COVER STORY : Still Livin' Large : He was the brightest comet in comedy--until he crashed to earth, crushed by problems and illness. But Richard Pryor's humor still touches many hearts.

By Lynell George

July 2, 1995 12 AM PT

<i> Lynell George is a staff writer for The Times' Life & Style section. </i>

An image that once made for a clever billboard now serves better as metaphor: the epitome of livin’ large.

Flaming-red tux, sans tie, Richard Pryor--like some caffeinated, animated Macy’s dirigible towering over Sunset Boulevard--dodges the crush of traffic. Clutching his Goliath foot, he howls in pain as some befuddled motorist has taken a roll over a toe or two.

Some 13 years after the release of “Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip,” the bigger-than-life story continues. It’s Richard Pryor Rises Again--Part XI . . . or is it Part XII . . . ?

Just a few blocks down the Sunset Strip from where that billboard once stood, a necklace of a line, doubled-up Disneyland fashion, winds around the Comedy Store’s perimeter. Above it, broad script letters announce the afternoon’s event: “Richard Pryor signs Pryor Convictions”--the comedian’s latest stab at a sense-making of his chaotic life.

In the dry steam heat on this windy Saturday, some have set up camp in the shade hours ago. Armed with disposable cameras, they wait--eyes not straying too far from the sloped driveway leading to the VIP stage door. Comedians with 8-by-10s, actors with resumes, old girlfriends with snapshots and memories.

Anticipation alone has men built like linebackers worried about stuttering in his presence. “If I were Catholic,” says longtime fan Byron Bonner, his three copies of Pryor’s book protected in a plastic bag, “this would be like meeting the Pope.”

Like a game of charades, bits and pieces of old Pryor routines float up: a flash of a trademark scowl here; there, imitations of wise and wizened Mudbone unscrewing a bottle of Night Train, jaw working, telling his version of the truth.

But it’s Pryor’s edgy and eloquent confrontations on the subject of race that propped him head and shoulders above other stand-ups. His act--blunt, blue and threatening to some--tackled what up until then no comic quite had the courage to.

“I credit Richard with saving my life,” says comedian Dominic Anthony, snapping into main-room action. “I was ready to commit suicide until I heard [the album] ‘That Nigger’s Crazy.’ It talked about where I was from. If he could do it where he came from, I could do it from where I came from. He was . . . “ Anthony pauses, considering the words, “ real real.”

When “he” arrives, it isn’t exactly the Pope-mobile. Nor is it a sleek stretch limo of the high-on-the-hog, fast-lane days. But no matter. A teal van hums past the waiting throng. Rolling to a stop, the door slides open in a whisper. After a pause, out rolls Pryor on a motorized scooter, baseball cap and glasses slightly obscuring his face, trademark conspiratorial grin--lit like neon.

Up shoot the hoots, the woofs, the applause of a couple of hundred fans--men, women, children, all ages, colors, expectations. The welcome lasts well after he disappears into the dark hole of the club.

“He changed the face of comedy forever,” says Anthony, craning his neck, gauging how long it will take until the line will snake inside. “It wasn’t just a blue act but a truthful act.”

In his new book, “Pryor Convictions--And Other Life Sentences,” Richard Pryor is once again finding his voice, trying to tell the truth.

It isn’t the first time. And it has never been easy.

Miles Davis once told him: “Listen to the music inside your head, Rich. Play with your heart.” This was in the mid-’60s, just about the time that Pryor was doing--and copping to it--his version of Bill Cosby.

But something shook his psyche after a breakdown under the spotlight at Las Vegas’ Aladdin Hotel in 1967.

“For the first time in my life, I had a sense of Richard Pryor the person,” he writes. “I understood myself. I knew what I stood for . . . knew what I had to do . . . I had to go back and tell the truth.

“People can’t always handle it. . . . But I knew that if you tell the truth, it’s going to be funny.”

Ultimately, Pryor took up one of the most treacherous endeavors: telling the truth about race in America--and telling it to America’s face.

That task--giving center-stage shape and voice to long-silenced black men and women living on the margins, articulating the range of joys and the shades of frustration--was far larger than the slight young man who chose to undertake it.

Lies, tall tales and the shadings in between assume a prominent place in the history of African American humor. And Pryor’s most famous creation, Mudbone, the grizzled back-porch raconteur, is, according to author Mel Watkins, “one of the most eloquent and popular purveyors of the tall tale or big lie in modern comedy.”

A master of creating worlds much larger than the small stages he once stood upon, Pryor, 54, is currently sorting through the taller tales of his own creation, mining for the center of his story, where routines end and life begins--amending some details, rethinking others.

His new book, depending on what day you get him, is either a labor of love or a labor of monetary necessity. But, in any event, it is an attempt to clear some of the misspeaks and creative re-creations--part of the poetic license of telling one’s own tale.

For some time he had the luxury of sharing each chapter one on one, from behind the microphone. Solo onstage, he cast a broad beam on the skeletons in the farthest corner, always with a sneaky grin on his face, like there was something more in the very back that we weren’t quite ready for.

However, in the last few years since Pryor was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1986, his work has been sporadic. The conversations, more and more infrequent. For someone who was considered among African Americans to be their Ted Koppel--offering topical commentary and analysis--the silence has been excruciating, his absence often palpable.

His performances since then have mostly been on film, including Eddie Murphy’s “Harlem Nights” in 1989 and “Another You,” his last pairing with Gene Wilder, in 1991.

The book, in effect, becomes a visit with an old friend, a chance to pick up where he left off, in his own words. But as well it allows Pryor to understand the impact of his craft and influence.

Released concurrently is contraband for a new generation: reissues of a passel of classic recordings--”Supernigger,” “The Wizard of Comedy” and “Are You Serious???” And in celebration of it all, Pryor has been making the rounds. Television. Radio. Parties. Signings.

At a recent publication fete at Georgia, friends, working press, names and near-names gathered at the Melrose restaurant to sip white wine and pluck catfish nuggets and barbecued spareribs from silver trays.

Accompanied by constant companion and ex-wife No. 4 Jennifer Lee, Pryor, fist clenched, arm upraised, bulldozed through the crowd on the motorized cart he calls “Mobie.” Strolling alongside, bodyguard-fashion, comedian Richard Belzer barked him across the “fairway” toward the “next hole.”

Television crews beamed back reassuring footage of a slower but smiling Pryor--in tux jacket and soft-leather slip-ons--clowning, breaking it up. Hovering like ghosts behind him, 2-decade-old footage on monitors spotlighted a wiry, wired Pryor stalking across--and through--various stages.

Amid the pomp, Pryor inscribed copies of his book with a determined hand, as friends and well-wishers Robin Williams, Sandra Bernhard, Robert Wuhl and Quincy Jones paused to pay homage or trade a story or two. Even Dominick Dunne pulled away from courtroom proceedings across town to shake the hand of a survivor.

Many are surprised that Pryor is still around; others, not so. Like one longtime friend and collaborator, comedian Paul Mooney: “Richard is a strong life force. Like a cat, he always lands on his feet.”

Despite a history of heart attacks, self-immolation and marathon drug use, Pryor is on the prowl--although maybe with a little more effort. The MS is not in remission, but recent visits to a holistic doctor have him feeling stronger. His days vary. Some are better, others far worse. Today is mixed.

Only days ago, he moved from rattling around too-large rented digs into a smaller, self-contained Encino hideaway--an oasis with a heated turquoise pool surrounded by a tangle of succulents and palms. He smokes. Marlboro Reds. Hard pack. One after another. He is slighter than custom--a rough sketch of jagged angles. And within his sandpaper voice there are shadings of early mentor Miles Davis.

At moments his attention wanders, along with his eyes--across the room, out the door, around the curve--toward past or future.

“I do have a brain, honest,” he says quietly, earnestly, the words emerging slowly. “It’s just on hold now. It went east.”

Presently, his life pours out of boxes--old scripts, framed movie posters, an old photo taken in what were probably his most churlish days--in turtleneck, smiling maniacally, his fingers peeking up behind a well-shaped Afro indicating the place where the horns should be.

“I think today is one of the first days I really enjoyed being in this room,” he whispers, stiffly adjusting himself in a straight-back chair, pillow at his back.

Leaning on a wall behind him looms a huge oil painting of Charlie Parker--wild strokes in earth tones. There is a wheelchair folded like an accordion in a corner. There are photos of family. A blanket of calm.

“There was a wall there. Jennifer had it knocked down,” says Pryor, referring to the woman who has been ruling over the grounds with an iron hand, weeding out excesses in his life--friends, hangers-on, even other ex-wives--and dedicating a healthy portion of her days to reassembling the puzzle that is Pryor’s life. It is, in fact, Lee who found the house, made the offer and closed the deal. (She doesn’t live here, however. A live-in health-care worker tends to Pryor’s full-time needs.)

Pryor slowly pulls another cigarette from the pack. “She’s great. [Jennifer] said, ‘I can fix it for you, and it will be nice for you.’ ” He lights up, sends up a cloud of smoke. “She’s working her ass off.”

And so is Pryor.

The book has jettisoned him back into the world--among friends, fans, temptations. But the hardest part began about a year and a half ago, when a depressed and thus bedridden Pryor was soliciting writers to help him tell his life story. He liked Todd Gold, who would become his co-author, even though he didn’t let on at first.

“We started, and we all seemed to get along,” Pryor rasps through a blue haze of smoke, over the hammering and buzzing of the construction crews who are assembling ramps and altering door-jambs. “He used to talk to me, come back in a week and say, ‘Now, you said that. . . .’ And I say, ‘Nah, that didn’t happen. I lied there.’ ”

Pryor shadowboxed with a parade of demons. The limitations of his body. Confronting unresolved pasts.

“We would try to talk an hour. We try . Sometimes I get frustrated beyond anything . Sometimes we talk 10 minutes. Other times we’d go for an hour and he’d say, ‘I think I’d better go.’ He knew. . . .”

The process, Pryor estimates, took about a year and a half. “But don’t go by me, ‘cause I know my [expletive] is wrong.”

In the book, Pryor cites his 1986 film “Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling” as his first formal attempt to write about the “300-pound alligator that was my life.”

Though he had Gold’s help with this glance back, “it was not easier. It’s hard for us,” Pryor says with a sigh, wide eyes glancing off one wall, then another, the pause long and textured. “I don’t know about most people--but I think it is very hard for people to confront the truth. In themselves most of all.”

Through the years, Pryor has sought the truth in various guises. There’s the truth according to Mudbone; the truth according to Black Ben the Blacksmith. He’s given voice to a legion: from itchy black nationalists and loquacious security guards to smooth pool sharks--and somewhere buried within it all there lies the truth according to Richard Pryor.

It is the seemingly invincible, larger-than-life Richard Pryor who occupies the most space in the public’s collective memory. He wore crazy like a buffed and spit-shined badge. Wild. Excessive. All-pistons firing. A life without a visible safety net.

Pryor was a potent combination: A switchblade wit--now you see it--the glint in the eyes, before he would strike. Couple that with keen observation, no-apologies commentary on race--and the subsequent fallout. It was new, dicey territory. In the early days it was a push to locate just who Richard Pryor was.

It certainly didn’t evolve simply: Paul Mooney remembers the biggest hurdle as an all-encompassing obsession. “Richard was always upset with Bill Cosby. I think he wanted to be Bill. Some of our worst arguments were about [him]. I always liked Richard’s stuff better,” Mooney recalls. “Bill didn’t wow me. He wowed white people. If they died and went to heaven, they would have Bill performing for them.”

But black people, Mooney observed, “sank into Pryor’s material like a favorite easy chair. I told Richard that that was where his talent was,” he says. “Talking about black people to black people. He told me: ‘My shoulders aren’t that wide. I can’t handle that weight. The race thing.’ But I remember back when white people didn’t like him, but Richard always had his people.”

“There was a world of junkies and winos, pool hustlers and prostitutes, women and family screaming inside my head, trying to be heard,” Pryor writes. “The longer I kept them bottled up, the harder they tried to escape. The pressure built till I went nuts.”

Emerging from the other side of the Las Vegas debacle, oiled and hungry, Pryor began his dramatic evolution. “Supernigger” wasn’t just a character; it was his new, powerful, Technicolor incarnation--swaggering, relentless, raw and raunchy.

“It would take a fool to do Richard Pryor,” comedian Reynaldo Rey says. “You cannot do Richard Pryor and everybody not know you are stealing. He was that unique.”

The key was that Pryor didn’t tell jokes. Augmented with a mere gesture or arch of an eyebrow, he wove textured stories, tall tales, big lies--that were more like cinema than stand-up.

In the process, Pryor backed into the very position that gave him pause, shouldering the burdens of race. However, in the interim, his shoulders hadn’t become any broader. Pryor was too busy thinking about how to mine for his truest voice to consider how much pressure he was under--the pedestal that had been erected for him. Just how far he had to fall.

It wasn’t until he expunged the N-word from his act after an eye-opening trip to Africa in 1979 that it all sank in. “People thought I’d gone soft . . . turned my back on the cause. . . . They wanted my voice to be theirs.”

Pryor struggled to keep what was his own --voice and vision. But others’ expectations didn’t always square with his human limits or personal desires.

“It just was scary,” Pryor says, his weak voice underscoring the result of the strain.

“I just saw the pressure that Richard was under at that point,” says Jennifer Lee, who lived with Pryor in the late ‘70s. “And for lack of another really strong black voice at that time, he was caught in the crossroads. There really was a very strange feeling that he was going to inherit this mantle. Richard felt the pressure. And I felt paranoid too--because people were starting to show up at the gate.”

To say that he has been misunderstood would be too easy. With Pryor there are no hard and fast rules. He’s a man stalked by contradictions, a man who quite vividly and poetically pointed up the nuances of race, but who says he doesn’t see color--at least in terms of pitting one camp against another.

“They miss the point of who he is,” Lee says. “Richard is not a racist. He is the antithesis of that. He’s talking about transcending color. At the risk of being wrong, I think it is what drove [him] to freebase. I just think no human being can take that pressure. . . . I think I would have lit myself on fire too.”

“Part of the frustration is that the public doesn’t want their stars to change,” says Todd Gold, who is L.A. deputy bureau chief at People magazine. “Richard’s life is nothing if it’s not about evolution. It must have been horribly frustrating to have so many different conflicting things working inside.”

Though the stage offered him more space to roam as an actor than any role Pryor was ever presented, it too could barely contain him.

Gold, however, wasn’t intimidated by the looming, larger-than-life persona--even when Pryor was bed-bound with a revolver and remote control on the night table. Rather, Gold admits to being kept off balance by his “complexity and reticence.”

“I would ask him questions and he would give me that kind of wide-open surprised, angry look and say: ‘Why are you doing this to me? Why are you making me remember?’ That happened mainly in response to questions dealing with women. And then he would close his eyes, and I would say: ‘Tell me what you see.’ And he would go: ‘No!’ That was that.”

The challenge was to move beyond perception and mine for essence, even if it was a truth defined only for that moment.

“The image we have of Richard Pryor in our minds is of a man who should have ‘100 Proof’ stamped on his lapel, who’s ready to combust, stalking the stage, saying things that stab people--like a knife that causes pain and laughter.”

But bravado shores up only so much. And, over the years, vulnerability periodically peeks through. Even now, with the book in stores, Gold is still wrestling with the contradictions. It is not that Gold would like to construct a saint, but he at least wants to shrink Pryor down to a manageable size.

Today, some things stay the same. Of late, Pryor can be seen around town with drink and cigarette in hand, working the captain’s table at one low-lit bistro or another. He’s even taken the first tentative step toward a return to stand-up, performing 15 minutes of material on the Comedy Store’s main stage recently.

“I think he is going through a period of reclaiming his life,” Gold says. “When I first started working with him, I never saw him get out of bed for three months. I think Jennifer straightened out his life. She allows him to make his own decisions. He’s interested in testing himself and seeing what he can do. She forces him to think about work, not about wallowing. She has him looking to the future.”

Pryor spends this afternoon taking in the sunny room, the workers trudging in and out. “This is my house,” he says, a smile warming. “That makes me happy to say.”

But there is still drama erupting around the edges--family and monetary issues flit in and out of conversation like other assorted ghosts.

Intermittently his days are dotted with distractions. Mooney drops by two times a week to watch movies and chat. “I try to keep it really light,” says Mooney, happily enumerating his duties. “I push his wheelchair and make jokes like we’re doing ‘[Whatever Happened to] Baby Jane.’ Sometimes we’ll go out to the racetrack. Sometimes dinner. I get him laughing, hopping around in that wheelchair.”

And Lee, in her role as constant reminder, requires that Pryor look into the future. That means confronting the past--not just the highs, but the turmoil and violence that punctuated their lives.

“Look at this man!” Lee says. “It’s a miracle he’s alive.”

“Especially if she had been here when I was in the shower,” cracks Pryor, struggling to find a comfortable position. “She would say: ‘Yeah, it’s a miracle!’ ”

“I’m really sorry to say it,” Lee says, the smile disappearing from her voice. “But it’s really honest, MS is keeping him alive. It’s really put him in a position to slow down.”

With a careful approach, they begin a dicey walk down memory lane.

”. . . ‘Live on Sunset Strip’ . . . that’s when you and I fell in love,” she says, helping Pryor connect the details.

“Every night we’d go to the Comedy Store. And she’d write down everything I’d say and at night we’d go home and go over it. . . .”

“The next morning,” corrects Lee.

“OK. So I lied.”

” . . . But you could do Mudbone again,” says Lee, holding Pryor square in her eyes.

“I hope you’re right.”

“I would love to hear Richard talk about his life now though.”

Pryor pauses, strikes another match, his voice a whispering echo: “I would love to hear him talk about it too.”

Lighting another cigarette, he unleashes a long, smoky sigh: “Helllllo? . . . “