Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  For all his antic energy, Richard smoothly infiltrated the Hollywood in-crowd. After rehearsing the Kraft Summer Music Hall during the day, he wandered at night to the Daisy, a private Beverly Hills club run by fashion maven Jack Hanson, who had, with his Jax slacks, created a line of tight pants that clung “like oil to water” to the slim hips of stars such as Audrey Hepburn and Candice Bergen. Pryor, himself a fan of the lean, pipe-cleaner fit, befriended Hanson and his wife, Sally, and was soon part of the club, part of a world that updated Old Hollywood glamour for the mid-1960s moment. On a typical night at the Daisy, Doctor Zhivago’s Omar Sharif might be found shooting pool, Tony Curtis sipping an Irish coffee at the bar, Natalie Wood relaxing after a vigorous Frug on the dance floor. The club limited its membership to around four hundred; paparazzi and autograph chasers were banned. “The Daisy, on any given night, is a noisy, frenzied circus of the most gorgeous women imaginable,” wrote one reporter granted entrée, agog. “It is a place where this great montage of thigh-high miniskirts and glued-on Jax pants are doing the skate, the dog, the stroll, the swim, the jerk, the bomp, the monkey, the fish, the duck, the hiker, the Watusi, the gun, the slop, the slip, the sway, the sally and the joint. Like all good Beverly Hills children, Daisy dancers never even sweat. . . . Compared to The Daisy, all other discothequesare slums.” For Richard Pryor, who had known actual slums, the Daisy was alluring and probably a little unreal. It became his favorite haunt, and the incubator of his new Los Angeles life.

  A flying leap: Pryor at the iconic intersection of Hollywood and Vine, 1967. (Courtesy of Johnson Publishing Company, LLC)

  On Sunday afternoons, Richard joined a select group of Daisy regulars who gathered at Barrington Park, in nearby Brentwood, to play a game of sandlot baseball. The weekend games breathed in an air of casual Hollywood luxury. Jack Hanson (manager-shortstop) and actor Peter Falk (centerfield) rolled up in their Rolls-Royces; actor Kevin McCarthy (team photographer), in his Porsche convertible. No one sported a uniform: some wore polo shirts, some pajama tops, some no shirts at all; one player went sockless and shoeless in the outfield. The Daisy team faced off against a team organized by a lumber broker, also filled out with Hollywood types—actors and producers and executives. Singer Bobby Darin and actor Ryan O’Neal were Richard’s teammates. When he wasn’t on the diamond, Richard presided over the PA system as a play-by-play announcer, announcing every “sensational catch” or “tremendous triple” or “dazzling throw” as if the World Series hung in the balance. Nancy Sinatra, Suzanne Pleshette, and any number of young women cheered from the bleachers. The games ended, typically, with scores too high for anyone to have kept track, and everyone was treated with coffee and ice cream courtesy of La Scala, a restaurant favored by the film colony. Over the next six years, no fewer than three of Richard’s fellow ballplayers—Aaron Spelling, James B. Harris, and David Wolper—would cast him in films they produced.

  Richard’s day job on the Kraft Summer Music Hall, meanwhile, was a letdown. He joked with Sandy Gallin about the utter squareness of the show, which always ended with host John Davidson serenading older audience members with the Tin Pan Alley songs of their youth. Given how retro the program was, and how geared toward a white audience, Richard may justifiably have felt like he was back at Peoria’s Blaine-Sumner Elementary School, the fly in the buttermilk. He kept his distance from the other cast members and sometimes skipped rehearsals, which fueled speculation that drugs were keeping him away. Richie Pryor seemed “really in his own world,” Davidson remembered.

  Matching outfits: on Kraft Summer Music Hall with host John Davidson. (Courtesy of the author)

  Viewers of the TV program, though, would have had a hard time detecting any disaffection on Richard’s part. He wore the same crewneck sweater, white slacks, and white buck shoes as every other male performer on the show, and carried himself in general like the happiest goofball in the world. “Smile a happy face and sing your cares away”: so the cast sang in chorus at the show’s opening, and when Richard was introduced as a guest performer, he went cross-eyed, stuck out his tongue, and waved like a child, with both hands, at the camera. In the show’s segments, he played well with others. For a medley of “river songs”—“Shenandoah” and so on—he added his voice to the three-part harmony and tap-danced with abandon when the spotlight fell on him. In another bit, where the cast performed some hokey children’s circle games, he slapped his thigh to the beat and recited a rhyme that would never have played in Peoria’s red-light district: “My girl, she went a-golfing, and boy did she have fun / She wore her new silk stockings and got a hole in one.” His guest stand-up segments were variations on his TV-friendly work for Merv Griffin: “Rumpelstiltskin,” the pantomimes, his failure as a pickup artist. Though familiar to Richard, they were deft enough that his fellow cast members were struck by how much he moved the straitlaced audience. As he’d learned to do at Blaine-Sumner, he had gauged his surroundings and donned the mask of class clown.

  In the August 1 program, Richard had the courage to let that mask slip for a few minutes. Davidson announced that, though Richard “had been a guest many times” and “had always been a clown,” he had learned that Richard’s “secret desire” was “to be a singer,” so he yielded the stage to Richard Pryor, crooner. The last time Richard had bared this side of himself, he was auditioning for Harold Parker at Harold’s Club in 1961, and his vocals had been a mess. Not this time. Accompanied at first only by a stand-up bass, he launched into a slinky rendition of the blues standard “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” a song about a man who splurges on his friends when his money is rolling in, only to find himself deserted when he goes broke. As the horns arrived to punctuate the chorus, Richard raised his voice by a full octave and belted the song’s cynical moral with showstopping energy and utter conviction. “Nobody wants you, nobody needs you when you’re down and out”: a strange thought, perhaps, for someone who had just moved into a new house in Beverly Hills and been awarded membership in the most exclusive of social clubs. But Richard seemed to feel the fragility of his success. Even as he was flying high, he reminded himself what it would be like to plummet to the ground.

  Richard’s fantasy of being a torch singer was probably stoked by his budding friendship with one of his sandlot baseball teammates, the singer Bobby Darin, who took Richard under his wing not long after they shared their first Daisy baseball game. Darin was the most connected, and the hippest, entertainer to sponsor Richard’s career yet. Through “Splish Splash” and a raft of Hollywood films, Darin had established himself as a teen idol; through “Mack the Knife” and his incandescent cabaret act, he had become a sensation among older audiences. He was also a self-styled industry iconoclast—a performer who followed up his smash hit “Mack the Knife” with a heartfelt R&B tribute album to Ray Charles, then albums of country-and-western and folk music. By August 1966, like Richard, he felt himself veering off from the core of his audience, the folks who filled New York City’s Copacabana or Las Vegas’s Flamingo Hotel to hear him perform Tin Pan Alley standards. He had just recorded the folk-rock “If I Were a Carpenter,” a song that wondered aloud: would you still love me if I wasn’t who I appear to be?

  A “wing-dang-doodle” of a time: Maxine Silverman, Bobby Darin, and Richard Pryor at the party Darin hosted in his honor. (Courtesy of Henry Langdon)

  Darin promoted Richard with characteristic élan. He signed him up as the opening act for his August 1966 return to the Flamingo hotel—a gig that promised $2,400 a week, more than Richard had ever made—and in anticipation of the gig, staged a party at his elegant Bel Air home to fête his new protégé. The invitation declared that, according to astronomers, a new star was to descend upon Darin’s home, a star that hailed from “the constellation Talent” and was named Richard Pryor. Darin promised everyone a “wing-dang-doodle” of a time, and the party itself was a head-turning celebrity summit. Old-school comedians Milton Berle and Groucho Marx were there, with cigars poking from t
heir pockets or cradled in their fingers. Singers Connie Stevens and Diana Ross tripped the light fantastic with Darin, who seemed liberated by the recent announcement that his wife, Sandra Dee, had filed for divorce. He was looking as sharp as ever, with a matching polka-dot ascot and pocket handkerchief. Meanwhile, Richard, the guest of honor, seemed uncomfortable with all the attention. He arrived wearing a cable-knit sweater over a T-shirt, dressed not for his “coming out” party but for a casual night at home, spent parked in front of the TV.

  Early in the evening, Richard discovered he was right to be nervous. Sitting across from him was Groucho, who had seen Pryor’s recent appearance on The Merv Griffin Show, where Richard had met his idol Jerry Lewis for the first time. After an earnest moment in which Richard had praised Lewis as “the god of comedy,” the two had regaled Merv’s audience by spitting water on each other.

  “Young man, you’re a comic?” Groucho asked Richard.

  “Yes,” Richard replied, walking into the trap. “Yes, I am.”

  “So how do you want to end up? Have you thought about that? Do you want a career you’re proud of? Or do you want to end up a spitting wad like Jerry Lewis?”

  “Huh?” Richard stammered. His idol a spitting wad?

  “Do you ever see plays?” Groucho asked.

  “No.”

  “Do you ever read books?”

  “No.”

  The questions, and Richard’s humbling answers, hung in the air. After the party, he turned over Groucho’s slap-down in his mind. Here he’d been, breathing the same oxygen as the entertainers who had defined American comedy for twenty years, and what did he have to show for himself? The Kraft Music Hall? He’d left one kind of brothel for another. “Wake up, Richard,” he told himself. “Yes, you are an ignorant jerk, pimping your talent like a cheap whore. But you don’t have to stay that way. You have a brain. Use it.”

  It was hard for Richard to use his brain when his ego was being so insistently, and distractingly, stroked. A few days after Darin’s party, he arrived in Vegas and marveled with Maxine at seeing his name in lights on the Flamingo marquee. It was, he said, “as big a thrill” as he’d had “up to that time.” He delighted, too, in the Strip’s “around-the-clock hustle”: by the mid-1960s, Vegas had evolved, as a sin city, into the best world that money could buy, a startlingly upscale version of the Peoria of Richard’s childhood. The just-opened Caesars Palace had reclaimed the banner of imperial Rome for the age of Populuxe. From the outside it looked like a fourteen-story Coliseum, while from the inside it looked like the largest bachelor pad in existence, with waitress “goddesses,” in tunics and sandals, instructed to introduce themselves with “I am your slave.” The Flamingo itself was the first luxury hotel on the Strip, and had already become iconic. The Rat Pack had robbed its casino in Ocean’s Eleven; Elvis and Ann-Margret had frolicked around its pool in Viva Las Vegas.

  Being an opening act for Bobby Darin at the Flamingo meant basking in an air of complete adoration. During the first week of their engagement, Darin demolished the all-time attendance record for the Flamingo’s showroom. The sellout crowds welcomed Richard’s act, which, despite Groucho’s advice, remained a smooth amalgamation of the sketches he performed on Merv Griffin: spoofs of New York, “Rumpelstiltskin,” and the rest.

  Yet if Vegas offered itself as a blank canvas for Richard’s fantasies, he grew indifferent about painting it. Sure, Variety praised his “wonderfully kookie style,” but he was still being lumped into “the Bill Cosby school of reminiscing and identifiable storytelling.” Don Rickles, ostensibly coming backstage to praise his act, merely slipped in the knife. “It’s uncanny,” he said. “You sound just like Bill Cosby.” It was the same connection Manny Roth had made two years ago and a world away, during Richard’s first hungry months in Greenwich Village, when he still had the excuse of being the freshest arrival in town.

  Back in LA, Richard was both making it and not making it—getting his first roles as an actor in TV and film, and then struggling with what to do with them. He took a supporting part in The Busy Body, a Sid Caesar vehicle that offered him the chance to work with one of his childhood heroes. He leapt at the opportunity, playing a circumspect, fumbling police detective to Caesar’s blabby, fumbling mobster. It was a part that Cosby would have invested with his reserves of calm and competence. Richard tried to give the role an inflection he’d crowd-tested in his work on Merv—the “cool guy” who always seems on the verge of a crack-up.

  Unfortunately, he suffered a crisis of confidence on set. He felt himself “tiptoe[ing] around the cameras [and] lights,” and wondered, “What the fuck am I doing here?” Acting in a film didn’t come as naturally as he’d expected. “I did every actor that I’d ever seen in the movies in this one role. I walked in the door like Steve McQueen. I took my hat off like John Wayne, even did some Charlton Heston.” The end result was a muddle: he voiced the role in an artificially deep register, as if he were a kid playing a grown-up. His performance was mannered, jokey—like pretty much every other performance in the film. A mashup of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry, The Busy Body lacked the star power of the former and the control of the latter, and it found little favor with audiences or critics. Time dismissed it as a “tasteless Runyonesque rehash.” The Chicago Tribune complained, “Producer-director William Castle . . . used to make supposedly horror movies that in actuality were funny. In ‘The Busy Body,’ he has made a supposedly funny movie that in actuality is a horror.” The film did nothing to elevate Richard among the ranks of working actors.

  His first role in a TV series—a background part on the fall 1966 premiere of The Wild Wild West—suggests that he was not exactly being choosy in his auditions. Richard played a dim-witted ventriloquist, outfitted in red turban and magenta dashiki, part of a group of carnival show assassins. It was no one’s proudest moment: at one point, the show’s hero exercises his wit by asking Pryor’s character, “Who’s the ventriloquist and who’s the dummy?” To Variety, the episode was patently ludicrous. “For real-life stuff,” the critic jibed, “viewers will have to turn the dial to ‘Green Hornet’ or ‘Tarzan.’”

  Fresh from these experiences as an actor, Richard traveled back to Peoria for the first time since he’d left in 1962, and was received with a warmth so novel that it felt disorienting. His old friends, who had doubted his prospects, hailed the conquering hero. The cops who had treated him like a juvenile delinquent now vowed that they had believed in his talent all the while. His father, an unsentimental character for as long as he could remember, told a Peoria Journal Star reporter that when he and Ann first caught Richard on TV, “the thrill of our son making it good tugged at our hearts and brought a tear or two.” Richard tried to reconnect with Peoria and embrace his new stature: he played cards, went fishing, got drunk. He pulled three or four friends over to the Pere Marquette Hotel, where he had worked as a shoeshine, and finally achieved a dream he’d held inside himself since he was a boy. He sat at the picture window of its restaurant, where he could enjoy a lordly view of Main Street, and ate a lordly lunch.

  Still, bitterness leaked out of him. He lashed at a Journal Star reporter when she suggested that blacks were getting more exposure on TV. “It’s a sham,” he said, “a trick that deludes. You see more Negroes on TV because what they are selling, sells to the Negro. Now, they are getting worse parts, but more of them.” It’s not hard to divine the sources of Richard’s frustration, given his recent work on the Kraft Summer Music Hall and The Wild Wild West.

  He was in a more positive frame of mind when discussing how he developed his comic material. “I can walk two blocks down the street and see funny things, comical happenings all around me. Now, I can put these local, human, real things into a skit, and they come out funny,” he said, noting that this method had taken him two years to hone. “I have a lot of people to thank for these funny bits,” he continued. “My grandma, the boss of the whole family, has lots of materi
al there. I’ve got a 13-year-old cousin, Denise, who they say is just like me. She’s a source with her little jokes. My uncle, Richard, and my grandpa Tommy Bryant—what they do gives me material. I called my grandpa to tell him I was going to be on TV. All I said was ‘grandpa’ and without letting me finish, he said, ‘I ain’t got a quarter,’ then hung up.”

  It was the first time Richard had publicly articulated the change he felt brewing in his comedy, the turn to the close observation of his family and neighborhood. There was a good bit of premature optimism in his self-assessment: when he discussed his family or his social life onstage over the last two years, he’d still tended to present a fantasy version of his life—for instance, in the oft-repeated joke about belonging to a family with eleven kids (repeated on the Kraft Summer Music Hall in June), or in his self-presentation as the most harmless of souls. And he had exercised his imaginative license for good reason: the Kraft Summer Music Hall was not about to lend its stage to a comic who pulled back the veil on Peoria’s brothels, replicated his obscenity-laced bull sessions with his friends, delved into his violent relationships with women, or described the psychedelic horror show of an acid trip.

  But if Richard misstated, to the Peoria Journal Star, what he’d already achieved in his comedy, his remarks pointed with clarity to the journey that lay ahead of him. He was poised to discover whether the larger following he’d built—a crowd that ranged from the dope-smoking hipsters of the Troubadour to the elderly gents and ladies in the Kraft Summer Music Hall audience—would follow him or abandon him as his comedy turned to the nitty-gritty of his life. Would Ed Sullivan, or even Bobby Darin and Henry Jaglom, remain simpatico if his comedy itself were no longer so congenial in spirit? His hurtling journey toward success was turning into a hurtling journey to find himself, and the velocity was becoming severe.