Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  The court record, however, does not mention that statement. And it’s also true that, under the influence of cocaine, Richard was not exactly the most reliable narrator. Tholkes ended up with a lacerated cornea and permanent loss of vision in his left eye—an injury disproportionate to the slight Richard suffered, whatever it was. Booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, Richard was silent as Tholkes, Trosper, and Tholkes’s ophthalmologist gave testimony in his preliminary trial. Whether because he was advised against it by his attorney or because he couldn’t, in his current state, give a good account of himself, he was not deposed to offer his side of the story.

  Three days after his mute performance at the preliminary hearing, Richard ran out of words in a still more perilous location—onstage at the Aladdin hotel in Las Vegas. It was the primal scene of his comic development, full of shock and shame and feelings of indecent exposure. He would return to the ill-fated act again and again in interviews, as if his failure there held the secret to his future success. In the words of journalist Mark Jacobson, the incident is “the pith of Pryor legend.” But Richard was loose with the details, which has lent an air of mystery to the legend. He dated his crack-up anywhere from 1967 to 1970. Sometimes, as in his memoir, he turned the episode into a story about his own haplessness—how he walked onstage, stared at his audience, wondered whom they were looking at, and walked off to find the answer. Other times, he turned it into a story of half-crazed defiance—how he stripped naked, ran into the casino, jumped onto the 21 table, and announced himself with a single word, “Blackjack.”

  Richard’s incident at the Aladdin, it turns out, was really two different incidents: an onstage nervous breakdown and a bold, if kamikaze-like, career move, separated by ten days of normal routine. All told, his two-part Aladdin fiasco was more complicated and audacious than he let on, or than the received myth suggests.

  The Aladdin was upmarket but loose-limbed, and hardly as straitlaced or middle American as Richard’s stories would later imply. It had opened only the year before and had made a name for itself as one of Vegas’s most extravagant hotels. It boasted a cavernous interior decorated in Ali Baba reds and blues, an eighteen-hole golf course, and (its signature) a fifteen-story sign, in the shape of Aladdin’s lamp, that required forty thousand lightbulbs to operate. Yet, in its programming, the Aladdin was on the adventurous side. Redd Foxx was a Bagdad Room mainstay. Other comics who preceded Richard to the five-hundred-seat Bagdad Room included Godfrey Cambridge, the tart and sophisticated black stand-up, and Rusty Warren, the “risqué redhead” who drew an audience of brassy older women with her tales of men who couldn’t perform and women who couldn’t get enough. Foxx and Warren even recorded two adults-only albums in 1967 in the same theater that was the scene of Richard’s mental disintegration—an indication that playing the Aladdin was not the same as playing the Kraft Summer Music Hall.

  The full bill during Richard’s run at the Aladdin was a typical mix of comedy, novelty, and sexual sizzle. He was scheduled to share the stage with Pat Collins, a curvy hypnotist known as the “blonde beguiler,” and the hotel’s in-house topless revue. He would earn three thousand dollars a week, or double his usual rate for nightclub work, for three weeks of work at the regular Vegas grind. Two performances a night, seven days a week. The full shows were to run like clockwork from 9:00 p.m. until 5:00 a.m.

  In mid-September 1967, Richard was not equipped to be a gear in someone else’s clockwork. A little after 1 a.m. on opening night, after the first seven minutes of his second set, he lost himself. According to Dick Kanellis, the Aladdin’s entertainment director, Richard left the stage and drove back to Los Angeles without the courtesy of an explanation. His own account corroborates Kanellis’s, but offers some measure of his rationale. “I was doing material that was not funny to me,” he told the Los Angeles Times in retrospect. “I saw how I was going to end up. I was false. I was turning into plastic.” Or, as he told Rolling Stone, more picturesquely: “The life I was leading, it wasn’t me. I was a robot. ‘Beep. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Sands Hotel. Maids here are funny. Beep’ . . . I didn’t feel good. I didn’t feel I could tell anybody to kiss my ass, ’cause I didn’t have no ass, you dig. My ass was on my face.”

  According to his memoir, Richard had spied Dean Martin at one of the front tables, staring at him and waiting expectantly for the first laugh of the evening. “Who was Dean looking at?” Richard wondered, then staggered for the answer. His eyes traveled across the sea of faces, all staring back at him. “I didn’t know who Richard Pryor was. And in that flash of introspection when I was unable to find an answer, I crashed,” he recalled. Rather than have compassion for himself, he considered his tuxedoed self with a cold eye: “I imagined what I looked like and got disgusted.”

  After a pause, he asked the crowd, “What the fuck am I doing here?” No answer was forthcoming, so he turned and headed off the stage. But even his exit was a botch: he had wandered to the side of the stage that had no true opening, just a narrow ledge beside the curtain.

  Someone yelled, “You can’t get through there!”

  “I can get through there, believe me!” he screamed back. Richard wasn’t about to cross the stage again. He crept along the thin lip of wood, hugging the curtain as if it were a sheer rock face, toward an Exit sign that beckoned weakly.

  He emerged on the other side some interminable seconds later, his nose scraped and bleeding. “Fuck, fuck, fuck” was all he could say. He picked up his clothes backstage, climbed into his ’65 Mustang, and pointed it straight for Los Angeles.

  Richard soon heard from Jim Murray, his agency’s man in Las Vegas. Murray was twenty years older than Richard and his regular agent, Sandy Gallin, and had a show business sensibility shaped by the likes of Frank Sinatra and Don Rickles. He had shrugged off Richard’s bad behavior at the Sands, but this was too much. “You’ll never work in this town again,” Murray threatened, then thought aloud about the blowback from Richard’s behavior. “What about us? What about our reputation?”

  Richard was unyielding. “Everybody was worried about themselves. I said, ‘Fuck all you motherfuckers, I’m worried about me.’” And in response to the demand that he needed to go back to the job, he scoffed. “I just knew I couldn’t work, not then, not that way,” he said. He needed to look after himself, and if that meant giving up the “big time,” he was ready to let it go. In Richard’s burnished version of the story, he faced the consequences of his actions: no more gigs in Vegas, no more work in the big time. Banishment to what Rolling Stone called “the minors—the low-paying, no-cover hoot-niteries you find in some major cities and college towns.” In Richard’s telling, his flame-out at the Aladdin became a parable of the suffering artist: he was the artist at war with his audience, his handlers, and the person he had been, and fated to be wounded grievously in each of those battles. “I was blackballed by most of the industry for two or three years after that,” he said.

  There are two major problems with Richard’s account here. First, Richard was hardly blackballed by the entertainment industry. Post-Aladdin, he kept Sandy Gallin as his agent and, with Gallin’s help, continued to land steady work in the most mainstream of venues. In 1968 he appeared on The Tonight Show four times, The Ed Sullivan Show twice, The Pat Boone Show five times, and the über-square Kraft Summer Music Hall once. He entertained soldiers at three army bases as a regular on the TV show Operation Entertainment. Even Vegas forgave him quickly: he returned in August 1968 to play Caesars Palace with Bobbie Gentry and José Feliciano—and he played it well. All told, his career jumped up several notches the year after the supposed fiasco. He gained a powerful manager in Bobby Roberts, who also worked with the Mamas and the Papas, and recorded his self-titled first album, for which he received a hefty advance. Though Richard wished to think of himself as the victim of a narrow-minded industry, he had a gift for ingratiation, and enough undeniable talent, that booking agents were willing to indulge him as th
e price of doing business.

  Not blackballed: Pryor onstage at Caesar’s Palace in August 1968. (Courtesy of the author)

  There’s a second, even more startling discrepancy between Richard’s account of the Aladdin debacle and the tale told by its paper trail: he came back to Vegas. After a brief sojourn in LA, he returned to the Bagdad Room to fulfill the terms of his contract, making himself presentable for a while. The Hollywood Reporter enthused on September 21—six days after he walked offstage on opening night—that Richard and Pat Collins were making “just the right pairing for the Aladdin.”

  But after a week of performing according to script, that delicate something in Richard snapped again. According to the Aladdin’s Dick Kanellis, Richard started becoming “abusive to his audience,” “crowd[ing] his dialogue with four-letter words.” He insulted Vegas and the Aladdin with the sorts of obscenities that were unacceptable even in the room where Redd Foxx and Rusty Warren recorded their “adults-only” albums. As the person responsible for the hotel’s entertainment, Kanellis warned Richard “at least four times” that he had to rein himself in, but to little effect.

  On Sunday, October 2, Kanellis decided to roll tape on Richard’s show. He wanted incontrovertible evidence of Richard’s obscenities—evidence that could be presented to the American Guild of Variety Artists, in case Richard challenged the decision to terminate his contract. Kanellis got what he was looking for: Richard delivered, in the words of the Hollywood Reporter, enough four-letter words to “blister the ears off a longshoreman.” Three days before he was set to complete his engagement, Richard was fired, with cause.

  Now that the laws around obscenity have loosened dramatically, it’s easy to judge Kanellis a timid soul who placed himself on the wrong side of history. But he wouldn’t have been wrong to be afraid for himself and the Aladdin, and to worry about Las Vegas police shutting down the show. Richard’s profanity-laced act was a great leap beyond even the blue humor of Foxx and Warren. In his 1967 Aladdin show, Foxx played with the line separating normal speech and profanity—with a shaggy-dog story about the “mother-frockers” and “cork-soakers” of New York City, and with a bluff that his name was spelled “F-U . . .”—but he never crossed that line. Any performer who, in 1967, spoke four-letter words onstage flirted with prison time or worse, and any impresario who presented such a performer could be on the hook, too.

  The case of comedian Lenny Bruce stood as a fresh cautionary tale. Starting in the early 1960s, Bruce courted censure with his goring of a whole parade of sacred cows. He talked saucily about Eleanor Roosevelt (“the nicest tits of anyone alive”); stripped the recently widowed Jackie Kennedy of her halo (after her husband got shot in Dallas, she “was hauling ass to save her ass”); and suggested, through his Uncle Willie character, that the American family was a breeding ground for child molesters (“Let your Uncle Willie, tickle ickle ickle you . . . Don’t tell Mommie or you’ll break the magic charm”). In San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City, the police responded by monitoring Bruce’s act and locking him up for breaking the law. The comic lost his Chicago and New York City cases, and after New York City’s district attorney succeeded in convicting and fining the club owner who sponsored Bruce, the comic was unemployable in Greenwich Village, his cultural base. His gigs became scarce, his performances overtaken by the minutiae of his legal troubles. On August 3, 1966, Bruce fell off the toilet seat in the bathroom of his Hollywood Hills home and collapsed onto the floor, a hypodermic needle in his arm. Police let reporters and camera crews mill around and “feed on the corpse,” in the words of Bruce’s biographers. The resulting photos were indelible: Bruce sprawled on the diamond-tiled floor, naked except for the blue jeans pooled around his ankles, silenced at last. His friend Phil Spector quipped darkly that the cause of death was “an overdose of police.”

  Strangely, Richard rarely talked about how, Lenny Bruce–like, he had unleashed himself at the Aladdin. His earlier breakdown onstage, for everyone to see, was seared into his memory with a vividness that made it easy to recall, and with a comic aspect—Richard’s bumbling stage exit—that may have made it easier to retail, too. Yet while his first Aladdin breakdown pointed backward in his career, towards his struggles with the “Mickey Mouse material that [he] couldn’t stomach any more,” the second incident at the Aladdin was prophetic. It pointed forward, toward the comic Richard became in the early 1970s—the comic for whom profanity was the grease that lubricated his monologues and helped them move. This impulse within Richard put him on a parallel but separate path from Lenny Bruce, who used obscenities to spike his social commentary, and especially to bring the mighty down to earth. For Richard, obscenities were not usually leveraged for an explicit point; they were just an indispensable part of how he expressed himself, like meat cleavers to a butcher or roses to a florist.

  It was telling that Richard turned to profanity onstage at the same time that he was committing, in his mind, to comedy that was character-driven and rooted in the black community. His trip to Peoria in October 1966 had cemented his sense that his family and old circle of friends deserved to be at the center of his comic material. His work on A Time for Laughter had deepened his awareness of the political character of black comedy, and had made him hesitate at what he saw as the inauthentic, pandering elements in his own act. He had desperately wanted to be on TV, but now that he was a regular player on variety and talk shows, he bridled at their restraining orders. Shortly before his engagement at the Aladdin, he complained to Ebony: “Be clean. They always say ‘be clean.’ They want you to be something that really doesn’t exist at all.” For Richard, life itself was unclean, profane. He couldn’t be clean and be true to the characters he wished to portray. And the very first character he needed to portray, the first character he needed to approach with utter candor, was himself. That was who came onstage at the Aladdin on the night of October 2, ready to reveal himself, and it wasn’t meant to be pretty.

  In only one interview, with Cynthia Dagnal Myron of the Chicago Sun-Times, in 1978, did Richard tell a version of the Aladdin story that covered, from his perspective, the second part of the actual episode. According to Myron, her interview with Richard had an intense, focused quality from the start: it was as if Richard were speaking directly to her—a black female reporter almost exactly the age he was in 1967—rather than to the readership of the Sun-Times. Richard intuited that Myron was, as he had been, dazzled by the glittering prizes of a nearly all-white world, and he wanted her to understand how dangerous her path was, how fraught with suicide traps.

  He told her that he had felt, in Vegas, like he was choking to death each time he walked through the kitchen “like a good little boy” to get to the stage. One day he decided he’d had enough. He told the Aladdin management that this would be his final performance, and beat back their protestations. Then he went onstage and delivered a performance so angry and profane that it was sure to offend, and it did: he was pulled offstage mid-act, and the Aladdin’s staff rushed up to him. Richard braced himself and, lifting his chin, told them that he couldn’t be a man and work for them anymore. They looked into his eyes, and whatever they saw disarmed them. They backed off.

  Richard felt the hand of God in his life, raising him up and protecting him. After he went back through the kitchen and stepped outside, the world seemed transformed. For a precious moment, a calm settled over him. His eyes scanned the desert horizon. The trees, perhaps stirred by the wind, were bowing to him.

  The magic moment didn’t last long. In November, a scheduled appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show sent Richard into a nervous “flittamajitter,” and he didn’t show up—the showbiz equivalent of standing up the Queen of England. Sullivan treated Richard like a monstre sacré whose bad behavior was to be expected: an extra clause was simply stitched into his next contract, specifying that Sandy Gallin was required to be in New York City for every engagement and that Gallin was personally responsible for his client’s appearance at rehearsal
and taping. Richard remained in the show’s good graces.

  Whatever sympathy and forgiveness Richard experienced in his professional life, elsewhere it was harder to come by. In mid-November he was ordered by the court to pay Maxine’s legal fees and a regular child support payment of three hundred dollars a month. A month later, on the first day of his trial on the Sunset Towers assault charge, he treated the court as he had treated Ed Sullivan, with a no-show, and the judge issued a bench warrant for his immediate arrest.

  In Peoria, Richard’s family was itself facing a sea of troubles. On the same day that Richard was ordered to pay child support, police raided his father’s brothel at 409 West Aiken and charged him with being a keeper of a house of prostitution. Tough to the core, Buck took the harder legal route: rather than pay a fine, he demanded a trial by jury. Meanwhile, Richard’s stepmother Ann was now so ill that, even though the Illinois Supreme Court had rejected her appeal of the previous year, the court order was apparently never carried out. She took her rest at home.

  On the very last day of 1967, Ann received last rites, then expired. For twenty years she had been a prostitute and a madam, but she was also a member, in good standing, of Peoria’s Catholic community, and the local priests reserved St. Patrick’s Church for her service. Peoria’s most prominent black mortician readied the body.