Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him

by David Henry

  Over the next decade and a half, every time a Richard Pryor movie came out or Warner Bros. issued a new Richard Pryor LP, Laff rode the coattails of free publicity and released a Pryor album of its own, culled from their apparently bottomless trove of archived recordings, sometimes repackaging the same material for a second go-round. Three of those Laff records were nominated for Grammys—perhaps a reflexive action on the part of nominating members in response to seeing the name Richard Pryor on the list of considerations, despite the junior-high-school-newspaper-quality cover illustrations (that’s assuming they actually saw the LPs in question). The first time that happened, with Are You Serious?, released in 1976, Richard bought full-page ads in the trades thanking the Recording Academy for the honor of being nominated but asking members not to mark their ballots for something he believed did not represent his best work. Eventually, one Laff title—happily, the most deserving one, Rev. Du Rite—won Richard his fourth gold award in 1982. (Live on the Sunset Strip would be his fifth and final Grammy winner the following year.)

  —————

  The cover of Rolling Stone dated October 10, 1974, pictured Richard and Lily Tomlin as personifications of theatrical comedy and tragedy masks—Richard cackling, Lily sobbing—under the headline “Jive Times: The Comedy, Theater and Routine Lives of Richard Pryor and Lily Tomlin,” the first of a two-part feature by David Felton. For this issue, Felton wrote three separate pieces on Richard: the most in-depth biographical profile yet published, a fanciful musing on the inner workings of Richard’s imagination, and the most candid, unguarded—and, one might guess, manipulative—interview Richard would ever give. (Felton’s piece on Tomlin appeared in the following issue.)

  Felton certainly fared better than the National Observer interviewer who found Richard in an especially pissy and combative mood when Richard claimed, with a straight face, that J. Edgar Hoover had been his most important influence. He feigned not to know who Charlie Chaplin was. Insisted he’d never even heard his name before. When the exasperated reporter started packing up his things, Richard told him, “Say hi to your boss, Buckley, for me.” So that was it. The reporter patiently explained that he was with the National Observer, not William F. Buckley’s National Review. Oh. In that case, Richard told him, sit back down and he’d submit to a proper interview.

  By contrast, Richard gave Felton eight separate interviews over the course of several months, allowing Felton to witness him sobbing in a restaurant as he tried to describe the guilt he felt for having let people down and letting him observe as he workshopped the material that would become That Nigger’s Crazy.

  Richard even allowed Felton to quote extensive passages from his autobiographical screenplay “This Can’t Be Happening to Me” that he’d begun writing in Berkeley, including a remarkable scene in a cathedral in which Christ begs Richard to help him down from the cross. “I’ve been hanging around here two thousand years,” Jesus says to him, “and they ain’t buried me yet, and I’m tired.” Richard pulls the spikes from his hands and feet, and helps him, limping, out of the cathedral. As soon as they reach the street, sirens go off. Richard and Jesus are set upon by a group of monks who beat them up, haul Jesus back inside, and nail him back on the cross. As Jesus wails in agony, Richard vows to tell the world what just happened, to which one of the monks replies, “Who’s going to believe you, nigger?”

  —————

  While on a late-summer cross-country tour, Richard stopped in Peoria to attend a ribbon-cutting ceremony dedicating the new sliding board—apparently a very elaborate sliding board—that he had donated to Miss Whittaker’s new day-care center. The mayor proclaimed it “Richard Pryor Day.” A band played on the back of a flatbed truck, and the YMCA put on a show in his honor at the Shrine mosque. Following the ribbon cutting, Richard presented the Emmy he had won as a writer for the second Lily Tomlin special to the woman who had inspired and believed in him when he needed it most. As he ceremoniously unveiled the trophy, which he had hastily wrapped in newspaper, he told Miss Whittaker, “If it hadn’t been for you, I would not have learned anything about the theater. And I certainly wouldn’t have learned how to write.”

  (On his next visit to Peoria, he shyly asked Miss Whittaker if he could have the statuette back. But it was adorable the way he did it, she insisted. “Miss Whittaker,” he said, “when I say I won an Emmy, people don’t believe me.”)

  —————

  Richard cohosted The Mike Douglas Show for the entire week of November 25–29, 1974. Introduced as “the Pride of Peoria,” his stint featured guest appearances by Sammy Davis Jr., Freddie Prinze, Harry Belafonte, Joe Frazier, and a memorable performance by Sly Stone. (Memorable to everyone except Sly, that is. When an interviewer complimented him on his appearance, he didn’t know who Mike Douglas was.) At the end of the week, in what Richard would often say had been the proudest moment of his life, his grandmother Marie came out to join him, giving him a massive hug on national TV.

  On that week’s Monday show, Richard found himself sobbing uncontrollably when Douglas, in one of the “this is your life” moments he enjoyed springing on his guest hosts, brought out surprise guest Miss Juliette Whittaker. Richard wept as she recalled the shy young teenager who looked to be no older than nine, showing up at Peroria’s Carver Community Center asking if he could be in a play.

  Later in that same broadcast, Richard, perhaps giddy from his emotional reunion with Miss Whittaker, began to snicker as guest Milton Berle attempted to tell a maudlin, heart-wrenching story from his just-published memoir about how he’d agonized over taking his girlfriend—an actress who, he hinted, later married a powerful producer—to Tijuana for an abortion in 1931. Not only did Pryor crack up over the story, he apparently blurted out a pretty good guess as to the woman’s identity, judging from the look on Berle’s face. “I’m sorry, man,” Richard stammered, still laughing, “but I just—I just did it.”

  “I wish, Richard,” Berle lectured him, “that I could have laughed at that time when I was your age the way you just laughed now, but I just couldn’t.” Richard, trying to make amends, offered to relight Milton’s cigar. “No, thank you, I don’t smoke that stuff,” Berle huffed. He attempted to resume his story with a little background on how his domineering mother, who invariably attempted to thwart any romance that lasted more than two or three dates, instructed him to marry the girl just long enough to give the child a name and then divorce her. This only provoked more ill-suppressed laugher from Richard. “I’m sorry, man, it’s just the story . . . it’s funny.” Berle refused to continue, saying he’d come back and tell the story some other time. “I told you this nine years ago and I’m going to tell you on the air in front of millions of people: Pick your spots, baby.” Richard came back with a faux Humphrey Bogart, “All right, schweetheart.” Berle gazed up into the studio lights, as though following the up-wafting smoke from his cigar and repeated the warning. “Pick your spots.”

  As the show’s credits rolled, Berle howled as Richard, for the second time in his career, went down in defeat against the show’s final guest, a wrestling bear.

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  That same autumn of 1974, Penelope Spheeris had a visit from her friend Lorne Michaels. He sat on the sofa in her Topanga Beach home and made his pitch, hoping to persuade her to come to New York and work on a new project of his. She never seriously considered the offer. Her longtime boyfriend, Bobby Schoeller, the father of their five-year-old daughter, had only a few months before died of a heroin overdose. The idea of uprooting her daughter and moving across the country was just too much. Besides, Lorne’s idea sounded a bit flighty. He wanted to bring live skit comedy back to TV, the way Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca had done it back in the 1950s, except hip and edgy and bold, for the 1970s.

  These, she recalls, were his exact words: “I want to do a live show, from New York, on Saturday nights.”

  When its time came, Richard would do for that show what he had done for Mitzi Shore and th
e Comedy Store, only nationwide.

  * If you must know, the evil ruler of communist Albania has kidnapped a multitude of America’s bygone stars—among them George Jessel, Butterfly McQueen, Guy Lombardo, Andy Devine, Ruby Keeler, Edgar Bergen, Colonel Harland Sanders (believe it), Jay Silverheels, Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan (aka Tarzan and Jane)—who all make cameos. The leader of the SSA (Super Secret Agency) wears a cardboard box over his head but sounds like Richard Nixon (courtesy of Rich Little). He responds to the crisis by assembling his legions of undercover agents—whole divisions of them—who pose as bikers, hookers, Black Panthers, Klansmen, Boy Scouts, and so on. He consults a supercomputer called MOTHA (Mechanical Oracle That Helps Americans), a female-shaped contraption with blinking lights and cone-shaped breasts. SSA hatches a plan to recruit four young men selected by MOTHA to form a rock group (the Phynx), make them into international stars, and then wait until they are invited to play a gig in Albania. As part of the group’s training, Richard (who introduces himself as “Richard Pryor”), dressed as a chef, is onscreen for all of eight seconds, just long enough to say that his job will be to teach them “soul.” Unbelievably, the Phynx’s songs were penned by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, composers of “Jailhouse Rock,” “Hound Dog,” and “Yakety Yak,” among others.

  PART FOUR

  “I SEE THAT MAN IN MY MIND AND GO WITH HIM”

  A joke went around in the early seventies that the continental United States had tilted slightly to the southwest and everything loose started rolling toward L.A. After watching so many of his top comics pick up and go west, Budd Friedman, owner of the New York Improvisation decided in 1975 that the time had come to get in on the action.

  For Mitzi Shore, the opening of the L.A. Improv in West Hollywood was a declaration of war. Comics who played the Improv, she decreed, were no longer welcome at the Store. (She allowed a few exceptions, one of them being Jay Leno. He saw no reason to deny himself the prestige and exposure the Improv could offer, and he was too valuable for Shore to shut him out.) The L.A. Improv was just one among a rash of new comedy clubs to spring up within a mile radius of the Store. As well, existing clubs had begun adding comedy to their musical lineups. Against this onslaught, Mitzi had one weapon no other club could match: Richard Pryor.

  The Comedy Store became the workshop where Richard would develop material for his heaviest LPs, from 1974’s That Nigger’s Crazy through 1978’s Wanted: Richard Pryor Live in Concert. Anytime Richard wanted to woodshed new material, all he had to do was let Mitzi know and she would clear the decks for as many nights or weeks as he wanted. His name on the marquee guaranteed sold-out shows every night, and his appearances, William Knoedelseder writes, “had the frenzied feel of a heavyweight title fight in Vegas, with lines stretching around the block.”

  When Richard held court, other comics, of necessity, had to relinquish their time slots, but when he was in the house, nothing else mattered. “They recognized that Pryor was the closest thing their peculiar profession had to a genius on the scale of a Beethoven or a Van Gogh,” says Knoedelseder. “Nearly every local comic who wasn’t on stage somewhere else was on hand to watch and learn. What were a few lost time slots compared to the chance of studying the master at work?”

  For those who weren’t there to witness it firsthand, Richard Lewis says, it’s impossible to convey the charisma of Richard in the mid-1970s. “To see him walk through a club, the way people responded . . . For a young comedian, it was like seeing God. You watched him and you thought, ‘This man was born to be a comedian.’ He was the most organic comedian I ever saw. It was like he grew up out of the ground.” Franklyn Ajaye attests that Richard quickly became every comic’s idol. ”It was clear to everybody that Pryor was the best guy around.”

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  Every night over the course of a single week in the winter of 1975 Ajaye watched from the floor of the Comedy Store as Richard gave birth to Mudbone, his most enduring and recognizable character. “When I was a young comedian I liked to go back and see what other comics repeated from one show to the next, what they changed. It demystified the process.” Seeing Richard Pryor spin his masterwork out of thin air did little to demystify anything. Just the opposite.

  Mudbone showed up one night as a nameless old man in the middle of Richard’s set. “One of those things that pop up in your subconscious that you don’t even know are in there,” Ajaye says. That first night, Mudbone spoke only a line or two at most, but Richard would bring the character out again every night and work on it. “That let me know that he was thinking about it during the day, building on what he’d done the night before. Each night he’d add a little bit more to it. That made me realize he was a lot more technical than I had thought. That’s why his routines are great routines. They’re very refined.” By week’s end, that nameless old man had become the crusty, wizened raconteur who commandeered more than a third of Richard’s next Warner Bros. LP . . . Is It Something I Said?, recorded in May at the Latin Casino in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Before Mudbone, Richard had always brought his characters into a specific situation to interact with each other while he, as storyteller, stepped in and out of the scene. Here Richard gives Mudbone a formal introduction before turning the stage—and his audience—over solely to him. It’s telling, too, that Richard introduces Mudbone by speaking as himself but in Mudbone’s voice.

  RICHARD (MUDBONE VOICE): I was born in Pee-oh-rah, Illinois.

  GUY IN AUDIENCE: What’s that?

  RICHARD: That’s a city, nigger. You probably wouldn’t know nothin’ about that, see? Ol’ country-ass boy.

  And when I was little there was a old man, his name was Mudbone and he’d dip snuff and he’d sit in front of the barbecue pit and he’d spit, see? That was his job. I’m pretty sure that was his job, ’cause that’s all he did. But he’d tell stories. Fascinatin’ stories, see? And I loved him . . . He made me very happy. ’Cause I’d stay with him and listen to him. ’Cause you learn stuff listenin’ to old people. They ain’t all fools, you know. You don’t get to be old bein’ no fool. Lot of young wise men, they deader than a motherfucker, ain’t they?

  A few moments later, Richard quietly retreats, leaving Mudbone to stand on his own and speak for himself. It’s a touching gesture, with Richard acting as caregiver, making sure this rickety old man is steady on his feet before he tiptoes away.

  In what is essentially a one-man theatrical piece, Mudbone tells how he drove a tractor to Peoria, Illinois, from Tupelo, Mississippi, after revenging the physical and verbal assaults he’d suffered at the hands of his bossman’s 465-pound mail-order bride.

  I went in the toolshed and got me one of them Kreg jigsaws and I sawed the bottom out of the outhouse and I hid in the bushes and waited for this big collard-green-eatin’ bitch to go to the bathroom. Well, long about eight thirty she commenced to going to the bathroom. I’m in the bushes lookin’ at her. She wobbled out to the outhouse, opened the door, went in, shut the door. I heard a big splash. That’s when I got on the tractor and drove up here. I wasn’t mad no more, either.

  Continuing on the album’s B side, Mudbone, now an established resident of Peoria, next tells how he took his friend Toodlum to visit a conjure woman known as Miss Rudolph in hopes that she can cure a hex cast on Toodlum by a lady friend from Louisiana. Mudbone tells Miss Rudolf right away that they have no money. That’s fine, she says. In lieu of cash, they can bring her a goose or a turkey at Thanksgiving time.

  I said, well, shit, that’s fine with me ’cause it was June then. If I don’t never see this bitch no more in life it’s alright with me, see? And just about that time a big motherfuckin’ tarantula this big crawled up my arm, around my neck—I almost shit on myself, man—went down this arm, under my hand . . . I tried to mash him. When I lift my hand up, he was gone! That’s when I put my hand on my knife. Because I figured if somebody get hurt in here, I ain’t gonna be the last one, see?

  I said, “Miss Rudolph, please tell me wha
t happened to the tarantula.” She said, “That ain’t none of your goddamn business. But if you don’t bring me that turkey, you will see him again.”

  As a youngster performing with his father and uncle at the Apollo Theater in the 1930s, Sammy Davis Jr. recalled that the best jokes were always told backstage. “We didn’t call them jokes at the time, we called them lies. ‘That nigger sure can lie’ was a common phrase at the time.” Mudbone said the same of his friend Toodlum. “He could lie his ass off. Oh, that nigger could tell lies! That’s how we became friends, see? He’d tell a lie, I’d tell a lie. And we’d complement each other’s lies. He’d make me laugh all day long, bless his soul. He told me this lie one time, he told me about the niggers with the big dicks.”*

  These niggers had the biggest dicks in the world, and they were trying to find a place where they could have their contest, see? And they wasn’t no freaks, didn’t want everybody lookin’. They was walking around lookin’ for a secret place. So they walked across the Golden Gate Bridge and the nigger seen that water and make him want to piss, see. Boy say, “Man, I got to take a leak.” He pulled out his thing and was pissing. The other nigger pulled his out, took a piss. The one nigger say, “Goddamn! This water cold!”

  The other nigger say, “Yeah, and it’s deep, too.”

  Boy could lie his ass off. He say, “Yeah, and it’s deep, too.” Goddamn his soul . . .

  Mudbone’s folk wisdom and deft storytelling skills immediately drew comparisons to Mark Twain. (“Dark Twain” was but one honorific bestowed upon Richard by his peers.) The genius embodied in Mudbone prompted Bob Newhart in 1998 to effuse that it was entirely right and proper that Richard should receive the first-ever Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor because “he and Twain did the same thing. Mark Twain wrote about life on the frontier, what it was like growing up on the Mississippi River, and Richard Pryor [told] what it was like growing up in the inner city. Even without the raw and colorful language, his concepts are still rich.” Richard, through his characters, provided entry into a side of life that seemed—that was, in fact—closed off to most of middle America. And it was a side we wanted to know. It was where all the best music and the biggest laughs came from.