Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  Richard hated Trewyn so much that he was willing to risk the wrath of his grandmother to escape the dreaded place. One day, Marie received a phone call from Richard’s school, advising her that Richard had not been in Miss Dempsey’s class for twenty-odd days. That was strange, Marie thought; she hadn’t noticed a change in Richard’s school-day routine. In the morning, she would give him money for lunch and he would leave with books under his arms; in the afternoon, he would return home and act as if he’d had another fine day at Trewyn. So Marie put a black policewoman on Richard’s tail. The policewoman tracked him down to a vacant lot covered with horseweed, whose tall shoots offered good camouflage for a thirteen-year-old on the lam. Richard was bedded down in the weeds, whiling away his hours with the assistance of a superhero comic book and some soda and cigarettes he’d bought with his lunch money. Marie was none too pleased.

  Richard escaped Trewyn permanently in late 1954, when, for unclear reasons, he moved out of his grandmother’s home on the edge of Peoria’s valley and into his father’s home downtown. He was placed in Roosevelt Junior High, his sixth school in seven years. Suddenly Richard was in a much blacker element: Roosevelt was closely split between white and black students. Still, in another sense, he never left Blaine-Sumner or Trewyn behind. His later crossover comedy returned to the psychic scenes of his sixth- and seventh-grade classrooms, where there were no other black faces in the room and he had to play to an audience that could not intuit where he was coming from. When he saw whites in his audience, he might wonder if he was performing for the likes of Mrs. Yingst or the likes of Miss Dempsey, and then devise tests—little barbed teases, like his gambit with Mrs. Yingst over her daughter—to sort the two groups apart. For the right kind of person, the barb was an invitation to a friendship that had the flavor of a conspiracy. For the wrong kind of person, it was simply a barb, and was meant to stick under the skin.

  In the spring of 1955, Richard walked into the George Washington Carver Community Center, a squat, unassuming brick building that had formerly housed the phone company’s maintenance division. He was looking for Carver’s Youth Theater Guild; he found, in Miss Juliette Whittaker, the person who showed him his future.

  Carver was, in the words of teacher Kathryn Timmes, “the Mecca of the black community.” Situated at the heart of the neighborhood where three-quarters of black Peorians lived, the center opened in 1944 as a “teenage hangout” and, by Richard’s arrival, had become much more. Black kids at Peoria public schools tended to be, like Richard, excluded from the mainstream of social life, so they converged at Carver after school and on weekends to find a world of their own. Carver had its own proms, its own carnivals, its own athletic teams. Young children played checkers or marbles or basketball, sang in its “Cherub Choir,” learned to tap dance, or worked on crafts. Teenagers shot pool, played chess and Ping-Pong, joined jazz bands such as the Rhythm Rockets or the Blue Dukes, and learned the basics of everything from modern dance and set design to cooking and sewing.

  Nondescript on the outside: the George Washington Carver Community Center in 1954.

  (Courtesy of the author)

  It’s telling that it took Richard fourteen years to reach this Mecca, and that even then, he did so at the behest of a friend rather than his family. The red-light district of North Washington Street was only a mile away from Carver, but in spirit, the two places were light-years apart. Carver had emerged out of the prewar efforts of Peoria’s Colored Women’s Aid Society, which aimed to put young black Peorians on the path of moral improvement—which is to say, a path that led away from brothels such as Marie’s. Carver’s teachers and administrators channeled the ethos of the black women’s club movement by running a tight ship. Obscenities were abhorred. Chaperones were on hand so that the social dancing didn’t get too heavy. In the minds of Carver’s staff, black boys and girls were there to learn how to work and play with dignity and, eventually, how to join the world of the middle class.

  Juliette Whittaker, who ran Carver’s theater program, was the rare adult there who had a more flexible sense of what “moral improvement” might be. Slim and petite, she had a dancer’s posture—the straightest of backbones—but an easy gap-toothed smile that, as Richard recalled, “made you forget about things.” Juliette was the center’s bohemian, the never-married teacher who wore radiant, flowing dashikis well before they were fashionable, knew her way around bongo drums, and piped from her office a steady stream of music ranging from Tchaikovsky to Miles Davis. She kept a bohemian’s hours, too, arriving at Carver in the late morning and often keeping her theater workshop open until the wee hours. “When you’re putting a play together,” she explained, “you don’t stop simply because twelve o’clock comes. You’re working on scenery, you’re doing costumes . . . We’d go home, sometimes dawn was coming up.” Juliette paired her matchless work ethic—she’d graduated from high school at age fourteen, from college at eighteen—with a deep-seated sense of racial pride. Her parents had both held their heads high in the world—her mother as a teacher; her father, a Harvard Law alum, as the attorney who ran the principal black law office in Houston.

  A sketch artist: Juliette Whittaker, Pryor’s first professional mentor, demonstrating the art of theatrical makeup.

  (Courtesy of the Peoria Journal Star)

  When Richard first arrived at Juliette’s Youth Theater Guild, the young actors were rehearsing a new version of Rumpelstiltskin that Juliette had concocted. Richard watched, spellbound, then walked up to the edge of the stage and said, “I can do that!” Juliette apologized: the play had already been cast. “I don’t care. I’ll do anything, I’ll do anything,” he begged. She gave him a bit part as a servant—someone who walks onstage and sneezes—and Richard accepted. It would be his entrée to stardom. When the actor playing the king was a no-show at rehearsal, Richard pleaded with Juliette to take over the part. He was never a good reader so couldn’t study scripts like other actors, but he had an inspired grasp of character and could memorize dialogue by ear.

  Starting with this, his very first role onstage, he refused to play things straight. His new king, modeled after his uncle Dickie, was a mack daddy who made the kind of sweet promises to the miller’s daughter that a pimp might make to his best earner: “Hey baby, you keep on spinning that straw into gold for me and I’ll get you a car. Something fine. Something for your mama. I’ll make you my woman . . .” The kids and Juliette split their sides with laughter.

  When the other boy returned to rehearsals, Juliette convinced him to watch Richard’s performance and decide for himself who should get the part. “Yeah, it’s true, he does do it better,” the boy conceded. Richard was the new king. Or as Juliette often encapsulated the story, “That’s the way Richard got on the throne of comedy, and he hasn’t been down since.”

  Starting with Rumpelstiltskin, Richard took a crash course in theater production from a woman who did everything: writing, directing, choreography, set design and construction, costume design and creation. Juliette never believed in excuses; a poverty of resources never justified a failure of imagination. For Rumpelstiltskin, her workshop built the scenery from discarded window shades, and the multilevel stage from tossed-out lumber and orange crates. And she refused to think of children’s theater as a hokey, feel-good exercise for the kids: it was art. Her Rumpelstiltskin had “an eerie quality not often found in amateur performances,” wrote a columnist for the Peoria Star. “I got the feeling of seeing an old folk tale, combined with the freshness and delight of a park in Paris with the audience watching a Grand Guignol of ‘Punch and Judy.’”

  Carver’s other teachers couldn’t imagine a future for Richard, the kid who had no stomach for self-discipline, kept flunking out of schools, and seemed half-crazy. “His elevator doesn’t go to the top floor,” they joked. Some wanted to “slap him away, like an annoying mosquito”: he was not on the Carver program of moral uplift, much less on his way to being the next president of Caterpillar, Inc. But Juliette saw
him as potential incarnate. For a precious year or so, Carver became the nurturing home Richard had never had, and Juliette became his surrogate mother. With one proviso attached: his real home was not to be discussed. Juliette never knew Richard had a father, because “I never even heard him mentioned in all the time I knew Richard”—this despite the fact that Richard was living with Buck at the time.

  The two spent countless hours in Juliette’s small corner office on the second floor, planning the shows that Juliette had written and would direct herself. Juliette was Richard’s first cowriter, and the two settled into a dynamic that he would later repeat with actor-writers such as Mel Brooks and Lily Tomlin: Richard would spin a yarn and keep riffing, and Juliette would try to give the riffs a structure and setting. When they had polished the story to a nice sheen, Juliette would holler, “We’ve got a new one!” to Kathryn Timmes, the teacher who handled Carver’s “girl’s department” downstairs, and Timmes would hustle upstairs and be treated to a twenty-minute monologue, Richard’s extemporized version of the tale. “He could make up a lie quicker than you could blink your eye,” said Timmes. “Honest to Pete. And it just had me on the floor, because I had never heard things like that before.”

  Juliette aimed to enlarge Richard’s sense of the world along with his sense of imagination. She sat in her office’s big chair and spoke with him about race in America, or city politics. She wanted him to explore beyond his neighborhood, so she took him on field trips to local plays and Peoria’s Lakeview Museum. At times, too, she had to drag him forcibly out of his old world when inertia got the best of him. More than once, Richard did not show up for rehearsal. Another sort of teacher might have thrown up her hands at the backsliding child, but Juliette went on a reconnaissance mission to “Pop’s Pool Hall,” where Richard could be found racking balls and sweeping the floor for his grandfather. “When I would come into that pool hall,” she recalled, “it was like a church—you could hear a pin drop. And this man would be standing against the cash register—and he’s huge—and he’d back up. I’d say, ‘I’ve come for Richard, it’s time for his rehearsal,’ and he’d say, ‘Take him, take him!’ He wanted me out of there so the game could continue. Because nobody was doing anything when I was there.”

  Juliette tried to slip in some moral instruction, too, in a crafty, indirect manner that contrasted with the brute-force methods of Richard’s father and grandmother. In Richard’s next play for her, The Vanishing Pearl, he played a thief who schemes to steal a pearl. But when the thief finally lays his hands on the jewel, it disappears—the moral of the tale being, according to Juliette, that “in order to be worthy of something, you have to work for it.” In another instance, Juliette monkeyed with Richard and a group of his friends when they stalked another kid who, they suspected, had stolen something from Juliette’s desk. Thinking that they were defending Juliette’s interests, they jumped him in the park and beat him up. “Confess!” they demanded—but he wouldn’t. So they brought him to Juliette. The supposed thief continued to insist, “I didn’t do it, Miss Whittaker.” Juliette stared at Richard and his friends, then announced, “Well, if he didn’t do it, one of you did it,” raking her finger across the group. In fact, Juliette had no clue who was the thief. But she meant to teach them a lesson about the importance of presuming innocence—by having them experience the presumption of guilt.

  Richard took in Juliette’s method of teasing moral instruction and made it his own, upping its trickster quotient. Once, he, Juliette, and Kathryn Timmes were sitting together in Juliette’s office, chatting about how black children needed to leave their comfort zone and see the world. Timmes, who taught third-graders at the nearby Douglass School, rued that her students’ lives were so bounded by the rim of the housing projects where they lived. A college graduate herself, she wanted to take her students on a field trip to a black-owned grocery store so they could aspire to more in life. Richard offered to accompany her and her class, and said he knew a special route. “They’ll see people they’ve never seen before,” he offered. “They should know everything”—wasn’t that the idea?

  On the day of the field trip, a fourteen-year-old Richard Pryor escorted the class of third-graders down a peculiar side street. The ladies of its houses, who tended to linger at their front windows, were surprised at the parade of children in their neighborhood and came out on their porches. Richard, who knew the women, introduced them with a smile to Mrs. Timmes and her class. To the teacher’s eyes, they were the nicest of black women—humble, yes, but ever so friendly, offering lemonade to her charges and waving hello with such enthusiasm. The children waved back, beaming. The field trip was a great success, she thought, thanks in no small part to Richard’s contribution. When she came home, she was still puffed up from the experience and described it to her husband, a policeman familiar with the vice beat. He stopped her short: “You’re the biggest fool I’ve ever laid eyes on.” Richard had led her by the nose down a street lined with brothels.

  Shortly thereafter, she confronted Richard. He fell out laughing. “I knew you didn’t know where you were going!” he said.

  “I’m going to get you for that, if it’s the last thing I do,” Timmes said.

  Richard kept up the teasing. “I’m gonna tell people where you were!”

  “If you do, I’ll whip you!”

  “Mrs. Timmes, you’re not going to whip me!”

  “I’m going to whip your ass!”

  At that last word, Richard laughed triumphantly. He not only had pulled the high-minded Kathryn Timmes into the red-light district, but had broken the façade of her propriety, too.

  Timmes jumped on Juliette next: how could she have let Richard fool her? The master smiled at the work of her pupil. “It’s good sometimes,” she said, “for people to become familiar with who they are after they think they know everything.”

  Though he adored Carver and Juliette’s Youth Theater Guild, Richard’s apprenticeship as a stage actor was surprisingly brief. Juliette had begun writing a play especially for him, The Magic Violin, in which an Italian boy charms his listeners with his music, turning them into better versions of themselves. But this love letter to a boy’s artistry was never completed. Richard began spending more and more of his time at a local gym, training as a boxer, to the delight of his father, who proudly remembered his own time in the ring.

  Juliette kept up a brave face, but the loss of Richard was a mean disappointment, one that she chalked up to the gender norms of the day. The trappings of Juliette’s theater—the fanciful costumes, the cosmopolitan themes, the general indulgence of the imagination—had no place in the meat-and-potatoes outlook of most Peorian men, much less the cynicism of men like Buck. Juliette, though, was nothing if not a fighter herself, and she had the will to lure Richard back from the boxing ring. “I would have gone to hell itself to get that boy,” she said.

  Ultimately, she just had to promise him the spotlight—the role of emcee at the regular talent shows she organized. These shows were a main event for Peoria’s young blacks. Carver’s auditorium would be packed with hundreds of kids, all straining to see who would win the prize for best singing or music group. Local gangs would even settle their rivalries at the shows: a singing group from the old projects would battle against a singing group from the new projects, and the outcome would determine which gang could hold its head high the next day. Richard loved the crowd—it was his first time performing his comedy for a large black audience—and the crowd loved him back. In little time, he’d built up a following. At his first show as emcee, he simply had five minutes, enough time for a riff or two. Then Juliette decided to design the shows around Richard, who was in a class of his own, the only comedian at the center. “The kids would come to rehearsal like you would expect them to come to a performance. The auditorium would be packed,” Juliette recalled.

  At the later talent shows, perhaps because he had more time to extend himself and perhaps because he drew on his recent work with the Youth T
heater Guild, Richard started taking on characters more fully. He did “impressions” of well-known figures from the community, and the audience howled in recognition of how Richard captured their quirks and body language. His favorite character, though, was an invention of his own: a black superhero too poor to buy his own suit, who went to rummage sales and put one together out of used pantyhose, a cape (which he stole), and a pair of shoes that were clownishly large: “The Rummage Sale Ranger.” Like Juliette Whittaker, who built her stage out of tossed-out orange crates, the Rummage Sale Ranger made an art out of making do. He was the comic book hero of Richard’s imagination and a mirror for everything he adored about the improvisational spirit of Juliette.

  “Miss Whittaker was just a magic lady,” Richard said in a 1974 interview, a note of wonder creeping into his voice. “She just makes you feel like there’s something in life.” He loved her tutelage, but his own capacity for troublemaking soon pushed him out of it.

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  The Boot

  Peoria and the Army, 1956–1960

  In September 1955, Richard transferred to Central High for ninth grade and found himself back in a nearly all-white environment, one of 9 blacks in a class of 340 students, most of whom hailed from Peoria’s affluent bluff. All Central’s teachers, administrators, and even its custodians and cafeteria staff were white. Still, there were fewer brawls at Central than at Roosevelt or Trewyn, and Richard at first adapted to its controlled environment, buoyed by his experiences two miles away in Carver’s afterschool programs. “Richard had something he could really get into,” said Juliette Whittaker, “a positive approach to himself. He was being appreciated [at Carver], and that minimized the problems he was having in class.” In the fall of 1955, he earned by far his best marks since second grade: a passel of Cs and the first A ever to appear on his transcript, in Physical Education—a subject, perhaps more than any other, in which it was possible to get an A for effort.