Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  While “I Feel,” as this bit was called, was a loose and playful mind bend, other riffs had more bite. Instead of whitewashing his past, Richard hung it out to dry. He recalled, as a child, how he didn’t hesitate to use the term nigger baby for a small black licorice candy. For Richard, that candy, which he loved to eat, opened onto a parable of his childhood: “I used to play a game, ‘Last one to the store is a nigger baby’ . . . I used to run like hell myself. I didn’t want to be it. I didn’t know that I’d lost before the race started.” He had a sharp eye for the hustle, and for what it meant to be the dupe.

  The most elaborate of Richard’s new sketches were around ten minutes in length, built on the multi-character template of “Rumpelstiltskin” but considerably more adult in theme. In “Prison Play,” a kind of play within a play that Richard performed for an imagined audience of the incarcerated, a black blacksmith has his bicep squeezed by a swooning southern belle in an upside-down version of Gone With the Wind. The blacksmith gently asks her if she’d like to feel his ass, and then the belle nearly faints, joined now in her swooning by her mother. The play within a play races to an unexpectedly happy ending: the blacksmith proposes to the belle, and the belle’s brother, a cavalier of the old sort, approves the union in the name of “true freedom and true love.” That’s the breaking point for the redneck prison guard, though, who stops the performance, having been advised beforehand that “the nigger dies.” “Nobody leave,” he shouts. “I want a dead nigger out here!” Richard pauses, then reveals through the character of this prison guard the madcap logic of scapegoating: “If I don’t get me a dead nigger here, we gonna hang one of them homosex-u-als!”

  Richard’s creative explosion now had to be brought to market—recorded, edited, packaged, sold—and here the complications began. His manager, Bobby Roberts, hired Robert Marchese, a recording engineer who had apprenticed with Phil Spector, as the producer of Richard’s album, and the two felt a quick bond: Marchese had grown up in a tough, racially mixed inner-city neighborhood in Pittsburgh, and he was game for Richard’s wildest and most provocative flights. At their first meeting, Marchese promised Richard a “motherfucking dynamite album” and pledged that “you’ll hear everything you say, and it’ll be live.” Marchese then recorded four nights of Richard’s shows at the Troub in late July 1968.

  Afterward, Marchese had a surplus of material to work with. At the Troub, Richard had performed, in addition to “Prison Play,” a number of other newly conceived playlets. “T.V. Panel Show” was a calmer, if equally iconoclastic, sketch in which Richard impersonates a potpourri of guests—a bloviating anthropologist, a sheepish minister, a fiery black nationalist, a still-jumpy woman who has given up narcotics for God—on a late-night interview show. Their solemn conversation about the origins of man and the relationship between man and God is a thinly disguised bull session. Everyone is on this side of outlandish, and a target for satire: the former addict for her brittle devotion to God; the anthropologist for his self-serious nonsense (“Man was begat by raindrops, grew out of the grounds, uprooted himself and just walked away”); the black militant for blowing his top at the slightest provocation (“Why didn’t you introduce me first, sissy?”); and the minister for his too-intimate rapport with the deity (“Often God touches me—at night. I lay in bed and I feel God touching me. It’s quite marvelous”).

  “T.V. Panel Show” bore Richard’s stamp as a satirist, which was to smuggle some sharp insights into the mouths of his all-too-human characters. God “has been cleaning up every Sunday for the last thousands of years with that religion crap. And we all know it’s patootee-patootee, don’t we?” remarks the anthropologist, who turns out to be a skeptic first, a blowhard second. The black militant responds with a blast of counterintuitive wisdom, one that transforms God from a huckster into something much more vulnerable: “God was a junkie, baby! He had to be a junkie to put up with all of this, you know what I mean?” Here the militant is surprisingly seconded by the minister: “God probably did take some sort of outside medication. As it states in chapter six, verse thirty-two, ‘I will take unto myself what is needed.’” Strange alliances were being made in Richard’s countercultural theater of the absurd. No doubt the Troub’s audience relished the suggestion that God, like them, had suffered through the chaos of this world and, like them again, had found his way to dope.

  Richard also performed, for Marchese’s recording equipment at the Troub, the comic masterpiece of this period in his career. In the eleven-minute “Hank’s Place,” he took his audience into the inner sanctum of this after-hours joint in Peoria and evoked the atmosphere of his misspent youth: a world of hustlers, prostitutes, gamblers and every other form of trickster black Peoria had to offer. Character after character presents him- or herself to a young and timid Richard, who drinks in their words and their style. There is, for instance, Mr. Perkins, a carpenter who hopes Hank, as the joint’s proprietor, will hire him to reupholster his craps table. His cajoling sales pitch is a soliloquy:

  See how you got them cushions up there? Now see, those cushions ain’t but that thick . . . You got to have four to five inches of cushion up there, Hank. You get that cushion up there, and those dice got to come off there and tell the truth. They got to come off straight . . .

  Most of those guys—they get that velvet down and crease it. I’m gonna take some satin and I’m gonna whup over the top of it. I’m going to pull it tight over the table. I’m gonna put in them big four-inch tacks in there—big ones, thick enough to hold that wood together. And [those dice] can’t do nothin’ but tell the truth every time they come off there.

  Mr. Perkins, like many of the characters of “Hank’s Place,” is a bullshit artist, but an artist nonetheless. He hammers on the word truth while speaking a language full of invention.

  “Hank’s Place” also marked the first time Richard brought to life a pimp onstage—and the first time he took up in his act what it meant to grow up shadowed by the world’s oldest profession. “Coldblood” struts into Hank’s Place and, like Richard’s own father Buck, makes the young Richard feel small, pointedly calling him “Little Dick” and trapping him in a corner of the room, where the young Richard has no choice but to listen to his spiel. Yet Coldblood is, beneath the surface, a bundle of need. In a silky but wheedling voice, he appeals to the young Richard:

  You smart. You don’t say nothin’. I been diggin’ you. See, a lot of these niggers talk, they don’t walk. But you can handle yourself.

  Got any money? I don’t know, I thought maybe you’d get a little blow or something, might snort up something. Find out where we at or something. Might tell me something. I need to know something.

  In “Hank’s Place,” Coldblood gets his comeuppance when he ventures beyond the safe audience of the powerless, voiceless Little Dick. After a shambly cop named Torsey wanders into Hank’s Place, Coldblood baits him, demanding that Torsey take off his badge if he wants to prove himself in a fight. Torsey obliges in a stuttering panic of machismo (“I can take this badge off qui-qui-quicker than a bitch”)—and decks Coldblood in a matter of seconds. The smooth-talking pimp is revealed to be all talk; the stammering cop, a worthy antagonist.

  In Richard’s version of after-hours Peoria, no one was quite the man he appeared to be.

  Despite the comic riches of “Hank’s Place” and the other extended sketches, Marchese didn’t have an easy time assembling the “motherfucking dynamite” album he’d promised Richard. During the editing of the tracks, Richard’s manager, Bobby Roberts, kept asking, worriedly, “Why didn’t he do ‘Rumpelstiltskin?’” Roberts wanted the Merv Griffin version of Richard Pryor, a comedian no more topical than the Bill Cosby of Why Is There Air? He agreed with the slant that Variety, with its distance from the counterculture, had taken on Richard’s Troubadour shows: that his new material flirted with making his audience “uncomfortable or perhaps even hostile” and that “[F]or Pryor to climb into the upper brackets, he faces the difficult task of poli
shing his gab enough for the jabs to still penetrate, but to tickle more than they do.”

  So Marchese and Roberts struggled for a month to define the shape of Richard’s first album. Every obscenity was cause for battle, with Roberts inevitably prevailing. The routines in which Richard ventriloquized Peoria’s black community—routines in which shit and motherfucker made an occasional appearance—were deferred to the second album of Richard’s contract. The first would be called, simply, Richard Pryor, and though it would be fashioned around the centerpieces of “Prison Play” and “T.V. Panel Show,” it would be filled out with some earlier routines, like Richard’s take on his time in the army. Marchese and Roberts skirmished, finally, over how the album would end. Marchese wanted to drop the curtain with a back-and-forth between Richard and a black audience member who had demanded that Richard impersonate a black militant, and who then had complained about Richard’s accent. “There you go again,” Richard had riposted, “telling us how to be.” Roberts wanted to close on a less political yet zanier note: Richard’s impression of Frankenstein’s monster on LSD, in which the monster evolves from groaning lout to burbling child to Lyndon Johnson (“mah fellow Americuns”). Roberts won again: “Frankenstein” was the closer.

  For all the losses in the editing suite, the album did capture the multidimensionality of Richard’s comedy, his ability to throw himself into characters both ridiculous and sympathetic, and to operate outside the framework of established routines. And while “T.V. Panel” and “Prison Play” may have been less innovative and revelatory than “Hank’s Place,” they also expressed a demographic truth about the world Richard had inhabited for the past two years in LA. Like Black Ben the blacksmith or the black militant on the TV panel show, Richard had been a lone black man in a white-dominated world, fighting to flip the scripts he’d been given and turn his cameo into a leading role.

  The “new Richard” of 1968 was perhaps showcased most vividly not on the tracks of the album but on its cover, a collaboration between Richard and the design team of photographer Henry Diltz and art director Gary Burden. An executive at Reprise Records had cautioned Burden to “be careful”: Richard was “out there” and might go “off the deep end,” and the company needed a “real record cover to sell the record.” Fortunately, Diltz and Burden didn’t take the warning too seriously. At a first photo shoot, in Burden’s garage on June 1, Richard wore a Native American bead necklace and a white tunic top that was cousin to the Nehru jacket. After a few shots with the tunic, he took it off, then vamped in front of a giant American flag left over from a folksinger’s photo shoot—extending his arms as if crucified, putting up his dukes, smiling while a gun was pointed at his head, and picking his nose as if that was all the respect the Stars and Stripes deserved. A watermelon was nearby, so Richard played with it, too, cradling it while giving a “Heil, Hitler” salute to the flag, and hoisting it like a quarterback aiming for an end zone thirty yards away.

  These photos were satiric but also hammy and obvious, and Diltz and Burden, once they developed the film, were left wanting something more. They arrived at Richard’s house in the late morning on June 29, only to find Richard asleep and in no mood for a photo shoot. “Let’s do it right here in bed. This will be the album cover,” Richard said lazily. Diltz and Burden balked. Richard sat up and suggested that if he were to do it, the premise would have to be something “rootsy.” Burden offered to visit a friend’s antique shop, which carried an assortment of aboriginal weapons and jewelry—“real authentic stuff”—and Richard brightened. For his part, he knew of a little cave in a park above Beverly Hills where they could stage the shoot.

  Hamming it up: Pryor in a crucifixion pose for his first album’s cover shoot. (Courtesy of Henry Diltz)

  An hour or two later, near the mouth of the cave, Burden gave Richard a loincloth, and Richard stripped and put it on; Burden gave him a bow and arrow, and Richard took the weapon; he gave Richard, more hesitantly, a brass nose ring, and Richard enthusiastically clipped it in his nose. Richard did the rest. His costume complete, he submerged himself fully into the character of the native alone on the dry plain. He squatted next to a few burnt sticks, the markers of his ostensible hearth and home, and scanned the horizon for predators. He grunted vaguely; he lifted his bow, strung it with an arrow, pointed it. Diltz snapped away with his camera. Richard didn’t acknowledge the camera’s presence except in the overall paranoia of his demeanor. It was as if he were trapped inside an improvisation to which he was committed with deadly seriousness.

  The figure at the center of the resulting photographs—the one who was taking seriously a ludicrous premise, detonating a stereotype by embracing it with total commitment—seemed a world away from the prankster with the flag and the watermelon. Even Richard’s face had changed. In the earlier photos, as in every photograph up to that point, he had been clean-shaven and fresh-faced. Four weeks later, he had raised the first scrub of a moustache and a beard. He no longer looked considerably younger than his twenty-seven years.

  On the night of September 27, Richard’s father, Buck, planned a private celebration for himself, his daughter, Sharon, and a tall, dark-skinned nineteen-year-old woman named Ginger who was one of four prostitutes working out of Buck’s Aiken Avenue brothel a half mile away. It was a Friday night, and as was his custom on Friday nights, he indulged himself with some Kentucky Fried Chicken—a meal that ran against his doctor’s orders, as he’d recently been hospitalized for gastritis and advised not to eat greasy foods. Friday night was for letting go.

  In character: the native on the plain, embattled. (Courtesy of Henry Diltz)

  While his teenage niece Denise sat downstairs in the living room of 1319 Millman, Buck set the mood in his bedroom. He put on some soft jazz—he was a fan of Etta James and Nancy Wilson—and mixed his favorite drink, a highball of Seagram’s Seven whiskey and 7-Up. He offered some to Ginger, his prime moneymaker after the death of Ann, and she downed a few. Then he plied his thirteen-year-old daughter with the cocktail, and though Sharon had never touched alcohol in her life, she drank it down, too.

  For Sharon, the evening was the crossing of a final threshold. In the nine months after Ann’s death, she had surrendered to Buck—surrendered not unlike the women who had given Buck his livelihood for twenty-five years. “I clinged to him,” she remembered, “because he wasn’t the one who was going to whup me or holler or scream at me, whereas my mom took action.” About a month after their first meeting, Buck initiated a sexual relationship with his daughter, a sixth-grader who had not yet menstruated. After sex, he would tell her, “This is our secret, and you know Daddy loves you.”

  He asked her to move into his home, where she could always be but a few footsteps away, and she did. Sharon felt her mind going blank with confusion: “Why did I love him and hate him, all at the same time? Why?” Life at 1319 Millman was a string of associations: Buck sitting in his La-Z-Boy, lord of the manor; the guns decorating the walls of the house; the pretty women, with names like Ginger and Delicious, who took refuge at the house after the Aiken Avenue brothel was raided. And everywhere, the press of odors: the brackish smell of the boat Buck kept in the backyard and of the river fish that he caught, then cleaned on the porch; the musky, “whorish smell” of Buck himself, the scent of sex.

  Before September 27, Sharon’s relationship with her father had always been, as Buck insisted, their secret. That night he decided to pull Ginger into the conspiracy. The older girl had resisted the move—”She’s just a child,” she said of Sharon—but ultimately relented. The lights were turned off, and the three were left in pitch-black darkness.

  In the middle of sex, a naked Buck let out three loud belches, then collapsed as if stricken. He lay facedown on the bed. Ginger and Sharon ran downstairs in a panic and brought Denise back to the bedroom. The fingers of Buck’s left hand were gripping the sheets in agony. Denise straddled her uncle from the back—Buck was so heavy that all three of them wouldn’t have been able to tu
rn his body over—and pressed below his shoulder blades with the weight of her body, hoping to release some gas from his chest and save him. But Buck never came back from his agony. By the time the ambulance arrived with his body at St. Francis Hospital at 11:25 p.m., he had died of cardiac arrest.

  Or maybe, as Sharon suggested from the distance of forty-three years, he had died at the hands of the Lord: “God said, ‘This is it. I’m going to take you where they take anyone in their badness.’ And He took him.”

  The death of Buck spun the Pryor family into a welter of grief and confusion. He had, with his blunt strength, organized the force field of the family for so long that it was hard to imagine life without him. The next day, Marie was disconsolate, searching for answers. “What happened to Bucky?” she asked everyone at 1319 Millman. “Somebody tell me what happened to Bucky!”

  Sharon kept her silence. She thought that if she were to tell her grandmother the truth, Marie would kill her. Her body was still in shock. Shortly, a doctor would recommend for her a course of sedatives, which she took to get through the next few days.

  After Marie discovered that Buck had been in bed with Ginger, her grief ratcheted into white-hot anger. She fixed on the idea that the nineteen-year-old girl had stolen money from him—money that was now due her, since she was the Pryor family backstop. It had been sixteen years since she ran a brothel herself, but the old reflexes kicked in. She took out the gun she often kept strapped to her stocking.

  “I know you got more money than this, bitch,” Marie told Ginger. “You gonna give me that money.” Then she was on top of Ginger—beating her, pistol-whipping her face in the same bedroom where her son had died the night before. A bruised Ginger packed her bags and left.