October, I had initiated preliminary divorce proceedings, slept with other women, and physically pummeled Jennifer, but something in me couldn’t let go completely. Pressured into making another concert film, which I wasn’t ready to do, I knew instinctively that I had to hang on to Jenny in some way, shape, or form. She’d gone through it with me before.
“You aren’t ready,” she counseled. “Don’t do it.”
“But they’re telling me that I have to cash in,” I countered. “They say now’s my time. Now’s my time.”
But December came and I knew it wasn’t time. Rather than work out for weeks and then tour, honing each routine to a razor sharpness, as I did before the first concert picture in 1979, I went up to Oakland the week before we filmed and fucked up. Too much booze, too much coke. I was little better when I got in front of the camera the first night at the Hollywood Palladium.
In a scene reminiscent of my breakdown in Las Vegas fifteen years earlier, I asked myself, “What the fuck am I doing here?”
Then I walked off stage.
Over the next couple days, I delivered the goods, enough so that producer Ray Stark, agent Guy McElwaine, and other powers behind the movie were mostly satisfied, but all of them knew they’d need to reshoot parts. As for me, I split for Hawaii. Told Jennifer, “They made the gentle mistake of giving me the money in advance. Bye-bye.”
“They didn’t give you all the money,” she said.
“Yes they did,” I said, flashing an evil smile.
Eventually, I finished the live concert film by performing at what was essentially an invitation-only party, but after the footage was spliced with the Palladium bits, it still played as inspired, cutting-edge theater. Even so, Live on the Sunset Strip wasn’t as great an overall performance as the first concert picture, but with routines like “Mafia Club,” “Africa,” and “Freebase,” it had its moments.
And, fortunately, so did I.
It’s nice to be able to laugh later.
I thank you all for the love you sent me, and I mean that sincerely.
Offstage, I was not nearly as sentimental. In January 1982, I embarked on Jennifer’s and my belated honeymoon, a cruise through the Caribbean. If we hadn’t been fighting at the time of departure, she would also have been on board the Silver Trident, the luxury yacht I’d leased for the occasion. In her place I found other female amusement when I wasn’t too fucked up.
But I missed her terribly, and after ten days of ship-to-shore, me sweet-talking and pleading from such appropriately romantic-sounding locales as Teardrop Cove, she succumbed to the lure of our mad addiction to each other.
It may not have been a traditional honeymoon, but there was no mistaking it as anything but ours. Wild and woolly, we were George and Martha sailing across the high seas of love. Passionate lovemaking spoiled by drinking and fighting. After less than two weeks, she jumped ship and got a divorce lawyer, and I finished up the vacation with another woman.
As always, Dr. Jekyll’s good intentions were fucked up by Mr. Hyde. The shit was beyond my control. I couldn’t escape the darkness.
Late on the night of March 4, 1982, John Belushi, Robin Williams, and Robert DeNiro had come by the Comedy Store looking for me to participate in their wee-hours carousing. Luckily, I happened not to be there. Otherwise I might have—and to my mind, probably would have—ended up going back to the Chateau Marmont and doing cocaine with Belushi, who died early on March 5.
It could have easily been me.
I was just as lucky in cheating death a month and a half later when I worked on The Toy with Jackie Gleason in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I didn’t much care for the picture. Like the others, I did it for the monies. But Jackie and I hit it off famously, like kindred souls.
The shit Jackie talked between setups was funnier than anything we got in the movie. He knew about gangsters, gamblers, comics, vaudeville, strippers, and sharks. He’d start talking about something that happened in the 1970s and then suddenly he’d be swirling around the 1920s and ’30s, describing people and joints so good I could smell them.
One day he asked me to get him some grass. I found some and gave it to him on the bench where we used to sit and talk.
It overlooked a lake that had no fish in it. But Jackie didn’t like the way I handed it to him. He showed me a sneaky way of handling the exchange, and then he winked.
“That’s called a switch,” he said.
We laughed. Two stars. Getting paid a few million dollars. And we were practicing dope deals.
Goddamn, that was funny to me.
Then things got serious. One day I felt my heart pound in rebellion to my secret dalliances with the evil white lady. An ambulance rushed me to a New Orleans hospital. I really thought I might actually die right then, and the only thing that really bothered me about it was being in the South. Down there, people didn’t care if a black man died. Or else the Klan would be so glad they’d declare a holiday.
Otherwise, I figured the rest of my family had gone. Maybe it was my time, you know?
But it turned out to be a warning. According to the doctors, it was my Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome acting up, a sudden arrhythmia, which they could treat. I explained that the palpitations had come during a scene I shot in a swamp opposite a live alligator. The gator had said, “Ah, blackened catfish.” With that, my heart began sprinting for shore.
It didn’t know the rest of me couldn’t swim.
Deep down, I knew the truth. Lying in my hospital bed, I let my mind wander back to the time when I’d asked Redd Foxx why I always wanted more, more, more cocaine, and how he’d looked at my ignorant face and told me it was because I was an addict.
An addict.
I didn’t tell anyone.
As if it was a secret. As if it wasn’t true.
But who were you fooling, Rich?
Even then you wanted more.