Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  Ramrod-straight Peoria had no sympathy for Ann. The president of Midstate College of Commerce, indignant to have been used for an alibi, dismissed her from its rolls after the story of her announced reform hit the newsstands. “If we had known her identity, we would never have accepted her,” he said, and refunded her tuition forthwith. In late October the judge quadrupled the sentence recommended by the state’s attorney, imposing the maximum of a one-year prison term for her offense. If his sentence stuck, Ann was likely to die in the Illinois State Reformatory for Women, ninety miles from her home.

  The Pryor family rallied to her cause, quickly raising two thousand dollars for her bail. Their lawyer shot off an appeal to a higher court, and Ann was free pending its resolution. She was playing out her string, though it was far from clear how much string she had left.

  For Buck and Ann, their son Richard—once a nuisance and irritant in the household—was now a source of consolation. In the days after the judge pronounced his sentence, Richard was headlining the Blue Angel in Chicago, and the two drove the three hours to watch him perform. “Sure enough, high above in big lights was the name Richard Pryor,” Buck recalled to a reporter in 1966, playing the proud father. “We knew then that he had found what he’d always wanted.” And Buck got a piece of what he wanted out of Richard’s success, too: twenty thousand dollars in cash, handed freely from Richard so that Buck could buy a new home in Peoria, separate from the Aiken Avenue house that had just been raided twice.

  For Richard, the generosity of that gift was inversely proportional to the amount of time he wished to spend in Peoria. He was trying to become the name on a bigger marquee, the star twinkling above his family and their troubles. Except in the controlled world of his imagination, he had not returned to his home in the three years since he left, and that was how he liked it.

  CHAPTER 9

  * * *

  An Irregular Regular

  Los Angeles, New York City, Peoria, 1965–1966

  Late October 1965, an apartment in a West Hollywood high-rise: Henry Jaglom, still an underemployed actor, is writing furiously in his journal with different-colored pens, having just dropped acid for the first time. He had been given the stuff—little known outside certain bohemian circles in Hollywood and San Francisco, and still perfectly legal in California—from a friend at Jane Fonda’s July Fourth bash in Malibu, and had held on to it for months, hesitant to experiment with his own psyche. Now he feels his world buzzing. The celestial harmonies of Bach are manifesting to him in a wash of color; flowers are growing out of the walls and the colored pens he’s holding. He looks at himself in a mirror and observes that he has undergone the most stunning metamorphosis. His hair is blond and flowing, his neck elongated, his back sprouting wings until he seems like a cross between a swan and an angel.

  An interruption: the phone rings. It’s his friend Richie Pryor, in town for a set of gigs down the hill at the Troubadour, a hotbed of the new comedy and folk-rock.

  “I’ve got something that is so incredible,” Jaglom says. “It will make you feel so great.” Richard hardly needs that strong a sales pitch.

  Later that night, Jaglom is lying naked on the bathroom floor when he hears a scream from the living room. He emerges from the bathroom to find Richard howling at the window, getting ready to hurl himself six floors down. The living room carpet now seems to Jaglom like high grass, taller than his body, but he runs across it, feeling like a knight on a horse, charging to save the princess—only Richard is the princess he needs to rescue. Arriving at the windowsill, he grabs Richard’s ankle so tightly that his fingernails break through the skin, and he holds Richard there for what seems, in LSD time, like an eternity.

  Why has Richard tried to climb out the high window? It’s not so much that he’s aiming to kill himself—nothing so coherent as that—but rather a sign of how intensely the acid has unhinged him. He’s crying, raving: about the ugliness he feels, about the pain he’s seen since he was a child, about the meanness of his life. When he looked in the mirror, at Henry’s well-intentioned suggestion, he had glimpsed the opposite of what Henry had seen. There had been a devil looking back, the devil inside. The window had been his escape route.

  How differently these two friends traveled through the high times they shared! Henry was cushioned by his privilege and his optimism; Richard, always at risk of falling—or throwing himself—into the abyss. And so the same LSD that had heightened Henry’s love affair with himself, enveloping him in a nimbus of glory, had trapped Richard at the top of a dark tower, swarmed by memories from his past and anxieties from his present. Dropping acid together, the white actor and the black comic had never been farther apart.

  Back home in New York City in late 1965, Richard put on his game face. He was writing new material constantly, and for good reason: with near-weekly appearances on Merv Griffin, he needed to keep his act fresh. He prepped for the shows with his agent, Sandy Gallin, an energetic player who would later manage Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin, and Michael Jackson, and who took on many of the duties of a manager with Richard. “What are you going to do with him?” Gallin had been asked when he first signed Richard to General Artists Corporation. “He can’t put three sentences together without saying ‘fuck’ or ‘nigger.’” Gallin was charged with trimming the swear words from Richard’s act.

  By the time Richard appeared on Merv, the rougher edges of his humor had been sanded down. His spots on the talk show were often fish-out-of-water routines, revolving around the misadventures of a small-town youth adrift in the big city. Sometimes he hinted at the peculiarities of being black in Manhattan, but only to dramatize his perplexity, not to lodge a protest:

  I cannot call a waitress. I go to a restaurant like Sardi’s, and I know that the only time I’d get into a restaurant like Sardi’s, if I wasn’t in show business, would be if I was cleaning it up. So I go in there and you can’t call a waiter. So I always go . . . [flutters his fingers, mouths some silent words to attract the waiter’s attention]

  And they always come over: “Do you want a shot?”

  On Merv and other TV shows, Richard presented himself as a classic klutz. He was the sort to get anxious at other people’s homes and knock over gravy boats or ashtrays—or ashtrays full of gravy. And he was at his clumsiest when he tried to pick up women by mimicking the suave motions he’d observed in cosmopolitan types. His “Cary Grant thing” involved arching his eyebrows like a clown doing warm-up exercises and gesticulating wildly until the drink he held flew out of his hand. Trying to light a woman’s cigarette, he burned his thumb instead.

  Perhaps because of the pressure to keep his act clean, Richard started working a vein of silent, absurdist pantomime in these early TV appearances. He honed an extended series of cockeyed “impressions,” in which the setup was as far out as the punch line. At the time, Richard was watching Jerry Lewis movies in marathon sessions at the all-night theaters of Forty-Second Street, and these “impressions” took Lewis’s zany physicality into the realm of surreal fantasy. Richard impersonated “the first man on the sun” by yowling and jumping with every step he took, as if the floor of the stage were now the photosphere. He became an amateur scuba diver in some imaginary “shark-fighting championship,” doffing his fins and goggles and swimming in slow motion toward the shark, then harpooning his own belly by mistake. He became “a Japanese robot who’s a karate expert,” his arms slicing through the air with beeps and whirrs—until, in a glitch of computer programming, he karate-chops his own body to the ground. Or he puffed up into the world’s strongest man, “Novocain Martinovich,” and went through the motions of hefting seven hundred fifty pounds: the show-offy flexing of his muscles; the guttural groan to rally his strength; the stricken look when the imaginary barbell refuses to budge; the hyperventilating surge that hoists the barbell up above his head; and, finally, the wide-eyed panic when the barbell falls behind his back and takes his body down with it.

  The comic and his talk-show foil: Richard
Pryor and Merv Griffin in 1965. (Courtesy of Getty Images)

  Merv acted as a straight man for Richard, his steady-as-she-goes foil. His aw-shucks demeanor put Richard at ease when they “unraveled” together (as Merv termed his creative conversations with his guests). “I just want to thank you, Merv,” Richard confessed in an early appearance. “You’ve been really nice to me. You were the first one to have me on.” And Griffin deserved the compliment. For all his midwestern ingenuousness, he was a canny programmer who did not shy away from controversy: in 1965, just as he was welcoming Richard on his program, he invited British philosopher Bertrand Russell to discuss, and attack, the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. (The in-studio audience booed.) And unlike Johnny Carson, Merv regularly took a chance on unknown comics, establishing a direct pipeline between the Improv and his show.

  Still, Richard was starting to chafe at the limits of his TV work. At countercultural clubs like the Café au Go-Go and the Troubadour, his “impressions” were considerably more freewheeling than on Merv—as in his “impression of my sweater talking to my ass.” The matter of sex, nowhere to be found in his TV routines, was popping up increasingly in his work onstage. He might talk about a “nudie” movie theater he patronized on Forty-Second Street: “five hundred guys would be in there, with coats on their laps,” transfixed by a movie about a runaway brassiere. Or he might tell a dirty joke, especially one with a tinge of absurdity to it:

  Did you hear the one about the guy who was in the hospital, dying?

  So the doctor runs outside and says, “Nurse Jones, come here. There’s a man in the room, dying, and he wants to see the Vice President and the President before he dies. And I hear that you have a tattoo of the Vice President on your left leg, and a tattoo of the President on your right leg. How about going into the room, letting the man see them, and in his delusion, he might really think that’s who it is?”

  So the nurse goes into the room, pulls up her dress, walks up to the bed. And the man sees the Vice President and the President, and he kisses the Vice President, and he kisses the President. And he looks up to the nurse and says, “Now can I bid Castro goodbye?”

  Maybe the greatest difference between his TV comedy and his live act was that, in a club, Richard could fool with his audience in real time. He was free to improvise and, like the jazz musicians he loved, free to succeed or fail in the moment. When his fellow comic Bob Altman asked him how he was able to create so many “hunks” of new material, often with no thought of using them again, he said, “You ever take a long ride in a car, and your mind just goes out there . . . you’re driving but your mind is somewhere else? I can let my mind out and I don’t care where it takes me. I ain’t ashamed of where it takes me.”

  At this time, Richard often opened his act by speaking in a stage whisper, as if confessing to a secret desire: “I would like to make you laugh. I would like to make you cry. I would like to make you.” Sometimes he skipped the two opening phrases and just left the last one hanging in the air, which made the confession all the more stark. “I would like to make you . . .”: it was a slippery, half-slangy expression, which probably explains why the audience laughed. Partly Richard was flirting with his audience, admitting he wanted to lay them en masse, and partly he was hinting at another desire—that he wanted to remake his audience, as a novelist might rewrite a character. They were part of his medium of expression, part of his search for himself. He made the confession disarmingly, but it was audacious, nonetheless: he may have been, in mid-1960s America, the only black man who admitted openly that he hungered for a soul kiss with his audience.

  He was developing a kind of authority, couched in vulnerability but sometimes revealing its prickliness. In February 1966, at his first engagement at the hungry i nightclub in San Francisco, he introduced his audience to a game:

  This is a game that I’m going to play with you because I would like to play with you. The name of the game is ‘Improvisation’ . . . [Y]ou name what you would like, and I do it. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s not bad, but it’s never boring.

  Boredom was the great enemy: better to create a memorable failure than grab a predictable laugh. When someone in the audience suggested that he tell a joke or two, he shot back, “Why don’t you go to Vegas? They got millions of comics doing that.” He laughed dismissively, and moved on.

  There was a final problem with Richard’s prefab work on TV: the wrong people—white folks—seemed to enjoy it most. In August 1965, he was excited to be featured on a bill launching a new theater season at Harlem’s Apollo Theater—so thrilled, in fact, that he convinced Bill Cosby to take a cab uptown so they could see Richard’s name on the marquee. During the cab ride, Cosby counseled him to act properly at the Apollo: he wasn’t to cuss or play the fool.

  “But I’m being paid to be a fool,” Richard said.

  “You know what I mean,” Cosby said.

  When the cab pulled up to the curb of the Apollo, Richard and Cosby got out and gazed at the marquee:

  BILLY ECKSTINE

  AND

  OPENING ACTS

  “Where’s your name, Rich?” Cosby asked. “I see Billy Eckstine’s. But not yours.”

  “Right there. Underneath.”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “What do you mean? Right there. ‘Opening Acts.’”

  The Apollo crowd could be brutal to black comedians whose humor was oriented to white audiences: Godfrey Cambridge, at his 1962 debut, was heckled so mercilessly that he scurried off the stage with tears running down his cheeks and felt compelled to cancel, midweek, the rest of his engagement there. Richard fared better than Cambridge: he survived his week under Eckstine, his zaniness an easier sell than Cambridge’s witty patter, but he hardly connected as he’d hoped. According to singer Jerry Butler of the R&B group the Impressions, Richard was “making faces and all kinds of funny sounds”—the pantomimes of his TV act—and “running back and forth across the stage.” The Apollo’s management didn’t ask him back.

  Half a year later, in March 1966, Richard returned to Harlem in the company of Redd Foxx. The two had just taped a Merv Griffin show together downtown, and then they hit uptown, the older comic guiding the younger on a tour. Time and again Richard heard people hollering Redd’s nickname: “Hey, Zorro!” Richard didn’t hear his name, which surprised him. Near the Merv Griffin studio, he had been the celebrity and Foxx the unknown. “Wait a minute,” he thought to himself. “I’m in the wrong place, I’m in the wrong town. I want to be here. I want people to talk to me like they talk to Redd.”

  His people, by not speaking his name, were calling.

  It was one thing, however, to hear the call, and quite another to answer it. Ever since Richard had landed in Greenwich Village three years earlier, he had been chasing after crossover success, and the stakes had been rising with his every breakthrough. He had begun by constellating around himself a crew of comedian friends, savoring with them the camaraderie of being young, keen, and on the move. Then he had proven himself with tastemakers such as Merv Griffin and Ed Sullivan, the cultural gatekeepers of middle America. Now his agent, Sandy Gallin, was dangling another business opportunity in front of him: Bob Banner Productions wanted Richard to appear as a recurring special guest on the Kraft Summer Music Hall, a prime-time variety show taped in Los Angeles. The show threatened to be as cornball as could be—its host was John Davidson, a squeaky clean, dimpled performer who played the banjo and whose mother and father both were Baptist ministers—but it was also billed as a “showcase of rising young stars.” The “spontaneous and multi-talented” Richard was to be the special guest kicking off its premiere.

  He accepted the gig without hesitation, eager not just to work on a prime-time show but also to move out to Los Angeles, where he could more easily audition for film and TV roles. Instead of subletting his Fifty-Seventh Street apartment or letting it sit vacant for the three-month gig, he chose to give it up. He was leaving New York City behind; it would be
the scene of his apprentice years, not his future.

  He journeyed out to LA in the spring of 1966, with Maxine at his side and their possessions stuffed into a car. By one piece of evidence, their relationship seemed to be deepening: on March 4, Richard had officially filed in Peoria County Court for a divorce from his first wife, Patricia, presumably to free himself up to marry Maxine. But on their cross-country drive out to LA, they bickered, the accusations and counteraccusations flying until, at a Chicago hotel, one of them punished the other in a spectacular fashion: by dumping a suitcase of clothes into the hotel swimming pool.

  Not long after arriving in LA, they settled into a home on Ferrari Drive, in the uplands of Beverly Hills, where their neighbors were guaranteed to be white and well-heeled. (As late as 1980, Beverly Hills had a black population of 1 percent.) If Richard felt a twinge of regret about leaving Harlem behind, the feeling wasn’t strong enough to make him choose a racially integrated neighborhood like Baldwin Hills, the affluent mid-city enclave favored by black entertainers like Earl Bostic and Ray Charles.

  A photograph taken by Ebony the following year catches the mad force of his desire for mainstream success. Richard is airborne, leaping high underneath the street signs marking the intersection of Hollywood and Vine, dreamland’s epicenter. His whole body is tense with the effort—his eyes wide, his mouth open, his arms shooting out from his sports coat to reveal his cuffs, his legs splayed out. He looks like someone crazed, and a little terrified, with his own eagerness.