Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  CHAPTER 13

  * * *

  Irreconcilable Differences

  Los Angeles and Peoria, 1969–1971

  Around the turn of 1969, Richard Pryor strutted onto the UCLA campus in a broad-brimmed hat and ankle-length brown leather coat. He was hailed by two young people, film student Penelope Spheeris and her then-boyfriend, who recognized Richard from TV and asked him why he was on campus.

  “I’m looking for film students to do a movie,” Richard answered.

  “You just found them,” Penelope replied. She worked at the tech office of the film school—the first woman employed there—and could arrange to borrow some equipment for a while. It was the first of many acts of creative generosity that Richard received from a woman who later became known as the sharp-eyed director of offbeat music documentaries like The Decline of Western Civilization and mainstream comedies like Wayne’s World and The Beverly Hillbillies. Spheeris signed up to work the camera; her boyfriend, the sound recording. Soon after, Richard recruited the cast from the UCLA student body and his circle of friends, many of whom didn’t require makeup or costuming, according to Spheeris, “to look like pimps and whores.”

  Shooting began in February 1969 at a soundstage in Gayley Studios in Westwood and at a private home in Beverly Hills, where Richard staged the abduction of the white man by several Black Panthers. But not long after the film fell together, it started falling apart. Richard had his screenplay in that spiral notebook, but he preferred to improvise. What worked at 3:00 a.m. in a New York comedy club, though, didn’t translate so well in film production: Richard had little concern for such crucial technical matters as continuity and coverage, to say nothing of the cost of film. And then there was the influence of cocaine, which made him believe his every brain flash was pure inspiration, regardless of the film’s prevailing arc. “[Richard] would go out and shoot a couple more days and come back,” recalled Spheeris. “When you’re doing a bunch of coke like that, you can’t really make a cohesive story. . . . You think of so many things and you try them all, and nothing is cohesive enough to make sense.”

  It was one thing to have a trickster as a character on-screen, where his amorality could be a source of delight, and quite another to have him installed in the director’s chair, where that same amorality had considerable drawbacks. Production funds were diverted into the bottles of Courvoisier and mounds of cocaine that Richard kept on hand. One actor on the film recalled that Richard promised him two dollars per hour on set and, after seventeen hours of work, wrote him a check for thirty-four dollars. Somehow Herb and Bunny Bonis’s thirty-thousand-dollar wedding gift had dwindled or been misplaced; the check bounced.

  In the film’s early months of production, though, Richard was upbeat about what the film signified for his career. In March 1969, when he traveled to Peoria to headline a benefit for its Afro-American Black Peoples’ Federation, he told the Peoria Journal Star that he was shifting away from nightclub work and into film; his production company, Black Sun, was gearing up for more; his career had achieved escape velocity. He boasted for the benefit of the hometown audience, “I can make whatever I want—$300,000, $400,000 a year.” The Peoria Journal Star commented, with a touch of hyperbole, that Richard had experienced “the most meteoric rise in show business of any single entertainer in many a year.”

  The trip to Peoria was a rush job, a whirlwind visit that lasted only a matter of hours. It was Richard’s first return since the death of his father, and he didn’t choose to linger among the ghosts of his past, even as he was brushed with intimations of another loss to come.

  He arrived at the Peoria airport just before noon and was whisked to Methodist Hospital to visit his mother, Gertrude. After Buck’s death six months earlier, Gertrude had reentered the Pryor family circle, living at 1319 Millman with her former mother-in-law, Marie, and three other members of the Pryor family. In the twenty-three years since her divorce from Buck, she had remarried a man by the last name of Emanuel, though she was no longer with him; had filled out in weight and lost several of her front teeth; and had contracted a cancer that was sapping her strength. No more than fifty, she had been ravaged by time but strove to keep up her appearance. Before Richard’s visit to her hospital room, she had put herself together as if it were Sunday.

  Richard hadn’t dealt much with Gertrude for decades. Still, he felt the impulse to shield her and care for her. When, a few years earlier, she had arranged to attend a performance of her son on The Merv Griffin Show, he had taken her shopping at Bonwit Teller and Saks beforehand to buy a new pocketbook. He wanted her to look nice, to feel nice, he said. But during the taping, when the camera found her and lingered, Richard went rigid, wanting to protect her from the scrutiny. “You’ve got it on her too long. Turn it off,” he snapped.

  Now Richard tried to make the best of his precious few minutes with his mother in the hospital. “Hiya, mom,” he said softly. He gave her a hand mirror he had brought as a present, then enveloped her with a hug and kiss. She lay back down in her bed. Two photographs hint at the mixed emotions that seem to have washed over him in the hospital room. In one, he looks at Gertrude warmly and appears to have just cracked a joke; her eyes are crinkling at the edges, her mouth wide with laughter. In another, he clasps Gertrude’s hand but is turned away from her, his eyes blank and distant, his face a mask of resignation. The two photos suggest a son torn between his desire to boost his mother’s failing spirits and his confusion over what he was truly capable of doing. He told the Peoria Journal Star that he aimed to fly Gertrude out to Los Angeles so she could live with him. It was an impractical idea: Richard could hardly attend to his pregnant wife, much less care for his dying mother, and the “House of Pain” was unlikely to serve as a good hospice. But after the deaths of Ann and Buck in the space of a year, Gertrude was his last living parent, and he must have felt a stab of dutifulness.

  Yet Richard had less than two hours before he was supposed to be onstage at the Carver Center. He rushed from the hospital to visit other family—his granduncle Herman, his grandmother and grandfather at their pool hall. (His five-year-old son, Richard Jr., was not on his itinerary.) Then he was off to the auditorium that had fed his early dreams.

  Richard’s benefit performance at Carver, his first in Peoria since his father kicked him out of his house in 1962, recalled performances past. His old Carver mentor Juliette Whittaker beamed from the front row. As in the old talent shows, he was the sole comedian, sharing the bill with local singing groups and bands. But how much had changed since his debut in “Rumpelstiltskin” thirteen years before! The name of the group sponsoring the benefit—the Afro-American Black Peoples Federation—hinted at how Peoria had been swept and shaken up by its local civil rights revolution. The Nation of Islam had put down roots, opening its first local temple on Peoria’s South Side a month before Richard’s visit. Twelve black men with guns, organized under the auspices of the “Afro-American Service Patrol,” now watched over Peoria’s black community on a nightly basis—and did so with the blessing of city hall and the Peoria Journal Star, who appreciated its tough-on-crime stance. Black high school students, under the auspices of the local NAACP, were pressing for school reform, boycotting classes and advocating for more black teachers and black-oriented history books. And just two days before Richard arrived in town, Bradley University bowed to student pressure and established a black culture theme house. Even the bands that now shared the bill with Richard at Carver had names redolent of black pride: the Struts, the Ace of Spades, Peggy and the Soul Setters.

  “I’m so happy, so excited,” Richard told the 175 people in the audience. “Nobody ever asked me to come here before.” He thanked the Afro-American Black Peoples Federation and offered that he was proud to be black himself, and proud to do what he could for the black community. He did some quick, hilarious impressions—of LBJ, of Nixon, of being born—and performed a few routines that touched on his childhood, name-checking friends in the audience and local
institutions such as the Irving School, the Carver Center, and State Park.

  After twenty minutes onstage, he left to catch a plane for Chicago, where he was performing that night at the Hilton. As was customary in his life, there was little time for reflection; he doesn’t appear to have stopped back at the hospital for a last good-bye to his mother. One of his relatives remembered that, shortly after Richard’s visit, Gertrude left for New York City—to die there. The plan to resettle her in LA was scuttled for reasons unknown, and Gertrude vanished from Richard’s life just as she had vanished after his parents’ divorce. She left little trace: while Richard revisited the deaths of his stepmother and father onstage and in print, evoking their impact on him and his family, he would never mention Gertrude’s passing. It’s hard to tell if the irrevocable loss of his mother was too sore a subject or, given the turbulence of his life at the time, no subject at all.

  While Richard burrowed into the making of his underground movie, his former amateur baseball teammate, producer Aaron Spelling, came calling with a different sort of opportunity. ABC had signed Spelling to create ten “Movies of the Week,” and Spelling thought of them as “Playhouse 90 on film,” a revival of the 1950s anthology program but with the resources of a small film production. A maestro of the mainstream, Spelling sensed he could carve out a niche for these prime-time movies by using them to put a human face on the political troubles of the late 1960s. He came to cast Richard in two Movies of the Week whose plots revolved around racism: The Young Lawyers (1969), a generation-gap drama about two jazz musicians railroaded by a bigot for a crime they didn’t commit; and Carter’s Army (1970), a Dirty Dozen–style film in which a ragtag all-black World War II platoon is sent on a suicide mission behind German lines.

  Spelling’s TV movies telegraphed a broader change afoot in prime-time programming, as network executives made a bid for the younger viewers they feared lost to rock music and films like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider—hipper forms of entertainment. The late 1960s had brought a trickle of youth-themed programs: The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour smuggled an antiwar and countercultural sensibility into the genre of the variety show, for instance, while the Aaron Spelling–produced Mod Squad featured three young “hippie cops” on the drug beat in LA. In 1970 the trickle became a cataract. Network executives premiered a host of TV shows, following the template of The Mod Squad, in which young and idealistic characters grappled with issues like inner-city poverty, antiwar resistance, and drug addiction, usually with the help of some crusty authority figure. Storefront Lawyers, The Young Lawyers, The Young Rebels, The Interns, Dial Hotline—these gave the 1970/71 season the nickname the “Season of Social Relevance.”

  Richard’s career got a notable boost from the trend. He played a drug-running trumpeter with Miles Davis mannerisms in The Mod Squad, a Detroit nightclub owner in trouble with the Mob in The Partridge Family, a jazz musician who steps into the wrong cab in The Young Lawyers, and a black GI who flirts with desertion in Carter’s Army.

  Most of these shows were as formulaic as Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales was freewheeling, turning the murk of late 1960s politics into brightly lit morality tales. The sniper who tries to pick off Richard’s trumpeter is brought to justice by the Mod Squad; the gangster named “Heavy,” happy to crush the ghetto’s spirit of community, is sunk when feisty red-haired Danny Partridge joins forces with the Afro-American Cultural Society; the bigoted father attempting to cover up his affair with his son’s wife is exposed by a salt-and-pepper team of young lawyers. After the initial surprise of these shows’ topicality, there was little surprise in their execution, the dastardly villain always foiled by a team of heartwarmingly interracial heroes.

  Carter’s Army was an exception, the best of the lot by far—“one of those curious flicks,” in the words of the Philadelphia Tribune, “which made you hate yourself for liking it.” A black World War II service battalion, used to serving food and digging latrines for white GIs who see combat, is called upon to secure a strategically vital bridge. The white officer put in charge of the mission, Captain Carter (Stephen Boyd), is a drawling southerner who low-rates his men’s potential and is given to such lines as “Boy, don’t let me catch you ’round no white women.”

  Sure enough, the black GIs pull out a squeaker of a victory and the white officer comes to respect them as men, but the movie squeezes some compelling drama out of its familiar premise. Its script is tight, its ensemble cast of six black actors delivering a nuanced portrait of a company of men. Richard’s character, the weak-willed private Jonathan Crunk, finds gusto in his friendship with the mountainous Big Jim (Rosey Grier); the tightly coiled lieutenant (Robert Hooks) bonds with an older physics professor (Moses Gunn); the hotheaded Harlemite (Billie Dee Williams) toys with knife-throwing, while the dreamy kid (Glynn Turman) writes in his diary about scenes of combat he’s never experienced. It may have been part of the formula for the six to dwindle to five, then four, then three, but the strength of the acting meant that each death evoked a shudder of loss.

  Carter’s Army took risks, too, with its surprisingly astringent ending, which might have earned the Black Panther seal of approval. After the black brigade captures the bridge in a death-defying maneuver, a caravan of Allied troops comes streaming by. The first truck bears a Confederate flag on its hood. A white soldier yells, “What you boys standing around for?”; another adds, “Hey, boys, you better get some latrines dug!” and tosses a shovel at their feet. Richard’s Private Crunk, coughing a bitter laugh, throws down his rifle. What was he risking his life for, exactly? In the film’s final moments, the white captain (a now-former bigot) breaks the shovel in two and hands the rifle back to Crunk. He’ll be needing that rifle, it seems, for whatever war comes his way.

  For Richard, Carter’s Army was an initiation into the guild of black actors, just as A Time for Laughter had initiated him into the guild of black comedians two years before. Hooks and Gunn were experienced stage players who had recently helped launch the Negro Ensemble Company, a New York theater group that sought to offer black writers and actors the chance to explore black life with a free hand. “We got to calling ourselves ‘the soiled six.’ There was a great feeling of togetherness,” Richard said. “At one point in the picture, one of the men in the unit is killed en route to the dam. When the actor who played him didn’t come into work the day after that scene was filmed, I think we all thought that he had really died. It was one of the most unusual experiences I’ve ever been through.”

  The intensity on the set registered in Richard’s performance, his meatiest dramatic role to date. “I play a coward and that was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he said. “My natural instinct is to be funny and I really had to fight with myself not to make the character a lampoon.” He won that struggle: in a raw four-minute scene that anticipates Richard’s later indelible portrayals of fear in The Mack, Blue Collar, and elsewhere, his Private Crunk is so terrified that he sees Germans in the waving branches of a darkening wood and fires wildly at the phantoms. When no Germans fall at his feet, he crawls into a ditch and huddles in the fetal position, crying out, “Shoot ’em!”

  Richard’s fear had little in common with the eye-popping, teeth-chattering, ‘feets-don’t-fail-me-now’ cowardice of earlier black and blackface comedians. It was immense but not cartoonish, and hinted at something tragic and new from a black male actor in the age of Black Power: a near-total vulnerability. Richard was physically lean but never seemed to flex his muscles with total confidence, and was convincingly fragile on-screen. After his various crackups and breakdowns of the past few years, he had the capacity to bring a trembling energy to his roles as an actor—if only a director knew how to use it.

  On July 16, 1969, Shelley gave birth to a daughter, and the parents named her Rain, after the weather of that summer day. For the first time in his life, Richard made it to the hospital, flowers in hand, for the birth of one of his children. But his dedication as a father was short-lived. Five days later,
Shelley waited in vain to be picked up from the hospital. After a cab dropped her off at their home, she walked in to discover Richard in bed with their housekeeper. She locked herself in the bathroom and sobbed; Richard remained outside, unapologetic. Later, he would bring other women to their home, flaunting his infidelity to the point of inviting Shelley into a threesome. His attention remained fixed on his needs rather than on his baby and her around-the-clock demands.

  Meanwhile, Richard and Shelley had a visitor who lived, during daylight hours, in the den of their two-story Hancock Park home. For twelve hours a day, five days a week, Penelope Spheeris sat parked in front of a Moviola editing machine, trying to give shape to the shapeless Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales. According to Spheeris, the atmosphere in the house was claustrophobic, crackling with tension. Richard had a collection of samurai swords above the fireplace, and he passed the hours standing above Penelope at the Moviola, tossing out ideas in his bathrobe, his Courvoisier and cocaine near at hand.

  At times the line between art and life would collapse, the plot dynamics of the film bleeding into the dynamics of Richard and Shelley’s marriage. Working at the Moviola, Penelope might be wrestling with a snippet of dialogue like “Get out of here, you pig-faced motherfucker!” while in the kitchen Shelley labored to cook soul food for Richard and his circle of black friends. “Come on, get our food together! Can you make some chitlins, Miss Shelley?” they razzed her as they trooped en masse through the kitchen, playing the race card with the same abandon as the film’s characters. Paul Mooney liked to call Shelley “the White Lady” to her face, and when he did, Shelley grimaced and Richard cackled. She had reason to feel, like the white protagonist in the film, that she was being put on trial for all the racial crimes in American history.

  By December 1969, Penelope had about forty minutes of film that was, at best, experimental, and Richard and Shelley had a marriage that had gone sour. One day, when Shelley came downstairs and saw a too-familiar tableau—Penelope in front of the Moviola, Richard sitting nearby with his Courvoisier and coke—something in her broke.