Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  Their relationship unraveled in a single conversation. Freddie Prinze, then breaking out as the star of TV’s Chico and the Man, had courted DeBlasio as his own manager, and Richard felt DeBlasio’s attentions wandering to the younger actor-comic. DeBlasio came to the conversation with a sense of blamelessness: Richard had personally introduced him to Prinze and had agreed to his taking on Prinze as his client. And Prinze was asking DeBlasio to manage his career because he considered Richard “my best friend in the business” and admired what DeBlasio had done for him.

  “Our relationship has changed,” Richard told DeBlasio, in a mood for summary judgments. “We’re not fucking anymore.”

  “So that’s it?” asked DeBlasio.

  “Yeah, motherfucker, that’s it,” Richard said.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way. I just don’t understand it. I thought it was okay.” DeBlasio paused, then noticed a piece of lint on his pants, which he picked off.

  “That’s right, that’s how I feel,” Richard said. He mimicked DeBlasio by picking a piece of lint off his own pants. And with that, he gave the brush-off to the manager who, he felt, had done the same to him. DeBlasio might have helped elevate Richard from someone blackballed by the industry to a Grammy-winning star, but in Richard’s mind, he was also guilty of a betrayal, and their intimacy had come to an end.

  The firing of DeBlasio created a vacuum that Richard filled by engaging the services of David Franklin, a black businessman-lawyer who proudly wore the nicknames Big Dollar Dave and the Smiling Cobra. Franklin was, in his line of work, as extraordinary a personality as Richard. He was short, husky, light-skinned, baby-faced, and blue-eyed, and spoke with a disarming stutter. Yet he knew how to command a room and close a deal; he talked often of what it meant to have “real power.” Unlike Richard, he came from the world of the black middle class—his grandfather had sat on the Presbyterian Board of Missions—and he had brash self-confidence, which he described as a necessity. “A Black man in this country can hardly afford to be modest,” he explained in an Ebony profile that dubbed him “The Man Who Makes Multimillionaires.” “If you don’t do it for yourself, nobody is going to do it for you.”

  By the time Richard met him, Franklin had made his name in politics and entertainment. As a ringleader of Atlanta’s “Young Turks,” he had masterminded the successful mayoral campaign of his law partner Maynard Jackson and helped break the back of the old racial order there. And in 1973, just a few years after starting to represent talent, he had negotiated a $5.5 million, ten-album deal with Atlantic Records for Richard’s friend Roberta Flack—the most lucrative contract ever for a black female performer. In the context of that coup, Richard’s fifty-thousand-dollar advance from Warner Bros. didn’t seem quite so generous. Flack herself set the wheels in motion for Pryor and Franklin’s partnership, telling Richard that if his business matters were handled by Franklin, he wouldn’t need to worry about being “ripped off . . . by white people” again. She wanted Richard to “have someone around who’d protect him.”

  Franklin came to Richard’s home and proposed a novel business arrangement. He would himself handle the duties of manager, agent, lawyer, and tax accountant, so Richard could dispense with paying for these services separately. Unlike the usual manager, too, he would be paid a salary rather than a percentage of Richard’s earnings; Richard would therefore not face ever-escalating costs as a by-product of his success. And the two of them would operate without a written agreement: Franklin assured Richard that, in Richard’s words, “we would always be brothers and everything would be all right . . . If we didn’t want to be together then we wouldn’t need any paper to keep us together.”

  For the next six years, Richard and David Franklin forged a high-profile partnership, the power performer paired with the power manager. They were sealed together through mutual admiration, a shared love of capital accumulation, and their common self-understanding as black men working the angles of a white world. Franklin had seen Richard at the San Francisco gig that produced “That Nigger’s Crazy” and had fallen on the floor, laughing. For his part, Richard thought Franklin “one of the most brilliant men I have ever met,” with a “great love for black people.” He believed Franklin when he promised not to “take a percentage or advantage of anybody, any black brothers or sisters.”

  Their word would be their bond. At least, that was the idea. Richard caught an inkling of future troubles when, a few months after starting Franklin with a monthly salary of $2,000, Franklin said that there was more work than he expected and raised his salary to $5,000. A little while later, it became $7,500. Franklin explained that it was no simple task to untangle Richard’s finances and restructure them—for instance, by devising a shelter for his earnings in the form of a corporation. (Pay Back Inc. was replaced by “Richard Pryor Enterprises.”)

  “I wish you would let me be the one to decide to give you a raise or not,” Richard said.

  “A man has got to know his worth, and that is what I’m worth,” Franklin replied.

  Fortunately for Richard, that same self-assurance made Franklin a valuable ally in the boardrooms of Hollywood, where he was the rare black man capable of simultaneously driving a hard bargain and calming white people’s nerves. He could impress the likes of Sam Weisbord, the head of the William Morris Agency, an entertainment industry fixture who had mentored everyone from Al Jolson and Frank Sinatra to Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley; Weisbord publicly called Franklin “one of the most brilliant, able, astute men I’ve met in my life” and “one of the most honorable men I’ve ever known.” Thom Mount, who later dealt with Franklin as head of Universal Studios, testified that he was “a very tough negotiator,” “absolutely one of the best.”

  For many years—until their relationship had to be litigated in front of California’s Labor Commissioner’s Office, with $3.1 million of Franklin’s earnings in dispute—Richard would agree with these admiring assessments.

  In the spring of 1975, while developing some new material at the Comedy Store, Richard experienced a visitation. He felt an old man, familiar from his days in Peoria, standing next to him onstage, beckoning to be noticed. “Over here, Rich. Look at me.”

  At home afterward, Richard turned over memories of the time he’d spent as a child at a barbecue shack, observing a goateed and toothless old-timer who sat in front of the entrance. The old man whiled away the hours by playing a guitar and a taped-up harmonica, and by singing of the world down south that he’d left, a world of hard luck and tough vengeance:

  Killed a guard in Lou-ez-ze-ana

  Stabbed him fifteen times

  Wouldn’t of stabbed him so much

  If he had of been a friend of mine

  “Say, boy,” the old man called out. “Wanna talk to you ’bout them fields.” His voice carried the drawl of the Mississippi Delta and was dredged with the wisdom of the blues, the awareness that what goes around comes around—and that a boomerang will pick the darnedest time to knock you upside the head.

  This old-timer was the source, the first draft, of the earthy character who came to be known as Mudbone, one of Richard’s most famous creations. Mudbone began as a figure from Richard’s past, an ancestor who carried with him, like so many black migrants to the urban North, a full cargo of southern folkways and folklore, along with whatever could be stuffed into a battered suitcase. As Richard embellished his character in live performance, he dropped the harmonica, the guitar, and the stoicism of the bluesman; Mudbone became kinetic, in words if not in body. (Richard sat down while performing the old man.) The drawl remained—one critic quipped that Mudbone’s “inebriated diction made it seem like he had created a new set of vowels”—but the character became a fast-talking trickster who appreciated that lies were a form of creativity and could knit people together in pleasure. As Mudbone said of his friend Toodle-ums, “that nigger could tell a lie. That’s how we became friends. He’d tell a lie, I’d tell a lie, and we’d complement each other’s lies.” When
ever Mudbone assumed the stage in Richard’s stand-up, the audience knew it was being welcomed into the realm of storytelling, of tall tales that revealed sideways truths. Mudbone was equal parts moralist and fabulist. Richard described his voice, aptly, as “somethin’ between a preacher’s Sunday mornin’ sermonizin’ and a grizzled seen-it-all coot sittin’ at a bar drinkin’ and spinnin’ some wild bullshit.”

  By the time Richard first recorded his Mudbone routines, in May 1975, he had so mastered the nuances of the character that it could seem that Mudbone took on the character of Richard, rather than the other way around. Alone among his characters, Mudbone made Richard speak in his voice as he was introduced. “I was boan in Peoria, Illinois. . . . And when I was little, there was an old man, his name was Mud-boan”: so Richard introduced Mudbone by sucking in his mouth and taking on Mudbone’s elongated vowels, his southern inflections and rhythms. It was a slightly disorienting move—Richard talking about being born in Peoria in the voice of a character obviously born in the South—but it had the effect of closing the distance between the two of them and signaling a cultural debt. The self-styled “crazy nigger” of the 1970s had his roots in Mudbone, with his peasant cunning. Or, to put it another way, Mudbone was Richard’s vehicle for transmitting the black past, that history of wild invention and wily rebellion that lived on in him.

  Richard split his first Mudbone act into two segments, which captured two different facets of black history. The first was an origin tale, the story of why Mudbone had come to Peoria from Tupelo in a tractor, driving “746 miles on one tank of gas.” While working for a white man named Cock-Eyed Junior (“His eyes went every which-a-way: he’d say, ‘Nigger, pick that up,’ and four, five niggers bend down”), our humble narrator had been tasked with picking up Junior’s 460-pound fiancée at the depot:

  I walked over to her, introduced myself, said, “Ma’am, my name’s Mudbone.” And I tipped my hat—bitch slapped me across my head! Said, “Nigger, pick up the bag.”

  I said, “Goddamn—what kind of shit? I ain’t never . . . Goddamn—what kind of shit”—said it to myself. ’Cause in them days, that’s all a nigger could do—was get mad, see? So I got mad.

  And I tried to help her into the buggy. The bitch snatched away from me, old uppity bitch. She stepped on the buggy and the goddamn thing turned over on her.

  Well, I couldn’t laugh [laughing]. I had to bite a hole in my goddamn lip.

  This was the segregated South in a nutshell: blacks made to hide their laughter as well as their anger, to act gracious in the face of abuse.

  After the fiancée slaps Mudbone a second time, he plots his revenge. He finds a jigsaw, saws away at the bottom boards of an outhouse, and lies in wait so he can observe his triumph:

  Along about 8:30, she come this way to go to the bathroom. I’m in the bushes, looking at her. She wobbled out to the outside, then opened the door, went in. Shut the door. I heard a big splash. That’s when I got into the tractor and drove up here. I wasn’t mad no more either.

  Mudbone takes satisfaction in watching his enemy sink to her true level, even as he knows that his satisfaction had a price. He has to go on the lam, having violated a principle the Jim Crow South holds dear: the sanctity of white womanhood.

  Mudbone’s second bit, “Little Feets,” was a spectacular riff, over ten minutes long, in the form of a conjure tale. It evoked the hidden black world that developed outside the scrutiny of white eyes from slavery times onward: a world of amulets, fetishes, herbs, and potions; a world ruled by the invisible force known, variously, as mojo, voodoo, hoodoo, or conjure. Conjure tales have long been a feature of black folklore and literature, from Charles Chestnutt’s The Conjure Woman to Ann Petry’s Tituba of Salem Village; they tend to be meditations on how, through the force of the imagination or the spirit, the powerless can assume some form of power. Richard spiked his conjure tale with an extra dose of ribaldry, irreverence, and surreal imagination. His voodoo woman was, like Mudbone himself, an earthy, outrageous character—utterly human as she did her spirit work.

  In Mudbone’s telling, his friend Toodle-ums comes to him, laid low by a hex: “My goddamn feets are swole up—look like elephant foot. My arms is weak, blood comin’ out of my eye. Plus, I’m in love with a bitch I can’t stand.” And so Mudbone escorts his friend to the home of Miss Rudolph, the voodoo lady, to reverse the curse. When Miss Rudolph asks for a Thanksgiving turkey as payment for her services, Mudbone agrees quickly, chuckling to himself: Thanksgiving is half a year away, he muses, and he’ll be long gone from Miss Rudolph’s neighborhood when it arrives. Then a tarantula crawls over Mudbone’s body and disappears. When he asks Miss Rudolph where it has gone, she answers, “None of your goddamned business. But if you don’t bring that turkey, you will see him again.” The trickster has been out-tricked.

  When it comes to her healing potion, Miss Rudolph herself furnishes the crucial ingredient. She brings out a wash pan, squats over it, and relieves herself with fifteen minutes’ worth of “old strong ammonia piss,” then instructs Toodle-ums to dunk his feet in the pan. Toodle-ums obliges, and a chemical reaction unknown in the annals of science commences:

  The water come to bubblin’ and boilin’, sparks start flyin’. Goddamn bugs runnin’ all crazy, bat was flyin’ around, monkey started shittin’ everywhere—that’s when I took my knife out!

  And she ran over and stroked this nigger with the monkey’s foot. And he was trembling. I tried to get the door open; it was locked. . . .

  Then, all of a sudden, it got real quiet. And the piss turned blue. And I said, “Holy Jesus! Holy Jesus!” ’Cause I ain’t never seen no blue piss.

  Well, the boy eased his feets out the piss, and they was healthy. The nigger had healthy feets. But they was real tiny. The nigger had little baby feets!

  Now that the conjure itself has gone awry, Toodle-ums goes berserk. He kills the monkey, hurls the bat out the window, and literally kicks Miss Rudolph in the ass, his tiny feet whipping through the air. He rips the monkey’s foot from her neck and swallows it. But in trying to destroy her powers, he makes himself their final victim: “they came and got his ass and took him to the zoo. And you can see him if you go down there. He’s the polar bear—with little tiny feets.” Mudbone spoke the punch line with a mix of disbelief and pleasure, as if both amazed and amused by the logic of his own tale.

  With Mudbone, Richard experienced a new level of freedom onstage and achieved a new sort of resonance. The freedom came from releasing himself into a character unburdened by the present because he lived in and through his past, and unburdened, too, by the demands of “reality.” With Mudbone, Richard stepped out of the history he had personally endured and let his imagination take wing in a fantastic kingdom of the past. At the same time, it was through Mudbone that Richard brought the larger scope of black history into his comedy, connecting the country South to the urban North, the Jim Crow past to the inner-city present.

  Mudbone was a one-man cultural revival. He pointed backward, teaching black Americans about their “roots” (as did Alex Haley, in his blockbuster book of the following year). Yet he also pointed forward, suggesting through his example that it was still possible to conjure, to tap invisible forces and make them your own—if only the imagination were willing.

  PART FIVE

  THE FUNNIEST MAN ON THE PLANET

  CHAPTER 19

  * * *

  Every Nigger Is a Star

  Los Angeles, Macon, New York City, 1975

  Between 1973 and 1975, Richard Pryor managed the ambiguously impressive feat of sowing different forms of havoc across the three major TV networks. In 1973, while working on Lily Tomlin’s two specials, he maddened CBS executives with his obscenities, his arrival on set in cornrows, and his refusal to play scenes for laughs. In March 1974 he riled ABC when, as emcee of a Redd Foxx roast that was to be televised, he was completely blotto—“so far out,” said comic Steve Allen, “as to be close to totally noncommunicative.” Then, in Fe
bruary 1975, Richard completed his trifecta of TV mayhem when, as a guest on a Flip Wilson special for NBC, he precipitated a chaotic meltdown on set. The debacle began innocently enough: in a lull between taping, Richard performed an uncensored part of his stage act—as a gift, with no cameras rolling—for the studio audience. Fellow guest star McLean Stevenson did not take kindly to the gift; he fumed “I won’t be on the same stage as that man” and walked off the set. A street-fighting mood fell over Richard. When an NBC page refused to let him open a fire door—Richard had some family at the taping and wanted to let them through the door to where their car was parked—Richard swung at him, and pandemonium erupted on the set. Fellow guest star Cher fled to her dressing room and locked herself in. Richard was restrained in a bear hug, but not before causing enough harm, mental and physical, for the NBC page to win thousands of dollars in an ensuing legal settlement.

  Remarkably, Richard’s track record did not scare off NBC executive Dick Ebersol and producer Lorne Michaels, who in early 1975 were putting together, for the fall, a new Saturday late-night program to replace reruns of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. A mere twenty-seven years old and in line to become the youngest vice president in NBC history, Ebersol wanted to target his new show—what became Saturday Night Live—at the under-thirty demographic, and thought Richard would give the show “credibility”; Michaels knew Richard from the Lily Tomlin specials and considered him “the funniest man on the planet.” Ebersol and Michaels needed to fight a battle on two fronts if they wanted to land Richard as a guest host for their program. On one side, they would have to budge the NBC higher-ups who were vehemently against Richard hosting the show in its first months on air: even the late-night slot, the execs thought, was too early for such a radioactive performer. On the other side, they would have to soften Richard, who felt, along with his new manager, David Franklin, that network TV was no match for his talents as a comic.