Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  In the screenplay’s final scene, Richard at last gets a proper send-off when the preacher gathers together Richard’s friends—“pimps, whores, dudes”—and mixes his ashes into ten pounds of cocaine. Everyone snorts and reminisces. Richard, reconstituted and now wearing what’s described as a “Super Nigger” outfit, looks on with satisfaction. But the “Super Nigger” costume, we discover, is merely another version of a clown suit. Richard announces, “Everyone knows Super Niggers can’t fly,” and shambles off toward the darkness. When he turns his back to the camera, he reveals that his suit has a large hole at his rear end. He departs bare-assed from his life, and his film.

  This Can’t Be Happening to Me never happened; it ended up in some producer’s slush pile, if it ended anywhere at all. But the screenplay stands as a revealing X-ray into the mind of Richard during his Berkeley sojourn. He might still wear a “Super Nigger” suit, but he no longer believed in the bravado of the act. He was reconnecting with the fragility he’d felt as a child and lingering with it, searching for answers and finding only more questions.

  As the final scene of This Can’t Be Happening to Me suggests, Richard never quite gave up all the things willed to him in the world. In Berkeley he kept his cocaine close, while being extremely generous with it. Claude Brown remembered a drug dealer visiting Richard with a fresh shipment and asking, “How much you want?”—to which Richard replied, “How much you got? Just leave it there. I’ll see you tomorrow.” The cocaine was so pure that the two of them needed to steady themselves with shots of overproof rum when they snorted it or else they’d lose their grip. “We’d be up at dawn and going for two or three days,” Brown said. “I used to have to keep away from him to get some sleep.” On his benders, Richard took to wearing an old kimono, wooden sandals, and the conical hat of a rice farmer, looking, in his words, “like a deranged wizard.” At one point on Telegraph Avenue, he popped a quarter into a newspaper kiosk, removed all the newspapers, and then tried handing them off to pedestrians nearby. When they wouldn’t take the papers, he started throwing them—at people, at cars. Someone familiar with the neighborhood’s denizens might have mistaken him for one of the Persian Fuckers.

  Yet in his stage act at the time, Richard was honing one of his greatest routines, a sharp and unsentimental portrait of drug addiction. Berkeley may not have released him from his drug habit, but it gave him enough critical distance on it to distill the life of an addict into a riveting version of his “Wino and Junkie” routine. The ironic stance of his intellectual friends, who claimed the authority of street knowledge but refused to be reduced to their blackness, resonated in his stage act. Asked by an interviewer how he found his material, Richard lit on a curious comparison: “You know how Dracula has to suck blood? I go out and get vibes, find out what it’s about. Revitalize, re-energize myself, get back with the people. I get high. I suck up the vibes.” Like some benign vampire, Richard was a boundary crosser—of the streets and beyond the streets at once.

  Richard’s “Wino and Junkie” was his showstopper for years to come, and it is both as experimental and as finely calibrated as anything he ever performed in his stage act. The routine always began with the familiar character of the wino, whose low social position is no bar to his braggadocio. For two or five or ten minutes, Richard would play this self-proclaimed “people-ologist” of the ghetto, spinning off unbelievable riffs on how he had worked for the FBI, or how he knew, from personal experience of the man, that Jesus could never have risen from the grave (“Shit—he wouldn’t get up in the morning”).

  Then the routine would hang and take on a more unpredictable rhythm, as if it were losing itself in the confusions of the street:

  JUNKIE [Body weaving; grimacing and struggling to form sentences; unclear if he’s addressing himself or the wino]:

  What’s happen . . . what’s happening, mother . . . What’s happening? Hah . . .

  [Picks something off his pants]

  Caked all up and smells . . .

  What’s happening? Shit!

  I see you, you old motherfucker, “I’m the man, motherfuck these cars, I’m directing this shit.”

  [Suddenly becomes animated and fluid as he mimics the wino’s efforts to direct cars like a traffic cop.]

  [Reverts back to his strung-out self] Say, man, I feel bad enough to drink some milk. You got anything?

  WINO: Yeah, boy, I got some—I got some advice for your ass. You better lay off that narcotic, nigger. It done made you null and void. You better try to go to work, get a job, be somebody respectable. Fuckin’ around here in the streets like a fool. You could help the community, get it together.

  JUNKIE: “Get it together. You better get it together, get a job.”

  [Looking glassily into the distance] What’s happening, shit. Motherfucker.

  I used to work, motherfucker, I worked for five years in a row when I was in the joint, pressing license plates.

  [To an unseen antagonist] Kiss my ass, truck!

  Where the fuck a nigger going to get a job out here in the street, pressing license plates, man? You understand, motherfucker.

  [Sobs, puts his hand over his face] Kiss my motherfuckin’ ass, nigger. Kill me, motherfucker! Hah.

  In his performance, Richard floated free of the rules of stand-up comedy and into some nether realm, the land of living hell. The punch lines—“I feel bad enough to drink some milk,” “Kiss my ass, truck!”—have no conventional setup. The junkie, stuck as he is in life, is largely stuck in language, too, fixed on two basic phrases: “What’s happening?” and “motherfucker.”

  Yet what complexity Richard wrings as a performer out of those two phrases! In his memoir, Richard said that at Mandrake’s or Basin Street West he sometimes experimented self-consciously with tiny shifts in tone—“I repeated a single word like ‘bitch’ or ‘motherfucker,’ but gave it fifty-seven different inflections”—and this routine suggests why his audiences didn’t just boo him off the stage. There was an emotionally acute method to the madness. Here “What’s happening?” is the phrase the junkie uses when he wants to put on a brave face and engage his friend; the phrase he uses when he looks at his dirty clothes and wonders what’s become of himself; the phrase he uses when he considers the forces that lock down the ghetto and keep people like him from finding a decent job; and more. Feelings of camaraderie, hopelessness, and rage churn through that casual scrap of language.

  Richard’s junkie is the sort of person who might sob through curses like “Kiss my motherfuckin’ ass!” and “Kill me, motherfucker!,” but he also has the capacity to step back from the brink of despair and laugh with one last “hah” at his own melodramatic imagination. He’s unlike other junkies ginned up in the media in the late 1960s and early ’70s—neither a tabloid villain nor an object of middle-class pity. He may be desperate, but he can’t be reduced to his desperation.

  Richard always ended the routine by converting it unexpectedly into a tenderhearted father-son drama. The two men were revealed to be ghetto yin and yang: one old, one young; one drawn to the past, one thinking of his future; one full of swagger, one drained of self-confidence. When they collide on the street, they complete each other. At the routine’s close, the junkie confesses he “need[s] someone to talk with me and walk with me” so he “can handle this white world” until his next fix, and the wino softens up as Richard’s own father never did, announcing “I’m going to walk with you, because I believe you got potential. You could be somebody if you had opportunity, like I had.”

  That last sentence struck a perfectly bittersweet chord, and Richard delivered it as the final punch line, performance after performance. He seemed to like the question it left hanging in the air: What opportunities were in the offing for people like his junkie, who represented the future of the ghetto as much as his wino represented its past?

  On the morning of September 9, 1971, over two thousand miles away at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York, an inmate pulled a lever o
n an open lockbox and freed another inmate, who had been confined to his cell for allegedly throwing a soup can at a guard. Prison authorities tried to crack down in response—and Attica exploded into riot. More than a thousand inmates seized control of the grounds, taking forty-two hostages from the prison staff and appealing to New York state officials to negotiate a series of demands, from better living conditions to the federal takeover of the prison and the removal of its warden. (In a prison that housed twice the number of inmates it was built for, inmates were allotted one shower every seven days and one roll of toilet paper every five weeks.) Four days later, Russell Oswald, the head of New York State’s prison system, gave the order for state troopers to storm the facility. The result was the bloodiest prison confrontation in American history: ten hostages and twenty-nine inmates killed by troopers. In the aftermath—what a federal court later called an “orgy of brutality”—guards forced inmates to crawl naked over broken glass while clubbing them with nightsticks. One inmate, who was wounded in the legs and couldn’t get up, was sodomized with a Phillips-head screwdriver.

  When the news arrived from Attica, Richard was roosting in Sausalito, an artsy enclave just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Not long before, he had packed his few possessions into the tiny, bright yellow Porsche of his new flame, Patricia Heitman, a smart-looking blonde with a passing resemblance to The Mod Squad’s Peggy Lipton, and moved into her apartment in a converted mansion built by the founder of Bank of America. After half a year of the simple life, Richard was ready to step up and out. (Not incidentally, Sausalito was also where he went to meet his drug connection.) Heitman lived in another world from that of Richard’s black Berkeley friends. She was a longtime Pan Am stewardess who, by her own admission, had never really “talked to a black man, let alone kissed one, let alone . . . please!” At a party on a Sausalito houseboat on the night they met, Richard made an impression by snatching a pair of Janis Joplin’s shoes from one of Joplin’s lovers, who had been crying over them. “What the fuck are you doing?” Richard cracked at the grieving lover. “They’re fucking shoes!” He threw them in the bay. On that unsentimental note, he captured the fascination of Patricia and maneuvered into what would become one of the most durable, if troubled, relationships of his life.

  The story of Attica—a group of largely black prisoners fighting for their dignity, then being crushed by the state—was a hammer blow that threw Richard back to Berkeley and his experimental circles there. He had just been given his own biweekly show on KPFA and decided to devote his first two shows to the insanity of Attica, composing poetry, new stage routines, and even a sound collage in the heat of his indignation. It was the last burst of creativity of his Bay Area sojourn, and capped the most politically militant stretch of his career.

  He led off his first program, broadcast two days after the suppression of the riot, with the admission that it was “really hard to be funny with what’s [gone] down at Attica.” Then he launched into a vitriolic poem he’d written:

  Murder the dogs,

  The mad, frothing-at-the-mouth dogs

  With expensive capped teeth

  And fat bellies full of babies starving.

  No, don’t wait until they die—

  Kill them now

  The anger was scalding, the politics of Attica boiled down to a life-or-death struggle against a pack of rabid dogs who, if allowed to “die a natural death,” would eat your children “whole—flesh, bones, and soul.” Onstage at Mandrake’s a few days later, Richard confessed, “I can’t think of nothing to do to motherfuckers that you hate, but kill them and forget about it,” then backtracked as he rethought the impulse: “You know, it’s easy for me to say. I ain’t never killed nobody—except emotionally. That’s the way I get even with white folks.”

  Richard spent much of his KPFA airtime trying out ways to “get even with white folks.” Mockery was his foremost tool, as he circled around the question of how the white public justified the carnage at Attica. He lambasted the take-it-slow rhetoric of those who defended current conditions, arguing that they had “been saying that since 1954, when they were supposed to let black children go to their white schools, to go work in their Ford company. Niggers should go to their own schools and learn their own things.” Attica, he said, was a town of “2800 white citizens” whose “industry is other people’s misery.”

  In his second and last KPFA program, Richard focused on the complicity of white liberals in the Attica debacle. He began his show with “The Button Down Mind of Russell Oswald,” a fifteen-minute sound collage he had constructed with Alan Farley, introducing it as part of a new album made by the “famous Attica comedian.” Richard and Alan had spliced applause and gut-busting laughter into a long, rambling speech by the prison commissioner, who announced his high-minded belief in rehabilitation even as he defended the lethal raid he’d authorized. By inserting their own punctuation into the speech, Richard and Alan managed to unravel it. Oswald’s hand-wringing sense that he had made “the most agonizing decision of my life”; his defense of prison guards as a “pretty fine lot”; his accusation that Attica’s “hard-core” inmates “preferred not to accept that I was going to change things”—all these were made to seem laughable on their face.

  Likewise, Richard put his scorn for mealymouthed liberals at the center of a Mandrake’s performance he taped for KPFA, a concert that became his onstage farewell to the Bay Area. “The liberal white folks that are on our side,” he offered, “are the most dangerous motherfuckers in the world,” because “after a while they start telling you how to think.” Then he ventriloquized the squishy thinking of Attica apologists, the excuse-making that allowed them to let themselves off the hook:

  [Nasally] Well, I know what happened is terrible and all, but, gosh, you’ve got to realize that Oswald was in a hell of a position. You’ve got to realize the trouble that man went through. . . . It wasn’t actually a mistake. Not exactly. It wasn’t exactly a mistake as much as it might seem. It seems to be a mistake only because it’s obviously a mistake that seems to be committed—but it’s a confused mistake.

  As Richard put it in a memorable aphorism onstage, “wrong is perfect, right fucks up all the time.” The worst people, like Oswald, were protected in a bubble of privilege and doubletalk—perfectly sealed off—while everyone else was exposed and vulnerable, their misdeeds magnified, their human failings held against them.

  The largely white crowd at Mandrake’s cheered Richard’s satire of liberal weakness and hypocrisy, and not just because it was well delivered. In 1969, thousands of radical Berkeleyites had taken over an unused university-owned parcel of land, greening it with sod and christening it “People’s Park,” only to watch in horror and anger as police bulldozed the land and National Guardsmen patrolled the area with bayonets drawn. Their liberal would-be allies, such as the chancellor of UC Berkeley, had acted like Russell Oswald, temporizing just enough to give his conscience a rest, then stepping out of the way once martial law was declared. After the lost battle over People’s Park, Berkeley radicals broke with liberals, propelling a regime change in city politics: in April 1971, right after Richard arrived in Berkeley, radicals captured the city’s mayoralty and ended more than fifty consecutive years of Republican rule.

  Through Attica, then, Richard and his audience experienced a meeting of the minds: they were all enemies of the liberal establishment, and all enemies of the state. Richard’s audience at Mandrake’s may have been the only white audience in America that could listen to his drubbing of Oswald and his account of police harassment—the officer barking, “Let’s see that little shuffle!,” Richard rejoining, “Mr. Officer, can I help you search myself?”—and hear it clearly as a version of their story, too.

  Richard and his Mandrake’s audience, one might say, occupied a bubble of their own. They lived in a Berkeley bubble of goodwill, funkiness, and enthusiasm for the experimental life, in which suspicion was reserved for those who, out of ignorance or prin
ciple, operated outside its hash-scented atmosphere. For seven months, Richard had enjoyed the freedom of that bubble, stretching out as a writer and performer. Released from his own need to succeed in the grandest terms, he had taken the liberty to explore the touchiest parts of his past and his present, hone the political edge of his satire until it was razor-sharp, and renovate his stage act.

  Then, not long after Richard’s second show on KPFA, the bubble popped. He had plans to tour some college campuses and work on a small independent film, but they were dropped when Berry Gordy’s Motown Pictures approached him about a bit part in the Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings the Blues—a day player role, but one that placed him outside the universe of comedy. Richard felt lured back to Los Angeles: Berkeley was a sideshow, not the main event. He pushed Patricia Heitman to give up her stewardess job at Pan Am and move down with him to LA, and she did.

  Now Richard faced a new challenge: how to take his Berkeley self out of Berkeley, where the outré was the norm and the avant-garde the ideal. He had no agent, no manager, no driver’s license, no bank account—just a restless ambition. “I talked about being a star all the time,” he remembered. “Not because I saw myself as a star. I just had all this juice inside me, this swirl of emotions that I felt could be brought on the big screen.” He girded himself to breach Hollywood for a second time.

  PART FOUR

  KING OF THE SCENE STEALERS

  CHAPTER 15

  * * *

  The More I Talk, the Less I Die

  Los Angeles, New York City, Oakland, 1971–1972

  One of Richard Pryor’s first moves, upon returning to LA, was to phone his old agent, Sandy Gallin, with the hope that Gallin might be enlisted to serve as his manager. When his secretary announced the call, Gallin felt his whole body tense up: Richard had been out of touch for nearly a year, and Gallin’s life had been an oasis of relative peace in the interim. When Richard asked Gallin to come on board, Gallin respectfully declined. As with him, so with others: a well-connected friend contacted the major talent agencies on Richard’s behalf, and each of them gave Richard the brush-off. Among those who controlled the traditional levers in Hollywood, he had no traction. Isolated, he started questioning what his stand-up gave his audience, exactly. “I don’t know what they’re laughing at. I think it’s the suit,” he told Norman Steinberg, a writer he’d met on the set of The Flip Wilson Show. So he stopped wearing the suit: he took a leave of absence from stand-up comedy and tried to pick up gigs as a writer and film actor instead, using whatever channels he had open to him.