Time to Laugh, Time to Cry

"He was misogynistic, mercurial, unpredictable and violent. But he was also my daddy . . . and I knew he loved me." (By Michael Robinson-chavez -- The Washington Post)

Her father's drug habits sparked violence and tumult in the home. When Rain was 6 months old, Richard Pryor split. According to the book, Bonis's extended family encouraged her to put the child up for adoption, but she kept her baby tight. And in time, her family welcomed Rain into their lives, providing much-needed stability.

When she was 4, her mother introduced Rain to her father. The book recounts that he took one look at her and said, "Ain't denying this one's mine!" That night, during a sleepover at Pryor's home, she wandered into her father's bedroom. She'd heard noises and she was afraid. She saw her father on top of a blond woman and ran out of the room.

This is one of her indelible, earliest childhood memories: Her father followed after her, and, as he gently tucked her in, gave her an profanity-ridden dissertation on the facts of life. She went home and told her mother: "People make funny noises and then babies come. . . . He was making noises. I was worried. But he said I didn't need to worry. He was [expletive] and having fun!"

With Richard Pryor for a father, there wasn't too much that his children were sheltered from. But she recalls that love never got short shrift during their sporadic times together. "So yeah," Pryor writes, "he was misogynistic, mercurial, unpredictable and violent. But he was also my daddy, and sometimes, when he held me close, I looked into his big sad eyes and I knew he loved me. And that's the part I want to remember."

Then, too, there was a sprawling, ready-made family of half brothers and half sisters. The comedian was married seven times to five different women and had six children (or possibly seven; there seems to be some dispute). At times, thanks to different mothers and adults with different agendas, the children were kept apart, told that so-and-so just wanted a relationship with their father for the money.

Despite the drama, sibling bonds formed. "She's my little sister and I've always looked up to her," Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor says from her home in suburban Los Angeles. "She has never been afraid to speak her truth, even when she was small."

Elizabeth has her own indelible memories: Once, their father and his wife took the children to Paris. The couple began fighting in the bathroom. Richard's kids sat on the other side of the door shaking in fear, Elizabeth recalls, while screaming ensued about "the children."

"Rain said, 'What about the children? The children are right out here -- what do you mean about the children!' " Elizabeth recalls, laughing. "She was 6 years old. There was this boldness that she had."

That boldness carried her through ballet classes and singing lessons and onto the stage. Rain had early success on the TV series "Head of the Class," playing the rapping tomboy T.J. Jones from 1989 to 1991. After that, the acting gigs were fewer, interspersed with unemployment and days working a stop sign on a construction crew or manning a psychic hotline. There was time spent walking the Twelve Steps. At one point, she decided, to hell with showbiz, and got her training as a certified drug counselor.

Finally, in her mid-30s, her one-woman show, "Fried Chicken and Latkes," got noticed. Critics waxed enthusiastic about her "comic ingenuity" and "powerful singing voice," and director Carl Reiner declared, "There's not a thing about her that doesn't work." The NAACP gave her an acting award. But she says she still couldn't get past casting directors who thought she wasn't black enough or white enough or Jewish enough or pretty enough or ugly enough to do whatever it was that they needed her to do. Today, she acts as her own agent, booking herself around the world for her one-woman show and performing as a jazz singer. "I was very successful as a young adult," she says, having breakfast on a pit stop in Washington to promote her book. "I can sit around and wait for someone to put me in a box. Or I can create something and say, 'This is what I do.' "

Her hopes include bringing her book to the big screen: She's persuaded the comic Mike Epps ("The Honeymooners," "Something New") to play her father, and is now in talks with a director.

"Rain is an artist," says Epps, who became friends with Richard after he fell ill. "I think her dad passed on a lot of that to all of his kids. Sometimes she can be talking, I'll look up and she'll say or do something that I've seen him do on TV and I'll be like, 'Wow.' There's an old saying, 'The apple don't fall far from the tree.' And that would be the case with Rain and Richard."

Rain told her father before he died that she was writing a book, and he encouraged her to tell the truth. So she filled it up with "a lot of laughter and a lot of tears," she says. "And then there's this man who's my dad."