Thursday, April 16, 2026
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How do you upload a memory of 70 years of a friendship. You can’t. His was life lived with passion, humor, angst, love, fierce arguments, forceful opinions, true compassion, great patience, no patience, vicious wordsmithing, suffering no fools and empathy for all, no matter their station in life.
You can’t encapsulate Bruce’ Prince’s life. It encompassed too much.
He was my best friend.
He was my oldest friend.
He was my standard of honesty.
He was my standard of intellectual curiosity.
He was the most argumentative friend I have ever had.
He was the only person on this earth who could read me the riot act and I would listen.
He suffered no fools but did not belittle those fools.
He loved one woman all his life and never thought of another.
He loved his sons more than is humanly possible.
There are simply too many memories to recount.
But there is one that I will never forget.
It was the late 70s, maybe 1980. Bruce came to visit me in Hollywood. I had a wife and a child at the time. Bruce had Linda. And he was afraid that if he had children, he wouldn’t live long enough to give them the father they deserved. He recounted how his mother died unexpectedly and how much it changed his life. And he inherited her heart issue. And had that fear deep down in his wounded heart that it would happen to him, and he wanted only to do the right thing and didn’t know what that was. We walked for hours around Los Feliz talking about his conundrum, his fears of an early death, his fears of abandoning his children by death, his fear of leaving Linda a single Mom. I listened and tried to assure him that life would not throw him a wicked curve. That he would survive. That he would have children. That he wouldn’t die leaving Linda a single Mom.
And he stopped and looked at me and asked me how did I know all that so adamantly? I simply said, I only know you and you will fight for what you want. If that’s what you want, fight for it. And he said to me…Yes, I want that! And I laughed and said, ok, settled. Now let’s go get something to eat. I’m hungry.
And he, of course, said…” I’ll pick the place. You have no taste!
Bruce is irreplaceable to me.
I loved him like no other person in my life. And I always will.When my father died, and I was crying uncontrollably, he held me in his arms and whispered to me…” Your dad was the best man I’ve ever known.”I wished I could have held him at the end and whispered the same thing to him. Because it’s true.
Bruce Prince was the best man I’ve ever known.
