Richard Pryorremains known for channeling his misfortune into groundbreaking comedy. But he was lucky to be alive after setting himself on fire in June 1980.
In Paramount Network’snew documentaryI Am Richard Pryor, hiswidow Jennifer Lee Pryorclassifies the life-threating incident a suicide attempt.
“He warned me,” she claims to PEOPLE. “He said to me, ‘I’ve decided what to do. I have to do this otherwise I don’t know how I’m going to get out. There’s no way out of this so you need to leave so you don’t get hurt too.’ I knew he was planning something, I didn’t know what. I called the house. Somebody answered and then the next thing I know they drop the phone and I heard someone screaming, and Richard at that time running through the house on fire.”
Bob Riha Jr/WireImage
Richard’s bodyguard and aunt were present and attempted to put out the flames that resulted from Richard pouring 151-proof rum on his shirt and setting it ablaze with a lighter. But Richard, then 30, thought they were trying to smother him, so he ran out onto the sidewalk,shouting: “Lord, give me another chance … Haven’t I brought happiness to anyone in this world?”
The police were called and an officer implored the comedian to stop moving, but he wouldn’t. Eventually, once Richard made it about a mile from his Los Angeles home, the fire department medics arrived and put him in an ambulance to Sherman Oaks Community Hospital, where was treated for severe burns onmore than 50 percent of his body.
Richard Pryor and Jennifer Lee Pryor.Bob V. Noble/Fotos International/Getty
“I came home one afternoon and I could smell the fire,” Jennifer says. “I went into the bedroom and the bed was on fire. I moved out not long after that. I got an apartment in Beverly Hills and would see him intermittently”
During one of those visits, Jennifer — who got sober after seeing how substances affected her then-boyfriend — alleges that Richard tried to kill her.
“One of the times I visited him, he was high on the drug and he almost killed me,” theTarnished Angelauthor says. “He was in a drug psychosis. Whatever was going on in the drug-addled brain, he thought it was a good idea to kill me. If I had had a line of coke or a glass of wine, I might have said, ‘F— you, Richard.’ And that might have done the job. Instead, I calmed him down and I got out of there.”
It also hurt Jennifer that Richard seemed to love his pipe more than he loved her.
“The addiction was very quick,” she says. “I thought that this was controllable. I’d seen him when he had to do a concert film or do a job, he was very disciplined. But that all went out the window when that pipe was introduced.”
The two married for the first time in Hawaii shortly after Richard got out of the hospital in 1981. But they divorced after the seven-time Grammy winner supposedly hit her on their honeymoon.
Jennifer Lee Pryor and Richard Pryor at their wedding.Courtesy of Jennifer Lee Pryor
At that time, Richard proclaimedthe 1980 blazewas an accident, the result of an exploding bottle of rum setting on fire. “He lied,” Jennifer asserts. “And people still say, ‘No, it was an accident.’ No, it was a suicide attempt. It was self-immolation. He apparently had seen some Buddhists on television doing this thing too.”
Richard went on to joke about the event in his stand-up comedy and his 1986 self-autobiographical filmJo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling. That same year, he wasdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis— and continued to drink and use drugs.
“He was drinking again, taking too many pills,” Jennifer says of when she met up with him in the early ’90s. “A couple years afterSee No Evil, he was in New York at the Apollo, it was a tribute to him. I went to his hotel room and there were big bottles, big glasses of vodka. Water glasses full of vodka he was drinking and pills. I said, ‘With MS Richard, this is a fast way to the grave.’ "
Jennifer Lee Pryor and Richard Pryor.Chris Whittle/Splash News
They remarried in 2001 (Richard had wed his fifth wife, Flynn Belaine, twice between his first and second marriages to Jennifer) and the couple spent his remaining years working on box sets together and laying the groundwork for his legacy.
TheSuperman IIIstar suffered a heart attack four years later in December 2005 anddied at age 65at Encino Hospital in California.
“I never stopped loving him,” Jennifer says. “My job was to take care of him and protect him, which is what I continue to do to this day.”
source: people.com
