by Scott Saul
Though Richard would later be seen as the anti-Cosby—funky, experimental, and provocative where Cosby was clean, predictable, and safe—he had reason in 1963 to identify with Cosby’s quest for a crossover style and a crossover audience. Having grown up in a city where blacks were about 10 percent of the population, a microcosm of America as a whole, he was accustomed to maneuvering through largely white institutions and communities. At least since third grade, he had brought white friends and teachers into his world by teasing them with half-barbed invitations; later, at Harold’s Club, he had grown comfortable working a mixed audience. And even after his months on the Chitlin Circuit, Richard’s comedy still hewed closer to the models of his childhood idols (physical comedians like Red Skelton, Sid Caesar, and Jerry Lewis) than to profane comics like Redd Foxx, who played to largely black audiences. Given his childhood, Richard might never have described himself as “Joe Q. Public,” but now that Cosby had taken on the role, it probably sounded like an appealing title, or at least a good alias.
Posthaste, Richard bought a train ticket to New York City. He arrived there with ten dollars in his pocket and patent leather shoes on his feet, hoping to glide through the door that Cosby had opened. But first he had to find it. He had only the faintest idea where to start looking.
At the train station, Richard took a shower, threw on his well-worn suit, knotted his skinny tie, and splashed on some Canoe cologne. He walked out into the open air and felt dizzy beneath the crush of Manhattan—the skyscrapers, the press of Checker cabs on the avenues, the people racing down the sidewalks as if they all had an urgent appointment with destiny. “It was a lot to take in for someone with no place to go,” he remembered. “I heard alarms go off in my head and wondered what the hell I’d done.”
His first priority, above even finding a place to stay, was to get a gig. He was familiar with only one venue in Manhattan, the Apollo Theater, so he grabbed an uptown bus, which dropped him off at 125th Street in Harlem. Ah, Harlem, the home he was looking for: “In two blocks, I saw more black people than I’d ever seen in my life. Just two blocks, and it was beautiful and it was exciting. And I looked and I felt it and I loved it, and I wanted to be part of it. Everyone talks about ‘Don’t walk in Harlem.’ I felt safer than I ever felt in my life.”
Uncertain charms: one of Pryor’s first head shots, not long after his arrival in New York City.
(Courtesy of Getty Images)
He’d landed in the cradle of blackness—or had he? At the Apollo, he met the theater’s booking agent, who looked put-upon when Richard asked for work. “Yeah, right. Why don’t you try down at the Village?” the agent said. Richard looked at him uncomprehending; he’d never heard of any village in New York. “Downtown,” the booker explained, and pointed him out the door and out of Harlem.
So much for the soft cushion of the cradle. But Richard had the good fortune, after catching a downtown bus, to arrive in Greenwich Village at a choice moment in its scrappy history. “It was a time,” actor-writer Buck Henry remembered, “when every doorway late at night had someone standing in it who would later be famous.” With America sitting on the edge of the cultural changes that came to be known as “the sixties,” bohemia was becoming, more than ever before, the incubator of the new comics, the new singers, the new talent.
In 1963, when Richard arrived, the New York Times described the Village as having a “Coney Island, carnival atmosphere,” complete with barkers who promoted their establishments to passersby. Coffeehouses offered a smorgasbord of artistic experiment, their freewheeling spirit typified by the twisted proverbs on the menu of the Bitter End: “One good mistress deserves another,” “Grasp the eye by the monocle,” “Cold meat lights no fire,” and so on. Bookshops stayed open until midnight, coffeehouses until dawn, and revelers kept the streets alive until the wee hours of the morning. The local avant-garde effervesced: it was the season of Andy Warhol and Pop Art’s explosion, of happenings galore, of art world productions like Carolee Schneemann’s Eye Body, in which the artist covered herself with grease, plastic, and chalk and had herself photographed nude with two garden snakes writhing up her torso. Buses filled with tourists crawled bumper to bumper through its narrow streets in a steady parade, their passengers looking down on the action. Performers in the Village in 1963 could justifiably feel that they were both on the edge of society and within its very nerve center.
Richard fell into a small bohemian pocket of the Village. With his friends he tried every drug the Village had to offer: he smoked reefer, got a codeine fix by buying terpin hydrate over the counter at a MacDougal Street drugstore, raided whipped cream cans at Village cafés for their nitrous oxide, and eventually found his way to cocaine. Meanwhile, he and his friends honed their chops in the Village’s hootenanny scene. The “hoots” were loosely structured amateur nights, where folk musicians and comedians performed in the hope of catching the eye of someone who would offer them a regular booking. Richard played the circuit, starting with the Café Wha? on Monday nights and the Bitter End on Tuesdays, where he sat nervously on a bench with the other comics awaiting their turn—among them, Joan Rivers, who remembered him wearing a coat “with jacket sleeves lengthened so many times, he looked like an admiral.” He appeared to be still, at age twenty-two, in the midst of an awkward growth spurt. Though he became a regular at its cafés, he felt ill at ease in the Village whirl. He made the decision to rent a small, dark apartment on the other side of the East River, in Brooklyn, rather than locate himself in the Village proper. “I didn’t make the Village scene,” he said. “[P]eople were very snobbish to me in the Village—I don’t know why.”
Part of that awkwardness came from his inability to tap into his past. On the one hand, he had a fund of experience, from his first twenty years in Peoria, that made the most “far-out” adventures of the avant-garde seem thin by comparison, mere playacting. On the other hand, the prevailing zeitgeist, in the form of Bill Cosby, was blowing him in the exact opposite direction—away from his underworld past and toward a squeaky-clean future. Before arriving in Greenwich Village, Richard had been transfixed by Cosby’s example; after catching him in action, in between his own sets at the Cafe Wha?, he was stunned by his talent. “The man was amazing. Truly amazing,” Richard recalled. “Do you hear me? I was amazed.”
For a few months he tried to remake himself as “Richard Cosby,” studying Cos’s records to divine the secret of their success. Much of Richard’s act had been made up of impressions—“screaming takeoffs,” wrote the Philadelphia Tribune—of Alfred Hitchcock, character actor Walter Brennan, and Sammy Davis Jr. Now he would slip mid-act into the kind of storytelling that Cosby was known for, in an unattributed impression of his new idol. Here’s how, in one routine, he described the arrival of a burglar in his home:
I grabbed the crook. That was the wrong move.
He threw me down—I got up.
He knocked me down—I got up.
He kicked me down. He said, “Get up!” I said, “heh, heh.”
Then my wife threw him across the furniture, and the police came. She beat them up, they took her away. Now me and the crook are living happily ever after.
The rhythms, the make-believe scenario, the wacky, absurdist ending—these were pure Cos. When his fellow comics confronted Richard on his raiding of Cosby’s act, he had a simple reply: “I’m going for the bucks.”
The critics picked up on the bald act of emulation, too. In what may have been the first media coverage of Richard’s career, on March 19, 1964, the New York Herald Tribune declared that “Comedian Richard Pryor has got guts. He uses Bill Cosby’s style, mannerisms, inflections, and much of Cosby’s material without batting an eyelash. Be yourself, Richard, so we can pan (or applaud) you on your own.” Manny Roth, the owner of the Café Wha? and Richard’s first manager, gave him a more profound version of the same advice. Roth told him, “You can’t be Cos, you just can’t be Cos. It’s going to be hard enough just being Ritchie, Richard Pryor . .
. You’ll never be Cosby in a million years. But you know what? You’re going to be bigger and better than Cos.”
Bigger and better than Cos? Bigger than the Tonight Show performer whose first album had soared up the charts? In 1964, such soothsaying was hard to fathom, much less credit. Yet the insight behind the advice was unimpeachable. Temperamentally, Richard could never hope to become Cos, whose strength onstage came from his preternatural composure. Cosby’s relaxed intensity made his audience trust that they could lean back in their seats and enjoy the ride. Richard’s strength, on the other hand, was his supersensitivity, his ability to tune into the lower frequencies of human interaction. Unlike Cos, Richard never took on an air of unqualified success; he was forever an underdog, and had all the anxiety and embattlement that followed that fate. If Richard wanted to live up to his promise, he needed to channel his anxiety rather than run away from it.
Richard found camaraderie, and a partial solution to his dilemma as a comic, among “a bunch of hobos looking for work”—the comedian friends he made in the Village. Together, they scraped for their ten minutes onstage and passed around a hat afterward for loose change. Though some hailed from more comfortable backgrounds, all of them were hungry—for experience, for action, for a break. They made a ragged army of individualists: Henry Jaglom, a loquacious actor-comedian who came to the Village by way of his parents’ luxury apartment building on Central Park West; J. J. Barry, an earthy, hefty performer once described as an “upright hippo of a man”; Bob Altman, a shaggy-browed stock analyst who would soon give up his day job and become the frenetic comic known as Uncle Dirty; Martin Harvey Friedberg, a sweet-tempered man who brought pathos to scenes of utter hilarity; and Burt Heyman, who worked for the United Jewish Appeal before committing to comedy full time. Richard was the one black performer in the bunch, but in observance of an unwritten rule of bohemia, the comics focused on their common present rather than on their multiple pasts. All of them were in transition from one life to another, where it was hoped the old rules wouldn’t apply.
The group found a second home at the Improvisation, a coffeehouse that had opened in the spring of 1963 at Forty-Fourth Street and Ninth Avenue, two miles north of the Village. (In an early Village Voice advertisement, The Improvisation called itself the home of “everyone you haven’t seen since they left the Village.”) Later known simply as the Improv, the café started as an after-hours hangout for the Midtown theater set. The Herald Tribune found it a “happy espresso oasis” where “local ‘gypsies’ (show business people)” went to “unwind after the curtain”; the likes of Judy Garland were known to give impromptu performances, singing and swinging until 7:00 a.m. Soon comedians like Richard and his gang started taking over the club, whose loose-jointed feel served their purposes, too. In the early hours of the morning, when the Improv’s audience dwindled to what Henry Jaglom called “the dregs”—a nightlife crew of “the hookers and the cab drivers and the drunks”—Richard would tell his friends, “Come on up, let’s get up and fool around,” and then two or three or four of them would take the stage, performing for nothing other than the joy of performance. Thus was born an important, if rarely noticed, experiment with the form of group improv.
In part, Richard and his fellow improvisers took their cues from the innovative exercises, or games, developed by the Chicago theater group the Compass. These games were designed, in the words of one critic, “to almost fool spontaneity into being”: they asked actors to surrender to the flow of interaction, to collaborate with the audience as well as their fellow performers, and to rely on their bodies to put over their character’s story.
For Richard, who had felt the limitations of his written material, group improv unlocked his genius as a performer. “He would just investigate. The commitment was very full,” said Jaglom. In one sketch at the Improv, Richard had played a fortune-telling vending machine that answered someone’s questions about their future in installments, one dime’s worth at a time. With other comics, the sketch had lasted three minutes; with Richard as the vending machine, seducing and goosing the paying customer, it lasted forty. During another bit, Richard started removing his shirt in an apparent non sequitur. A beat later, his shoes came off. Then his pants. And then, to everyone’s astonishment, he pulled off his underwear. “That was against the law at that point,” Jaglom reflected. “I was screaming, and other people were screaming, with laughter. Other people were really mad: ‘Put your pants on! What are you, crazy? They’re going to close us down.’ I remember clearly saying in my journal, ‘This guy has no limits. He’s free.’”
Though Richard’s improv often came out of these theater games, it frequently had less of a pretext or conceptual frame. Much of it was high-concept larking—the result of someone’s brain flash. Richard and his buddies might pretend to be an officer and his platoon of soldiers, a Mafioso and his mark, or a fellowship of samurai warriors (anticipating Richard’s famed samurai hotel sketch with John Belushi on Saturday Night Live). Or they might go outside the club and transform the Improv’s picture window into a make-believe aquarium, the sudden setting for a four-man water ballet. In their improvs, all lines were to be crossed, including the one that separated “onstage” from “offstage.” Once, Richard and his comic friends sat eating an entire meal, of rice pilaf and chicken, under the lights onstage, with the audience watching. After a while, Richard started eating with his hands, touching off an avalanche of anarchy: soon all the comics were acting like cavemen, licking their dishes and throwing them on the floor. Budd Friedman, the Improv’s owner, charged the stage; the comics expected him to scold them. “So that’s the way you feel about it, hunh?” Friedman said—then yanked away the tablecloth so that absolutely everything crashed to the ground.
Present at the creation: sketch by Henry Jaglom, “Richy Pryor ’66 The Improv.”
(Courtesy of Henry Jaglom)
Richard and his friends probably wouldn’t have considered themselves avant-garde, but their improv was taking them close to the edgier performance scenes of the Village, where it was more important to create a spectacle than to advance a well-made plot. At the same time that they had their caveman banquet, flouting social decorum onstage, the Village avant-garde had the “flesh jubilation” of Meat Joy (1964), a ritual play where men and women, stripped to their underwear, writhed together and rubbed raw chicken and sausage on their bodies. With their affection for improvisation and their frank sensuousness, Richard and the avant-garde were on parallel paths to points unknown.
The Improv was generally a hospitable home for Richard’s explorations, with Budd Friedman and his then-wife, Silver, happy to stoke the merriment and the madness. At the Improv’s first birthday party, an after-hours party for regulars in the spring of 1964, Richard disappeared into the men’s room near the tail end of a set by a self-serious chanteuse and emerged having ditched his button-down shirt, sports coat, pants, and underwear. Clad only in his felt hat, shoes, and socks, he pranced sweetly across the stage, exposing his nether parts to his audience and toying with their expectations about how black men were supposed to measure up. “Well, there goes another myth,” quipped Silver, in the spirit of Richard’s escapade.
Yet not every audience at the Improv could match the freewheeling spirit of the guests at the Improv’s birthday party. One night on the early side of a weekend evening, Richard sat next to Silver and eyed the Improv crowd for several minutes. “I think I’ll go downtown,” he said finally.
“Not enough action for you?” she asked.
“Maybe later.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Openness.” Then he lit off in search of it.
Richard found a type of openness in his unexpected friendship with Henry Jaglom. Later known as a director of more than fifteen independent films, Jaglom came from a spectacularly wealthy Jewish family: his father, formerly the finance minister of the Free City of Danzig, had been so important to the German economy that Hitler wished to make him an �
��honorary Aryan” so he might keep brokering trade between the two territories. Henry himself was a student at the University of Pennsylvania and the Actors Studio in Manhattan, and had been affiliated with an offshoot of the Compass theater group in Boston; by temperament he was an intellectual and an idealist, involved with the Congress of Racial Equality’s effort to desegregate Madison Avenue. Just two years before, Richard had been living under his father’s roof with a stepmother who tricked to put food on the table. Now he was Henry’s regular guest at the Jagloms’ luxury apartment on Central Park West, where Louis XV furniture decorated the rooms, Renoir and Degas paintings hung on the walls, and family dinners were elaborate affairs with servants setting out finger bowls. Richard played it cool, as if he were to the manner born. He never admitted any disorientation to his well-off friend.
Precisely because of the unacknowledged distance between the two of them, Richard and Henry made a perfect bohemian pair: the black outsider bonding with the artistic son of a Jewish import-export financier. Richard had been born into the sex trade and had flunked out of it; Henry had been born into money and had felt himself an imposter. They met up, providentially, on the stage of the Improv, where creativity required no credential.