Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  DEDICATION

  * * *

  TO MAX

  EPIGRAPH

  * * *

  A trickster does not live near the hearth; he does not live in the halls of justice, the soldier’s tent, the shaman’s hut, the monastery. He passes through each of these when there is a moment of silence, and he enlivens each with mischief, but he is not their guiding spirit. He is the spirit of the doorway leading out, and of the crossroad at the edge of town (the one where a little market springs up).

  —Lewis Hyde, TRICKSTER MAKES THIS WORLD

  The world around us is crumbling to make way for new life.

  —Richard Pryor, in a 1977 interview

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  PART ONE: UP FROM PEORIA

  CHAPTER 1 Dangerous Elements

  CHAPTER 2 The Backside of Life

  CHAPTER 3 The Law of the Lash

  CHAPTER 4 Glow, Glow Worm, Glow

  CHAPTER 5 The Boot

  CHAPTER 6 The Measure of a Man

  PART TWO: MAN OF A THOUSAND RUBBER FACES

  CHAPTER 7 In Search of Openness

  CHAPTER 8 Mr. Congeniality

  CHAPTER 9 An Irregular Regular

  CHAPTER 10 The Person in Question

  PART THREE: IN THE HOUSE OF PAIN

  CHAPTER 11 The King Is Dead

  CHAPTER 12 Black Sun Rising

  CHAPTER 13 Irreconcilable Differences

  CHAPTER 14 I’m a Serious Mother

  PART FOUR: KING OF THE SCENE STEALERS

  CHAPTER 15 The More I Talk, the Less I Die

  CHAPTER 16 Black Goes First

  CHAPTER 17 Be Glad When It’s Spring, Flower

  CHAPTER 18 Number One with a Bullet

  PART FIVE: THE FUNNIEST MAN ON THE PLANET

  CHAPTER 19 Every Nigger Is a Star

  CHAPTER 20 Hustling

  CHAPTER 21 A Man of Parts

  CHAPTER 22 Giving Up Absolutely Nothing

  CHAPTER 23 Can I Speak to God Right Away?

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Scott Saul

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  * * *

  On Monday, March 19, 2007, at 11:00 a.m., I drove up a hill to the parking lot of the Phillip and Sala Burton Academic High School, where I took in a startling view of San Francisco from its southeastern corner. The public radio station KALW was housed within one wing of the school; I had an appointment to meet Alan Farley, a KALW DJ who, thirty-six years earlier, had been Richard Pryor’s housemate in Berkeley.

  Farley welcomed me to the station. His face was framed by a full head of white hair that he parted down the middle; he spoke with the silky grace of an experienced DJ and the quavering tones of a man in his seventies. Farley was one of those intercessors whom biographers dream of finding. He had stuck close to Pryor in 1971, recording for posterity everything he could and carefully labeling and dating each reel-to-reel tape. At KALW, he spread out before me eight hours of unreleased Richard Pryor recordings. I couldn’t take them home, but was allowed to listen to them in Farley’s presence and make notes. As I recall, Farley spent much of his downtime that afternoon lying on the radio station floor—he was suffering just then from a debilitating attack of gout—while I tapped out page after page of notes on my laptop.

  My listening session with Farley was the culmination of a two-month quest to figure out what had happened during Pryor’s enigmatic, if crucial, sojourn in the Bay Area. Pryor himself declared that he’d reinvented himself in Berkeley, experimenting with his act as never before, but he was fuzzy with the details. His previous biographers couldn’t even agree on when he landed in the Bay Area. They placed his arrival somewhere between 1969 and 1971—somewhere between, that is, his beginnings as a winsome comedian in the mold of Bill Cosby and his breakthrough as the most fearless stand-up comic of the 1970s.

  Since I was based in Berkeley, I’d begun my Pryor research by delving into this mystery. I interviewed those who had known him and scoured various archives for the traces he left. (It turned out that he spent seven months, February to September 1971, in the area.) I discovered that Pryor had DJ’ed a bit for KPFA, Berkeley’s Pacifica affiliate, and it was that station’s archives that led me to Farley; over the course of a ninety-minute interview, he revealed, among other things, that he still had his cache of Pryor-related tapes. So we arranged the rendezvous at KALW.

  The tapes offered a fascinating jumble of material. They encompassed Pryor’s programs on KPFA, his concerts at local clubs, his ideas for unproduced screenplays, his attempts at spontaneous poetry, and even an avant-garde sound collage. Listening to them over the course of a long afternoon, I could hear how Pryor, having come to Berkeley without a clear sense of his future, had absorbed the countercultural energies of his new home and tried out different versions of himself: serious actor, guerrilla filmmaker, poet, political satirist. His struggle was that of an artist searching for his true medium, not of a comedian polishing his material. He sparred with his audience; he riffed to himself; he spun out wild scenarios for films that seemed unfilmable. His Bay Area interlude, formerly hazy, now popped into focus. I felt I’d been raptured to Biographer Heaven.

  The “Farley tapes” launched me on a quest to understand Richard Pryor anew—a quest that has pulled in biographers before me and no doubt will pull in others in the future. A man burns himself up as he ascends to the sky: this is the myth of Icarus, the story of Richard Pryor, and a tale whose meaning begs to be unraveled. Pryor revolutionized American comedy with his improvisational approach, his frank talk about sex and race, and the psychological depth that he brought to the stand-up stage. Consigned to bit roles and cameos in Hollywood, he improvised his way, literally, to become a top box office draw and the most powerful black movie star of his time. Meanwhile, he led his life with the same incisive imagination that he poured into his comedy, and with the same gamut of troubling emotions. He was intensely memorable: those who spent time with him tend to spill over with stories about this or that incident, quip, or cutting remark. And since Pryor’s comedy was frequently autobiographical (in fact, he might be said to have initiated the autobiographical turn in stand-up comedy), there’s a justifiable sense that the secret to his genius must be located within the story of his life. We long to know how he turned the confusions of his life into the complexities of his act—and how the brilliance of the act was not enough to save him.

  At the same time, Pryor has proved to be an elusive quarry for the biographer. For all his openness about his life onstage, he was guarded about the facts of it offstage. He hated the standard format of Q&A interviews. Often he refused to play it straight with reporters: asked about his comedic influences, he might offer up J. Edgar Hoover. During his heyday, he wanted to reserve for himself the prerogative to tell his own story on his own terms. Even late in his life, he had the same proprietary sensibility: when film critic Elvis Mitchell tried pitching a major Pryor biography to publishers in 2004, an ailing Pryor announced he would scoop him by pitching a second memoir of his own.

  Pryor’s earlier biographers ran into another sort of wall when they tried to fill out his story by approaching his family with questions about his background. Pryor’s elder relations were tight-lipped with outsiders to the family—a habit of circumspection they’d acquired from years of operating in Peoria’s underground economy, where much business was kept off the books. When, in 1983, the Pryor biographer John A. Williams hired a pr
ivate detective in Peoria to get his bearings on the world of the Pryors, the detective warned him off the enterprise and confessed that he’d found little. “It’s hard to get information from these people,” he said. “It’s hard even to find them.”

  Given the caginess of the family and of Pryor himself, earlier accounts of his life left unexplored the space between how Pryor understood his life as it unfolded and how we readers might understand it in the fullness of history; the legends of his life tended to be burnished rather than scrutinized and investigated. John A. Williams was the one early biographer who challenged Pryor’s own account of his life, refusing to take it on faith. He wouldn’t believe, for instance, that Pryor grew up in brothels unless he could independently confirm the fact. He tried to contact the Pryor family; they rebuffed him. He tried to find a record of the Pryor “family business” in the Peoria Journal Star and city directories, and came up short. So he came to question this most basic fact of Pryor’s childhood. It was a bold stand—and a wrong one, as my own research has established. But it’s easy to understand why, given the smokescreen he passed through, Williams might have suspected that there was, in fact, nothing to see beneath it—that the smoke was all there was.

  This book is different from other Pryor biographies. It’s different partly because it was written in a different, freer moment than the earlier ones that were published in Pryor’s prime. By the time I began my research in 2007, the elder Pryors had passed away, as had Richard Pryor himself, and any statute of limitations had run out on the illegalities of the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. Younger relatives of Pryor, such as his two half-sisters, were willing to share their memories. And there were many more people, friends and lovers and collaborators of Pryor, who wanted to talk, too—to fill in the gaps in Pryor’s own account of his life, or add a missing dimension, or dispute some piece of it. This book is built, in no small part, on the memories of the eighty-some people I have interviewed, many of whom were generous enough to speak for hours, and often over several days, about Pryor. From the person who literally shared a crib with Pryor to the musicians who played behind him at his first club dates; from those who acted alongside him in Hollywood to those who tried to build a life with him—these were my sources, and their contribution to this book has been essential.

  The book is different, too, because it approaches Pryor as a historical figure and uses a historian’s tools to reconstruct his life and unpack its meaning. Pryor and his family were powerfully dramatic people, and the drama of their lives left an extensive paper trail—though often the documents were not so easy to locate. I needed to constellate my own “Pryor archive,” since Richard Pryor, for all his gifts, was not exactly the most punctilious record keeper; he left no set of papers on deposit. To fill out the story of Pryor’s early years, I combed through old issues of newspapers like the Decatur Herald, the Peoria Journal Star, and the Chicago Defender; I asked the Peoria county clerk to dig up the divorce records of Pryor’s parents and any records of criminal proceedings that involved his family; I procured, with the help of his widow Jennifer and the respective registrars, Pryor’s school and army records.

  Though a few intervals in Pryor’s life remain less documented (for instance, his time on the road in 1962), these were the great exceptions. From the time he began performing as a comic in New York City in 1963, Pryor generated copy—whether in the press, the diaries of those who knew him, the archives of the film productions he worked on, or the files of the Los Angeles district attorney and the FBI.

  With these materials in hand, I could follow Pryor’s life from month to month and sometimes even day to day. The chronology of his life, formerly nebulous, could be clarified immensely; inflection points—for example, the moment he began speaking publicly of growing up in a brothel—could be isolated. Just as important, I could now place him within the larger tides of history: the boom of the home front during World War II, the struggle to desegregate the Midwest in the 1950s, the burgeoning of underground culture in mid-1960s Greenwich Village, the rise of the Black Power movement, the opening of “New Hollywood” in the 1970s, and so on. Filled out by these larger histories, Pryor’s story took on a new resonance. He could be seen both as the exceptional comic genius he was and as a bellwether of the great changes that defined postwar American life, some of which he helped incite.

  Finally, this book is different because it aims to trace, meticulously, Pryor’s evolution as an artist. A recent documentary film on Pryor took the subtitle Omit the Logic, as if his life were disjointed to the point of absurdity. I beg to differ: though Pryor’s life was certainly tumultuous—full of extreme swings of mood and violent reversals of fortune—it can, and does, make sense. Pryor developed as an artist in step with the times he lived through and the circles he inhabited. Many critics and audience members, at their first experience of Pryor, might have wondered, “Where did this man come from?,” but the essential truth is that he didn’t come out of nowhere. He was, first, a product of Peoria, Illinois, and of a family that was shrewd, loving, and bruising—a family of survivors. As he grew from a child into an artist, he kept himself open to everything (an important source of his genius as a performer). He learned from whoever could provide him inspiration, whether it was a garrulous wino on the street or a drama teacher at a community center, whether Jerry Lewis or Bill Cosby, Huey Newton or Mel Brooks.

  In this book, I trace Pryor’s artistic education up to that point, in the late 1970s, when the roles were definitively reversed—and he became the teacher from whom everyone else learned. Another sort of biography would cover the last, sobering years of Pryor’s life more dutifully. I’ve chosen to focus on those hungry decades when Pryor was wondering who he might become and when no one, least of all Pryor himself, could anticipate what would happen next.

  PROLOGUE

  * * *

  My grandmother is the lady who used to discipline me,” says a slender man in his late thirties, wearing a collarless red satin shirt, black slacks, and gold shoes. “You know, beat my ass,” he finishes with a chuckle. His face flickers between the confident look of a storyteller in control of his audience and the haunted look of a child who recalls how he was beaten more than why. Before him, at Long Beach’s Terrace Theater, sits a crowd of three thousand. They’re watching what will become, after the film is released, the most celebrated stand-up comedy performance of all time: Richard Pryor: Live in Concert.

  “Anyone here remember those switches?” the comedian asks his audience. “You used to have to go get the tree yourself and take them leaves like that?” A roar of “yeah!” comes back at him. He demonstrates by reaching upward and groping to strip off a branch, suddenly a little boy agonizing over the task before him. For the rest of the sketch he’ll flip effortlessly, with a jazzy rhythm, between boy and man.

  “I see them trees today,” he says, “I will kill one of them motherfuckers. I will stop the car—say, ‘Wait, hold it.’” He strides over to the microphone stand and starts throttling it with a rage that’s absurd—arbicidal. “‘You ain’t never gonna grow up. You won’t be beating nobody’s ass.’”

  Then he pauses, returning to the perversity of his past and finding some belated pleasure in it: “That’s some hell of psychology—to make you go get a switch to beat your own ass with, right? My grandmother said, ‘Boy, go get me somethin’ to beat your ass with.’ And that would be the longest walk in the world.”

  He pivots so the crowd can see him in profile, a boy inching forward with a frozen look of fear on his face. “You be thinking all kind of shit ’cause you know you done fucked up, Jack,” he says. The boy turns his eyes upward as if in prayer, and whimpers, “‘Maybe it’ll snow before I get there. Maybe she’ll have a heart attack and won’t be able to whup me. I don’t want to get no whuppin’ ’cause it’s going to tear it up.’”

  “You get them switches and they start cutting the wind on the way home. Make you start crying before you get in the house,” the comic says.


  Shwoo-shwoo.

  “Ma-ma!” The boy’s whimper has opened into a full-on wail.

  Shwoo-shwoo.

  “‘Ma-ma! I don’t want. . . . Mama, please! Mama, please!’” The boy starts darting from one place to another, cowering while dodging blows that seem to rain over his entire body. “Mamapleasemamapleasemamaplease!” he howls, his voice the same pitch as a baby’s scream.

  At this point the routine takes the less expected tack. It would be easy for the comic, looking back at the beatings that framed his childhood, to paint his grandmother as the villain of this tale. He does not. When he plays her, his voice assumes a honeyed drawl, a more confident register, as if he were relishing her strength.

  “‘Get your ass out of bed!’” his grandmother hollers when the boy tries to escape her wrath by putting himself to bed early. “‘Put your hand down! Don’t you run from me! Don’t you run from me!’” Then, giving one downward clout to her grandson’s body with every syllable: “‘Long . . . as . . . you . . . black, don’t . . . you . . . run . . . from . . . me!’” The crowd roars at this last line—at the wallop of it, the double truth about the boy’s life it relays. Try as he might, there’s no outrunning the twin forces of his fate, the squeeze of his race and the squeeze of his grandmother’s discipline.

  The next morning, the boy faces the woman who struck him, and is given a lesson in the peculiarity of love. “‘Morning, Mama,’” he says softly, his mouth fixed in a grimace from the welt that has taken over his face. “‘Come here, baby,’” she says, then looks at his bruises tenderly, fixing them up. “‘You see, you shouldn’t do that, goddamn it. I told you not to—just sit still now.’” She’s still administering to the bruises when Richard Pryor delivers the last line of the sketch in her voice: “‘And next time you do it, I’m going to tear your ass up again.’”