Laughter &
THE GROUNDBREAKING LATINO COMIC’S STAR SHINED BRIGHTLY — BUT FLAMED OUT QUICKLY
I’m not into drugs,” Freddie Prinze told Rolling Stone in 1975. “Look, I grew up with ’em, did it all, sniffed coke, but no more, because it’s wasted too many guys, too many comics, and I got too much to get done.” Tragically, the stand-up comic and sitcom star would die of a drug-influenced, self-inflicted gunshot wound two years later at 22. But he accomplished a lot in a very short time, and his legacy lives on. “His life just burnt out quicker than it should have,” says his son, actor Freddie Prinze Jr. “And that is unfortunate, but what is more unfortunate is that everybody focuses on the nature of his death as opposed to the nature of his life, which was so much greater and more important.”
Freddie grew up in a rough section of New York City. He joked that his Puerto Rican mom and gypsy dad met when they tried to pick each other’s pockets on the subway. “I couldn’t fight, and I wasn’t particularly interested in the academic,” he later said. “So I started doing satiric bits in the school bathroom. Guys would cut class to come and see me.”
He attended the famed Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts but stayed out late playing comedy clubs, and he dropped out during his senior year. “Freddie promised his mom if he couldn’t get his act together in a year, he’d go back to school,” Jose Sonera, who plays the comic in the one-man show Prinze (now available on PBS’ All Arts streaming service), tells Closer. Within that year, he got his big break on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1973. He soon landed a lead in NBC’s sitcom Chico and the Man, which shot to the top of the ratings.
With overnight fame came temptation. He had a passionate romance with blaxploitation star Pam Grier. “Money, lust and power hung heavy in the air,” she recalled of that time. “He seemed to be eating it up.”
Freddie married former cocktail waitress Kathy Cochran in 1975, and she gave birth to Freddie Jr. five months later. “He was so ecstatic to have a son,” Sonera says. “Freddie wanted his boy to be with him all the time.”
Despite his protestations to the contrary, Freddie developed a serious drug habit, abusing cocaine and Quaaludes and mixing them with alcohol. Eight months after Freddie Jr. was born, his father was arrested for driving under the influence, and Kathy filed for divorce. The shock sent Freddie, who suffered from depression, into an emotional tailspin. Says Sonera, “He couldn’t handle the fact that he was going to lose his wife and kid, so he ended up doing the worst.”
Freddie’s death was ruled a suicide, but a later civil case called it a medication-induced accident. In any event, his memory endures. “My dad taught me the greatest lesson in life, and that’s to make sure the people around you feel loved,” says Freddie Jr. “He might not have been able to teach me that if he were alive. So I owe him one.”
— Bruce Fretts, with reporting by Amanda Champagne-Meadows
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