Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him

by David Henry

  “That’s how quick Richard was. He turns around, looks down, sees Billy, and comes up with the line, ‘Have you bumped into any good pussy lately?’ ”

  —————

  Producer Rob Cohen recalls visiting Richard’s bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel shortly before the release of Bingo Long. Cohen was grousing about all the commercial hype surrounding the U.S. Bicentennial. Richard was unresponsive, in one of his moods, until Cohen said, “Jesus, the only product that hasn’t jumped on the Bicentennial bandwagon is Tampax.” Richard immediately came to life. “He jumped up,” remembers Cohen, “assumed the voice of your typical unctuous, white-bread announcer, and said, ‘Hi there, girls, have you tried Bicentennial Tampax? It’s already white and blue, you can make it red!’ And I thought to myself, Christ, in less than a second, he hooked up the red, white, and blue of the flag, and the fact that Tampax wrappings are white and blue, with blue lettering, and that menstrual flow is red. Red, white, and blue. He just tied the whole thing up instantly.”

  —————

  One night, on top of the world at Redd Foxx’s club, Richard and Redd were snorting coke, telling lies, flirting with the cocktail waitresses. Even as he nodded off, barely able to keep himself awake, Richard went on snorting. “Why do I always want more?” he asked Foxx. “Because you’re a junkie,” Redd said. As flat-out cold as that.

  * Seven years after parting company with NBC, Richard returned to TV with Pryor’s Place, a CBS Saturday morning kid show that premiered on September 15, 1984, and ran for ten weeks. The expected parties were outraged that Richard Pryor should in any way be presented as a role model for children. It was a thoroughly wholesome affair, following two young boys on their adventures in a Sesame Street–type neighborhood as they faced moral dilemmas and learned lessons from them. Richard somberly played himself as host and narrator but showed much more life playing neighborhood characters. Critics were kind, though few could resist pointing out that he’d come full circle and was back to doing Bill Cosby’s act.

  “YOU HOLLYWOOD FAGGOTS CAN KISS MY RICH HAPPY BLACK ASS”

  At Lily Tomlin’s request, Richard volunteered to take part in a star-studded benefit for gay rights at the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday, September 18. The “Star Spangled Night for Rights” (subtitled “A Celebration for Human Rights”) was organized by the San Francisco–based Save Our Human Rights in response to an anti-gay campaign fronted by California senator John Biggs and former Miss America and orange-juice shill Anita Bryant. The capacity crowd of seventeen thousand Hollywood luminaries included Paul Newman, Cher, Alice Cooper, Norman Lear, Chevy Chase, John Travolta, and Truman Capote.

  Richard arrived in good spirits and reportedly enjoyed the first half of the show, laughing and applauding from the wings while watching his friend Lily Tomlin, Christopher Lee, David Steinberg, a young dance troupe called the Lockers, the band War, and going on just head of him, two members of the Los Angeles Ballet Company.

  Richard opened the second half of the show unprepared. (He was, after all, doing this for free, as were the others.) But he could riff on human rights for twenty minutes, easy.

  He started off haltingly, feeling his way. “I came out here for human rights . . . and I found out what it’s about . . . what it’s really about is . . . is it’s about not getting caught with a dick in your mouth.”

  The crowd went wild. Richard warmed to his topic.

  “I’ve sucked dick, and it was beautiful . . . but I couldn’t deal with it. I went home and didn’t tell nobody.”*

  After several minutes of playing to the crowd, his mood changed. He stumbled over his words, seemingly talking to himself.

  “Shit. This is really weird. What the fuck? I never seen this much traffic in my life . . . I seen cars all the way from where to what . . . coming to this motherfucker this evening . . . to give us some money . . . to suck a dick?”

  The crowd got restless and he turned on them, dropping the word faggot as freely, if not as affectionately, as he did nigger. “I came here for human rights, but I’m seeing what it’s really about. Fags are prejudiced. I see the four niggers you have dispersed. White folks are having good fun here tonight.”

  Here he was, a notorious pussy hound, an embodiment of hetero cool in the late 1970s—an era when most Americas couldn’t even pick up on the signals telegraphed by the Village People when they sang about the delights of staying at the YMCA—with some nine million dollars in studio contracts, and he’d just come out and boasted to a crowd of seventeen thousand assembled in one of the most conspicuous places on earth not only that he’d sucked cock, but that he liked it. That it was beautiful. (He’d said as much before, in clubs, and in a performance filmed at the Improv in 1971, but that movie, Live and Smokin’, had not yet seen the light of day.) Perhaps it was starting to sink in on him that he’d better walk that back, and do it fast.

  This is an evening about human rights, and I’m a human being. I just wanted to see where you was really at, and I wanted to test you to your motherfucking soul. I’m doing this shit for nothing. But I wanted to come here and tell you to kiss my ass with your bullshit. You understand? When the niggers was burning down Watts, you motherfuckers was doin’ what you wanted to do down on Hollywood Boulevard. Didn’t give a shit about it.

  Then he turned his back to the audience, hiked up the tail of his jacket, thrust out his backside and said, “You Hollywood faggots can kiss my rich happy black ass.”

  “I thought they would kill him,” says composer Van Dyke Parks, in attendance that night with his wife, Sally. “Seriously. I was scared Richard wouldn’t get out of there alive.”

  An L.A. Times reviewer wrote that Richard’s remarks “jolted the audience, confused them, in the end angered them . . . It was left to Tom Waits to recover the audience and he tried nobly with songs including the old Four Lads tune ‘Standing on the Corner.’ But his was an unenviable task—following Pryor and preceding Miss Midler. He finished quickly.”

  Bette Midler knew what to do. She pranced out and reclaimed the crowd with, “Who wants to kiss this rich happy white ass?”

  Lily Tomlin, who had invited Richard to take part in the show, tried to shrug it off, saying, in effect, that when you ask for Richard Pryor, you get Richard Pryor.

  “I don’t know,” she said years later, “maybe he was high.” Then: “Duh! What am I saying? Of course he was high.”

  —————

  That was Sunday. Late Tuesday, Richard knocked on Rocco Urbisci’s office door to ask if it would be okay if he came in late the next morning. Sure, Rocco said. It was his show. Rocco didn’t ask the reason why, but Richard volunteered, “I’m getting married.” And then he sort of laughed. Rocco congratulated Richard, wished him good night, then picked up the phone and ordered a cake.

  Richard came in late the next day still sporting his white wedding tux. Everyone crowded around as he introduced his new bride, Deboragh. Urbisci had the presence of mind to grab up a bouquet of flowers and, pretending a jubilant gesture, plunged their stems into the decorated cake, rendering illegible the inscription congratulating Richard and Pam Grier.

  “Are you sure that was Deboragh?” Rocco asked when we interviewed him for this book. “I didn’t recognize her. She looked about seventeen. I figured she was just some girl he knocked up.”

  —————

  Richard was wrung out from the nonstop ordeals of Greased Lightning, Which Way Is Up? (produced through the provisions of his Universal deal), doing the special and then butting heads with NBC over creative control of his weekly TV show in between the insanity of filming Blue Collar and facing fallout over the Hollywood Bowl kerfuffle. Plus, he had married again. As soon as they finished taping the final episode of his show on October 12, he and Deboragh took off for a brief and belated honeymoon in Hawaii. They were there just long enough for Richard to fall in love with the place and buy a parcel of land in the isolated community of Hana on the easternmost tip of Maui. From there, he w
as off to New York to finish filming The Wiz, then home to Peoria, and then he had a heart attack.

  * In 2002, we had the opportunity to read through Richard’s first attempt at writing his memoirs. He had filled the unruled pages of two and a half leather-bound volumes before abandoning the project in the early 1980s. The volumes were unnumbered, undated. The first volume opened with the confession that he’d had sex with men maybe ten or twelve times and they had been among the most profound experiences of his life. “Does that make me a fag, a queer, a bisexual or what?” he had written. “The answer is none of the above. It just makes me, me. My sexual preference is for women, but what makes a man? His words? His actions? Am I a straight acting queer, or a queer who just happens to love pussy?”

  “DOES IT LOOK LIKE I’M SMILING TO YOU, MOTHERFUCKER?”

  I was walking around in the front yard and something say, “Don’t breathe!”

  “Huh?”

  Richard looks from side to side, like, who said that?

  He twists his fist into his chest.

  Said, “You heard me motherfucker, I said don’t breathe!”

  Richard’s face contorts in pain.

  “Okay, I won’t breathe I won’t breathe I won’t breathe.”

  “Then shut the fuck up!”

  “Okay, I’ll shut up. Don’t kill me don’t kill me don’t kill me . . .”

  “Then get on one knee and prove it!”

  Richard tightens his fist and drops to one knee on the stage.

  “I’m on one knee, don’t kill me don’t kill me . . .”

  “You thinkin’ about dying now, ain’t you?”

  Another twist. Richard curls up in a fetal position on his back.

  “Yeah, I’m thinkin’ ’bout dyin’ I’m thinkin’ ’bout dyin’ . . .”

  “You didn’t think about it when you was eatin’ that pork.”

  Funny as a heart attack.

  Everyone marveled that here was a man who could turn a very real brush with death into an uproarious stand-up routine. It wouldn’t be the last time.

  The bit ended with Richard sitting up and saying, “I woke up in the ambulance, right? And there wasn’t nothing but white people staring at me. I say, ‘Ain’t this a bitch? I done died and wound up in the wrong motherfuckin’ heaven. Now I got to listen to Lawrence Welk for the rest of my days.’ ”

  The bit was a perfect illustration, critic Mel Watkins wrote, of Richard taking an audience to the peak of emotion and then letting them off with a nice laugh.

  —————

  In December, Louie Robinson of Ebony magazine visited the Northridge estate to write a cover story on newlyweds Richard and Deboragh, with full photo spread. The triumphs of 1977, he wrote, had made Richard “a folk hero to millions of Blacks (they mob him wherever he appears, tugging at him, wanting to touch him)” and “one of the wealthiest of the ‘new breed’ of actors in Hollywood.”

  His marriage to Deboragh was his third “on paper,” Richard said, but insisted it was his first real marriage, the first time he’d married for love.

  —————

  Sometime in the first hours of New Year’s Day, 1978, things went awry at the Northridge house. Paul Mooney and his wife, Yvonne, had been there earlier but left when he saw the pentagram begin to glow on Richard’s forehead. “There’s going to be some shit happening here,” he told his wife.

  “Richard never lays a hand on a woman when I am around,” Mooney writes. “It’s like he is afraid of my judgment. Then again, when I see the werewolf in Richard about to come out, I know enough to get gone. So I’m never present to witness him turn violent. But I see evidence enough that he abuses his wives and girlfriends horribly.”

  The fuse was lit, according to actor D’Urville Martin, when Richard became convinced that Deboragh had been more than just friends with one of the women at the party. Richard got his .357 Magnum, then told Deboragh and her two friends, Beverly Clayborn and Edna Solomon, they had five seconds to get out of his house.

  Richard fired in the air, shattering a ten-thousand-dollar Tiffany chandelier as he herded them out. The three women took shelter in Clayborn’s Buick. Richard rammed the Buick repeatedly with his Mercedes. When the women took off on foot, Richard walked over to the abandoned car and shot out its tires and windshield, executioner-style.

  On January 19, Beverly Clayborn, wearing a neck brace, filed a personal suit against Richard in Los Angeles Superior Court for seventeen million dollars. “If she gets it,” he quipped, “I’ll marry her.”

  When Deboragh filed for divorce on February 3, the January issue of Ebony was still on newsstands with the cuddling newlyweds smiling out from the cover.

  It took Richard a long time to come to terms with what he had done—how quickly he’d managed to ruin the marriage he swore would last. The sad part (yes, there’s a sad part to this story) is that Richard and Deboragh were still in love, they said, still wanted to make their marriage work, but vile and hateful things had been said that night that could not be unsaid or swept aside. Such things fester, lurk in the house like dozing demons, liable at any time to awaken in fury.

  In November, Richard pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of malicious mischief, was fined five hundred dollars, and ordered to seek psychiatric help. By that time, he was opening his sold-out concerts with a reenactment of the incident, though amending certain details. “It seemed fair to kill my car to me, right? Because my wife was going to leave my ass. I say, ‘Not in this motherfucker, you ain’t. Uh-uh. No, Lawd. If you leave me you be driving those Hush Puppies you got on, ’cause I’m gonna kill this motherfucker here.”

  More frequently on stage, Richard was giving voice and personality to all manner of animals, body parts, bodily functions, and inanimate objects. Here he is shooting out the tires: “I shot it. ‘Fooo-whoom!’ Tire say, ‘Aahhhh-aaaahh.’ It got good to me, I shot another one. ‘Bwooom!’ . . . Aahhhh-aaaahh.’ And the vodka I was drinking said, ‘Go ahead, shoot something else.’ I shot the motor, motor fell out the motherfucker, right? The motor say, ‘Fuck it!’ ”

  As Mel Watkins notes, the device “enriched his performances with a resonance that transcended race . . . Routines in which dogs, monkeys, pipes, or automobiles spoke in black voices called forth images of antebellum animal tales and the oral techniques of black storytellers or ‘liars.’ ”

  It wasn’t just the voices. Richard had developed an almost eerie ability to transform himself physically to mimic physical characteristics, body types, and facial expressions. One of the most moving segments of his 1978 concert program comes when Richard describes walking in his backyard, grieving the accidental deaths of his pet spider monkeys,* when a neighbor’s usually ferocious German shepherd jumps the fence to console him. Richard’s face takes on not just the attitude of a German shepherd, but one feeling confusion and pity.

  David Brenner has said that “Pryor’s routines were really more like plays; one-man theater where he plays all the parts.” And, we would add, he plays the props and the scenery, too.

  The tour was cut short when Richard got the news that his grandmother Marie had suffered a stroke. Richard rushed to her bedside at his house in Northridge where she had been staying.

  He had to face the fact that it was time to take her home to Peoria.

  —————

  Marie died some weeks later, in mid-December, at Methodist Medical Center. Richard fell apart. Relatives struggled to pry his hand loose from hers as he cried and shook “like a rag doll.” When they had succeeded in dragging him out of her hospital room, he broke loose and ran back, crying, “Everything I’ve had and everything I’ve got is gone.”

  Mama Marie had been the one person he could always turn to. Even after he got to be a big star, she always called bullshit on him. She never tried to flatter him or win favor. But neither did she ever relinquish her role as his “mama.”

  Richard unnerved his young daughters, Elizabeth and Rain, on the trip back to Los
Angeles. “I just don’t see how I can go on,” he told them. “Nothing means shit no more.” (Probably not the best thing to tell one’s nine- and eleven-year-old daughters, Rain allows, “but I guess he needed to tell someone and we were handy.”)

  It took him years, according to friends, to come to grips with Mama Marie’s death. Rain is not certain he ever got over the loss.

  Yet it could not have been more than a week or two after she died that Richard, at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach, California, on December 28, 1978, gave what is considered the greatest performance of his life. Or, if you accept the judgment of critic Pauline Kael, the greatest performance of anyone’s life.

  —————

  Cameras were rolling as people milled in the aisles and chatted in the lobby during the intermission that followed Patti LaBelle’s opening act. Without introduction and the house lights still up, Richard bounded out across the stage and, with a great leap, seized the microphone from its stand as he landed on both feet with a loud thump that sounds, on film, to our ears, like the signal rim shot that opens “Like a Rolling Stone.”

  Richard performed the act he had honed to perfection on tour the previous autumn. He began by goofing with those in the audience as they scurried back to their seats, and he never let up or even settled into anything that felt like a practiced routine. The one time he paused to catch his breath, Richard asked that the house lights be turned up so that he could introduce an old friend in the audience. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “Mr. Huey P. Newton.” Maddeningly, the camera did not pivot to capture the moment when Huey half stood and waved to the crowd, in the unlikely event he actually did.

  For an hour and fifteen minutes Richard riffed on his troubles with the law, his recent heart attack, and how his machismo was undone by the mysteries of the female orgasm. Richard relied on none of his seasoned characters—there was no Oilwell or Big Bertha, no sermons from Reverend Du Rite or Mudbone monologues to fall back on—just pure, uncut Richard Pryor. Working entirely without props, gimmicks, or excuses,” Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “he creates a world so intensely realized and richly detailed that it puts most million-dollar blockbusters to shame.” When the resulting movie, Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, was released to theatres just one month later, David Handelman, writing in the New York Times Magazine, called it his “indisputable moment of glory.” Not only is Richard Pryor: Live in Concert the crown jewel of stand-up comedy movies, it was also the first. Never before had a feature-length stand-up concert film received a theatrical release. Which seems fitting, in the same way that Henry Aaron, the last major leaguer to have played in the Negro Leagues, remains the first player listed in the alphabetical Encyclopedia of Baseball.