Richard Pryor

The Full Biography

Richard Pryor. Comedian. The Peoria kid who made a stage into a confession the country had not hired, then spent the last decades as a body that had already walked through fire.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is a man on a stage in a red suit, telling the truth at a volume the nightclubs had not budgeted for. Live in Concert. What the still cannot show is Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III of Peoria, Illinois, a childhood in his grandmother’s brothel, a Cosby-safe act he walked off, a 1980 fire he ran through, and a man who died in Encino in 2005 with multiple sclerosis already in the file.

He was born on December 1, 1940, in Peoria. The first house was not a sitcom. His grandmother, Marie Carter, ran a brothel. His mother, Gertrude Thomas, worked in that weather. His father, LeRoy “Buck Carter” Pryor, had been a boxer and a hustler. Richard has told this. A complete file does not tour it and does not skip it. He was one of four children raised in a building where the adult world was already the whole weather. At seven he was sexually abused. At ten a court gave Gertrude’s custody away and Marie kept him. At fourteen the school expelled him. He was a child in rooms that did not pretend to be kind. The stage, when it arrived, was not an escape from that house. It was the only language the house had left him.

Juliette Whittaker at the Carver Community Center in Peoria put him in plays. He has named her. She was the first adult who treated the gift as a gift and not a problem. In 1958 he joined the Army. The stint ended in a stockade in West Germany after a fight that began in a theater, over a white soldier laughing at the wrong scenes in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life. He came home. He worked Harold’s Club in Peoria, then any room that would have a kid who could hold a mike. In 1963 he moved to New York. He opened for Nina Simone at the Village Gate and shook so hard she held him in the dark until the set. He did a clean act because the clean act paid. Ed Sullivan. Merv Griffin. Johnny Carson. Las Vegas. The Cosby model: stories that did not scare a supper club. He was good at it. He was also, by his own accounting, a man standing in the wrong weather.

The door is September 1967, the Aladdin Hotel, Las Vegas. Dean Martin was in the house. Pryor walked on, looked at the sold-out room, said “What the fuck am I doing here?,” and walked off. He has told that as an epiphany. What followed was the work the century kept. He moved to Berkeley. He sat with Huey Newton and Ishmael Reed. He put the Peoria house, the Army, the sex, the race, and the fear into the act without asking a booker if the room was ready. The 1968 album Richard Pryor on Dove/Reprise is the first recording of that leaving. Craps (After Hours), 1971, on Laff, is a club at 3 a.m. He wrote for Sanford and Son and for Flip Wilson. In 1973 he shared an Emmy for a Lily Tomlin special. He was already a writer the town could hire. He was not yet the man the albums would make.

That Nigger’s Crazy (1974) won the Grammy and made the leaving a civic object. …Is It Something I Said? (1975) did it again. Bicentennial Nigger (1976) did it a third time. Three gold albums. Three consecutive Grammys for Best Comedy Album. He did not ask permission. He made the permission irrelevant. He co-wrote Blazing Saddles with Mel Brooks, Andrew Bergman, Norman Steinberg, and Al Uger. Brooks has said the studio would not let Pryor play Sheriff Bart. Pryor wanted the part. Cleavon Little got it. The writing is still his weather in that picture. He hosted the first season of Saturday Night Live in 1975, the first Black host, and did a word-association sketch with Chevy Chase that the censors still talk about. The Richard Pryor Show, on NBC in 1977, lasted four episodes. He played the first Black president in a sketch, examined a gun without a joke, and would not sand the material down to a network’s idea of family. He said he had said what he wanted in four. The network was relieved. The albums did not need the network.

The pictures were a second living. Lady Sings the Blues (1972), as Piano Man opposite Diana Ross, showed a dramatic instrument the clubs had not advertised. The Mack. Uptown Saturday Night with Poitier and Belafonte. Car Wash. The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings. Which Way Is Up? and Greased Lightning for Michael Schultz. Then Silver Streak (1976) with Gene Wilder — a train, a disguise, a pair the gates loved. Blue Collar (1978), for Paul Schrader, opposite Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto, is the picture the concert crowds skip: an auto worker, a union, a man who is not a bit. The Wiz (1978) put him in the emerald suit. California Suite. The movies made him a face in houses that would not have bought the albums. The albums are the file. The movies are the living. He was, for a stretch, the most complete American stand-up the art had hired, and a movie star the studio could sell on a Friday night. Every comic who treats a stage as a confession booth still pays him a tax whether they say so or not.

Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1979), shot in Long Beach, is the monument. A man alone. A body that is also a weather. A set that is a biography without a narrator. He does his heart, his grandmother, animals, sex, the police, and the fear of dying, and he does not leave the stage to fetch a second character from a trunk. The concert film is the Bible the next two generations stole from. That same year he went to Kenya. He came home and said he would not use a particular racial slur on stage again. He had looked at people who were not living inside the American insult and decided the word was a white room he did not have to keep renting. The next albums honor that vow. The old albums do not. Both are in the file.

On June 9, 1980, he caught fire. Freebase. Rum. He ran, burning, down Parthenia Street in Northridge until the police stopped him. Second- and third-degree burns over more than half the body. Six weeks at the Grossman Burn Center. He lived. He made the fire a bit because that is what he did with pain he had already decided to own: Live on the Sunset Strip (1982), a match, a jog, a line about Richard Pryor running down the street. One chapter. Not a tour. The fire is not the life. It is the night the body became a headline, and then a routine, and then a fact the obituaries would lead with.

Stir Crazy (1980), again with Wilder, was already in motion and became the first time a Black actor earned a million dollars for a single picture. Bustin’ Loose. Some Kind of Hero. Superman III (1983), which he did not love and which paid him four million. A five-year Columbia deal, forty million, Indigo Productions. Brewster’s Millions. Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling (1986), which he wrote and directed, a fictionalized accounting of the life, including the fire, that the town did not know how to buy. Critical Condition. Moving. See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Another You closed the Wilder pair. Harlem Nights (1989) put three generations — Redd Foxx, Pryor, Eddie Murphy — in one room. The formula pictures paid the house. The concert films and Jo Jo are the work he owed himself. Multiple sclerosis arrived as a diagnosis in 1986. The body that had been the instrument became the subject. He kept working as long as the body allowed.

I never thought of myself as a comic. I thought of myself as Richard Pryor.Richard Pryor

The turn is the walk-off from the clean act, and then the decision, after Kenya, to retire a word that had been his trademark. A lot of comics become a brand. He became a confession the country could not look away from and could not fully quote in a family newspaper. Fond memory that keeps only the Wilder pictures is a cleaned room. A pile-on that keeps only the pipe is a different cleaned room. The stage is the life.

He married seven times, to five women: Patricia Price, Shelley Bonus, Deborah McGuire, Jennifer Lee twice, Flynn Belaine twice. Seven children, among them Richard Jr., Elizabeth, Rain, Steven, Franklin, Kelsey. The private life was not quiet. Friends from the clubs describe a professional who could destroy a room and then sit in a corner as if the room had happened to someone else. Pam Grier tried to teach him to read scripts more steadily and to put the pipe down. He married someone else while he was still with her. The Pryor on a 1990s stage, thinner, slower, on a scooter he joked stood for More Shit, was a man who had already been a climate and was now a body the confession had used. Both are the life.

The later years

Multiple sclerosis did not retire him on the day of the diagnosis. It rewrote the instrument one season at a time. He used a scooter. He said MS stood for More Shit. He still took the work that would have him. Another You in 1991 closed the Wilder partnership on a picture nobody files as a monument. David Lynch put him in Lost Highway in 1997 as Arnie, a garage manager, a last film appearance, the scooter in the frame, a man who is not asked to run. In December 1999 he opened an episode of The Norm Show as an old man in a wheelchair. That is the last television. The body had become the blocking.

In 1995 he published, with Todd Gold, Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences. The book does not unsay the brothel, the Army, the walk-off, the pipe, or the fire. It is a memoir by a man who had already used the material on stage and was now willing to put it in a typeface. Jennifer Lee Pryor, who had married him in 1981, divorced him, and married him again in 2001, became the manager of the last chapter. She sat with the tapes. In 2002 they won the rights to the old Laff material, nearly forty hours. Rhino’s Evolution/Revolution: The Early Years (1966–1974) came out in 2005, the year he died, a map of the Cosby act becoming the confession. The box set …And It’s Deep Too! had already gathered the Warner years. He was, at the end, a catalog as much as a man.

The Kennedy Center gave him the first Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 1998. He accepted it as a man who could no longer do the physical show the prize was naming. Lawrence Wilker said the committee had chosen him because he forced the country to look at race and at the tragicomic condition, and because, like Twain, he projected a generosity that still united a room. Pryor, on that night, was not a nostalgia act. He was the reason the prize existed. Comedy Central would put him at number one on its all-time stand-up list. Rolling Stone would do the same after he was gone. He did not get to tour those lists. He sat in the scooter and let the room come to him.

A second heart attack, in Australia in 1990, and a triple bypass in 1991, sat on top of the MS. He had already had a first attack in 1977, at thirty-six, after years of smoking and drink. The last years were a negotiation with a body that had been asked to do too much and had done it anyway. In late 2004 a sister said he had lost his voice. Jennifer posted on his site in January 2005 that he was still, in his own words, a talkin’ motherfucker on the good days. He was not performing. He was remaining. He did not pretend the body was the 1979 body. He did not tour a farewell that the rooms would have paid for. The albums kept playing in cars the new comics stole from.

He died on the morning of December 10, 2005, at home in Los Angeles, a third heart attack. Jennifer could not bring him back. He was sixty-five. The hospital clocked it at 7:58 a.m. She said there was a smile on his face. The obituaries had been in draft since the fire. They still could not hold the whole stage. The ashes went to the family. In 2019 she scattered them in the bay at Hana, Hawaii. Peoria still has the first house. Encino has the last years. The tapes have the rest.

After he was gone

Every comic who treats a wound as material still pays him a tax. Seinfeld called him the Picasso of the profession. Bob Newhart called him the seminal comedian of fifty years. Dave Chappelle said he was the figure walking upright on the evolution chart. The Wilder pictures still play on holiday television. The albums still argue with anyone who wants a clean language. The Mark Twain Prize still has his name first on the wall. Rain and Elizabeth have had to share a father who is a red suit and a confession. Jennifer has had to share a husband who is a catalog.

He came out of a brothel weather, walked off a safe act, made a concert film the art still uses as a Bible, ran burning down a street, told that too, and died in a body MS had already rewritten. If you only remember the red suit, you have the still. If you remember the walk-off, Kenya, the fire as one night, and the name he claimed instead of “comic,” you have him.

Portrait: NBC Television · Public domain (PD US no notice) · via Wikimedia Commons

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