Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him

by David Henry

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  So many of Richard’s friends over the years—colleagues, cohorts, and business associates—have said the same thing, arriving at nearly identical metaphors, to the effect that there was a big emptiness somewhere at his core, a hole he kept trying to fill with drink and drugs. A pain he kept trying to numb.

  “There’s something desperate about Richard stuffing his face with dope and drink. Something is bothering him, something deep down at the root of his soul,” Mooney writes. “I know if I had an album, a Las Vegas date, or a film role, I’d let myself be happy for at least a little while. Those are the kinds of shots that every stand-up wants to nail. It’s what we are all working for. It kills us that Richard has it and it can’t make him happy.”

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  Just as the soda fountain and pay phones at Schwab’s drugstore became “headquarters” for Hollywood actors and dealmakers in the 1940s and ’50s, so Duke’s Coffee Shop, at 8585 Santa Monica Boulevard, was to the musicians and comics who performed in West Hollywood clubs during the 1960s and ’70s.

  Duke’s was a greasy-spoon diner on the ground floor of the Tropicana Motel, a haven for actors, musicians, writers, poets, film producers, and rock stars. Owned by Dodger pitcher Sandy Koufax, it became like a West Coast incarnation of New York’s Chelsea Hotel but with a motor court and Astroturf around the pool.

  It was at Duke’s one midafternoon in September 1968 that a morose Richard Pryor, recently returned from his father’s funeral in Peoria, sat nursing a hangover with brandy-laced coffee when Paul Mooney came bouncing in and took the seat opposite him.

  “Oh, man,” Mooney said, “I just saw a lady so pretty somebody should suck her daddy’s dick for a job well done.”

  For a moment, Richard simply stared back at him. Then he laughed.

  “You know you can die happy when you make Richard Pryor laugh,” Mooney writes. “His laugh is like ripping open a bag of joy.”

  Richard used the line that very night during his set at Doug Weston’s Troubadour, amending it slightly but significantly to “Coming here tonight I saw a woman so motherfucking beautiful gorgeous that it made me want to suck her daddy’s dick for a job well done.” The place exploded. Afterward, Richard slipped a ten-thousand-dollar watch on Mooney’s wrist as payment for the gag.

  Richard recorded his first LP on Dove/Reprise during his September run at the Troubadour, but he didn’t include Mooney’s line on that record. He didn’t commit it to vinyl until That Nigger’s Crazy, nearly six years later, when he incorporated it into the “Wino & Junkie” routine he’d been refining and expanding and digging deeper into for years, dating back to when an awed Ed Sullivan allowed his performance to run overtime rather than ask him to cut it.

  Here’s how Richard’s junkie made use of Mooney’s line:

  JUNKIE: I saw a bitch, she was so fine. . . . Shot bolts through my heart, baby.

  WINO: Nigger, you wouldn’t know a fine woman if you tripped over her.

  JUNKIE: This bitch was fine, pops. I ain’t lyin’. Bitch was so fine I wanted to suck her daddy’s dick. Is that fine enough for your ass?

  Richard’s junkie blurred the edges of that line, opening it up. There is no longer any quid pro quo. He wants to suck her daddy’s dick, not as a reward for a job well done but more like some sort of primal desire to get at the source—the essence—of the woman’s beauty. It gets a huge laugh, but it’s not really a joke anymore.

  The junkie, like many of Richard’s characters, seems to know more about life than his creator does. Or perhaps, through his characters, Richard came to know more about life than he could process. They carried him into deeper, more turbulent waters than he could navigate.

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  Richard was at a stage in his development where, according to Mooney, “he never knows what he’s going to say. The words just spill out. I’ve done enough improv to know how tough it is to do what Richard’s doing. Just a man and a microphone, saying whatever’s on his mind at the moment, developing it on the spot into a routine.”

  The title track of his Laff Records album Rev. Du Rite includes a young woman’s astonishingly emotional testimony of how she sought out the faith-healing Reverend Du Rite to cure her of a runny nose. Richard’s trembling, feminine voice is so pitch-perfect, it seems he has disappeared completely into the character. At first, the audience laughs but then falls into a rapt silence until the Reverend reappears to provide what can best be described as comic relief.

  Sometimes his spontaneous muse led him into more bewildering territory. In “Boobs,” another track released on Rev. Du Rite, a stripper stands trial for exposing her breasts in public.

  The hapless stripper is asked to describe her boobs (“I dunno. They’re just a pair of ordinary ones. They hang kinda low . . .”) and further asked if they have a criminal record. The prosecutor then turns on her and thunders, “Is it not true that you took your boobs and touched them on the grave of John Dillinger in 1948? Thus, I hereby say to you that you have had your boobs associating with the underground! If you’ll pardon the expression.”

  There is scarcely a murmur from the crowd.

  “Little hip for you folks, huh?” Richard breaks character. “Face it, that was kind of wild. I’ll get out of it, though. Don’t sweat it.”

  That connects. He gets an appreciative chuckle, but he doesn’t get out of it. When his from-out-of-nowhere gender-reversing twist at the end gets more groans than laughs, Richard hurls it right back at them: “Yeah, well, I’m disappointed in you, too.”

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  Then there is the stunning versatility of “Hank’s Place,” a nearly eleven-minute ensemble piece set in a Peoria after-hours club patronized by hillbilly johns, thugs, hustlers, a stuttering cop who orders an underage Richard out of the joint, and a carpenter who offers to recushion Hank’s craps table in such a way that “the dice always tell the truth.”

  Richard peoples the stage with no fewer than nine characters who argue, hustle, cajole, and otherwise interact with each other as they pass in and out of the room. And, like a vaudeville juggler, he keeps all the plates spinning. A telling moment comes about a third of the way through when, at the conclusion of his minute-long monologue as “Black Irma,” the audience rewards him with a spontaneous outburst of applause. Not laughter for a punch line, mind you, but an ovation of the sort usually reserved for a virtuoso guitar solo or a scene in a play. Stand-up comics don’t get this kind of response, but Richard does.

  Richard and the audience both seem to know they are witnessing an artist in the process of discovering his genius. Yet, for all his giddiness, Richard is fully in control, letting this fish he’s hooked carry the line out, reeling it back in, then letting it out farther.

  “He speaks what he hears on the streets, at parties, and during drug transactions,” Mooney writes. “What Richard does is knock down the walls between who he is onstage and who he is off it, until there’s less of a difference between the two.” W. E. B. DuBois’s double consciousness. “His routines are no longer comic confections whipped up in some comedy kitchen. They come straight out of his bent life.”

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  It was 1969. The year the Beatles broke up. Judy Garland and Jack Kerouac died. The year Ohio’s roiling and oil-slicked Cuyahoga River caught fire, and the United States instituted a draft lottery. American families sitting down to dinner in front of their TV sets were confronted with images of the My Lai massacre, the Stonewall riots, and the Manson murders. It was the year U.S. cities, one after another, began to riot and burn, as Chicago and Paris had done the year before.

  It was also the year of Woodstock, where music and drugs and mud created a legend, and then, only a few months later, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival where Hell’s Angels were hired to provide security and, on that day, they were the Man. They knew firsthand how the Man conducted his business. They busted some heads, knocked Jefferson Airplane’s bassist Jorma Kaukonen unc
onscious mid-performance and, during the Rolling Stones’ spectacularly raw and raucous set, stabbed a spectator to death right next to the stage. The Maysles brothers’ terse documentary film Gimme Shelter attests to the fact that, aside from the brutality, it was a fantastic show, and most in attendance didn’t know about the stabbing until they saw it on the news the next day; but just the same, a curtain had come down, and it signaled the end to a generation’s utopian dream. The sixties were over. Anger, violence, and fear dragged the Aquarian flower children into darkness as it always did.

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  Having burned his bridges in Vegas, dissatisfied with Wild in the Streets, and equally unenthusiastic about the few other film roles that had been floated his way, Richard and Shelley decided to make their own movie from a script—or, more likely, an idea for a script—Richard had been kicking around. They convinced themselves that Richard’s movie would shake up the world.

  Shelley thought, too, that it might save their marriage, and so she sank into it the whole thirty thousand dollars her parents had given them as a wedding present, despite their misgivings about the marriage. It was pretty much all the money they had in the world. Shelley, though, was willing to risk it because, at that time, in that place, everything seemed possible. The heady euphoria of those drug-infused times inclined them both to believe that the plans they made were revolutionary and, once unleashed, would spark a raging fire. That was a common phenomenon of the times, as great creative minds disappeared behind closed doors and into a coke-stoked paranoia that told them all, one way or another, that their visions were potent enough to be dangerous. More often than not, though, the same manic fears kept many artists from completing anything, lest their vivid and grand presumptions about the relevance of what they incubated in dark rooms, curtains drawn and taped together—attended by enabling friends, hangers-on, and sycophants—not be met in kind.

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  Twenty-two-year-old film student Penelope Spheeris and her boyfriend, Bobby Schoeller, were walking across UCLA’s campus toward Melnitz Hall when this black cat crossed their path about thirty feet ahead of them wearing a long brown leather coat and a big wide-brimmed hat, very odd looking for a college campus even then. “Oh my God,” Bobby said. “That’s Richard Pryor!” Penelope had never heard of Richard Pryor, but Bobby pulled her along saying, “Come on, let’s talk to him.”

  They introduced themselves, curious to know what he was doing on campus. Richard explained that he was looking for some film students to help him make a movie; Penelope said, “You found her.”

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  The movie’s title changed several times. Today, it is generally referred to as Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales. Few who were involved had a clear idea of what the movie was supposed to be about, but the consensus recollection is of a surreal allegorical tale concerning a white man standing trial before an all-black jury and judge. The man is charged either with raping a black woman or, according to some recollections, for the collective crimes of whites against blacks throughout history. Nobody ever saw a script, although they did see Richard from time to time consulting a spiral notebook of frayed, handwritten pages.

  “Richard was crazy on the set, okay? We would assume that,” says Penelope. “Pretty screwed up all the time on coke.”

  The cast consisted of a lot of friends and character types—Paul Mooney and comedian Franklyn Ajaye among them. Members of the jury had plates or mirrors of cocaine in front of them, and the judge swigged from a bottle of booze.

  “They all looked like crack heads,” Penelope says.

  The movie’s cast and crew were never sure what sort of domestic mayhem they might walk into when they reported for work at Richard and Shelley’s Hancock Park house. Massive amounts of coke coupled with Richard’s samurai sword collection did little to calm jittery nerves.

  For Franklyn Ajaye, the filming was not a pleasant experience. The first day they met, Ajaye remembers that Richard was screaming at his wife in the kitchen. “It was a pretty rough scene.”

  When the two comedians came to know each other later on in the seventies, appearing regularly on The Midnight Special and The Tonight Show, and together on Flip Wilson’s show and in the movies Car Wash and Stir Crazy, Ajaye never mentioned to Richard that he’d been in his movie. “I doubt he remembered me from that, and I never saw it. I don’t know if he ever finished it. I didn’t even know what it was called.”

  Ajaye recalls that his character had to wash the man standing trial, “like in a car wash or something. It was kind of a strange-ass fucking movie.” Ajaye put in a seventeen-hour day for a fee of thirty-four dollars and Richard paid him with a bad check. “It certainly didn’t make you want to be in movies, I can tell you that,” he says with a laugh.

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  A few weeks into the filming, Penelope Spheeris fainted behind the camera. When she came to, Richard was standing over her in his all-white pimp costume. She heard him saying to someone, “Hey, this bitch is pregnant!”

  “Oh, Richard, shut up!” she said. “I am not!”

  Richard knew it before she did. He was psychic about some things, Penelope now says. It stands to reason that any extrasensory powers Richard might possess would naturally be attuned to detecting pregnancy.

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  In March 1969, Richard took time out from working on the movie to visit his mother, Gertrude, who was gravely ill in Peoria. At her hospital bedside, Richard presented her with the gift of a simple hand mirror he’d bought at the airport, not even bothering to wrap it. He sat on the edge of her bed and looked away with nothing very certain to say, nursing his shame and the bitter memory of his grandma Marie—the only woman he ever called Mama—coaching him, at the age of ten, on what he should say when the custody judge called his name so that he could come live with her in that big bustling bawdy house filled with lust, signifying, knife fights, the groans of hard-earned delight, and the thumping of heavy furniture audible through the walls instead of with this woman, his actual mother. She died a few months later.

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  After completing filming on Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales, Penelope spent more than a year at Richard and Shelley’s house, often putting in twelve-hour days cutting the film on a Movieola set up on a table in the den back by the kitchen.

  There would always be arguing going on upstairs between Richard and Shelley, “and it would just be—oh, God—it would be so hard to work because I couldn’t hear because they were yelling at each other.”

  A lot of their arguing had to do with Richard’s friends. They were always around. Paul Mooney was a “very, very, very smart guy,” Penelope says, “but he really got on Shelley’s nerves. Paul was like a character out of Alice in Wonderland, always sitting around, smug, making brilliant but insulting comments about everything and everybody. She would be cooking in the kitchen and Paul would keep harassing her, doing a southern drawl and saying shit like, ‘Miz Shelley, are you gwine to fix us some greens and beans and ham hocks?’ It drove her crazy. He and Richard clicked so well because they both had this thing that they were going to erase racism.”

  In the midst of this frenzy, Rain came into the world.

  Rain Pryor was born July 16, 1969. Richard and Shelley took it as a sign that their daughter arrived on the day of the Apollo 11 liftoff, the world’s first manned space mission destined for the moon. They called her Rain because it rained that day. It was so weird to have rain in July in L.A.

  Rain, her parents believed, was destined to make a mark on the world: a biracial child born in the Age of Aquarius during the Summer of Love, at the dawn of the space age, as the first man embarked to set actual foot upon another celestial sphere, heralding the future, now arrived, where race distinction would be a thing of the earthbound past.

  “They both really believed if they both had a child they would start a color revolution,” Rain says. “They would change the way America looked at race.”

 
Shelley envisioned her newborn daughter as a window out onto a bright and open field. She may be excused for not knowing that the die had long before been cast, the pattern well established: whenever a child was born unto Richard Pryor, he turned tail and ran.

  Richard would follow the same dance steps nearly every time he wanted out of a relationship, as if they were outlines painted on a floor. As he did with other women, Richard did his best (worst) to make Shelley push him away. But she wouldn’t, and remained, either unwilling or unable to acknowledge as significant any breach of his against her vested vision of their life together. On the day he was to bring Shelley and their infant daughter home from the hospital, he never showed. A nurse finally called Shelley a cab, and when she walked into their bedroom, babe in arms, she found Richard in bed with their housekeeper, as he surely knew she would. But even that wasn’t enough. Shelley forgave him. The worse he treated her, the tighter she clung.

  Richard returned to New York for roles in two films, You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You’ll Lose That Beat and Dynamite Chicken.

  Not released until September 1971, You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It was a disjointed counterculture satire written, produced, and directed by twenty-seven-year-old Peter Locke (who, in 1983 with Donald Kushner, would form Kushner-Locke Productions). New York Times reviewer A. H. Weiler described it as the “wacky saga” of a “young, confused middle-class hero tilting against the windmills of the Establishment.” Over the course of the eighty-five-minute film, the hero (played by Zalman King) goes up against “his doting mother, a crazy old lady; the Puerto Rican minority municipal madness in the form of a new job ferreting out ‘revolutionaries’ supposedly out to bomb our highways; group therapy; Madison Avenue advertising; Women’s Lib; abortion, and even unrewarding marriage and fatherhood. . . .

  “Mr. Locke is partial to more than a few gross sequences,” Weiler wrote, “some of which are funny, such as the one involving Richard Pryor, the TV and nightclub comic, who plays a gibbering lush in a men’s room.” The film is also notable for its sound track, which comprises the first recordings ever released by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, some two years before they formed Steely Dan.