Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

A night out at the Famous Door: a candid photo of two couples at the Pryor family’s tavern.

  (Courtesy of Barbara McGee)

  Among the underground entrepreneurs of black Peoria—the Pryors, the Parkers, Bris Collins—there was a sense of camaraderie throughout the 1940s. The money was good, abundant enough to go around, and together they were opening up Peoria in a way that even the most progressive civil rights leaders of the time hardly dreamed of: by creating a world where blacks and whites might pair up as lovers without consequences. (As late as 1947, interracial marriages were illegal in thirty states; in the eighteen other states, they were frowned upon.) Of course, many of the assignations at the Famous Door or the brothels of North Washington Street were the very opposite of love, the product of stone-cold business, and need not be romanticized.

  While the red-light district, from one vantage point, showed how taboos existed to be flouted, Marie made sure that her grandson Richard never lived in a moral vacuum. She may have been a madam, but she was also a mother who took care of her family, and a churchgoing woman. After the scorching revels of Saturday night, there was always Morning Star Baptist Church on Sunday morning, where Marie and her grandson felt the congregation rock with the righteousness of the Lord, singing and praying and testifying in waves of enthusiasm. And when Marie’s professional duties relaxed during the week, she would run the family kitchen like a master, whipping up a soul kitchen feast of barbecued coon or chicken, candied yams, potato salad, and coleslaw. She aimed to provide for her kin and seems to have kept the whole family in reasonably solid financial shape. The young Richard always dressed nicely and in childhood photos, he was kitted out in the type of clothes bought for special occasions: a sailor outfit, a suit complete with a brightly patterned bow tie. Sometimes he even felt embarrassed by how nice his clothes were: when he got a pair of new shoes, he would step in mud to dirty them up and keep his friends from noticing their shine.

  Marie also impressed her grandson with a profound sense of personal dignity, one that would resonate in his comedy. She constantly told him, “Son, one thing a white man can’t take away from you is the knowledge”—the knowledge of who you are, which you keep separate from how other people might treat you. Richard applied this maxim not just to himself but to everyone he saw who lived in the shadow of other people’s preconceptions: “You take some 63-year-old cat on the street—ugly, spit coming out his mouth—he’s still got something you can’t have. You can’t say he didn’t see that gutter or he didn’t drink this wine. That’s the knowledge.”

  For Richard, though, “the knowledge” came at a price. Marie’s approach to parenting was old-school, strict. A boy had to respect his elders, never talking back and always calling them ma’am or sir. (Even as an adult, Richard followed this latter protocol with older men and women.) He had to perform his chores well or else be sent back to perform them again. And he had to do manly things or else risk being turned into a “sissy”—as when Marie took him out fishing to test his sexual orientation. “If you couldn’t put the worm on the hook, you was a faggot,” Richard recalled. “I always identified with the little worm because it seemed like he was talking—no, don’t put me on the hook!” Marie insisted, “Boy, put that worm on that hook!” Richard complied. Marie crowed, “See? I told you he wasn’t no sissy,” and Richard learned to keep his misgivings to himself. “The worm,” he couldn’t help but notice, “didn’t like it.”

  In Marie’s household there was no space for a child’s ambivalence, no wiggle room. Richard knew that if he disobeyed his grandmother, she would try to beat his disobedience out of him, using anything from a birch switch to an old hot water bottle that doubled as a douche bag and smelled of vinegar. He grew accustomed to living in a state of fear, telling a reporter later in his adult life, “Anything you want to know about fear, you got the right person.” Thirty years later, in his film Live in Concert, Richard evoked his grandmother’s beatings as if they were still fresh—and still the moral touchstone of his early childhood.

  On the plus side, Marie’s beatings were predictable and, relatively speaking, limited in scope. Richard walked on eggshells with his father, never knowing when Buck would detonate in his presence or nonchalantly slay him with a cruel remark. When Richard struggled to pick up the saxophone through music lessons, Buck told him, “You don’t have to take ’em no more. The guy says you have no soul,” a comment that left Richard feeling “destroyed. I took the horn and tried to flush it down the toilet.” Matt Clark, one of Richard’s childhood friends, remembered that Richard was “scared to death” of Buck, “afraid to make a sound” in his presence. Buck could strike fear into his son with the smallest of gestures. From his easy chair in the living room, he might simply rustle and straighten out his newspaper—fffsshtt!—and Richard would drop whatever he was doing.

  In his early comedy, Richard managed to find humor in his father’s bouts of humorlessness. Most parents, he noted, warned their children “If you don’t go to sleep, the bogeyman will get you.” In his family, the dialogue was considerably different.

  BUCK [deadpan]: “Richard, you want me to kill you?”

  RICHARD: “No, sir.”

  BUCK: “Then go to sleep.”

  When other kids in the neighborhood said they never got spankings, Richard would chime in and say he never got a spanking, either. And he didn’t: he got beatings. His father would brag, “My son never cries when I whup him,” but there was a simple explanation for that: one punch from Buck, and Richard was out. Richard joked that there was no limit to how far Buck would go, but he may not have been simply joking. A Peoria police officer speculated that Richard could “never have gotten into real trouble. At the first sign of it, I’d just march him up to his father and he’d kill him.”

  Even when Buck was not disciplining Richard, he dispensed a brand of hard-edged wisdom that was difficult for a kid to swallow, especially one drawn to toying with his world. Once, Richard trapped a few rats by luring them with some cheese into his grandmother’s blue-speckled oven roaster and then clamping the lid down on them. He then threw the rats into a kitchen sink, full of water, to watch them swim around. (“I was weird,” he admitted when recounting this story to TV host Mike Douglas.) Buck walked in and cut his son to the quick: “Kill them. Take the broom and kill them.” Richard gulped: “I can’t kill them. Not like that.” “Then let them go. Don’t play with them.” And that, as so often happened when Buck got involved, was the end of the story.

  There may have been a deeper reason, beyond sheer perversity, for Richard wanting to see rats skittering in the sink, clutching for their lives; why he was so curious about the look of fear when a powerless creature faced its powerlessness. Around the age of six, he had been playing by himself in the alley behind North Washington Street, casting stones at trash cans to push rats out of their hiding places, when an older teenager named Hoss stepped into the alley. “Right away, I knew he was trouble,” Pryor recalled forty years later. “I saw it in his bloodshot eyes . . . I should’ve run. But I didn’t. Because he was right about me in that sense—I was a little chickenshit.” Hoss slammed Richard into a darkened corner where no one could see the two of them. He unzipped his pants and told Richard, “Suck it.” Richard did as he was told; Hoss walked off a happy man. He left Richard feeling dirty, humiliated, and ashamed.

  As with his parents’ divorce, Richard felt complicit in his misfortune. Whom would he tell? His grandmother, with her birch switches and vinegary douche bag? His father, with his KO fists? His mother, seventy miles and a universe away in Springfield? A few nights later, in the middle of dinner, his father started serenading the table with his personal version of “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”: “I’m forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air . . .” Richard “felt a shiver of embarrassment and mortification run up and down my spine like rats in a wall. What the fuck? Did he know, too?” Richard never asked his father why he chose the song or if he was aware of who had blown whom in the
alley; he had never confided in his father, and wasn’t about to start with the story of Hoss and the darkened alley. Like other victims of abuse, Richard became warier, more suspicious of the motives of others, and kept his secret for five decades, until the writing of his memoir Pryor Convictions unlocked it.

  At least his family let him repair to the movies, where he could fall into a dream life. His heroes tended to be orphans, like Tarzan, or rootless loners, like Lash LaRue or John Wayne, or comic fools lost in a world of their own, like Red Skelton. He initiated a lifelong fascination with cartoons, where violence was anarchic and acceptable and magically exaggerated into slapstick comedy; his favorite comedians, too, had more than a touch of the cartoonish to them. At some Saturday matinees, he would sit through as many as twenty-five cartoons in a row, reveling in the antics of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Mickey Mouse, and the Road Runner. He studied their poses and facial expressions with the eye of an artist and would delight himself by drawing goofy cartoon characters on sketch pads. Each tilt of an eyebrow, each curve of a lip, made such a difference—a lesson the future comic internalized in his own facial muscles. Once, he went around for days imitating the Road Runner.

  Though Richard generally identified with leading men, there was one glorious exception: the character of Little Beaver, the Navajo orphan who served as Red Ryder’s loyal, spunky sidekick in a series of Republic westerns through the 1940s. Little Beaver had a compelling backstory, one that offered easy entrée for a black boy feeling cornered by his own family. Beaver was the grandson of an Indian chief, an outsider by birth, but gave up his claim to chiefdom so that he might stay at the side of his surrogate father, a solitary Anglo cowboy so charmed by Beaver’s pint-size moxie that he adopted him as his ward. With his trousers always falling down, Little Beaver was a child stuck in a man’s world, but he was also an indispensable presence in it, rescuing Red Ryder time and again with his sly intelligence. (In one film, he procures a skunk to foil a villain.) The granite-faced Ryder cared for Beaver and needed Beaver, in ways that may have felt delicious to a child beaten or ignored by his own taciturn father.

  Yet Richard’s infatuation with Little Beaver also set him up for a pointed lesson in the foolishness of openly confusing fact and fantasy. After losing himself in the Red Ryder serials, he grew convinced that Little Beaver had to be behind the screen, waiting to meet him. Once, when the picture ended, he went to the back of the theater and discovered no trace of Little Beaver, or even the actor Bobby (later Robert) Blake, the white boy who played him. Instead, he came upon an angry crew, who chased Richard from the premises. It was, Richard said, “one of my first big traumatic experiences”: the discovery that characters were not real just because he ached to believe in them.

  Around this time, Richard fell into his first performance as a comic. In his memory, his first stage was the brothel’s backyard in the mid-1940s; his first prop, a pile of dog poop. He was wearing a spiffy cowboy outfit his grandfather had given him and was sitting on the edge of a brick railing, looking for all the world like a miniature version of his heroes John Wayne or Lash LaRue. Then he threw himself on purpose off the railing, and his family broke out in laughter. A few more falls, and the laughter didn’t stop. The comedian-in-the-making conceded that his routine was over and ran to his grandmother, but along the way, he slipped on the pile of dog poop. Again, roars of laughter. Eager to please, he did what any attention-craving child would have done: he repeated his pratfall, dog poop and all. “That was my first comedy routine,” he said. “And I’ve just been slipping in shit ever since.” If comedy was partly the art of self-humiliation, early on Pryor realized he had a knack for it.

  His elementary school became his first public stage, though he grew to have qualms about his audience there. At home he was in the violently controlled dominion of Marie; at Irving School, he was in a white-oriented world where the realities of his life were unmentionable, if not unimaginable, for his teachers and fellow students. Richard was one of a minority of blacks at Irving: the school drew predominantly from the white working-class population of Peoria’s valley, families that lived paycheck to paycheck and looked anxiously at the influx of blacks to Peoria during its wartime boom. If his white classmates knew anything about black life, it was most likely refracted through the cartoon versions of it in circulation, the minstrelsy behind popular radio programs like Amos ’n’ Andy. (In fact, the white actor playing Andy had been born and raised in Peoria, and discovered blackface comedy in the city’s theaters in the 1910s.) Richard felt his way through school by turning his own sense of himself as a misfit into the stuff of comedy. If his white classmates expected an act from the skinny, excitable black kid, he would give it to them—and then some.

  Richard did not begin as a class clown, though. He started simply as a boy out of sorts, having trouble adapting to the strictures of school. At the end of first grade—by which point he had witnessed his parents’ divorce and been sexually abused—his teacher made a special note in his record: “Apparently unstable emotionally.” He received an F in “conduct” and similarly low grades in every subject except English, where he earned a C. Irving decided to hold him back a year.

  During the middle of his second try at first grade, for reasons that remain unclear, Richard left Peoria and lived for half the school year with his mother and her family on the outskirts of Springfield. “The farm,” he recalled in his memoir, “was paradise, a playground where my imagination could go wild. At night, I listened to crickets instead of creaking beds and moans, and in the morning, I woke to the sound of roosters crowing and the smell of hot biscuits and fresh-brewed coffee.” The setting, in a neighborhood on the eastern edge of town, might have appeared to others as a rural slum, with its shotgun houses and unimproved land. But to Richard, it was a slice of heaven. Even the garbage dump next to the farm, where his grandfather hauled the trash he picked up during the day, enchanted Richard. He would wander down to the dump and pretend he was a cowboy or soldier, firing rounds from a .22-caliber gun at any rats that made the mistake of crossing his path. “Yes, sir, I fucked up some rats,” he said. He called this interlude the happiest time of his life.

  And then it ended: by September 1948, he was back in Peoria schools, now promoted to second grade. By third grade, in 1949, Richard suffered constant bullying from boys who hailed from the valley’s white Protestant blue-collar families. They ganged up on him in the vacant lot across from the school, sometimes giving him flimsy grounds for their attack, often not. Slight in stature, Richard fought back most impressively with his mouth. Bottled up tight at home, elsewhere he was loose, and mimicking the kind of salty talk he heard at Marie’s brothel and the Famous Door. And he had the good fortune to befriend two other kids who were similarly outsiders and similarly targeted: the pint-sized Michael Grussemeyer, whose family was middle class (not blue collar), and the wavy-haired Roxy Eagle, whose family was Italian American and Catholic (not Protestant). Roxy also happened to be the son of Joe Eagle, who ran the sole brothel with white prostitutes on Richard’s block of North Washington Street.

  Repeatedly the three fended off the bullies in the vacant lot and developed a strong sense of togetherness, so much so that Richard started calling Michael and Roxy “nigger” as a term of endearment. Richard seemed to recognize, early on, that there were some white people who could be smuggled into the circle of black identity—the exact white people who could be called nigger and hear it as a compliment. They were “three oddball brothers,” in the words of Michael Grussemeyer, and proud of it.

  Third grade marked the beginning of the end for Richard’s academic career. Despite relatively decent grades (three Bs and four Cs) the year before, he took a nosedive, now ending up with two Cs, four Ds, and one F, again in “conduct.” And that was about as good as it would get. For the rest of his time in school, his grades would never rise above Cs, with an increasing concentration of Ds and Fs. Given an intelligence test, he scored a 100—perfectly average. Conventional t
esting could little recognize unconventional talent.

  Richard’s poor grades in “conduct” were tied to his increasing propensity for mischief. Often he was simply disruptive, a prankster on the loose. He threw spitballs and went through a Tarzan phase where, from out of nowhere, he would erupt into his imitation of Johnny Weissmuller doing his yodeling call or would gibber like the chimpanzee Cheeta. But he also fell into a reverberating discovery: that he could use his failures to transfix his audience. When he was caught without his homework or when he lost his books, Richard would not make a quick, shamefaced confession and be done with it. Instead, he seized the opportunity for a disquisition about how, exactly, he’d arrived at this sorry outcome. The teacher might not like ceding control of her classroom, but the other kids delighted in Richard’s freewheeling spiels—even the ones who, outside class, attacked him on the vacant lot.

  Richard started testing boundaries, treating rules as playthings, monkeying with expectations. He tried out for, and made it onto, Irving School’s basketball team. His inspiration? The Harlem Globetrotters, who visited Peoria every year to play an exhibition game at a local high school and who, despite their name, actually hailed from Chicago. The Globetrotters were the toast of the black community at the time. They had just defeated the Minneapolis Lakers, the dominant team in the all-white world of pro basketball leagues, in two exhibition matches—victories that were as sweet as black heavyweight Joe Louis’s knockout of Max Schmeling a decade before. In his mind, Richard was channeling the spirit of Goose Tatum, “Clown Prince” of the Globetrotters and ball handler extraordinaire. At practice, he tried to dazzle and entertain his teammates rather than demonstrate basic skills. The reaction was swift. The coach felt he’d lost control of his team and would have none of it; style was not at a premium in his version of the game. Within a week, Richard was kicked off the team.