Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  In New York City, black activists were disillusioned to discover that local whites, no matter how sympathetic to Martin Luther King Jr.’s actions down south, balked when the civil rights movement showed up at their doorstep. After a black-led boycott in early 1964 pulled hundreds of thousands of children out of their schools (the largest civil rights boycott of the era), the New York Times advocated a “self-imposed curb on speechmaking” and opined sourly that “A racial balancing of all the city’s schools remains as impossible after the boycott as before.” Black activists looked at the difficulty of the tasks ahead—turning broken schools into engines of opportunity, slums into livable neighborhoods—and felt a combustive sense of urgency. White liberals, and some black liberals, too, were chastened by that same difficulty. They looked to study the problems, grasp their complexities, and find a workable, targeted approach to them. Meanwhile, the middle ground between these two positions seemed to be disappearing. In July 1964, the month before Richard’s debut on TV, the shooting of a black ninth-grader by a white policeman touched off several days of battles between black Harlemites and the NYPD, with black rioters hurling Molotov cocktails and bricks at armed officers, who shot back.

  Richard’s political feelings in this period are hard to trace with exactitude, perhaps because they weren’t well defined. He was more a tongue-tied witness to events than the trenchant commentator he would become. But in his acquaintance with poet-playwright LeRoi Jones, a fellow black bohemian, he felt the pull of a certain articulacy, a slashing anger that put the white world on notice. At the time, Jones was known primarily for his play Dutchman, an Off-Broadway sensation in which a white woman propositions a black man on the subway, inflames him into a rage, then stabs him in the chest and enlists the other passengers to throw his body off the train. Though married to a Jewish woman himself, Jones had an astringent view of the undercurrents of jealousy and desire that ran between blacks and whites in America. And he had an uncompromising vision of how honest an artist had to be: “[The artist] is a man who would say not only that the king has no clothes,” he wrote, “but proceed from there to note how badly the sovereign is hung. Such a man is, of course, crazy. . . . We’re all ravers, in one fashion or another.” By mid-1964, Jones had become a prominent voice of black radical disenchantment.

  It was Henry Jaglom, ironically, who introduced Richard to Jones, by taking him to an intimate staging of a Jones play at the Actors Studio. In the post-play discussion, Jaglom attacked what he saw as the play’s slanted treatment of race, and Jones responded with a stark challenge and an ad hominem attack: he was not prepared to listen to anything Jaglom said about his play or race in America; Jaglom was part of a system of oppression and had no right to comment on his work unless he was prepared to kill his own parents. Jaglom was shocked. He was coming at the race issue from a progressive angle, he felt. And his parents, as Jews escaping the Nazis, had only recently come to America—how could they be held responsible for slavery and its legacies? Jones was unperturbed. He repeated that if Jaglom wanted to be taken seriously, he needed to be willing to kill his parents. At this point, Jaglom looked to his good friend Richard—his collaborator onstage, his partner in dreaming, his political sounding board—for some moral support. To Jaglom’s chagrin, Richard kept his silence. It was a turning point in their relationship, a sign that they were not just compañeros in comedy, but separate particles: white and black, legit and illegit, rich and not rich at all. That night the two migrated from the Actors Studio to the Improv, where they assumed the stage as if nothing had happened. But “something had been broken,” Jaglom reflected.

  Near the time of the face-off at the Actors Studio, Richard met Jones, this time without Jaglom, at the well-heeled apartment of the publisher of Kulchur, an avant-garde magazine for which Jones served as music editor. The apartment was a hipper version of the Jagloms’ luxury residence: original paintings by Picasso and Modigliani, rather than Degas and Renoir, hung on the walls. Richard, Jones, and the son of Kulchur’s publisher were talking politics, and the publisher’s son wanted to know how he might become more involved in the cause, whatever that entailed for a young white radical. “What can I do to help?” he asked Jones.

  “Cut your father’s throat,” Jones said. It was a well-practiced, all-purpose answer to white would-be allies in 1964.

  Richard started to interject something, but Jones cut him short with a look and one word: “Richard.”

  The son hemmed and hawed; Richard watched. He was entranced by the power of Jones’s sharp cruelty, by the paralyzing effect it had on the white kid in the room. The kid who seemed to have everything in the world, who seemed born into knowingness, was suddenly and indelibly at a loss.

  “Reality is best dealt with,” Jones told Richard privately at another moment. It was professional advice in the form of a Zen koan, and Richard tried to straighten his head so that he might follow it.

  On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom, killed by a shotgun blast that ripped a seven-inch hole around his heart. For LeRoi Jones, as for many black radicals, the death of Malcolm was a shattering event: the most charismatic spokesman for black liberation had been cut down at the very moment when his message felt most vital. Within a few weeks, Jones left behind his Jewish wife, their two children, and their world of friends in Greenwich Village and moved to Harlem, a neighborhood he had never known from the inside. There he founded the Black Arts Theatre Repertory/School, an all-black cultural organization that aspired to be the handmaiden of the black revolution. His dalliance with bohemia behind him, he was now fully committed: “[b]ack in the homeland to help raise the race.”

  Richard Pryor wasn’t there yet. He had an affinity with Jones, but it was hard enough to be a struggling comedian without taking on the revolutionary struggle, too. And while Jones had been a resident of bohemia for a full decade, Richard was just starting to sample its freedoms—not least among them, the freedom to date white women.

  In early 1965, Richard fell for one in particular, an Audrey Hepburn lookalike by the name of Maxine Silverman. Maxine was a savvy bohemian with a hard-earned sense of independence. Her parents—working-class Jews from Boston, a cabdriver and a department store clerk—had expected their daughter, first, to be well behaved. When she wasn’t, they tried to pound the mischief out of her with an ironing cord, or locked her in a closet to teach her a lesson. (Throughout her life, she went to sleep with the TV on, as she couldn’t stand to be in the dark.) By sixteen she had had an abortion. By age twenty-one she had split for New York City with a girlfriend and become a devoted follower of jazz, Lenny Bruce, and haute couture. Holly Golightly had Tiffany to spark her dreams; Maxine had Henri Bendel, where she could eye, but not buy, the latest dresses and accessories.

  A vivacious beauty: Maxine Silverman at the beach in 1961, posed with Phillip Wylie’s Opus 21, a novel of sexual and political discovery.

  (Courtesy of Elizabeth Pryor)

  Maxine was a prickly, vivacious beauty. When she first caught Richard onstage, she saw him as a Lenny Bruce wannabe: he’d dropped the word shit into his routine, and she thought it was a cheap way to get a laugh (and told him so). But she warmed to his aura of innocence—he seemed to her like the sweetest, most darling person she’d ever seen—and not long after they met, she was willing to ditch her then-boyfriend and take a chance on love. Richard thought Maxine was “the cutest white girl I’d ever seen,” who “grooved right along with me in treating life like a party” and “knew things, sophisticated things that I’d never learned, like which forks to use at a nice restaurant.” After he caught some commercial breaks, they moved in together, in a classy doorman building at Fifty-Seventh Street and Ninth Avenue.

  Their relationship was high drama. It began as a comedy of misrecognition—Maxine taking Richard’s sweetness as the whole of his personality, Richard taking her vivacity as the whole of hers—and evolved into something considerably darker. Both of them had grown up
in homes where abuse and affection were mixed up like feathers in a whirlwind, and they practiced on each other what had been practiced on them, probably without knowing why. Petty quarrels flared into knock-down, drag-out fights, fanned by Richard’s discovery of a different kind of “white lady”: cocaine.

  In his memoir, Richard recalls one of the few occasions when Maxine got the last jab. An actor friend broke into their apartment late at night and shook Richard awake. Richard’s signature, it seems, had been illegible on a two-hundred-dollar check he had written so that his friend could fly out to LA for an audition—a check that would have cleaned out his bank account, and that Maxine had asked him not to write. The bank had sent the actor back to get another signature.

  Richard did not wake easily. “I’m sleeping. Ask Maxine,” he said.

  The friend woke Maxine, who became incensed—that Richard hadn’t listened to her, that the argument was coming around again, that he was fobbing this actor off on her—and ended up on their apartment’s balcony, screaming. Soon there was a roundelay of rage: Richard “angry at Maxine for getting angry while this actor was angry at both of us for fucking up his big chance.”

  In the heat of the moment, Maxine grabbed a knife and fumed, “I’m gonna cut you, motherfucker.”

  Richard egged her on. “Go ahead, bitch.”

  She sprang at Richard, swiping across his left arm with a slash of the knife, cutting half an inch into the flesh.

  Blood spurted out. Richard, in a fugue state, staggered to his friend Bruce Scott’s apartment upstairs. “Holy shit, she nailed you good!” Scott exclaimed. He brought Richard inside, where, in silence, he cleaned the wound and wrapped it in gauze. Finally, Richard asked, “You want to come along? I’m going to rent a car and drive around.” Scott feared that Richard might, with his hundred-yard stare, drive himself off some forlorn cliff in suburban New Jersey, and so, around seven in the morning, the two found themselves in a rental car tooling aimlessly around the Garden State. Richard sat quietly with his gauze-packed arm on the wheel, mulling over something and revealing nothing on the long ride. He wanted a companion who would put no demands on him—who would just be there.

  Usually the violence between Richard and Maxine went the other way. Richard could be brutal, and she never knew how far he might go. Two years later, when they lived together in Beverly Hills, she wrote a secret message on the back of a picture in their home: “If anything happens to me, Richard Pryor did it.” He might put her in the grave somehow, she thought bleakly, but he wouldn’t get away with it.

  Still they considered themselves, for a while, husband and wife. Maxine called herself “Mrs. Maxine Pryor” early in their relationship and never dropped the title; Richard called her his wife, though he hadn’t yet divorced his first wife, Patricia. In the manner of bohemians, they preferred informal vows to any official ceremony in a church, temple, or city hall. Cigar bands, not wedding bands, were exchanged between them. Richard cried out to be taken care of, and Maxine tried to take care of him, in her fashion. When Richard debuted on The Ed Sullivan Show in May 1965—the biggest break of his early career—he turned to Maxine to pick out his tie.

  The routine that opened the doors in Richard’s professional life was a five-minute farce, a version of his theatrical debut in a children’s production of Rumpelstiltskin. “Rumpelstiltskin” was his calling card as a comic, a work of mini-theater that he used successfully to audition for Ed Sullivan’s and Merv Griffin’s shows. And like much of his early act, it was an elaborate scrambling of the facts of his life.

  At age fourteen, Richard had made his stage debut at the Carver Center in a production of Rumpelstiltskin that had lived up to Juliette Whittaker’s exacting standards of professionalism and artistry. In his routine, Richard backdated the routine to his kindergarten year at Irving School, substituted a nasally white “Mr. Conrad” for the elegantly black Miss Whittaker, and converted his fellow performers from aspiring thespians to “little kiddies” who can’t seem to get their lines or characters straight:

  RUMPELSTILTSKIN [squirrely kid’s voice]: My name is Rumpelstiltskin and I’m a meanie! My name is Rumpelstiltskin—uh-oh! I hear the sound of horsey hoops. I will hide behind a rock or tree.

  NARRATOR: Bookety-bookety-bookety-bookety-bookety . . .

  PRINCE [overacting]: Whoah, horsey. Whoah, horsey. Ho, ho, ho, man! I saw something hidin’ in the woods behind a rock or tree. Go look, captain of the garbs.

  CAPTAIN OF THE GUARDS [haltingly]: Prince . . . you did not see anything. It must have been a menage.

  And so it goes, in this burlesque of a fairy tale. The boy playing the fairy godmother introduces himself as the fairy “godfather,” then confusedly corrects himself. Rumpelstiltskin brags about the wicked power of his magic dust, then blows it by mistake into his own face and gasps.

  For Rumpelstiltskin, Richard drew upon that part of himself that had stayed forever in kindergarten, the part that was not wised up and that wanted to believe in fairy-tale happy endings. (His kindergarten year at Irving School marked the moment, in his life, of his parents’ divorce and his separation from his mother.) The sketch was a hilarious portrait of the guilelessness of children, rendered by a comedian who hankered after innocence even as he knew how absurd it was to walk innocently among the wolves of the world. With his narrow shoulders and pipe-cleaner legs still suggesting the gawkiness of adolescence, Richard looked young, too—young enough that the years seemed to melt away when he played kindergarteners. And unlike Bill Cosby, whose sketches often revolved around children, too, he didn’t seek to correct their behavior or interject himself as an authority figure when they misbehaved and struggled to stay “on script.” There was joy in their comedy of errors, delight in how they slipped out of the roles they were given. The only grown-up in the sketch, the self-important teacher Mr. Conrad, was the character who came off most poorly.

  Artistically, “Rumpelstiltskin” was a watershed for Richard. With it, he found a way to collapse the techniques of group improvisation he’d learned at the Improv into his solo act as a stand-up comedian. Instead of joining a handful of actors onstage to play a theater game, he became all the actors himself and made the rules of the game into the premise of the routine. “Rumpelstiltskin” set the template for later virtuosic sketches such as “T.V. Panel,” “Prison Play,” and “Hank’s Place,” in which he effortlessly seemed to incarnate character after character and spun the anarchy of their interaction into comedic gold. Though these sketches were carefully crafted and sometimes repeated word for word from performance to performance, they had a bracing sense of spontaneity built into them. They felt improvised even if they weren’t, perhaps because the people within them, like all children and all good improvisers onstage, tended to be searching for the truth of their character rather than in possession of it.

  Practically, “Rumpelstiltskin” marked a new stage in Richard’s career, and for a very simple reason: both Ed and Merv loved it, and loved him. Right after his debut with Merv Griffin, he became a regular, notching more than twenty appearances on the show in less than a year. After he performed “Rumpelstiltskin” on Ed Sullivan, he was signed to a multi-show contract that kept him on the program every two months. The television exposure changed his life: he left behind Manny Roth, who, after all, had the Café Wha? to attend to, and teamed up with General Artists Corporation, a powerhouse talent agency that represented everyone from the Beatles and the Supremes to Nancy Sinatra and fellow up-and-comer George Carlin.

  Soon Richard would be recognized as a “lean, literate, quick-witted kook,” the man with “the most elastic face in show business.” He had graduated from the coffeehouses of the Village and was becoming a national, not just a local, act. Jet reported, breathlessly, that this “newest and youngest of the Negro comics” was “being stormed by teen-agers every time he does a TV show.” As the appearances piled up, he found himself in an unprecedented situation: making more money than he could spend.

 
Back in Peoria, Richard’s family was dealing with legal trouble more serious than the cat-and-mouse games of his early childhood. The police were cracking down on the Aiken Avenue area where Peoria’s brothels had migrated after the bulldozing of North Washington Street, and for the first time in twenty years, his father and stepmother faced the threat of prison time.

  The trouble began on May 28, 1965, when Sheriff Ray Trunk was fiddling with a padlock at 405 Aiken Avenue, a house shuttered by court order. He heard a tapping sound from the house next door, at 409 Aiken; a woman was knocking on the window and signaling him to come over. He approached, and the front door cracked open; the woman invited him to sneak around to the back. Instead, Trunk pushed open the door and arrested the two women he found in the front room as suspected prostitutes. He explored the house and, coming upon Richard’s stepmother Ann in another room, asked if she ran the place. When, according to Trunk, she said yes, she was hauled off to jail on prostitution charges.

  Three months later, the Pryors suffered another impromptu raid at 409 Aiken. On September 18, an undercover Illinois state trooper wangled his way into the house; a twenty-one-year-old working girl propositioned him, and, after money changed hands, he revealed himself as an officer of the law. The trooper was ill prepared for what came next. Several people—among them Buck Pryor, fifty years old and built like a refrigerator—grabbed the girl and ran into the streets. It was a lucky if impulsive move. Buck eluded capture for a day, and though he was charged with being the brothel’s proprietor, in the end there was not enough evidence to substantiate the charge. He got off with just a twenty-dollar fine, for resisting arrest.

  Richard’s stepmother was not so fortunate. On October 6, 1965, a Peoria judge declared Ann guilty of operating a brothel, and the assistant state’s attorney recommended a three-month jail term. Ann’s lawyer pleaded in court for a fine, not jail time, and put his client on the stand to make a case for extenuating circumstances. She was dying of oral and nose cancer, Ann said; she had recently been operated upon in a hospital in Chicago, and her condition required regular follow-ups there. She also testified that she was out of the game, a madam no more, and pointed to the fact that she was attending night school at Midstate College of Commerce, studying typing and office work.