Comedian's daughter talks of Pryor experience - baltimoresun.com
Rain Pryor says that when her father, Richard, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, the legendary comedian and actor saw the disease as another trial in a life that seemed tormented from birth.

She says he insisted MS stood for "more stuff," then she flashed a wily grin and admitted that "stuff" was a euphemism for a four-letter cuss word her dad was known for using.

Yet for Rain Pryor, it meant more stuff, too. In fact, to read her newly released memoir, Jokes My Father Never Taught Me (Regan, 2006), is to wonder whose soul was tortured more.

The book relives with exceptional detail the violence, turbulence and decadence that came with being the daughter of one of the greatest standup comics of all time, a man whom she says most folks got along with better if they didn't try to get close to him. But it's also about how she overcame resentment and bitterness during the latter years of his life - when MS made him a shell of the man he'd been - and how they grew closer than she ever imagined.

"I wanted to write a love story and about forgiveness and about growth," said Pryor, 37, an accomplished actress who moved to Baltimore from Los Angeles a month ago to be with friends in the area and to get away from the Southern California glitz. Her book tour comes to Security Square Mall's Center Court at 6:30 this evening. "I wanted to be really inspirational ... about this man who was very flawed but he was a dad."

The book tour, which is approaching the anniversary of Richard Pryor's death last Dec. 10, is part of Rain Pryor's steps to branch out in an entertainment career that once consisted mainly of parts in television series and indie films. She's most noted for playing a gifted teenager in the 1980s sitcom Head of the Class and for an episode of Chicago Hope where she starred alongside Richard, whose performance as an MS patient earned him an Emmy nomination.

The daughter of an African-American father and Jewish mother has recently drawn acclaim for her one-woman play, Fried Chicken and Latkes, about growing up in both cultures. The play made two stops in the Baltimore area - at the Hippodrome Theatre and Morgan State University's Murphy Fine Arts Center. Pryor also is popular overseas as a blues and jazz performer who sings Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn tunes at clubs in London and Hong Kong.

"She's such a multi-layered actress that's so dynamic in what she brings," said producer Niles Kirchner, who went to high school with Pryor in Beverly Hills, Calif. He is working to bring Pryor's book to the big screen. "She comes with two different sides, a Jewish side and a black side, and when you throw those cultures together, and add the unique experience of living in L.A. and having a showbiz background, she can reach places a lot of actors today can't often find."

Pryor has a down-to-earth, keep-it-real personality. In Baltimore, she says, she has found folks easier to relate to than in Tinsel Town.

"People are real here," she said about Baltimore. "That's why I moved here. People may recognize you, but it's a different kind of recognition. You feel like you're at home. I don't feel like I have to wear makeup or look a certain way or be a certain way. I can just be me."

Being yourself is important when you feel forever linked to your famous father, a man whose offstage behavior drew as much attention as his onstage persona. Indeed, many of the stories Rain Pryor tells about her father are well-documented: born of a prostitute, raised by his grandmother in her brothel. Fathered seven children by five wives. Had run-ins with the law. Abused women. Set himself on fire while free-basing cocaine. Perfected a provocative, obscenity-filled, groundbreaking act that appealed to millions and left him known as a celebrity who, as she put it, "told funny stories that dug for deeper truths."

The Richard Pryor story is so well known - he told much of it in his highly acclaimed 1995 autobiography, Pryor Convictions - that you may wonder what else is left for his daughter to tell.

For starters, her story.

She says her parents were high on drugs and watching rainfall when they named her while she was still in the womb

Her mother, Shelley Bonis, was an aspiring entertainer who put many of her aspirations on hold to help further her husband's career. Their lives together began as bliss but turned violent even before Rain arrived.

He was throwing punches like a boxer - to her head, to her pregnant stomach - and Mom went down hard, Pryor writes about an episode of abuse that was relayed to her as a young child. "I should have left him there and then, but I couldn't bring myself to do it," she told me.

Bonis did leave shortly after Rain was born, and Rain didn't see her father again until she was 4 years old - although she and her mother lived down the street from his mansion. On the day Rain was reacquainted with Richard, Bonis left her behind to spend the night; later that evening Rain was awakened by sounds of her father and a woman having sex.

When she approached them unsuspecting, Richard decided it was time to tell his daughter about the facts of life - in a way that only he could.

From his tone, he could have been telling me a bedtime story, she wrote. The thing is, sex, for my Dad, was pretty much recreational. It was fun, it was a tension reducer, and no - it didn't have anything to do with love.

Bonis' parents raised Rain through the first two years of her life, as Bonis moved to New York to "find herself." She ultimately came for her child and returned to New York, yet her parents' friends implored her to give up Rain for adoption. Bonis became enraged at the thought of walking out on her daughter the way the child's father had. But Bonis wasn't ready to be a parent, either.

There were times when she simply couldn't cope, trapped in a tiny apartment with a tiny, mocha-colored child, and occasionally turned to prescription painkillers to get by. Sometimes they got her through the day. Sometimes not, Pryor wrote.

When they didn't, she tended to explode in Mommie Dearest-type rages, and it was all she could do to keep herself from striking me, or worse, tossing me out the window. As night fell, she would pull herself together to go to work, as a dancer - because Jewish girls don't use the word, stripper - and Miles Davis would come downstairs to babysit. Yes, that Miles Davis.

Being Jewish and African-American, Pryor found herself often unaccepted by both cultures. Some blacks, she said, thought she wasn't black enough. Some Jews, she said, believed there was no way she could be Jewish. Feeling isolated and alone, she tried meditation, Buddhism, past-life regression, most anything to center her soul and solidify her identity. Everything she tried proved only momentarily effective.

On good days, I feel like the world accepts me; on bad days, I feel as if I'm on my own, destined to be an outsider forever.

Her dad once hit her in the face so hard it made her nose bleed, she wrote. When he found out that a man had sexually abused her as a teenager, he chided her for "flaunting her stuff." Her mother blamed her for her failed dreams and unrealized potential.

Before long she became a rebellious child, doing whatever she could to agitate both parents. She abused alcohol and drugs. Twice she attempted suicide. On one of the occasions, she placed a plastic bag over her head, refusing to take it off when her mother implored her to do so.

"I had the unconventional dysfunctional family. There's typical dysfunction, and then there's the Pryors," she says, laughing. "I carried a lot as a child. And at the same time, I have to tell you, I don't want to say blessed, but someone's been looking after me, that I turned out the way that I have and had the ability to go forward the way that I had."

Once, while her father was still in the hospital, she and Bonis - now an astronomer- went to visit. By then, Pryor had already grown close to her father, but she says Bonis still hadn't come around.

Mom looked at me, then at Daddy, then back at me. She may have acted tough, but it was evident that she still had feelings for Daddy. "This is the best thing you and I ever did in our lives," she told him. He looked over at me - I was trying not to cry, but the tears were already spilling down my cheeks - and [he] nodded. "You got that right, Shelley." It was a big turning point for me and my mother, and today we're closer than we've ever been.

"I started the book from his passing, and I started working backward from that," Pryor said. "The purpose was to take you from the beginning moments so you can feel emotionally connected. The point was not to have self-pity and be bitter. You wanted people to watch you go through the growth and be with you on the changes." MORE... baltimoresun.com