Dynomite!: Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times--A Memoir (23 page)

That is why when we discovered Michael Moye, it was an extraordinary event. Right out of college, his spec script was so good that we shot it almost exactly like he wrote it. That almost never happens with even a veteran writer. He penned several episodes during our last couple of seasons before writing extensively for
The Jeffersons
, developing
Silver Spoons
and, most notably, creating
Married . . . with Children
. In fact, the original idea for
Married . . . with Children
from Moye and his partner Ron Leavitt was that the series would be the anti–
Cosby Show
in philosophy and feature an all-black cast. That would have been even more revolutionary than
Good Times
—a black sitcom with characters you did not have to like.

Though we had shows that final season about alcoholism, the lack of medical care for the poor, and interracial dating, the series became far less edgy than it had been earlier. Ratings continued to slip, until we were barely in the Top Fifty. The show was pulled off the schedule in January 1979. Beginning in May several more shows aired, and a final wrap-up episode was broadcast on August 1.

Titled “The End of the Rainbow,” the happy ending conclusion found Michael heading off to college, Thelma’s athlete husband Keith signing with the Chicago Bears, and Thelma announcing her pregnancy and asking Florida to live with them in their new condo to help with the baby. Willona was also moving and, as it so often conveniently turns out in sitcoms, to the same Bakersfield Street complex in an affluent Chicago suburb as Thelma and Keith. The Evans Family was finally leaving the ghetto.

J. J.? He proudly strutted around in his superhero outfit as Dyn-OMan and revealed that he had sold his Dyn-O-Woman comic strip. He had succeeded, fulfilling his dream of becoming an artist.

Good Times
aired between a rock and a hard place. If we had been a white show, we would never have lasted six seasons. Being a black show is what made us unique and special. Blacks could relate to us, and whites were curious about us. However, being a black show that tried to be socially relevant cut short our run. We had to be more than a sitcom; we had to be important. The characters in our show always had to rise up, always had to be better than other people. We were not allowed to just be a sitcom, and J. J. was not allowed to just be the guy who takes the pie. No other sitcom had ever been saddled with those expectations, not even
All in the Family
or any of Lear’s other comedies. The Evans Family had no choice but to overcome.

In the end Lear was proud of the show. “The white audience had an opportunity to have a black family in their homes every week,” he later said. “They were there because they were funny; they were there because they were facing problems that white families were facing; they were there because on some subliminal level, if no other way, people realized that what hurt me in my white family hurts them too . . . The oneness of the black experience and the white experience, I think if it [the series] mattered at all, that’s the way it mattered the most.”

On
Good Times
J. J. made people laugh, but it was Norman Lear who made them think.

Good Times
was unlike anything on television then and still today, whether a comedy or not. I think the show would be too edgy for network TV today. In the mid-’90s, several years after he was the king of sitcoms, Lear tried another spin-off of
All in the Family
. For
704 Hauser
, a black family moved into the Bunkers’ old house in Queens. The father was played by—guess who—John Amos. The son was black but with the twist that he was not liberal; he was an arch conservative, holding views not unlike my own in real life. He also dated a white Jewish woman, again reflecting some of my own life. I wonder if Amos realized that this time he was playing a father figure not to J. J. but to a character much more like Jimmie Walker!

I talked to Lear when he was writing the pilot episode at his summer home in Vermont. He said he wanted the show to be gritty and urban and funny—like
Good Times
. I told him, “Well, there is no better place to be inspired to write a gritty, urban show about blacks than Vermont.” Only five episodes aired in 1994. America no longer wanted socially relevant sitcoms.

In 2006, at the Fourth Annual TV Land Awards,
Good Times
received the Impact Award for being “a show that offered both entertainment and enlightenment, always striving for both humor and humanity, with comedy that reflected reality.”

I guess J. J. wasn’t such a “negative stereotype” after all.

8

Freddie, Richard, Andy, Mitzi, and Budd

THE COMEDY BUSINESS HAD MOVED FROM NEW YORK TO LOS ANGELES. For stand-up comics success on a series had become the fastest road to fame and fortune. I wasn’t the only comedian from our crew in New York to have a sitcom in LA—just the first: Freddie arrived too, cast in
Chico and the Man
after a spectacular shot on the
Tonight Show
.

Freddie and I both made our network television debuts on
Jack Paar Tonite
, and both of our sitcoms debuted in 1974:
Good Times
in February and
Chico and the Man
in the fall. In the TV world I was the young black and he was the young Hispanic. But we had different views of success. The hotter he became, the more out of control he became. Sex, drugs, and alcohol dominated his life, and many of the people around him fed his ego and his demons. Some people gave Freddie drugs, and TV producers gave him a new blue Corvette. Today we call them enablers.

Freddie always called me a “goody two-shoes.” I didn’t drink or use drugs and I wasn’t a partying kind of guy. But we were still friends. He lived a few blocks from the Store, along with more than a dozen other comics, in an apartment building that came to be known as Fort Bursky, because it was managed by the parents of comic Alan Bursky. Bursky had, at age eighteen, been the youngest comic ever to appear on the
Tonight Show
. But he didn’t have enough shots ready, and so his career never lived up to its beginning. Freddie would call and say, “Let’s go over to Hollywood Boulevard.” Along with Bursky, we would stand in front of the teen magazine section of a giant newspaper stand. Freddie was on the cover of dozens of those magazines. He stood there hoping people would recognize him.

The next year
Welcome Back Kotter
, which starred Gabe Kaplan, another regular from the Improv, hit the air. The actor who played the breakout character Vinnie Barbarino was a young John Travolta, and suddenly he was on the cover of those same teen magazines. Freddie was incensed. He bought a high-powered crossbow and went with some friends to Travolta’s apartment. I doubt if he meant to kill Travolta, but he sure wanted to scare the hell out of him.

He knocked on the door but no one answered. Thank God. Freddie fired a few arrows into the door and left. Hey John, now you know where those arrows came from!

Unlike Freddie, I preferred my privacy. When I went home to New York for the premiere of
Let’s Do It Again
, I wasn’t able to walk around the streets at all. I had to hole up in my hotel room. I did not like that. I remembered the story about the restaurant busboy who became a star. When he was a busboy, he had to eat in the kitchen. Then he finally made it—and he still could not eat in the dining room because he caused too much excitement as people came up to ask for autographs and pictures. So again he had to eat in the kitchen.

Freddie did not know that fame does not make you happy. But there he was: famous
and
unhappy—he was always telling people how unhappy he was. He did not know how to deal with that, at least not alone. He would phone me at three in the morning and say, “Hey man, I’m really depressed. Could you come over?”

“Freddie, it’s three a.m.!”

“I understand. No problem.”

He sounded so desperate and pathetic and alone, so I would rush right over. I’d find his apartment filled with people, and he’d say, “Hey, I just wanted to see if you would come.” He was in constant need of attention.

In 1975 we were both in Vegas, with Freddie headlining at Caesar’s Palace and me opening at the Riviera. He seemed very happy, which was very unusual. He said he was getting married.

“But Freddie, you’re nailing every chick in town! How are you going to be married?”

He had met a cocktail waitress at the casino. “She thinks I’m great. She loves me. She understands me.” That’s what he wanted and needed to hear.

“Freddie, it’s never going to work,” I warned.

“Fuck you! You’re a pussy! You don’t know me!”

So he and Kathy Cochran married.

When I was back in LA, I saw Freddie—with another woman.

“Freddie, what about this marriage thing?”

“Man,” he said, “I just couldn’t resist.”

Even though I saw him with other women—even during the time he was so happy because Kathy was pregnant . . . and with a boy—I never saw him and Kathy together. After Freddie Jr. was born, that was all he talked about. He loved his child so much.

Then one day, a week after he performed at President Jimmy Carter’s inaugural ball, he met me at a club and he was as down as I had ever seen him. Kathy was divorcing him, on the grounds that his drug dependency threatened her safety and that of their child. He told me he loved her. He could not believe she would leave him.

“Really, Freddie? How about she’s leaving you because you’re still dating!” He gave me an evil look.

The next day I received a call saying that Freddie had shot himself and was in serious condition. He died January 29, 1977. He was twenty-two years old.

Some say Freddie committed suicide. They told police that he made a series of phone calls to friends and family saying that “life isn’t worth living.” But Freddie was always doing that. Many times he would play Russian roulette in front of people who did not know his gun was unloaded. It scared the hell out of them. That’s what he wanted—for them to be concerned about him. That final night, even after his worried business manager showed up at his hotel room in Westwood, Freddie continued to make those calls. The manager dialed Freddie’s psychologist, who told him that the comedian was acting out, that he was in no danger.

After he phoned his mother and Kathy, Freddie reportedly pulled a .357 Magnum from under his sofa. The manager intervened and the gun went off. Freddie shot himself in the head.

I was flying to Union City, New Jersey, to play the Latin Quarter when I heard the news. Within minutes Brenner, Gabe Kaplan, Landesberg, singer Tony Orlando—who was a very close friend of his—and I, along with still others, called each other. At first we were told he might pull through, then that he might have brain damage. When I arrived at the airport, I was told he was dead.

I went on stage that night and said, “You may have already seen this on the news. Freddie Prinze has passed away. He was a friend of mine. I will always miss his funk and his swagger.”

Like his mother and many others I believe Freddie did not commit suicide. I believe he was simply looking for sympathy, was playing at shooting himself, and accidentally, tragically, did. In fact, the original suicide verdict was later officially changed to “accidental shooting.”

Suicides, say the experts, rarely pull the trigger with others watching. Freddie wanted attention—nothing more and nothing less. There was nothing any of us could have done to forever fill that need in his life. However, I cannot help but think that Freddie would still be alive today if Brenner had been around to give him guidance. Brenner was older, had more worldly experience than us, and his intellect and advice meant a lot as we grew up both on stage and off. He was our mentor, our House Dad. But he was a Philly/New York kind of guy. He hated LA. When we went west, he stayed behind.

Freddie was chronically unhappy, but that did not make him much different from any other comic. I always say that there is no such thing as a happy comedian. Off stage, we are always bitchin’ and complainin’ about somethin’—money, clubs, billing, whatever. There are a few who are content, but for the vast majority there is always something to make us dissatisfied. The only place we are happy is on stage trying to make people laugh.

When I get on stage, that is my heroin fix. I’m on top of the world. Leaving the stage, there is still a little bit of a high as people come up to say they liked me. But as soon as I walk outside into the night, that feeling disappears. I come down as fast as a junkie. The approval of strangers had filled a hole that now returns. The next day there are agents who will not pick up my calls, club owners who will not answer my e-mails. There is rejection, again and again—until the next time I get back on stage and hear the laughter of strangers. I am thankful for my heroin, those minutes I get on stage.

Life, however, happens off stage.

I met Lilly when she was a twenty-year-old student at Santa Monica College. With long black hair and often not wearing makeup, she looked like singer Rita Coolidge. Extremely bright, shy, and quiet, she had been estranged from her family and living with friends for a few years. She didn’t watch much TV and wasn’t starstruck by Hollywood. Instead, she spent most of her time reading and studying. Unlike with my second Barbara, we never argued, never got loud or crazy. We had such a smooth relationship that one day I realized we were living together and wondered how that happened.

I am not easy to live with, but Lilly made everything easy for me and for us. She would never interfere or bother me when I was working. When she needed to study, she would go into the spare bedroom. Sometimes she traveled with me when I went on the road. And she laughed at my jokes! What more could a comic want? But still I fooled around with other women. Lilly knew but never called me on it. Women are my one vice. That is one reason why I could never marry. Unlike Freddie, I know I could not be faithful. Yes, I am a dog, but at least I am an honest dog.