by Scott Saul
In the wee hours of the night, Richard might wander over to the Villa, a large club outside the Peoria city limits, run by his buddy Hank Hansen. With its mixed-race house band, the Villa drew a lively and mixed crowd, but for Richard the real action was in the casita that served as a gambling house out back. The scene was a comedy sketch waiting to happen. Among the dramatis personae were “Big Irma” Anderson, a huge lady who used “Kiss my ass, nigger!” as the equivalent of “Hello”; Sylvester “Weasel” Williams, for whom insults were a prelude to a hustle (“You funny in that hat . . . That hat went out with Dick Tracy. You can go look funny if you want to, but I got a hat out in the car that’s a bitch”); and an older, unnamed black man who stood on the fringe of the gambling but made more noise than anyone else (“Now what you gonna do, nigger?! You done fucked up the game!”). Richard observed later that Hank’s Place was “a beautiful place with beautiful people. Everybody was an individual.”
When he couldn’t afford a stool at a tavern or a stake at a table, Richard simply took up residence on the streets of Peoria. He remained loyal to the sweet white wine of his teenage years, the citrus-flavored Silver Satin. And he discovered that the street, like the back room at the Villa, was full of characters, none more compelling than a grizzled drifter known as “Preacher” Brown. Brown spent much of his day walking and talking around Peoria, often ending up in the heart of its soul district—near Pop’s Pool Hall and Wade’s Inn, a country kitchen that served up a fine plate of beans and neck bones. Brown was social but did not socialize, exactly: he wasn’t the sort to drink with a close-knit group of friends on the street corner. Instead he preached with a bottle in his hand, stopping traffic, schooling youngsters in their no-good ways, and telling stories about his illustrious past.
A decade later, Preacher Brown would manifest onstage as one of Richard’s breakthrough characters, “the wino”:
Man, I know Jesus. Shit, he lived over there in the projects. Nigger ain’t shit. I knew the boy’s mama personally. That’s right—Mary. The girl with big titties. Pretty black girl, man. Had personality all over her face. Well, that’s right. I knew her. I’m the one responsible for that girl. She wasn’t no virgin either, ’cause I know a couple of niggers eased up there and got some. . . .
I remember when her son Jesus was born ’cause her husband Joe damn near killed her. ’Cause she told him God made the baby. He beat her with a pool stick. Said, “Bitch, you gonna tell me who the daddy of this baby is.” Damn near broke that bitch’s neck. She fessed up—found out it was Jimmy Walker. . . .
Shit, I been around. I ain’t no fool, I study peoples. I know where peoples comin’ from. Shit, I’m a people-ologist.
In Preacher Brown, Richard found a riveting companion, and one who put absolutely no demands on him other than to listen and observe—to conduct his own form of “people-ology.” Which is what Richard did, without condescension or even that much distance. Richard was on the skids himself, and it didn’t take too much imagination to think that, thirty years down the line, he might wind up in Preacher Brown’s shoes, holding forth to anyone who would indulge him. That was an obvious trajectory for a black kid with a spotty job history, a taste for sweet wine, and an unquenchable love for the stage, any stage.
Happily for Richard, his family had well-placed friends in Peoria’s nightclub world, friends earned through two decades of shared dealings in the city’s underground. He dropped in on his old neighbor Harold Parker, who now ran a club on one of the few blocks of North Washington Street to have survived urban renewal. Richard told him he was looking for work.
“What do you do?” Parker asked.
“I sing and play piano,” Richard said.
“How much you expecting to make?” Parker followed up.
“Not much,” Richard said.
“That’s good,” Parker said. “’Cuz you won’t.”
There were a two small problems with Richard passing himself off as a Nat King Cole disciple: he had none of Cole’s savoir-faire onstage and knew his way around only four chords on the piano. At his nightclub debut, Richard sat down at the piano and fingered those four chords, then sang some nonsense words to fill the space. Sweat poured from him. The people in his audience—not for the last time—wondered if Richard was messing with them or was simply a mess himself. To his everlasting credit, Parker appreciated the courage behind the bluff. “You’ve got more nerve than anybody I’ve ever seen,” he said, and offered Richard two jobs—one as a bartender and another filling the fifteen-minute intermissions between sets. Richard had stumbled into his first paying job as a professional comedian. For much of the night at Harold’s Club, he worked behind the bar in a red vest and bow tie. Then, when the musicians left the bandstand, he removed his bar costume and assumed the stage. Sometimes he sang, to mediocre effect, but more often he used his short sets to make people laugh. When his fifteen minutes were up, he returned behind the bar and retied his bow tie, put his vest back on.
Arguably, Richard could not have found, in all of Peoria, a better venue than Harold’s Club or a more influential sponsor than Harold Parker. Parker had seen his own star rise over the previous decade: in 1959, the Chicago Defender christened him the “Boy Wonder of Peoria” and dubbed his nightclub “the hottest thing this side of Khrushchev.” After years entangled in prostitution, Parker was making a bid for respectability. He’d divorced his wife, China Bee, Peoria’s best-known black madam, and married a Chicago-bred chorus girl. In early 1961 he even ran, albeit unsuccessfully, as a Republican candidate for alderman, campaigning as the underworld’s enemy and promising to “give ward residents an honest and impartial representation in our city administration.”
Harold’s Club was the centerpiece of Parker’s new class act: the swankiest black-and-tan nightclub in Peoria, modeled after Chicago showplaces like the Regal Theater. An evening at Harold’s promised a “package entertainment.” Chorus girls strutted through choreographed routines and a series of costume changes over the course of the evening (with fishnet stockings being one constant). Musicians suited up in matching tuxedos to perform. From the diamond-patterned parquet floor to the sprays of flowers that sat atop the piano, the design of the club was elegance itself. Not only was the ladies’ room set up as a powder room, but even the men’s room was designated a “men’s lounge,” in the upscale idiom of the time. For its clientele, an evening at Harold’s Club was a night of stepping out on the town. With its cover charge and dress code, it attracted a mixed-race crowd (about one-third white and two-thirds black) who had money to spend.
A club like no other in the Midwest: Harold’s Club, with its proud proprietor at the center.
(Courtesy of Harold Parker Jr.)
Presiding over this festival of swank was Harold Parker himself, a pencil-mustachioed dandy who left a scent of cologne trailing after him. He had such beautiful skin that he seemed to wear cosmetics, and reminded at least one musician of the zoot-suited Cab Calloway. Parker’s framed portrait hung above the bar—the Boy Wonder paying tribute to his own wonderfulness. Yet Parker was also a stone-cold businessman who, according to pianist David Sprattling, bribed the musicians’ union so that he would not have to pay union scale to musicians—if he paid them at all. “Sometimes when he didn’t pay the musicians anything, they’d go in there and loud-talk him,” Sprattling said, “and he’d have his bodyguards whup you up a little bit.”
The “Boy Wonder of Peoria” on an off night: Harold Parker Jr., in a 1961 mug shot.
(Courtesy of the Peoria Journal Star)
Richard Pryor, who had reason to be grateful to Parker, called him one of the “meanest cats” he had ever known. In the early years of Harold’s Club, Parker’s own mother played the part of enforcer, adding an odd tinge of menace to the club’s smart ambience. Night after night, from the moment the music began at 9:00 p.m. until the club closed at 4:00 a.m., the sexagenarian sat like a statue at the bar, dressed in black and carrying a large black handbag. In that large
black handbag, everyone knew, was a large black gun. No one was going to double-cross her son or otherwise endanger his livelihood.
The incongruities of Harold Parker—his ruthlessness matched by his grace—played out in his club, which smuggled an “anything goes” attitude into an atmosphere of controlled elegance. “It had that very clean, very organized feel, but with people who were out of control,” recalled Fred Tieken, who fronted a mixed-race rock ’n’ roll group there. “The crowd was one of the most mixed [crowds I’ve ever seen], and I’m not just talking racially mixed. There were gays, straights, cross-dressers, business guys in suits, young people, old people . . . every form of life you could possibly imagine.” According to Tieken, the composition of the audience shifted around 1:00 a.m., halfway into the night’s entertainment. “People who had responsibilities—a day job—were heading home, and a whole new crowd of nightlife people would be there, jumping up on stage.” Once, after Tieken hopped on the piano to play a saxophone solo, a black woman started grabbing his ass in excitement. “The women were very suggestive, in terms of the way they dressed and in terms of their makeup. And some of them were actually guys.”
The freewheeling atmosphere of Harold’s Club suited Richard’s comic style, which, partly because of his lack of experience and partly because of his inclination, was fluid and exploratory. He assumed different characters over the course of the evening, some of whom were drawn from the streets of Peoria, others merely lifted out of his imagination. He might pretend to be Santa Claus, squeezing himself down different chimneys. Or the jackleg preacher who partied on Saturday night only to clean himself up on Sunday morning. Or the car salesman who put over a lemon on an unsuspecting customer.
Thanks to the hours he spent among the likes of Preacher Brown, Richard had a wino character in his repertoire, and he invented shambolic conversations between him and his friends on the street corner. In one bit, he pantomimed how the wino acted the fool until the police arrived on the scene, at which point he stood up straight as a soldier and sober as a priest. When the police left, the wino returned to his old self, cutting the monkey with his friends again. Already Richard’s stand-up leaned toward multicharacter theater, with Richard the comedian a recessive presence in the overall drama. And already, too, it was the down-and-outers, the marginalized, who assumed center stage in his imagination.
As he groped toward his own style, Richard did not aspire to be a comedian in the mold of Bob Hope, who chose his lines from an overstuffed catalog of gags (most of them written by jokesmiths in his employ). In sensibility, he leaned toward his idol Sid Caesar and his fellow midwesterner Jonathan Winters, two comics who submerged their real selves beneath the outlandish characters they created. Both Caesar and Winters were averse to jokes; they were performers, not commentators. They were interested in the absurdity of so-called normal life. Caesar specialized in nutty professors and squabbling husbands; Winters, in squares and hayseeds. Richard had his own body of material—the people he’d observed in Peoria’s pulpits, used-car lots, and working-class bars—and his comedy inclined to the off-kilter and the zany.
In tone, he was closer to these mid-1950s comics than to the fiery, experimental comedian he would later become: he was trying hard to make the patrons of Harold’s Club laugh, and so excised any details that might make them squirm. His wino was not yet a foul-mouthed blasphemer, just a man in his cups. When he acted crazy onstage, it was “crazy” in quotes, kooky rather than unglued. He didn’t yet have the confidence to mine the memories of his Peoria upbringing for their brutal pathos, or the artistic intuition to start digging. No one in the audience—not even the house musicians who performed with him night after night—knew much about the real life of the kid who turned himself inside out to become other people, and he wasn’t telling.
Offstage, Richard was in bloom, and in trouble. In the spring of 1961, he fell for Patricia Watts, a seventeen-year-old, auburn-haired transplant from the small river town of Louisiana, Missouri. The two made for an unlikely couple. Richard was lanky as an exclamation point; Pat, sturdy and curvy. Richard had been raised among pimps and prostitutes in a brothel; Pat, among livestock on a farm. Richard dreamed of becoming a comedian; Pat, of becoming a mortician. (“Dead people never hurt you,” she said often. “The ones you need to be afraid of are the ones who are alive.”) Yet they shared enough—a zest for life, a fondness for alcohol, a sense of mutual attraction—and the two became an item.
Shortly thereafter, Pat discovered that she was pregnant. Richard hankered to have a happy family, one devoted to one another “for better, for worse, and forever”—a vision of family he’d gathered from Father Knows Best, a TV show he watched avidly. Pat, meanwhile, wanted to be sitcom star Donna Reed: happily ironing, doing the dishes, and taking care of her man and her kids. When Richard asked Pat to marry him, she accepted. His grandmother Marie supplied the ring, a Pryor family heirloom with a series of flat-cut diamonds set over its gold band.
As the ceremony neared, Richard wavered. The “forever” part of the wedding vows started seeming less abstract and more forbidding. His father pulled him aside and dispensed the same advice he’d given his son before his military service, when Richard supposed that he’d gotten his first lover pregnant: “Son, you don’t have to do it.” Buck didn’t question the paternity of the child, as he had before, but he underlined how ill equipped his son was to support a family. Earlier, Richard had bowed to his father’s counsel; this time he defied it. “If Buck hadn’t said that, I might have chickened out,” he reflected later, “but to spite him I said, ‘Shit, I’m going through with it.’”
On June 11, 1961, Richard and Pat were married in a short, informal ceremony in the living room of Marie’s home on South Adams Street. Fewer than ten people attended. Buck picked up Richard’s sister Barbara on the way to the wedding, and by the time they arrived, the ceremony had already ended. The eighteen-year-old Barbara was surprised to discover that, in her purple dress, she was dressed more formally than the bride.
With Richard earning only fifty dollars a week, the newlyweds saved money by moving into Marie’s home, four miles from downtown. No longer a madam, Marie made a living by selling liquor out of her home during the week and by converting a room, over the weekends, into a modest restaurant that served fried chicken and fish to a few customers at a time. Meanwhile Richard and Pat struggled for bare essentials. When Richard wanted to write down an idea for a comedy routine, he would strip the paper from clothes hangers. Pat pushed him to hold down a regular job, but he resisted. After she sent him off to a hospital so that he could fill out a job application—her parents both worked as housekeepers in local hospitals—he came back empty-handed. The hospital had been closed somehow, he explained weakly.
The daily grind took its toll on their marriage. Pat cooked up potatoes day after day—boiled potatoes, fried potatoes, mashed potatoes—and one day, Richard reached his limit. “I’m sick of potatoes,” he cried, and started beating Pat in frustration. Marie, who, like Pat, had been married in her teens, took the younger woman under her wing. “The next time he hits you,” Marie told her, “you pick up something and hit him back, and he won’t bother you any more.” Pat did as instructed: when Richard exploded next, she grabbed a pan and walloped him so hard that he tottered and fell onto Marie, seated nearby. Marie, in turn, scooted her feet back so that Richard tumbled to the floor. Her baby had to learn his lesson, even if it meant landing hard on his backside.
The lesson didn’t take, despite the fact that Richard was under new pressure to play the role of supportive husband. Pat suffered a miscarriage just after their wedding, then quickly became pregnant again. The two newlyweds were heading, with deliberate speed, for the responsibilities of parenthood. But Richard was easily distracted. At one point, Pat stopped into Harold’s Club to watch her husband perform onstage. He broke into a song and looked in her direction, and Pat brightened at her husband’s serenade. How romantic! Then she realized that his gaze was
fixed not on her but on a white woman sitting at a neighboring table. That was Pat’s breaking point, her own “I’m sick of potatoes” moment. She dragged the other woman into a knockdown fight, toppling over chairs and sending glasses crashing to the nightclub floor. At the end of the week, Richard had even less money than usual to bring home: Harold Parker had garnished most of his pay to cover the damage.
Richard and Pat’s marriage ended, effectively, soon after. Around September 1, 1961—eighty days after their wedding—Pat moved back into her parents’ home on Fourth Street. Richard left his grandmother’s house and returned to his parents’ home. If he was going to be broke, he figured, it was better to be broke downtown, close to the action. He sank deeper into the nightlife offered by Harold’s Club, the Blue Shadow, Hank’s Villa, the Elks Club, Blackie’s Archway, and other Peoria hotspots, sometimes staying out well past sunup. Sonny Stenson, a drummer who worked at Harold’s Club and a slender, smooth operator, introduced him to marijuana and amphetamines. “It’s part of show business,” Sonny said. Richard didn’t need much of a sell: he took instantly to the buzz, the relaxation, offered by pot and the rush offered by uppers. The drugs “eased my pain and insecurity, erased the fear, turned me into a whole new man,” he remembered. “Sometimes I stayed up two or three days straight, feeling so cool and jive.” He loved the uppers so much that he sometimes doubled the dose, which felt great until, on the second or third day of wakefulness, it felt horrible. “There’s an Indian playing a drum inside me. Tell him to stop,” Richard told Sonny. “That’s your heart,” Sonny replied, laughing.
At first, the drugs were merely one ingredient in the jangling carnival of Richard’s days and nights. Unanchored, he drifted from scene to scene—and nearly lost his life one Sunday morning, at the tail end of an extended Saturday night.