Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him

by David Henry

  It didn’t happen overnight, as Richard often claimed, but he set about tearing down the wall between his two selves with a decisive and defiant act on Friday, September 15, 1967, his opening night at the Aladdin Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

  It was a move, everyone knew, that once done he couldn’t undo.

  Gazing out at the crowd, the bullshit reached critical mass. His eyes landed on Dean Martin, of all people, seated at a table down front, his cigarette curling smoke up into the spotlight as he waited for the comic to give him something to laugh about. A realization slammed hard into Richard’s chest that Mama—his grandmother Marie—wouldn’t be welcome in the room, would not be allowed a seat at the table. “I was looking out at the audience,” he would tell Paul Mooney, “and it hit me that all those motherfuckers out there wouldn’t make room for Mama if you put a gun to their heads.”

  And if Mama wasn’t welcome in that place, he had no business being there either. As it was, he knew that the only way he could enter that room was by way of the stage or through the kitchen. No matter how glamorous or lucrative, the stage door was still a service entrance.

  That’s when his inner High John the Conqueror kicked in, his Stagolee, his Bad Nigger. “Every black man harbors a potential bad nigger inside him,” psychiatrists William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs would write in their landmark Black Rage, published just nine months later. “The bad nigger is bad because he has been required to renounce his manhood to save his life. The more one approaches the American ideal of respectability, the more this hostility must be repressed. The bad nigger is a defiant nigger, a reminder of what manhood could be.”

  So standing on that Las Vegas stage, Richard leaned into the mic. “What the fuck am I doing here?” he said, and left the stage.

  Moments later, he was trapped. He’d turned the wrong way when exiting the stage and found his path blocked by the theater’s soundboard. Recalling the venerable comic gag where a man, filled with righteous anger, storms out of a room slamming the door behind him, only to emerge, sheepishly, moments later from what turned out to be a closet, Richard had no intention of crossing back in front of that audience. He edged his way along a narrow passage in the dark and squeezed through a tiny gap between the proscenium and a soundboard that was so tight he drew blood scraping his face against the brick wall, a scene that conjures up images of passing through a birth canal.

  —————

  One rumor, started by Richard himself while joking with a reporter, had him running naked through the casino, leaping up onto one of the tables and waving his cock in the air while yelling, “Blackjack!”

  The most entertaining account—still current in some circles—has it that Richard whipped out his dick onstage and began pissing either on or in the general direction of a coterie of “very special people” (read high-powered mobsters) who were so incensed that their henchman seized him on the spot and trundled him off to await a swift and certain execution, a sentence rescinded thanks to appeals from a delegation of black entertainers led by Bill Cosby who, as the story was related by novelist Claude Brown, gave the performance of his life, down on his knees streaming crocodile tears. “The boy is sick,” Brown had Cosby plead. “We’ll look after him. I’ll look after him. He won’t do it again. That’s a promise.” The mobsters finally relented and delivered a shell-shocked Richard Pryor into Cosby’s care.

  Richard, in his book, says the mobster incident never happened.

  His agent and the Aladdin’s management, however, did give him a thorough dressing-down. He would never work in that town again, they told him. He never did.

  Two months later, though, he was back on Ed Sullivan.

  —————

  Richard would forever after describe his Aladdin meltdown as his personal and professional epiphany, marking the B.C.–A.D. divide in his life, although the transition was in no way so decisive or abrupt. He’d long been keeping it real, doing real-life material in friendlier venues, yet more than a year after the Aladdin incident, according to Mooney, his transformation was nowhere near complete. He continued channeling Cosby, was still unhappy with himself. He still did not know who or what, exactly, he wanted to be. All he knew was that he had to get over, to keep pushing ahead till he found what felt right. What his meltdown onstage at the Aladdin did was cut off any means of easy retreat.

  The Vegas walk-off wasn’t entirely driven by artistic angst. The storms were raging all around him. Maxine had filed suit for child support, claiming that they had lived together as husband and wife—a characterization Richard neither could nor would deny. He had often introduced Maxine as his wife and addressed her as such in letters. She had legally taken his last name and would keep it for the rest of her life.

  Following his breakup with Maxine, Richard moved into a hundred-dollar-a-month room in the notorious Sunset Tower Motel. Coming in late one night, he got into an altercation with the night-shift desk clerk. Richard claimed he had no recollection of ever striking the guy, but the police report said he punched him in the face and broke his glasses. The clerk successfully sued him for seventy-five thousand dollars.

  Richard, at that point, said, “Fuck it.” He tried to make himself invisible, at least as far as the System was concerned. He threw away his driver’s license and stopped carrying any type of ID. He closed his bank account, stopped cashing paychecks—there is the perhaps apocryphal story of a friend who started leafing through a book in his apartment and found a months-old check for eighty thousand dollars that Richard was apparently using as a bookmark—stopped paying parking tickets or income tax.

  —————

  Richard’s appearances on Ed Sullivan and Merv Griffin, his run in Vegas, and his movie with Sid Caesar all put him in a caste above all the other climbers he mingled with at bungalow parties around L.A.

  It was at one such gathering on Sunset Boulevard that Richard walked up to the drop-dead gorgeous model Carol LaBrea and said to the guy she was with, “Let’s all take off our clothes and have an orgy!”

  Those were the first words Richard Pryor ever spoke to Paul Mooney.

  “Let’s go, let’s do it, man. Look at these ladies! Let’s all get in bed and have a freak thing!”

  Mooney’s attention had been drawn to Richard from the moment he and his date walked in the door. “Right away I sense he is different,” Mooney writes. “He is smiling and laughing. Everything pleases him. He knows there are lots of women and drugs around, and that fills him with childish delight. Like a kid in a candy store. . . . And right away, the first thing out of his mouth, he says he wants to go to bed with me.”

  Richard’s date worked for ex–football star Jim Brown and did some moonlighting on Sunset Strip dancing in the cages at Whiskey a Go Go. So did Carol LaBrea. Maybe that’s where Richard had seen her before. He knew her from somewhere. What he didn’t know was she was Mooney’s half sister.

  Despite this questionable first impression, Mooney would become Richard’s most trusted lifelong friend, champion, and collaborator.

  —————

  Mooney found it impossible to be angry with Richard. “He’s so obviously without guile. He just has no inhibitions. . . . No other considerations figure into his actions, nothing else other than ‘I want it.’

  “For everybody else in the world, an attitude such as this would come off as totally insufferable. But Richard makes it work because he’s completely open and vulnerable. Sure, he’s selfish. But he’s selfish with the innocence of a four-year-old. . . . He makes me feel protective toward him.”

  The first time they went to a party together, Mooney sized up the room filled with dope smoke, the cocaine laid out on the table, and told Richard he was cutting out. He’d been to enough parties like this to know that he hated them. “Sometimes it seems like everybody in L.A. is high but me,” he writes. Richard was flabbergasted to learn that Mooney didn’t do drugs. He didn’t drink; at least not the way Richard drank.

  He persuaded Mo
oney to stay. They could just hang out and talk—and Richard would take Mooney’s share of the drugs being passed around.

  “I get Mooney’s share!” became Richard’s cheerful refrain whenever they were out together and someone broke out the powder.

  Remembering how often he heard that phrase, Mooney reckons that he single-handedly doubled Richard’s drug intake.

  —————

  When Richard went back to New York to open for Miles Davis at the Village Gate in the winter of 1968, Miles bestowed upon him a magnanimous vote of confidence by flipping the bill. He sent a member of his entourage to Richard’s dressing room to tell him there’d been a change in plan. “Miles is gonna play first,” he said. Miles had decided to make him the headliner.

  After the show, Miles took him to a midtown apartment to meet a woman known as Gypsy Lady who provided them with the best cocaine he’d ever had. They “chopped and snorted until the sun crept through the windows and then we disappeared like vampires.”

  “From now on you get your coke from her,” Miles instructed him.

  During that same engagement at the Village Gate, Richard caught the eye, and the fancy, of Shelley Winters who came backstage afterward and offered him a part in her upcoming movie Wild in the Streets.* Richard was more than happy to pay the price of admission, according to Mooney, getting “Wild in the Sheets” with Miss Winters, “the most cock-hungry actress in Hollywood.”

  Richard, for his efforts, was able to get Mooney a job on the film as his stunt double, and his new girlfriend, Shelley Bonus, a role as an uncredited extra playing a “tripped-out hippie chick.” With her long blonde hair, miniskirts, white patent-leather go-go boots, and outsized tinted glasses, she fit the part perfectly, although Shelley insisted she was no hippie. Hippies were filthy. She was a flower child.

  American Pictures International’s Wild in the Streets was an over-the-top election year romp in which rock star Max Flatlow (Christopher Jones in a role turned down by Phil Ochs) makes a devil’s bargain to deliver the youth vote for Senate candidate Johnny Fergus (Hal Holbrook) and ends up being elected president in a landslide victory at age twenty-four, running as a Republican, by giving fourteen-year-olds the right to vote, spiking the water supply with LSD, and consigning adults over the age of thirty to reeducation camps. Richard played Stanley X, the nonobservant Black Muslim drummer in Max Frost’s band (also an anthropologist and author of The Aborigine Cookbook, according to the voiced-over introduction). With its pre-Woodstock split-screen sequences, acid-trip camera work, and swirling score by space-age composer Les Baxter, the movie garnered an Oscar nomination for best editing and achieved a cult status that endures unto the present day. Although he made good use of the opportunity to observe firsthand how movies were made, the film itself was a disappointment to Richard, one that sent him spiraling into yet another bout of “What the fuck am I doing here?” soul searching.

  —————

  On nights when he wasn’t performing, Richard liked to hang out with Redd Foxx at his Jazz Go-Go club on Adams off Western, snorting coke and flirting with the cocktail waitresses while Foxx regaled him with stories of the old days, back before he and Richard had worked together on the Chitlin’ Circuit.

  Foxx told him how, while working in Chicago in the late 1930s, he and three members of a washboard band eager to make their names in show business, hopped a freight train bound for New York, where Foxx—still going by his birth name John Elroy Sanford—became fast friends with a Detroit hustler by the name of Malcolm Little. Because they shared matching “mariney complexions” and red hair, friends took to calling them “Chicago Red” and “Detroit Red,” respectively.

  The two Reds worked together at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, a Harlem eatery and jazz club at 763 St. Nicholas Avenue near West 148th Street, Little as a waiter, and Sanford—taking over a job previously held by Charlie Parker—as a nine-dollar-a-week dishwasher. The two shared a bed of newspapers on a nearby rooftop.

  “We had about 500 pounds of newspapers up there,” Foxx told Ebony magazine. “Newspapers is some of the warmest stuff going.”

  “Chicago Red” became famous as Redd Foxx, and “Detroit Red” as Malcolm X. Foxx would point with pride to the passage in the Autobiography where Malcolm said, “Chicago Red was the funniest dishwasher on this earth. Now he’s making his living being funny as a nationally known stage and night-club comedian. I don’t see any reason why old Chicago Red would mind me telling that he is Redd Foxx.”

  —————

  Richard met his future second wife, Shelley Bonis—she preferred to spell it Bonus—at a dance club just before filming began on Wild in the Streets. Her father, Harold Bonis, was a show-business Brahman who had managed comedian Danny Kaye for more than three decades.

  As husband and wife, Richard and Shelley set out to live as flower children in their own private Eden. Mooney once drove up to the cabin they shared above Laurel Canyon to find them, literally, hugging trees. Shelley arranged flowers in Richard’s hair, recited poetry to him. They gave each other rocks as gifts. They gave the rocks names.

  Richard would later depict the two of them existing in this blissful state from the stand-up stage. “ ‘Oooh, a rock for me?’ If I gave that bitch a rock today, she’d hit me over the head with it.”

  Shelley took him to task for not being informed or politically aware of his people’s struggles, for not reading books. So did Groucho Marx.

  At the party Bobby Darin had thrown for him when he first arrived in L.A., Richard found himself cornered by the great comedian, who, to Richard’s chagrin, recalled seeing him on The Merv Griffin Show when he and fellow guest Jerry Lewis, desperate for laughs, began spitting on each other.

  “Do you ever see plays? Do you ever read books?” Groucho scolded. “Do you want to end up a spitting wad like Jerry Lewis, or do you want a career you can be proud of?”

  —————

  Shelley, being more hip to the literary and political writings that informed black consciousness, encouraged Richard to read young black poets, along with the writings of Angela Davis, Malcolm X, and the prison writings of former rapist and eventual Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver published in the Catholic literary quarterly Ramparts and later collected in the best-selling Soul on Ice.

  In reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Richard would learn that the One True God first appeared to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad (then Elijah Robert Poole) in 1931 in the person of Mr. Wallace D. Fard, then posing as a seller of silks in Detroit. This was but one of several revelations that Malcolm shares in his book—another being that an evil scientist named Yacub (Jacob of the Old Testament) had created a race of white-skinned devils “6,600 years ago”—that can be jarring to Malcolm’s political admirers unfamiliar with the Lost-Found Nation of Islam as preached by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.

  Richard, we can imagine, would have been delighted to learn of Mr. Muhammad’s 1931 encounter with God in the flesh on the streets of Detroit. The story melds perfectly with his portrayal of the black preacher who “first met God in 1929, outside a little hotel in Baltimore.” (If, in fact, Malcolm’s account of Elijah Muhammad’s encounter with the One True God on the streets of Detroit is what sparked Richard’s routine, he clearly demonstrates how well he knows his craft, as any student of comedy can attest that his elongated “nineteen twenny-nahhhh-nah” is much funnier than 1931.)

  “Richard puts on an outrageous character I instantly recognize from my childhood,” Mooney writes. “It’s the kind of pompous, self-inflated preacher every black churchgoer knows.”

  Richard performed a nascent version of the routine in May 1968 at P.J.’s, an after-hours club on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood.

  I was walking down the street eating a tuna fish sammich. That’s right, in 1929 you’d eat anything you could get. And I hear this voice call unto me, and the voice has power and majesty. And the voice said, “Pssst . . .” I walked up to the voice and I said, “What?”
And the voice got holy and magnificent, and the voice said to me, “Gimme some of that sammich.” And every since that day I’ve been able to heal, because I didn’t give up none of my sammich. I said, “If you’re God, make your own goddamn sammich. Don’t be messin’ with me.”

  (In some performances, God beckons to the preacher from down a dark alley. “However,” his preacher concludes, “I did not venture down that dark alleyway, because it might not have been the voice of God but two or three niggers with a baseball bat.”)

  “I hear the true voice of the preacher in the bit,” Mooney says.

  Mooney was struck, too, by what he didn’t hear.

  Richard didn’t crack a single joke. No punch lines. No toppers.

  “My God,” Mooney thought. “He’s left jokes behind. Is he going to leave me behind, too?”

  —————

  Nine months later, Richard did a nearly identical version—minus the “goddamn”—on the premiere installment of This Is Tom Jones, a TV show taped at BBC Elstree Centre/ATV Studios in Hertfordshire, England, and broadcast Friday, February 7, 1969 on ABC.

  Jones had not been familiar with Richard before he came on the show. He believes the network booked him as a way of testing the waters, as they wanted to align themselves with the rising wave of black performers.

  “I thought he was really funny,” Jones says, “but sort of . . . scared, almost. Very skittish and quiet.” Then he made one of the female production assistants cry. “It seems Richard’s car wasn’t waiting as it was supposed to be after the taping, and he screamed at her that if his car wasn’t there in five minutes he would rip her head off and ram it up her ass. Maybe he was just trying to be funny, acting out as if he was outraged by something stupid. But it upset a lot of people.”

  When the two men met again, many years later, Richard seemed genuinely thrilled to meet the Welsh soul singer saying, “Wow, great to finally meet you, man.” Jones was embarrassed to remind Richard that not only had they met before, but that he’d been a guest on Tom’s show. “He kind of said . . . ‘Oh yeah . . . yeah, man . . . that’s cool,’ but I’m not really sure he remembered.”