by David Henry
“THERE’S A PERSON HERE THAT’S POSSESSED”
By mid-1976, it was no longer possible for Richard to make surprise appearances at the Comedy Store. Word always got out and suddenly a lot of fly-looking people would start pouring in. Crowds formed out on the sidewalk watching for his car. Comics who usually hung backstage would come out and claim seats back by the bar and stalwarts like Redd Foxx might be seen peeking through the curtain. By the time Richard bounced out on stage, the place would be primed to explode. One night a twenty-two-year-old Freddie Prinze leaped from his barstool and went running through the room, whooping like a worshipper at a revival meeting, punching random people in the arms and yelling, “He’s the goddamn best! Man, Pryor knows what’s right; he’s paid all the dues!”
Franklyn Ajaye would often come to observe. “Every comedian looked at him with awe for the brilliance he was bringing out.” Yet Ajaye said he never felt any personal warmth for Richard as a person, ever since their first meeting in 1969 when Ajaye reported for work on Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales and found him screaming abuse at Shelley. “There was absolutely zero he could teach me about living,” Ajaye says.
I could learn from how he did his comedy, but I didn’t see anything about how he lived his life that I wanted to emulate. Zero. He was very tempestuous. I didn’t even like to be around him. I don’t like being around volatile people. I have no interest in being around geniuses. Those tempestuous volatile geniuses the media likes to hold up. But I had the deepest admiration for his artistry. As a stand-up, not as an actor. He was just a troubled man. He was heavy into the drugs, heavy into alcohol . . . Who’s sane doing that? Nobody. Just look what happened to Belushi. Freddie Prinze . . . Robin Williams survived it, but he was headed down the same road.
So when Ajaye heard that Freddie Prinze had started hanging out with Richard he thought to himself, Well, that’s a mistake.
He could understand why Freddie wanted to hang with Richard.
Richard was pretty much every comedian’s idol. But I remember thinking very clearly at the time, Richard can’t teach him anything about life. Freddie was young and impressionable. That’s trouble. Richard was deep off into drugs, Freddie was deep off into drugs . . . Richard was doing a lot of cocaine and he had a troubled background from his upbringing. That’s just a recipe for disaster. Anyone could see that. There’s no earthly way out of that.
Around three o’clock one morning that summer, Kathy McKee got a call from her sister, Lonette, who was then dating Freddie Prinze. Lonette said, “Kathy, you’ve got to help me. Richard Pryor is holding me and Freddie hostage with a gun in his house in Beverly Hills and he won’t let us go. He’s going crazy. He’s snorted up Peru and he won’t let us leave. I’m terrified and he keeps saying ‘Get your sister. Call Kathy and have her come.’ ”
“Where are you?” Kathy asked. She wasn’t fully awake.
“Richard’s house. Can you get over here? Please?”
“Okay.” Kathy got dressed and drove over. Three thirty in the morning. Richard answered the door.
“Sure enough, Richard has them captive. He’s got a gun and he’s going crazy, threatening to kill himself. Then I walk in, and he lets them go. I always had this calming effect on Richard,” she explains. “Like a therapist. I came up in the hood in Detroit and I don’t put up with that. He said, ‘Okay, baby, you stay with me now and talk with me and party with me . . .’ So I did. I stayed like three days with him and kept him company and got high with him until he passed out. Then I went home.”
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Richard got his first real taste of the Deep South during location filming for his second Motown production, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, the story of a Depression-era barnstorming baseball team based on the novel by William Brashler. Richard was reluctant to take on yet another supporting role, but Berry Gordy, who’d given him his break in Lady Sings the Blues, insisted that Richard was the only actor who could play the part of Charlie Snow, the team’s intrepid third baseman who tries passing for Cuban, Native American, whatever it might take to get out of the Negro leagues and into the majors. Richard turned it down cold. Producer Rob Cohen made his case by appealing to Richard’s sense of racial pride and was able to convince him to at least read the script. Richard was impressed by its earnest ambition to re-create an important but little-known epoch in black history, and he saw shades of himself in the conflicted character of Charlie Snow.
The mostly upbeat movie “captured a lot of fans,” recalls costar James Earl Jones, “but the critics were hard on us because they expected a black cast to exude black rage. They wanted the tragedy of black baseball players in the black baseball leagues, not the comedy we gave them. They wanted political relevance and content and protest. They couldn’t accept that this was not a black film, but simply a film about black people.”
While the rest of the cast stayed at the Macon Hilton, Richard, as had become his habit, kept himself apart from his costars, renting a house near Mercer University ostensibly so that he could be with his family—Grandma Marie, Aunt Dee (his uncle Dickie’s ex-wife), and, according to one reporter, “a lady friend of Greek extraction” whom he routinely introduced, as had also become his habit, as his fiancée. He kept mostly to himself on the set, although toward the end of the shoot he invited the cast and crew over for a feast whipped up by Mama Marie that included fried chicken, okra, oxtail stew with string beans (Richard’s favorite dish), and peach cobbler.
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Billy Dee Williams and James Earl Jones may have been the film’s marquee names, but to the rural folks who came to gawk, Richard was the star they were most excited to see. They knew him from his TV appearances, magazine articles, and record albums. Richard had never before experienced small-town life in the rural South. The complacent poverty and miserable living conditions upset him—the leaning shacks with tin roofs and bare red-clay floors were essentially unchanged since the 1930s, which is why those locations were chosen—but the people were a delight. “You look at them,” Richard said, “some brothers and sisters who can’t read, some who may have combs sticking in their heads, or a big fat black woman with her hair going every which way—but when you live with them and hear them talk, you know that they are some of the smartest people on the planet.”
They kept their distance during the day, but once shooting had wrapped, Richard would go join them out in the street and deliver impromptu concerts that lasted long into the summer nights—going until four or five in the morning on one occasion—swapping stories and telling lies. Producer Rob Cohen recalls that the black dialect got so thick at times he couldn’t make out a word they were saying. Richard would let loose with something completely indecipherable to Cohen’s ears, and then “there would be this huge burst of laughter. It was a real joy to see.”
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Rob Cohen bore witness to a similar outpouring when he next worked with Richard on The Wiz, not in rural Georgia but in midtown Manhattan. When Cohen went to pick him up at the Plaza Hotel for his first day of rehearsal, he found Richard in a “very, very bad mood” that showed no signs of improving during their car ride downtown. Rather than handing Richard over to director Sidney Lumet and the assemblage of suits awaiting his arrival at the St. George Hotel, Cohen thought it might be better to give him some time and some air. He casually suggested they stop by the midtown rehearsal space where the film’s choreographer was working on the Emerald City dance sequence.
Richard, wearing a T-shirt and a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, followed Cohen docilely into the enormous space where some four hundred dancers were going at it full tilt. “All of a sudden,” Cohen remembers, “some of the dancers in the front row saw me and who was next to me, and they stopped dancing. And it spread. Another five would stop, then twenty, then fifty. And the whole place stopped. They were just staring at him. Then they broke into spontaneous applause.”
Richard fought back tears, acknowledgi
ng the ovation by going into a monologue as his preacher character. When he stepped up and said, “We are . . . gathered heah to-deh. . . ,” the place erupted. By the time he finished, dancers were falling on the floor, they were laughing so hard.
After that, Cohen reports, Pryor was fine, although The Wiz would turn out to be a thirty-million-dollar flop, providing ammunition to the industry’s contention that all-black movies were incapable of pulling in mass audiences.
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“I don’t like movies when they don’t have no niggers in them,” Richard told his audience at West Hollywood’s Roxy Theatre in July of 1976. “I went to see Logan’s Run, right? A movie of the future? There ain’t no niggers in it! I said, ‘Well white folks ain’t planning for us to be here!’ That’s why we got to make movies.”
On July 7, barely a week before cameras rolled on Bingo Long, Richard signed a three-million-dollar contract to write and develop screenplays of his choosing exclusively for Universal, with the option (but no obligation) to appear in them, plus a healthy share of the profits if he played a starring role. The deal provided him with offices on the studio lot and further stipulated that the studio would buy the film rights to any literary properties he wished to acquire. Universal would also hire additional screenwriters to assist him with the work. And he was free to appear in non-Universal films.
Universal’s young president, Thom Mount, publicly touted the agreement as proof of the studio’s belief that movies starring black actors and made by black filmmakers would make money, to which Richard rejoined that a “whole lot of niggers gonna be in trouble” if his movies didn’t.
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Richard appeared onscreen for all of eight minutes in Michael Schultz’s Car Wash, an ensemble comedy from a day-in-the-life screenplay by Joel Schumacher. By the time the film was released in October of 1976, the distributors saw fit to market it as a Richard Pryor movie. His image dominated the promotional materials, like a deity in the sky looming large over the rest of the cast, which included Bill Duke as a militant black activist, Ivan Dixon as an ex-con, Richard Brestoff as the owner’s Mao-quoting son, Professor Irwin Corey as a mad bomber terrorizing the neighborhood, George Carlin as cab driver, and Franklyn Ajaye sporting a bouncy afro the size of a large beach ball.
Richard plays Daddy Rich, founder of the Church of Divine Economic Spirituality, who is chauffeured onto the car wash premises for the purpose of having a single pigeon dropping removed from the hood of his gold limousine. In a sequence that functions mainly as a musical interlude, Daddy Rich’s female entourage, played by the Pointer Sisters, perform “You Gotta Believe.” Schultz says he had conceived of the movie as “a closet musical. We didn’t tell people we were doing a musical, but that’s exactly what Car Wash was.” Schumacher had based the character on flamboyant television and radio evangelist Frederick Eikerenkoetter, better known as Reverend Ike, the “success and prosperity preacher” whose slogan was “You can’t lose with the stuff I use!” Initially, Reverend Ike had agreed to play the role himself, but he ultimately decided self-parody might not be in his best interest.
Richard came out for the one-day shoot primarily as a favor to Schultz. The two had previously worked on a never-realized project called “Timmons from Chicago,” a comedy developed by the Godfather of Black Music, Clarence Avant, who wanted Schultz to direct and Richard to play the title role, a Chicago man who becomes the first black president of the United States.
Schultz, who came up as a theatrical director with the Negro Ensemble Company, made his Broadway debut in 1969 with Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? starring Al Pacino, before establishing himself as a film director with 1975’s Cooley High. He would direct Richard in his first two starring roles, Greased Lightning and Which Way Is Up?, both released in 1977.
But, for the time being, Richard battled frustration as he struggled to get past the sidekick and second-banana roles offered him, such as the petty thief who gets swept up in the madcap scramble of an innocent man suspected of murder in Arthur Hiller’s comedy-thriller Silver Streak.
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Richard was leery that the role, as written, would only paint him deeper into that corner where he would be known as nothing more than a comedian who occasionally played bit parts in movies. What decided it for him was director Arthur Hiller, a twenty-year veteran with a string of recent successes that included The Out-of-Towners, Love Story, and Plaza Suite. He was certainly the caliber of director that Richard wanted to be working with, and his recent film, The Man in the Glass Booth, was one of Richard’s favorites. He gushed to Hiller that he had seen it at least fifty times.
More than an hour of the 114-minute Silver Streak has unspooled before Richard’s character shows up, but once he does, the film is all his. Author and Gannett movie critic Marshall Fine wrote that “the script, by Colin Higgins, owes a big debt to Alfred Hitchcock; but the mystery isn’t all that mysterious and the comedy isn’t all that hilarious—at least not until Richard Pryor shows up, which is at least halfway through the film. Things definitely pick up from there.” As was often the case when Richard played supporting roles, his onscreen arrival underscored how plodding and lifeless the movie had been up until that point. “For about fifteen minutes,” Pauline Kael wrote in her New Yorker review, “Pryor gives the picture some of his craziness. Not much of it, but some—enough to make you realize how lethargic it had been without him.” Arthur Hiller realized it, too, and immediately ordered a rewrite of the script so as to keep Richard on for the duration of the picture. Hiller credits Richard with improvising some of the movie’s best lines and for suggesting a simple change that turned a potentially embarrassing scene into one of the biggest laughs in the film. Hiller felt a nagging concern about the scene in a train station men’s room where Wilder, concocting a disguise to sneak past police, blacks up with shoe polish, dons a floppy hat, and flails hopelessly off the beat with a portable radio pressed to his ear. A white man who comes into the restroom is completely fooled. Richard suggested that “instead of a white dude being fooled by the disguise, have a black dude come in who isn’t fooled.” It completely flipped the scene and made it work.
Silver Streak was the first—and the best—of four films Richard and Wilder would make together. In the ones that followed, they would share star billing, but for Richard there was something gratingly minstrel-like about the whole arrangement. Hadn’t that all died out with vaudeville? It felt like he was Rochester to Gene Wilder’s Jack Benny. Television could always be counted on to bring up the rear of social progress, but surely the movies had moved on, hadn’t they? Even Humphrey Bogart’s Rick and Dooley Wilson’s Sam had a better understanding than that. (But then, it was Casablanca, and there was a war on.) Again, Pauline Kael observes that Richard’s performance rings false only when the script asks him to show pure-hearted affection for Gene Wilder. Interracial brotherly love “is probably the one thing Richard Pryor should never be required to express.” When he does, she wrote, “you have never seen such a bad actor.”
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Richard finally won his first starring role playing Wendell Scott, America’s first black stock-car racing champion in Greased Lightning, opposite Pam Grier and Beau Bridges. The project was developed by writer-director Melvin Van Peebles, best known at the time for Watermelon Man and the breakout blaxploitation classic Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Filming came to a halt over creative disputes between Van Peebles and the film’s producers. Van Peebles left the project, and Richard, faced with the wheels coming off his first star vehicle, called Michael Schultz and begged him to take over as director. Schultz felt conflicted. Rightfully, the film belonged to Van Peebles and he didn’t want to step on his toes. At the same time, Schultz was busy developing another star project for Richard, one he anticipated would be the first movie to star Richard Pryor had Van Peebles not cut in ahead of him. Ultimately, Schultz agreed to finish Greased Lightning, reasoning that he could do a good job with it
and he didn’t want Richard coming out with a bomb before he secured financing for his own Pryor movie. And, he notes, Melvin Van Peebles could not have been more gracious. “He had a substantially black crew and was shooting in Georgia and they were all going to leave with him in protest against the producer—who really wound up being a pill—and Melvin said, ‘No, no. Stay. I want you to support Michael and Richard and do the best you can and make this movie happen.’ ”
Richard had invited Kathy McKee to come with him for the location shooting in rural Georgia. She was reluctant at first. She knew that artists can be moody when they’re working. “During filming is not the best time to be with someone.” Especially Richard, especially in his first lead role. But she assumed Richard would rent some palatial suite for the two of them where she could have her privacy. Instead, as he often did, “he rented this little shack of a house out in no man’s land where he could walk right outside the house and fish. That’s all he wanted to do.” Kathy hated it. She hated the South. She hated being out in the sun getting bit by mosquitoes. And the whole time Richard was having an affair with Pam Grier. “He didn’t think I knew that, but of course I knew that. I’m not stupid. But I didn’t care. I just wanted to go home.” After two weeks she did, which must have given Richard pause.
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Richard’s first project under his deal with Universal was Which Way Is Up?, an adaptation of The Seduction of Mimi, Lina Wertmüller’s dark comedy about political struggles and sexual politics among grape growers in Italy’s wine country. The film was to be directed by Michael Schultz, and Richard picked his Berkeley pal novelist Cecil Brown and Jaws co-screenwriter Carl Gottlieb to transplant the story to California’s citrus groves and amp up the laughs.