by Scott Saul
“I’m sick of this movie and sick of your shit,” she said. “You have a wife and daughter. It would be nice if you would acknowledge us from time to time.”
Richard was apparently sick of the movie, too: he rose to his feet and attacked the Moviola, yanking the film’s one two-thousand-foot reel out of the bin. He ripped it to pieces in a whirlwind of effort, returning the film to the incoherence in which it had been born. Penelope sat motionless in the editing chair, too dazed to stop him. Months of her work lay in tatters; some scraps of celluloid were no more than four inches long.
Shelley repaired to the bathroom, where she undressed to take a shower. Richard, like his film, was at loose ends: he dashed out of the house and made for his car. According to Spheeris, Shelley noticed him leaving and, playing her own mad part in their folie à deux, ran naked to his car. He was pulling out of the driveway, so she threw herself on the car, her body plastered on the hood, her face looking at Richard’s through the windshield and the car motoring away as though everything were normal.
Penelope grabbed an extra coat, jumped into her car, and took off in pursuit. Richard’s car traveled a block and a half with a nude Shelley on top, until finally he reached a red light at Wilshire Boulevard. Shelley scrambled off the car and ran around to the window, banging on it and begging him to come back. Richard looked past her; the light changed to green, and he peeled away. By the time Penelope caught up with Shelley and offered her the coat, Richard was gone.
Astonishingly, this was not quite the end of Richard’s film or his marriage; both limped on. Penelope spliced back together a working print, and Richard arranged a private showing of the film in a UCLA screening room for Bill Cosby, who Richard hoped would finance a final edit. Around the same time, Cosby had, without batting an eyelash, put up a fifty-thousand-dollar loan to help director Melvin Van Peebles launch another off-center, X-rated exercise in black guerrilla filmmaking, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Despite his wholesome persona onstage, Cosby was sympathetic to black artists who strayed from the snug spot in the American mainstream that he had seen fit to occupy.
Cosby watched Richard’s film at UCLA and managed just one sentence when the lights came back on: “Hey, this shit is weird.”
It was to be the last verdict on the film. Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales was shelved for good; only a few minutes of soundless footage remain. Richard had attempted to bring his own vision of the black revolution to the screen and had been outdone in militancy by an Aaron Spelling TV movie in which he costarred. He felt scooped, too, by director Robert Downey Sr., a fellow low-budget absurdist who had trained his gimlet eye on the racism of corporate America in Putney Swope. “I liked it very much,” Richard told an interviewer, “and I was mad that a white cat did it. See, nigger, you let a honky beat you at your own game. . . . He took a chance, see, and the gods favored him.”
Black Sun Productions was defunct; Richard’s marriage, heading for a similar fate. Not long after their dramatic argument over his film, he moved out of the home he shared with Shelley, distancing himself from his responsibilities as a husband and father. In June 1970, Shelley finally filed for divorce, citing “irreconcilable differences.” Her action meant that a full trifecta of women had recently taken Richard to court: in 1969 his first wife, Patricia, and his companion Maxine had separately sued him for child support, the latter case producing a year-long bench warrant for his arrest when he defaulted on paying legal fees.
Richard let his phone be disconnected, went incommunicado with the world, courted the void. He couldn’t be found when Shelley’s attorney tried serving him with a copy of her legal complaint.
In 1970, Richard was in danger of becoming a second-string character actor, called up whenever there was a part for a streetwise black dude. He rarely worked the nightclub circuit anymore. He had rung in the New Year, in fact, by cutting off his relationship with Mister Kelly’s, the Chicago nightspot that was the premier supper club between New York City and Las Vegas. When its owner asked Richard, in advance of a multi-week holiday engagement, to “keep it clean,” Richard replied that he would do the same act he was performing elsewhere, or no act at all. When the owner called his bluff, Richard pulled out of the gig at the last minute, to the owner’s fury. Other clubs, such as Lennie’s on the Turnpike, decided to drop Richard, too. The gigs Richard did play had a new spring-loaded tension, his white audience sometimes squirming in their seats at the “niggers,” “bitches” and “motherfuckers” whizzing in their direction. “Just listening to nigger bum talk can get them uptight,” Richard told the Washington Post, reflecting on the new atmosphere at his shows. “The deeper you get, the more uptight they get. It scares them. They haven’t heard this stuff. But it’s the truth.”
Still, it wasn’t just the “uptight” club owners or audience members who started doubting Richard’s ability to deliver as a performer. The black critic Charles Brown, who had earlier enthused about Richard’s comedy, suggested in the Los Angeles Times that Richard “could use some self-discipline” and complained about his “confused and erratic” delivery: “He would start a story, drift to another, forget what he was talking about, and at last ask the audience to refresh his memory.” In May 1970, Redd Foxx groused that Richard was too often a no-show at Redd’s nightclub, a venue where the younger comic was free to use whatever language appealed to him. And from still another angle, a white critic from the countercultural Los Angeles Free Press accused Richard, in a review of a Bitter End West show that drew a nearly all-white audience, of “pandering”—of “keeping up the Stepin Fetchit image” for “all the $4.00 cover-plus-one-drink-minimum hip liberals.” All those N-words, the Free Press said, were simply Pryor’s way of “using our prejudices to work for him.” The problem was not that white audiences became uptight (as Richard saw it), but that they loosened up, flattered themselves for their open-mindedness and tolerance, over the course of the show.
The rumbling chorus of complaint narrowed Richard’s options considerably. By 1971 there were only four clubs “in the world,” he felt, whose doors were still open to him: the Cellar Door in Washington, DC; Maverick’s Flat in LA’s Crenshaw corridor; Basin Street West in San Francisco; and Mandrake’s in Berkeley.
With no manager to help him handle his business decisions and with his debts to his drug dealer mounting, Richard turned for help to Louis and David Drozen, the father-and-son team behind Laff Records, an independent label that specialized in bawdy comedy records from the likes of Skillet and Leroy, LaWanda Page, and Mantan Moreland. Laff reveled in raunch, and given the saltiness of Richard’s new act, there was a decent fit between his comedy and a label that zestily pressed albums with titles like Elsie’s Sporting House, Mutha Is Half a Word, Two or Three Times a Day, and That Ain’t My Finger. But Richard wasn’t exactly negotiating with the Drozens from a position of strength. “When we signed Richard Pryor,” David Drozen remembered, “we gave him an advance of five thousand dollars. He had to have it or otherwise he was going to get killed. He said ‘if I don’t get this I’m going to die.’”
The four-album contract Richard signed with Laff on December 9, 1970, was a harsh comedown from the $50,000 two-album contract he’d signed with Reprise two years before. Laff agreed to pay him $1,000 immediately and another $4,000 upon the recording of his first album for the label, and then another $27,500 for the next three albums. In return, Richard gave them exclusive rights to his comedy for two years, along with the option for two more years, during which time Laff would release a minimum of three more records. Richard had generated one comedy record in his first thirty years; now he was looking at generating at least seven albums in the next four. One imagines that, feeling the heat of his unpaid debts, he didn’t trouble himself with such niggling details.
The fruit of Richard’s desperation was ‘Craps’ (After Hours), an album that later became a cult classic and a creative touchstone for generations of black comedians. It was his Sun Sessions, the small-label effort that
revealed the shape of his creativity when he was performing for himself above all. Mostly recorded at the Redd Foxx Club, ‘Craps’ was casual, scatological, and scalding in its originality. Unlike Richard’s first album, which was sequenced as a series of short polished plays, ‘Craps’ felt intimate and conversational, with Richard rapping about the facts of life and the facts of his life. His first album had seven tracks; ‘Craps’ had thirty-two—and was only six minutes longer.
Instead of going high concept, Richard mostly went low. There was the eleven-second “Masturbating,” for instance, with its quick riff on how women put up a sexual smokescreen (“That vibrator is for my back”), followed, twenty minutes later, by the pointed seventeen-second confession of “Jackin’ Off” (“People don’t talk about nothin’ real . . . like jackin’ off . . . I used to jack off so much I knew pussy couldn’t be as good as my hand”). Although Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales had stalled out as a production, the comedy on ‘Craps’ was conceived alongside it and did what that film had aspired to do: it brought together the sexual revolution and the black revolution in a madcap mésalliance. Unlike the film, ‘Craps’ didn’t have to be coherent. It just had to be funny—and it was.
The best routines found a dark vein of comedy in the same racial injustices that elsewhere were occasioning sit-ins, rallies, and boycotts. Richard had been performing some of them since 1966, but once collected together and pressed on vinyl, they seemed to chart a decade in the life of a young black man growing up in the pincers of the law. The subject matter was militant, but Richard’s routines winked at life’s absurdities. When he and his teenage friends were entrapped by Peoria’s curfew, it was the black cop who was their nemesis, and for good reason: “The black cop had to do more shit to keep his job. He had to whup more niggers than the white cop. ‘I ain’t gonna lose my pension, nigger!’” Richard spoofed police lineups, inventing one where the suspects acted like they were “in show business”:
Alan T. Johnson, suspected of grand theft auto. Step forward [cop voice].
I’d like to say something about that. I thought that was my mother’s car. I went downtown. My mother told me to pick the car up at 1:30, and it was in front of the bank. . . . I dug this white lady sitting next to me screaming and shit. I didn’t know what was happening. I thought it was a stick-up. In fact, I want to press charges against her ’cause she scratched my hand, and yelled in my ear and hurt my ear. And I have medical reports to prove that—
You want an ass-whuppin’?
Then there was the gloss on human anatomy that Richard felt compelled to deliver as a result of being strip-searched himself. “You talk about degrade a nigger,” he said. “They degrade you immediately. I don’t know what they be looking for. What you be looking for in my ass? Ain’t nothing in my ass. If I had a pussy, I might dig it because you can hide something in your pussy. But in your ass—what am I going to hide in my ass? A pistol? We’ll come out with a .45? ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker’?”
Balanced against Richard’s account of his skirmishes with the law was an unvarnished portrait of the black community’s chippies, hustlers, jackleg preachers, and winos. He took his audience to the inner sanctums of the black experience—the “members only” all-night clubs, storefront churches, barbershops—and captured the human variety he found there, channeling voice after voice with an ease that suggested there was no limit to their number. The exponents of Black Power claimed there was a fundamental difference between white life and black life in America; Richard brought that difference to vivid life, his every N-word a stabbing reminder of the American caste system. And he openly punctured the optimistic talk of interracial fellowship:
We used to think that we could all sit in the same club, white and black, and not understand each other.
NEWSCASTER VOICE: It’s amazing. It could only happen in America.
Or, as he quipped in another performance at the time, “Blacks are the same as whites . . . except the whites have all the money and guns.”
In the four decades since the release of ‘Craps,’ many critics have noted how the album brought the language of the street to stand-up, but fewer have observed the equally fundamental change it registered: Richard was now using the ugly details of his intimate life as fodder for his comedy. Previous to ‘Craps,’ his autobiographical skits tended to be ironically observational, in the manner that Seinfeld later made famous, or backward looking, with Richard reliving his childhood. On ‘Craps’ he put his marriage to Shelley up for examination and poked its sore spots:
Being married is hard, ’cause we fuck from memory now. We have some great fights, though. Do you ever have fights with your woman? Me and my woman have some serious fistfights. Not like on TV, where you be arguing. ’Cause she hurt my ego and I punch her out.
Me and her fights our ass off upstairs ’cause I found that if you be with a woman, if you don’t fuck in a week, you’ve got to fight. You either fuck or fight, one of the two.
The sexual candor, the capacity for violence that Richard owned up to, the mix of vulnerability and menace that radiated off him as a result—these were new ingredients not just in his stand-up but in American comedy as a whole. The battle between the sexes might have been at the core of stand-up since the heyday of Henny “Take my wife, please” Youngman, but Richard’s confessional comedy drew blood—as when, in the struggle for a butcher knife, his wife scratches his neck and denies the damage, provoking Richard to retort, “Nail polish, my ass!”
Richard couldn’t have spoken so frankly about sex if the counterculture hadn’t challenged older ideas of discretion; ‘Craps’ might have been banned if it had been released just a few years earlier. Still, Richard’s vision of sex had more in common with the topsy-turviness of the blues than the free-love ethic of Woodstock. He acted for his audience as a voice of skeptical wisdom, a guide to the familiar troubles that persisted after the sex-and-drugs revolution had supposedly freed people from their hang-ups. Sexual competition: “I don’t have no advice for married people except don’t take them on an orgy, because they always say things like ‘you never touched me like that.’” Jealousy: “I had to quit [smoking dope] too, since I’d wake up in the middle of the night and say to her, ‘Are you fucking the paper boy?’” In an absurd reversal, the multiplication of sexual partners meant simply that there were more ways to be betrayed: “I got the guilties after [me and my wife’s best friend] fucked. I had to tell my woman because I thought she knew. . . . ‘I did it! I fucked Ethel!’ ‘You fucked Ethel?’ She went and kicked Ethel’s ass. She was fucking her too.”
There was a strange dynamic here: in detailing his failed connections with his various lovers, Richard was reaching for an unpredictable intimacy with his audience. “I was the only dude in the neighborhood who would fuck this faggot,” he said in a quick but shocking aside. He let down his guard and confessed to the unmentionable:
A lot of dudes don’t play that shit. In the daytime [they say] “I don’t fuck no faggot, man!” At night you catch them [sound of door knocking].
But it’s embarrassing because I met the dude ten years later.
[Campy effeminate voice] “Hi, Rich!”
A bundle of need, Richard presented himself as someone driven to have sex with a man, black macho be damned. But there was another level of need directing him onstage: the need to admit his embarrassment and, through his rapport with his audience, move beyond embarrassment, beyond shame.
With ‘Craps’ in the can, Richard had produced an album unlike any other, but his life was still bottoming out, consumed by the chase for the next high. He was living in the Sunset Tower, a thirteen-floor Art Deco gem that rose grandly over the Strip and had once been a haven for the Hollywood film colony, with residents ranging from John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe to Preston Sturges and Frank Sinatra. Over the course of the 1960s it had lost much of its aura and was now known for having the best-kept prostitutes in Hollywood.
If Richard had chosen, on January 29, 1971
, to flick on his TV and watch the episode of The Partridge Family in which he guest-starred, he would have caught a perfect parable of the limits of his career at the time. He played A. E. Simon, a Detroit entrepreneur who, along with his brother, Sam (Lou Gossett Jr.), has sunk his ambitions into a club that represents the ghetto’s dreams of uplift and self-reliance. “We started this place out to be a community club, a place for our people to go,” says Sam, sitting in an oversize cane chair that replicates the chair Huey Newton used as a would-be throne in an iconic photograph. “They don’t have much, so we don’t charge much.” But the soul brothers’ dream is foundering: their club is in hock to the Mob, and since the lily-white Partridge Family, instead of the Temptations, have been sent to perform at their club, there’s little chance that they can raise the funds to save it.
Fortunately, the can-do spirit of the Partridge Family saves the day—saves the ghetto, in effect. The Partridges brainstorm the idea of hosting a benefit in the form of a block party; Keith Partridge (David Cassidy) writes a song—“sort of an Afro thing”—for the occasion; the Partridges and Sam fan out through the neighborhood, collecting donations; and the braggadocious Danny Partridge (Danny Bonaduce) enlists the help of the local Afro-American Cultural Society, whose paramilitary airs and black berets are cribbed from the Black Panther stylebook. As might be expected, the block party is an extraordinary success, the Mob rebuffed, the club saved.
Yet there’s more, a final joke at someone’s expense. As the Partridge Family bus is about to pull away, the leader of the Afro-American Cultural Society sprints over, breathless, to meet up one last time with Danny. He commands Danny to stand at attention, then unrolls a scroll and proclaims, “For your dedication and service in helping our community, I’m hereby making you an honorary member of the Afro-American Cultural Society.” He hands the scroll and a black beret to Danny, who enthuses to his mother, Shirley, “Look, Mom, I’m official. Maybe I can start my own chapter at home.” The ever-indulgent mother replies, to a burst of canned laughter, “We’ll talk about that in the bus, Danny.”