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: Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America's Most Dangerous Amusement Park by Andy Mulvihill with Jake Rossen

Action Park:

Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of 

America's Most Dangerous Amusement Park

by Andy Mulvihill with Jake Rossner

      They say a personal library is like an amusement park for your mind. If that’s the case then my personal library is like Action Park in New Jersey. It’s a place that’s exciting, maybe even liberating, because all caution gets thrown to the wind. It’s a place that’s entertaining because it’s full of unsavory characters and being out of control is the whole point. But the real Action Park existed outside of New York City, not in the pages of my book collection, and Andy Mulvihill’s Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America’s Most Dangerous Amusement Park tells the whole story of this notorious business dedicated to rowdy leisure time and the total suspension of self-preservation or common sense.

Andy Mulvihill is the son of Gene Mulvihill, the visionary and evil genius who put together Action Park in a bid to be the Disneyworld of the Northeast. While renting and operating a ski slope on a hill in New Jersey, he schemed up ways to use the hill and its empty surrounding areas during the summer season. Initially he started with the Alpine Slide, a concrete track that could be navigated by fearless but not-too-wise people in sleds using a foot pedal and brake to control the speed. Injuries like bruises and abrasions were common, but as long as people knew the risks before going down, Gene Mulvihill had no worries. Throughout the 1980s he expanded Action Park to include race cars, go karts, water slides, a wave pool and all kinds of other attractions that were enticing because they were dangerous. They even boasted of having one of the first bungee jumps in America. Mulvihill’s whole philosophy was that he put the individual in the center of the action. Other amusement parks would strap people into rides like roller coasters or tilt-a-whirls that were controlled by ride operators. Mulvihill, on the other hand, believed in giving control of the vehicles over to the participants while letting each individual decide on their level of comfort and safety.

As you can guess, things didn’t always work out for the best. Action Park gained a reputation for being treacherous and people jokingly referred to it by names like “Traction Park” and “Class Action Park”. Injuries of all kinds were frequent. Food and beer from vendor stands were poor quality, restroom sanitation didn’t meet minimum standards, and sometimes gang fights broke out. Safety regulations were posted, but Spanish speakers couldn’t read them. The park’s most notorious ride, the Cannonball Loop, barely made it past the experimental stage. It was a waterslide in an enclosed loop and people often got stuck somewhere inside due to lack of momentum. Those who did make it to the end came out with broken bones, head wounds, or missing teeth. Every now and then, people even died on various rides, though ironically most of those cases were found to be the fault of the deceased for not following safety guidelines. Most injury cases were settled out of court and the ones that did get adjudicated were often won by Gene Mulvihill because he had an ultra-slick lawyer. The one case that almost did Action Park in involved Mulvihill taking out a fake insurance policy with a company that didn’t exist.

The patrons and employees could be a sociological case study unto itself. Due to a successful advertising campaign that was innovative for its time, Action Park attracted huge weekend crowds of working class families and teenagers from inner city Manhattan and the outer boroughs of Queens and the Bronx. New York City in the pre-Giuliani 1980s was nothing like it is now. It possibly was one of the most dangerous cities in the world at the time. So it was a pretty tough crew that came out to New Jersey for fun in the summer. Employees trying to limit overcrowding in the wave pool were often greeted with a middle finger in their faces when they tried to prevent too many people from going in. Fights were common and many children were conceived at various places away from the park. It was a popular hangout for knuckleheads.

The employees could be interesting too. Lifeguards at the wave pool were overworked since so many of the people there did not know how to swim and were often on the verge of drowning. Injuries happened when clueless people with dove into the shallow end and the wave maker was cranked up to the maximum so that people, especially young kids, kept going under after being whacked in the face by a high-intensity wall of water. Due to overcrowding, they often struggled to get back up to the surface. Meanwhile, one of the lifeguards had decked out the wave control shack with a cot, a mini bar, and a stereo system so he could use it as a shag pad. Gene Mulvihill came up with the great idea of hiring underprivileged kids from the hood as employees, but they refused to do any work and spent all their time smoking weed and going on the rides.

Action Park reads like a memoir put together by Andy Mulvihill. Although he does include some anecdotes about his life and the family business, its central theme is not him but the park itself. Gene Mulvihill gets plenty of biographical attention too as he should. Outsiders to this story may think he sounds like little more than a sleazy creep of a businessman, and they might be right, but this is also a portrait of an artist and a visionary. The way son Andy portrays his father Gene is as a man who thought of this pet project as so much more than a way to make money. He went about building Action Park the way some hobbyists build model railroads. Ultimately he loved seeing people having fun and, believe it or not, the park’s patrons did just that. Kids in the 1980s were a lot tougher than they are now and bruises, fractured bones, and bloody cuts were worn as badges of honor. Veterans and survivors of Action Park used to show off their wounds the way soldiers show off their battle scars after a war. I can relate to this mentality myself considering the time I fell off a motorcycle in Phuket and slid down a rain-slicked hill; afterwards I photographed my bloody arm and posted it on Facebook to the delight of some of my friends. Some might criticize Andy Mulvihill for being too sentimental and painting an overly rosy picture of his father, but the guy does come off as quite a character and a fun, charming guy with warm personality. Really though, it is Andy Mulvihill’s gallows humor that makes this book so much fun to read. It’s packed from cover to cover with the grim ironies of growing up and working in such a place. Any attempts at describing his hilarious dark comments would fail. You just have to read it to see what I mean.

Action Park is an easy, engaging, and fun book. Maybe it will even make you think about what it means to be human. If you need a break from reading heavy or serious books, or if you are in the mood for some kind of nostalgia trip, taking you back to a time before Americans became safety obsessed and the bland culture of corporate sterility set in during the 1990s, then it is a great diversion. It definitely reminded me of what it felt like to be young, reckless, carefree, and a little bit stupid. Life is more fun and rewarding when you take risks. Damn the consequences. 

 

Book Review & Analysis: Confessions Of a Dangerous Mind by Chuck Barris

Confessions Of a Dangerous Mind:

  

An Unauthorized Autobiography

by Chuck Barris

      If you were around in the 1970s, you might remember a television program called The Gong Show. Maybe you remember it even if you don’t want to. It was a variety show and a talent contest for people with no talent and often no taste either. They had a celebrity panel of three judges who had to endure an entire performance. If the people on stage were intolerably bad, one of the judges would bang a gong to end it. The performers were immediately disqualified. There were very few contestants who ever made it through a whole set. But it was all in tne name of fun and it WAS fun at least for certain people. In my eight year old brain it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. My mother didn’t agree, but then again she never liked The Three Stooges either. That made it all the more exciting. The producer and host of the show was an awkward little guy who wore a hat with its brim pulled down over his eyes. His name was Chuck Barris and after The Gong Show got canceled after three years, he wrote an autobiography in which he claimed to secretly be a hitman for the CIA. It was called Confessions Of a Dangerous Mind: An Unauthorized Autobiography. Yes, that’s right, this autobiography is unauthorized. You’ve heard of an unauthorized biography, but an unauthorized autobiography? That title itself should be a recognizable indication that something is a little off about this book.

In the opening chapter, Barris is going off on an assignment to rub someone out in New York City. He puts on a fake beard and moustache to hide his identity. As he sits in a coffee shop eating breakfast, a woman recognizes him as a celebrity and strikes up a conversation. She easily sees through his disguise and offers him a blowjob, free of charge no less. This scene sets the tone for the rest of the story and I’m not talking about the blowjob part. Barris, as an author, intends to deceive his audience, but he also sets the audience up to see through his deception the same way the fan in the restaurant does.

And there is deception all the way through the book. If you’re prone to playing drinking games I have one to propose. Read this book and every time Barris gets himself out of a tight fix through deception or outright lies, take a shot of your favorite venom. You probably won’t make it through 20 or 30 pages before the room is spinning like a tilt-a-whirl amusement park ride or you are lying on the bathroom floor because it’s convenient to be next to the toilet so you don’t have to stumble too far the next time you hurl your hamburger dinner. Next time you’ll remember to go easy on the hot sauce. A case in point is where Barris has a problem with guests on a game show using less than acceptable language during live filming. He hires an actor to pretend he’s a government agent from the FCC and to lecture the guests before each show about the legal consequences of broadcasting obscenity on TV. Problem solved. The contestants clean up their act and almost everything else goes right. Well, maybe not everything.

Chuck Barris says very little about his childhood as a Jewish kid in Philadelphia, an interesting omission for an autobiography. He does write about how he failed with the female students he chased after during college If he’s luckless in love, he’s luckier in his career. He doesn’t have a smooth ride there either, but eventually he pitches the idea for a game show to a television producer and things begin to fall into place. Some people might remember The Dating Game, where a single woman would interview three male contestants hidden from her view and then choose the one who best suits her desire for a date. Barris would go on to produce another hit game show called The Newlywed Game in which newly married couples would be quizzed on how well they knew their partners. Of course it was the 70s so a lot of the questions were loaded with sexual innuendos. More importantly, the contestants often had IQ’s that were lower than the average yearly temperature of Boston. It is lowbrow entertainment in its finest form. These shows were popular because Barris had his finger on the pulse of American pop culture in the 1970s. And that wasn’t such a good thing.

But no matter how successful Barris’s career as a TV producer is, something always goes wrong. For example, on an early set of The Dating Game, he tries to change up the show’s formula by having three chimpanzees sitting in the chairs reserved for the bachelor contestants. Off stage actors would answer the questions asked by the bachelorette with the joke being the expected shock on her face when she gets introduced to the three representatives of the hominid taxonomic family. The filming is a bit of a disaster because one of the apes plays with his genitals while the one next to him begins dismantling the chair he is sitting in and throwing its pieces into the audience. The passages about Barris’s TV shows are full of hilarious anecdotes like this.

Another side of his autobiography is the perpetual flux of his failing love life. There is no shortage of groupies, but none of them are appealing as people. When he meets women he is attracted to, the relationships always fail. There are two women who float in and out of the narrative. One is Penny Pacino, a redhead who spends a lot of her life pursuing him as a husband. The other is Patricia Watson, a commanding officer in the CIA.

Barris gets tapped to work undercover as an assassin by the world’s most notorious intelligence agency. He gets assigned to work under Jim Byrd, his senior officer, mentor, and friend. Together they spend time drinking, talking about life in the agency, planning assassinations, and carrying them out. Barris goes on assignment in Mexico City, London, Paris, and New York all for the purpose of permanently ending the careers of rival spies. Later he gets tracked down for a revenge killing by a KGB agent and the whole story climaxes when they learn there is a mole in the upper ranks of the CIA, one who is responsible for the death of Jim Byrd. An interesting piece of foreshadowing occurs when Barris accidentally tells someone where Jim Byrd will be during a sabbatical. Loose lips sink ships as the World War II navy propaganda posters used to say, warning sailors not to give details to friendly strangers while on shore leave. What Barris says about Jim Byrd has deadly consequences.

So how should you interpret this unauthorized autobiography? Start by accepting that almost everything in it is fiction. While Barris’s career as a businessman and game show producer are verifiable, most of the rest of it isn’t. There are obvious clues that his employment in the CIA is fake. He does things that an effective intelligence agency would never allow like having meetings with other operatives in bars and restaurants where company planning is discussed openly or assassinating people in crowded public areas like the plaza in front of a museum in Mexico City or a busy shopping street in Paris. The idea of sending a recognizable public figure on these missions is absurd as well. Other clues are more subtle, like how he meets with the man who assassinated Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende by gunshot. Only, in reality, Allende died after falling out a window. Was he pushed or was it an accident? It doesn’t matter here. What matters is that he didn’t die of a bullet wound. When it comes to the CIA story, Barris is just spinning a yarn to see what he can get away with. He seems to be dropping hints, winking at you, and elbowing you in the ribs throughout the whole book to see if you are in on the joke. Like the fake facial hair he wears in the opening chapter, he expects you to be perceptive enough to see through his disguise. If you don’t, that’s your problem.

A quick biographical check on Chuck Barris reveals something else. During the two decades this book takes place, spanning 1960 to 1980, he was married twice, something which is never mentioned in this autobiography. He did marry a redhead but her name wasn’t Penny Pacino, as stated in the story, and he didn’t marry her until ten years after this book was published. So the story of his frustrated love life and eventual marriage to Penny can’t be taken any more seriously than the CIA story.

Despite all his trickery, Barris does confront us with an ironic truth that can be found in his personality. Throughout the book, he privately struggles with depression, issues of self-worth, and a low self esteem. Despite his success in television, he is haunted by a dark shadow since nothing ever goes as planned even when things are working out for the best. The entertainment establishment isn’t accepting of him either, thinking of him as a troublemaker and an annoyance. His game shows work on the premise that people are happy to make fools of themselves in public if it means they get a chance to be on TV. Barris has an enormous contempt for his game show contestants and for a lot of his audience as well. The Gong Show, in all its trashiness, can be seen as a middle finger in the face of the industry that tolerated him as long as he made money for them, but scathingly put him down behind his back. This book reveals Barris as being pummeled into depression by the negativity that goes with fame and being hailed as the King of Schlock. He is like a successful CEO who looks in the mirror and sees Charlie Brown staring back. In the midst of all the fiction, Barris reveals a candid portrayal of the most sensitive parts of his mind, an irony that goes far in making this project work on a literary level. You get a sense of how a man riddled with anxiety reacts to others by being cranky, condescending, and snarky. The story about being a CIA assassin can thereby be read as a compensation fantasy where he gets lauded by the agency for being successful and in control of his assignments. Besides, the other agents are suave, courageous, intelligent, and urbane. They aren’t like the nitwits Barris has to work with in television or the fans of his game shows, the kinds of people who laugh at jokes about people farting while 69ing. While he wanted to be proud of his life, he had some misgivings. After all, his legacy is that he initiated a long string of TV shows where ordinary people act like idiots for entertainment stretching from The Morton Downey Show, Geraldo, The Jerry Springer Show, and Fear Factor onwards into the abysmal slime pit of reality shows that amount to little more than junk food for the mind.

When read as a straight up work of fiction, Confessions Of a Dangerous Mind is worth your time. It’s a combination of autobiographical realism and a traditional spy thriller complete with plot hooks, plot twists, and a surprise ending. Then it’s held together with the psychological insights of a quality character study with Chuck Barris playing the protagonist’s role as Chuck Barris. And if you’re not convinced that it’s all fiction, keep in mind that in 1982, the year of publication, the author is on record saying that this book is fiction when he appeared on TV talk shows to promote it. Some people believe that Barris really was a CIA assassin. Some have accused him of being mentally ill and delusional. Still others have claimed this book is a hoax. I think they are all wrong. This book is more like a prank and it’s a pretty enjoyable one if you approach it from the right angle.

 

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.

 

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