Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  On April 1, 1962, Richard and a musician from Harold’s Club were about to exit the Elks Club through its front door when the club’s bouncer, James King, insisted they step back. There was danger waiting outside that door: a sixty-eight-year-old man named Albert “Goodkid” Charles, who felt he’d been cheated of his money at the club and had now returned with a .12-gauge shotgun in hand. The bouncer—himself a father of five and the leader of the choir and Sunday school of his Baptist church—came onto the front steps of the club and appealed to Charles to put down his gun. Charles replied by shooting him point-blank in the groin. “Goodkid, why did you shoot me?” were King’s last words. The man who had saved Richard’s life was lying in a pool of blood on the steps.

  On April 10, a week after the shooting, Richard and Pat’s child, a son, was born. In the hospital, Richard stared at the baby, taking in his features. He told his father that his son “looked like a little ape.”

  Buck wasn’t one to gild the lily, either. “So did you,” he said. “Like a little gorilla. That’s what Mama said about you.”

  “Yeah?” Richard said under his breath. “Then I guess he’s mine.”

  The boy was named after his father: Richard Jr. For a few months, Richard stopped by the home of his in-laws, checking in with Pat and playing games with the baby. But his mind and heart were elsewhere.

  On May 17, 1962, Harold Parker lost his liquor license, which was tantamount to losing the lease on his nightclub, and Richard was forced to find a new job. Parker had been dogged by the law for several years, but he was effectively nailed when he allegedly bribed a police officer who had written him up for a liquor code violation. (Parker claimed he’d been entrapped.) Peoria mayor Robert Day prosecuted Parker with a vengeance: after the Illinois Liquor Control Commission ruled in favor of Parker in 1961, Day filed a lawsuit against the commission and against Parker. When Day’s lawsuit succeeded, the wild and styled world of Harold’s Club was no more. In a matter of years, the entire vice district of North Washington Street, the seedbed of Richard’s childhood, would be wiped off the map in its entirety. In a striking cultural about-face—the military-industrial complex edging out the underground economy—the Caterpillar Corporation would build its sprawling international headquarters on the block where Harold’s Club had stood. Harold Parker left Peoria for Chicago, where he died a few years later of a heart attack.

  When Harold’s Club shuttered in May 1962, there was still one survivor from the old days: the resourceful Bris Collins, who had operated a tavern at 405 North Washington Street since 1939. Collins and the Pryor family had been tight for decades. When Collins was sent to prison for a year on counterfeiting charges in 1954, Richard’s grandfather Pops took over the operation of the tavern in his absence. Eight years later, Collins repaid the favor by giving Richard a steady job, for seventy-two dollars a week, at Collins Corner, the nightclub he had recently opened on the spot of his old tavern.

  Collins may have been, like Harold Parker, a hard-nosed hustler who always made sure to get his cut, but in his own way he was also a pillar of the community, supporting the Carver Center financially and refusing to carry any liquor from Hiram Walker as long as the distillery did not employ blacks outside of menial jobs. Collins Corner was, unlike Harold’s Club, a nightclub oriented primarily to black Peorians. With the exception of the white strippers who straggled into Collins Corner after their own clubs closed for the night, no more than a handful of whites ever wandered in—and when they did, they had to endure an evil eye or two. The house band played jazz in the bebop mode of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, but people found a way to dance to it anyway. And despite the intimidating presence of Collins’s three-hundred-pound bouncer, people found a way to tear up the place in barroom brawls, too. Pianist Jimmy Binkley observed that the fights were cinematic in scope, MGM-grade. “Bris Collins would say, ‘Play louder, Jimmy, play louder!’” Binkley recalled. “In the back of the room, they sometimes had two or three fights going on at one time.”

  For Richard, Collins Corner was a return to the all-black audience he had last experienced at the Carver Center, loosened up by a liberal dose of alcohol and an even stronger one of working-class irreverence. He continued to refine his characterizations of his wino, his hustler, and his preacher, three stock figures that would have been familiar to his audience. His comedy was often uproariously physical—as when, after heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson suffered an infamously quick first-round defeat to Sonny Liston in September 1962, he imitated Patterson by tumbling off the foot-high bandstand and rolling into the back of the audience, scattering chairs along the way.

  The physical comedy was not simply wacky, though. The best of it expressed his vulnerability, his tenacity, and the depth charge of his resentment, and gave a stronger hint of the comedian to come. It was at Collins Corner that Richard developed his impersonation of “a baby being born,” an extended pantomime in which a spirited baby attempts, and mostly fails, to escape the womb. The baby begins in the fetal position; he touches his face and, in the act of exploring its contours, catches some sticky goo on his fingers. He tries to widen the opening of the womb, and the breach slams shut like a pair of subway doors. He tries again, with trembling hands, and succeeds in catching a glimpse of the outside world—which is a horrible thing; his face assumes an expression of raw terror. Undeterred, he gathers himself and attacks the breach again, and this time it tightens around his neck like a noose. In a rage, he slips out of the noose and assaults the breach again—only to be stuck there, halfway born, his legs in a vise. He starts hearing things: a doctor saying, “Ooh, that’s one ugly baby”; a mother chiming back in agreement. Everything—biology, society—seems to conspire against this poor baby. But rather than admit defeat, he musters his courage and finally clears the breach. His reward for entering the world: he begins his life on the outside with a full-on cry.

  At this point in his career, Richard steered clear of talking about his personal life onstage, but this routine offered his psyche in miniature: innocence mixed with cynicism, wonder spiked with fear, anger heated by the sense that he was fundamentally alone. And if we were to substitute “Peoria” for “the womb,” we might see that the birthing sketch was a nakedly autobiographical retelling of the first twenty-two years of his life. Richard had tried hard, in mind and body, to leave the world he’d been born into, and had slammed against barrier after barrier—until it was tempting for him to believe that there was no escape, just new ways of being mortified and entrapped. The world was a horror show, a noose, a vise, an insult.

  In the fall of 1962, despite the fact that Richard was pulling down steady money from his gig at Collins Corner, Buck decided that his son should take on the family business. Like a master guildsman instructing an apprentice, he set up Richard with a prostitute, expecting him to profit from the experience. One day, after earning a little money, the prostitute gave some cash to Richard and asked him to beat her. “Hit me, hit me,” she screamed. Richard didn’t understand that she wanted him to rough her up and show his control, but not hurt her seriously. “She hit me and I started fighting—for my life,” he told an interviewer. “I had no idea what she was talking about. I went berserk. I didn’t know there was any romantic connotation to physical violence.”

  The bruised prostitute ran to Buck, who approached Richard, steaming. “What the fuck are you doing?” he asked. “You don’t know how to beat a whore.” The apprentice had learned so little from living with his master’s example.

  “But she said to hit her,” Richard said in his defense.

  For Buck, this remark was the last straw. His son the comic didn’t understand women, didn’t grasp the basics of pimping, and didn’t deserve the indulgence of anyone.

  “Get your ass outta here!” Buck said.

  Richard scrambled to gather a few things—some clothes, some money, an alto saxophone, a typewriter he’d borrowed from his sister Barbara, under the pretense that he wanted to script a Western wit
h a black cowboy at its center. The screenwriting was put on hold: the typewriter, along with the saxophone, was pawned for some quick cash.

  His head swimming, he headed over to Collins Corner and bunked for a while at the club. But where would he go from there? In conversation with his mentor Juliette Whittaker, Richard had confessed that his dream was to be on The Ed Sullivan Show, and Whittaker urged him to head east: the stepping-stone to Ed Sullivan, she said, was Grossinger’s in the Catskills, not any club in Peoria. Then one night, all the performers at Collins Corner arrived at the club to discover a nasty surprise. The club had been closed without any notice, an apparent casualty of fiscal mismanagement. The performers looked at one another, stunned, and talked about what to do next. A choreographer of a burlesque revue offered, “Let’s all go to St. Louis. I think I can get a job for all of us.” The musicians in the house band stayed back; they had prospects still in Chicago. Richard told Pat he needed to follow his dream and pointedly did not invite her along for the ride.

  When Richard had earlier told his friends, “One day you’ll pay to see me,” they had laughed at his bravado. Now that he was in fact leaving, they expected him to return, humbled, after a few weeks. In their defense, it was hard to foresee a dazzling future for a young man who was leaving home to emcee what turned out to be a South Pacific–style burlesque show of female impersonators at a Chitlin Circuit club in East St. Louis.

  At Richard’s departure, there was no love lost between him and Buck. Four years later, Buck would brag that kicking Richard out of his house was “probably the best thing we ever did for him—make him go out on his own.” And in a twisted way, he was right: Richard may never have found the courage of his convictions if he had not been cut off from the abusive relationship that defined his childhood. His eviction from his father’s home not only made him desperate; it also gave him his freedom.

  For Richard, Peoria would always be the scene of his childhood’s ghosts, of unutterable feelings and unbearable pressures. Peoria had made him and unmade him both. When a Peoria journalist asked him, in 1993, if he had a message for the folks back home, he took on the voice of the demon in the film The Amityville Horror and rasped, “Get out!” He got out, in late 1962, and for the next decade rarely returned for more than a few days at a time—usually when there were loved ones to bury. He needed to leave Peoria, and needed to keep leaving Peoria, so that he could metabolize what he had experienced there. So he began his journey: as a wayfarer on the road known as the Chitlin Circuit, with no final destination in sight.

  PART TWO

  MAN OF A THOUSAND RUBBER FACES

  CHAPTER 7

  * * *

  In Search of Openness

  New York City and the Road, 1962–1964

  When he first hit the road in the fall of 1962, Richard Pryor had reason to think he might spend the rest of his working life on it, touring the sort of showplaces, nestled in black communities, where “good Negro folks would never venture and stepping on a brother’s Florsheims has meant hospitalization.” An earlier generation of black comics—Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley, LaWanda Page, Pigmeat Markham—had ridden the Chitlin Circuit for the whole of their careers. With white-oriented clubs and TV networks closed to their style of gutbucket humor, Foxx, Mabley, and the rest had traveled from one “Bronzeville” to another, entertaining boisterous crowds between floor shows and R&B combos, and making a meager living at it. “We was so poor even poor folks didn’t speak to us,” said Page. “We traveled by bus or train, couldn’t afford hotels most of the time. Stayed in boardinghouses in the Negro neighborhoods. Every once in a while you’d get lucky and stay in somebody’s house. But most folks wouldn’t let you, because most of those show people would steal.”

  Richard lived hand to mouth on the road for months at a time, working any venue that would have him. He bused, trained, and hitchhiked from Chicago to Cleveland to Pittsburgh, and picked up a few tricks along the way. “Every day was different, a surprise, an adventure through uncharted territory, and it forced me to sharpen my skills and learn my craft,” he remembered. It was a time for experimenting with material and delivery, for shaping what was admittedly a rough-hewn stage persona. In Youngstown, Ohio, he dressed down a hostile audience: “Hey, y’all can boo me now. But in a couple of years I’m gonna be a star, and you dumb niggers will still be sittin’ here!” An emcee in East St. Louis advised him, “You’ve got to talk to the people. You always look like you want to kill them.”

  By his own account, Richard’s time on the road was full of miscues and misadventures. He learned the hard way to be suspicious of his fellow show people when, after a three-week gig in East St. Louis, he woke up to discover that his “friends” had given him the slip and taken his clothes with them. In Youngstown, after suspecting that the owners of the Casablanca club were going to stiff him, he burst into their office and tried to claim his earnings. According to an embellished version of the incident that he performed onstage, he brandished a blank pistol to intimidate the owners of this “mafia club,” but found that he’d succeeded only in making himself a laughingstock. “Hey, do it again, Rich!” they said. “Put the gun away and do it again. Say ‘stick ’em up.’ Ha-ha-ha-ha! You fucking kid.”

  In December 1962, Richard was in Pittsburgh when he discovered that his idol Sammy Davis Jr. had just headlined its Civic Arena. Desperate for work and hungry for advice, he tracked Davis down to his hotel room and knocked on the door. Davis’s handler wouldn’t let him in. Playing for time, Richard drew up a chair and camped outside the door. The handler called the police. When a couple of officers arrived, Richard put on his best adult voice and faked them out: “Officer, about that young fellow—he has lit out, so take it easy. But if he comes back, I’ll give you a call.” The police moved on. Richard sat back in his chair, awaiting his idol with an empty stomach.

  Hours later, Davis came out for a breath of fresh air and, finding Richard parked in the hall, invited him into his room. Richard asked for a job. Davis let him bum a cigarette, then gave him a quick bit of perspective. Even for a major star like him, Davis admitted, the business was “a hard grind at best.” Still, what was to be done? “Daddy, swing—take it easy,” he counseled the young man.

  Richard heard the advice and took solace in it, but hardly took it easy. While in Pittsburgh, he started dating a singer and, in an ill-considered moment, bragged that he was collecting cash from her, as pimps do from their girls. Six hundred miles from Peoria, he was still shadowboxing with his father. When the singer caught wind of Richard’s boast and confronted him backstage, he panicked and gave her a beating so as to avoid, he thought, getting a beating himself. On January 1, 1963, police rousted Richard in the rooming house where he lived, charged him with aggravated assault and battery, and dragged him to jail. In court, he was given a suspended sentence, but appears not to have been able to pay the costs levied by the verdict—which meant his first extended stay in a jail cell, thirty-five days of incarceration.

  The misadventures persisted when, sprung from jail, Richard tried his luck at clubs that weren’t on the Chitlin Circuit. On one hapless jaunt in the middle of 1963, he crossed the border to Canada and faced white audiences who, he remembered, were less receptive to his act. In Windsor, Ontario, he played a “hillbilly bar” where the audience, eager to see the voluptuous singer next on the bill, booed him off the stage in the middle of his James Cagney impression. At a Toronto nightclub, he was upstaged as well as thumped by his competition: a bear that guzzled beer before wrestling with customers. The bear “got a little bit carried away with the wrestling,” Richard recalled. “He went after me. You know—a bear’s a bear. You can’t out-wrestle a bear, especially a bear that’s had a few. And then the bear would get gentle, and stroke you and sit on you.” Meanwhile, at his hotel, he observed a group of huge, gay wrestlers acting much the same as that bear, swinging between violence and tenderness. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I mean, you’d see them brutally murdering e
ach other in Saturday-night wrestling matches. And then you’d see them back at the hotel, kissing and holding hands. It was bizarre.”

  Frustrated in Toronto, Richard caught yet another surprise. He flipped open Newsweek and was startled to read about a “smart new 24-year-old Negro comic.” The young comic, Newsweek observed, had begun his career onstage with some racial humor—by imagining, for instance, what would happen if a black man were elected president. (“Everything is OK,” says the black president. “Just a lot of ‘For Sale’ signs on the street.”) But then this comic—an athletic, handsome type by the name of Bill Cosby—made a name for himself by scrubbing all race-related jokes from his repertoire. His signature routine revisited the first conversation between God and Noah, turning it into theater of the absurd:

  GOD: I want you to build an ark.

  NOAH: Riiight . . . What’s an ark?

  GOD: Get wood. Build it 80 cubits by 40 cubits.

  NOAH: Riiight . . . What’s a cubit?

  GOD: Let’s see . . . A cubit, a cubit. . . .

  NOAH: What’s going on?

  GOD: I’m going to destroy all the people from the face of the earth.

  NOAH: Riiight. . . . Am I on Candid Camera?

  Cosby was sly and wry, threading observational humor into shaggy-dog stories with little explicit political content. His act was a clear departure from the “sick” humor of comedians like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, who had laced early 1960s stand-up with strong doses of vinegar, gall, and topicality. “I’m trying to reach all the people. I want to play Joe Q. Public,” Cosby told Newsweek.

  Richard was devastated. “Goddamn it,” he said, “this nigger’s doing what I’m fixing to do. I want to be the only nigger. Ain’t no room for two niggers.” Cosby represented literally the road not taken: rather than build his audience by working the Chitlin Circuit, where Richard had concentrated his energies, Cosby had focused on hip cafés in Philly and New York City. His big break had been a 1962 summer residency at the Greenwich Village café the Gaslight, where, according to the New York Times, his audience was “composed mainly of Bohemian youths in beards, college girls who discuss medical care for the aged, and tourists who are alternately bewitched and bewildered by what they believe is the ‘dolce vita’ of New York.” That audience had been Cosby’s pathway to the talent bookers and, from there, to national exposure via The Tonight Show. Cosby had been a pioneer in his approach not only to comedy, but to his career as a whole.