by David Henry
Richard worked himself into the circle, shyly hanging back, content to listen to the veterans talk trash and tell their stories of life on the circuit and to dream of the day when he would be one of them. “I don’t know exactly when it happened, but suddenly he was always there,” LeRoy remembered. “We would say to each other, ‘Isn’t he the politest little fella?’ He was about seventeen, I guess—real thin then.” Eventually Richard got up enough nerve to ask if he could look though LeRoy’s prized gag books. LeRoy was flattered. “I had a lot of material for him to look at—wrote most of it myself. It was mostly stand-up material. He used to sit for hours going through my scripts and books and gags.”
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At seventeen, Richard fell in love with a girl named Susan whom he described as a Sophia Loren–type from a poor family. They made a secret love nest in the garage of a house his family owned on Goodwin. “She wore me out,” Richard told Spin magazine in 1988. Susan’s orgasms were so intense, he claimed, that “when she would come, she would faint. I thought I killed her.” The fun ended, as it often would for Richard, when his girlfriend got pregnant. He went home in tears, he told Barbara Walters in a 1980 interview. “My mother said, ‘What’s wrong with you, boy?’ Father says, ‘There ain’t nothing wrong with him, he got some girl pregnant.’ ” This rattled Richard all the more. Did his father know everything he did? In this case, his father knew because the girl had told him so herself. Buck had been sleeping with her, too. (Richard’s aunt Mexcine cryptically assured him the child was not his. “I was out in the chicken shack,” she told him, “and someone else said it was his baby.”)
Richard was not present when Susan gave birth to a daughter, Renee, in April 1957. Later in life he came to accept Renee, reasoning that, even if she were not his daughter, she was likely his half sister. Either way, she was family.
His more immediate response was to flee Peoria and enlist in the army.
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Military service would not provide the easy way out Richard had imagined. The first time he tried, after bragging to everyone he knew that he was going off to Chicago to join up, he flunked the entrance exam and they sent him back home. He was so embarrassed, he told Janet Maslin of the New York Times, he hid in the house for months. When he did venture out, he wore a costume uniform. It fooled his friends but not their parents.
On his second try at enlisting, he got in. After spending eight weeks of basic training in plumbing school—covered in shit, once again—at Fort Leonard Wood, he shipped out to the military installation in Baumholder, Germany, just south of Idar-Oberstein, then the largest concentration of American troops outside the United States. The soldiers’ collective buying power had brought about an infusion of bars, dancehalls, and sex-trade workers, prompting the West German government to declare the region a “moral disaster area.”
No great student of world history, Richard had supposed that racial attitudes would be more enlightened in Germany. The bars and clubs there, he quickly discovered, were even more segregated than they had been in Peoria. “Out of like 150 bars,” he wrote, “only three let in blacks.” The worst of it came from his fellow soldiers. Cornered by three guys wielding tire irons in the armory one day, Richard made good use of his basic training. Much to their surprise, he grabbed a length of lead pipe and bashed one of them over the head. (“Really?” David Felton asked him in a 1974 Rolling Stone interview. “An enemy or one of ours?” “No, a white cat,” Richard said. “One of yours.”)
Although Richard had gone into the army with the idea of making it his career, he spent the majority of his two-year stint in the stockade for stabbing a fellow soldier. Prior to his incarceration, he had a love affair with a married woman, a poignant encounter that stayed with him for the rest of his life—so much so that he ruminated on the relationship in the closing pages of his autobiography.
And, as he told Felton in that same Rolling Stone interview, the army was where he learned to eat pussy. “I gave some head for the first time in my life when I was in Germany. That was an experience. I’ll never forget how it felt on my head, her pussy . . . her hairs and all . . . I knew I would be doing it again.“
If it seems improbable that a man of Richard’s upbringing would be a cunnilingual virgin at the age of eighteen, consider the African American male’s well-documented aversion to going down on a woman. As he described it on That Nigger’s Crazy: “My family only fucked in one position—up and down. My uncle said ‘Boy don’t you ever kiss no pussy! I mean that. Whatever you do in life don’t kiss no pussy!’ I couldn’t wait to kiss the pussy. He’d been wrong about everything else.” And this from . . . Is It Something I Said?: “Niggers will not admit to giving up no head. (in character) ‘Uh-uh. Noooo. Not the kid! Uh-uh. Nah, I ain’t no termite.’ Be lying their ass off. And black women like head, but they won’t kiss you afterwards.”
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Richard got his first taste of success outside of Miss Whittaker’s theater group by performing in amateur shows on the base, developing a routine on army life in which he assumed the role of an incomprehensible drill sergeant, which he included on his first Warner Bros. LP, Richard Pryor. But then came the first of what would be a career-spanning string of self-inflicted derailments. During a screening of the Douglas Sirk movie Imitation of Life, a melodramatic tear-jerker about a struggling black woman whose light-skinned daughter rejects her in order to pass for white, a white soldier in Richard’s unit began laughing a little too loudly at inappropriate times.
As Richard told it, another black soldier started the fight but proved to be “a dumb motherfucker in terms of fighting. The white boy seriously hurt my guy’s ass.” Richard pulled a switchblade and waited for the right moment. “I stabbed the white motherfucker in the back six or seven times. He didn’t stop, though. . . . As soon as I realized he wasn’t going down, I ran in the opposite direction, tossing the knife into the bushes.”
Richard was fingered for the assault by the victim himself who marched into the barracks later that night, still wearing his shredded and blood-soaked T-shirt, accompanied by an MP. Richard spent the remainder of his stint in an army prison, receiving an early discharge courtesy of a base commander on the verge of retirement who couldn’t be bothered with some “silly enlisted man fucking up regulations.”
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His envisioned military career cut short and again at loose ends, Richard got a job singing and doing impersonations at Harold’s Club, a black-and-tan joint (patronized by whites and blacks alike) on Washington Street back in Peoria. Richard claimed he’d had to lie his way onstage at Harold’s Club by telling owner Harold Parker he could sing and play piano. His command of the keyboard may have been limited to few simple chords, but his soon-to-be sister-in-law says he had a beautiful voice.
Kelly Jay & the Jamies, a Ronnie Hawkins–inspired rockabilly band out of Toronto—an earlier incarnation, the Consuls, had featured future Hawks (and later Band) guitarist Robbie Robertson—frequently played Harold’s Club in the early 1960s. Drummer Peter De Remigis remembers Richard as a mellow, Brook Benton–styled singer who emceed the shows and sometimes told jokes.
Another Canadian band, Freddie Tieken and the Rockers (featuring Little Richard’s sometime sideman Byron “Wild Child” Gipson on vocals, piano and guitar) often played week-long gigs at Harold’s. It was a fun place, Tienken remembers. In between their sets, from 9:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m., Richard did stand-up. Some nights they would see a big yellow Cadillac convertible parked outside, and there would be Chuck Berry sitting at the bar all by himself.
“It seemed like everywhere we went, there was Chuck Berry,” Tienken says. “In all the years that I ran into the guy throughout the Midwest, I never heard him say two words to anyone.”
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Patricia Price first met Richard Pryor through a cousin who’d been dating a friend of his. One day they brought him over to the house and she fell in love. “I don’t know
why,” her sister, Angie Gordon, says. “To this day I don’t know why.”
They married in the summer of 1960, shortly after Patricia’s sixteenth birthday. “I don’t know if she was pregnant or thought she was pregnant,” her sister remembers. “Richard said he thought I had told him she was pregnant . . . that she had a miscarriage, but I told him, ’No, that wasn’t me. I don’t know anything about a miscarriage.’ I think she thought she was pregnant and that’s why he married her.”
Richard certainly thought so. His father advised him against the marriage. “You don’t have to do this, son,” Buck told him. But he did. “Just to spite him.”
The newlyweds moved into a boarding house owned by Patricia’s grandmothers. She lived on the ground floor and rented out the rooms upstairs.
“He really had a bad temper,” Angie says. “Oh, he was something else. He used to beat her up about the food and have tantrums.”
He’d give her money to go grocery shopping—the little money he’d bring in—and she’d buy great big bags of potatoes and chicken wings and things like that. She’d do potatoes in every form you could name and he’d get tired of potatoes. He would come home and she’d fix his plate and he’d throw it across the room and make her clean it up. Grandmother told her, “As long as you let him hit on you, he’ll keep doing it, but if you fight back he’ll stop.” One night he jumped on my sister and she hauled off and knocked him across the floor. He fell at Grandmother’s feet and she just pulled her feet back and started laughing at him. After that he never did hit my sister again.
Richard had a special song he always sang to Patricia when she came to see his show. Then one night his gaze seemed to stray. He kept looking past her, just above her head, and his eyes took on an extra sparkle. Patricia turned in her chair to see a white girl smiling up at her man with that same enraptured sparkle mirrored in her eyes.
The club withheld Richard’s salary for the next several weeks to pay for the damage Patricia did to the glassware and the furnishings that night. “She tore the place up,” Angie remembers. “All of a sudden she was on the stage going after Richard. After that everything was completely downhill.”
He was using—they used to call them bennies. Pills. I remember one time she had a headache and she took one. She thought it was an aspirin. They were lying out on the table by the bed. When he got home she was just cleaning and cleaning and cleaning with all this energy she had. She told him she took one of the pills by the bed and he got on her. He said, “You don’t ever take pills you find lying around.” He told her what it was and she was like, “That was what!” because she was very naive. He said, “Don’t do that. Don’t ever take stuff you see lying around.’’ Finally she got calmed down enough that she could go to sleep. He was always taking something.
Richard and Patricia lived together as husband and wife only a few months. Patricia’s mother had made him promise when they married that if he couldn’t take care of her he’d bring her back home.
Angie Gordon again: “He brought her back home and told my mom that he was living up to his promise, that he couldn’t take care of her like she should be taken care of so he was bringing her home, which she wasn’t happy about. But then they went on seeing each other, off and on.”
When Patricia told him In December that she was pregnant—for real, this time—he moved in with her at her parents’ house. For a while. “I felt responsible,” he wrote, “which might’ve been the first and last time I did.”
“AIN’T THAT MANY OF US TO GO AROUND”
On Friday the thirteenth of January 1961, Dick Gregory sprinted over twenty blocks of frozen Chicago sidewalk in slick-soled dress shoes to make a club date that would forever alter not only the course of his own life but Richard’s, too. And, for that matter, the lives of every African American comedian who followed in his wake.
A call had come in at the last minute that the Playboy Club needed a replacement for Professor Irwin Corey who had canceled his performance that evening in the Carousel Room. Could Gregory fill in for him?
He borrowed a quarter from his landlord for carfare, then, in his excitement, boarded the wrong bus. Realizing his mistake, he signaled for a stop, got out, and ran.
Dick Gregory, along with Nipsey Russell, Bill Cosby, and Godfrey Cambridge, belonged to a new generation of black comedians unencumbered by the deferential buffoonery of vaudeville or minstrelsy. Gregory, especially, did not flinch from skewering white audiences on issues of race: “Wouldn’t it be a hell of a thing if this was burnt cork and you people were being tolerant for nothing?” and “Everyone I meet says, ‘Some of my best friends are colored,’ even though you know there ain’t that many of us to go around.”
Perched on a stool in a three-button Brooks Brothers suit, Dick Gregory possessed an unflappable cool, taking long, contemplative drags on his cigarette and exhaling well-timed streams of smoke into the spotlight before delivering his punch lines. Not even the inevitable catcalls of “nigger” could rock his composure. “According to my contract,” he replied to one such heckler, “the management pays me fifty dollars every time someone calls me that. So will you all do me a favor? Everybody in the room please stand up and yell ‘nigger.’ ”
The pace of his delivery was so dependent upon the draw of his ever-present cigarette—Winstons only—he once chewed out a stagehand at the hungry i for buying the wrong brand. “Look,” he told the gofer, “the timing of the drag that I’m using on this cigarette is part of my act. I can’t suddenly change.”
When Gregory arrived, out of breath, at the Playboy Club that night, he was told to go home. A mistake had been made. They were very sorry, but they hadn’t realized the room had been booked by a convention of frozen-food executives from the South—not the best audience for Gregory to break in with. They offered him fifty dollars and said they would try to work him in again soon. “But I was cold and mad and I had run twenty blocks and I didn’t even have another quarter to go back home,” Gregory wrote. “I told [the room manager] I was going to do the show they had called me for. I had come too far to stop now. I told him I didn’t care if he had a lynch mob in there. I was going on—tonight.
“He looked at me and shrugged. Then he stepped aside and opened the door to the top.”
I understand there are a good many Southerners in the room tonight. I know the South very well. I spent twenty years there one night.
Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant and this white waitress came up to me and said, “We don’t serve colored people here.” I said, “That’s all right. I don’t eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.”
About that time these three cousins come in. You know the ones I mean, Klu, Kluck, and Klan. About that time the waitress brought me my chicken and they say, “Boy, we’re givin’ you fair warnin’. Anything you do to that chicken, we’re gonna do to you.” So I put down my knife and fork, I picked up that chicken and I kissed it.
At the end of his show, the frozen-food execs gave him a standing ovation. They handed him money as he left the stage. One of them said, “You know, if you have the right managers you’ll die a billionaire.”
Hugh Hefner came down for the second show to see what all the excitement was about and immediately signed Gregory to a three-year contract, beginning with a three-week run that was held over through March 12.
“And, just like that,” Phillip Lutz would write in the New York Times, “with little fanfare or protest, nightclub comedy was integrated.”
Time magazine of Friday, February 17, featured a prominent article on Gregory, and the following Monday morning a call came from someone on Jack Paar’s staff inviting him to appear on The Tonight Show.
“My wife took the call and she’s so happy,” Gregory said. “I got on the phone and said, ‘No, I don’t want to do this,’ and I hung up and started cryin’. ”
Gregory had long dreamed of appearing on The Tonight Show, sometimes practicing for hours in front of the mirror afte
r the show signed off at 1:00 a.m., imagining how he would comport himself and what he would say to Paar when his opportunity finally came, as he was sure it would. Then one night he went out drinking with singer Billy Eckstine who began “cussin’ Paar out to me. [He] told me, ‘Hey, man, that motherfuckin’ Jack Paar, he ain’t never let a nigger sit on the couch.’
“I was so embarrassed, so humiliated, I never told my wife that I could not do the Paar show. It was just a personal thing.”
Fortunately, Gregory’s phone rang again. This time it was Paar himself.
“Dick Gregory?”
“Yes.”
“This is Mr. Paar. How come you don’t want to work my show?”
“I just don’t want to work it.”
“Why?”
“Because the negroes never sit on the couch.”
There was a long pause and he said, “Well come on in, you can sit on the couch.”*
While Paar and Gregory exchanged a few canned jokes (“What kind of car you got?” “A Lincoln, naturally”), so many phone calls came in to the NBC switchboard in New York the circuits blew out. The calls, Gregory says, were coming from “white folks who were seeing a black person for the first time in a human conversation.”
Gregory had been earning $250 a week at the Playboy Club. After sitting on Jack Paar’s couch, he said, his salary jumped to $5,000. “What a country!” he would say. “Where else could I have to ride in the back of the bus, live in the worst neighborhoods, go to the worst schools, eat in the worst restaurants—and average $5,000 a week just talking about it?”
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Back in Peoria, Richard Pryor was watching, stretched out on the couch in his in-laws’ living room while his pregnant wife slept upstairs. Agitated by deferred dreams, Benzedrine, and the long, leaping shadows cast by the black-and-white TV, he chewed on bits of paper and flicked spitballs until the walls and ceiling were stuccoed with the stuff.