Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  On August 20, 1972, the Los Angeles Coliseum rocked to Wattstax the concert. Some ninety-two thousand people paid a nominal one dollar per ticket to see and hear Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers, Rufus Thomas, and others. But after Stuart’s editors sorted through the one hundred thousand feet of film that his cameramen had shot, he was left nonplussed (not unlike later film reviewers, who noted the music’s lack of oomph on-screen). “It’s a newsreel,” he told the film’s creative team. “I don’t do newsreels.” The music was there, but the spirit behind the music was not. So Stuart sent his cameramen out to Watts’s soul kitchens, barbershops, and stoops, where they filmed hang-loose conversations about topics such as the blues, the police, and the black church.

  It was an inspired decision. Partly because so many of the cameramen themselves hailed from South Central, the interviews had the feel of a neighborhood bull session, full of hyperbole, backtalk, and salty turns of phrase. In keeping with Watts’s demographics, most of those captured on camera were folks struggling to make do. “There are directors I could name—black directors too—who wouldn’t have wanted so many street people in the film,” said Stuart at the time. “They would want more lawyers and businessmen. But our producers took the decision to show the language and attitudes of the people who have to hassle with the essential business of living each day just to get by.” In other words: the film was keyed to the same slice of the black community that Richard took up in his comedy.

  But even with these on-the-street interviews stitched into the film, Stuart still felt his film was incomplete. “Gentlemen, we need Shakespeare,” he told the film’s producers. The room became deathly quiet. “We need the chorus in Henry V.” Stuart elaborated: “Henry V was so big and the pageant so big that [Shakespeare] couldn’t put it all in the picture, so he needed some guy to tell you what was going on in France and England and in the war and everything else. We need somebody to be the chorus of this picture, someone who really knows the black soul and yet is funny.”

  This is where Richard entered the picture. Seeing him perform at the Summit Club at the top of Baldwin Hills, Stuart felt he’d found his chorus figure, the commentator who could convey the full pageant of black America. The next day, he returned to the Summit Club and set up his cameras. Richard spoke mostly off the cuff. He was given a single phrase, like “black men and women” or “black politics,” and allowed to rap as long as he wanted, to let himself go. Several hours later, Stuart had his narrator, and Richard had improvised himself into another starring role in a feature film.

  With Wattstax, Richard found a remarkable vehicle for bringing his stage act to a larger audience. Speaking to the camera as if to a friend, he seems like the liveliest of barstool raconteurs—a sit-down comic. He didn’t have to mind the censors, as he did with his TV work. He didn’t have to lose the visual nuances of his nightclub work, the montage of gestures and expressions, as he did on records. And given the focus of Wattstax, he had the freedom to dwell on the absurdity of race. In a double-edged bit—one that placed him as the descendant of black royalty and the upshot of a cosmic joke—he offered a history of the N-word in the form of a parable:

  I think that niggers are the best of the people that were slaves. That’s how they got to be niggers—[the traders] stole the cream of the crop from Africa and brought them over here. And God, as they say, works in mysterious ways, so they made everybody “nigger” because we were arguing over in Africa about the Watusi, and the Buwalladah, and the Busawoono, and Zawoonga . . . And so he brought us all over here, the best, the kings and the queens and the princes, and put us all in one tribe: niggers.

  While the larger film documents the early 1970s efflorescence of black pride—black beauty pageants, a black Santa Claus, a stadium full of black people chanting, “I am somebody”—Richard’s commentary troubled the waters and pointed to the excesses of black militancy: how identity politics could go horribly awry, especially when the identity in question was subject to reinvention. After one of Wattstax’s “native informants” testified to the deep racial bond established by the soul handshake, Richard said, “Niggers change their shit all the time,” then dramatized the soul handshake as a problem, not a solution:

  You be meeting the guy: Thunk-bam-spun-spun [clasping his hand in the middle, then lower]. But then six months later, the shit done change: Chee-pun-chee-up-hunh! You all down here [reaching down to the ground]: Hey-hup-ho-chup!

  And if you don’t do that, then you ain’t no nigger.

  The dude be, “You ain’t black, motherfucker. You didn’t know how to do—” [points to both ears as if plugging them, points down, then runs his finger across his throat as if slitting it].

  At the same time Richard did not downplay the tribulations of being black; his satire of black militancy was aimed at its trappings, not its root causes. He lashed at police brutality (“How do you accidentally shoot a nigger six times in the chest?”) or, through his wino character, portrayed the struggle to find work. Asked at the unemployment office for his occupation, the wino, fresh from the penitentiary, gave the ridiculously true answer: “license-plate presser.”

  In Wattstax, Richard could be “side-splittingly funny and at the same time tremendously sobering,” as one critic observed, because the film itself struck the same fine balance. It was urgent and ironic both. On the urgent side: it showed the black audience at the Coliseum sitting listlessly through “The Star-Spangled Banner,” as if trapped watching an endless commercial, then purposefully standing up and pumping their fists for the chant of “It’s Nation Time” (the nation in question being the black nation). It drew out the defiant energy of the musicians onstage, whether it was the Staple Singers pressing the crowd to “Respect Yourself” or the Bar-Kays offering themselves as the descendants of detective John Shaft, one “bad motherfucker.”

  Yet Wattstax also reveled in the rich theatricality of black life. It lavished attention on the dashikis and dark glasses of the concertgoers; on Isaac Hayes’s glittering mesh of gold chains and the Spandex pink tights that showed off his manhood; on Rufus Thomas’s pink cape, pink sports jacket, and pink Bermuda shorts; on the matching blue fur coats of South Central’s players, stepping out of a silver Rolls-Royce with the license plate FLA-VOR.

  Wattstax intimated that these two aspects of black life, its political struggles and its extravagant theater, were two sides of the same coin. Director Melvin Van Peebles explained as much from the stage, linking the 1965 Watts riot to the festive air of Wattstax: “We’re here to commemorate a revolution that started the movement and was one of the milestones in black pride. Some folks may find it a little strange that we laugh, we sing and we joke, but we’re doing our thing the black way to commemorate.” It was the summer of 1972—close enough to the radical upsurge of the late 1960s for him to speak of revolution in the air, far enough away that the demands for political commitment were less clear cut than organizing a protest or picking up a gun.

  It was a moment, in short, when a provocateur like Richard could seem like the natural-born tribune of the black community. He had only to stylize the nitty-gritty problems of black life, not to solve them. A Los Angeles Times columnist, anticipating that Wattstax would push Richard to a whole new level, named him the “Here and Now Black Man of the Moment.”

  The heart is a curious, convoluted organ. Not long after Richard tried to choke the life out of Patricia Heitman in their Hollywood Hills cottage, he took a trip out to Sausalito, hoping to track her down, talk with her, and win her back. He brought, as enticements, a Mercedes-Benz, a floor-length black sable coat, and the dog that Patricia had loved but had left behind in LA. He speculated that she might still be haunting the Sausalito bar where the two of them met, and when he walked into it, he found her there.

  Patricia was petrified when she first spotted Richard. Then she saw her dog—a happier reminder of the life she’d left behind. Richard begged her to come back to him, vowing to change his ways, and offered her the Mercedes and
the fur coat as gifts. She wanted to believe that they could make a new life together, so she swallowed her misgivings and decided to give Richard another chance, moving back into the cottage with the hatcheted bedroom door. Instead of giving them a new door, their landlord simply put a new piece of wood over the part Richard had destroyed.

  For two years, Richard had been drifting professionally, picking up work through acquaintances like Norman Steinberg and Berry Gordy or friends like Paul Mooney and Max Julien. He caught a boost when Ron DeBlasio, who ran a boutique label under the Atlantic umbrella and had worked with Helen Reddy and Tiny Tim, offered to serve as his manager. Now he had someone willing to hustle on his behalf—someone who could look out for his interests, strategize about his future, and fix any problems that developed along the way. With Richard’s help, DeBlasio made a list of all those who liked Richard or owed him a favor, and all those whom Richard owed or had pushed away.

  DeBlasio could also act as a buffer for Richard, whose ego was unstable, easily inflated or deflated. When Lady Sings the Blues premiered at the Directors Guild, Richard stayed home out of anxiety; DeBlasio attended without him. After the screening, DeBlasio couldn’t contain his enthusiasm, so he went to a pay phone at a gas station and called Richard.

  “Richie, you were a sensation, you were fantastic.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were funny. The audience loved it.”

  “That’s what you think. That’s you—you’re thinking that . . . Gotta go.” Richard hung up.

  Around midnight, DeBlasio’s phone rang at home.

  “Did I interrupt you?” Richard asked. “You’re not fucking, are you? Listen, I was with some people tonight and they said the film was great—that I’m great.” He gushed with enthusiasm at what he’d achieved.

  The next day, Richard popped by DeBlasio’s house with a special gift: a Dunhill lighter, dark blue with gold trim, the sort favored in James Bond films. Richard wanted his manager to be prepared for the big time. “You’re going to have to look the part,” Richard explained. “You’re going to be smoking cigars and are going to need something to light your cigars with.”

  The momentum seemed to be gathering. The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, the Village Voice, and The New Yorker celebrated Richard’s performance as Piano Man with fulsome praise. In mid-November the Pied Piper, a club in South Central, was packed with black celebrities and other well-wishers for a “Richard Pryor Salute.” Richard felt himself on the brink of a breakthrough.

  Alas, the Dunhill lighter went unused. In fact, Richard was dealt a considerable setback when he discovered, near the end of 1972, that the role of Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles, the role he’d written for himself to play, had gone to Cleavon Little, an amiable, classically trained actor then starring as a loopy doctor in the hospital sitcom Temperatures Rising. Mel Brooks said that after he saw Richard “acting out so many things so beautifully” in the writers’ room, he “asked [Warner Bros.] on bended knee to let Richie do it.” He even flew out to New York to meet with the studio’s moneymen and beg for Richard. The studio’s response: “Absolutely not. We like Cleavon’s looks . . . [I]f you want to do the picture, it’s with Cleavon.” For the studio executives, Richard wasn’t even in the running. “Very simply,” Brooks said just after the film’s release, “they’re afraid to go with an unknown, unknown as far as they are concerned, vis-à-vis dollars and the public.”

  Twenty years later, Brooks revealed the true source of the studio’s hostility toward Richard: “he was a known sniffer.” Richard’s co-writer Andrew Bergman explained: “Warner Bros. wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole because his reputation was so dubious in terms of reliability.” It seems likely that the news about Richard’s coke-fueled crackup on location with The Mack, just a few months earlier, had traveled to the Warner Bros. executive suite.

  Richard spoke bitterly about his experience with Blazing Saddles, calling it “a thorn in my heart.” He was skeptical that Brooks or anyone else had gone to the mat for him—“They used me and that’s not fair”—and viewed the collaboration over the script with a jaundiced eye, claiming credit later for the film’s most famous scene, the explosion of farts around the campfire. The other writers, by contrast, treasured their work on the film and felt there was plenty of recognition to go around. When asked if the campfire scene was Richard’s brainchild, Norman Steinberg said, “Nobody takes credit for anything. I wouldn’t even begin that discussion.” Apparently, Richard hadn’t gotten the memo.

  The spiking of Richard as Black Bart is one of the great what-ifs of his career, not to mention of film history. Blazing Saddles was Cleavon Little’s shining moment. Would it have been Richard’s, too? The two had such different personas as actors, Cleavon with his indestructible affability, Richard with his hurt and anger always threatening to break through the surface of his boyish charm. After the grandmotherly woman in Blazing Saddles responds to Bart’s “Good morning, ma’am” with “Up yours, nigger,” Cleavon’s Bart acts as if simply dumbfounded by the exchange, his grin sliding into a blank expression. Richard’s reaction as Bart, one imagines, would have been anything but simple. In other roles he manipulated the mask of his face so that it captured the quick-flying emotions—anger, fear, shock—that flashed over him and warred with one another. “Richie had a dark side and Cleavon didn’t,” summed up Bergman. Cleavon was too sweet to inhabit fully the role as Richard had imagined it, which goes some length in explaining why some of the more personal contributions Richard made, like the “pimp’s lament,” were cut.

  A Blazing Saddles with Richard Pryor in the lead role would have been more cutting and psychologically complex, touching an extra exposed nerve or two. It would also have launched Richard and Gene Wilder as a comedy team three years before their debut in Silver Streak, and have given them better material than anything in their shared future. But the movie might have lost some of its winking staginess (perfect for Cleavon’s style), and its jokes might have been less inviting to a mass audience. “Cleavon is not a threatening figure,” said Bergman. “It’s probably another reason that the movie was as successful as it was.”

  Dinged for the lead role in Blazing Saddles, Richard was disappointed with the scripts that did come his way. “I don’t want to become Jack Oakie the rest of my life,” he told the Los Angeles Times, referring to the rubber-faced actor of the 1930s and ’40s—the epitome of the second or third banana, punching up scenes with a wisecrack or double take. “Always getting those parts, over and over, just to fill in. I don’t want to do that.”

  Director Sidney Furie, just coming off Lady Sings the Blues, made Richard the first offer he felt he shouldn’t refuse: a supporting role as a mechanic-turned-assassin in Hit! The film reunited much of the cast of the earlier film, including Richard and Billie Dee Williams, and below the line, its cinematographer and editor. Conceptually Hit! was a “Lincoln-doctor’s-dog of a movie,” borrowing as many bankable formulas as possible. The French Connection, Mission: Impossible, The Dirty Dozen, Death Wish—all were blended together in its story of a federal narcotics agent (Williams) who, after his daughter dies of a heroin overdose, assembles an improbable team to assassinate the nine kingpins of a Marseilles-based drug syndicate. As in Lady Sings the Blues, Richard was there to give a comic accent to a film that otherwise threatened to become grim, and was allowed to improvise his dialogue in that vein.

  During Hit!’s production in late 1972, Richard grew closer to Billie Dee Williams. On December 27, when Billie Dee married his girlfriend, Teruko, at a civil ceremony in Beverly Hills, Richard served as his best man and Patricia as Teruko’s maid of honor. When the justice of the peace asked the group “Which ones of you are getting married?” Richard joked, “Me and Billie.”

  Their relationship, like most intimacies in Richard’s life, was vexed. Richard was jealous of Billie, of his leading man looks and laidback, honey-voiced charm. (In his memoir Richard wrote, sparingly, of his frequent costa
r: “I didn’t know anyone more aware of their image.”) Meanwhile, according to Patricia, Billie craved Richard’s creative understanding of character. During the filming of Hit!, he turned often to Richard for advice about how to play a scene; afterward, he called Richard a “genius” to the press. And then there was this bombshell, just planted and waiting to go off: what with all the evenings that the two couples spent together, playing dominoes and poker at each other’s homes, Patricia and Billie were drawn into an affair around the date of Billie’s wedding.

  In the meantime, Richard and Patricia traveled together to Marseilles for the shooting of Hit!, arriving on New Year’s Eve at an elegant old-world hotel that faced the Mediterranean. An orchestra was playing in the ballroom; Patricia felt she’d been transported to some version of Versailles. Then, one day, upon returning to their hotel room, she found Richard in bed with a prostitute. Brazen as ever, he insisted Patricia join in the action. When she refused, he beat her for spoiling his party, stripped off her clothes, and threw her naked out of the room. She found a sheet, wrapped herself in it, and, with the help of the hotel staff, settled in a separate room. Then, in a moment of inspiration, she recalled a conversation she’d had, when she and Richard had first moved to LA, with a call girl who’d evened the score with an abusive lover.

  After getting her clothes and putting herself together, she went to a hardware store and bought a can of powdered rat poison. She stole into Richard’s hotel room and sprinkled the poison in his socks and underwear; she’d heard that it stung terribly on contact with human skin. She knew Richard would be filming a scene the next day in a wetsuit and relished the idea of him being trapped in tampered underwear, his groin on fire. Then she folded up his clothes with care, concealing her handiwork; gathered her passport and things; and left for the United States. She wasn’t around for the filming of Richard’s scene, but was sure that her plot worked—that Richard felt his nether regions burning up.