by David Henry
There’s something that happens to your bladder. I can be out on Sunset talking with eight or nine womens and I start pissin’. That shit be running down my boots . . . I say, “Damn, baby . . .” She say, “It’s alright.” How come people always say it’s alright when it ain’t them? And you have piss trailing a mile and a half.
After the D.C. show, Richard’s face lit up when an assistant introduced Luciano to him backstage.
“Really? You’re from the Star?”
Up close, he seemed smaller than he had on stage. His fifty-one-year-old body scarred by third-degree burns and ravaged by the early onset of multiple sclerosis, his rheumy eyes magnified by oversized glasses that dwarfed his shrunken but still-iconic face. The star seemed genuinely awed that a writer from his hometown paper would come all this way to see his show.
Within moments, though, a swarm of hangers-on invaded the room and he was back on again, performing for the benefit of the room, cracking one-liners in answer to Luciano’s questions, killing any chance for a genuine exchange between the two.
Asked about his health, Richard deadpanned, “I’m gonna die one day.”
“Do you feel happy?”
“I’m here,” he said, “so I’m all right.”
And so on.
That final question Luciano put to him was this: “Do you have any message for the folks back in Peoria?”
Richard answered in his horror-movie rasp: “Get out!”
That was it. Get out.
—————
“My home’s in Peoria,” he told a sparse crowd at the hungry i in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood in 1966. “Whatever you think of when you hear the name, that’s what it’s like.”
Usually, people applaud when an entertainer mentions his hometown. If it’s Brooklyn, the crowd goes wild. But Peoria? “Last night,” he told them, “somebody threw up.”
Peoria. That famously average embodiment of Middle American values, three-time winner of the National Civic League’s All-America City Award. Peoria has long been a demographer’s dream, a city-sized applause meter reliably registering what the great unwashed will embrace or believe, what they will buy and what they won’t. As the largest city on the Illinois River, it was a major stop for musicians and vaudeville troupes traveling between Chicago and St. Louis. In the days of vaudeville the old saw was that if an act went over in Peoria, it would play anywhere. Hence, “Will it play in Peoria?” became a catchphrase of the uniquely American theatrical phenomenon that evolved out of blackface minstrelsy, medicine shows, olio, and dime museums and provided a livelihood for itinerant jugglers, plate spinners, ventriloquists, crooners, baggy-pant comics, acrobats, barbershop quartets, hoochie-coochie dancers, human oddities, and animal acts for nearly a century, roughly from the mid-1800s through the 1930s when radio stole America’s heart away and held it hostage in front rooms and parlors. Unlike vaudeville itself, the phrase has endured on Madison Avenue and in political campaigns.
Peoria prided itself in being seen as a model city, a coded phrase that meant, “We have our Negroes under control,” Richard would often say. Yet things were decidedly more lax on North Washington Street where Richard spent his childhood. Hookers, winos, gamblers, musicians, politicians, and street-corner men populated both Pop’s Pool Hall, owned by his grandfather, and the brothels run by his grandmother. From the 1920s through the 1950s, Peoria was awash in gambling halls, speakeasies, whorehouses, and corruption, a haven for gangsters and bootleggers. Known as Roaring Peoria, it was “a wide-open river town in the old meaning of the word,” says retired police chief Allen Andrews.
—————
In a 1977 New York Times profile headlined “Richard Pryor, King of the Scene Stealers,” author Joyce Maynard wrote, “Pryor has been given to saying that he was raised in a brothel, which is evidently not the case.”
Maynard gave no reason for doubting the stories Richard told of his upbringing, but she wasn’t the only one. Perhaps the idea that a red-light district could prosper openly in America’s model city during the wholesome Eisenhower era simply beggared belief. Yet a federal report issued in the early 1950s cataloged 132 brothels operating in and around Peoria’s “Aiken Alley” alone.
Aiken Alley was not an alley at all but the popular name given to a notorious stretch of Aiken Avenue that ran west from Briss Collins’s tavern at the corner of Franklin and Jefferson, down to where it intersected with Reed Street.
Whorehouses such as the ones Richard’s grandmother ran weren’t just outlets for illicit sex; they were part of the fabric that held African American neighborhoods together. Playwright and performance artist Jovelyn Richards learned the lore of brothels from one of those prostitutes who went by the name of Satin Doll, immortalized in song by Duke Ellington.
The madam and the other ladies took care of the community around them, of the families of the women whose men didn’t have steady work . . . The madam would pay the grocery store to deliver eggs and milk to families, and loved the fact they didn’t know where these were coming from, that they could make up their own stories about how the box of groceries or the coal got to be on the front porch.
As a child of the fifties, Richard felt a mind-messing disconnect between his own surroundings and life as depicted on TV shows such as The Life of Riley and Father Knows Best. “On television people talked about having happy lives,” he wrote in Pryor Convictions, “but in the world in which I grew up, happiness was a moment rather than a state of being. . . . It never stayed long enough for you to get to know it good. Just a taste here and there. A kiss, a sniff, a stroke, a snort.”
The gleaming postwar automobiles, big as boats, favored by the city’s upper crust, would likely have drawn attention in a neighborhood like Richard’s had they not been such a commonplace sight parked along the curb. Onstage, years later, Richard would recall playing in his front yard when some untouchable white man would “drive up and say, ‘Hello, little boy, is your mother home? I want a blow job.’
“That,” said Richard, “was our mayor.”
The joke was barely an exaggeration. Mayor Edward Nelson “Dearie” Woodruff, who served eleven terms as Peoria’s mayor over the course of nineteen elections spanning forty-two years, presided over a brazen administration that imposed a strict schedule of “fines” for various illegalities, including, but not limited to, gambling and prostitution. The mayor famously defended the city’s thriving brothel trade by saying, “You can make prostitution illegal, but you can’t make it unpopular.” One December, when the city council authorized a crackdown on the red-light district, the mayor objected on moral grounds, arguing that it would be “unchristian” to shutter the brothels so close to Christmas.
To give Peoria its due, let it be said that Abraham Lincoln publicly denounced slavery for the first time in a speech delivered there in 1854. The first African American ever to vote in the United States cast his ballot in Peoria on April 4, 1870. The original mold strain for penicillin was discovered in Peoria. And, in 1945, early civil rights activist Rev. C. T. Vivian joined forces with Barton Hunter, a white minister at West Bluff Christian Church, in leading a nonviolent direct-action campaign to integrate Bishop’s Cafeteria on Main Street. Vivian and Hunter organized their efforts a full decade before Martin Luther King Jr. led the Montgomery bus boycott following Rosa Parks’s refusal to comply with a Jim Crow law that required her to give up her seat to a white man. That she did so on Richard Pryor’s fifteenth birthday hardly seems worth noting, but there it is. As John Cage said: “Everything we come across is to the point.”
Peoria is also the city where Paul Robeson was banned from performing a concert just two days after the House Committee on Un-American Activities cited him a Communist Party sympathizer, where a fourteen-year-old Charles Manson served his first jail time for robbing a grocery store, and where Richard Pryor’s 1993 comeback tour abruptly fizzled out for lack of ticket sales.
Buoyed by big turnouts elsewhere along the to
ur and by the outpouring of affection from his audiences, Richard agreed to an additional string of midwestern dates. Among them was a June 11 show at the Peoria Civic Center, marking what would be his first hometown performance in nearly twenty years. But, then, just three days before the date, Richard abruptly canceled the show, along with the remainder of his tour. Clearly stung by reports of sluggish tickets sales (civic center spokeswoman Amy Blain declined to say how many of the twenty-five-dollar seats had been sold), Richard’s spokespeople offered up the hastily concocted excuse that he needed time to prepare for an upcoming television appearance. Transparently false because his next TV role didn’t come until 1995 when he received an Emmy nomination for his portrayal of a multiple sclerosis patient on an episode of the CBS hospital drama Chicago Hope.
—————
Peoria has yet to make peace with Richard, his street-level profanity, his frank sexuality, his fury, or his wanton drug use. Even today, the town barely acknowledges him.
In October 2001, while Richard languished in deteriorating health in his Encino, California, home, confined to a wheelchair where he spent his days watching a DVD of The Silence of the Lambs on repeat play, the Peoria City Council begrudgingly voted 6–5 in favor of renaming a seven-block stretch of a nondescript residential street Richard Pryor Place. In 2011, more than a half decade after Richard’s death, when Phil Luciano wrote a column suggesting that the city choose a more fitting site to commemorate its most famous son—the city’s new arts center, perhaps, or a major thoroughfare—his readers responded thus:
I have a perfect suggestion: Match a memorial with his mind and his mouth. In other words, find a nice sewer somewhere and name it after him. —Wally
He was just like any other foul-mouthed comedian. Some of his stuff was funny, most wasn’t. There was absolutely nothing special about him. So he came from Peoria, who the hell cares? At the end of the day he’s just another semi funny, dead drug user. —AM
I’d hate to plan the Pryor exhibit in the new museum. Exactly how does one “honor” this man and still keep the exhibit rated “G”? Elementary schools will make up the majority of attendees. Do you leave out the facts that he was raised in a whorehouse, that he made profanity funny and that he often joked about his illegal drug abuse? —Anne
To the reader Anne, Luciano replied: “Leave that out? Why? Pryor didn’t glorify hookers, drugs or abuse—he put a spotlight on it. Maybe that’s why many Peorians never liked Pryor: They didn’t like what he made them see.”
“I get this kind of crap every time I write about Pryor,” says Luciano, a transplanted Chicagoan. “People always say, ‘Why don’t you ever write about Fibber McGee?’ I say, ‘Because nobody gives a fuck about Fibber McGee.’ ”
Fibber McGee, children, was a character created by Peoria native Jim Jordan who costarred with his wife and Peoria high school sweetheart Marian Driscoll in the radio sitcom Fibber McGee and Molly which aired on NBC from 1935 to 1959. One of the longest-running and most successful radio shows of its time, it depicted the foibles of daily life in the fictional midwestern town of Wistful Vista.
Peoria was also home to feminist author Betty Friedan, musician Dan Fogelberg, comedian Sam Kinison, and, most happily for our purposes, Charles Correll, the cocreator of Amos ’N Andy.
When Correll and his vaudeville partner, Freeman Gosden, were offered the opportunity to create a radio series on WGN in Chicago in 1928, it seemed natural, Correll said, that they should continue to perform in the same black dialect they had developed on vaudeville stages in the South. “We might just as well have done Irish or Jewish dialect,” he said, “but we knew that of Negroes.” Besides, Correll maintained, he and Gosden were laughing with blacks, not at them.
Regardless of who may have been laughing at or along with whom, the fifteen-minute broadcasts of Amos ’N Andy drew huge audiences at 7:00 p.m. every week night for fifteen years from 1928 until 1943 when it switched over to a half-hour weekly format. It was said, with claims of only slight exaggeration, that one could take an after-dinner stroll through almost any American town and not miss a single line of the show as it wafted from the open windows and front porches of an estimated forty million homes.
When CBS proposed a TV version of the show, the network, in a television first, cast African American actors for all the roles. Chief among them were Alvin Childress as Amos, Spencer Williams as Andy, Ernestine Wade as Sapphire, and Tim Moore as George “Kingfish” Stevens—veteran vaudeville comics all. However tempting it may have been for Correll and Gosden to play the principal roles themselves, their business sense prevailed. The television era, they knew, would not tolerate white actors in blackface.
Despite drawing huge audiences, the TV incarnation of Amos ’N Andy survived only two seasons. CBS programmers later acknowledged their miscalculation in airing the series premiere during the 1951 national convention of the NAACP, a coincidence that prompted the group, in a fervor of reform, to pass a resolution condemning the show’s depiction of African Americans—or “colored people,” as the NAACP preferred—and filed for a court injunction that would have forced CBS to stop the show. (It’s worth noting that the NAACP’s national office had declined to endorse a similar protest launched by the Pittsburgh Courier against the radio show in 1931.)
In a 1975 Ebony article titled “Black Humor—Full Circle from Slave Quarters to Richard Pryor,” film and broadcast historian Donald Bogle pointed out the irony of an integrationist movement insisting that blacks surrender their own rich heritage as the price of admission into an unwelcoming white culture.
How fitting is it that, after thriving twenty-seven years on radio starring white actors who caricatured black voices, the TV version, featuring the medium’s first all-black cast, fell under a storm of civil rights protests? Doubling down on this irony, the Gosden and Correll–voiced program continued to chug along as a weekly radio sitcom until 1955 and then as a nightly disc-jockey show until 1960.
—————
At the time Richard canceled his 1993 hometown comeback performance at Peoria’s downtown civic center, it was the only venue in the town with the capacity to house such an event. Yet, when Richard was born in 1940, the city of barely 105,000 people boasted more than two-dozen performance theaters that had sprung up during vaudeville’s heyday. For longtime Peorians, the names of those theaters—among them the Duchess, the Majestic, the Deluxe, and the Palace—still conjure up images of bright marquees and glamorous performers.
Although black performers were sometimes seen in these vaudeville theaters, black audiences were not. For their own entertainment, they went instead to taverns, after-hours clubs, and sporting houses.
As the audience for black entertainment grew too large to ignore, a group of enlightened businessmen in the early 1900s established theater circuits exclusively for African American performers. Chief among them was TOBA (Theatre Owners Booking Association—or, if you asked the performers, Tough on Black Asses), founded in 1907 by Memphis-based Italian businessman F. A. Barrasso.
Performers on the TOBA circuit might play as many as ten shows a day while paying their own travel expenses and seeking out their own accommodations, often staying in private homes since Jim Crow laws barred them from most hotels, restaurants, and restrooms. Yet TOBA afforded many the opportunity to play to all-black audiences—although (nice twist here) some theaters roped off small sections for white patrons.
Initially, nearly all TOBA comics appeared in blackface, as they had done since the days of minstrelsy, covering their faces with burnt cork or black greasepaint and using a white flour compound to accentuate the whites of their eyes and teeth. In effect, blacks adopted the same techniques whites used to caricature blacks. It was one of the few areas in which skin color made no difference. Everyone “blacked up” for comic effect. The first time vaudeville comedian Johnny Hudgins worked the Apollo without blacking up, he said backstage that he had felt naked out there.
Harold Cromer, one-half
of the famed team Stump and Stumpy, said, “What people today don’t understand is why the artists did all the things they used to do. [Performing in blackface] is what you did if you wanted to eat.”
The times demanded that black entertainers performing before white audiences restrict themselves to acting in skits or in teams. They could crack wise with each other, exchange banter with straight men, or enact a scene, but black performers on the Keith vaudeville circuit—the largest and most reputable circuit of its day—were explicitly instructed not to address anyone in the audience. Any black performer attempting to elicit a personal response would be making an assumption of equality intolerable to most whites at the time. Not until the early 1950s did black comics, led by Dick Gregory, speak directly to white audiences as peers without the buffer of clownish costumes or in the guise of a character. The few TOBA-era comics who adopted the monologue approach pioneered by the likes of Jack Benny, Milton Berle, and Fred Allen soon found themselves shunned by white booking agents and remained largely unknown outside of black clubs and theaters.
The exception to this rule, and a notable one at that, was Charley Case, an African American songwriter and vaudeville comedian of the late 1800s famous for his monologues, which he performed in blackface while passing for white. Some historians credit Case as having single-handedly invented what we now know as stand-up comedy. (His only likely rival to that claim would be Mark Twain, who began a wildly popular sideline career as an after-dinner speaker with an impromptu address at a printers’ banquet in Keokuk, Iowa, on January 17, 1856.)
Because of the restrictions imposed by white theater owners, hundreds of black entertainers—many now recognized as the finest performers of their time—flocked to TOBA, among them Silas Green from New Orleans, Pigmeat Markham, Butterbeans & Susie, Pen & Ink, Moms Mabley, Slappy White, Johnny Hudgins, Miller & Lyles (widely credited as the inspiration for Amos ’N Andy), Stump and Stumpy, Dusty Fletcher, and greatest of them all, the Jamaican-born Bert Williams.