Richard Pryor, Pam Grier and a miniature horse: Just one of the wildest nights of his life
As funny as Richard Pryor’s films were, they represented just a small portion of his baffling real-life adventures.
Often heralded as being the greatest stand-up comedian of all-time, Pryor reached an unprecedented level of fame during the peak of his career. That a comedian would be able to sell out crowds was virtually unheard of, and he was willing to discuss taboo and otherwise ‘controversial’ topics that most of his contemporaries wouldn’t have been brave enough to bring up. He was responsible for inspiring an entire generation of impending comedians.
While his legacy as a stand-up would have been enough to sustain his place within popular culture history, he also had a great deal of success in cinema. Pryor wrote, directed, and starred in his own semi-autobiographical story, and also made a series of successful comedies with his real-life friend, Gene Wilder. Considering that he also managed to pop up in Superman III, Pryor had so much money that it could only ever end up getting him into trouble.
It was during one of the short eras in which he was completely sober that he had begun acquiring a number of animals, including a minuscule horse. After his dogs began attacking the horse, he got into such a fit of frustration that he decided to drive to the veterinarian.
Since the vet hadn’t picked up his innumerable calls, he decided to put the horse in the backseat of a Jaguar, which belonged to Pam Grier, the legendary Blaxploitation star who Pryor had been dating at the time.
She was one of the few people in the world who was just as culturally influential as he, given that she had become the defining star of a movement that completely reshaped Hollywood’s history of inclusion, not only an icon during the ‘70s when the Blaxploitation movement first began to grow prominent, but had a major resurgence when her work was celebrated by Quentin Tarantino, who also cast her in his 1997 masterpiece Jackie Brown.
Given that Pryor was distraught in his bathrobe, Grier was the one responsible for handling the situation, and beyond her desire to settle the situation with as little blood, sweat, and tears as possible was her understanding of the importance that the horse had in Pryor’s life. Should the animal suffer serious injury or death, it could leave her boyfriend in such a depressive state that he might fall back on his addictions and begin using drugs again.
While it seems like it could be pitched as a scene in one of Pryor’s comedies, he actually rode in the backseat with the horse, Ginger, as Grier drove down the freeway to meet the veterinary staff in a parking lot. While many of the attending vets and their assistants were starstruck to meet two of the biggest stars in the world, they were able to successfully do their jobs and save Ginger’s life, which inadvertently may have saved Pryor’s life as well.
It was a different era of celebrity media in which famous actors, comedians, and public figures did not have their every move documented and speculated upon by social media accounts. Today, fans have a little too much access to the stars that they care about, making it less likely that a story as wild as this could have been kept a secret for so long.
