by Scott Saul
When Buck called Richard with the news, his son expressed his condolences but balked at attending the funeral. “Dad, I ain’t going,” he said. He wasn’t in a frame of mind to handle the weight of the family he’d tried so hard to escape.
“That’s all right, son. You don’t have to come,” Buck said, baiting him. “But the next time you be on Ed Sullivan, it’ll be a duo.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’ll be you telling jokes and me kicking your ass.”
Richard quickly booked two plane tickets to Peoria. One was for himself, the other for the woman who accompanied him out of the destructive chaos that was 1967 and into the productive chaos that was 1968.
PART THREE
IN THE HOUSE OF PAIN
CHAPTER 11
* * *
The King Is Dead
Peoria and Los Angeles, 1968
When Richard arrived for Ann’s funeral with a young white woman named Shelley Bonis at his side, he brought convincing evidence of how far he’d traveled in the six years since he’d left Peoria—and how far American culture had traveled with him.
The two had met a few months before in a bar, both togged in the costumes of the times. Shelley had pulled off a stunning go-go look: honey hair spilling to her shoulders, miniskirt levitating above her tall white-leather boots. Richard looked like some combination of hippie, pimp, and journalist. He carried a notepad and pen, and wore bell bottoms with a wide belt, from which dangled a “huge, Mad Hatter–style watch,” as Shelley recalled. His pickup line was to ask for the time.
Shelley walked away, moseyed to the dance floor, and started doing what she had done, professionally, for the cameras of Hollywood a Go-Go: danced by herself. Richard followed the tease by approaching her with the notepad and pen.
“So what’re you writing on that little notepad of yours?” Shelley asked. “You’re not trying to steal my dance moves, are you?”
“Dance moves! I’m working on my act, girl.”
“What kind of act?”
“My comedy act. I’m a comedian.”
Something squared in Shelley’s head—she was under contract with Columbia Pictures and plugged into the industry—and she said, “You’re the guy who walked off the stage in Vegas. I dig that.”
Richard was intrigued, and riled, by whites playing black. “You ‘dig’ that? Now where you comin’ from, girl, talking the talk. You don’t look like no nigger I know. You’re not some kind of freaky bitch, are you?”
Shelley punched back that she was simply “hip to change”: “The Man ain’t the Man no more—dig?”
“Don’t get all political on me, bitch,” Richard said. “I know who the fuck I am. I’m a nigger. And I know who the fuck you’re not: a nigger.”
“You don’t know a thing about me, funny man. Not a thing.”
Richard didn’t know, for instance, that Shelley was the daughter of Danny Kaye’s manager, a child of liberal Hollywood. Or that she was the sort of Brooklyn-born Jewish girl who loved black culture more than her own—that she felt herself a “sister” in her very soul. Or that she had already fallen for him with his first ridiculous question about the time, and was ready to take a deeper plunge.
Just days after they met, Shelley moved into the small cottage, at the tail end of Wonderland Avenue in Laurel Canyon, where Richard had settled after the Sunset Towers fiasco. The cottage was only a three-mile ride up from the Sunset Strip, but it was a world away from that neon carnival. The Canyon was rusticated—home to screech owls, coyotes, and a pack of folk-rock troubadours hoping, in the famous words of one of their own, to “get ourselves back to the garden.”
It was steadily becoming home, too, to the “heads and “freaks” of LA’s counterculture (head and freak being terms much preferred, within the community, to the epithet hippie). Music engineer Robert Marchese, who later produced Richard’s first album, lived nearby in what he called a “classic psychedelic pad.” Each room was painted scrupulously, or fanatically, with a different color scheme: Marchese’s bedroom was split between orange and magenta down to the mismatched screws—one orange, one magenta—on the light switch. A few months after Shelley joined Richard, musician Frank Zappa came to the Canyon and settled into a dim, cavernous house known as the “Log Cabin,” which quickly became, according to the Canyon’s chief chronicler, a “rock-and-roll salon and Dionysian playground,” drawing a steady stream of freaks from the San Fernando Valley to Hollywood. Its goings-on became part of a richly embroidered legend of rock ’n’ roll decadence: “Talents as imposing as Mick Jagger and as whimsical as Alice Cooper were stabled, jam-sessioned, fed, and fellated while the undisputed master of the house . . . reigned as the ‘freak daddy’ of the whole show.”
Richard was neither freak nor freak daddy, but he and Shelley inhaled the Canyon’s heady romantic spirit. Shelley lit incense, wore love beads, pattered around barefoot, and, in Richard’s words, “made me feel free.” They made a sport of the rocks lying around the cottage—giving them as presents to one another, kissing them, imagining them in conversation—and then laughed at the deliriousness of it all.
Then the world outside their cottage came calling—threatening, in the person of Buck, an ass-kicking for good measure—and the lovers packed themselves off for Ann’s funeral in the dead-of-winter Midwest.
On the day of the funeral, the temperature fell to fourteen below. Two hundred friends and relatives filled St. Patrick’s Church; a soloist’s voice rose above the hum of the organ. Ann was laid out in a fur-lined coat, her usually straightened hair braided in cornrows.
Buck was neither a religious man nor one to stand on ceremony. Inside the limousine as it traveled to St. Joseph’s Cemetery, Richard held his father and tried to give him strength: “Pop, don’t cry, please.” Buck cut the tender moment short: “Okay, son. But if it get any colder, they’re going to have to bury the bitch by themselves.”
At the cemetery, the pallbearers hoisted Ann’s casket to the grave site. They wore gray gloves, and after lowering the casket into the grave, they removed their gloves and dropped them into it. The preacher began delivering a eulogy over the casket, only to be interrupted by a shivering Buck. “The dirt. The dirt. Throw the dirt,” he muttered through clenched teeth. “It’s cold, preacher. The dirt.” Even at his wife’s funeral, Buck would be Buck—“brutally honest,” as his son later observed.
After the service, the whole family repaired for a reception at the large house that Richard had bought for his father a few years earlier, at 1319 Millman. A photograph from the reception suggests how Ann’s death rippled differently across the family. Buck and June, Ann’s daughter from earlier in her life, sit in front, their faces drawn and tight-lipped in grief. Behind them, Shelley and Richard’s aunt Maxine beam at each other as if sharing a private joke. Richard’s teenage cousin Denise smiles with a look of nervous excitement. Richard wears a powder-blue turtleneck and white windbreaker, and connects to the camera with confident eyes and an easy grin, ready even in hard times for his close-up.
A family reshuffling itself after Ann’s death. Front row: LeRoy “Buck” Pryor and Ann’s daughter June. Back row: Barbara McGee, Denise Pryor, Maxine Pryor, Shelley Bonis, Richard Pryor. (Courtesy of Barbara McGee)
With Ann buried, there were some new introductions to be made. Buck had fathered three children with three different women while married to Ann, and as long as she was alive, he had been able only to watch those children from afar—by standing across from a schoolyard while one of them played, or from the inside of his station wagon. Now they could be brought into the fold.
Buck’s daughter Sharon came timidly to the door at 1319 Millman. She knew that Buck was her father, but aside from an overpowering hug at Ann’s viewing—“he squeezed me like he was going to squash me to death”—she had never had any physical contact with him in her thirteen years. A small white poodle yapped at her ankles. She saw Buck sitting with the family at a table near the entrance to th
e house.
“Let my baby in,” he said. “Look at my baby!” Buck, who needed comforting, comforted her. “Come on over here—that dog ain’t going to bother you.” She skittered over, and he led her around the house, introducing her with great pleasure to the extended family. Marie was ministering to a kettle of neckbones in the kitchen; Richard and Shelley were nesting together like lovebirds in the living room. Then Buck sat down again and put Sharon on his lap, where she stayed.
When Sharon was leaving, Buck insisted to her mother, “Please don’t let this be the last time I see her.” Sharon was in sixth grade and, in the eyes of her school and her mother, who had ten other children to handle, she was a problem child, always tilting against figures of authority. The freshly bereaved Buck soon took her under his wing. “Baby, everything’s going to be all right,” he reassured her when they spent time together in the next few months. “Ain’t nobody gonna mess with my little girl again.”
On January 13, Richard and Shelley were married in a quick impromptu ceremony at a small chapel in Las Vegas. They consecrated, in the city of Richard’s recent embarrassment, a relationship that sometimes played out as a political allegory of late-1960s America. Shelley was the white romantic, Richard the black cynic. It was Shelley who had avidly read Malcolm X, Angela Davis, and the Black Panthers, and who believed that a new day was dawning and that the love she felt for Richard was proof of it. Richard, meanwhile, had been hardened by his family and his struggles with school, the army, and show business—every institution he’d come into contact with. He tended to shield himself from disappointment by expecting the worst—of people and of his country.
Still, a piece of Richard longed to believe, as Shelley believed, in what was pure between them and how it might spill beyond their cottage in Laurel Canyon—and here, again, the two lovers were emblematic of larger hopes and tensions. Around the country, the Black Power movement and the largely white counterculture were engaged in a delicate, circling dance, as each group wondered what they might give to, or gain from, the other. In Los Angeles in 1967, white hippies had sought to bring together “the city’s two hip communities” by organizing two “love-ins” at parks in Watts, with tellingly mixed results. The first love-in drew a crowd of seven thousand whites and blacks, who danced together to a mix of blues and rock groups; the alternative paper Open City raved that the hippies “short-circuited the ghetto’s mental hate syndrome with smiles, freaky renaissance clothes . . . and an open attitude which became contagious.” The second love-in, more poorly attended, was disrupted by a stone thrown at a white photographer and a “get whitey” speech from the stage—and the hippies, discouraged, left Watts for good.
For their part, black militants looked at the counterculture and saw two things at once: some of the least racist and most engaged people in America, and some of the most privileged and committedly naïve people in America. A case in point: the Los Angeles Free Press and Open City ran some of the most detailed and sympathetic coverage of the Watts riots and the Black Power movement, but they also published articles like “Hippie: The New Nigger” or “Diggery Is Niggery,” which appeared to turn black suffering into someone else’s plaything. H. Rap Brown expressed a typical ambivalence when, in a 1967 interview, he called the hippies “politically irrelevant,” but added that he wished “all white Americans were like the hippies, because they ARE peaceful, and that’s more than can be said for most honkies.”
Richard’s stand-up was one of the great beneficiaries of this dance between Black Power and the counterculture. In 1968, performing for Troubadour audiences that, for him, were half white and half black, he invented a style that was as far-out as Frank Zappa and as defiant as H. Rap Brown, and was catalyzed by the fusion of the two movements. On the one hand, the freewheeling ethic of the counterculture shaded Richard’s act with irony, making his more political moves seem provisional and subject to revision. On the other, the militancy of the Black Power movement sharpened his zaniness, giving it a point: his improvisations could cut you open with their poignancy or shock you with their bitterness. For years, Richard’s comedy had set itself apart from the conflicts of the times; now it drew on the energy of those tensions and played them out in spectacular fashion.
He needed his art because, offstage, the chaos was sometimes too much. When news of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination reached Richard on April 4, 1968, he was between sets at Mister Kelly’s nightclub in Chicago. The second set was immediately canceled, and everyone was warned to take caution and head home. Richard did the opposite. He smoked a joint with Jeff Wald, the booker at Mister Kelly’s. Then the two hopped in a car and “drove around Chicago like lunatics,” Wald remembered. They felt aimless, high on grass and miserable about the state of the world, and were curious to see where their careening would take them. Richard was sobbing uncontrollably; he couldn’t believe how crazy America had become. The two heard shots fired around them but raced through the streets anyway. It was the beginning of a riot that would wreathe the streets in smoke and tear gas, and leave at least nine black Chicagoans dead.
The death of King reverberated in Richard. He canceled a scheduled appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and returned to Los Angeles, where two weeks later he performed in front of an audience of ten thousand at a Martin Luther King Jr. memorial benefit at the Hollywood Bowl. The tone of the King event was set by actor Rod Steiger, who proclaimed that “we are here today because of a man with a purpose and a dream. We are gathered for one reason and one reason alone—to raise money to help fulfill that dream and that purpose. We mean to guarantee that a future shall exist without ignorance and without prejudice.” These were high-minded thoughts, and Steiger was joined in his solemn tribute by entertainers ranging from Jimmy Durante and Edward G. Robinson to Bill Cosby and Barbra Streisand.
Richard punctured the mood. He looked out at the largest live audience of his career, one assembled to mourn one of the most grievous losses in American history, and spoke with the brazenness of his father at his stepmother’s grave. “All these people here are giving money,” he observed, “but if your son gets killed by a cop, money don’t mean shit.” There was a collective gasp at both the four-letter word and the bitter sentiment it carried. The show, after all, was meant to embody King’s vision and raise money for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Urban League, two organizations that represented the civil rights establishment. Richard, meanwhile, was refusing to turn the other cheek. He was pointing his audience’s attention to those, less sainted than King, who had been killed by police bullets in the riots following King’s assassination, and he was refusing to forgive.
For Richard, it was almost like a public “coming out”: no one with a decent pair of ears could mistake him for Bill Cosby any longer. Forty-five KLAC listeners withdrew their pledges in protest at his remarks.
The death of Martin Luther King Jr. marked the beginning of an extraordinarily productive four months for Richard as an artist. His manager, Bobby Roberts, had negotiated a fifty-thousand-dollar, two-album contract with Mo Ostin’s Reprise Records, and Richard generated a flurry of new routines for his vinyl debut. For the first time since his breakdown at the Aladdin, he was able to pour his volatile emotions into the channel of comedy, where they remained so intense that his act took on fresh vitality, audacity, and outrage. The salty characters of his teenage years in Peoria glided and swaggered on the stage of the Troubadour, where they were joined by a wild assortment of Uncle Toms and black militants, faith healers and mainline ministers, prison guards and stage directors. And at the center of this new world was the newly unbuttoned character of Richard himself. “Strange, unconked and outspokenly glib, Pryor exudes the essence of every street-corner gang comedian who ever did his schtick while keeping one eye out for a prowl car”—so wrote Nat Freedland in the Los Angeles Free Press in April 1968, catching in print for the first time the stage persona that made Richard famous.
At his most freeform, the ne
w Richard might work an angle like a jazz soloist working a motif. In one riff during his mid-April engagement at the Troub, he tried to describe how he felt:
[Funky scat-singing] Bam-da-boom, bippidy-bop bop-da-boom!
I got the feeling! Hunh-da-doo!
I got the feeling, yeah! Hey!
I feel like a . . .
[Deep-voiced, imitating Paul Robeson] “Sometimes I feel like a . . .”
[Halting] I feel—I don’t know how I feel, man. I don’t know. All I know is I feel.
[Church woman’s voice] “I feel!”
[Warming up] I don’t know how I feel, but I just—unnhh!—I feel. I feel. I really feel. Bing-bing-bing! I really feel, man.
Them energies are coming.
[Loud sound of waves traveling down a tube, being sucked into a vacuum, then escaping into the air with the fading vibration of a tuning fork.]
And it’s cool. It’s cool. Hey, wow! God, man.
That’s what I feel—I feel like, I feel like—God. That’s a groovy feeling.
The comic had cycled, in exactly a minute, through several forms of black identity (funky dude, Paul Robeson, church lady); aligned himself with the freaks in the audience by experiencing a trip before their eyes; then lightly sent up the spiritual pretensions of that set by mocking his own sense of godhood. And while the pinballing of his mind made him seem one of the freaks himself, Richard denied that he was high, then ended by underlining his own love-hate relationship to drugs: “Dope just cut out, and leave you hanging there. Dope say ‘later!’ and you say, ‘But dope, I wanna go with you.” Despite the seeming randomness of the improvisation, it was all of a piece: Richard had a mind that established quick affinities, then just as quickly located the comic downside of every one—until the identity he’d just assumed had turned into an embarrassment, or a trap. No one was spared the thrust and parry, least of all him.