Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him

by David Henry

  Marie’s next public notice appeared in the Decatur Herald of October 14, 1929, under the headline “Three Are Arrested in Raid Sunday Night,” wherein it was reported that Marie Carter had pleaded guilty to possession of intoxicating liquor, was fined $28.15 by Justice J. G. Allen, and released.

  After divorcing from LeRoy in 1929, Marie moved with her four children to Peoria where she soon married Thomas “Pop” Bryant and went into business operating a brothel and doing some bootlegging on the side. Pop ran a gambling operation, a candy store, and later, a saloon and pool hall.

  Marie’s eldest son, LeRoy “Buck Carter” Pryor Jr. was a Golden Gloves boxing champion in his teens, spent some time traveling between Chicago and East St. Louis, working odd jobs—including a bit of vaudeville singing—then came back to Peoria to take up the family business. He fell in love with Gertrude Thomas, a part-time bookkeeper who also turned tricks in Marie’s brothel, and on December 1, 1940, she gave birth to Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III. He was called Frankin for the uncle who had prophesied his birth. Thomas, of course, was his mother’s maiden name. And Lennox, he would later learn, had been one of his aunt Mexcine’s boyfriends.

  Richard professed not to know where his mother came up with the name Richard. An odd claim since his father’s younger brother and his great-grandfather on his grandma Marie’s side were both called Richard. Odder still considering that biographies, reference works, even his own press materials, often identify him as Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III, although, to reckon him as the third in a line of Richards requires making a few zigzags in his family tree and a slight exception to the rules. No matter. That piling on of names was heavy enough without a Roman numeral at the end.

  —————

  With full acknowledgment of how telling were the circumstances, a grown-up Richard Pryor recalled how he had come to recognize the draw and power of physical comedy very early on, when, running across the yard in his new cowboy suit, he slipped in dog shit and set everybody on the front porch howling with laughter. Realizing he was onto something, he got up and did it again. “And,” he would say, “I’ve been slippin’ in shit ever since.”

  Richard found he could use his fledgling comic abilities to ingratiate himself with older, tougher kids in the neighborhood or to worm his way out of scrapes with bullies. But not always. At the age of five, while playing alone in an alley behind his house, Richard found himself cornered and sexually molested by a fourteen-year-old bully known as Hoss. Despite his efforts to avoid further encounters with Hoss, the assaults continued. “I felt violated, humiliated, dirty, fearful, and, most of all, ashamed.” The humiliation got even worse when an older kid in the neighborhood pulled him aside and told him he shouldn’t be sucking dick. Who else knew?

  At the dinner table a few nights later, his father, out of the blue, began singing “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” Richard was mortified. Did his father know, he wondered. And if he did, why didn’t he do something? Why didn’t he cut off Hoss’s dick? Did he think this was funny?

  Richard never asked his father if he knew or why he sang that song. He never mentioned Hoss to anyone until he confessed it in his memoir fifty years later. “Had me a ghost rattling in the attic. It didn’t matter that I lived in a big house behind a gate in Los Angeles, some half a country from the bricks and bars of the old neighborhood. My ass was haunted by the image of Hoss’s dick.” When he returned to Peoria to re-create scenes from his childhood on location for his semiautobiographical movie Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, someone told him that Hoss still lived in town and wanted to see him. “Even though I was a famous and successful comedian, surrounded by big, menacing bodyguards who would’ve killed at the snap of my fingers, I was seized by that old sense of fear of Hoss telling me to suck his dick.” One day during the shoot, Richard came out of his trailer to greet his fans and there was Hoss with his young son, waiting in line for an autograph.

  —————

  Other scenes from young Richard’s early life include:

  Finding a dead baby in a shoebox.

  Seeing his father shoot a client who had cussed out his grandmother. Although Buck emptied the entire magazine of his pistol, not only did the man not die, the multiple gunshot wounds so infuriated him that he dragged himself across the floor and slashed Buck’s leg, leaving him with a lifelong limp.

  Standing on a chair outside a bedroom door and looking in over the transom to see his mother servicing a client.

  Trying to help a man who’d been knifed in the stomach as he stumbled down the street with his guts hanging out. Richard begged the man to lie down and wait for the ambulance, but the man was determined to make it to the liquor store and get himself a half pint.

  Seeing his father go running down their residential street clutching his blood-soaked boxer shorts and screaming for his mother. Gertrude, Richard learned, had ripped Buck’s nutsack off with her fingernails after he had beaten her.

  Yet, when asked, Richard said the most traumatic experience of his early life came when he ventured behind a movie screen at the end of a Little Beaver western and discovered the show had been a trick, an illusion of light and shadow. “I thought Little Beaver would be there, you know, and I wanted to talk to him.”

  During his youth, Richard took refuge in the movies, idolizing Tarzan, John Wayne, Jerry Lewis, and especially matinee cowboy Lash LaRue. Exceptionally skilled at using a bullwhip, Lash dressed all in black and enforced the law with the cool aplomb of a film noir gangster. Richard would salvage the theater’s discarded movie posters and hang them up on his bedroom wall, pasting his own name over that of the leading man’s.

  —————

  After his parents divorced, Richard went to live with his grandmother at 313 North Washington, just two doors down from his father’s home at 317. In between the two houses, at 315, was China Bee’s, the most prosperous whorehouse in town.

  From the time Richard moved in with her at the age of ten, he always called his grandmother “Mama.” To everyone else, by that time, she was Grandma Marie. “Grandma Marie was everybody’s anchor,” says Richard’s onetime sister-in-law, Angie Gordon. “She was the head of it all. Everybody was crazy about her. She looked and talked like Madea. When Tyler Perry came out with Madea, I’m like, ‘God, did he meet Grandma Marie?’ They were just alike.”

  Richard’s religious upbringing, to the extent that he had one, was Catholic. Although Grandmother Marie attended Peoria’s Morning Star Baptist Church, she had been raised in the Creole Catholic tradition and used her influence to enroll Richard in St. Joseph’s Catholic School. It didn’t take long before the nuns got wind of how the Pryor family came by their livelihood, and a confused young Richard found himself unceremoniously expelled. “Some people just don’t know right from wrong,” Marie explained, “even though they think they wrote the book.”

  Despite his expulsion from St. Joseph’s, Marie insisted he continue going to weekend catechism where, one Saturday, according to Richard, a priest snuck up and gave him “some smooches on the lips.” Richard ran bawling and heaving all the way home. Once his father and uncle Dickie got over their anger at Richard’s story, they saw the financial possibilities and hatched a blackmail scheme. “We’ll collar him,” his father said. The men listened in on an extension while Richard flirted with the priest on the phone—that is, until his grandmother happened to overhear and put a stop to it.

  “Richard,” she told him, “you’ve got to understand that everybody’s human. Don’t ever forget it. No matter what they are. Everybody’s human.”

  Richard, for his part, remembered this as a bonding experience with his father and found it exciting being the center of attention.

  After St. Joseph’s, Richard enrolled in the overwhelmingly white Blaine-Sumner Elementary School. A chronically truant student, Richard was listless and withdrawn in the classroom on the days he did show up. Yet his sixth-grade teacher, Miss Marguerite Yingst, noticed th
at he enjoyed making other kids laugh on the playground. So she offered him a deal: if he came to school on time every day, he could have ten minutes to perform in front of the class on Friday afternoons. It worked. His classmates loved him, and having a regular time slot challenged him to come up with new material each week. His family had just bought their first television set, so he mimicked the antics of comics like Red Skelton and Jerry Lewis, freely lifting their jokes until other kids in his class got TVs, too. Richard never forgot the Monday morning he arrived at school to find his classmates all abuzz over Sammy Davis Jr.’s performance on Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town the night before.

  “I was jealous,” he said. “It was like I’d been home sick one Friday and some other cat had come in and done my act. Now I knew I was going to have to be even better.”

  —————

  Richard was expelled from Woodruff High after he threw a punch at a teacher (and missed). He next attended Peoria Central but dropped out after just one semester. If he wasn’t going to school, his father told him, he had to start pulling his own weight. “If you don’t put nothing in the pot, you don’t get nothing out.”

  He got his first job mopping floors in a North Washington Street strip club, but did such a poor job the dancers got filthy from writhing on the stage.

  Next he tried his hand at robbing stores, but he bungled his first and only attempt when the coins spilled from the register and went rolling all over the floor. Instead of calling the police, the owner kicked him out and threatened to tell his father if he ever came back.

  Despite Grandma Marie’s faith in Catholic schooling, she had become a devout Baptist and frequently attended revival meetings in hopes of being cured of her arthritis. She took young Richard with her, believing the preacher could “pray the devil out of him.”

  “It was kind of embarrassing in front of all those people,” Richard recalled. “He prayed over me and says for that devil to come out! . . . I didn’t feel anything. I couldn’t see it. Maybe . . . it’s still in there.”

  * A second wave migration from New Orleans in 1917 proved beneficial in paving the way for Marie Carter’s future occupation. Prostitution had been legal in New Orleans’ Storyville district until 1917 when the U.S. secretary of war requested that the law be amended to safeguard the health of the multitudes of seamen who came ashore during the first World War. Many of the Crescent City’s girls, madams, and pimps went north in search of greener pastures, resulting in a sudden proliferation of brothels in river towns such as Memphis, St. Louis, and yes, Peoria, where officials found it was easier to control prostitution than to stamp it out. Thus it could be said that Richard’s grandmother came by her profession honestly.

  BACKING UP WHILE SWIMMING

  As it turned out, Richard’s salvation came in the person of Miss Juliette Whittaker.

  A native of Houston, Texas, Miss Whittaker took a job as director of Peoria’s Youth Theater Guild at the Carver Community Center in the late 1940s soon after graduating with a degree in drama from the University of Iowa.

  The first time Richard showed up at the community center, they were in the midst of rehearsing a play based on the fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin. All the parts had been cast, but Richard was so eager and insistent, Miss Whittaker gave him a role as a servant. He was a “skinny little kid” in his midteens, she remembered, although “he looked about nine.”

  One day, the boy playing the king was absent and Richard begged her to let him fill in. He knew the king’s lines. He knew everyone’s lines. “The other kids just broke up, he was so funny. When the original king retuned, even he had to admit that Richard was better in the part.

  “So Richard stayed on the throne,” she was fond of saying, “and he hasn’t come down since.”

  After that, he won the title role in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (set to the music of Bizet), and played the lead in The Vanishing Pearl.

  “You know that label they use now—hyperactive? Well, they didn’t have that label then. . . . He had a quick mind, was very good with puns. He could see the biting satire in things people would say. He could take your words, twist them, and throw them back at you. And this used to make the other kids very angry because they weren’t used to fighting with words.”

  Miss Whittaker suspected that Richard hid his talent from the menfolk in his family. “It wasn’t quite masculine.” Not that his father or uncle had any problem with stage performers. Their world was populated with musicians and comics and female dancers. Buck had done a little vaudeville singing himself. Drama, though, was for sissies. “Nobody from the family, as I recall, would ever come to the plays,” Miss Whittaker told biographer Jim Haskins. “They didn’t take it seriously.”

  After observing Richard tell jokes to entertain the kids building sets for one of her plays, Miss Whittaker asked him to be the official host and emcee for the Carver Community Center’s talent shows. He took the job seriously, trying out material on the teenagers who hung out in the candy store across the street.

  One of his most memorable bits was his takeoff on the popular 1950s TV show Person to Person in which Edward R. Morrow interviewed celebrities while touring their opulent homes. Richard’s parody had Murrow interviewing a poor black southern sharecropper. Miss Whittaker recalled that he imitated both Murrow and sharecropper to perfection. “Mr. Murrow,” Richard-as-sharecropper would say, “this is my table and that there’s my chair. And that’s my chair and this is my table. Now the table lost a leg in ’44 and we put—oh, yassuh, the wall? We papered it with newspaper. Goes all the way back to 1914.”

  “I’ve never forgotten this routine,” Miss Whittaker said, “because just when you’d think he’d exhausted the possibilities of this chair, this table, and this newspaper, he would say something else. . . . No props. He was just showing it to us. And we were seeing it because he could do that.”

  In another bit, Richard mimed a scuba diver confronted by a shark. “It was so funny, the way he got out of the water, backing up from this shark,” she said. “It’s hard to show someone backing up, swimming, but Richard did.”

  Richard worked whatever odd jobs he could find, mostly through family connections: driving a truck for his father’s carting company or racking balls for tips at Pop’s Pool Hall at the corner of Sixth and Sheridan. Anytime Richard failed to show up for rehearsal at the community center, Pop’s Pool Hall was the first place Miss Whittaker would look. The place would fall silent when she walked in—more out of disapproval than respect, she felt—and Uncle Dickie would say, “Fine. Take him, take him.”

  “When you walked in that joint to get me,” Richard told her later, “they’d be cussin’ and fussin’, and you’d walk in and that place would be just like a church.” Guys who had pool cues “raised in the air to strike somebody would suddenly freeze,” she said. “Then the minute I’d leave they’d go back to whatever they were doing.”

  She could not have known then that his pool-hall loitering would be every bit as essential to his developing genius as the hours he spent rehearsing at the community center. He watched everyone, soaking it all up, holding it in store for future use.

  —————

  In 1956, Miss Whittaker turned thirty. Having dedicated herself to the Carver Community Center for a full eight years, time seemed to be passing her by. She left Peoria for New York City to take a shot at her lifelong dream of appearing on Broadway. It didn’t take her long to decide she wasn’t cut out for the fierce competition on the Great White Way. She eventually returned to her post in Peoria, but her absence came at a time that made Richard’s life seem all the more desolate.

  After a stint shining shoes at the Hotel Père Marquette, Richard landed his first real job in a meatpacking plant as a shaker of cowhides. It was grueling and foul-smelling work, folding and loading the heavy hides onto railroad cars bound for Chicago. At the end of each shift he would walk home—or more frequently to Yakov’s Liquor Store—his fingers cramped and frozen and his trouser
s crusted stiff with slaughterhouse slime.

  Richard spent his free time at Yakov’s, washing down pickled pigs feet with ice cold beer and contemplating a bleak future which, he began to fear, might well mean buying a pair of steel-toed shoes and lugging a lunch pail to and from the Caterpillar plant five days a week, spending his evenings and his pay “watching TV, getting fucked up, and chasing pussy. Work, pension, die.”

  One day at the plant, Richard went upstairs to inquire about a better-paying job that had opened up in the beef-cutting department. He took one look at the men in their blood-slicked rubber aprons knocking the brains out of cattle with sledgehammers and changed his mind—as did one of the bulls waiting its turn in line: the bull suddenly bucked free of his stall and, in Richard’s account, “ran through the shop, upstairs and downstairs, snorting and butting and kicking everything in his path.” Police finally shot the bull as it ran down the street. Perhaps Richard saw parallels between the bull’s circumstances and his own.

  —————

  Gamely attempting to follow in his father’s footsteps, Richard entered a Golden Gloves boxing competition. “He won his first fight in the first round,” Buck later told a newspaper reporter. “And I think he did it by telling a joke, which made the guy double up. And then he punched him out.” If true, that would mark the pinnacle of his brief career.

  “I always boxed them niggers that looked like they’d just killed their parents. You know, them rough niggers that could strike a match on the palm of their hand. Niggers would come and be beatin’ themselves up. I’d say, ‘Well, he don’t give a fuck about me. He’s beatin’ his own ass!”

  —————

  As luck would have it, Richard’s stepmother operated an establishment on North Aiken Street right next door to Ray LeRoy, “the George Burns of Peoria.” LeRoy worked a steady gig as the house comedian at Mike and Mike’s Show Lounge and his place was a favorite hangout for black entertainers on the Chitlin’ Circuit passing through town.