Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  CHAPTER 10

  * * *

  The Person in Question

  Los Angeles and Las Vegas, 1967

  The summer of 1967 may have been known, to flower children in San Francisco, as the Summer of Love, but for black Americans it was a long hot summer of reckoning. Ghetto residents looked around and wondered whether, for all the promises of the civil rights movement and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, their lives had really changed. Jobs were still scarce, their schools still substandard, and their streets still patrolled by police forces with the air of an occupying army. The political temperature was rising steadily. “If America don’t come around,” black militant H. Rap Brown threatened at a rally in Cambridge, Maryland, in July, “we should burn it down, brother.” He pointed to a nearby school as a sign of America’s moral dereliction. Later that night, flames enveloped the school and the nearby business district.

  More than a hundred cities across America burned, in fact. In Newark and Detroit, blacks tangled with police, National Guardsmen, and paratroopers in battles that left twenty-six and forty-three dead, respectively. By the fall of 1967, the mood of black America had turned urgent and desperate. “Violence is as American as cherry pie,” “These rebellions are but a dress rehearsal for real revolution”: so declaimed Brown, and his cynicism and zeal proved infectious. “On certain corners in American cities,” Ebony reported, “black brothers can be heard kidding one another about being tuned out of the revolution if they haven’t yet purchased a Butane gas lighter.” The revolution called for action, even as it was unclear—aside from setting one’s neighborhood on fire—what form that action might take.

  Richard Pryor was living in Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, not Watts, but the summer of 1967 was his season of reckoning, too, scissoring his life in half. On the one side was the accommodating, fresh young fellow who was Bobby Darin’s protégé; on the other, a man who felt the pulse of black America in his own racing heartbeat and saw no way to express the truth of his experience without resorting to a healthy dose of obscenities. Richard’s comic act was in transition to something unforeseen, something rooted in the sense of emergency all around him.

  While opening, in January 1967, for the upbeat cabaret act of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé at the Sands hotel in Las Vegas, Richard made his first bold move of 1967: he criticized the Vietnam War from the stage. The Sands was no countercultural hole-in-the-wall like the Café Wha?. The clientele of its Copa Room supped on prime sirloin, French peas forestière, and Boula Boula Amontillado, and expected their entertainment to be similarly rich, buttery, and smooth. The crowd booed and hissed Richard; a woman whose son was posted in Vietnam stood up and ripped him to shreds. Richard was shaken by the vehemence of the response—and though Bobby Darin was on hand to console him afterward, he couldn’t hold himself together. His agent, Sandy Gallin, remembered fielding a call from Jack Entratter, the bearish, Mob-connected president of the Sands, who screamed into the phone that Richard was “fucking crazy. He’s right now swinging from chandeliers in the lobby.”

  Gallin somehow got Richard on the phone and tried to reason with him. He was playing “the top place in the United States”—did he really want to burn his bridges? On this occasion, Richard took the path of conciliation. He patched himself up and, this time, left Vegas with his reputation intact.

  A month later, Richard was whipped by headwinds coming from the exact opposite direction. He stepped into a role on the hour-long TV special A Time for Laughter: A Look at Negro Humor in America—and was given a trenchant lesson in the politics of culture, courtesy of singer Harry Belafonte, the show’s producer, and William Attaway, Belafonte’s creative partner and the show’s main writer. Both Belafonte and Attaway had strong radical credentials, the former as Martin Luther King Jr.’s confidant and the benefactor behind 1961’s Freedom Rides, 1964’s Freedom Summer, and much else; the latter, as a writer with roots in the proletarian literature movement of the 1930s. Their shared frame of mind was defiant. “A whole people has been disenfranchised, subhumanized and put through culturally crippling experiences,” Belafonte argued in an Ebony interview. “How did we as a people survive? We have survived through our dignity and integrity and a rich sense of humor.” Attaway laid out the aims for the show in related terms: “Negro humor has often been loud and bitter. In the show we tried to give the reasons behind the bitterness and what has grown out of the bitterness.”

  For A Time for Laughter, Belafonte and Attaway brought together a comic wrecking crew without precedent on American television. Their cast stretched from Chitlin Circuit veterans like George Kirby, Redd Foxx, Pigmeat Markham, and Moms Mabley to relative newcomers like Dick Gregory and Godfrey Cambridge. Foxx and Mabley, who had seventy-five years of stage experience between them, were making their prime-time TV debuts—proof of the cultural segregation the program sought to challenge. According to Richard, he snuck into the project through the back door. “They wanted Bill Cosby,” he explained sheepishly. “He was contractually committed so they took me. There was a time in my career when it wouldn’t have mattered. For about a year I was Bill Cosby.”

  A Time for Laughter schooled Richard in his own history, his own dilemmas. Narrated by Sidney Poitier, the show suggested that, when it came to blacks, comedy in America had developed along two tracks. One track was the tradition of blackface minstrelsy, here presented as a story of theft and caricature. The program began with the legendary meeting, around 1830, of black stable hand Jim Crow and the white minstrel “Daddy” Rice: it showed Rice emulating Crow’s dance steps, then scoped outward to a gang of white minstrels blacking up with burnt cork, creating a grotesque counterfeit of what they had seen. When Jim Crow protested, “That ain’t fair,” the blackface minstrels responded unnervingly, “Now that ain’t fair, yuk, yuk, yuk.” The echo telegraphed a larger, weighty history of unequal interchanges, in which questions of fairness were laughed away. At the close of the segment, a chorus of blackface performers belted out, “And dat’s how darkies was born”—a shockingly harsh illustration of how white audiences had wrested black images away from actual black people.

  The second track of black comedy, infinitely preferable by the lights of A Time for Laughter, encompassed the performances that blacks had reserved solely for themselves. “Negro humor has stayed home,” Poitier explained. “And through generations of fermentation it has become a heady wine rarely tasted by the outside world.” A Time for Laughter announced that now, in 1967, the time had come for everyone in America to put away the cheap imitations and sample the real stuff. It entered a pool hall, where Redd Foxx was irreverently dressing down the civil rights movement: “Somebody hit you upside the head with an axe handle, and all you’re supposed to do is lay there and hum, ‘We shall overcome’?” It sat in the courtroom of Judge Pigmeat Markham, who delivered his verdict by whacking the plaintiff with a bladder balloon. It dallied in a barbershop, where a manicurist and a Black Muslim bantered freely. If blackface minstrelsy tended to flatten black life into a cartoon of itself, A Time for Laughter revealed the variety of the black community and the streetwise wit of those within it.

  Richard might genuinely have wondered where he fit into this two-track model of black comedy. Alone among the comics assembled for the special, he was a crossover performer first and foremost, with a taste for physical comedy and surrealism that was easier to link to the hash-brownie spirit of the counterculture than to the “heady wine” of the black tradition. He wasn’t shucking and jiving, exactly, but neither was he in the company of older comics like Foxx, Markham, or Moms Mabley. Nor did he fit in with the more recent “humor of the revolution.” There was nothing in Richard’s act that compared with the defiance of Dick Gregory, recounting from a jail cell his tussle with a southern cop: “He said, ‘You’ll make this march over my dead body.’ I said, ‘Baby, that wouldn’t be a bad route.’”

  On the special, Richard played a version of his frequent Merv Griffin persona, the novice out of his
depth. Here he was a young funeral director fumbling through the eulogy of a man he never knew, casually taking up a seat on the coffin and crossing his legs to make himself comfortable. Mostly he was a victim of his own improvisatory spirit, his inability to stick with the safety of cliché. “The Lord giveth and he taketh away,” he started. “You might say he’s a sort of an Indian giver. Life is not a bowl of cherries. No, life is just a big bowl and it’s up to us to fill it up with anything we want to fill it with. Now John—he chose to fill his bowl with old beer cans. That’s his bowl!” Richard’s performance was a solid piece of character-based humor, but in its goofy tone, it was also an outlier in the special. As the Chicago Defender judged, it “would be equally at home in any color scheme.”

  A Time for Laughter cut Richard to the quick. Observing his fellow comics do their thing, he felt that his career had been missing a dimension. “Working in a show like the Belafonte special has convinced me I’ve got a long way to go to really make it,” he told TV critic Harvey Pack just after the show wrapped.

  A few months later, in an Ebony interview, Richard chose to speak the truth about his past for the first time with a reporter. Whether he’d experienced some sort of political awakening or had simply grown frustrated by the game he’d been playing, he let go of the usual euphemisms and canned answers. When asked the standard question about where he came from, he answered that he had lived in a brothel until he was fifteen. The interviewer, a black woman, was “shocked by his lie.” Richard laughed hysterically. The reporter implored him to be serious, and he parried by reading the situation perfectly. “Your serious and my serious are two different seriouses,” he told her. It wasn’t just white America that couldn’t absorb, or stomach, the truth of his life.

  The interviewer might be forgiven for thinking that Richard was pranking her. In the hours they’d spent together, he had, variously, run into the middle of the intersection of Hollywood and Vine and started directing traffic (for which a motorcycle cop awarded him a ticket); hopped into an empty bathtub fully clothed to demonstrate his creative process; and “proven” that he was making a documentary on dogs by training the lens of his sixteen-millimeter camera on a coil of excrement on his lawn. Still, a more contemplative Richard was poking out of the hijinks. When asked to reflect on his career, he said, “I never thought about not making it,” then paused. “But the it has nothing to do with show business. The it I’m trying to make is me. Who am I?”

  After A Time for Laughter, Richard’s life took two dramatic turns. Onstage he delved into the more color-coded parts of his past, developing what Billboard called “vignettes of a boyhood in a not-too-genteel neighborhood”: his first sketches on his Peoria circle of friends and their struggles with the curfew date from this period. Personally, he spun into a crisis without compare, in length and severity, with his life’s earlier rough patches. Drifting away from his earlier act as a comedian, he also drifted away from his commitments in toto, consequences be damned.

  His relationship with Maxine, nine months pregnant and about to give birth, was the first to go. While she focused on the child-to-be and the future life of their family, he acted as if he had no obligations to her, haunting nightclubs and gambling with friends until the early morning. In his defense, Richard claimed that he “could barely commit to being me. How could I give her more? But the more I said no, the more adamant she became. The only reason we stayed together was because neither of us had any other place to go.” The relationship hit its breaking point when, just a matter of days from having their child, Maxine went on a reconnaissance mission to the Daisy and caught Richard with another woman in his arms. At that, even the adamant Maxine finally threw up her hands.

  On April 24, 1967, Maxine was at a friend’s home and, feeling the pangs of labor, was rushed to the hospital; she gave birth soon after. Richard, meanwhile, was in a world of his own—wandering outside that evening, his eyes trained on a gently looming harvest moon that looked like a “big orange balloon” or a “big orange titty” and was teasing him: “Hey, Rich, what’s going on? Why don’t you come and get me?” He jumped in his car and chased the full moon south toward Mexico. He drove as if “holding on to a rope,” and that rope pulled him back to the red-light districts of his past. By the time the moon disappeared in the light of day, Richard was in Tijuana, drinking and partying with a few “pretty little whores.” He was looking to blot out Maxine—her demands, the pressures of building a family—and the partying did the job. For four or five days, he devoted himself to oblivion.

  U.S. Customs officers killed his high, and quickly, when at the border they searched his car and person for drugs and found an ounce of pot—part of a crackdown on the Tijuana–San Ysidro border that seized more than sixteen thousand pounds of marijuana in 1967. Richard disputed the charge in his memoir: “I was black and I’m convinced that was the reason I got stopped. . . . There wasn’t even enough to roll a joint.” Whatever the material evidence, he soon found himself in jail, charged with possession of marijuana. Richard stewed in jail for six days before he was reminded, by a deputy, that he had been booked with thousands of dollars on his person, more than enough to post bail. He bought his way out of jail time.

  When he arrived back in Los Angeles, it was as the father of a baby girl named Elizabeth—and it was without a place to live. By splitting the first two weeks of their child’s life between a Tijuana brothel and a San Diego jail, Richard had done an unparalleled job of demonstrating his unfitness for parenthood, and Maxine made him leave their Beverly Hills home. He decamped to the Sunset Towers West, a complex that claimed to provide “the most luxurious apartment[s]” on “the famed Sunset Strip,” with “country-resort living” and hotel-quality service for its residents. Richard remembered it, by contrast, as a “home for a hodgepodge of Hollywood dreamers, schemers, and hustlers,” and he seems to have been dead-on about the desperation in the air. In the year after he lived there, one resident—a producer of noir and horror films—shot himself in the head. Another resident, also a Hollywood producer, would later hijack a Chicago-bound plane and demand half a million dollars in small bills and safe harbor in the Bahamas. (He got neither.)

  Richard was himself a sharp-elbowed wreck during his stay at the Sunset Towers West. He hooked up with a drug dealer he called Dirty Dick, and it was not unusual for him to snort as much as two hundred dollars’ worth of cocaine a day, or roughly the full amount he commanded for a night’s work. Around 11:30 on the night of July 26, 1967, Richard walked into the lobby of the Towers fresh from a session at Dirty Dick’s and “fairly well fucked up.” He asked for his messages and his mail. Fabian Tholkes, the hotel’s auditor and night clerk, gave him his messages but couldn’t give him his mail right away: the mailbox required his key, which the Towers management had taken from Richard for nonpayment of his rent. Richard was discovering, for the first time, that he had been locked out of his room. Tholkes offered to talk to the manager about the missing key and began to patch through the call, but before he could follow through, an older white woman asked Tholkes for her mail. Tholkes made the fateful decision to give Rose Pritcherson her mail before settling the matter of Richard’s key.

  In an average tone of voice, Richard muttered a single word: discrimination. It was his last restrained action of the night. He reached across the hotel desk, grabbed Tholkes by the necktie until he gagged, and punched the bespectacled clerk in the left eye. The lens shattered, and pieces of glass sliced into Tholkes’s eye. By this point, Sunset Towers manager Wayne Trosper had picked up the phone call from Tholkes. Instead of hearing Tholkes’s voice inquiring about Richard’s mail key, he caught the sound of commotion. Trosper, a former Las Vegas policeman, rushed into the lobby and, seeing Richard only, asked what the trouble was.

  “Who are you?” Richard asked back.

  “The manager,” Trosper answered. He caught sight of his hotel clerk, slinking in the background with a bloody towel held over his face.

  Richard ask
ed Trosper, “How would you like some of the same thing?”

  Trosper got off the best line of the evening: “Not in my lobby. I just redid it today.” He laid his suit jacket on a safe—as cautious about his suit as about his renovated hotel—and told Richard not to leave.

  Richard went outside and stood on the hotel entrance’s top step. Trosper circled him and stood on the bottom step, blocking his way. The two traded insults.

  Without warning, Richard lunged at Trosper and smashed Trosper’s face with his fist. Then he ran to the street and paused at a newspaper vending box. Juiced by the cocaine, Richard picked up the vending box and tried to heave it at Trosper; it was chained to the ground, and clattered at his own feet. The Battle of the Sunset Towers West had progressed from intemperate explosion to blustery farce, with Richard reprising the role of failed weight lifter from his pantomimes. Sirens could be heard approaching from the west.

  Richard pulled a knife from his pocket and told Trosper, “I am going to kill you.” He slashed Trosper across his cheek, then pulled out a fork to complete his utensil set. Trosper grabbed Richard’s arms, twisted them backward at the wrists, and removed the fork from one hand and the knife from the other. Weaponless, Richard ran down Sunset Boulevard—and into the arms of the Sheriff’s Department. He was saved, for the night, from his own capacity for making trouble.

  It was a night of random wastage that was, in other ways, not random at all. In the army, Richard had rehearsed the threat “I am going to kill you.” At the Café Wha?, he had rehearsed attacking someone with a fork. Throughout his life, he was cursed by the combination of his sensitivity to racial prejudice and his combustible temper. For Richard, “discrimination” could explain so much—how quick Trosper was to lock him out of his room, or how slow Tholkes was tosettle the matter of his mail box key, or how matter-of-factly Trosper handled Richard in the lobby and outside. In cross-examination at a preliminary hearing about the incident, Richard’s lawyer suggested that Trosper had been terminated by the Las Vegas Police Department for police brutality. (The judge never let Trosper answer the allegation.) And in his memoir, Richard claimed that Tholkes taunted him into a fight with “Come on, nigger. Come on and try it.”