I know this makes me sound incredibly square, but once we had a comedian you’ve never heard of auditioning who took out a cigarette and removed some of the tobacco to make it look like a joint. Then he proceeded to light it onstage and began doing some sort of routine about pot. Naturally, that’s what I thought he was smoking, even though there was no odor to suggest he was.
Even so, I immediately became suspicious. My first impulse was to grab the Louisville Slugger I kept for protection behind the bar. Slamming it down on the table as hard as I could, I screamed, “That’d better be a real cigarette!” I’m still not sure if it was or it wasn’t, but I do know that I scared the living shit out of this guy. As soon as I yelled at him, he bolted like a scared rabbit through the fire exit door onto West 44th Street and I never saw him again after that.
But getting back to Richard Pryor, he was a good friend of David Astor’s, which I didn’t discover until many years later. Like George Carlin and Joan Rivers, who only came in a handful of times, Richard was already a regular at places like the Village Gate and the Cafe Wha? on MacDougal Street, where the owner, Manny Roth, had become his first manager shortly after Richard moved to New York in 1963.
Somewhere in between, Richard met David, and along with Ron Carey—who later appeared in a series of Mel Brooks films and as New York City police officer Carl Levitt on TV’s Barney Miller—they did an improvisational act for us on Friday and Saturday nights. Ron, too, was an extraordinarily gifted comedian, particularly when it came to physical comedy and characterization, and together the three of them were brilliant. We had this one little microphone that was barely audible and Dave would sit in the corner and tell a story, which Ron and Richard would act out.
All three of them were terrific together and alone. However, Richard, without a doubt, was the most magnetic, and we all knew he was special from the beginning. He was also already a force to be reckoned with as well as a solo performer, even though his material initially was still far less controversial than what was to come. And one-on-one he could be absolutely charming. Still, his well-known volatility could also surface at any moment without warning.
One night, he stormed into the club high as a kite and accused me of taking advantage of him and not paying him because he was black. When he said it, I was stunned. After I told Silver about this later that evening, her reaction was that I should have told him I took advantage of all performers, regardless of race, color, or creed—meaning that none of them were getting paid.
About six months later, he came back very contritely to apologize and nothing more was ever said. We even exchanged manly hugs, and on this particular evening he was with a very attractive-looking black woman. It was the first time I had ever seen him with a female companion who wasn’t white, although he was also there to pick up one of my white waitresses, a woman named Paula Best, whose father, Larry, was a well-known Catskills comedian.
As I look back at my relationship with Richard, I think that it was the confluence of both of those temperaments—not to mention the fact that he remains to this day the funniest comedian of all time—that always endeared him to me. For those who knew him both at the Improv and outside of the Improv, I truly believe this is how most of them feel as well.
DAVID STEINBERG, comedian, director, actor, writer, and talk-show host:
By the time he got to the Improv, Richard had pretty much mastered his political radicalism. He was always dangerous after that.
ROBERT KLEIN:
Not long after I got to the club, we did a lot of improvs there a la Second City, and Pryor could be very sweet. He also paid me the greatest compliment once when he said we got our material the same way. I’m paraphrasing here, but one night at the club he took me aside and said, “You know, we’re alike in a way, because it all comes off our head. We make faces.” And you know what? He was absolutely right. I mean, my comedy isn’t like Richard Pryor’s, but the process of how we got from point A to point B was essentially equal.
JACK KNIGHT, actor, longtime friend of Budd’s, and Improv stockholder:
At the time he was performing at the Improv in New York, Richard was just like the rest of us. He wasn’t a star, although he was beginning to get known because of his outspokenness. It was like whatever came into his head came out of his mouth and there was absolutely no filter.
PHOEBE DORIN:
Richard Pryor was a doll. I thought he was absolutely adorable even though he was also a huge dichotomy who hated everything and everybody but still wanted to be loved. The first time I met him was when he came over to my table to talk to me. It wouldn’t get busy until after midnight because that’s when people started coming in, but the waitresses had to be there early to set everything up. Once you were done, though, you could sit and schmooze before it got busy, and I remember Richie coming in and just riffing before he went onstage.
He would talk to us about his childhood growing up in a brothel in Peoria, Illinois, and honest to God, I don’t know how he survived. He saw an awful lot of shit. What might have shocked me as a little Jewish girl that grew up in a sheltered environment, Richard embraced his background out of necessity and turned it into comedy gold.
BUDDY MANTIA:
Richard was one of the very first comedians I ever saw at the Improv. His comedic mind was so sharp and so brilliant that he could have you doubled over laughing one minute and in tears the next. I also think he could have been as funny without the booze and drugs. The ideas were all there. They came from the way he grew up, not a drug state.
CARL REINER, writer, actor, director, and producer:
Absolutely, unequivocally, there was no one like Pryor. He was maybe the most brilliant comedy mind ever. Not only was he an incredible performer, his ideas were just off the charts and he was his own writer. Even though he had writers, I don’t think he ever necessarily needed them.
JERRY STILLER, comedian and actor:
Richie Pryor came on with a bang. Let’s put it that way. Before he became famous, we all looked at it with a little bit of shock. What rescued him, of course, was the fact that he could pull it off because he was funny.
MARTY NADLER:
We did a lot of improvs at the Improv, and on one such occasion in the early seventies, I was onstage with Richard and Steve Landesberg, who later went on to fame on the sitcom Barney Miller. I can’t exactly recall what the setup was, but right in the middle of it, Richard pulled out a switchblade and held it against Steve’s throat. There’s not much to tell other than we were speechless—and scared shitless—but we kept going and nothing happened. It was just Richard being Richard.
DANNY AIELLO:
Here’s the weird thing about Richard—and how or when we became close, I don’t know. I mean, I was always bowled over by his talent as a comedian and I always respected his honesty onstage, although I don’t ever recall a time when we sat down and discussed our friendship. To the best of my knowledge, I don’t think we ever once hung out together outside of the Improv. But somehow, not too long after my daughter Stacey was born, Richard found out she was about to be baptized and he offered to be the godfather. He was completely serious about it even though it never happened because he was working. However, the fact that he offered was interesting. It was an incredibly kind gesture and the last thing in the world I ever expected.
JOHN DEBELLIS, screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, and author of Standup Guys: A Generation of Laughs:
Pryor’s years at the Improv predate mine, but I remember him coming into the New York club one night in the late seventies when he was the biggest star in comedy and sitting down at a table. Then he got up and left after about ten or fifteen minutes but not before leaving two crisp one-hundred-dollar bills for a tip. I’m not sure why he did it, but we were all in awe and I just remember being amazed by his generosity. Richard was like a god to all of us.
HOWIE MANDEL:
Pryor was the first guy I saw that showed us that the Improv and these other comedy clubs w
ere great gymnasiums. He was the first one that made this really clear because whenever he came in, it wasn’t just to perform. He was also there to write and experiment, which meant that even at his worst, he was better than most because he was willing to take chances.
BYRON ALLEN, television executive and former comedian:
Seeing Richard perform live was the first time I saw a comedy rock star in the flesh. Picture it. I’m a kid, Richard Pryor comes through, and he’s got these comedy albums. Then he shows up and people are going bananas. They’re screaming for him like he’s Elvis. They’re like hanging off the side of the building.
Then he goes onstage, they announce him, and they go even crazier. He probably gets a five-minute standing ovation going to the stage. But then he gets up there and he won’t repeat any material that he has on the album—Mudbone and the monkey fucked me in the ear, all that kind of stuff. He just didn’t do any of that and he bombed night after night. And then all of a sudden, ninety minutes of absolute brilliance and that’s the ninety minutes of Richard Pryor: Live in Concert. He overcame the pressure of people screaming his name like he was one of the Beatles. He literally bombed, but he kept doing it until he worked out that new material, which was amazing to watch.
BOB SAGET, comedian, actor, and television host:
Watching Richard live was like seeing Obi-Wan Kenobi. It was him being honest about what he was going through and that was always the most astonishing thing to watch.
LIZ TORRES, comedian, actor, singer, and former New York Improv waitress:
Once he became famous, nobody wanted to go on after Richard because he would get up there and just absolutely destroy the crowd. He also liked to come in late when hardly anyone was there, which is when I preferred going on also, despite the fact that by this point in the evening most everyone would be squirming in their seats and asking for their checks so they could leave. The reason why I liked performing then was because I sang and did comedy, and I had this trick where I could turn the room around and get their attention back by mixing things up and doing both.
Richard absolutely loved that and he wouldn’t go on if I wasn’t there. What he’d do is finish his set, then leave the club, circle around the block, and come back in just as I was going onstage so I could see him. He said he liked seeing me turn the room around, which I thought was the biggest compliment in the world coming from him.
One night, he was at the club when there was practically no one else in the audience, and Budd came over to me and said, “Get up and do something.” So I did, and I was right in the middle of my set when I looked over towards the VIP section and saw Richard sitting by himself drinking a Courvoisier. But instead of watching me, he was hunched over the table scribbling something into a notebook. A few minutes later, Budd asked Richard to go on, which he did, even though he was drunk and stoned. When he got up onstage, he said, “Tonight, I’m going to recite some poetry.”
The next thing I knew, he opened up the notebook and started reciting the most incredible romantic poetry I had ever heard in my life. I swear, what Richard did that night was on a level with Byron or Keats. He didn’t pause or hesitate for a second, and it was literally coming out of his pores like music. As soon as he started reading it, the room got completely quiet and all I could think of was the fact that there was hardly anybody there to appreciate it. This went on for like fifteen or twenty minutes. He had the entire room in the palm of his hand, and I’d never seen anything like it. Then he got offstage, put the notebook back on the table, and went over to the bar to order another drink—at which point I made a beeline for the notebook only to discover there was nothing in it. I will never forget that night. Never. Richard Pryor absolutely blew me away.
MICHELE LEE:
I had a childhood friend named Suzie visiting me in New York from Los Angeles, and one night we went to the Improv when Richard was on. Afterwards he came and sat at our table, and after suddenly realizing or noticing that Suzie was new in town, he looked at us and said, “Come on. I’m going to take you girls for a ride. You’re going to see New York.” He was a complete gentleman about it, and the next thing we knew we were in Central Park sitting in a horse-driven carriage—and where, for the next hour or so, we rode around the park with Richard acting as our tour guide and pointing out all these buildings.
Of course, half of what he told us was made up, but it was a very special night. We were great friends at the Improv, although we didn’t remain that close after he became a superstar. At the time I knew him, I wasn’t particularly aware of his drug use or any of his other vices. But in my head I always knew he was a little crazy, and I was attracted to that.
TOM DREESEN, comedian, actor, writer, and producer:
Pryor and I connected right away because we basically grew up in the same kind of neighborhood even though I’m from the South Side of Chicago and he was from Peoria. So we had that in common right off the bat and we became good friends even though I wasn’t his Ace Boon Coon. When I was going to record my album That White Boy’s Crazy in front of an all-black audience, Richard wanted me to call it That Honky’s Crazy because he’d done That Nigger’s Crazy. The only reason I didn’t—and I told him this—I said, “Richard, no black guy has ever called me honky in my life.” They called me white boy by affection, and to this day they still do.
PART TWO
TWELVE
Revelry and Rivalry
BILL WEEDEN, actor:
I’m not sure what the ratio was, but by the time I got there in the early 1970s with my performing partner David Finkle, there was still a fairly even mix of singers and comics. David and I had been collaborating ever since we were prep-school classmates at Andover, which we continued to do at Yale and then at various clubs in New York after we graduated.
Budd had seen us at a place called The Duplex after reading a review in the New York Times, and he invited us to come to the Improv immediately after that. Since David and I sang comedy songs, we were in a really good position because he could put us in between the comedians and keep the laughs coming but still have music. It was the best of both worlds and it guaranteed us a lot of prime-time action.
While sporadic, Richard Pryor’s appearances continued into the 1970s as his star rose and more comedians came in. At the time, The Tonight Show and The Ed Sullivan Show were the two most important vehicles for launching comics. Both originated from New York, and by extension, the number of both new and established performers we had showing up to try and get seen by the people who booked these shows also increased nightly, forcing the singers to share the stage—and sometimes breeding resentments.
To say that it was a near-constant power struggle in which attempts to upstage one another weren’t uncommon is putting it mildly. In fact, one of the earliest and most notorious incidents involved Richard Pryor himself.
LIZ TORRES:
Perhaps hate is a strong word, but let’s just say there was no love lost between the comedians and singers, especially after the comics started to dominate. There was this one time that we had a female singer onstage when Richie was there. Right in the middle of her set as I was serving drinks, he waved me over and said, “Watch this.”
I said, “Okay.” Well, right about then he went into the men’s room, which was right behind me, and I returned to the table I was serving. When Richard came back out about five minutes later, he was completely nude—although not totally naked because he still had his tie and shoes on. But other than that, you could see the whole enchilada. Anyway, he walked past me and up onto the stage—where he then proceeded to stand right in front of her for about a minute before going back into the men’s room, getting dressed, and returning to the bar to finish his drink. Now here’s the amazing part: As Richard was parading around in front of her, the singer continued her song as if nothing happened. She didn’t blink.
SILVER SAUNDORS FRIEDMAN:
The streaking incident with Pryor happened a year after we’d been open. At that point, he was
still doing a lot of clean material so this was before he really became Richard Pryor. We were having a party to celebrate our first anniversary, and the name of the singer that night was Betty Rhodes. Richard was also on the roster and around one in the morning, he decided to go parading around the club in his birthday suit. He made a loop around the entire room, which wasn’t that big then, and made his way towards the stage. Although I tried not to stare, I couldn’t help myself and after looking at his exposed genitalia, I turned towards Budd. I said, “There goes another myth.”
JOHN MEYER:
Actually, Betty Rhodes, who was my girlfriend at the time, originated that line and Silver appropriated it, unless they said it at the same time. What happened was, we were there that night and Betty was singing, with me accompanying her on the piano. Her big number back then was “I Happen to Like New York” by Cole Porter. I know that it was a great night because we were celebrating the club’s first anniversary and everyone was in a wonderful mood.
Anyway, Betty was in the middle of her act about halfway through, and Richard Pryor was sitting at the bar, when all of the sudden he took his clothes off and began streaking diagonally across the floor. I don’t know what he thought he was accomplishing except to draw attention to himself, which he did. So Betty just said, “Well, he just made a liar out of a legend,” and then she went right back to her song.
The Improv Page 9