The Prince I Knew

In 1983, I was 25 years old and beginning a screenwriting career. When I got a call from the agency that represented me, I was surprised to find myself talking to its founding agent. Even more unusual was his greeting:

“You’re young. You know who Prince is, right?”

I had never heard of Prince, so I lied. “Oh, yeah. He’s great.”

“Okay,” the agent said, “You’re going to meet with him tonight. If he approves you, you’ll be going on tour with him for six weeks, maybe longer.” He then explained the terms of the deal to me: One of his biggest clients, the very fine writer William Blinn was scheduled to write the screenplay for an as-yet unnamed movie starring Prince.

Absorbed in running the TV series FAME, Bill Blinn had no time to tour with a recording artist, nor did he have the patience to deal with the crap that went along with a pop star on tour. My job was to learn all about Prince, then shape the storyline for the future movie.

At the time, I was living on unemployment. $166 a week let me pay my rent and eat, but did not permit the luxury of a working sound system. When a messenger arrived at my apartment and dropped off a box load of cassettes and LPs, I headed over to my parents to use their stereo.

“What is that noise?” my father asked. Since I’m tone-deaf, I shared his assessment, but I kept listening. After a few hours spending time with the LPs and working through the lyrics, I began to get it. “Controversy triggered my first “Wow!” moment. Though it was definitely danceable, Prince was talking about things, big things, important things: sexual identity, public bigotries of the kind that shaped an individual’s identity — often against his or her will. I was intrigued.

Preparing to meet Prince that evening, I was trying to wrap my head around the idea that you would call someone Prince. I practiced saying his name many times in order for it to seem pretty normal… almost. On the matter of what to wear: my best friend from college, Raul Del Rio, was the only one in my circle who had any style, and he wore tweed jackets with leather elbow patches. Clad in a clean pair of jeans, a polo shirt, and my one tweed jacket, I headed off to meet Prince.

I came face-to-face with Prince around midnight. Dressed in purple, with a ruffled shirt, he was editing a music video in a small room in Hollywood. Though he had a professional editor operating the equipment, Prince was clearly in control. I didn’t say anything. Prince didn’t say anything. He was sizing me up while he focused on the work in front of him. As I watched the editing screens, I could see that Prince had a good eye.

After an hour of no words spoken between us, Prince looked up from the editing screen. “Hi. I’m Prince.” He held out his hand. It somehow seemed normal to call him Prince. “Hey Prince, how do you do.” And that was that. Prince went back to editing. I went home.

In the morning, a messenger delivered my plane tickets. I packed up a bag and boarded a plane to join the tour in Georgia.

At Prince’s request, I stepped onto the bus for The Time, his opening act. Morris Day, the lead singer, was encrusted with glitter, left over from his previous evening’s encounter with a groupie who showered him with the stuff before she had sex with him. “Freaky hippie shit,” he exclaimed.

“Hi guys,” I said. Nothing. They stared, trying figure out who I was and what the hell I was doing on their tour bus. Ten minutes later Prince came back, laughing at everyone’s expression. He told them what I was going to be doing — and with that, the tour began for me.

Thus I discovered Prince’s wicked sense of fun. I’m not sure whether he was fucking more with me or Morris Day, but at all times, he was a bundle of contradictions. He was very private, unwilling to talk about himself, yet also very introspective, with a sharp intuition about the people around him.

Though Prince didn’t talk much about his childhood, the two bands travelling with him, The Time and Vanity Six, had many members who had grown up with Prince. Little by little, I began to get pieces of Prince’s personal history — much of which would make it into the film PURPLE RAIN.

I began to sense that when Prince was offstage, he wasn’t so much shy as lacking a layer of protective cover from his environment. He caught everything: nuance, tone, insights from a conversation. It was as if he couldn’t turn off his intellect. If he heard something that interested him, or came upon a personal insight, he immediately wrote it down in his ever-present notepad. I first witnessed Prince’s avid curiosity when a tour bus driver, anticipating his first day off after two weeks of 18-hour shifts, announced that he had “my go-to-hell-hat on,” Prince instantly recorded the expression.

Prince was a night owl, as was I, so if he called at two in the morning, I was likely to be up. As the tour bus throbbed toward the next engagement, we had a lot of conversations in the wee hours. Though we were too dissimilar to be best friends, I marveled at his original turn of mind.

In a department store, I watched him trying on women’s perfumes. “Think about it,” Prince said to me. “What smells do women like to be around? Not men’s colognes. You want to wear what they like.” Prince left the store with a bottle of Chanel #5.

Prince’s work model was one of control everything, both in his personal life and his professional life. Every show was videotaped, no small task in 1983. Post-concert, Prince studied everyone’s performance, including his own. Notes went out: “Didn’t like those socks.” “You were off a beat on the middle section.” “Flatted on your first solo.” Whatever it was, no detail was too small to escape his attention, often to the silent annoyance of band members.

Onstage was where Prince came fully alive and was free. Night after night, he made an emotional connection with his audience. Despite their skilled professionalism and outsized humor, The Time lacked Prince’s versatility, his gift for playing to the mood of each venue. Each night, they did the same act, while the less experienced women of Vanity Six understood exactly how to use their youth, beauty, and sexuality to energize a crowd. I gradually realized that Prince was using both bands to express an aspect of his own personality.

Prince was dating Vanity Six’s lead singer Vanity, aka Denise Matthews. She was an exquisite beauty, yet there was something frail about her. Though she enchanted audiences, I sometimes found her by herself, crying, lonely, and grateful for a simple conversation. The only time I saw her truly happy was when her family came to visit. Between Prince’s relentless work ethic and Vanity’s ambivalence about a career in the spotlight, for her, life on the road with Prince was more burden than pleasure.

Drugs were part of the music scene, if only due to the rigors of touring. Prince despised them. If he found out that anyone around him was using drugs, that person went home that day. Period. No exceptions. Prince’s musicians had to roll up towels and wedge them under the door in order to smoke dope without Prince finding out. I never learned why Prince hated drugs so much, but I witnessed a few people sent packing.

In the meantime, Prince’s sense of humor sustained the 1983 tour. On a rare day with no obligations, he challenged me to a game of racquetball. I didn’t know racquetball, and Prince was a good athlete, but I had played tennis in college and done some time on the professional circuit. I beat him pretty easily. Since this apparently didn’t happen often, Prince later had me play his drummer, Bobby Z, who was an excellent racquetball player, maybe even ranked in his home state. He beat me in three sets.

“You just cost me a lot of money,” said Prince matter-of-factly. “After you beat me like that, I thought you were pretty good. I bet Bobby a new car he couldn’t beat you.” I shrugged. It was the only second time in my life I had played racquetball.

In his characteristically direct and self-deprecating style, Prince said, “I guess I must really suck.”

“You do,” I told him, “You should have asked me. I would have told you.” Prince laughed, a deep belly laugh at his own expense. For the rest of the tour, every time we checked into a hotel, Prince would go down to the gift shop, buy a toy car, and offer it to Bobby. I believe that Prince actually bought him a real car at the end of the tour.

As I traveled with him, Prince played in larger and larger stadiums, the press and music industry began to pay more and more attention. Prince was hitting the big time, about to be bigger still. Over coffee, we talked about what this would mean for him.

“It’s going to be tough,” I suggested. “As you get more and more successful you’re getting increasingly isolated from the real world. What are you going to draw on for material? Without direct experience, without ordinary everyday sorts of interactions, you’re going to have to rely on your imagination.”

Prince thought about this for a moment. Finally, he looked up at me. “It’s all right. I have a very good imagination.”

“Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince; And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” — William Shakespeare, “Hamlet”.