Holiday reading
BY: Jon Sarpong
Jokes My Father Never Taught Me: Life, Love, and Loss with Richard Pryor
By Rain Pryor
In her intimately revealing autobiography, Jokes My Father Never Taught Me: Life, Love, and Loss with Richard Pryor, Rain Pryor, speaks of a life spent navigating the complicated terrain of race, fame and family. As the daughter of comedy legend Richard Pryor, the complex African-American comedic icon who famously set himself on fire, and an equally complicated blond, blue-eyed Jewish woman, Rain speaks about the unfulfilled potential of a situation that could have been the successful marriage of race, culture and tradition; but instead devolved into a typical familial failure. Life at her mother’s house was unstable in the extreme, while at Richard’s place Rain was exposed to sex and drugs before she had even learned to read. “Daddy,” she told her father one day, sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner at the advanced age of eight, “the whores need to be paid.”
In 1980, Pryor tried to kill himself by setting himself on fire, then joked that it had been an accident: “No one ever told me you couldn’t mix cookies with two types of milk!” In his later years, Pryor succumbed to multiple sclerosis, and Rain watched in tears as her father became a shell of his former self. Once, in an unusually introspective mood, Pryor asked his daughter, “Why do you love me, Rainy, when I can be so mean?”
Jokes My Father Never Taught Me answers that poignant question and many more. It is an unprecedented look at the life of a legend, told by a daughter who both understood the genius and knew the tortured man within.
By Burt Boyar
Sammy Davis Jr. — iconic; legendary; in a word, classic. While the world has long known of Davis’ unparalleled abilities to sing, dance and act, only his closest friends and associates knew of his amazing talent and passion for photography.
Now, in this collection of never-before-seen photos, Burt Boyar, Davis’ longtime friend, exposes these memorable images for generations of his fans, portraying a side of Davis that has long remained a secret to the world at large.
Here are Davis’s candid shots of his closest friends — Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Sean Connery, and Paul Newman — not to mention scores of the 20th century’s biggest stars captured at their most casual and revealing moments.
But beneath this public veneer is also a private side of Davis, one that gives a glimpse into his difficult past and long road to success. Tracing Davis from his humble origins, the moments captured here demonstrate the struggles he faced as an African-American performer during racially divided times and show the difficulties of being one of the country’s most revered celebrities when his mere presence signaled the changes taking shape across America.
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