Freddie Prinze: Too Much, Too Soon

He seemed to have everything going for him. Playing a wisecracking Chicano hustler in an East Los Angeles garage, he starred in NBC's three-year-old hit series Chico and the Man. He had just signed a multiyear $1 million contract with Las Vegas' Caesars Palace. He was negotiating film deals with Warner's and Universal. He had filled in for Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show; more such appearances were in the works. And at the age of 22, he attained one of the highest status roles in show business when he performed for the incoming President at last month's Inaugural gala in Washington.

Yet something was terribly wrong in the life of Comedian Freddie Prinze. After a few games of backgammon at his TV producer's home late last week, he returned to his $695-a-month apartment in the plush Beverly Comstock Hotel. Depressed, he called his parents and his psychiatrist. He told them he was going to kill himself. His secretary and his business manager, Marvin Snyder, had come over to cheer him up. Then, with Snyder still present, Prinze hung up the phone after talking with his estranged wife Katherine, reached down into the sofa's cushions, pulled out a small automatic pistol, placed it to his temple and fired. The bullet passed straight through his head. Police found a note that said he could not go on any longer. After a day in the hospital, he succumbed.

It was such a quick end to such a quick career. The son of a Puerto Rican mother and a Hungarian father, Prinze had used his wit to survive among the teen-age toughs in the Latino section of Manhattan's Upper West Side. Disarming his foes with switchblade-sharp one-liners, he avoided the fighting he hated. At the High School for Performing Arts, Prinze's ability to twit his own background--the comedic formula he never abandoned--earned him star status in the boys' room, where he would try out his routines. His ethnic-based act worked on New York's club circuit too, which led to his first national appearance on the Jack Paar show. Then, in December 1973, his stand-up routine on the Tonight Show thrust him into the big leagues: he had caught the eye of James Komack, who was casting his generation-and ethnic-gap sitcom. With Chico a winner, Prinze had reached the top.

But the fast trip left the sensitive Prinze off balance. A close friend, Comedian David Brenner, explains: "There was no transition in Freddie's life. It was an explosion. It's tough to walk off a subway at age 19 and then step out of a Rolls-Royce the next day. He was in a life-style that's very unusual for a 22-year-old." Producer Komack, 20 years his elder, became a close confidant. Says he: "Freddie saw nothing around that would satisfy him. He would ask me, 'Is this what it is? Is this what it's all about?' He'd say, 'I can't go out now, I can't walk around.' " The hokiness of Hollywood fame got to him too. He would say, 'Even my friendships are related to ratings.' "

Some friends suggest that the breakup of his marriage in December was the source of his last bout of despondency. Though he did surfer over the divorce and worried about his ten-month-old son, those closest to Prinze minimize the domestic problem. Indeed, Prinze had been threatening suicide for more than a year. His morbid bent had led him often to watch a copy he had of the Zapruder film of President Kennedy's assassination. Noted Prinze's TV costar, Jack Albertson: "A combination of things had him down. On the set he would sometimes retreat into himself. But he would recover. He would joke, have fun, kibitz around. Then the next day he would be depressed again." Says Komack: "His real despondency, whether he could articulate it or not, concerned the questions: 'Where do I fit in? Where is my happiness?' I would tell him, 'God, Freddie, your happiness is right here. You're a star.' He'd say, 'No, that's not happiness for me any more.' "

Prinze liked to tell interviewers that the Chico character "is very close to me. He comes out an optimist, very ambitious and hardworking. He's made something of a life that could have made him bitter." But for one of the most singular escape stories in ghetto history, escape was not enough.

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