Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him

by David Henry

  His sister-in-law Angie got stuck with the job of sweeping his dried up spitballs down. “He was just a mess,” she says. “He wouldn’t go to work. He would just sit around all day making spitballs and throwing them on the walls and ceiling.”

  One day he went off in the head. I don’t know what he had taken, but he climbed out our second floor window and said he was going to kill himself and my sister was pulling him back in and begging him to go lay down. Well, she couldn’t do anything with him, so my dad finally got tired of fooling with him and he went upstairs. We had a state hospital here called Bartonville. They would pay you to bring people in, you know. Twenty-five dollars if you brought crazy people in. So my dad went upstairs and he said, “Hey!” He says, “Pat’s tired of fooling with you,” he says, “so we’re gettin’ ready to call Bartonville and we’re gonna have you picked up and we’re gonna get that $25 for you.” So Richard’s like, “WHAT?” My dad says, “Yeah, because, you know, something’s wrong with you.” And so he says, “Well, I better stop then, hadn’t I?” Daddy says “Yeah.” He says, “Pop, I’m gonna lie down and take a nap.” We didn’t have any more trouble out of him playing crazy after that. But he was just a weird guy. Real weird.

  He was real quiet and shy otherwise, though. He had a whole lot of different sides to him, but the majority of the time he would sleep all day and sit up all evening and watch television and chew on paper. But he watched everything around him at all times. That’s how he gathered material, you know.

  Patricia delivered their son six months into her pregnancy. Born April 10, 1961, Rodney Clay Pryor weighed just one pound three ounces, “the smallest preemie ever to survive in Peoria at that time,” according to Angie. “He stayed five weeks in the hospital before he was strong enough for Pat to bring him home.”

  After his son came home, Richard moved out.

  “Why’d I split? Because I could.”

  Finding himself once again living under his father’s roof, Richard doubled down on his resolve and began performing at Collins Corner, another notorious black-and-tan club owned by local businessman Carbristo “Bris” Collins. There he was quickly promoted from opening act to emcee at a salary of seventy-two dollars a week.

  Stripper-turned-fire-dancer LaWanda Page, then billed as “the Bronze Goddess of Fire,” recalled Collins Corner as the first club she ever played outside of her hometown of East St. Louis. “It was a dump,” she said. “It was the kind of place where if you ain’t home by nine o’clock at night you can be declared legally dead. They all walked around with knives in there. You better had one, too.”

  Richard would soon cross paths with Page** when they played the Faust Club together in East St. Louis. “Me, Richard Pryor, Chuck Berry, and Redd Foxx all worked there around that time,” she said. “Richard was doing an act where he sang along with doing comedy. He was a very quiet, polite person offstage. Onstage he was doing true-to-life stuff even then, and he was very funny.”

  Richard later told Rolling Stone’s David Felton how his army training had served him well when he first started out on the Chitlin’ Circuit. “Like you’d suck a fire-dancer’s pussy in the dressing room, and in her next job she’d try to get you as the emcee. Shit, if I hadn’t been able to give head, I’d probably still be in St. Louis at the Faust Club.”

  —————

  Given the irregularity of Richard’s club engagements, Buck tried to steer his son toward a more stable career as a pimp and, in Richard’s telling, even threw in a whore to get him started. For a time, Richard thought he had it made: steady work at two clubs and a woman working for him. Plus, he could have all the sex he wanted with her without any messy emotions or romantic strings attached.

  Things quickly fell apart, though, when his woman demanded that he beat her. “I had no idea what she was talking about,” he admitted to Sander Vanocur of the Washington Post. “I didn’t know there was any romantic connotation to physical violence.” Richard’s stunned inaction only infuriated her. She began screaming at him to hit her and he went crazy, “fighting as if it were a real fight.” When his father saw the girl, bruised and battered, he blew up. “What the fuck are you doing?” he yelled. “You don’t know how to beat a whore! Get your ass outta here!” He was serious. Buck was so disgusted he banished Richard from his house for good.

  The elder Pryor told the story somewhat differently to Jean Budd of the Peoria Journal Star, after his son had made it big. “Richard was beginning to run around with the wrong group. So I said one day to my wife, ‘Okay, that’s it—he goes.’ That’s probably the best thing we ever did for him—make him go out on his own.”

  In either case, Richard grabbed up a few clothes, stuffed twenty dollars in his pocket, and hit the streets. He was twenty-two.

  By law, Richard was still married to Patricia. He was father to a year-old son and possibly a five-year-old daughter who was just as likely his half sister. Yet the only thing keeping him in Peoria, he said, was the price of a bus ticket.

  When Richard told his woes to a troupe of mostly transvestite dancers and backup singers performing with the headliner at Collins Corner, they invited him to come along with them to their next gig at the Faust Club in St. Louis.

  “I couldn’t believe my luck,” he wrote. “One minute kicked out of the house, no prospects. The next I was on the road in show business.”

  Before leaving town he went and said good-bye to Miss Whittaker at the Carver Community Center. Recalling his decision years later, she would say, “I guess he did what Gauguin did.” She may or may not have been the only resident of Peoria who would have compared Richard to the nineteenth-century postimpressionist French painter who abandoned his family and homeland to pursue his muse in the South Sea Islands, but she is likely the only one who would’ve made the comparison a favorable one.

  “I believe there was a gift given to me, probably when I was a child,” Richard would say. “That God searched me out and found me and said, ‘Try that one.’ Somebody said, ‘Uh? That one?’ And God said, ‘Try him, I’m telling you there’s something about him.’ ” Or, as he explained it after a few months on the road to a hostile audience in Youngstown, Ohio, “Hey, y’all can boo me now. But in a couple of years I’m gonna be a star and you dumb niggers will still be sittin’ here.”

  Richard was ready to shake the dust of Peoria off his feet. He would go out there and show them all. The ones who’d told him he wasn’t shit. Not least of all, his father.

  He pawned a typewriter he’d borrowed from his half sister Barbara Jean for bus fare and, unbeknownst to Patricia, had their son’s name legally changed to Richard Franklin Pryor Jr.

  “Does the champ know this is a benefit?!”

  Richard Pryor climbs into a ring with Muhammad Ali who, in answer to Richard’s clowning and faux preening, theatrically scowls and mouths carefully constructed words from deep in his corner: “I’m going to kick your ass.”

  Two equally implausible characters, each of whose rise now feels as inevitable as it once seemed implausible; both slipping through the cracks of trauma and circumstance that helped define an era even as they failed to contain the men they marked; both escaping, skipping out onto a wire—or beneath one—that was sharp, swaying, and electrified. Like Parker and Miles and Dylan and Picasso and Malcolm, they picked at a lock only to find the door already free and swinging, dark and unguarded; sneaking in and onto a vacant seat that had never really been wholly occupied.

  Ali literally beat his chosen new name free from the lips of Ernie Terrell who had clamped down on it and refused its utterance and legitimacy. And then he finished him.

  Richard made Ed Sullivan’s stage a back alley wherein he leaned and hid out, flashing anger and grief; sucking down self-loathing even before it was forced upon him; setting the place on fire and giving away the whole of his secret heart for nothing.

  * While acknowledging the significance of Dick Gregory’s appearance on the show, Paar clarified in his memoir P.S. Jack
Paar that the first black performer to sit on The Tonight Show couch had been Diahann Carroll. The young ingénue and singer, who vaulted to stardom on Broadway at the age of nineteen in Harold Arlen and Truman Capote’s 1954 musical House of Flowers, appeared on the show no fewer than fourteen times during Paar’s tenure (1957–62). Paar invited her to sit on the couch after the Jewish American satirist and publisher of the Charlotte Israelite Harry Golden had been on the show outlining his “Vertical Integration Plan,” by which integration could be achieved simply by removing the chairs from any segregated facility. As Golden explained it, southern whites had no objection to standing and talking with black people but would never sit with them. “I suddenly realized,” Paar wrote, “that in our year or more on The Tonight Show, while there were black performers on, I had not actually sat down with one and talked. This may seem a strange thing to say now, but I do it only in the historical context. It just had not been done on any program or panel show that I knew of.”

  ** The fire-dancing Page later became a popular stand-up comic in her own right. Billed simply as LaWanda, she was known for her signature line “I’m gonna tell it to ya like it tea-eye-IS, honey” and her raunchy, uncut humor.

  LaWanda had little interest in crossing over. Like Rudy Ray Moore, Skillet & Leroy, Wildman Steve, and Tina Dixon, she’d found her niche; she never tried to clean up or water down her act for the sake of reaching a wider audience, and she likely would have continued performing X-rated material for predominantly black audiences and recording risque “party” records for the rest of her career had it not been for the intervention of Redd Foxx, her friend since childhood, who saw to it that she got the role of the Bible-thumping Aunt Esther on Sanford and Son.

  PART TWO

  “GIVE ME SOME MILK OR ELSE GO HOME”

  Down along Manhattan’s MacDougal Street, Richard may have felt like a rube with his Jackie Wilson pompadour and shiny, narrow-cut suit that was perhaps a full size too small, but it took more than that to stand out in Greenwich Village in 1963. You could be anything there, and as such, everyone was unfurling a flag in hopes of staking a claim upon outrage and attention. It didn’t matter your discipline: it was all theater, and the tiny coffee shops were packed with performers—comedians, musicians, monologists, poets—all eager to survey the competition and glean some deft bits of stage business.

  Beat poets, visual artists, and jazz musicians had, since the mid-1950s, become such a potent and magnetic presence in the neighborhood that they’d seemingly reset the clocks, filling the dark cafes and narrow ethnic restaurants with dense smoke at odd hours, spilling with their work from dim rooming houses and co-opted storefronts and animating the street corners of early morning hours, blurring the lines between friendly congregation and performance. Over egg rolls and scorched coffee, writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and filmmaker Robert Frank hashed out an informal manifesto, whereby the most gritty and unabashedly personal of experiences would be thinly veiled in their work, if at all. And just north, Zoot Sims, Mose Allison, and Al Cohn wandered in and out of the frame of the ever-open-and-revolving door of photographer W. Eugene Smith’s buzzing loft, nodding their heads through sprawling rehearsals of Thelonious Monk’s big band. Smith snapped pictures throughout and kept a reel-to-reel tape recorder endlessly turning, documenting thousands of hours of jam sessions and casual conversation, street noise, radio speeches and staticky baseball games— all with seemingly no thought to judging what of it might be relevant for posterity. At this juncture—where a random satellite photograph revealed Soviet missiles in Cuba, and a crowd member’s silent Super 8 footage served as the only recorded witness to an era-defining assassination—there was almost no such thing as irrelevance: something was happening here, even if you didn’t know what it was.

  —————

  The last years of the 1950s had left a flooded gully in its wake, like a psychic borderline snaking through an America that had imagined itself, in the years following the Second World War, to be modern and sufficiently settled: dreams had been assigned and sanctioned—handed out along with your honorable service discharge—and involved new cars, office jobs, pretty wives, and obedient children. But once upon the shore of 1960, it was clear that its sandy banks were trembling and perilous, and that the way forward was dark and overgrown with vines. The boiler room beneath the nation’s freshly paved surface was clanging and giving off wisps of rancid steam following decades of brutal violence, deep resentment, and the denying of the very humanity of great segments of the country’s population. And now, an imposing and abstractly treacherous cold war pushed back from the idealized future. In a quick few years, a stout crop of popular TV sitcoms sprang up, each a variation on a single theme: something alien is close and secretly among us, and one person is burdened with protecting all others from the unspeakable truth of their presence and power: My Favorite Martian, My Mother the Car, I Dream of Jeannie, The Munsters, Mister Ed, Bewitched—they all pointed to the growing anxiety of middle-class whites that nothing was as it appeared, and once the mask slipped, there would be no way of ever securing it back in place.

  —————

  By the middle sixties, the bohemian subculture would become so pervasive that no longer would the flustered secretaries and pressed businessmen cross the street to avoid bearded confrontation, but, rather, tour buses filled with middle Americans would crawl along Cornelius and West Fourth streets, craning for a glimpse of the dirty and drugged radicals they’d read about in Time magazine. This transformation had begun a scant few years earlier, centered in New York’s Greenwich Village. There, a grubby and baby-faced young folksinger named Bob Dylan was still nicking songs and banter from established acts like Jack Elliott and Dave Van Ronk, sharing cigarettes and kitchen scraps with Tiny Tim in the basement of the Cafe Wha? Painters Red Grooms and Bob Thompson were hustling canvases up Sixth Avenue in a scavenged baby carriage, and dressing sets for the impromptu theater pieces they helped stage in an empty shoe store. Ornette Coleman might be dressed in a burlap sack—like Moses being chased instead of followed—while Sun Ra paraded his Myth Science Arkestra along East Third Street like a barnstorming baseball team trying to drum up business en route to their weekly Monday night gig at Slug’s.

  —————

  Into this constantly shifting scene stepped Richard Pryor—straight from the Chitlin’ Circuit and the fading theaters of skittish northern and midwestern towns that had years before shaken off the dust of vaudeville and the swing era but found little in the grainy, flickering glow of distant television screens to take its place.

  Looking back on the scene, screenwriter Buck Henry could remember, in his mind’s eye, walking along Bleecker or MacDougal streets late at night and seeing in every doorway someone who would later be famous. On any given night that autumn of 1963, a club hopper might see the top four stand-up comics of all time—(1) Richard Pryor, (2) George Carlin, (3) Lenny Bruce, (4) Woody Allen, as ranked by Comedy Central in 2005—within blocks of each other working the basket houses, where performers passed a basket or a hat to collect their pay, or appearing in all-night cafes housed in crumbling basements where patrons were requested to applaud by snapping their fingers rather than clapping their hands so as not to incur the wrath of apartment dwellers farther up the airshaft who were trying to sleep.

  As outrageous as the Village characters believed themselves to be, however, they would have turned few heads among the players Richard encountered out on the Circuit, in the days before he made it to New York.

  There was the hotel in Toronto favored by gay wrestlers where, after watching them try to murder each other in the ring, Richard was dumbfounded to see the same guys kissing and holding hands in the lobby.

  There was the club where Richard opened for a wrestling bear who guzzled beer between bouts. One night when the furry star had a few too many, he pinned a terrified Richard to the floor backstage and gently began stroking him.

  There was the Cas
ablanca in Youngstown, Ohio, where Richard, upon learning from a tearful Satin Doll that the performers weren’t going to be paid, came to the rescue by pulling a starter pistol on the club’s reputedly mobbed-up Lebanese owners (reimagined as Italian for Live on the Sunset Strip and again in Jo Jo Dancer) and demanded their share of the take.

  There was the female impersonator who enticed Richard with a bit of quid pro quo. He was relieved to find, when push came to shove, that she was in fact a she, passing as a female impersonator.

  In Pittsburgh, he served thirty-five days of a ninety-day sentence handed down for assaulting a singer he had been seeing. Richard never denied the charge. He’d been talking trash about the woman behind her back, playing the pimp and bragging that she’d been giving him money. When she confronted him backstage, he claimed preemptive self-defense. “I thought she was going to do some serious damage to me so I beat her ass first.” It turned out her father was connected. When the cops burst into the rooming house in the middle of the night, Richard feared they’d come to work him over. But, he concluded, they must have felt sorry for this skinny kid with no muscles, trembling in his underwear. Instead, they gave him time to get dressed and then hauled him downtown.

  In jail, he struck up a conversation with a fellow inmate who, it turned out, knew his aunt Mexcine and only had a few days left to serve. Upon his release, the inmate contacted Mexcine and she sent Richard twenty dollars, which he parlayed into seventy by playing the numbers. That was enough to buy his way out of jail and out into the freezing cold.

  Back on the street, Richard heard that Sammy Davis Jr. was in town. He found his hotel and stationed himself in a chair at the end of the hallway hoping for a chance to meet the man who, along with Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, formed a holy trinity of African American performers of the day.