The Prinze of Prime Time

My parents met on the subway--picking each other's pockets.

My mother's always talking about the wedding. "You shoulda been there," she says. She doesn 't remember. I was there, and so were my two brothers.

To survive in the ghetto, you gotta look tough. The best way to look tough is to have a broken arm.

Bill Cosby? Dick Gregory? Or maybe Richard Pryor in one of his less savage moments? Wrong, wrong, wrong. It is ghetto humor all right, but it comes from a different part of town--the streets of the Latino section of Manhattan's Upper West Side, where a fat kid named Freddie Prinze lived for most of his 20 short years. Nowadays Freddie works another barrio. As the wisecracking Chicano hustler in the decrepit East Los Angeles garage in NBC's smash new series Chico and the Man, Prinze is the hottest new property on prime-time TV.

Though the new season has only just begun, Chico is already up there at the top of the Nielsen ratings with CBS's Rhoda, whose star, Mary Tyler Moore's old sidekick Valerie Harper, has a following of her own, and Archie Bunker's crew in All in the Family. That is not bad company for a lad who is barely out of his teens, and got his first professional job little more than a year ago as a stand-up comic playing to an off-season crowd in a Puerto Rican resort hotel. Actually, Freddie Prinze is the sort of kinetic, compulsive comic who is and always has been on--whether the locale is a Burbank TV studio or the darkened stoops of Manhattan's West 157th Street, where he was born.

Sit Freddie down for a serious conversation and he coasts along, heavy-lidded eyes at half mast, his parabolic mustache drooping below his mouth. But put him in front of an audience and he comes alive: his lids shoot up like window blinds letting the sun in, and his mustache dances expressively around his face. He cannot even stay quiet during breaks in the taping of his show. During a production delay, Freddie entertained the audience, with a burst of pent-up one-liners. "This is a minority show," he announced. "The next minority to get its own show will probably be the Eskimos--Let's Make a Seal." Then he laid into the Chinese: "I'm really afraid of them. Take this Kung Fu, for example. They say that Bruce Lee died of an overdose of marijuana. What really happened was he smoked a great joint, got a great high--and beat himself up." The difference between whites and blacks? "If you go up to a Midwest WASP and ask the time, he'll look at his watch and say 'Quarter of four.' You go in the ghetto and ask a black guy and he'll say, 'Do I look like Big Ben to you, turkey?' "

As Chico, Prinze gets to try out his wisecracks on the crusty old bigot (Jack Albertson) who owns the garage he works in. Chico's humor, like Freddie's, is mordant but never really malicious. Says Prinze: "Chico's made something of a life that could have left him very bitter. He could have been anything from a pusher to a pocketbook snatcher."

Royal Lord. The same goes for Freddie. The only child of a Hungarian-born tool-and-die worker and a Puerto Rican mother, Freddie grew up a wary outsider--a "Hungarican," as he puts it --in one of Manhattan's Hispanic ghettos. But young Freddie had some advantages, among them an early command of English, which gave him an access to the world outside that other kids lacked. But he also had some liabilities, notably his 6-ft. 2-in. height, which made him both recognizably alien and a natural target. He joined a series of street gangs for self-preservation, winding up at 16 wearing the colors of the Royal Lords. Characteristically, Freddie jokes about those violent days. There was a rival gang member, he insists, who used to bring along his Doberman pinscher. "He would set the dog on you and sit back," Freddie recalls. "In the end, the dog got used to the fights and got itself a switchblade."

Back then, Freddie literally lived by his wit: he learned that he could often head off the fights he so feared by disarming his foes with laughter. Freddie's mother urged him to take his street-born talent to the stage. As a student at New York's High School of Performing Arts, he was so eager that he even began working out routines in the bathroom; they proved so popular that other students would ask "What time's Freddie going to be in the John today?" The school refused to graduate him last year because he cut too many classes: he was forever oversleeping after a 3 a.m. gig he had landed in a midtown cabaret.

No matter. By that time he had been spotted by a TV talent scout. The result was the first of several spots on Johnny Carson's Tonight show. The funny Hungarican's name was just beginning to get around last spring when Producer James Komack was looking for someone to play Chico on TV. Komack was sold on Prinze: "He's the best comic to come along in 20 years."

He is, in any case, the first Puerto Rican comedian to command a nationwide audience. When he was working as a stand-up comic, Prinze found that 80% of his fans were black. "They went through the crap first," he says, "so that when they hear a Puerto Rican talking about it, it's like nostalgia."

Free-form Latin. Oddly enough, it is unclear whether Freddie's TV act will be equally appealing to Spanish Americans. He is forever making fun of Puerto Ricans like Mr. Rivera, the apartment-building superintendent who responds to every crisis by shrugging, "Eeets not mai job." On the other hand, within hours of Chico's debut three weeks ago, Chicano community leaders objected to a Puerto Rican being cast as a kid from the L. A. barrio. They cited dialect and accent differences, a distinction that baffles Freddie ("I play Chico as a free-form Latin"), and put NBC on the defensive. The network shelved four shows that had already been taped and asked Freddie to modify his exaggerated Spanish accent. NBC flacks then announced that Chico was "raised in New York"--presumably under Puerto Rican influences--before he came to L.A.

His Chicano critics aside, Freddie finds fan mail mounting at his Hollywood apartment and even at the West 157th Street apartment where his parents still live. When he does get time off from a crowded schedule of rehearsals and taping nowadays, he puts on what he calls his crazy Rican outfit--a spangled shirt and silver-studded pants --and prowls his new neighborhood, where "even the junkies have sun tans."

Freddie tried drugs for a while, but now he gets his kicks from Marx Brothers movies, Kung Fu acrobatics--and girls. His current bird is Kitty Bruce, the late Lennie's 18-year-old daughter. A night person, Prinze is still a perilously late sleeper, but Komack has found a solution. He calls Freddie's apartment every morning, and refuses to hang up until he hears those one-liners begin sputtering over the line.

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