Yes, I was unrepentant, even with that scare, as I went off to London to play the villain in Superman III. And yes, the movie was a piece of shit. But even before I read the script, the producers offered me $4 million, more than any black actor had ever been paid.
“For a piece of shit,” I’d told my agent when I finally read the script, “it smells great.”
But the money couldn’t buy what I needed. One night Margot Kidder stopped by my room to see if I’d go out with her. She observed me sitting in the middle of the floor of a vast, luxurious suite, sucking on a crack pipe. I was surrounded by empty vials.
She muttered something about me being such a sad sight.
So fucking sad.
What could I say?
“What did you say, Rich?”
“Nothing. I just kept smoking.”
There were moments when I dreamed of escaping my misery just as I had before I’d set myself on fire. I just couldn’t find an escape that suited me. I took my kids to Hana for Christmas, making a big show of it though in truth it was nothing more than an empty gesture. I wasn’t capable of anything else.
Remember when Rain stood in the doorway. She and the others were going to the beach.
“Daddy, come with us,” she said. “Come on.”
I was grouchy and hungover. I looked out at the beautiful Hawaiian afternoon, sunny and warm. The blue Pacific glistened in the distance like a sapphire I might’ve given a woman after having the guilties for cheating on her. None of it registered with me.
I wanted the kids to go already.
But they wanted their dad.
So?
That’s what I thought.
I just wanted to do my base.
Then the strangest thing happened. Left alone, I asked myself what I was doing. You know? In a moment of clarity, I glimpsed the absolute pitifulness of my situation. Got a clear view through the window of hopelessness and despair.
You go through changes in your life and you just fucking change. Something happened in my life just fucking changed my mind about all the shit. I used to think I knew everything, man. I’d be fucked up and I knew it. I knew all the shit.
And all of a sudden I didn’t know shit.
I was one of the dumbest motherfuckers that ever lived. If you catch me on the wrong day and ask me my name, you’re gonna get trouble.
“How’d you end up like that again, Rich?”
Although the answer was in my heart, I dealt with what was in my hands. Trembling but determined, I tossed the shit in the garbage. For real. No hiding the pipe in one drawer and the rock in another and tiptoeing away for a few minutes. I chucked it. Grabbing my cigarettes, I walked to the beach. As I shuffled onto the sand, my kids looked as if they saw an alien.
In a way, they did.
“Daddy!”
Even I was tempted to turn around and look at who they were talking about.
“Daddy!”
But then it was great. Rain taught me how to float. Bobbing in the salty water, I got into the sensation of buoyancy, the feeling of levitating off the ground. I imagined drifting away from my addiction, away from the dark rooms where I was prisoner to the pipe. Staring up at the sky, I saw the immensity of the spinning world. The gulls squawked. My kids squawked. The water slapped the shore.
Like music.
And I was in the middle of it.
Alive.
And grateful to be there, you know?
Several weeks later, I got a call from a friend. Coincidentally, she’d checked herself into rehab and wanted me to help her in recovery by participating in therapy. Ordinarily, I would’ve told her no. In my neighborhood, the administration of affection had always been a one-way street. However, in my newfound sobriety I asked where and when and hopped on a plane.
Although there was no bigger skeptic than me, the therapy sessions had an unanticipated effect on me. I listened in the group meetings, where people stood up and told harrowing stories caused by their addictions. I thought back to when I was seven and my grandmother took me to an evangelist in Springfield and pleaded with him to rid me of the devil.
Even then I thought that shit was funny.
But now I heard things that sounded too familiar to laugh off. Gradually, I recognized the picture being assembled by these confessions was of me.
I had to quit drinking. I got tired of waking up in my car driving ninety. You know? Trying to talk to the police when your mouth don’t work.
One day, caught in the fervor, I stood up and admitted that I, too, was a drug addict and alcoholic.
It wasn’t anything I didn’t know already.
Amen.
Or hadn’t known for many years.
Sing it, brother.
But to say it out loud, in front of strangers, without adding a punch line, man, that was like saying adios to the greatest, funniest character I’d ever created.
My best work, you know. And it scared the hell out of me.
Hallelujah!
“I know you, motherfucker,” I said. “We ran for a long time. But I’m tired of you hurting me. Let’s declare a truce. Leave each other alone. See how it goes, you know?”
No response.
“Okay?”
No response.
“Please?”
“We’ll see. If you just shut up.”
Even sober, I couldn’t control my addiction to the womens. Deboragh started out by my side when I began a lengthy spring tour in preparation for another live concert film. But after a performance in Washington, DC, I met twenty-year-old Flynn Be-Laine. Within two days, I shuffled Debbie off to Buffalo, so to speak, and cozied up to Flynn.
By any standards, Flynn was drop-dead fine. Strong legs, nice breasts, and sweet smile.
I was like a mouse sniffing around a trap.
But it was good, you know?
There were other womens, too. A Julie in New Orleans, where I filmed most of Here and Now.
But when I added the finishing touches to the film in New York I had Flynn meet me there. Then I set her up in LA. By August, though, I lost interest in her and went back to Jennifer. Naughty me. I couldn’t help myself, and neither could she.
Flynn, bless her, was tough. She didn’t give up. I wanted nothing to do with her, but she had other ideas. One day Jennifer slipped into my Rolls and saw a pair of baby booties hanging from the rearview mirror. Her eyes rolled.
“Flynn sent ’em,” I said.
“You know what she’s telling you, right?” Jenny asked.
Indeed. In February 1984, right before I received the Black Filmmaker’s Hall of Fame Award, Flynn broke the news: she was pregnant. Clearly, I was a productive motherfucker, deserving of some Hall of Fame. But instead of celebrating Flynn’s announcement, I ran to Deboragh, seeking consolation, advice, excuses. Seeking something. She knew as well as I did that my own need for parenting far exceeded my ability to be one.
My life’s sentence, you know?
But that poor-pitiful-me shit didn’t play in Peoria, and it sure didn’t play on Debbie’s doorstep.
“Well, what am I supposed to do about it?” Debbie asked. “I didn’t get her pregnant.”
“I’ve got to do the right thing,” I said.
For some reason, I thought I saw the pieces of my life falling into place much like a puzzle. Events took on a pattern and meaning. Such nonsense began making a certain amount of sense. I don’t know why.
Following my accident, I had tried to write my autobiography but never quite got a grip on the three-hundred-pound alligator that was my life. Still too close to the fire. Didn’t have perspective. I kept at it, though. Thinking about shit. Writing down bits and pieces, thoughts and shit.
Finally, I asked Mooney and Rocco Urbisci, a writer friend, to help me stitch it all together, and the result was Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling. Originally, I intended it to be a straight-out comedy, but I couldn’t keep the sadness and emotion from spilling onto the page. It was beyond me, you know? Like therapy. I went with it.
Maybe a documentary would’ve played better. It would’ve had the edge of my stand-up. More dick, less heart. Or maybe more heart and less dick. I don’t know.
I never will, either.
Jo Jo was the latest and biggest project my company, Indigo Productions, produced as part of a $40 million deal with Columbia Pictures. For my money—which it was—Indigo was a fiasco, something much bigger than I could handle. I didn’t know how to run a company, and, come to think of it, I didn’t even want a company, you know?
Jim Brown did, though.
I made my friend Jim president.
At the end of 1983 I fired him and all hell came down on top of me.
Jim, a complex man, liked running that company more than I liked having it. He hired lots of people. He made lots of noise. He commissioned numerous scripts. Started up all sorts of projects.
However, I wasn’t happy about where the company was going. The only thing I cared about was the work, and when I sat down to read the scripts that had been developed, I couldn’t find one that stood out as special. Not one screamed to be made, you know? I had to ask myself a serious question, something I tried my damnedest to avoid.
“Rich, do you want the company?”
“No.”
And that’s basically what I decided to tell Jim when I fired him.
I caught shit, though. The black film community was outraged. The NAACP turned on me. Everybody, it seemed to me, acted like it was my obligation to employ people just because of their skin color. They didn’t understand. I didn’t want to employ anybody—black, white, or purple.
I didn’t give a shit anymore.
Jo Jo was the exception. The project was my own creation, my own madness. Certainly, it takes a degree of madness to produce, direct, cowrite, and star in a movie. By the time I took all that damn film in the editing bay, I felt like a snake charmer slowly being strangled by his own charming pet viper. I just wanted to know how I might’ve fucked up. Not that I could see anything wrong. I was too close, and everyone around me only said how brilliant it was.
“Genius, Rich, that’s what it is.”
All that shit.
But goddamn it, I knew better. I just wanted someone to tell me where the holes were, you know?
“Right there,” the doctor said. “Look there.”
Flynn’s legs were apart. My eyes were riveted to that amazing sight: my son Steven entering the world. On November 16, 1984, I actually stood in the delivery room and watched him being born, and now I can finally say it:
I’m glad I was sober.
If you’ve never seen a baby born, you ain’t seen shit. I know if men had to push babies out their asshole, there’d be no question about abortion. Not even a smither of a question.
I saw this woman who I loved lying on a table with her legs open, a baby coming out of her pussy, and she had a smile on her face. Right then I knew she was crazy. That was proof.
I was just praying to God that the baby didn’t come out and grab her hemorrhoids.
Then he came out, and that made me realize women have been bullshitting us. You know when you’re fucking, really working, doing some serious damage, and she says, “It hurts.” Well, if your dick is not as big around as my thigh, you ain’t hurting shit, okay? I saw a baby, a whole entire human being, come out of this lady’s pussy.
The doctor let me help pull him out. It was my baby boy, you know? And you hold it in your arms and do the stupidest shit. While she was recovering from the pain and the blood and shit, I took that little guy and held him up in the air. Like, “Behold the only man greater than myself!”
Then the doctor says, “Can you give him back to the mother so she can feed him?”
“No, motherfucker, I’m not finished beholding yet.”
I still refused to marry Flynn, and it cost me. I came back from a gambling binge in Las Vegas. Had my winnings in a briefcase. Some $600,000 I’d won at the blackjack table. Flynn’s lawyer was the first to congratulate me.
“That’s about how much she’ll need to take care of the boy,” he said.
But that’s life sometimes.
A simple, unpredictable roll of the dice.