Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  Watching Richard’s scenes from Hit! now, with an awareness of their backstory, he seems foiled less by Patricia’s sabotage than by the film’s too-stiff sense of itself. A pulp vigilante film with a tabloid sensibility, Hit! delivers some familiar pleasures—New York’s Judith Crist, one of the film’s few defenders, said that “The secret of the film’s success is professionalism”—but it is also ponderous where it cannot afford to be. In a typical pan, The Hollywood Reporter offered that director Sidney Furie had “made the bizarre choice of giving this thin, incredible story the look of a superproduction, thereby exposing its emptiness.” Richard’s character is stranded in the movie’s humorless landscape, a jive non sequitur.

  Film critics did pay attention to Richard’s performance, and noted its peculiar angle toward the rest of the film. “Pryor’s humor pierces through his characterization to mock the whole movie with energy and finesse,” wrote Time. The Hollywood Reporter praised Richard’s improvising, then chimed: “His work may relieve the tension of watching something so bad, but certainly doesn’t add to the reality.” It was easy to enjoy Richard’s dialogue but hard to admire the craft of the scenes in which his character, Mike Willmer, was placed. Take this exchange between Willmer, who has just speared one drug kingpin with his harpoon, and his teammate, a willowy and whey-faced call girl:

  MIKE WILLMER: Take it easy—ain’t nothing to it—killing some pigs, that’s all.

  CALL GIRL [frail and red-nosed, whimpering]: Aren’t you scared?

  MIKE WILLMER: Scared? Fuck no, I’m supernigger.

  CALL GIRL: I’m scared.

  MIKE WILLMER: You think you got troubles, nigger? I lost a motherfucking spear. Cost me forty-seven boxtops. I saved for six months. . . . Had a gold tip on it and everything.

  As a whole, Richard’s performance in Hit! was oddly split. In its first half, he seemed determined, as he told the Paramount publicist, to break new ground for himself as an actor: on-screen he was serious and reticent, as if husbanding his resources. In the second half, he became a comedian again. He relied on old reflexes—and old routines—to generate some energy for the film and fell victim to a hoary trap, the Jack Oakie syndrome that he was trying to escape.

  On February 4, 1973, Richard spent three hours getting his hair braided and wrapped in leather so that he might arrive, at the Los Angeles Music Center that evening, resplendent: the cock of the walk in impeccable cornrows. The occasion was the premiere of Wattstax, one of the most singular openings in Hollywood history. It was the first premiere held at the cultural acropolis of downtown LA. And in keeping with the ambitions of the film’s producers, it brought together the glamorous and the gritty, the powerful and the out-of-luck. A range of politicians—including Richard Nixon’s staff assistant and the deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee—consorted with musicians like Isaac Hayes and Rufus Thomas, professional celebrities like Zsa Zsa Gabor, and, more strikingly, a collection of gang members and welfare mothers bused in from Watts. Because the recommended dress on the premiere’s gold-plated invitation was “bizarre,” the spirit of the evening was ghetto fabulous in its early ’70s heyday. Redd Foxx peacocked in an orange-printed polyester knit suit, Raymond St. Jacques in a full-length orange monkey-fur coat, Jim Brown in a floor-length white wool coat over a jumpsuit. Wattstax’s producers had turned the Music Center into what the Los Angeles Times called “a fashion free-for-all.”

  For Richard, Wattstax marked a turning point in how he was perceived as a performer. Before Wattstax, he’d been largely a player on the fringe: the one black comic in countercultural productions such as Wild in the Streets or Dynamite Chicken, the kooky cameo player, the offbeat comic. After Wattstax, he had a new platform and a new authority—as an expert on the black “street.” For all Richard’s showbiz ambitions, it wasn’t a larger role he had actively sought. “I’m not equipped politically to be a spokesman for an organization or a group,” he said while promoting Wattstax. “I don’t like giving my mind up. I don’t like anybody in the back of my funnel closing off the sunshine. No, I always felt I was a revolution just by doing and speaking the way I speak and saying what I think and living my life the way I live it.” And yet here he was in Wattstax, his private revolution setting the barometer for everyone else in the film. When the next Watts Summer Festival rolled around, “that crazy nigger” was asked to serve as grand marshal of its parade. And when Councilman Tom Bradley, on a trajectory to become LA’s first black mayor, held a fund-raiser for his campaign, Richard was chosen to headline it. He was less radioactive than he’d been for years.

  For film critics nationwide, Richard’s Wattstax monologues were something of a revelation: few had heard ‘Craps’ (After Hours) or seen Richard perform after he’d dropped off the nightclub and talk-show circuit in 1970, and so his new act seemed to come out of nowhere. To them, Richard was “wickedly funny” (Newsweek), or “breathtakingly irreverent and ironic” (Los Angeles Times), or “the most talented black comedian to emerge since Bill Cosby” (Tulsa World). Even those less captivated by Wattstax singled Richard out for praise. The Boston Herald-American judged that “Without Pryor’s wise rudder, Wattstax would probably be a ship lost at sea”: the film needed his complex stance to the world, “composed of equal amounts of self-love, self-hate and bemused irony.” The Seattle Daily Times went so far as to suggest that “Perhaps Pryor should have directed ‘Wattstax.’ It needs more of his irreverent involvement.” According to many, he had carried the film.

  Up and coming: Pryor shaking hands with soon-to-be-elected LA mayor Tom Bradley at Wattstax’s premiere. (Courtesy of the Los Angeles Daily Journal)

  A bit abashedly, Richard plugged Wattstax with interviews in the press and on TV programs such as Soul Train and Black Omnibus, but despite his efforts, the film underperformed at the box office. Its producers had hyped it as an artistic and civic landmark, hosting premieres not just across the country and in London, but also at the United Nations (for African dignitaries) and in Washington, DC (for Nixon’s White House and members of Congress). They had plugged it, in ads, with the tag line “You Can’t Judge a Movie by Its Color,” and tried to entice white viewers with the explicit promise that it would “be enjoyed by all movie-goers.” Still, the white audience for the film didn’t show.

  In the final promotional push, the producers looked to a Wattstax screening at the Cannes Film Festival to generate some buzz. So Richard journeyed, along with his manager and the film’s producers and director, to the Côte d’Azur.

  It was a magical French interlude, the opposite of his troubled time in Marseilles the previous winter. The sun gleamed off the Mediterranean; the roulette wheels spun; and Wattstax coproducer David Wolper opened his deep pockets so that the entourage could luxuriate in the romance of Cannes. They stayed at the sumptuous Hotel Carlton, and at a certain point Wolper asked Richard if he wouldn’t mind hanging on a few extra days so as to meet with a group of African directors. “We’ll move you to one of the bungalows,” said Wolper matter-of-factly. Richard and Ron DeBlasio were led to their new bungalow suite and started laughing at their absurdly good fortune. The sea was at their eye level; they were in the best room of the best hotel, they felt, in all of France.

  With DeBlasio and his Wattstax compatriots, Richard relaxed and took in the Cannes parade. Ladies of the night were out in full daylight; aspiring starlets strolled the Croisette promenade in see-through swimsuits. Richard was garrulous and open. When, at the hotel bar, a sad-faced girl asked him if he wanted to buy a stuffed toy, he didn’t brush her off, but gave her double the price.

  It was a time to be proudly and playfully black. Richard talked with African filmmakers about how racism was not limited to the American South; he exulted at seeing writer James Baldwin. He gave a press conference that, according to the Los Angeles Times, was “one of the uproarious delights of the festival.”

  At Cannes: Pryor on the Croisette with director Mel Stuart and associate producer Forrest Hamilton. (C
ourtesy of Traverso Photos)

  One day, at Richard’s urging, he and director Mel Stuart sat down to play chess. Richard happened to sit in front of the black pieces and Stuart in front of the white ones.

  When Stuart made the first move, Richard said, “No, black goes first.”

  “No, white goes first,” said Stuart. “You can have white, I’ll take black, but the white has to go first because the whole game, all the moves, the moves of the bishops and the pawns, they’re all set in a certain pattern and everything’s going to get mixed up and it’s going to be hard to play.”

  “No, black goes first.”

  “No, white goes first.”

  “No, black goes first.”

  Stuart folded up the chess set and said, “No game today. We’ll play tomorrow.” The next day, he returned with a red and green set. Trickster had met trickster. Richard jumped into playing without a problem—and with, one imagines, a smile at how he’d managed to hold on to his principles.

  Richard was in fine form, too, when the Wattstax entourage drove to Monaco to meet Grace Kelly at the Prince’s Palace. Wolper was exquisitely well connected—he’d made films for both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon—and had met Kelly on an earlier project, so he thought he could swing an audience with the princess. The group set off in a rented van large enough for forty but holding eight, and upon arrival they drove into the gates of the castle. There, an older official looked them up and down and informed them stiffly, “Princess Grace can’t see you today. She’s busy. But you can see the mosaics on the inner wall of the castle.”

  Entrance denied, Richard dropped into character. “Wait a second,” he yelled up at the parapets in the thick voice of his wino. “I don’t wanna see no goddamn mosaic! I wanna see Princess Grace! Now, Richard come all this way—shit, man, what am I supposed to do? Grace! Richard’s down here!”

  The palace guards came at Richard with their pikes. A hefty member of the Wattstax gang picked Richard off his feet and shoved him back into the van. “It was so true and so funny,” remembered Mel Stuart. “We had come all this way, and we were going to look at the mosaics?”

  They drove back to Cannes along the gentle curves of the Grande Corniche, a famously romantic road. The Alps were behind them, the Mediterranean spread in front of them, their bus sweeping along the ledge two thousand feet above the ocean. At the top of the route, they stopped at La Chaumière, an elegant restaurant with a fireplace crackling in the center of its dining room. During their meal, David Wolper—who paid for everything and had chosen the restaurant, one of his favorites—noticed tears running down Richard’s face.

  “What’s wrong?” Wolper asked.

  “Nothing,” Richard said. “Spending this day in the South of France—I just never knew the world could be so beautiful.”

  A few days later, Richard was back at his low-slung cottage in the Hollywood Hills. Cannes was a waste of time, he told Patricia. There was good blow, and in steady supply, but the French didn’t understand his sense of humor. No one knew how to translate motherfucker.

  CHAPTER 17

  * * *

  Be Glad When It’s Spring, Flower

  Los Angeles, the road, 1973–1974

  When invited to work with new collaborators in the early 1970s, Richard devised little experiments to see how his world would collide with theirs. With filmmakers like Mel Brooks, James B. Harris, and Mel Stuart, he would remove some cocaine from, say, a tinfoil package, as casually as one might unwrap a chocolate bar, snort a little for himself, then offer the astonished onlookers a toot for themselves. (One did not need to take the toot to pass his test, just refrain from judgment.) With actress Lily Tomlin, who hoped Richard might lend his talents as an actor to her first TV special, the tests were more elaborate. “I had to jump through hoops for him,” Lily remembered. “I’m sure he was testing if this white girl was okay to work with.”

  He began with the neighborhood test. He took Lily to a black part of Los Angeles to observe how she behaved and was received. Lily had grown up in a working-class ghetto in Detroit, where success “meant, if you were a girl, not getting pregnant; if you were a boy, not going to jail.” On the streets of black LA, she was at ease—and greeted with cheers of enthusiasm. People recognized her from Laugh-In, the comedy sketch show where she had developed unforgettable characters like Edith Ann, the most audacious of five-year-old girls, or Ernestine the telephone operator, pinch-faced and punchy, snorting to herself in self-amusement.

  Satisfied with the results of the first test, Richard asked the loose-limbed actress to accompany him to a porn theater. He had probed her for any racial hang-ups; her sexual hang-ups were next. A committed feminist, Lily agreed to go but only if she could pay her own way. So Richard escorted her, on this odd Dutch date, to the Pussycat Theater on Santa Monica Boulevard. Nearby, a sign winked “Nude Live Girls.”

  Soul mates: Lily Tomlin and Richard Pryor in a 1974 photograph by Annie Leibovitz. (Courtesy of Annie Leibovitz/Contact Images Press)

  However Lily comported herself at the Pussycat, it worked. Soon after, Richard invited her to his Hollywood Hills cottage, where they brainstormed her TV special. “We had conversations that spiraled into the ozone,” Richard recalled. “In minutes, we’d create enough characters to populate entire neighborhoods.” Richard found in Lily a comedian who, like him, was wedded less to the pursuit of laughs than to the pursuit of character, and who was willing to lose herself in the act of imagination. “We are soul mates,” Richard reflected in 1977. “I mean the characters we do literally take possession of us. You’re O.K. as long as you keep an eye on what’s happening, as long as you don’t get scared or tighten up. Because then you lose control over yourself and the character takes over completely. I’ve never seen it happen to any other entertainers but Lily and me.”

  The collaboration between these two soul mates was brief, beginning in late 1972 and ending a year later, but it left a considerable imprint on Richard’s psyche. Working with Lily enlarged his sense of himself: unguarded in her presence, he found new reserves of both fearlessness and tenderness. For the first time, he was working with a fellow performer who was equally committed to the battle for free expression—who was willing, even, to lead the charge to create something sharp and poetic on prime-time TV. “The networks feel [that] certain things don’t belong in variety shows,” Lily quipped at the time, “but what I’ve always hated about variety shows is that they have no variety.” Together, the two of them produced some of the most remarkable television moments of the 1970s—scenes of interracial affection that didn’t aim for Movie-of-the-Week “significance” and so, in their roundabout way, were able to achieve something more striking. They avoided the easy laughs and went for the hard ones instead. As the Los Angeles Times observed, Lily’s TV work made “the 11 o’clock news afterward seem like a situation comedy.”

  From the start, Lily grasped Richard’s potential as an actor. She urged her creative partner, Jane Wagner, to write a sketch that could tap into the full array of Richard’s abilities, “something he’d be proud of.” A white Tennessean by birth, Wagner was yet deft at capturing the flow and hardship of black life. She had earlier written J.T., an unusually bracing TV movie about a black boy who, estranged from his mother and his school, devotes himself to nursing a wounded cat back to health. In a shocking departure from the usual formulas, Wagner had the cat get run over by a car. For Lily and Richard, Wagner delivered “Juke and Opal,” about a woman who runs a hash house and the man who drifts into her establishment looking for some mixture of companionship and drug money. Three decades later, New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als hailed the ten-minute “Juke and Opal” as “the most profound meditation on race and class that I have ever seen on a major network.” But when Lily submitted the draft of her special’s script to CBS, the script came back with “Juke and Opal” excised by the producer the network had selected.

  For this first special, titled The Lily Tomlin Show, Richard and
Lily were left then with a more limited sketch, one that put Lily’s Tasteful Lady and Richard’s wino together in an elevator for a short and unpredictable ride. The premise was simply to watch these two characters, a snob and a derelict with dignity, duel in an enclosed space. At rehearsal, the network was horrified at Richard’s improvised sallies. “You ever kiss a black man?” his wino (here named Lightning Bug) teased. “You better get off of here before you get pregnant.” To make matters worse, the staging of the sketch coincided with the premiere of Wattstax, for which Richard had styled his hair in cornrows with white leather braiding, and he played up the unfamiliarity of his coif. “He was telling people it had been tied up with some white people’s skin,” Lily recalled. “And it made all these people in suits just blanch. They didn’t know what to do.”

  The sketch’s most provocative moments—the ad libs that called out the threat of interracial sex—were edited out, but the larger sketch survived, and with it, a quick portrait of an unlikely intimacy. “I don’t believe a thing you’re saying,” says the Tasteful Lady, to which Lightning Bug responds, “I don’t, either.” The sketch ends on a promising note, the Tasteful Lady softened by Lightning Bug’s roguish charm:

  LIGHTNING BUG: I may be a wino, but I am a gentleman, believe that. I’m going to give you my card and if you’re down Philadelphia way—a little expression—I want you to look me up. My motto is, “You can always share a jug with Lightning Bug.”