Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  On March 26, 1946, Justice John T. Culbertson (a future Illinois Supreme Court judge) heard the case in Peoria County Circuit Court. Richard sets the scene vividly in his memoir: Buck and Marie dressed him up in his Sunday best and coached him to tell the judge that he wanted to stay with Marie, not Gertrude. In court, he remembered saying exactly that—“I’d like to be with my grandma, please”—and remembered feeling shattered by the experience. “I broke my mother’s heart,” he wrote. “But, Ma, I thought that they were going to kill me if I said that I wanted to live with you.”

  If Richard Pryor had ever consulted the records of his parents’ divorce, he would have discovered that this recollection—of betraying his mother and asking the judge to give custody to his father—was a trick of his memory. He thought he was ten at the time when, in fact, he was only five, and the testimony of a five-year-old child would hardly have been the decisive factor in awarding custody, then or now. (The judge’s three-page ruling does not mention Richard having any preference for his guardian.) In an even greater discrepancy, the judge’s decision stated that Richard was living in Springfield “at the present time.” If true, then it seems improbable that he was coached in any testimony by his father and grandmother, as he was not living with them before the court date.

  In his ruling, Judge Culbertson came down hard on Gertrude. Though there was generally a presumption, in custody battles, that the mother would be better fit to care for young children, Culbertson did not give Gertrude an inch of sympathy. Buck was a “true, loving, affectionate and dutiful husband”; Gertrude, an adulterer and a mother who had repeatedly deserted her child. Culbertson decried how, at the time of the hearing, Richard had been “abandoned” in Springfield, though most likely he was simply staying at the home of Gertrude’s parents. He awarded the full “custody, control and education” of Richard to Buck, and explicitly prohibited Gertrude from “any interference” in Richard’s upbringing; she had no visitation rights. After his ruling, Gertrude would be involved in her son’s life only at Buck’s discretion.

  It seems a curiously extreme ruling in retrospect. The testimony of the gentler parent was deemed a fraud; the testimony of the more abusive parent was taken on faith. Sole custody was given to a father who never found a way to talk to his son—a man whom Richard later summed up this way: “He had a child but he didn’t need a child.” But Culbertson was responding to the panic stirred up, at the tail end of World War II, by a perceived spike in adultery among war brides: in one notorious case, a sailor came home from the Pacific to discover another man wearing his old clothes and living with his wife and son. Such stories offered a quick explanation for a divorce rate without precedent in American history. In 1940, one in six marriages had ended in divorce; in 1946, with so many wartime marriages unraveling upon the husband’s return, the ratio stood at one in four. It was tempting to believe, as Culbertson simplified matters in his ruling, that the adultery of a wife like Gertrude was the root cause of a marriage falling apart, and that a man cuckolded was a man who deserved the indulgence of the court. To find the source of trouble, cherchez la femme.

  Why would Richard have fabricated a memory of having betrayed his mother in court? Possibly, at some point, his father or grandmother had suggested that he was living with them, not Gertrude, because he had chosen them, and that suggestion swelled into a story in the young child’s imagination. Or possibly, like many children of divorce, Richard felt that he was somehow at fault for the unhappiness of the parents, and so he invented a scene where he was responsible for his mother’s distress, grasping for a strange kind of power in a situation that made him feel powerless.

  It’s easy to understand, though, why Richard’s mind would have circled back to the courtroom and the judge’s decision to send him to his father and grandmother. It was the pivot point of his early childhood. It deprived him, for good, of his right to be a child, but gave him in return his material as an artist. “I got my bizarre sense of humor from the fact that I was scared,” he observed. Unlike his soft-edged mother, Buck and Marie were extraordinarily gifted at instilling fear; their livelihoods depended upon it.

  Instead of remaining on a farm next to a garbage dump, in a city that revolved around state government, Richard was headed back to Peoria, brothel bound.

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  The Law of the Lash

  Peoria, 1946–1952

  From an early age, Richard gravitated toward the movies, spending as much time as he could in the cool, dark sanctuary of Peoria’s downtown cinemas. The curtains would open at movie palaces like the Madison, Majestic, and the Rialto, and Richard would drift into his dream of being a leading man. In his mind, he assumed the lean of John Wayne, the musculature of Tarzan, the fiery look of Kirk Douglas, the uncanny force of Boris Karloff. He was promiscuous with his fantasies, quickly projecting himself into another place, another time, another persona. For an hour or two, it no longer mattered that his home life was chaos or that he was expected to sit in the back of the house just because he was black. His affection extended even toward a theater he called the Funky London, where cockroaches and rats vied for a nibble of his popcorn. “I used to live in the movie houses,” he remembered. “No movie opened that I didn’t sneak in to see.”

  In his pantheon of cinematic heroes, one star loomed largest: Lash LaRue. “I wanted to be just like him, I wanted to be him,” he said. Lash LaRue may have been the most unlikely leading man in 1940s Hollywood, and was certainly the odd man out when it came to Westerns of the time. Unlike John Wayne or Roy Rogers, LaRue dressed head to toe in black—black Stetson hat, black cape, black neckerchief, black shirt, black pants, black boots—and rode a black horse. He looked and sounded like Humphrey Bogart, bringing a city kid, gangster inflection to his roles on-screen. He had a gangster’s sense of style as well, cocking his Stetson at a jaunty angle and strutting in high-heeled boots. His eighteen-foot bullwhip, ever coiled above his six-shooter, was his weapon of choice. One flick of the wrist and—snap!—the whip would snatch a gun from the hand of a villain. Another flick and—snap!—the whip would loop around the legs of another villain and bring him to the dust. In “quality” Westerns, it was the villain who sported a whip, perhaps because a whip is less efficient than a gun and more of a plaything. LaRue was strictly B-grade, his heroics verging on camp. He was the sort of fellow who’d woo a lady by grabbing a bouquet of flowers for her—with his bullwhip.

  The young Richard found in Lash LaRue the perfect alter ego. Here was an actor whose everyday looks didn’t keep him from being a star; a man who could wear black from head to toe and punish his enemies brutally yet remain broadly sympathetic; a hero with so much panache that he punctured the seriousness of the films he starred in, turning them into parodies of themselves. (Fans of Blazing Saddles, take note.) Most of all, here was someone who, in claiming the whip hand himself, was never humiliated, never burned, by the sting of the lash.

  In the films Richard loved, violence had a purpose. In his home life, violence was often both senseless and inexplicable. One of his strongest memories of growing up in his grandmother’s brothel was of being woken in the middle of the night by screams, without knowing where they came from. Were his mother and father at each other’s throats again, or was one of his “aunties” getting roughed up by another strange man? It was so confusing, so bewildering, this world where screams could come from anywhere and mean anything or nothing, and where the people you loved were always disappearing behind closed doors.

  Marie specialized in score settling and ass whupping: when she wanted to, she was good at getting screams to stop. But she was not gifted at explaining her world to her grandson. His childhood was “hell,” Richard said, “because I had nobody to talk to.” When asked, by an interviewer in 1979, who cared for him, Richard answered, “Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor the Third.” Which is to say, no one but himself. “It was somehow assumed that I knew everything, maybe because I saw so much,” he wr
ote to himself in a late 1970s diary entry. “Things were told to me in a way that left me with the impression that I was not to ask again.” When his otherwise indomitable grandmother seemed to shrink at his questions, Richard reckoned with a child’s magical thinking that they must be extremely dangerous, capable of “bring[ing] down every whorehouse in this world.” He learned to keep his questions to himself.

  An irony for the annals of child rearing: the comic who later seemed most able to unzip his brain, without fearing what would spill out, grew up completely zipped. “It’s so much easier for me to talk about my life in front of two thousand people than it is one-on-one,” he reflected. “I’m a real defensive person because if you were sensitive in my neighborhood you were something to eat.” Something to eat, or something to be taken away by child services: Richard also lived in fear that, if anyone discovered he was growing up in a brothel, he would lose the only family he had. Though Marie had worked out an “understanding” with Peoria authorities, the young Richard still felt himself at risk. “You had to be an adult,” he recalled. “[Y]ou had to be very careful about what you said because the police might take you away at any moment.”

  Since he was not going to talk, Richard learned to observe, and observe closely. His grandmother’s brothel at 317 Washington had a “strange, dark, big feel” and “stood amid whole blocks of such places.” Formerly a dance hall, it sported a large central room where the girls lingered at its bay windows, exhibiting their wares. His grandmother’s girls would “peck on the windows with quarters—tap, tap, tap—for customers.” Cajolery would ensue: “Hello, it’s me, baby.” The customer would file in, partner up with the girl of his choice, then follow her upstairs to the bedrooms where Marie’s girls lived and worked.

  Starting around age four, Richard shared one of these bedrooms with “Pops,” Marie’s husband Thomas, so was well placed to peep and eavesdrop on the brothel’s more intimate goings-on. He knew there was secret knowledge there, and he sought it out by peeking through keyholes and peering over transoms, “watching things when I didn’t exactly know what they were.” Once, probably when he was around eight or nine, he scooched into a vent and watched a prostitute and her john “attack[ing] each other, humping and pumping with a furiousness I’d never imagined”—and grew so excited that he popped out the vent and stuck his head into the room. But if the brothel’s keyholes and vents initiated him into the mystery of sex, its larger operations also stripped it of its mystery, turning the sex act into a matter of coldhearted calculation. In a 1977 interview with the New York Times, when asked how his wealth suited him, he jabbed back, “I saw my mother turn tricks for some drunk white man when I was a kid. I saw my father take the money, and I saw what it did to them.” In the brothel, “feelings” were nonsense, and money was all.

  Growing up in a brothel had an ambivalent effect, then, on the young Richard. It made him a cynic for life, with a piercing appreciation of the games people play on others (and sometimes on themselves); and it made him an undefended romantic, his heart hungry for a purer connection. His childhood “messed me up sexually for a minute because I’m afraid sexually,” he confessed. Thirty years after the experiences of his childhood, he yearned to tell a lover, “Hey, this scares me. What we’re doing together, it scares me.” He knew “the act” that was sex, had learned “how to be fake,” but the tenderness of love—“the real thing, the real deal, when you’re laying with someone and you touch someone, you stroke them or something, touch them, make magic”—was left unrevealed. From an early age, Richard felt both that sex was a motor force in the world and that there had to be a softer form of intimacy, of which he knew next to nothing.

  If Marie’s brothel defined Richard’s sense of home, the other establishments on North Washington Street, a mix of taverns and brothels, defined his sense of neighborhood. His family’s friends were fellow brothel owners and hustlers, all finding their niche in Peoria’s underground economy. They were also larger-than-life characters who, while they gave young Richard few answers, furnished him with countless stories.

  Next door to Marie lived Harold and Margaret “China Bee” Parker, the power couple of Peoria’s black underworld. Harold was a heavyset, light-skinned Creole whose elegant suits seemed personally tailored, but his suavity was matched by a gangster-like approach to business. Once, after a waitress at his club made a one-dollar mistake with a customer, he slapped her down with a blackjack; when another waitress came to her defense, a bouncer threatened the second waitress with a gun and clocked her in the mouth with his blackjack. Harold’s wife, China Bee, also a Creole, was Peoria’s best-known black madam in her day and ran a tight outfit, sending her girls regularly to a doctor to be inspected. China Bee had her own sense of style: her brothel was decorated with plush wine-red furnishings and Chinese lanterns that cast a soft glow on the operations of the house; her fifteen girls dressed exquisitely and shopped at Peoria’s finer department stores. They were reputed to provide “anything you needed, sexually.”

  Down the block, at 405 North Washington, Cabristo “Bris” Collins ran a tavern that was notoriously freewheeling. Bris was a tough, bullnecked businessman who wore thick spectacles and was the type to employ an unsmiling three-hundred-pound bouncer-chauffeur named “Bulldog” Shorty. Over the span of his career, Bris was variously a boxing manager, a drug runner, a purveyor of fried chicken and barbecued ribs, a club owner, a procurer, a counterfeiter, and an alleged kingpin of a hundred-thousand-dollar numbers racket in Chicago. (His name surfaced during the Kefauver investigations into organized crime in the early 1950s, and he spent time in military and federal penitentiaries on the drug and counterfeiting charges.) Bris was not a sharp dresser like Harold Parker, but he threw around his money with flair. If he were stuck in a losing streak at a craps table at the Elks Club, he would put hundreds of dollars in the hands of a young lad and make him shoot the dice. According to musicians who worked for him, Bris was straight up in his business dealings if you fell on the right side of them and nasty if you didn’t: he liked to shake down deadbeats and then brag about it afterward. When police raided Bris’s Washington Street tavern in 1953, they confiscated a large cache of gambling paraphernalia and a decent arsenal of guns: four .38-caliber snub-nose revolvers, one .45-caliber revolver, one .25-caliber automatic, and one Spanish-made automatic. Two bartenders had been packing heat; the rest of the guns were stashed behind the bar for backup.

  The Famous Door, the Pryors’ tavern, was another lively neighborhood hub, and another place where the underage Richard was exposed to a very adult carnival. “As a comedian,” he recalled, “I couldn’t have asked for better material. My eyes and ears absorbed everything. People came in to exchange news, blow steam, or have their say. Everybody had an opinion about something. Even if they didn’t know shit about sports, politics, women, the war. In fact, the less people knew, the louder they got.”

  Richard’s memories of the Famous Door have the half-lurid, half-comic tone of the best blaxploitation movies. A drunk man comes in, cursing out Richard’s grandmother; Buck defends her honor by shooting him full of holes with a pistol—and the man not only survives but crawls across the floor to slash Buck in the leg. A few months later, the man is back at the Famous Door nursing a drink. Or an angry marine starts raising hell, only to be jumped by Richard’s father and uncle Dickie; the three spend a half hour duking it out—and when they’ve exhausted themselves, they laugh and share drinks together. Or a guy gets knifed in the stomach during a barroom brawl, and rather than wait for an ambulance, he screams for someone to escort him to the liquor store down the street. Richard: “Come on, man. The ambulance is coming. Why don’t you lay there?” Man with guts spilling out: “Shit, I’m going to get me a half pint.” Richard’s takeaway thoughts: “I wondered where he going to put that half pint. If he drank it, I thought he’d die instantly. Of course, that’s what I thought. But I found out different. Assholes don’t die. They multiply.”

  Family photog
raphs of the Famous Door do not capture its wilder aspects, but they underline how special the tavern was. Located on the more respectable address of North Adams Street, just a block away from Marie’s brothels, it was surrounded by an eclectic mix of businesses—a barber shop, a laundry, a chicken hatchery, a butcher shop, and the local Salvation Army—that would never have been found in the red-light district proper. And after it expanded to a larger location, at 319–21 North Adams, the Famous Door had all the accoutrements of a smart business: elegant colored lettering on its front picture window, a bar gleaming with rows of glasses, bartenders and waitresses dressed all in white, and a bandstand that featured small jazz-blues combos.

  And then there was the Famous Door’s clientele, which departed sharply from the Peoria norm. Especially after 1:00 a.m., when other bars closed, white Peorians would drift to this black-owned establishment and fraternize on equal terms with black Peorians. A family photograph of the club’s interior preserves a spectacle exceptional in late 1940s America: a table with two couples who appear to be interracial, black men with white women, encircled by a seemingly interracial crowd. Everyone is togged out for a night on the town, the men in suits, the women with corsages on their dresses and flowers in their hair. A white woman on the left looks pleasantly at the camera; a black man eyes it more warily, as if unsure where this photograph will end up. A Creole man holds his arm leisurely around the back of his white date, so confident that he doesn’t need to be possessive. It’s Harold Parker, Richard Pryor’s neighbor and one of the smoothest operators in Peoria.