by Scott Saul
Meanwhile, the Redd Foxx Club, on La Cienega Boulevard in the Mid-City neighborhood, returned Richard to the days of his first performances at Collins Corner. Foxx wielded a switchblade and a small black Derringer to keep his employees in line (and to protect himself from overeager creditors). Richard judged that Redd “ran the club like a gangster, treating friends like relatives and enemies with scorn. People were beat up regularly.” In other words, it felt like home. The room was so intimate that Bill Cosby described it as “an aisle.” As at Collins Corner, the nearly all-black audience at Redd’s place was rambunctious and free with its backtalk: according to one performer, “a comic with his wits about him could stand there and do fifteen or twenty minutes just trying to slow them down long enough for him to tell one planned story or do one planned piece of material.” Some comedians might have clenched under the pressure; Richard surrendered to it. “I loved getting on that stage and just tripping—adlibbing new routines and so on,” he recalled. And the club was free in another way, too: Richard remembered snorting so much cocaine with Redd in the small hours at the club that he felt they were competing in “the coke Olympics.”
Onstage at Maverick’s or the Redd Foxx Club, Richard could say anything he wanted. It was an extraordinary feeling, this sensation of creative freedom. For him, the worm was turning: those parts of himself that had been buried, by shame or censorship, were now his creative fuel. According to Mooney his two favorite words at Maverick’s, in order of frequency, were motherfucker and nigger. Richard’s use of the N-word, in particular, was a stark sign of where his newfound freedom was taking him. Nigger has been called “the nuclear bomb of racial epithets,” and comics before Richard, such as Lenny Bruce and Dick Gregory, detonated the word sporadically in their act. Richard leaned on it often, and found more flexible uses for it. He might use the word, while in character, to sharpen an insult (“Say, nigger, what the fuck wrong with you? You gonna slam the door in my face, as much money as I spent in this raggedy motherfucker?”). Or he might use it, in his own voice, as a blanket term (“Niggers nowadays be serious. The same niggers who was winos is in the Panthers now, doing something for the community”). Though it served occasionally as a punch line, especially if Richard pronounced it as a white person might (“Look up in the sky . . . it’s Super Nigger!”), usually it was a basic form of oral punctuation, something between a comma and an exclamation point—there to supply a pause and underscore his latest poke at the audience.
Richard’s use of the N-word kissed his entire audience with lightning. Instantly, it established a rapport with those blacks who had never heard a comedian address them in the language of their closest friends and family, and who, in the age of Black Power, were eager to leave Negro behind in pursuit of blackness. Less obviously, it connected Richard to those white audience members who wanted to eavesdrop on the black community’s inside language, letting them join his black fans in a grand gesture of refusal. Whenever the N-word came out of Richard’s mouth, it expressed a basic stance to the world of the kibitzers and star makers, the world of Bobby Roberts and the Aladdin hotel. It was the same stance taken by Clark Washington to his boss: You can’t fire me, I quit. I’ll make it on my terms, or on no terms at all.
A jazz critic for the Oakland Tribune judged that Richard “had an act the like of which has never, to my knowledge, been done before in a conventional nightclub.” Bill Cosby remembered that “Richard would walk in [the Redd Foxx Club], and he’d blow Foxx away. He’d blow me away, with no problem. That was mainly because Richard was bringing in a new kind of language at the time—not really bringing it in, but using it and using it well.” “Using it well”: Cosby appreciated that Richard was not simply dropping N-bombs and F-bombs willy-nilly. He’d found a way to control their power.
In a dope-fueled brainstorming session with Paul Mooney, Richard announced that he was going to make a movie. TV was too confining—his last speculative foray in that medium had been his untimely idea, with Henry Jaglom, of an interracial buddy comedy—but filmmaking was opening up to anyone with a sixteen-millimeter camera.
“We’ll get our friends together and do it,” Richard told Mooney.
“Where we gettin’ the money?” Mooney asked.
“Me,” Richard said. “I’ll put it up. I’ll produce.”
“Who’s gonna direct?”
“Me.”
“Who’s gonna be in it?”
“Everybody we know.”
From the start the film was powered by an insane level of ambition on Richard’s part; he supposed that he would be the film’s writer, director, producer, and star. He founded a production company and gave it the resonant name of Black Sun.
Richard had toyed for a while with the idea of making his own film. During his Greenwich Village days, he had bought a sixteen-millimeter camera: Manny Roth remembered him wandering around New York City for a full day and night, his camera trained on whatever sights and sounds snagged his interest. And just in the two years since he’d moved to Los Angeles, the barriers to independent filmmaking had been lowered dramatically. Several new types of low-budget movies competed with the glamour films churned out by the major studios. Director John Cassavetes pioneered a mode of personal filmmaking that was untidy, urgent, and actor-driven. Skin flick auteur Russ Meyer produced grindhouse classics such as the S/M melodrama Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966) or Mondo Topless (1966), in which a group of “busty buxotic beauties” (San Francisco strippers) perform and discuss the realities of sex work. On the exploitation end, American Independent Pictures (AIP) dominated the field, latching onto the counterculture with a boomlet of motorcycle gang and hippie films.
In Richard’s case, it was his involvement with the AIP film Wild in the Streets that both inspired and goaded him to sit in the director’s chair. His fascination with the process of moviemaking deepened on its set. “I can spend hours watching people on the set do their ‘thing,’” he said. “Everybody here has their certain ‘thing’ and it’s amazing to watch their concentration. Take the makeup man. You’d think that his work was the only thing seen on the screen. The same with all the people here. I guess that’s why American pictures have the reputation of being so technically perfect.”
It seems likely, too, that the tabloid quality of the film itself helped spur Richard to believe in his own tilted vision. Wild in the Streets was a mad parable about a groupuscule of young rock musicians (including Richard’s Stanley X) who convince an opportunistic politician to lower the voting age in America so that teens can vote. The franchise thus expanded, psychedelic chaos ensues: LSD contaminates the nation’s water supply; the leader of the band gets elected president on the motto “Down with experience!”; everyone over thirty is packed off to concentration camps, where they pass their lives in a stupor, dazed by the daily dose of acid they’re forced to drop. The movie feels as zonked out as its characters, delighting in rapid plot reversals, kaleidoscopic cinematography, and a tone that oscillates between comedy and horror before landing squarely on the latter.
Yet Wild in the Streets also gave Richard a taste of the limits of independent filmmaking. The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael called the film a “cheap commodity,” which “in its blatant and sometimes funny way of delivering action serves to remind us that one of the great appeals of movies is that we don’t have to take them too seriously.” Richard certainly valued irreverence, but the on-screen evidence suggests he did not enjoy how much his character wasn’t to be taken seriously. As Stanley X, drummer and “author of The Aborigine Cookbook,” Richard was a trivial, token presence in the white rock star’s entourage—the black militant there to balance out the gay guitarist, the vegetarian acidhead, and the teenage Japanese masseuse. He was part of the scenery, and he intoned his few lines with an aloofness that suggested he wasn’t going to fight to become something else. After one particularly limp moment of repartee (“You’ve got a big mouth”; “You’ve got a square head”), the camera focuses on Richard, who puts
his hands together on his lap, rolls his eyes up to the ceiling with a look of scorn, and lays a heavy topspin on his single word of dialogue: “Wow.”
Worse was the unthinking racism that, according to Paul Mooney, came at Richard from the same below-the-line technicians whose professionalism he admired. Hanging out on the set with Mooney, Richard observed some set decorators spraying the streets with a shiny substance that made them glisten with the look of fresh rain. “What’s that stuff?” Richard asked.
“It’s called ‘nigger-size,’” a set decorator answered. His tongue didn’t pause over the word; his eyes didn’t meet Richard’s to gauge his reaction.
“Nigger-size?” Mooney asked.
“Yeah, it’s what we nigger-size the streets with.” This was established Hollywood lingo, it seems. The two black men on set looked at each other and shook their heads.
When asked later about the film that went variously by the name of Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales, Bon Appetit, and The Trial, Richard told the Peoria Journal Star that “an angel is helping finance it.” It was a coy remark that papered over the serious political ironies that underlay the production of his film and shaped his marriage to Shelley.
By the fall of 1968, their marriage was fraying at the ends. If their relationship had originally been conceived as a countercultural experiment in interracial loving, it was colored now by the brooding vision of Black Power, in which battles between black and white were taken as the baseline of American politics. Mooney called Richard and Shelley’s home the “House of Pain”; arguments began with insults and ended with Richard administering blows. Lady Cocaine, along with various other women, had supplanted Shelley in Richard’s favor. He spent long nights at the home of his drug dealer, racking up debts and becoming deeply hooked. On one occasion, when Shelley flushed Richard’s cocaine down the toilet, he jabbed her, with a boxer’s efficiency and strength, in her head and pregnant belly, knocking her to the floor just as Buck had knocked down Gertrude. Shelley was at a loss—unsettled by his cocaine binges, demoralized by his faithlessness, shaken by his physical abuse.
What to do? She hit upon an inspired idea: she could invest her parents’ wedding present—thirty thousand dollars, waiting in a bank account—in the Black Power screenplay that had become Richard’s pet obsession. By working together on the film, she hoped, the two of them could breathe new vitality into their marriage. When she proposed the idea, Richard quickened: he was happy to take the money and lose himself in a movie of his own creation.
And so his vision of the black revolution would come to cinematic life through a cash infusion from Herb and Bunny Bonis. Super Nigger depended, in material terms, on the white wife he cheated on and, behind her, on the white in-laws who regarded him with suspicion. If that irony weren’t rich enough: Herb had earned the money as the personal manager of Danny Kaye, the effervescent Jewish comedian who came up from the Borscht Belt, and who had made his stage debut Jolson-style, in blackface, in his Brooklyn kindergarten’s production of The Watermelon Fantasy. It was an intergenerational, interracial transfer of funds, from the center of the political spectrum to its leftward edge.
The production gradually took shape over the course of 1968 and early 1969. In its first outline, Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales was propaganda pure and simple. When art director Gary Burden visited Richard’s home in June 1968 for the cover shoot of Richard’s first album, he observed that Richard was brainstorming “a documentary . . . of black people taking over the world, and he had all these storyboards on the wall of black warriors mowing down the white pigs.” But the project took a surprising turn in the wake of the trial of Black Panther Huey Newton, cofounder of the Black Panther Party. That trial was the major Black Power media event of 1968, a political shocker in a summer of shockers, and Richard’s creative imagination was jolted by its electricity.
The trial was touched off by an arrest gone wrong. Nine months earlier, Newton had been stopped on the streets of Oakland by police officer John Frey, who contacted headquarters to notify them he was stopping a “known Black Panther vehicle.” In Newton’s account, he took out a criminal law textbook and questioned whether Frey had reasonable cause for the arrest; Frey snarled, “You can take that book and shove it up your ass, nigger,” then punched Newton in the face with a force that sent him tumbling to the ground. A struggle ensued, and when it ended, Newton had taken a shot in the abdomen; a supporting officer had been shot in the arm, knee, and chest; and Officer Frey had died from bullets to his leg, chest, and stomach.
In another time, another place, the death of a white police officer in a firefight with a black radical would have been an open-and-shut case, and Newton would have picked up a one-way ticket to death row. But the Black Power movement had cleared open a space in the American legal system, broadening the relevant “facts of the case” until they encompassed the larger social forces that had sent a young black radical and a young white police officer on a collision course. In a striking reversal, Newton’s trial put the American status quo, more than Huey Newton himself, up for cross-examination: in the words of legal historian Mark Weiner, defending Newton meant “questioning the assumptions that made his acts criminal in the eyes of the law.” Newton’s lawyer Charles Garry did not even touch on the shooting incident until a few days before he called Newton to the witness stand, convinced that “the only way Newton could be defended was to take him in the context of his world and see the facts from that viewpoint.”
The Newton trial was high rhetorical drama, with Newton’s life hanging in the balance. Garry audaciously compared Newton to Jesus Christ, likening the Panther message of self-defense to the instructions found in the Gospel of Matthew: “Think not that I come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.” In his closing argument, Garry called for not just the exoneration of his client but the abolition of the ghetto:
White American, listen, white American, listen! The answer is not to put Huey Newton in the gas chamber, it is not the answer to put Huey Newton and his organization into jail. The answer is not that. The answer is not more police. The answer is to wipe out the ghetto, the conditions of the ghetto, so that black brothers and sisters . . . can walk down the streets in dignity.
Garry’s argument worked, in part. In its verdict on September 8, 1968, the jury held that, while Newton had shot Officer Frey, he had been provoked by the lawman. It lowered the charge from murder to manslaughter; instead of facing execution, Newton faced a potential sentence of two to fifteen years.
In the aftermath of the Newton trial, Richard began contributing significantly to the Black Power movement. In January 1969, during his run at Mister Kelly’s nightclub in Chicago, the Black Panther Party chapter of that city courted his support, and he responded warmly, donating a thousand dollars in cash to the cause. He agreed to make a special trip to Peoria to perform a benefit for the city’s fledgling Afro-American Black Peoples’ Federation. And he headlined a Congress of Racial Equality fund-raiser at the Apollo Theater at a moment when the organization championed black nationalism and community control.
Yet in his art, Richard rarely traveled a straightforward route. He ripped the premise of Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales from the headlines of the Newton trial, but he also turned history upside down in his imagination. Scribbling his screenplay in a spiral notebook with tattered pages, he created an odd mixture of pornography, black comedy, and Black Power agitprop. The trial of a black man in a white man’s courtroom became the trial of a white man in a black man’s courtroom. No longer a grandiose vision of black people taking over the world, the film shrank to the scale of a chamber drama and become less programmatic, more offbeat. Richard recalled:
The film opened with a black maid having her pussy eaten at the breakfast table by the wealthy white man who owned the house where she worked. Then, a gang of Black Panther types burst into the house and took him prisoner. As he was led away, the maid fixed her dress and called, “Bon appétit, baby!”
Afte
r that memorable kiss-off, the white man was put on trial “for all the racial crimes in U.S. history.” He pled his case in a basement courtroom, in front of a black judge and a jury stocked with pimps, prostitutes, winos, and drug addicts. The judge had a plate of cocaine and a bottle of liquor in front of him; the jury was similarly well furnished.
Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales was half lurid, half loopy, and fully avant-garde. In one scene, the white man was stripped to his underwear and made to lie on the floor in the courtroom. A gang of black men arrived with sponges and buckets of water. They soaped him up and rinsed him off—an event billed as a “car wash.” When the time came for the jury to reach its verdict, it didn’t deliberate over the man’s fate but yelled out his sentence like members of a lynch mob: “Kill the motherfucker!,” “Hang him!,” “Shoot him!” In his cocaine-whirred imagination, Richard had conceived a vision of revolution as a travesty of justice, a kangaroo court. Blacks were granted a fantastic power, only to abuse it.
Tellingly, Richard set himself up to perform two opposing, color-coded roles in the film: he was both the lawyer for the defense, kitted out in white hat and long white leather coat; and the lawyer for the prosecution, resplendent in darker duds. He played out his own internal drama, becoming the white man’s closest ally and his most committed antagonist. For Richard, there was no golden mean, no middle ground. Between his assumed identities as defense lawyer and prosecutor—as between Clark Washington and Super Nigger—there was only an unbridgeable gap.
Now, as the director of a film moving into production, he faced the challenge of finding a form that could contain the energies splitting him, and his country, in two.