The 1970s were a golden era for television sitcoms. People got nightly doses of half hour comedies about working class people or upwardly mobile minority groups that worked hard to raise themselves above the status they were given. These shows were socially conscious, using humor and sympathetic characters to show that, despite our differences, people from all walks of life can solve problems and learn to live together. Norman Lear was a major driver of this pop culture trend, bringing us shows like Sanford and Son, The jeffersons, Good times, and the now monumental All In the Family. Other shows like Barney Miller and Welcome Back Kotter worked along a similar line but emphasized workplaces that were more ethnically integrated as opposed to Norman Lear’s productions that focused more on white and African-American familial relations. Looking back now, it is obvious that although Latino communities were present in those shows, they were also underrepresented. So in the mid-1970s, producer James Kornack saw the gap in the market and created Chico and the Man, the first TV show in history to be set in a Mexican-American neighborhood. It was the story of a cranky, elderly white garage owner who hires a young Chicano to work as an auto mechanic. The show was a hit so when the star, Freddie Prinze, took his own life, a dark cloud came over the lives of television viewers across America.
Immediately after the shocking suicide, the networks were quick to cash in on the tragedy and aired a made for TV movie about the actor and comedian’s life. But the family were unhappy with the production which they thought was sensational, inaccurate, and commercially motivated. Therefore Prinze’s mother Maria Pruetzel in collaboration with John A. Barbour, to put together The Freddie Prinze Story giving her version of what happened.
As this biography opens, Freddie Prinze is lying on his deathbed in the ICU of a Beverly Hills hospital. His parents are there along with his closet friends and colleagues along with medical professionals who try to save his life while holding a rabid gang of journalists at bay. With a gunshot wound to his head, the chances of survival aren’t great. It’s a maudlin scene with heightened emotions and lots and lots of praying and talk about God. As a non-religious scholar of the literary arts, this was off-putting to me at first, but saw the necessity of suspending my previously formed prejudices and admitting to myself that this is how some people are in real life. One thing I can say in this book’s favor is that its realism cut through all my preconceptions and brought me out of the boxes I think inside to a grounded place that reminded me of the varieties of ways people deal with grief in this terrible world we live in. After clearing away the fog of my intellectualism (some might call it pseudointellectualism but I’m not the one who gets to decide if that’s correct or not), I was ready t move on.
In contrast to the deathbed scene, the shift to the story of Freddie Prinze’s childhood came in like a ray of sunshine. He was born as Freddie Pruetzel to immigrant parents, his mother coming from Puerto Rico and his father coming from Hungary as a refugee from the communist government. While his mother was proud and compassionate, constantly gushing with love and admiration for her son, his father was quiet and distant. Freddie maintained a close relationship with them throughout his brief life. The family raised him in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, straddling the line between the working class and the middle class. They weren’t rich, but Freddie was a little bit spoiled as his hard working parents went out of their way to give him whatever he wanted.
In his teenage years, Freddie Pruetzel got accepted into a performing arts high school, the same one that later became the basis for the TV show Fame. He was popular, charismatic, and smooth with the ladies and also a bit precocious. He flunked out of school because he was spending all his nights on stage doing routines as a stand up comic, something he had a natural talent for. Some of these venues he worked, like Catch a Rising Star and the Improv are now legendary for being the place where many famous comics were discovered. Freddie Pruetzel was discovered by David Brenner who immediately saw his talent. Brenner took him on as a friend and mentor, helping guide him towards the show business big time before he got out of his teenage years.
Freddie Pruetzel moved to Hollywood, changed his name to Freddie Prinze, and continued working on the national stand up comedy circuit. After his move, he made one of the biggest errors of his career: he ditched his agent in New York and took on a local agent who had more contacts in the West Coast entertainment industry. This contract break would come back to bite Prinze financially later on.
But things were on the up and up for Prinze. He got cast as Chico in the TV show Chico and the Man and television brought him into the homes of people all across America. The show was not without controversy though. A lot of Mexican-Americans objected to him playing a Chicano mechanic because of his Puerto Rican and Hungarian ethnic background. This might seem trivial to some, but from a Chicano point of view there were few Mexican people in Hollywood story lines and fewer chances for Mexican people to enter the mainstream entertainment industry. Historically Mexican people were often played by white people wearing make up to make their skin look brown. So the conflict, like so many other conflicts in the world, was over access to a limited resource. If you come from an underrepresented community, this can make a difference. But otherwise the show was a hit and Prinze’s stand up performances consistently drew huge crowds too.
Flush with money, Prinze bought a house for his parents in Los Angeles and that was probably the best thing he did with his newfound fame and wealth. Otherwise, he got hooked in a cycle of drug addiction where he sniffed cocaine to feel energetic then took valium and quaaludes to calm himself down. With alcohol and weed added into the mix, his brain became foggy and it wasn’t long before he felt lost in the world. Prinze made the mistake of thinking that getting married and starting a family would bring him out of his depression, but it didn’t. Then the parasitical agent in New York ,who he dropped the contract with, sued and won, thereafter being entitled to a significant chunk of Prinze’s earnings. The comedian wandered around in a suicidal daze until one night, in the presence of his business manager, he shot himself in the head.
Freddie Prinze’s suicide flies in the face of everything we are told about how to help people who want to end their lives. They tell us that religion and communal bonds are what prevent people from offing themselves, and yet Freddie Prinze was deeply religious to the point where he had considered leaving show business to become an Evangelical minister. And up until the hour of his demise he was surrounded by friends and family who were literally begging him not to kill himself. Something was wrong with him on a much deeper level than community and faith. His mother the narrator makes it look like his drug abuse was the ultimate problem. The drugs certainly didn’t help, but simply blaming the drugs doesn’t answer the question of why this happened because this kind of drug abuse is often a symptom and not the causal illness of depression. As an armchair psychologist, my opinion is that Freddie Prinze got into too much too soon. He got swept up into a life of fame at a young age and then found himself lost and disoriented without any maps or reference points to guide him along the way. He was 21 when he committed suicide; he was still a child. I feel like he was too young and immature to handle all the pressures of fame and wealth that were put on him before he had developed a strong inner core of self. He hadn’t developed enough sense of identity or psychological stability to be able to handle the burdens of a whirlwind career where he had the world at his fingertips and had no idea what to do with such responsibility. He was just a kid when he died and the close relationship with his mother, and his emotional dependence on her, shows that he hadn’t matured to the point necessary to continue on with the life he had gotten himself into.
For the kind of book this is, it’s surprisingly well written. It does leave out a few details though. This was written by Prinze’s mother in collaboration with an actual writer so it’s taken for granted that she will be selective in what she does and doesn’t include. And regardless of how close a mother is to her son, there will always be things he did that she will never know about. But as it is the story feels complete. There should have been more commentary on Chico and the Man and hat it represented in American culture. If anybody reads this book in the future without having seen the show, its significance might be lost on them.
It’s also written from a unique angle. Biographies written by the subject’s mother are rare and those written by Puerto Rican mothers are even more rare. As can be expected, Maria Pruetzel gushes with motherly love for her son no matter how bad life gets for him. The writing is often sentimental and dramatic so it might be considered over the top by conventional literary standards, but as I said before many mothers are like this in the everyday world and the sentimentality makes this book hit home as a quality work of realism. And I don’t want to indulge in stereotypes of Puerto Rican people, but the way that Maria Pruetzel idolizes and dotes on her boy is common among the Puerto Rican mothers I’ve encountered in my time. There is a certain kind of bond between mother and son here that borders on religious devotion which makes the death of Freddie Prinze at the end so much more painful. This is as much a portrait of the central role a son plays in his mother’s life as it is a portrait of a tragic celebrity suicide. It must have been extremely painful for her to tell this story.
There is a list a mile long of comedians who were miserable and suicidal. Comedians entertain people by making jokes about the things that bother them and audiences are entertained by laughing at the jokes about things that bother the comedian. At some point this feedback cycle makes a lot of them snap. The Freddie Prinze Story is an account of one of them and it’s one more story in a long line of stories that are a lot like it. Even though memories of Freddie Prinze and Chico and the Man may be fading, this book is still timeless enough in theme to be worth reading in our present day. It might be of especial interest to people who are fascinated with the dark and tragic side of Hollywood.
The death of Freddie Prinze didn’t have to happen. But it did. That’s how the world is. So it goes.
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