Prinze for About 786 Days
The Short Bright Career That Was Freddie Prinze, Ending on This Day in 1977
Of the many ways to look at the sad end of comedian Freddie Prinze’s life by his own hand back in the 1970s — the loss of a son / husband / father to a ten-month-old boy, the end of a lucrative television career that likely would have expanded to films, the blow to the Hispanic and Latino cultures that championed his success — the saddest way is probably found in the numbers.
How young is suicide at 22? Had he lived, Freddie Prinze today would be just 67. And he’s been gone 45 years. Almost half a century.
Twenty-two is the age at which most lives begin, not end. Just three years removed from being a teenager.
It was as a teen when Prinze shot to fame, following his first appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, on December 6, 1973. (He’d been exposed two months earlier on a short-lived ABC late-night talk-show with Jack Paar, but Carson was the Bigs.) His five-minute set went over so well that Prinze became the first comedian ever to be invited over to Johnny’s couch his first time at bat. “You’re gonna do fine,” Carson said to him after he sat down, about his future. A comedy king from one generation had anointed a comedy prince for another.
(Frederick Karl Pruetzel actually adopted the stage name Freddie Prinze when he first started in his drive to be known as just that — the Prince of Comedy.)
It was that biggest of breaks for Prinze: Not only did he become a fixture on the talk-show and live stand-up circuits, he also caught the attention of sitcom producer James Komack, who’d been developing an idea for a Latino-centered series for NBC and saw in Freddie Prinze his star. Ten months after The Tonight Show, Prinze had his own show: Chico and the Man.
As the charming job-seeking hustler Chico Rodriguez, who talks his way into the fading East L.A. garage-shop business — and life — of crusty old-school Ed Brown (Jack Albertson), Prinze essentially portrayed himself, with much of his stand-up material working its way into his dialogue. Paired on Friday nights with juggernaut Sanford and Son, Chico and the Man was what then referred to as a runaway hit: It landed in Nielsen’sTop Ten with its first episode that 1974–75 season and never left.
The comedy rode a wave of new sitcoms — set in big cities, featuring younger faces and more realistic stories that offered edgy humor, often pivoting on the country’s widening generation gap — that were changing TV in a change-filled decade. As the first sitcom set in the barrios of East Los Angeles, during a time of an escalating Brown Pride movement in the country, it also spotlit, and bridged, a cultural one.
Chico spoke to many. And it spoke loud and funny. Critical and Emmy favor were bestowed. NBC was flush. And then just as quickly the show — and its star — were over. Midway through the third season, in the pre-dawn hours of Friday January 28, 1977, just 37 months after his Tonight Show benediction, experiencing more fame than he probably ever dreamed possible yet addled by mental-health struggles and drug dependency, Freddie Prinze shot himself in the head in his Los Angeles apartment. Never regaining consciousness, he lingered on life-support at the UCLA Medical Center until the following afternoon, when family had it removed. A few hours later, across town, the 1977 Golden Globe Awards went on as scheduled, with Prinze up for Best Actor in a TV Comedy. Now a posthumous nominee. (Happy Days’ Henry Winkler won.)
Seven episodes of Chico and the Man’s 21-episode third season were left hanging in the balance — four filmed and waiting to be aired, three others written and waiting to be shot. NBC broadcast one of the ready-four the week following Prinze’s death. It pre-empted the show the week after that, and then it aired the remaining three as scheduled over the course of the next three weeks. The last episode to feature Freddie Prinze aired March 4, 1977. With that, Freddie Prinze and his short brass-ring life came to a close: The three Chico-less episodes that followed were filmed and broadcast under a death pall (Chico was said to be in Mexico), and the third season of Chico and the Man wrapped up on April 8, 1977.
(NBC, demonstrating the kind of what-were-they-thinking wisdom often on display in network TV, actually renewed Chico and the Man for a fourth season that spring, despite its star’s suicide. An unknown non-actor 12-year-old named Gabriel Melgar was hired to replace Freddie Prinze, playing a Mexican orphan named Raul whom Ed Brown finds hiding in his garage and decides to adopt. The reported executive-suite rationale for keeping the show and the title: “They’re all named Chico.” Ratings, of course, plummeted. Both the Man and the new Chico were gone by Christmas 1977.)
From luck to timing to chance, many factors and many people made for the brief success that was Chico and the Man from September 1974 though January 1977. But it was charming and handsome and talented Prinze, born both for comedy and the camera, who brought it all together. In the process, half-Puerto-Rican Prinze nudged TV ethnicity’s needle in a (much-needed) way it hadn’t been since Cuban-born Desi Arnaz came to prime-time in 1951 with I Love Lucy.
The sadness that is the loss of Freddie Prinze? It’s found in another number: 5. In five years, Prinze went from unknown to TV star, Vegas and touring headliner, and the youngest guest-host in The Tonight Show history; he recorded a best-selling comedy album and starred in a TV movie-of-the-week; he married, divorced and fathered a child.
He did all that between 1971 and 1976. Then: gone in a bullet’s flash.
Part of the weekly fix of Chico and the Man was Jose Feliciano’s opening theme-song, written as a caution to Chico that he not be discouraged by having to work alongside such a cranky-old-man boss, reminding him that
There’s good in everyone
And a new day has begun
You can see the morning sun if you try
Given the talent involved, it stings that during a lousy few minutes on January 28, 1977, 45 years ago today, Freddie Prinze apparently just couldn’t try.
Chico and the Man lives on in reruns. Freddie Prinze lives on in the faces of his son and two grandchildren.
