Book Review & Analysis: The Freddie Prinze Story by Maria Pruetzel & John A. Barbour

The Freddie Prinze Story

by Maria Pruetzel & John A. Barbour

      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.

 

Book Review: Naked By the Window by Robert Katz

Naked By the Window:

The Fatal Marriage of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta

      Ana Mendieta fell out a window and died. It happened in September 1985, just several months after marrying Carl Andre. The couple had been arguing. Both of them were artists in New York City. Other than that, not a lot is known about what jappened that night. We do know that Carl Andre was charged with second degree murder, but was found innocent when taken to trial. The author Robert Katz doesn’t accept this verdict and makes it clear in his book Naked By the Window.

This review doesn’t have any spoilers because there isn’t anything to spoil. It opens with Ana Mendieta falling out the window of Carl Andre’s loft in Lower Manhattan. He calls the police, gets taken to jail, and goes up in front of a grand jury who decide not to send him to trial. The case gets reopened twice with similar results and a verdict of not guilty the final time. The rest of the story is non-sequential, alternating between flashbacks and the 1980s up to the last attempt at conviction.

Ana Mendieta was an up and coming Cuban-born artist. After the Revolution of 1959, her parents sent her and her sister Raquel to the United States where they had rough childhoods in foster homes. The racist white Americans in Iowa were not kind to them. While Raquel opted for the hippy lifestyle as she got older, Ana turned to art to vent her anger and ended up in the blossoming Soho art scene in Manhattan. Her sculptures and photography drew on Land Art and Body Art as source materials, examining the connections between the female body and nature. 1980s Soho was the right time and place for her arrival as an interest in both Latino and feminist art were coming into vogue. It was there that she met Carl Andre.

He was older than Ana Mendieta and had already established himself in the art world. From the late 1970s, he was involved in the postmodernist minimalist movement. His most famous works were things like piles of bricks, pieces of wood, and square tiles of zinc laid on the floor. It’s the kind of stuff that art critics love to praise as genius while making people outside the art world laugh. The concept of the “art world” is important because it has a lot to do with how the public reacted to the death of Ana Mendieta at the time of Carl Andre’s trial.

If people weren’t aware of class, race, and gender divisions in the art scene before Ana Mendieta’s death, they became aware of them at her funeral. Modern artists like to maintain a public image of being anti-establishment revolutionaries, but by Robert Katz’s estimate, they are little more than an miniature establishment unto themselves, a closed society of artists, critics, dealers, collectors, and gallery owners that are predominantly white, male, and rich. Ana Mendieta was becoming a leading figure in the Latin-American art scene and also embraced by some, but not all, feminists; her rising popularity threatened the traditional domain of the art establishment and her funeral became a rallying cry for unity among artists representing the Global South. So her funeral ended up being a tense mixture of white people who were ill at ease and Latinos who were outraged by her death. The walls of demarcation grew taller and thicker over the coming years as the white establishment maintained a code of silent defense, protecting Carl Andre from questioning. Those that believed Ana Mendieta had been murdered became aggressive in their public campaign against him. If art is meant to be revolutionary, this revolution is one that failed.

Aside from the artists’ biographies, the death of Ana Mendieta, and the effect it had on the art scene, the other major component of this book is the invstigation and trial of Carl Andre. The man was a minimalist artist and a man with minimal emotions, and if he truly committed murder, it was a crime with minimal evidence. While the police were convinced that Andre was guilty, they botched the collection of evidence and the small number of material witnesses proved to be unreliable. Aside from Ana Mendieta’s corpse, they couldn’t find much else to go on. That meant the prosecution had little more than circumstantial evidence.

What could be admitted into the case was that the married couple were heavy drinkers and prone to fighting. Carl Andre was adulterous and had a known history for verbally and physically abusing women. In Ana Mendieta’s defense, she wasn’t likely to have committed suicide as Andre claimed since she had extensive plans for the future, one of which was to divorce her husband. She also avoided going near windows because of her extreme fear of heights. The defense’s argument was that Mendieta was overly emotional because of her Cuban heritage, mentally unstable because she incorporated elements drawn from Santeria into her works, and obsessed with death because of the color red, representative of blood, she used in her sculptures indicating an unconscious wish to die. Therefore she killed herself. By Robert Katz’s estimation, Carl Andre had more reason to kill Ana Mendieta than she did to jump to her death. But the prosecution couldn’t provide enough evidence to support their case.

Robert Katz tells this story in a straightforward manner. His bias that Ana Mendieta is clear from the beginning. As mentioned before, those who are attracted to this book are probably already familiar with the case of Mendieta. Katz mostly wrote this book to fill in all the fine details for those who want to know more. But whether Andre pushed his wife out the window or she fell or jumped of her own volition is left an open question. Katz makes it feel overwhelmingly that Carl Andre is guilty of murder, but the reader is still left with the possibility that he is just skilled enough at persuasive writing to manipulate the reader’s emotions. He could have made his case by leaving out or altering information. But in recent times, patterns in the response to Ana Mendieta’s death have emerged even though more evidence hasn’t. Supporters of Carl Andre have continued to maintain strict silence in the questioning of the incident and the cause of Ana Mendieta remains a rallying call for feminists and social activists who are convinced of his guilt. Putting all politics aside, I am of the opinion that Carl Andre murdered Ana Mendieta and justice has never been served. Based on my sum of knowledge so far, I can’t see it any other way though I do admit this might be an impossible case to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt. And the two people who would know best are both dead.

Naked By the Window is a good document, probably the best document, of the Mendieta-Andre case. It is also a good portrait of the Soho art scene of the 1980s and some of its problematic aspects. It gives you a look into the darker side of a closed community that most will never be a part of. It should give you something to think about the next time you visit a gallery or sit for an art history class in a lecture hall. The art market is just as cut throat and vicious as any other big business. Don’t let the aesthetics and the mental stimulation of the art works fool you as to what goes on behind the scenes. As for the works done by those respective artists, and aside from the alleged crime of homicide committed by Carl Andre, the works of Ana Mendieta are certainly more visually engaging and meaningful. Her premature death cut short the life of a promising artist who was just beginning to find her stride towards her mature period of expression. Since her death, Carl Andre’s art has grown in popularity with his bales of hay and rows of bricks selling for millions. Some critics still love him, some consider him to be a con man. Although I’m not a big supporter of minimalism, I do know of some minimalist artists who are good. Carl Andre isn’t one of them. Maybe on that night of September 1985 the wrong person fell out of his window.

 

Book Review: The Life and Times of Pancho Villa by Friedrich Katz

The Life and Times of Pancho Villa

by Friedrich Katz

      The Mexican Revolution is a difficult subject to approach. It was a loosely organized aeries of uprisings that lasted a little more than a decade. Some of the key figures, especially military commanders were obscure people with obscure motivations. Alliances shifted constantly, sometimes inexplicably. Historical records of events in Mexico at that time were not meticulously kept. A lot of what people know about the revolution is apocryphal and based in folklore, legend, and sometimes propaganda and yellow journalism. It’s no wonder that historians who tackle this field of knowledge often contradict each other in their accounts. It’s hard to tell the truth when the truth is so uncertain. One way of reducing the amount of murkiness and confusion surrounding the Mexican Revolution is to write about it from a biographical standpoint so that one historical figure can act as an anchor, making it easier to organize and analyze the confusing mass of information. That is what the Austrian historian Friedrich Karz does in The Life and Times of Pancho Villa.

The whole story starts out in the northern state of Chihuahua where military veterans of the Mexico-Apache wars were given land as reward for their fighting. As the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz grew in power, the increasingly unpopular oligarchs Luis Terrazas and Enrique Creel were encroaching on people’s land, establishing haciendas, and instituting a system of debt peonage. Francisco Madero started a pro-democracy uprising to unseat Diaz and one of his military commanders was a former bandit named Pancho Villa. This ex-bandit had a natural talent for military leadership and quickly rose in the ranks. His army unit was composed of mostly peasant agriculturalists and Indians and their agitation for land reform and redistribution came into the revolution along with them.

Understanding the mind and personality of Pancho Villa is not an easy task. A lot is known about what he did, but personal accounts of what he was like as a man are on the sketchy side. He is known for being compassionate and cruel in equal measures, he moved easily among the poorest and richest members of society, his educational level was low but he had a natural intelligence and a curiosity for learning, and he was a bigamist who married several women and had a large brood of children. None of this tells you much about the inner workings of his mind. But I also suspect that Katz is not the kind of author who has an aptitude for that kind of writing.

Nevertheless, Pancho Villa’s story is amazing. After helping Madero overthrow the dictatorship, Villa was imprisoned for some unclear reason. After Villa escaped, the military commander Huerta overthrew Madero and reestablished the dictatorship. Villa called up his armies again and the next phase of civil war began. After the revolutionaries called the Conference of Aguascalientes, Villa formed a loose alliance with Emiliano Zapata since both caudillos stood for the cause of land reform. Villa seized power in Chihuaua as acting governor for a while, then eventually returned to fighting in the war, this time against the faction of the revolution lead by Venustiano Carranza, the man who ratified the new Mexican constitution. Just like in the French Revolution, and so many other revolutions in the past, the revolutionary soldiers entered into combat against each other. By the end of the decade, Villa was losing favor with his followers but he kept fighting, probably because he didn’t know what else to do with himself. During this period before his assassination, he led an attack north of the American border on the town of Columbus, New Mexico. This led to a brief invasion into Mexico by the American army that resulted in nothing but more chaos.

There is so much more to this story and most of it is written here in minute details. It is an understatement to say that Friedrich Katz is anal retentive. Ultimately, though, he is on the tolerable side of detail oriented writing, thereby making it just possible to digest. If he had given any more details this book would have been impossible to read. But the details are the best and the worst thing about this biography. By giving such long, drawn out explanations, Katz runs the risk of boring his readers to death and drowning them in information. But at least the information is relevant and, actually, it works to his benefit. Since the Mexican Revolution can be such a swamp of muck to unpack, something goes to be said for the excessive details. Writing it all out this way separates the different strands of the history, bringing them into sharper focus, and making it easy to examine each part of the story in clarity. A quality microscope can make a splotch of biological matter easier to see in its complexity by expanding and exaggerating its appearance so its disorganization looks more organized for our perception. That is what Katz accomplishes in this book. Even though this work is so thorough that it can induce migraines for the reader, it is worth the torment of reading it because it ends up being the most comprehensible and clearly written book on the Mexican Revolution I have encountered so far.

Another impressive aspect of this biography is Katz’s unwillingness to take sides in an argument when he feels there is not enough evidence to draw a strong conclusion. A case in point is the issue of why American president Woodrow Wilson supported the Villista forces at first and then switched sides to support the Constitutionalist Carrancistas. Katz gives multiple perspectives on the issue, but doesn’t come to a definite conclusion because there isn’t any documented records directly explaining Wilson’s stances. Other issues treated in this similar way are Madero’s reasoning for imprisoning Villa, Villa’s continued support for Madero after being imprisoned, Villa’s reasoning for fighting against Carranza and his troops, whether Villa was persuaded by a German agent to attack Columbus as part of a conspiracy to keep America out of World War I, and who was behind the assassination of Villa. He even contemplates the unanswered question of why Villa continued his campaigns of guerilla warfare for so long after the Revolution had lost meaning for him. While it is useful to speculate on unanswerable historical problems, it is even more commendable when a scholar is humble enough to admit that he doesn’t know what the right answers are.

To be blunt, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa is a pain in the ass to read because of its length, excessive detail, and Germanic writing style that could very well make your hemorrhoids act up. But if there is only one book you ever read about the Mexican Revolution, this one is worth the trouble. That’s not to say it exhausts the subject matter because it doesn’t. But it does clarify a lot of the confusion surrounding this hotly debated topic of Mexican history. And by the end, it makes it easy to see why Pancho Villa remains a hero of the poor and the working classes in Mexico, along with Leftists in other countries, and such a villain to heartless conservatives who think the world should only belong to them. And Villa is even a saint to some devotees of Santa Muerte.

 

Book Review: Vesco by Arthur Herzog

Vesco:

From Wall Street to Castro's Cuba

the Rise, Fall, and Exile Of the King of White-Collar Crime

by Arthur Herzog

      The world of big business and corporate finance is a shady place. When profits and personal gain are the primary motivations for success, then inevitably a company will attract some questionable characters. Greedy, sharky narcissists and grifters sometimes claw their way to the top. Slick deal makers invade the boardrooms and moral guardrails get flushed down the toilet. Our culture of economics celebrates those who accumulate the most wealth regardless of their character or usefulness to society as a whole. Organized crime syndicates are little more than the shadow side of big business. It is no surprise that such an environment would attract some pathological predators. It is also no surprise that some libertarian lunatics will lionize these scumbags for being an exotic breed of amoral heroes. Vesco by Arthur Herzog gives a biographical account of one such sleazy businessman who eventually ended up on the lam.

Robert Vesco had an unimpressive childhood. His family were part of the Midwestern blue collar class, living without frills or fortune. After getting bored with mundane factory work, Vesco got into the habit of buying businesses. He developed a talent for buying failing businesses and turning them around to be either resold or else used to buy other businesses. He built up a network of them and then set his sights higher, using the profits to buy his way onto the board of the Investors Overseas Service or IOS. This high-finance corporation was already being run by some shady people and had actually been banned from doing business in America. So Vesco tried to take over IOS and along the way, stashed investors’ money in offshore bank accounts and shell companies in the Caribbean and Central America. The American SEC caught on to what he was doing and tried to take him down. After a joke of a trial in which the government struggled to define what crime Vesco had committed, let along prove their case, the rogue businessman had already become one of the richest men in the world. Instead of risking more harassment from the government, Vesco fled the country, spending most of his time making banking and business deals in the Bahamas and then making a semi-permanent move to Costa Rica.

That much of the biography is interesting if you can manage to extract so much meaning from Herzog’s text. Unfortunately, there are three identifiable problems that muddy up the narrative waters. One is that a lot of space is taken up with details of banking and corporate business management. There is nothing inherently wrong with that and it would be expected in a book about white collar crime. The problem is that it is alienating to readers who are not familiar with these business practices which can be assumed to be most people. Herzog doesn’t explain this side of the story sufficiently enough for those of us who have never been inside a corporate boardroom. Another problem is that Robert Vesco disappears for a long stretch from his own biography. Herzog goes into too much detail about the lifestyles of the IOS managers, especially that of Bernard Cornfeld who dominates such a long portion of the writing that you might forget who this is meant to be a biography of. And that is not the only time that happens in this book. The third major error is that the author writes about how Vesco has such a charming and attractive personality, but this never comes across in the writing. The book actually lacks sufficient detail to drive this point home. Herzog could have included more personal testimony or anecdotes from people who knew Vesco to make him come to life more as the central figure of the story rather than being so one dimensional.

Robert Vesco settled in Costa Rica after the American government put pressure on the Bahamas to extradite him. There he made friends with the president Jose Figeres Ferrer. Vesco was the wealthiest man in that tiny, impoverished nation and Figeres urged him to invest money in the national infrastructure. Subsequent presidents warmed up less to Vesco but tolerated his presence as long as he didn’t meddle with the national media. Public opinion in Costa Rica was divided and the presence of Vesco was a prominent news item for several years. Despite living lavishly, Vesco’s fortunes were growing smaller and he began investing in more dangerous business ventures like drug smuggling and arms running to keep himself afloat. He got too hot for the Costa Ricans to handle, so after secretly bouncing around from Antigua and Panama to Nicaragua, he eventually settled in Cuba. It can be said that the communists allowed him to stay in Havana simply to annoy the American government, but they probably wanted some of his money and access to his business contacts as well. The sections about Vesco’s life in exile are somewhat interesting, but again, he disappears from the story for unnecessarily long periods including passages about an illegal arms deal with Libya in which Vesco only had a tenuous connection.

As far as the writing quality goes, the best part, meaning the clearest and easiest to follow, comes in the final chapter when Herzog goes to Cuba to interview Robert Vesco and show him a transcript of his biography. Actually nothing especially interesting happens there and the chapter does almost nothing to add to the bigger picture of who Vesco really was, but it is the best written part of the whole book. This is important because Herzog wrote about what he saw in Cuba. The rest of the book lacks that kind of vision. Herzog can’t be faulted for not being in the room with Vesco throughout his entire life, but the author never actually sees what he writes about. There are lots of listed details, but he never actually puts you, as a reader, right into the action the way a good writer does. Reading this book has the feel of trying to follow a TV show while sitting in a separate room and listening to it through the wall without any visual input.

Robert Vesco was a man who got into too much too soon. He obviously had a natural talent for business, but he moved too fast for his own good. He didn’t learn the lesson of Icarus whose wings made of wax melted when he flew too close to the sun. If Vesco hadn’t been so reckless he might have survived longer in the world of corporations and banks. Maybe he would have even gotten away with squirreling some money in offshore bank accounts. White collar crime is just as common as kids stealing candy from the supermarket and probably gets prosecuted less often.

Arthur Herzog’s Vesco doesn’t qualify as a great biography. It has too much detail about things I don’t understand without sufficient explanation to make them comprehensible and not enough detail about the things that make Robert Vesco interesting even though he can’t be sympathized with. Unless you have a burning passion for corporate business, financial institutions, and white collar crime, this probably isn’t a book worth your time.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Becoming Richard Pryor by Scott Saul

Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

      “Cocaine’s not addicting. My friends have been snortin’ coke for fifteen years and they’re not addicted.”

Welcome to the world of Richard Pryor. It’s a world where a young African-American boy grew up in an inner city brothel, discovered he had a talent for stage performance, and went on to become one of the greatest stand up comics of all time and a movie star too. If you grew up in the 1980s, your introduction to Richard Pryor was probably in family friendly movies like The Toy or Superman III. But those who explored his works further were probably shocked at first by the X-rated brand of humor on his comedy albums in which “bitch”, “motherfucker”, and the n-word are used over and over again. On stage, on screen, and in his personal life he was a complex man with a multi-faceted personality. In Scott Saul’s biography Becoming Richard Pryor, all these different sides are brought out on display. It’s like exploring the closet of a disguise artist to find an almost incomprehensible range of clothing styles that don’t go together but still make up a picture of the man who owned them. Only Pryor wasn’t just changing outfits to suit each individual character he played the way a normal actor would; these weren’t disguises since they came from inside the man, revealing to public view the crazy world that existed inside his head.

There are a lot of ways Scott Saul could have written this biography. He could have simply emphasized the course of Pryor’s professional career. He also could have emphasized the turbulent social and private life of the man. But instead he brought those two threads into a multi-dimensional biographical portrait showing how they contributed to the development of Richard Pryor’s work as an artist. Knowing that Pyror saw himself foremost as an artist rather than a comedian and actor helps clarify what a loftof his life was all about.

Richard Pryor’s childhood was something that no child should ever have to live through. He was raised in Peoria, Illinois by his grandmother, a strict disciplinarian and madame of a brothel who always carried a pistol on her person. His father was also a pimp and a violent man. Pryor spent his childhood seeing women being mistreated in various ways. He also went to integrated schools where he experienced racism first hand while also learning how to navigate in the white world as a Black person. He was smart but not a great student, getting attention by being a class clown. Then a perceptive woman working as a stage director in a youth center saw his potential and inspired him to pursue a career in the performing arts.

Eventually Pryor moved to Greenwich Village in New York City and easily found his way into the bohemian night clubs where he did stand up and got involved with improvisational acting troops. These actors were of the experimental and avant-garde variety and Pryor carried a surreal sense of absurdity into later works as a comedian and film maker.

It didn’t take long for him to get a break so he ended up in Hollywood starring in corny TV variety shows. Although he had made it into show business, he felt lost as though he wasn’t being himself, a situation that led to a nervous breakdown on stage during a performance in Las Vegas. After recovering from that crisis, his stand up comedy took a new, uninhibited turn and Pryor began drawing on his own life experiences to create a unique brand of performance that nobody had ever seen before. He began telling stories, switching his voice and demeanor to represent different characters in absurd situations. A lot of these characters were drawn from people in the African-American community. There were pimps, winos, junkies, con artist preachers, revolutionaries, and do gooders, all ciphers of recognizable character types. What Richard Pryor got right was that he mirrored these personages to the Black community, showing them the faults and shortcomings of people they recognized, but doing so in a way that humanized them. This wasn’t cruel humor. It was self-effacing humor, something rare in American comedy, that allowed Black people a chance to laugh about the things that troubled them. Richard Pryor also found success as a cross over comedian, appealing to progressive white audiences because he gave them a window into a Black community that they never experienced first hand despite their support for integration and the politics of Civil Rights.

The issue of racial politics play a prominent role in this book. Richard Pryor was deeply committed to the African-American cause and a fair bit of his performances were related to issues of racism and social justice. Even when making jokes about winos or tall tale bullshitters like his recurring Mudbone character, there was always a sense that these people were welcome as members of the Black community despite their human imperfections. Even when making jokes about white people he did so in a way that showed white people how they look in Black people’s eyes. This was done in a way that made white people laugh at themselves. Pryor’s relations with the white community were sometimes contentious though. As a child he had white friends at school and often encountered white men in the whorehouses where he lived, something that probably helped him get along with white people later in life, but later in his film career he got into long running disputes with directors and actors who didn’t always see things from his point of view. There were other times when he felt like he couldn’t trust white people even though acceptance in the white community was often a priority of his. And yet making it to the big time meant making it in the white world of entertainment. He had this conflict over being true to his art and his people or selling out, but somehow he came out on top, finding himself in script writing, producing, and acting that he would never have gotten into had he not pushed himself beyond the obstacles that other Black artists saw in their way.

There was one area in which his relations with white people was the most controversial: his relationships with white women. Maybe the seeds for his problems were planted in his childhood when he tried to be friends with white girls in school only to have their parents forbid their friendships because he was Black. As he got older, Pryor married seven different white women and all of the marriages were disastrous. He was an habitual wife beater and all of his wives ended up with bruises, broken bones, and knife wounds. Pryor’s rages were fueled by high doses of cocaine and alcohol and didn’t stop with domestic violence; he sometimes destroyed his own houses in the process. You don’t have to be more than an armchair psychologist to see how his upbringing contributed to this with his violent grandmother, his absentee mother, his woman-beating father, and housefuls of prostitutes that put up with abuse on a daily basis, sometimes even humiliating him for being skinny and weak. He probably felt a great deal of confusion over women as well as anger at the dominant white power structure, so by marrying white women and assaulting them, he dominated them through a violent expression of rage, a maladaptive means of working out his frustrations This is the ugliest side of Pryor’s life and something that could ruin him in the eyes of his fans. The author of this biography treads lightly in this territory. The purpose of the book is to examine the development of Richard Pryor’s art, therefore emphasizing his extreme misogyny could easily distract attention away from that purpose. Yet Scott Saul would be doing a great disservice to his audience by downplaying or dismissing the truth of Pryor’s violence altogether. He finds an uneasy balance in his writing. It is a balance that makes you uncomfortable as it should, but it is a balance nonetheless.

This biography also covers Pryor’s career in Hollywood films. Aside from being the primary script writer for the classic comedy Blazing Saddles, he also acted in a number of movies during the 1970s. Pryor had a charismatic appeal and a strong on-screen presence. It could be said that he was a first rate actor and comedian starring in a series of mediocre movies. But what this biography shows is how much Pryor dedicated to working with directors and other actors to ensure that his characters would project a positive image of Black people to Black and white audiences alike. These movies are all overlooked today, but this book shows how instrumental they were in bringing Black film characters to be accepted in the mainstream of American cinema. Fortunately this book winds down in the early 1980s when Richard Pryor set himself on fire after freebasing cocaine and spares us an in depth analysis of what most would call Pryor’s sell out phase when he starred in commercial blockbusters, turning in less than inspiring acting performances yet maintaining his on screen charm all the while.

Becoming Richard Pryor is a brilliant biography. The media likes to feed us stories of multiple personality disorder. The status of that mental illness is a matter of dispute to professional psychiatrists, but the designation does fit Richard Pryor, only in his case he sublimated his multiple personalities into stand up comedy routines and acting. Some might criticize Scott Saul for pulling punches when writing about Pryor’s monstrous dark side, but he needed to do that maintain focus on the intended purpose of this biography. If the intended purpose is to show how the life Richard Pryor led off stage and off screen served as inspiration for his performing art, and also to show how Pryor developed his talents over the most important span of his career, then this book is entirely successful. It also reminds us that art is a flower that grows out of a damaged mind. We have to separate the art from the artist, but we also have to be careful when the art and the artist are so intricately entwined. As horrible as Richard Pryor was in his personal life, his art still managed to be uplifting, inspiring, and socially aware while making sharp observations about the human condition. It was all done by a man with a rare talent for being both entertaining and skilled at communicating while also being delightfully weird. Maybe we can still celebrate him for being a genius artist while condemning the worst things he did.

 

Edward Abbey: A Voice In the Wilderness

biographical video

 

S£X LIES & JERZY KOSINSKI

BBC documentary film about American author Jerzy Kosinski

 

Forensic Psychology & True Crime Book Signed by Author

Let Me Take You Down: 

Inside the Mind of Mark David Chapman,

the Man Who Killed John Lennon

by Jack Jones

Villard Books, 1992, 1st edition/2nd printing

hardcover with dust jacket

SIGNED BY AUTHOR ON TITLE PAGE

In Let Me Take You Down, Jack Jones Penetrates the borderline world of dangerous fantasy, in which Mark David Chapman stalked and killed Lennon:

Mark David Chapman rose early on the morning of December 8 to make final preparations... Chapman had neatley arranged and left behind a curious assortment of personal items on top of the hotel dresser. In an orderly semicircle, he had laid out his passport, an eight track tape of the music of Todd Rundgren, his little Bible, open to the The Gospel According to John (Lennon). He left a letter from a former YMCA supervisor at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, where five years earlier, he had worked with refugees from the Vietnam War. Beside the letter were two photographs of himself surrounded by laughing Vietnamese children. At the center of the arrangement of personal effects, he had placed the small Wizard of Oz poster of Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion.

"I woke up knowing, somehow, that when I left that room, that was the last time I would see the room again," Chapman recalled. "I truly felt it in my bones. I don't know how. I had never seen John Lennon up to that point. I only knew that he was in the Dakota. But I somehow knew that this was it, this was the day. So I laid out on the dresser at the hotel room...just a tableau of everything that was important in my life. So it would say, 'Look, this is me. Probably, this is the real me. This is my past and I am going, gone to another place.'

"I practiced what it was going to look like when police officers came into the room. It was like I was going through a door and I knew I was going to go through a door, the poet's door, William Blake's door, Jim Morrison's door...I was leaving what I was, going into a future of uncertainty."

"Jack Jones has written a beautiful book, rare in its attention to the social context, giving rise to stalkers and assassins of celebrities...celebrity worship is ambivalent - admiration shares the altar with envy. When the worshipped celebrity disappoints, a 'nobody' can become a 'somebody' by killing the pop culture idol...Let Me Take You Down is both fascinating and brilliant."

(copied from the back cover)

Available for purchase on Ebay here