Good Night, Sweet Prinze

They were all there, crowded onto the sixth-floor intensive-care ward at UCLA hospital: the true and false friends, the close and estranged relatives, the press agents and the pretenders to intimacy. Somewhere inside it all, Freddie Prinze lay dying.

The spectacle had all the makings of a made-for-television movie. But for four dark days in late January, show business had touched down hard in the tangible world. There was no stunt man, no blank cartridges. The scene, could not be rewritten.

Still, some kind of story had to be released. In the first few hours after the news broke, Prinze's press agent would assure callers, "At this point, we have every reason to believe it was an accident." The hospital was flooded with phone calls; half were from reporters, the rest from fans or cranks. One man called to offer a transplant, without specifying which organ. Nearly everyone was willing to trade his concern for "the answer"--why Freddie Prinze had put a gun to his temple and pulled the trigger.

•

More than anyone else at the crowded deathwatch in the hospital, Maria Pruetzel must have prayed for a miracle. She would remember that other miracles had occurred, back during those tough years in New York City.

There had been her son's nearly fatal childhood bout with asthma. Maria had prayed to Oral Roberts, whom she watched often on television. Once she decided to write to him, telling him about Freddie's asthma. Roberts wrote back, assuring her a miracle was on the way. Freddie recovered.

And there was the time in 1972, when Freddie's first real girlfriend abruptly broke up with him because he'd been fooling around with another girl. (What Mrs. Pruetzel didn't know--and Freddie did--was that the second girl was pregnant. She gave birth to a son, and Freddie was to agonize over it to a few close friends three years later.) Mrs. Pruetzel never admitted it, but that was the first time he'd tried to commit suicide. He swallowed a large quantity of tranquilizers. While they were pumping his stomach, Maria had gone to the neighborhood Catholic church and recited novena after novena. Again, Freddie recovered.

The son of a tool and die maker, Freddie grew up on the streets, was spoiled by his mother, learned how to "rank out" his sidewalk adversaries ("Your mother's so old she shits rust") and went to ballet school. At 16, he began hanging out with musicians in night clubs, snorting his first hits of cocaine and entertaining his connections with full-fledged routines.

His strenuous night life was beginning to take its toll. He stopped going to classes. When he did bother to show up at school, he'd hold court in the boys' room, expanding his earlier "snapping" approach into complete impersonations of Nelson Rockefeller and Ed Sullivan.

After one too many routines in class, Freddie was forced to leave high school. He saw it as a blessing in disguise, allowing him more time to devote to his comedy. Each night, Freddie and Nat Blake, a black musician and worldly street person he'd met in high school, would head for the Improvisation and, later, to Catch a Rising Star, the nonpaying clubs that showcase aspiring comics.

He decided that if he were going to make it, a name change was required. He had read an article that labeled Bob Hope the "King of Comedy." He would be the price ... no, the "Prinze."

At the Improv, Freddie became something of a regular--as a customer. He and "Black Nat," as he used to call his best friend, went to watch, to learn. Eventually, he became a go-fer for owner Budd Friedman.

Finally, after a few weeks of absorbing shtick, he got up the courage to audition. He signed the sheet and did the usual amount of material for Friedman. Some of his jokes were weak, most didn't blend well, but Friedman was impressed. "He had this immediate likability, a warmth, a charm," Friedman recalls, and he gave Prinze a chance to start. At the Improv, it's called working your way up to the majors, and Freddie started at the lowest rung--the 3:45-A.M. stint.

He needed to develop an identity, a gimmick. At first, he began with the premise that he was Puerto Rican. The next night, he was opening his act with the announcement that he was a Hungarican. It was a funny line, a handle that both he and the audience could grasp as they laughed together. The third evening, he went too far. He explained that he was not just Hungarican but also Jewish. Now the audience was confused. After the show, Friedman called him aside. "Listen, Freddie, be biethnic," he cautioned. "Two is enough." Prinze laughed but listened. He stuck with the "Hungarican" approach, and it worked.

By the time Prinze hit the prestigious 11:15-P.M. slot, the word had spread. Late-night audiences crowded into the club, excited at the prospect of mass discovery of a major new talent. "Ees not my chob," Prinze would mock his reallife building superintendent, Feliciano Dias, and the club would roar.

Freddie was one of a dozen or so comedians who worked the place every night. David Brenner was another. The two met at the Improv in December 1972. Brenner was there to break in new material. "Terrific, terrific!" Brenner exclaimed when Freddie walked off the stage. "You're probably the most natural performer I've ever seen."

Prinze was stunned. "Do you really think so, Mr. Brenner?" Before long, Freddie was invited to join a very special fraternity of comedians that included Brenner, Jimmy Walker, Steve Landesberg and Mike Preminger. Freddie started spending endless hours rapping with Brenner at his East Side apartment or with writer Chuck McCann. And he listened to advice. After all, he didn't even have a manager.

He was working his first paying job, as an usher at a movie theater. He had almost no money, so people bought him meals, fronted for subway tokens and supplied the dope. He got into the habit of snorting coke before and then immediately after going onstage.

Freddie alternated between the Improv and Catch a Rising Star. It seemed to season the material. He also got to meet more comics that way. One was Freddie Roman, a funny comedian with a perpetual tan. He took an immediate liking to the kid. Roman knew where to find the best Jewish cooking in town. And the best manager--his.

David Jonas wasn't particularly anxious to see Prinze. He already had his hands full with a steady client list of comics. But Roman insisted. Jonas caught the act and flipped. This wasn't the Cat-skills. It was the start of something really big. Roman and Jonas sat out in the lobby after the show and waited for Prinze. "I think I can help you," Jonas told him. "Come to my office tomorrow."

Prinze was thrilled. Someone had taken an interest. The next day, he took the subway to Jonas' office on West 57th Street. He was broke and Jonas lent him money. The same day, he got Prinze booked into the New York Playboy Club for the following weekend. The next week, Jonas got him a gig in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, but Freddie bombed. Freddie was depressed, but Jonas was happy it had happened so soon in his career.

Some weeks later, Roman nabbed him to play a benefit for his synagog and 750 worshipers. They gave him a standing ovation.

But Prinze had a lingering problem-- a lack of material. In later years, it would be reported that he wrote his own routines. In fact, he wrote only half of them. "That's your problem," Jonas told him one day, "you need more stuff."

Freddie agreed and spent the next few weeks working on material at the Improv. In the meantime, Jonas was planning a gamble. ABC was about to drop Jack Paar from its late-night line-up. The ratings were poor against Carson and there were only a few more shows to be taped. Jonas called Prinze into his office. "You got any balls?" he asked Freddie. He didn't wait for Prinze to answer. He picked up the phone and called Paar's producer, Bob Carman. "I'm gonna get you on the Paar show."

Freddie laughed.

Carman was then headquartered at the Plaza hotel, a block and a half from Jonas' office. "Bob, I've got this kid named Freddie Prinze."

Before he could finish the pitch, Carman said, "Is that the kid from the Improv? They told me he's not ready yet."

"Bob," Jonas begged. "I have him in my office right now. Why don't you let me bring him up to yours, it takes only ten minutes." Carman invited them over. Prinze and Jonas were there in eight minutes, did the material and it clicked. Carman said he'd book Prinze for the second to last show.

October 18, 1973. Four months after meeting Jonas, only ten months after auditioning at the Improv, Freddie Prinze was a smash on national television.

Friedman made a tape of the show for Jonas, and now Jonas was ready to run with it. He went to Craig Tennis, then the chief talent buyer for the Tonight Show. Tennis wasn't even lukewarm to the idea, but Jonas sent him the video tape. Seven weeks passed. Still no word. The tape never left its container.

Every day, Jonas would call the Coast and ask Tennis if he had seen the tape yet. And each day, he would get a polite stall. Instead, Tennis called Brenner. "What do you think of Freddie Prinze? We saw an audition tape of his," he told Brenner, "and people here say he's six months away."

"I think you're wrong," Brenner argued. "I think Freddie's ready for the Tonight Show tonight!" Tennis told Brenner that if he'd work with Prinze on his material he'd get him on.

The next day, Tennis called Jonas and told him Freddie had the spot.

•

Sometimes when I see myself on TV, it's like, well, have I just pulled a big con job on America?

--Freddie Prinze, 1975

It's a tradition on the Tonight Show that if Johnny Carson doesn't laugh the audiences won't laugh, either. Freddie was introduced and walked on to do his four-minute routine. As the 240th second ticked by, the audience realized it had been a witness to a late-night-television miracle: Carson was laughing hysterically, Sammy Davis Jr. was literally on the floor and the Hungarican kid had made it on his first try. That initial December 6, 1973, performance on (continued on page 110)Prinze(continued from page 104) the Carson show was tantamount to a Puerto Rican "Rocky" taking the middleweight comedy title. Carson actually invited 18-year-old Freddie to join the other guests--the first debuting comic in years to make it to the couch.

Elsewhere in Los Angeles that night, producer James Komack was laboring over a series pilot he was proposing at NBC--something called Chico and the Man, a weekly half-hour show about the love-hate relationship between a cranky old Anglo garage owner in an East Los Angeles barrio and his young Latino mechanic. Komack had already signed the veteran actor Jack Albertson, but he hadn't cast the chicano.

Komack and the network wanted stage actor José Perez to play the part, but Perez had other commitments. Then someone told Komack about Prinze. He looked right, even if he was a bit overweight. Komack had missed that particular Tonight Show but asked to see the tape. He called Jonas immediately.

Freddie returned to California on January 8, 1974. Komack tested him the next day along with four other actors. Komack fell in love with Freddie. But NBC didn't. It insisted on further tests--in Canada, where Albertson was working. When it was ready for the test, Freddie hadn't shown. No one could find him. The two other actors had been up since early that morning. It was now 11:30. Incredibly, Prinze had overslept. Komack finally knocked on his door loud enough to get Freddie out of bed.

Jonas asked if Komack would test Freddie first, since he had booked him for a $125 job that night. Komack agreed, and the tests, video-taped in a Toronto garage, took place.

Three hours later, Jonas was rushing to catch a return plane to New York when he burst into Freddie's hotel room. He found him snorting cocaine.

"What the hell are you doing?" Jonas asked.

"What the hell do you think it is?" Prinze laughed. "Wanna blow?"

Jonas shook his head.

"Oh, you're just an old cocksucker who won't turn on with me," Freddie taunted.

"No, Freddie, I'm not," Jonas said quietly. "I just don't want to see you destroy yourself."

That day, Freddie told him that he was taking Quaaludes as well. They were downers, he told Jonas. "I really practice relaxation," he laughed, "and they help."

Later that week, Freddie was told he'd gotten the job--he would be Chico.

•

Freddie knew only two people in Los Angeles: Komack and Alan Bursky, a young, ambitious kid comic he had met while they were both performing at Catch a Rising Star. It was only Freddie's third trip to California and the idea of going there to live sent him into culture shock. Komack had invited Freddie to move in with him at his rambling Spanish minimansion in Beverly Hills. Within two hours of his arrival at Komack's home with two suitcases in hand, Freddie had disappeared.

"I didn't want to hurt your feelings," Freddie explained, when he reappeared the next morning. "It was just that the bedroom you put me in was the size of the apartment I grew up in."

Instead, Freddie moved into Bursky's small apartment near Hollywood Boulevard. Bursky slept on a foldaway bed in the living room; Freddie got the bedroom. They divided the $190 monthly rent.

In Los Angeles, Freddie renewed his friendship with Brenner and got to know another comedian he'd met briefly before: Richard Pryor. Pryor had recognized Freddie's talent early, when Prinze had played at Mister Kelly's in Chicago, and had proposed to his manager, Ron DeBlasio, that Freddie be given all the help possible. "He's young and he needs to be wised up," Pryor said. "He doesn't know how to play Whitey's game yet."

More than once, DeBlasio and Freddie talked about his career plans, but Freddie remained committed to Jonas. Future arrangements were tabled. In any case, there was a series to be produced.

Komack and three writers had put together the first Chico pilot. Freddie was not an accomplished actor, so Komack incorporated many of the lines from Freddie's club routines ("Not my chob," " 'Sixty-four Cheby with pom-poms") to make it stronger.

But there were problems. Throughout the week, during rehearsals, Prinze wasn't funny. He brooded and didn't work well with the other actors. By the day the pilot was to be shot, Komack and Albertson were convinced it would be a bust. Komack picked Freddie up and took him for a haircut. "Freddie," he said on the way to the barber, "I have something to tell you. All the guys in the studio were sitting in the bar yesterday saying that you weren't gonna make it."

Freddie spun around in the car seat. "Oh, yeah? Wait till the bell rings. I'll show 'em."

At the first run-through, he was so stunning he stopped the show cold. His performance was so strong that Albertson couldn't work. Komack huddled in the dressing room with Albertson.

"What happened?" Albertson asked.

"I don't know, Jack," Komack said. "The kid just exploded."

"Lots of kids in the audience out there," Albertson observed.

"Don't worry, Jack," Komack said. "At eight o'clock we'll get the adults, and then it will be your audience; you'll get your laughs."

At eight o'clock, they went out to work and Freddie was twice as good as he was during the first taping. "After the second show," Komack recalls, "Peter Baldwin [the director] came down and said to me, 'Could you ask them to sit still? We're going to have to do it all over again.' That's how incredible Freddie was. There was no one else on the screen. None of us had ever encountered a kid like this before. We finally decided we had to tape it all one more time, so that the other actors could come up to the standard that Freddie Prinze set."

The pilot was a walkaway--an immediate sale. Five weeks after the new season began, Chico became the number-one show in the country.

•

Hollywood is one big whore. It breeds decadence.

--Freddie Prinze, 1975

At Bursky's apartment, Freddie's social life was picking up. To say the least. It was no longer a question of how to get laid--it was whom to choose. Women were calling him. After dating dozens of starlets, he seriously dated Pam Grier for a few months. Raquel Welch called him in his dressing room once just to meet him. He remembered seeing her onscreen in One Million Years B.C. when he was working as an usher just a year earlier. He began going to the A parties, snorting the finest cocaine.

"Hey, Freddie," Brenner cautioned him during one of their many L.A.-to-New York telephone calls, "you can go crazy out there. When a person smiles at you, it doesn't mean he likes you. In California, he may be smiling because he's figuring what he can get from you."

It wasn't Brenner's warnings but dope that made Freddie's mistrust of people begin to grow. As his consumption of Quaaludes increased, he went on a hiring binge. Brenner was in Los Angeles, doing the Dinah Shore show one day, when Freddie popped into his dressing room. They hadn't seen each other in six months and Freddie now (continued on page 202)Prinze(continued from page 110) had an entourage with him: secretary, make-up man, lawyer, chauffeur.

"Hey. I'm telling you, Brenner, man, things are great!" Freddie announced. "I did have some trouble, though, driving up to Malibu in my Stingray."

Brenner cut him off. "Wait a minute, Freddie. If you were in New York, you would have said your car's in the shop. Why are you telling me what kind of car it is and where you're going? What do I care? You're talking to me, man, to Brenner from New York."

Freddie laughed. He went and got a soft drink, then began talking about how much money he had in the bank. As he paused to sip the soda, it dribbled down his chin and onto his shirt. "Isn't that something?" Brenner giggled. "You got a Stingray, you know how to get a Malibu and Palm Springs, you got a hundred thousand dollars in the bank, and you still don't know where your mouth is. You ought to say over and over to yourself, 'Under the nose, above the chin, under the nose, above the chin.' "

"I know, I know," Freddie laughed. "But I tell you, I really got my shit together. I really do."

"But, Freddie," Brenner warned, "a lot of people get their shit together. The question is, can you lift it?"

•

From his first days in Los Angeles, Freddie grilled Komack about Lenny Bruce. "He's the ultimate comic," Freddie insisted. "He took all the risks." When one critic hailed Prinze as "a second Lenny Bruce," it triggered something. By the summer of 1974, Prinze had bought all the Bruce albums and had read all the books about him. Now he wanted to meet Kitty, Bruce's daughter.

He asked an interviewer to arrange a meeting. Kitty was flying to Los Angeles and Freddie met the plane, wearing a Chico and the Man T-shirt. Their relationship was intense from the start. To be sure, they were an odd couple. Freddie--tall and now slender, with his drooping, parabolic mustache; Kitty--blonde, slightly overweight, doll-like, a year younger. But they spent almost every day together, catching old Marx Brothers movies in Santa Monica, rushing into the West Los Angeles gym where Freddie took his karate lessons and talking about Lenny Bruce.

To Kitty, Freddie was a wish fulfilled. He was funny. He seemed genuinely interested in her and he made her laugh. It was the first time, she would later tell him, that anyone had made her laugh since Lenny. She called him her "funny man."

But as their relationship developed, it seemed to her that Freddie was becoming more and more preoccupied with her father. Often they would head up the steep road toward the four-bedroom cliff-hanging house in the Hollywood hills where Kitty had lived as a child--and where Lenny had died in 1966.

Freddie also loved to zoom up that road in his yellow, beat-up 1968 Buick, scaring Kitty as he managed nearly impossible hairpin turns on the way to the house. One day he got permission from the new owners to go inside. He took Kitty with him and they spent two hours there, gazing at the tree Lenny had planted for Kitty when she was born.

For a brief and unintentionally cruel time, Prinze had convinced everyone, including himself, that he was going to marry Kitty. At one point, he told Sally Marr (Lenny's mother), who was leaving for New York, to stop in and see his parents. "After all," he told her, "you folks should get to know one another, since you'll be relatives soon."

But the Prinze-Bruce engagement lasted only a week and ended in a traumatic phone call that left young Kitty feeling hurt and abused. "He was blunt and cruel," she told her mother, Honey. "He just admitted he's been with me all this time because I was Lenny's daughter."

His affair with Kitty was over, but his fascination with Lenny only intensified.

A few weeks later, Freddie picked up Brenner after a gig at the Comedy Store and they went for a ride. Soon Prinze turned north on Kings Road and shifted down. Brenner gave Freddie a strange look. "Don't worry," Prinze soothed. "I just want to show you something."

Three minutes later, they were there. Prinze motioned Brenner out of the car and over to a large tree in front of the house. "See this tree?" he pointed. "Lenny planted this tree when Kitty was born ... that was her tree."

It was a big tree. Prinze reached up, tore off a new leaf and gave it to Brenner. Then he produced his wallet and a decaying frond that had been entombed in plastic since his affair with Kitty. "I've carried this around for months," he boasted. "This is Lenny Bruce."

"It's very nice," Brenner cautiously responded. "But, Freddie, it's just a tree. It's just a tree."

•

Chico continued to pull high ratings and it wasn't long before the Las Vegas casinos were after Prinze, Caesars Palace, in particular. Sidney Gathrid, who books entertainment for the hotel and is an experienced talent spotter and had seen Freddie on the college circuit earlier, called Jonas in New York and suggested Freddie might be ripe for a Vegas spot.

"You may be right about Freddie," Jonas told Gathrid. "But I think it's too soon. Let's hold off. I think he needs a little more development."

Gathrid was surprised. People rarely turned down Caesars Palace. But Jonas was from the old school of management, where talent was nurtured and gradually built up.

Communication was sometimes difficult between Jonas and Prinze and, more often than not, it was aggravated by the fact that for a long time Jonas stayed in New York, commuting each week to Los Angeles for the Friday-night tapings.

Freddie started to complain. "I need someone to represent me out here," he said to DeBlasio one day. "By the time Jonas picks up the beat, I could be yesterday's news. I need the cloud now."

Freddie finally decided he wanted to drop Jonas and told Komack about it.

"Freddie, no way," Komack argued. "You just came to California, you're nineteen years old and you do not do that. If you want to get rid of Jonas," he suggested, "wait a year or two. He's not gonna be in your way."

Prinze was unconvinced. "He's a little short fella with a toupee and he just won't handle my career right," he insisted. Komack would not discuss it further.

Three months later, after his salary had been upped to $1500 per episode, Freddie brought it up again. Again, Komack refused to discuss it.

Jonas finally decided to go out West. He had opened an office in California, had prepared ads for all the Hollywood press and had rented a beautiful apartment.

He called Freddie from the Friars Club to tell him he was on the way.

"Don't come out," Prinze said curtly. "I just fired you. You're gonna get an attorney's letter. You did everything for me," he said, talking much faster, "but I'm too big for you. I don't need you anymore."

"Freddie," Jonas warned, "you're going to have a big fight on your hands." Jonas had Freddie under contract for six more years. He canceled his Los Angeles lease, called his lawyer and filed suit.

Freddie called DeBlasio to tell him the news and his new manager--no longer handling Pryor--went to work at once.

But first there were a few outstanding commitments.

•

I always found myself with hookers and strippers, what society calls the low-lifes. One hooker told me I was the type of guy she'd never charge, and I dug that. Hookers are great because they're all woman. I'd marry a hooker in a minute.

--Freddie Prinze, 1975

In March 1975, Freddie flew to Nevada for a weekend engagement at the Sahara Tahoe. On his first night there, he met Kathy Barber. There were plenty of girls in the crowded casino that night, but somehow Kathy stood out. She had long black hair, a great body and a smile no man could resist. She was a cocktail waitress with an arrest charge--eventually dismissed--for prostitution.

They retired to his room, but they talked for hours. Then they made love. It was the biggest compliment he could ever hope to receive, the fulfillment of a long-standing fantasy. As he later admitted, he assumed she was a hooker--and a special one, at that, who was giving it to him for free.

Prinze returned to Los Angeles and found he was intrigued by her. Her original name was Kathy Cochran; she was a West Virginia girl. Her folks were Southern Baptists who had moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where they opened an art gallery and went to church regularly.

Against her parents' wishes, Kathy married a teenaged boyfriend. When the marriage failed, she moved to Reno and into a second marriage that lasted less than a year.

Kathy is a most attractive woman. She was broke, had a very good body and decided to use it. Without telling her parents, she started working in 1968 at the Mustang Ranch, a legal brothel in Nevada.

After nearly three years of intermittent employment and not enough money, Kathy left the ranch in 1971 and attempted to start a beauty-supply business in Reno with Carol Novak, who was also a divorcee. The women opened The Answer Shop in Reno, on the south end of town. It was a poor location and after three months, the business folded.

That's when she decided to take the cocktail-waitress job in Tahoe and met Freddie there one evening in 1975.

Early the next morning, Carol's phone rang. "Hey," said an excited Kathy, "I just met this fantastic guy and it's great."

"Who is he?" Carol said, half-awake.

"Well," Kathy giggled, "did you ever hear of a guy named Freddie Prinze?"

It wasn't long before Kathy left Nevada to share the small $300-a-month Hollywood apartment with Freddie and Duke, her large Doberman. She was legitimate again--and she promised Freddie she wouldn't work. Kathy was all his now, and vice versa. They placed few demands on themselves and, more important, Freddie trusted her. At first, he told friends and the press that they had met in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Later, he said Lake Tahoe and that she was a travel agent, then a cocktail waitress and, finally, an art-store employee.

"Two years ago," Freddie later confided, "it would have mattered to me what her profession was, but now I don't give a fuck. I wonder: Have I matured that much, or is it that I just fried my brain in the Sixties and I just don't care anymore?"

•

Since their first and only phone call a year earlier, Gathrid had yet to hear from Jonas about the Caesars Palace offer. Prinze was hot and Gathrid knew the time was right. He called Jonas. "Surely," Gathrid tried to persuade him, "he's ready now." Jonas muttered that he was no longer Freddie's manager.

Gathrid traced Prinze to DeBlasio to make the deal: one-shot appearance for Prinze as an opening act in April, for which he would be paid $25,000, get 75 percent billing on the marquee and be allowed 35 minutes each show.

Freddie's first Vegas appearance, with Paul Anka in April 1975, was a smashing success, and Gathrid found that, despite Anka's strong following, Prinze was a good draw on his own.

His material wasn't polished, but it worked. Prinze was cute, he was funny and the baby jowls had tightened into dimples that mothers could love. He had been warned to keep the Vegas routine clean, to maintain that false sense of morality imposed on those who work the casinos. With only a few verbal jabs at Nixon and a mildly salty vaudeville joke that Albertson had provided, he walked off to loud applause.

By the end of that first week, however, Freddie had grown discouraged. He wanted to do his social-commentary stuff, the blue Lenny Bruce material. His friends told him to wait--there would always be time for that. First, they advised, build your career, so you have the credibility to say what you want.

Prinze chose not to wait. A few weeks after the Caesars engagement, Freddie left for a one-month national tour as the opening act for his singer-songwriter friend Paul Williams. They had met a few months before and had liked each other immediately. Freddie loved his music and he would frequently drop by to visit his small but talented friend and his equally small white spinet piano.

The Williams tour took Prinze (and Kathy) on a grueling journey of one-nighters to places such as Westbury, New York, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and a handful of state fairs, where the little old ladies with blue hair came to see Chico Rodriguez and to laugh. Instead, they saw a dirty little boy.

Before Prinze had a chance to ponder the implications of his poor road reception, the bosses at Caesars beckoned him back. In July, they negotiated a substantial arrangement for him. The William Morris Agency, Freddie's agents since his arrival in Los Angeles, issued some steep requests this time, but Gathrid honored almost every one: a four-week pact for 1976 (two two-week engagements) for $40,000 a week. A codicil at the end of the agreement made the contract even more attractive: If the 1976 engagements were successful, Caesars would make Prinze a headliner, extend his contract six weeks into 1977 and up his weekly take to an incredible $90,000. It was more than mutually acceptable--to Prinze it was Cinderella without a pumpkin and he eagerly signed on.

•

"All over the country," Prinze once told a friend, "kids are drowning in their chicken soup and their mothers are just saying they're tired. I know better, because I'm one of those kids."

He was talking about Quaaludes, the soporific downers he loved, but he also knew better about other drugs. He knew the people in Hollywood who dabbled in them as well. "If I ever wrote a book on all the people I know who take drugs in show business," he said, "mid-America would freak!"

Somehow he maintained his equilibrium with a delicate balancing act of coke, Quaaludes and Courvoisier by the bottle. It was a roller-coaster existence.

The cocaine he bought on the street, often snorting as much as five grams a day. Earlier estimates of Prinze's drug intake have been too polite, too conservative. One dealer in Los Angeles often grossed $1000 from Freddie in two-day sprees. The dealer had promised Prinze pharmaceutical-quality cocaine but stepped on it anyway.

The Quaaludes came, more often than not, from obliging Beverly Hills physicians. They were cheaper by prescription ($15 for 100), which Freddie often filled at Schwab's drugstore, where he had an account. When Freddie ran out, he'd often pay three or four dollars for each pill on the street.

In the early days, he tried just about everything from angel dust (animal tranquilizer) to heroin. A few friends knew about the angel dust. The smack was Freddie's secret. On two occasions, he shot it into the small veins between his toes. "I wanted to get closer to Lenny," he later told a friend, but the heroin was not a satisfying experience.

He prided himself on living on the edge, on seeing how far he could go on how little sleep, how close he could flirt with oblivion and still return to the civilized world. In time, his fascination with drugs and Lenny Bruce extended to a preoccupation with guns--and death.

Besides Lenny's death, he began thinking of Marilyn Monroe's suicide and John Kennedy's assassination. He and Bursky once made a trip to West Los Angeles to look at Monroe's grave and Joe DiMaggio's roses. Freddie had read Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment at least four times, had become an apologist for Mort Sahl's conspiratorial theories and had purchased a copy of the Zapruder film of the assassination in Dallas.

The film was on a loop and he kept it on his projector to show friends. "I see something new in that film every time I look at it," he would claim. He was particularly obsessed by the frames that pictured the precise moment the bullet from the assassin's gun ripped into the President's skull. He would slow the film down at that point and identify the different parts of Kennedy's brain as they fell to the street in Dallas.

But he never knew much about guns until he went to Los Angeles. He was surprised to find out how many people in show business owned weapons. It seemed they were as prolific as drugs.

On one occasion, Freddie and Bursky were watching old movies at Freddie's new apartment when Freddie brought out a Colt Python .357 magnum. Bursky stared at it. "Where the hell did you get this?" he asked Freddie.

"I got it from a friend," Prinze boasted, naming a fellow comedian he'd met at a party.

"Why would he give it to you?"

Prinze was sitting in his underwear, toying with the weapon. He chuckled. "Because he doesn't trust himself with it."

Bursky almost laughed. "And he gave it to you?"

A pizza they had ordered arrived and Prinze put the gun down. They smoked some grass, drank a little. By 3:30 in the morning, Bursky was wiped out. He wanted to go home. He looked over at Freddie. He was still playing with the gun. Prinze took a bullet and put it in the cylinder. He pulled the hammer back and forth. He spun the cylinder, looked up at Bursky, then spun the cylinder again. Suddenly, he lifted the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. There was a click.

He had picked an empty chamber. Bursky froze for an instant, not believing what had just happened. He started to shake. "Freddie. I always believed you were the luckiest human being in the world. Now I'm convinced of it."

Freddie stood up and headed for the apartment's balcony. He opened the sliding doors and walked out, still in his underwear. He aimed the gun high, pulled the hammer back and fired the weapon. A flash of flame nearly a foot long exploded from the barrel and the recoil threw Freddie back a few steps.

The noise was deafening. Instinctively, Prinze threw the gun onto the floor. Both men dove for the carpet and the neighborhood lit up.

•

I'll see people at Hollywood parties, drinking martinis, getting wiped out, swapping wives.... And I'd say, "What the hell is this?" It's so Roman. I'd sit there and get sick. I go for honesty, and what society calls the low-lifes are really the good people by comparison.

--Freddie Prinze, 1975

Most of the motorcycle cops who hide out along hilly Laurel Canyon to catch speeders knew Freddie as the "blue streak." They used to nail him quite regularly as he sped down the hill in his bright-blue Corvette Stingray. Freddie would just as regularly trick his way out of a ticket: "Officer, please, I've got diarrhea. Just follow me to the gas station, then give me the ticket." He pulled into the station's "clean" rest room, slammed the door and waited 20 minutes. It worked; the cop had left.

Then there was the charity scam. He was two for two on that one--the excuse that the Muscular Dystrophy Association had just called him to make an emergency appearance on a local telethon.

But one night a cop got him. It was two o'clock in the morning and Freddie was meandering through a school zone at 70 miles an hour. It was a story he loved to tell: "'Don't you know it's a school zone?' the cop asked me. I said, 'Yeah, but it's two o'clock in the morning.' He said, 'But it's still a school zone.' 'Officer, if any kids are in there at two in the morning, you better get in there, 'cause they're taking typewriters.' " That ticket put Freddie in driving school.

But when Freddie got his own place, and Kathy moved in, much of that recklessness seemed to disappear. Freddie began telling friends he was on a natural high. Kathy's friend Carol Novak also came from Reno to become his secretary; and his official life straightened out considerably as well.

In August, Kathy told Freddie she was pregnant. At first he was angry, but he felt he loved Kathy and the pregnancy seemed for a moment to cement that emotion. He asked her to marry him. She accepted. One of Carol's first jobs was to plan the wedding. On Freddie's instructions, she flew to Las Vegas and met with Billy Weinberger, one of the top bosses at Caesars, to suggest the wedding take place there. Weinberger was delighted.

Carol called pastor Stanley Unruh. Unruh had moved to Las Vegas in 1972. He likes to tell his parishioners that the Lord brought him to the sinful city and to the small Sunrise Southern Baptist Church he now runs on the outskirts of town. Part of his regular sermon is that he's "never pulled a handle" and he never intends to.

He hadn't seen Kathy in years, and the little girl who had played with his daughter as a child in Albuquerque had grown into a beautiful woman. He had never met Prinze, but Unruh was excited at the thought of his first "star" wedding.

Unruh would be disappointed. When he arrived at the suite in Caesars north-central tower on October 13, there were few stars to be found. It was to be a very quiet, very small ceremony.

DeBlasio was there, so were Carol, Albertson (who was working in Vegas at the time) and the parents of the bride and the mother of the groom. Just before Freddie slipped the plain gold wedding band on Kathy's finger, Albertson joked, "It's not too late. You can pretend it's a vaudeville act and disappear." Everyone laughed.

As soon as he returned from Nevada, Freddie took Kathy over to meet Komack. While the bride and the producer chatted, Freddie dashed upstairs with a present for Maxine, Komack's 11-year-old daughter. It was a beautiful color photo of himself that she had asked for months earlier. He borrowed one of her pens and signed it--with a special message. Maxine thanked him for the photo, but she did not show it to anyone else. After reading the inscription, she carefully buried it in a dresser drawer.

The autographed 8" x 10" glossies were as close as he ever came to hyping himself. Twice he had turned down T-shirt and merchandising offers. He had refused to do a centerfold for Playgirl ("I'll have to consult my priest") and was considered by many writers to be a tough interview.

His marriage to Kathy convinced him even more to try to hold on to his private life. He wanted to protect her--and he did. Even Prinze's closest friends never got too close to Mrs. Prinze. Komack had met her a total of two times. Albertson was with the couple on only three occasions. Freddie saw his job as shielding Kathy from the outside world.

Shortly after the wedding, Friedman called to congratulate Freddie. Friedman had been seduced by California and was opening a second Improvisation. Freddie was in great spirits. He liked the idea and became one of the first investors. Friedman sold 15 points (at $2000 a point) to a number of comedians and Freddie became a $2000 partner, along with Harvey Korman, J. J. Walker and comedienne Liz Torres.

Friedman didn't need the money, but he's known for using his talent as well as he showcases it. "I knew then that if I could make them all investors," he says, "they'd come down here and work the place for me." He was right: Prinze became a regular.

He was also about to become a father.

It was going to be Kathy's first child and she decided she would undergo hypnosis when she delivered it. Through a Los Angeles hypnosis association, she was referred to a Dr. William Kroger, who was also a psychiatrist. She went to see him in November and was impressed with his care and his credentials.

After the second session with Dr. Kroger, Kathy decided she didn't have the concentration for the hypnosis to work. But she thought he'd be great for Freddie. Prinze started seeing Kroger in December.

Things had begun to sour quickly with their marriage. The disintegration began over little things. He loved sports. She didn't. He loved to read. She loved the soaps. He was a loner. She wanted to entertain. He went back on coke and Quaaludes.

He began to tell friends he had made two mistakes. First Jonas, and now Kathy. Although his lawyers advised him to fight the suit Jonas had filed against him, it was a losing battle. Brenner had testified for Freddie. So had Friedman. But meanwhile, 15 percent of everything Prinze was earning was being placed in escrow, pending the outcome of the trial.

Prinze started downing out. On at least two occasions, he passed out with lit cigarettes smoldering on the living-room couch of the two-bedroom Nichols Canyon house he had bought a month earlier.

What held the marriage together was the expected child. Freddie James Prinze, Jr., was born just after seven P.M. on March eighth. It wasn't a natural childbirth, but Prinze was in the room when Kathy's gynecologist delivered the child. Seeing his son made him want to change. He was high on life again, driving more carefully now and returning to karate classes.

A week later, Bursky and Prinze were touring in the Corvette, talking about James Bond. It was a favorite subject of theirs and Freddie had devoured everything Ian Fleming ever wrote. They were talking about Freddie's new house and child and the need for protection. "I want a gun just like the one James Bond had," Freddie said. Bursky told him it was a Walther PPK, a weapon no longer imported. Instead, Bursky suggested a PPKS.

The Big Five Sporting Goods Store on Wilshire Boulevard stocks everything from volleyballs to bows and arrows, but it was out of the PPKS on the Tuesday Freddie walked in.

It had something similar--a semiautomatic Astra .380 Constable. The salesman showed Prinze an Astra, serial number 1096942. He pointed to its easily removable clip and the gun's safety. It was also on sale: $158.99. Prinze bought it.

"Now," he said, "I want one for my wife."

He selected a cheaper weapon for Kathy, a Charter Arms .38 for $110.29. Two weeks later, after his gun registration was validated, he returned to the store, picked up the guns and bought two nine-dollar boxes of copper-jacketed hollow-point bullets. He drove home and presented Kathy with her weapon.

Less than a month after the baby was born, Prinze's accountants made a disturbing discovery: There was no money. Aside from the funds in escrow for Jones, the rest had found its way to an assortment of lawyers, agents, business managers, public-relations men and, last but certainly not least, his dope connections.

On May 11, Gathrid received a phone call from Fred Moch, Freddie's agent at William Morris. While Freddie wasn't scheduled to play Caesars until September (for 14 days with Andy Williams), Moch wanted to know if Gathrid could advance Freddie his two-week salary immediately. It was an unusual request, but Gathrid called downstairs and had the $80,000 check made out that afternoon.

Freddie was depressed again. He was seeing Kroger off and on, but the psychiatry wasn't working. He started playing with the guns again, firing his Astra into the trees and redwood planters behind the house.

•

The last time I saw Freddie, he was sitting in Theodore's, a Hollywood restaurant. It was four in the afternoon and he was just waking up. He ordered his usual "comedy breakfast": crisp bacon, French fries, a large Coke and a double order of buttered white toast.

He talked about the show and his tensions. "Everybody owns a piece of me," he said. "Most of the money goes to the lawyers. And in the meantime, they want you to keep working for them.

"I've been so crazy," he explained, "that I didn't think any woman could live with me without shooting herself through the head in three weeks. It's been a struggle with Kathy."

He said he was tired of the has-beens and the almosts. "They give Hollywood a bad name. It's not such a bad town, really. But people come out here to make it. If they haven't made it in three years, they go 'Bang!' and shoot themselves through the head."

"What about you, Freddie?" I asked.

"Well, I've been out here that long. I've made it, I guess, but I haven't made a decision yet." He laughed. It was a joke.

That brought up the subject of permanence. "If Hollywood does have a problem," he said, eating his second order of toast, "it's that the town burns you out after a while if you let it. You get placed in a certain box, you get a certain image, and then you can never get out. It's like being condemned to being one of My Three Sons for the rest of your life, and I don't want to get trapped. Ten years from now, if I'm still around, I just don't want to be known as the guy who used to be Chico.

"I drive home in my car," he said rather distantly, "and I think about the applause. If I'm happy with the way a show worked, I usually drive right home. If I'm not, I can drive on forever."

He was on a long drive on the night of November fifth when the California Highway Patrol pulled him over on the San Diego Freeway. He had had a few Quaaaludes. He had been weaving, the cop said. "Weaving?" he protested innocently. "I wasn't even sewing."

Freddie was arrested. A test revealed methaqualone in his blood stream. He also worried because the cops had confiscated--and were analyzing--some nose drops Kroger had given him. Kroger had known Freddie was conning him, so he had conned him right back with a little psychosomatic medicine: He told Prinze the nose-drop prescription contained a seven percent solution of cocaine. Freddie believed him.

(Kroger's con worked until the arrest. When the lab results came through a week later, Freddie's cocaine solution turned out to be nothing more than a nonprescription local numbing agent.)

Freddie was allowed one phone call. It was after midnight. He dialed Carol's number, but Kathy answered. She was visiting Carol and had picked up the phone. It was an awkward conversation.

An hour later, Freddie was released from the Van Nuys jail. Kathy and Carol were waiting for him. But Kathy refused to talk with her husband. "Freddie," she said, controlling her anger, "I'll drive your car home. I think you better let Carol drive you, because she won't scream at you ... I will."

•

Hollywood breeds self-contempt. It tells you you're a star now, here, enjoy, smoke this, snort this, drink this. And you say, "Why not?" But if it all fails tomorrow, that's where suicide comes in.

--Freddie Prinze, 1975

Three days later, Freddie left the house. Carol made arrangement0s for him to get a second-floor one-bedroom apartment at the Beverly Comstock, a Wilshire Boulevard apartment hotel just west of Beverly Hills. He packed his things and moved into the $700-a-month apartment on November eighth.

He began to depend more and more upon Carol. Along with the Quaaludes, she became his 24-hour crutch. Now there would be more lawyers, more expenses and more dope. On two Quaaludes, Prinze could function properly. On three, he would slow down. By the fifth, paranoia set in. He couldn't sleep. He'd take a few more, and then some more.

The Jonas case was resolved: It had gone to a costly arbitration hearing and Jonas was awarded 15 percent of Prinze's earnings for three years.

Freddie started talking about suicide. First, he called Brenner and made a general remark about not making it to 30. "That's very normal, Freddie," Brenner said, " 'cause you're trying to shock me. That's very normal for someone who's twenty. Someone who's thirty is going to end it before forty. Someone who's forty is going to end it before fifty. Some eighty-year-old guy says I'm not making ninety, and a ninety-year-old guy says I'm gonna end it before four hundred. It's pretty normal," he laughed, "so you're not shocking me." But Freddie kept talking about it. "Look," Brenner shouted, "you're being a putz. First of all, you're doing it to go out in glory. Chances are, maybe fifty-fifty, it will be a splash story, maybe. Maybe you'll just go out, bang, it's over. Now," he continued, "the big thing that's not logical is that you won't be around to enjoy it, even if it happens big!"

He tried out his gun routine with Bursky. He had seen Taxi Driver, and he pulled the Astra out and stuck it in Bursky's ear. "You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me, sucker? Well, suck on this."

Bursky looked at the gun. The clip was in place and the safety was off. "Look," he joked, "if you're gonna shoot me, make it in the leg so I can make some money out of this." Prinze pocketed the gun.

One night, he called Bursky at four in the morning. "Nobody loves me; I'm all alone. I can't take it anymore. I'm gonna do it."

"OK," Bursky advised. "Then go into the bathroom and do it neatly."

He called Carol with the same threat. "I'm so lonely, Carol. I need you; please come over. I'm going to shoot myself." She almost took him seriously, until he added, "And be sure to bring me something to eat."

On December third, Komack got a call at 9:20 one night from John Travolta, who plays Vinnie Barbarino in Welcome Back, Kotter. "I just left Freddie," he said, "and I'm worried. He's got a lot of pills and he's gonna O.D."

"But, John," Komack said, "I didn't know you and Freddie were friendly."

"We're not," said Travolta. "He just called me up and asked me to come over."

Komack and his secretary, Mei Ling Moore, arrived at the Prinze apartment at 9:40. They knocked on the door, but Freddie didn't answer. Moore went down to the front desk and got a key. As soon as they opened the door, a rush of hot air blew out. Prinze had all the heaters on. He was passed out on the sofa. Komack lifted Freddie up and began slapping him. They walked around the room for a good 20 minutes. "Jimmy, don't take my 'Ludes," Freddie mumbled. There was one bottle of Quaaludes on the coffee table and Komack sent Moore into the bedroom to look for more pills. (One of the Quaalude bottles, she soon discovered, was in Carol's name, prescribed by one of Prinze's doctors.) She searched the dresser drawers. As she opened the nightstand drawer, the Astra fell out. She quickly put it in her pocket.

She motioned to Komack and they both headed toward the door. Freddie reached over and grabbed Moore's arm as she tried to walk out. "Get your fucking hands off her," Komack shouted, "or I'll knock your fucking head off!" Prinze released his grip.

Komack's phone started ringing shortly after Komack and Moore returned home. Komack told the answering service not to ring through, to tell Freddie that he was at the hospital. (Komack's wife, Cluny, had had a hysterectomy that day.)

Komack figured that would be the end of it. But, somehow, Freddie sweet-talked his way through the hospital switchboard and got to Cluny, still sedated from her operation. "Where's Jimmy?" he demanded. "I know he's there."

She tried to convince him that he wasn't.

At 12:30, Freddie rang Komack's doorbell. Carol was with him. Komack wouldn't let them in. "C'mon, Jimmy, you don't love me, you don't understand me," Freddie cried. "Let me have my gun and my 'Ludes back."

"But I do love you," Komack responded. "That's why I'm not giving them back."

"You motherfucker!" Freddie yelled. "Give them back. I know you have them."

Finally, a compromise was reached. Komack said--without meaning it--that he would give the gun and the pills to Freddie only after Carol drove him home. At five that morning, Carol returned to the house. Komack gave her the pills and the Astra.

The next day, she returned them to Freddie. When she told Komack, he got angry: "He's bullied you, Carol, he's bullied everyone. Nobody can say no to him."

DeBlasio knew about the gun and the drugs. By that time, however, Freddie wasn't listening to anybody. But Ron had a partial solution: Find Freddie a girl.

Tricia Pelham is a beautiful 27-year-old actress friend of DeBlasio's. Before Ron was married, they had dated. DeBlasio and his wife invited Tricia for dinner one night when Freddie was at their house.

Prinze could never resist a good-looking woman. As soon as she walked in, Prinze said, "Hi, do you want to have dinner with me on Saturday night?"

Pelham is the kind of girl who likes slow approaches and good meals. His forwardness stunned her, but she had come prepared. "Sure," she said, "but you have to take me to Chasen's."

"Absolutely," Prinze answered.

They never made it out of his apartment that Saturday night. He was totally loaded on Quaaludes, and Pelham, who is the daughter of the Duke of Newcastle, was reduced to playing nursemaid.

A few days later, Kathy filed for divorce. Freddie was with Tricia when it happened. More 'Ludes.

David Braun, Freddie's attorney, had asked Kathy's lawyers to go easy with Freddie. He told them that his client was in a very sensitive condition. It's a fairly typical legal ploy in divorce cases, but this time it was the truth. Kathy's lawyers thought otherwise and demanded a $5000-a-month settlement.

As a way of keeping his mind busy, Freddie sat down to write--in longhand--his autobiography. "What the hell are you doing that for?" Bursky asked him one afternoon. In answer, Freddie began to read aloud. "Wait a minute," Bursky interrupted. "How's it going to end?"

Freddie looked up from the table where he was sitting. "With a big bang," he said, grinning.

A few days later, Freddie left for his last date in Las Vegas. He took Tricia with him.

After his first night at Caesars, sharing the bill with Shirley MacLaine, Freddie's depression worsened. He took six Quaaludes and passed out. He started acting like a junkie. The 'Ludes numbed his skin. It would tingle. He would sit in the hotel room and scratch himself crazy. It was difficult to watch. It ended only when he crashed.

But in the morning he was up, full of energy and talking about his career, his future, how much he enjoyed working with MacLaine. He took a phone call from ABC. Bad news. The network had approached Prinze to be a part of its Battle of the Network Stars. When they had asked him what he'd like to do, he said he wanted to box. It was an unusual preference but a genuine one. The problem, said the network executive on the other end of the line, was they just couldn't find anyone on any of the three networks who wanted to fight him.

Freddie hung up. "I just want to find somebody to beat up," he told Tricia. "I just want to get violent."

Tricia and Freddie spent long hours talking. When he was coherent, he talked about his friends in the business. One of his biggest disappointments was, he would tell her, Tony Orlando. "I can't understand him," Freddie would say. "When his show was on the air, we'd get together all the time. Now I never hear from him. Some friend."

Indeed, Orlando and Prinze hadn't talked for three months. It wasn't a feud--they just hadn't talked. The relationship had simply evaporated, along with Freddie's marriage, and that hurt him.

•

God, it's all happened so quick. I look at it this way: If I die tomorrow, I got no regrets. For my age, I've fulfilled everything I want to do. Now, if another two years go by, God, please don't take me. But as of now, if God takes me tomorrow, I don't give a damn.

--Freddie Prinze, 1975

Vegas was a success, but not for Freddie. He still liked cocaine, but the Quaaludes were now receiving most of his attention. They distorted his perceptions terribly, depressed him and activated his death wish. They made him think about his will, something he'd never taken seriously before. He decided to change it. He specifically excluded Kathy; his father was written out as well. Three quarters of his estate was to go to his mother, and his son, Freddie, Jr., would get the rest.

His spirits revived for what was to be his last public appearance: the Inaugural gala in Washington, D.C. He was funny, could do no wrong, make no mistakes. It was, perhaps, a brief rebirth.

But, in the end, it was only a remission. The 'Ludes were working their way into his every thought and warning lights were flashing.

He flew back to Los Angeles on January 21 and called Sid Gathrid. He wanted to go to Vegas for a weekend. Gathrid arranged to "comp" him a $240 suite.

There was nothing for Freddie to do in Vegas, except get more Quaaludes. The house doctor at a major Las Vegas casino had prescribed them for Freddie's sleeping problems before.

Prinze stayed in Las Vegas only a day and a half and called Carol to pick him up at the L.A. airport.

She was there promptly at ten P.M. with the limousine. She went to the gate to meet Western flight 247. It was on time, but Freddie apparently wasn't on it. Finally, the gate agent locked the ramp. All the passengers had deplaned. She had him paged. No luck.

She returned to the limo and waited a few more minutes. Suddenly, Prinze came staggering toward Carol and the chauffeur. He was about to pass out. On the way home, he told her the story. He had bought a new supply of Quaaludes in Vegas and had taken so many pills that by the time they began to work on the plane, he had no idea where he was. In fact, he had been in the bathroom when the plane landed and was roused from his stupor only when a cleaning crew boarded the aircraft.

When they arrived at his apartment, Freddie begged Carol to stay. She was tired, but he insisted. He then taught her how to play backgammon and she won $95. She also stayed the night.

Monday was the same. She stayed with him, stroking his hair, massaging his back, doing everything to help him go to sleep. She wanted to go home. She had often been away from her daughter for days and wanted to spend at least a little time with her.

But again, Freddie insisted. Carol called home and spoke with her daughter.

"Honey, you really, really don't mind?" Carol asked her.

"No, Mom. He's lonely, I'm not. And in the long run, it all evens out, anyway. He's done so much for us."

On Wednesday, things began to disintegrate. Freddie learned that Kathy's lawyers had asked for a restraining order restricting his visits to Freddie, Jr. During a break in rehearsal, he went over to some of the prop boxes. Slowly, then with building frequency and force, he began to kick them, smash them, destroy them. He was making so much noise that Albertson screamed at him to stop.

Freddie left early and went down the hall to the studio where the Tonight Show is taped. Brenner was guest-hosting and Prinze always dropped in. He entered the dressing room empty-handed. He made a phone call and then he and Brenner talked. He told Brenner that he was leaving the Beverly Comstock apartment and moving to a better pad. The conversation shifted to Freddie's upcoming divorce. Freddie didn't want to talk about it. "It's going great, man," he told Brenner.

"No," Brenner said, shaking his head, "how are you doing? Not your show but you?"

"Fine," he said. "Well, I gotta go, gotta split." Prinze rose and thanked Brenner for letting him use the phone.

It struck Brenner as strange that Freddie would thank him for that. "It isn't even my phone," he laughed. "C'mon...."

Freddie was at the door. "Hey, Freddie," Brenner called, "you know you can have anything you want from me any time you want it."

"I know, man," Freddie said, smiling, and went back into the room. Freddie and Brenner always greeted each other with hugs, but this hug seemed different. As they briefly held each other, Freddie kissed him on the cheek. "I love you, David," he said and walked out.

Carol drove him home. Once inside the door, he took out the gun. He put the gun barrel in his mouth, on his head, under his ear. "I should do it," he said. "Show them all."

"No, you won't, Freddie; now, stop it."

Prinze went into the bedroom to get ready for an appointment he had with Komack.

Suddenly, Carol heard a shot and the sound of a body slumping to the floor. "Freddie!" she shrieked as she ran toward the bedroom.

The first thing she saw was a jagged hole in the bedroom wall and splinters on the floor from the bullet's impact. Then she saw Freddie. He was laughing. "Ha, ha. I fooled you. You thought I shot myself."

Carol broke down. "I can't take this, Freddie. I just can't take this."

He apologized.

Freddie was no longer sending suicide signals. He was shooting flares. That night, he was going out with Suzanna Martin, another woman he had met while at dinner at DeBlasio's. She was late, so he told her to meet him at Komack's house. Komack and his wife were out to dinner. The only person there was Buddy Garion, a Komack house guest. Freddie pushed his way past Garion and ran up the stairs to Komack's bedroom.

"Where is it?" he yelled. "Where?"

"What?"

"The cocaine. I'm out and there may be some around here." Garion tried to stop him. But Freddie was looped and brandished the Astra threateningly. Garion grabbed the gun away from him.

Then Suzanna arrived. Garion gave Freddie back his gun and the couple left. She drove him toward Kroger's house. As they drove, Freddie once again drew his gun and frightened Suzanna by putting the barrel in his mouth and, with the safety catch on, repeatedly pulling on the trigger.

When Freddie arrived at the house, Kroger took away his gun and his pills. Suzanna stayed with him all night and, for the first time since the Inaugural, he really slept.

Carol arrived at the studio the next morning at 11 and Freddie was already there. He wore a strange smile and the same outfit he had worn the night before: gold pants, an old denim shirt and scuffed-up white shoes.

"They took my 'Ludes and my gun away," he said mischievously. "Well, I've got twenty more!" He was smiling and scratching. My God, Carol thought, he's already taken some more!

During the lunch break, he called Kroger. "Doc, I want my 'Ludes and my gun back. I'll be over about six to pick them up."

Kroger told him he wouldn't be home then. "Well, then, put them in an envelope and leave them with your maid. Don't worry, I won't mess with them."

He hung up, then grinned at the telephone. "Fool!" he said.

When he returned to rehearsal, he almost passed out. He was spacy and couldn't remember his lines. When he finished, he drove over to Komack's house for a meeting he had requested.

"OK," Komack said as Freddie sank down with a glass of wine into a stuffed chair in the den, "who talks?"

"You do."

"Got a complaint?"

Freddie had two. He wanted Komack to pay what was owed on the Corvette.

"OK," Komack agreed. "Done."

Second, while his salary had recently been raised to $9500 per episode, he wanted the same money Albertson was getting.

"What?" Komack asked.

"You know. Parity," Freddie said.

"What do you mean by that?" Komack demanded.

"You know," Prinze argued. "Equal."

"But, Freddie." Komack shrugged, "you're not equal."

Prinze tried to argue, but Komack held his ground. The meeting ended.

Freddie had taken five 'Ludes before the meeting, and the wine didn't help. He slid into his Corvette and weaved dangerously back to his apartment.

Carol was there when he returned. "I've had five 'Ludes and some wine," he boasted sluggishly, "and I drove!"

He put away his gun and changed into his favorite white karate pants and T-shirt. He called one of his attorneys. "I'm gonna do it," he warned and asked about his insurance policies. The attorney brushed off the threat and told him there was a two-year moratorium that had four months left to expire. Freddie hung up.

He called Kroger, but the doctor was out; his exchange said he'd be calling in.

To pass the time, Freddie and Carol played backgammon. He could hardly move the pieces. He passed out in the middle of the game.

At nine o'clock, Kroger called. "Doc--I need help," Freddie said. "I'm going to do it. I can't take it anymore." Kroger promised he'd be over. Freddie got up and got the gun, then counted and recounted his Quaaludes. He wanted to be sure how many he had taken. Seven.

He called Bursky, who tried to make small talk by asking him how he liked the Inaugural. "It was great, man. I got new faith, new hope." Bursky thought he said "new coke." Freddie cut him off.

"Let's keep it short and sweet."

"What?" Bursky asked.

"OK," Freddie mumbled. "It's been short but sweet."

At midnight, Prinze grew nervous. He jumped up from the sofa and began to pace. He put two albums on the stereo--Car Wash and a new Stevie Wonder record.

He danced a little, and then Carol convinced him to sit down and sleep. She removed his shoes, got a blanket and pillow and gently stroked his forehead. "Tell me, Carol, tell me," he whispered.

"What, Freddie?" she asked. "Tell you what?"

"Tell me, Carol, just tell me, but don't tell me to go to sleep."

At 1:30 A.M., Kroger came up the steps. Freddie heard his footsteps and let him in. He studied him for a moment. The doctor is a small, thin man in his 70s, with high cheekbones, smooth skin and a good rap. Carol got him some orange juice.

"Doc, in a nutshell, what am I? Am I schizophrenic? Psycho?"

"You're none of those things," Kroger soothed. "You're a very immature boy with masochistic tendencies, that's all."

"Pseudomasochistic tendencies," Freddie countered. Kroger ignored him. Freddie asked again.

"All right," Kroger conceded. "You're pseudomasochistic. Yes, you can kill without any conscience, without any guilt when you're under the influence of those Quaaludes. But when you are normal, without any of this stuff in you, you are the sweetest, the most lovable, the kindest person there is."

Kroger immediately saw the gun lying on the cheap wooden coffee table. Prinze slowly picked it up as the doctor began a casual conversation about his lack of knowledge about firearms. Freddie seemed to respond to the doctor's ploy and in his stupor tried to explain how the gun worked. Then he replaced the gun and clip on the table.

Prinze looked up just as Kroger was pocketing the clip. He reached out for it. "Give it back," he said. Kroger hesitated. Freddie sat up on the couch. "Doc," he said curtly, "I'm serious. I want the clip back. And if you don't give it to me, I'll take it from you."

Kroger reached into his pocket and fingered the clip. "But, Freddie," he tried to gently tease, "you wouldn't hit a man with glasses, would you?"

"Yes," Freddie quickly responded. "I would." The doctor's cheeks flushed. He glanced at Carol and she gave him a look that seemed to corroborate Freddie's threat. He shrugged slightly, pulled the clip out of his pocket and, without further hesitation, gave it back.

Carol was tired. Since Kroger was there, she could go home. Because the weather was bad, Carol promised to call when she got back to her apartment.

When she did, she heard a familiar line: "Carol, I'm so lonely."

"Isn't Kroger still with you?" she asked.

"No, he left."

Carol begged him to get some sleep: "Freddie, you're wearing me out."

He was on the phone to her a quarter of an hour later. "Carol, I'm gonna do it. I can't take it no more. I'm just gonna do it."

Freddie called Dusty Snyder next and made the same threat. Dusty agreed to go over. Freddie sat down on the love seat and examined the gun for the fifth time that night. His mind was fighting sleep, a battle he was slowly losing to his body. The stereo was almost at full volume. Moving slowly, he loaded the bullet clip, slid a shell into the chamber and pushed down on the safety catch, revealing a red-lacquer dot, which told him the gun was ready. Satisfied, he slid the gun under one of the couch cushions.

He sat down on the couch in the darkened apartment and drew up the coffee table. He pulled out a sheet of hotel stationery and began to write: "January 28, 1977. I must end it. Theres no hope left. I'll be at peace. No one had anything to do this. My dicision tottaly."

There was a knock at the door. It was Dusty. "Things will get better, Freddie," he said as soon as he walked in. "All this is just temporary. And what's the worst that could happen? They'll take your money now--but it's only money."

Freddie only nodded. He grabbed for the phone. He called David Braun. Then his mother.

He glanced down at his suicide note and added a couple of lines: "Dusty's here. He's innocent. He cared."

At 3:30, he called Kathy. "I love you and I love the baby very much," he told her, "but I just have to find peace. The attorneys are taking all of it."

He hung up and stared at the wall. It was quiet now. The records had been played. In the eerie light of the room, he already looked like a ghost.

Prinze reached into the sofa, withdrew the gun and, holding it in his right hand, put it against his temple. He squeezed the trigger.

There was a loud pop. The quarterinch bullet went upward through his brain, mushroomed and exited his skull near the top of his head. Snyder first thought it might be another of Freddie's poor-taste pranks. Then he saw the blood trickling down the side of his head.

The bullet landed five feet away on a window sill. Freddie's hand, still tightly gripping the gun, came to rest in his lap. His heart was still beating.

The phone rang at Honey Bruce's rented house in San Anselmo, California, shortly after 5:30 that morning. It was Kitty calling from New York. She was crying uncontrollably. "Mom, Mom," she sobbed. "Freddie did it, he shot himself." Honey tried to calm her, but it was no use. "Now I know how it feels," she insisted. "Now I know. You lost your funny man, and now I just did."

Thirty-three hours later, it was official. The machines keeping Prinze alive were removed.

Komack returned from the hospital a half hour after the death announcement was made. He walked into Maxine's room to tell her the bad news, but she had already heard it. As he walked out, he saw it--now displayed on her dressing table: It was the autographed color photo of Freddie. "To Maxine," he had written, "When you grow up, may you never grow up to be like your Uncle Freddie."

•

Twenty-four hours after Prinze was pronounced dead, Kathy had agreed to nearly all the funeral arrangements. Everyone had gathered at DeBlasio's house to work out the final details. Komack and DeBlasio had made up a list of honorary pallbearers. DeBlasio wanted Pryor, but Kathy was adamant about not having any of "his kind" at the funeral. Many of those at the house had just met Kathy and some of them were beginning to understand, they later said, why Freddie had always shielded his wife.

DeBlasio tried to persuade her that Freddie loved Pryor. She wouldn't listen. Finally, she agreed to a compromise: She'd allow Sammy Davis Jr. (who hardly knew Freddie) to attend. Neither entertainer went to the services.

The funeral was everything a star could hope for. Dozens of celebrities, hundreds of fans, the press and, finally, pastor Stanley Unruh. Kathy wanted him to perform the services; Unruh agreed immediately to fly in from Las Vegas. It would be his second star ceremony.

Ironically, the services were held at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, which just happens to overlook NBC. Many of the honorary pallbearers on the well-publicized list were absent. "Where's Carson?" someone asked of the Tonight Show king.

"Oh," replied one of the celebrities, "he doesn't do funerals."

Neither does Friedman. He went to Schwab's, instead, for lunch and commiseration with Chuck McCann and Huntz Hall. "It's a shame, it's a shame," Hall muttered as they ate. "In the old days, I remember they handcuffed Errol Flynn and put him away so he wouldn't hurt himself. But here they did nothing," he sighed. "They did nothing."

Komack, Albertson and DeBlasio delivered eulogies. So did Tony Orlando, who had miraculously reappeared on the scene to be quoted as Prinze's "best friend." Albertson was too emotional to complete his remarks.

After the services, the pastor led the small group of family and close friends to a crypt for the burial. Maria talked only briefly with Kathy. As Maria was leaving the crypt, she turned back and began to cry.

Albertson felt weak. As he left the burial site, he glanced over to see Orlando, whose arms were raised in evangelical fashion, orating to the fans and the press. Albertson shook his head, muttered something and started toward his car. It was over. But not quite, not in the world of show business. He had taken only a few steps when a small woman wearing butterfly sunglasses ran up to him and pressed a crumpled business card into his palm.

"My cousin looks just like Freddie Prinze," she sputtered. Albertson tried to move away. She kept pace with him long enough to regain his attention and then said, winking persuasively, "Call me, OK?"

"Three hours after the first test for 'Chico,' Jonas burst into Freddie's hotel room. He found him snorting cocaine."

"The Prinze-Bruce engagement lasted a week and ended in a traumatic call that left Kitty feeling hurt and abused."