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But the movies got lousier even as the pay got better. ''Yeah, The Toystill makes you cringe,'' says Wanda Sykes. ''Ah, damn. Superman III, he got a huge check [$4 million]. Good for Richard, he deserved a big check.'' Pryor felt that way too. He encased his sensitivity in pragmatism. ''You ask Richard, 'What about love?''' says Dion Jackson, his friend and physical therapist. ''He said, 'Love? Love, Dion? My mother was a prostitute. My dad was a pimp. My uncle owned a whorehouse. Love comes in hundred-dollar bills.'''

But while he was busy collecting and spending those Benjamins, a young comedian named Eddie Murphy was usurping his position as America's fearless black funnyman. Somewhere between the third-degree burns and the rehab, Pryor seemed to have lost his creative spark. Chevy Chase, also recovering from addiction, once asked Pryor, ''When does it come back? He said, 'I'm still waiting.'''

He waited the rest of his life, more or less. Diagnosed with MS while making 1987's putrid Critical Condition, Pryor grew weaker and weaker over the next five years, until he could no longer work. Missing the spotlight and needing money, he would make sporadic appearances over the next few years, delivering routines from his wheelchair. Sometimes the magic came back; sometimes it didn't. But the terror of failure was something Pryor had always been familiar with. For all of his supposed fearlessness, what made him so magnetic, so familiar to his audiences was his neurotic, almost sheepish vulnerability. ''Richard was okay not being on top of it all,'' says Tomlin. ''Pain, sweetness, rage — when he came on stage, you felt his essence. There are some people who are just...open. And he was open.''

That openness also informed his humility, something that doesn't come easily to living legends slipping into decline. ''We were in the limo, and there was a bum out there on the left-hand side,'' remembers Jackson. ''And someone was giggling and Richard said, 'Don't be giggling. That's only one month away from us.' He made everyone give him some money.''

''A lot of kids who weren't able to go to college, he sent to college,'' says Mike Epps, who got to know Pryor after being hand-picked by the comic to star in an upcoming biopic, which is still in the script stages. ''He would donate money to Martin Luther King foundations. He had a big heart.''

That was Pryor: a humble introvert who boldly told truth to power — told truth to everybody, really, and, perhaps most notably, told truth to himself, about himself, and at his own expense. He valued people who were similarly honest with him. He remarried both fourth wife Jennifer Lee and fifth wife Flynn Belaine. The former, with whom he rode out the end of his life, once publicly said he was lazy, and made awful movies just for the money.

''He once asked me, 'Paul, do you think I'd have what it takes to be an actor?''' says Mooney. ''And I said, 'You're the best actor I know...you keep acting like you're not crazy.'''


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