Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  “I was raised to hate cops,” Richard Pryor once told a journalist. “We ran a whorehouse, and I was raised to not trust police.” But through the 1940s, Marie, like other madams in Peoria, appears to have reached an accommodation with the authorities, who gave her free rein to run her business as she saw fit. Richard remembered that, during election season, “all the political people would come to the whorehouse to try to win votes, to tell all the whores that there wouldn’t be no busts and shit like that.” Woe betide the rookie cop who decided to take down Marie. According to family legend, Marie’s brothel was once raided by a group of young policemen who were unaware that the house was off-limits. “As fast as they would come in,” remembered family friend Cecil Grubbs, “she would throw them out the door. She said, ‘You tell your chief, you don’t go bothering me.’ And before they could get back to the station, she’d been there, talking to the chief, and her place wasn’t bothered anymore.”

  Marie’s toughness and working relationship with the cops might have been savored, from a distance, as the stuff of family lore, but the scene was considerably uglier up close. One of Richard’s neighbors recalled being devastated, as a young girl, by what she saw on the sidewalk of North Washington Street, right in front of Marie’s brothel. Marie was whaling with her fists on the body of a black woman, most likely one of her prostitutes. Buck the boxer was standing on the sidelines. The woman would struggle to get up; Marie would knock her back down, hard enough to draw blood. As this one-sided melee unfolded, a police car rolled down the street and continued on its way; Marie kept whaling. Looking on, the young girl cried uncontrollably.

  Even in Peoria, where the red-light district was integrated into the political and social life of the city, it was no place for the tender emotions of a child.

  The historical record sheds only a bit of light on the background of Richard Pryor’s mother, Gertrude Thomas. Unlike the paternal side of Pryor’s family, the maternal side kept clear of the law and left few traces. Born in 1919, Gertrude spent her first years on a farm in the small eastern Illinois township of Pilot, where her father, Robert, worked land that he did not own. As the Great Depression deepened, Gertrude’s family was part of the migration off of farms and toward cities, leaving Pilot for Springfield, Illinois. Her father started working, like her future husband, as a chauffeur. Though her family was part of the working poor, Gertrude was likely exposed in Springfield to a more glamorous lifestyle. Her father’s employer lived in the tony neighborhood of Leland Grove and was the business manager and personnel director of Illinois’s State Division of Highways, administering one of the larger money pots in Illinois government. A more attainable sort of glamour was on display at Rosalie’s, a two-story brothel with a black madam and black prostitutes, a few blocks away from Gertrude’s home. En route to her high school, Gertrude would have passed Rosalie’s and noted the spectacle: the deep red paint of the house, the neon sign with a red rose, the girls dressed in the latest fashions.

  Around 1939, the Thomas family relocated to Peoria: Gertrude’s father found work there as a driver. The twenty-year-old Gertrude struck out on her own and took a room in a fateful location downtown: across the street from the apartment building where two of Marie’s children, Maxine and Dickie, were staying. She was launching herself in the world, and it’s likely that they introduced her to Marie as a girl who could work in her brothel. Gertrude was light-skinned, small if solid, and moon-faced, with sad, expressive eyes. An added bonus, from Marie’s point of view, may have been that she was fresh from Springfield: Peoria madams preferred to take their girls from out of town. In Marie’s brothel, Gertrude reportedly took on the professional name of Hildegarde, a nod to the elegant supper club singer of the period.

  And what did Gertrude see in front of her when she met her future husband, Buck? The twenty-four-year-old son of the madam who was bringing her into the business; a tall man with the muscled body of a former boxer, now settling a bit; heavy-lidded eyes that rested all their weight on whatever they focused on; a well-trimmed mustache over a mouth that, at least in photos, gave out a thin smile. The various features added up to a man, good with his hands, who enjoyed his vices, did not deny them for himself, and radiated a hustler’s tough confidence. His softer side was expressed through his love of music: he adored the Ink Spots’ 1939 ballad “If I Didn’t Care,” and loved to sing it. Perhaps Buck wooed Gertrude as he wooed another woman who would carry his child, a year after Richard was born, by singing onstage at a local tavern.

  The two began sleeping together, and when Gertrude became pregnant and wanted to keep the baby, Buck let her. He did not have much choice: Marie took Gertrude’s side in the matter.

  Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor was born December 1, 1940, in Peoria’s St. Francis Hospital. There was no birth announcement in the local newspapers because Pryor’s parents were unmarried and the papers did not trumpet births that could not be attached to a “Mr.” and “Mrs.”

  The circumstances surrounding Richard’s arrival in the world remained a mystery to him later in life. “I wish I would’ve asked my mother more about how I came to be, but didn’t,” he admitted in his memoir. “Why didn’t you, Richard?” It’s easy to understand the older Richard’s frustration: he had only a fleeting relationship with his mother, Gertrude, and it was concentrated in the first five years of his life, when his memories were few and hazy. Raised by a grandmother who “made it her job to scare the shit out of people,” he could not help but wonder what it might have been like to grow up around someone whose oversize shoes were not always threatening to kick your ass.

  “At least Gertrude didn’t flush me down the toilet as some did,” Pryor reflected in a hard-bitten aside. “When I was a kid, I found a baby in a shoe box—dead. An accident to some, I was luckier than others, and that was the way it was.” As he was growing up, his father never let him forget that he was fortunate simply to have been taken in by the family. “I chose you, so be cool,” Buck repeatedly advised the young Richard. “You could be in an orphanage.” Buck’s other children—four more, by four different women—may not have been sent to orphanages, but neither were they raised within the family.

  A year after the baby arrived, the onset of World War II gave a great jolt to the family business. Caterpillar jumped into high gear, manufacturing tank transmissions, howitzer carriages, and bomb fuses; its tractors leveled the landscape of South Pacific islands for airstrips and cleared the rubble from London during the Blitz. Cash was everywhere on the table in Peoria. Factory hands had steady work again, and soldiers streamed in on weekend passes, looking to spend their wages on a good time. After the opening of nearby Camp Ellis in April 1943, that stream into Peoria became a deluge. There were so many soldiers sleeping off their hangovers on the courthouse lawn in the center of downtown that Peoria County opened up its jails and let the soldiers crash on beds brought from the camp.

  Politically, the war sharpened Peoria’s divides, emboldening the city’s “reform” elements while handing windfall profits to the operators of its red-light districts. Regional military officials noticed that soldiers were picking up venereal diseases on their lost Peoria weekends, and in early 1942, they threatened that the city would be denied defense contracts and declared “out of bounds” for soldiers and defense workers if its brothels were not padlocked. Peoria’s Junior Chamber of Commerce organized a mass meeting on the theme of “Why Peoria’s Vice District Must Go!” Venereal disease, chaplains declaimed, was a form of wartime sabotage on a par with Nazis wrecking machinery in defense plants. In response, the foxlike Mayor Woodruff practiced a strategy of public acquiescence and private obstruction. When the reform-minded city council passed ordinances closing brothels, Woodruff assented but kept the city’s health department and police from pursuing the work with any vigor. And even when judges clamped down on prostitution, levying a two-hundred-dollar instead of a five-dollar fine on brothel keepers, the local madams found a way to keep the profits rolling i
n. They jacked up their prices three- or fourfold, and the unlucky soldiers, who sometimes had not been to a city in two or three months, paid the new tariff. According to Richard Pryor, his grandmother had her own strategy for skimming a little extra from servicemen in her brothel: she’d ply them with liquor and turn up the heat in the winter months, then have a young boy like Richard search their combat boots for money while they were sound asleep.

  The war years were boom times for Marie and her family. A good number of Camp Ellis men were black, and so found their way to the block on North Washington Street where Marie ran her brothel. Soon she expanded her operation to include another brothel two doors down and a tavern on Adams Street just an alley away: men who came to the tavern looking for action could easily be funneled to one of her houses. She copped the tavern’s resonant name, the Famous Door, from a pair of well-known clubs in New Orleans and New York. The place might have been simple—a handful of tables, drinks but no food, a small bandstand—but it had aspirations. The family was joining together and going “legit,” carried there by the money sluicing around wartime Peoria. A photograph of the Famous Door, taken around 1945, is a family portrait—and perhaps the only surviving picture that places Richard’s mother, Gertrude, with his grandmother, father, uncle, and aunt. Framed in the center of the ensemble, Marie has the happiest face in the picture, one lit up with a den mother’s pride.

  Then Buck received his draft notice, and the war was more than just an economic godsend. Buck married Gertrude on December 24, 1943, in Peoria, seven days before he was inducted into the U.S. Army in Chicago; the Pryor family now claimed the three-year-old Richard officially. Buck and Gertrude were probably motivated, like so many wartime couples, by practical concerns as much as any desire to cement a romance. As a war bride, Gertrude would receive a fifty-dollar monthly allotment for herself and a twenty-dollar monthly allotment for their son; and if Buck were killed in the war, she would be the beneficiary of the army’s ten-thousand-dollar life insurance policy. Death in battle was a palpable threat: on their wedding day, the Peoria newspapers announced that Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had been selected to head up a second Western Front, a huge human mobilization that would be launched six months later, with the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

  The Pryor family at the Famous Door. Bottom row from left: Gertrude Thomas Pryor, Dee Pryor. Top row from left: unidentified woman, unidentified man, Marie Carter Bryant, Dickie Pryor, LeRoy “Buck” Pryor.

  (Courtesy of Barbara McGee)

  Buck did not last long as an enlisted man. Well before his time in the army, he had bristled against shows of discipline: as early as 1931, he was arrested in Decatur for disorderly conduct. The army was a poor match for a man of his temperament and ego. After seven months, in July 1944, it gave him a Section 8 discharge (“mentally unfit for service”) at the height of the military’s large-scale deployments in Europe and the Pacific. It was as if he had been declared unsuitable even as cannon fodder. One intriguing detail from the traces he left in Army records: Buck’s pay was docked for ten days of lost time. By whatever means—going AWOL, drinking too much, taking too many drugs—he had absented himself from his military obligations for that interval. Buck returned to Illinois with $68.72 in back pay, cut off from veteran’s benefits: no unemployment benefits, no education benefits, no home loans, no disability checks, no military burial—none of the entitlements that helped lift so many working-class veterans of World War II into the American middle class.

  Judging from his subsequent actions in Peoria, Buck didn’t come back from his tour of duty with much respect for military men. On the afternoon of February 12, 1945, a black sergeant from Camp Ellis was strolling down North Washington Street, a block from Marie’s brothels, with a billfold carrying $106 in cash. Buck and another man jumped him, dragged him into a sunken space off the sidewalk, pummeled him, and took his money, wristwatch, Ronson lighter, and pocketknife. Buck was indicted by a grand jury for assault and robbery. The sergeant had been staying at the exact address where Buck’s brother and sister let rooms, so it’s possible that Buck was tipped off to look out for the black soldier with a wallet stuffed with money.

  For the most part, Buck’s post-service violence was directed at a closer and easier target: his wife. They worked together at the Famous Door—Gertrude as a waitress, in a close-fitting white uniform; Buck as a bartender—but at home they fought constantly. Typically, in the heat of argument, he would knock her down, then leave the room with her still splayed on the floor. In the space of one month in late 1945, according to Gertrude’s divorce papers, Buck once struck her and kicked her in the face; once beat her so badly that she was “compelled to seek refuge with friends”; and once threw a chair at her before beating her face and body, again forcing her to take refuge. Gertrude’s flights went unexplained to the young Richard. Even later in life, he half-blamed his mother for abandoning him: “Gertrude drank a lot. She’d be home for six months or so, then one day she’d leave the house as if she was going to the store, say goodbye and be gone for six months. How’d that make you feel, Rich?”

  Though her divorce filing painted her as the victim of domestic abuse, Gertrude was sometimes capable of throwing a few punches herself. On at least one occasion, according to Richard, she managed to get the better of her husband through a supremely well-aimed swipe. Buck, wearing undershorts and a T-shirt, had been beating her in their bedroom, and finally Gertrude drew the line: “Okay, motherfucker, don’t hit me no more.” Buck hit her again. Gertrude shot back, “Don’t stand in front of me with fucking undershorts on and hit me, motherfucker”—and then, lightning-quick, she clawed his crotch. Buck ran to his mother’s brothel two doors down, and the four- or five-year-old Richard saw him bust in, his undershorts wet with blood, crying, “Mama! Mama!” The boy struggled to reconcile his father’s panic and his mother’s air of satisfaction. When, soon after, she hugged Richard and rubbed his head, she “confused my ass just by being so nice to me.”

  All told, Richard’s sentimental education was none too sentimental. Just as a young Marie and a young Buck had watched their respective parents go at it, so Richard now watched his parents do the same; he absorbed the message that love was tangled up in violence. He believed to the end that his father truly loved his mother: “He felt that deep kind of love that doesn’t ever do a person good, that ends up kicking you in the ass, leaving you crying and tormented.” This was love in the spirit of the blues—crazy love, love as damnation, love as possession by devils, with little tenderness to act as a countervailing force. Buck eventually admitted to Richard that “he was glad Gertrude had gone. He loved her so much, he said he probably would’ve killed her.”

  On December 31, 1945, Gertrude decided she’d had enough. She fled North Washington Street with her son, telling no one in the Pryor family where she was going. She wanted a clean break for both of them: no more Buck or Marie, or the family business. The Pryors scrambled to find her and Richard, to no avail: Gertrude was no longer in Peoria. Many days later, she disclosed her whereabouts—in Springfield, seventy miles away—when she filed a legal petition for divorce.

  The divorce was ugly, with the custody of the five-year-old Richard at the center of it and the two sides jousting for the judge’s sympathies. The stakes for Richard’s future were stark: would he end up with Gertrude and her parents on the rural outskirts of Springfield, sharing space with livestock, or would he remain with Buck and Marie, surrounded by the sex trade? The court battle was a curious shadow-puppet show where no one could mention the fact that they had all been involved in illegal activities—and, more specifically, that Buck’s family ran a brothel where Gertrude had worked. Both parties presented themselves to the judge as upstanding citizens and fine parents. In her suit, Gertrude claimed that she had “always conducted herself in a manner becoming an affectionate and virtuous wife,” while Buck had acted with “extreme and repeated cruelty.” She asked for custody and some financial relief.

  In his
counterclaim, Buck denied everything—that Gertrude had ever been compelled to leave for fear of her safety, that he had ever struck her on any of the days enumerated—and went on the offensive. Most likely he benefitted from the strategic counsel of Marie, who had learned in Decatur how to bend the law to her own use. Exploiting Gertrude’s professional life to undercut her suit, Buck argued that she had “committed adultery with divers other persons to your counter-plaintiff unknown.” (Notably, Buck alleged that she had committed adultery on the exact same day when, she claimed, he had struck her; he let the judge draw his own conclusions.) He labeled her an unfit mother, accusing her of child abandonment under cover of “taking refuge.” By leaving Peoria with Richard in tow, Buck argued further, she had essentially kidnapped the child. Last, he added that as an army veteran, he was a fit person to take custody of Richard.

  This final claim was simply too much for Gertrude. How could someone who’d been kicked out of the army draw upon the great reservoir of gratitude felt toward those who had served honorably? Her one formal response to Buck’s counterclaim was an “affidavit of non-military service” clarifying that Buck was no longer with the army. But Gertrude did not contest, on paper, the substance of Buck’s suit. She did not bring up, for instance, how he had fathered a child by another woman. Nor did she make what seems the most obvious claim for custody of her child: with her, Richard would not be raised inside a brothel.