Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  “I’m not doing shit until I get my apology,” Richard told Badham. The director wondered if there was menace in Richard’s tone—the actor was holding a glass of water, and Badham thought he might throw it in his face—but then he saw, beneath the threat, an undercurrent of sadness. Badham heard himself saying, “I’m really sorry that this is upsetting you a lot.” It was more an acknowledgment of Richard’s feelings than a heartfelt admission of regret, but Richard took it as genuine and played his scene.

  While Richard’s feud with Badham threatened to torpedo the production, his feud with costar Billy Dee Williams threatened much worse. Once, Richard observed Williams speaking to his, Richard’s, new girlfriend, who was visiting from out of town, and once was enough: Richard accused Williams of trying to steal her away from him. Given Williams’s talents as a charmer, it was easy to understand the source of Richard’s panic. Cohen riffed, “If there was a vagina within ten feet of [Billy Dee], he went into a mode, what I call the V-mode—where he starts talking really low and all that. He’d say things like, ‘I love your hair. How much time do you spend on it every day?’ . . . And you know, he was very successful with women. He was the black man that every white woman who had a black fantasy wanted, because she knew he was good and powerful and charming, a lovely man.”

  Richard fumed, talking often of bringing his gun with him on the set—to handle the threat of Williams once and for all, to put in the ground the fantasy of suavity he represented. Williams tried to de-escalate the feud. After one altercation, he grabbed Cohen in the film’s production offices and insisted, “You got to calm that guy down!” When Cohen asked what had happened, Williams couldn’t say; he was so whipped up as to be inarticulate. Cohen decided to put as much physical distance between his two actors as possible, moving Richard to the director’s dressing room—unbeknownst to Badham, who alighted upon Richard there and needed to have the situation explained to him by the second assistant director: “We had to move him away from Billy Dee. He was threatening to kill Billy Dee.” When the filming of Bingo Long wrapped without a violent incident, the crew breathed a collective sigh of relief.

  Still, it would be wrong to adduce that Richard was simply seething during Bingo Long’s production. He had a warm rapport with the former Negro League and major league ballplayers—people of great gusto and no pretensions—who were cast as his teammates in the film. “We work hard and play hard,” said Leon “Daddy Wags” Wagner, formerly of the San Francisco Giants and Cleveland Indians. Unsurprisingly, the “playing hard” portion found a home in Richard’s rented house, with the assistance of his grandmother Marie, who joined him in Macon for a spell. One night she prepared a classic soul food feast—fried chicken, oxtail stew, okra, string beans, peach cobbler—for some twenty-five members of the cast and crew. Richard spun a few tracks from his most recent album, but his voice on the stereo had to compete with the wisecracks flying all around him. “We blow Richard’s mind,” Wagner told a reporter. “He been used to being a funny motherfucker with a quip here and there. But we come on so black, man, that we have to pick Richard up off the ground.”

  Richard felt at home, too, among the people of “James Brown country.” When the crew set up at a four-way intersection in one of Macon’s black neighborhoods, its residents started to converge upon the film’s three stars. At the first sight of the crowd, Billie Dee Williams and James Earl Jones vanished to their dressing rooms. Richard stood calmly in the center of the intersection as he was enveloped by a crowd that grew from a straggling few to several hundred. He chatted, slipped into a character or two; he enjoyed the back-and-forth with a crowd that cherished him and expressed their love not by gawking but by channeling their warmth. When he was performing for such a crowd, Richard’s cynicism and jealousy went into remission, and he rose above his apprehensions about himself and others; he felt magnified into a better and larger version of himself. And as part of the gift of his comedy, he magnified his audience as he reflected them, giving them a sense of the extraordinary in their ordinary lives.

  Around this time, Richard distilled that feeling of reciprocity into the form of a motto. He took to wearing a yellow-and-black running suit, inspired by an obscure 1974 Jamaican film and emblazoned with its title: “Every Nigger Is a Star.”

  While Badham prepared Bingo Long for release, Richard rode the tailwind of . . . Is It Something I Said?, the follow-up to “That Nigger’s Crazy,” and his first album of new material for Warner Bros. He had recorded the album during a May 1975 run at the Latin Casino, not far from Philadelphia; after so many larger concerts, he’d been amped to play a more intimate club, a dinner theater with terraced tables, in front of a black audience. For him, the recorded show was “one of my best ever,” its memory almost sacred: “The comedy gods have many tentacles, you know. And they swoop down and touch you at different times. But when they do it’s like salvation. Or deliverance. It’s as close to flying as man gets. The magic doesn’t happen often, but when you’re on and rolling nothing that I’ve ever touched comes close.”

  Is It Something was a potent distillation of Richard’s latest stand-up act. On it, he recorded for the first time the character of Mudbone, that most garrulous and glorious of his comic creations. He spoke of his cocaine addiction for the first time, too, observing himself with an astonishment that sometimes carried over into bafflement: “I must’ve snorted up Peru. I could’ve bought Peru for all the shit I snorted. Could’ve just given up the money up front and have me a piece of property.” He took aim at the legal system, capping his riff on his experience at the courthouse with a stinging one-liner, courtesy of Paul Mooney: “You go down there looking for justice, and that’s what you find—just us.” And he spoke frankly about sex, the desperation and double-talk of the bedroom. He gave voice to the man who pleads with his girlfriend during a breakup (“Take the TV, but leave the pussy, please”), as well as the woman who hesitates to kiss the mouth that has pleasured her (“It’s bad for your teeth”). The negotiations around sex seemed to turn everyone into an absurd version of him- or herself. Witness the father who scolded his daughter for offering up only a kiss to the man who took her out on an expensive date: “Hey, girl, get your ass down here! . . . Thirty-five dollars is a lot of money, you must be rich. You are? Wake up your mama, too!”

  Released in August 1975, . . . Is It Something I Said? rocketed to the No. 1 position on Billboard’s R&B chart, sealing the love affair between Richard and his black audience. But its appeal extended further: it broke the Top 15 of Billboard’s overall album chart. The record heralded Richard’s acceptance by the hip white audience that he hadn’t courted for four years, since he left Berkeley behind. In the interim, while he’d been preoccupied with establishing and deepening his connection with black America, that white audience had come to him.

  Richard’s hosting of Saturday Night (later Saturday Night Live), in December 1975, was a related experiment in cultural cross-breeding, bringing him in contact with the still-tender, and overwhelmingly white, creative team behind the show. In the run-up to his guest appearance, the mood around the set was tight with worry. Members of Richard’s entourage, it was said, were carrying guns; Richard himself was viewed as combustible in the extreme. Michael O’Donoghue, the show’s head writer, visited Richard in his hotel room and ran a joke by him, one written for the Weekend Update sketch: “A man should not be judged by the color of his skin, but by the size of his nostrils.” Richard bristled and started to object; O’Donoghue cut him off in midsentence. Richard lifted up a cognac bottle and offered, with a burst of laughter that was hard to read, to brain O’Donoghue with it. For the rest of the week, Saturday Night’s head writer took a leave from his own show rather than tangle with its host.

  Meanwhile, Lorne Michaels was feeling heat from NBC executives, who argued that the show needed a five-second delay so that any expletives could be bleeped. Michaels acceded to the request, unwilling to bet his show’s future on Richard’s ability to restrai
n himself. But he did so under conditions of the utmost secrecy. All the clocks in the studio were synchronized to the five-second delay, and the staff who knew of it vowed not to let the secret slip. Michaels feared that his host would walk off if he learned of the delay—an utterly justified concern. In his memoir, Richard said, “If I’d known, I never would’ve shown up.”

  The show that Richard delivered did shake up Saturday Night, though not in the way NBC execs had feared. (Richard said “ass” twice, but stayed clear of four-letter territory.) With his demands in Miami, Richard had already integrated the show—from the writers’ room to the stage to the audience. Now he made the show his own—and race conscious as never before. In a small but symbolic move, he even took control of the photo stills that served as “bumpers” between sketches and commercial breaks, supplying photos of his grandmother, uncle, and children to replace the usual images of New York City street life.

  Aptly, the episode began with a staged dispute over the whiteness of Saturday Night’s comic formula. Richard and his friend Paul Mooney had noticed that black actor Garrett Morris was often the odd man out, the trouper with no role to play, and they took their frustration public, getting the writers’ room to generate a sketch in which Morris stands his ground and Chevy Chase—already emerging as the show’s breakout star—plays up his sense of privilege.

  “Richard Pryor’s here tonight,” Morris tells Chase in the sketch, “and I thought I would open the show. I mean, do the fall.”

  Chase glares and returns, “I always open the show. Is it understood?”

  In the spirit of comedy, the show settles the argument by splitting the difference. Chase offers to teach Morris how to execute the pratfall and so steals the scene from him, but then, because the fall has ostensibly knocked Chase unconscious, it’s Morris who announces the opening of the show. “Live from New York—it’s Saturday Night!” he says with relish, grinning over Chase’s lifeless body.

  Most of Richard’s Saturday Night program toyed with that gap—or was it a chasm?—between how whites and blacks perceived the world and traveled through it. In his opening monologue, Richard put the white half of the studio audience on alert, delivering a version of “Acid” that played off the great distance between Richard’s drug-induced panic (“I can’t breathe!”) and the blithe indifference of his white friend (“Told you it was far out!”). In “Samurai Hotel,” John Belushi and Richard were samurai bellhops who duel over which one of them should carry a traveler’s suitcase upstairs. After a bit of posturing with their swords, Belushi’s samurai yells, “Your mama-san!” at Richard’s. The insult is a miscalculation: Richard’s samurai is sent into such a rage that he slices the front desk in two—at which point Belushi’s samurai concedes the duel. “I can dig where you’re coming from,” he says, in the only bit of English his character ever spoke. Another running gag featured Richard in an ever-evolving police lineup. In the first bit, he’s placed, handcuffed in a bathrobe, alongside a Boy Scout, doctor, and businessman; in the second, alongside a refrigerator, a goose, and a nun; in the last, alongside three policemen, all of whom point an accusing finger in his direction. After every lineup, he appears more battered and bandaged.

  The most provocative sketch opened onto a job interview at a desk in a drab office. Richard’s Mr. Wilson, in a dress shirt and tie, is apprehensive and obliging, while Chase’s interviewer leads him through the beginning of a word association test. “Tree,” “dog”; “fast,” “slow”; “rain,” “snow.” Then the interview takes a curious turn, as an ostensibly objective test is revealed to be anything but:

  INTERVIEWER: Negro.

  MR. WILSON [meekly]: Whitey.

  INTERVIEWER [blandly]: Tar baby.

  MR. WILSON [doing a double take]: What’d you say?

  INTERVIEWER: Tar baby.

  MR. WILSON [testing what’s possible]: Ofay.

  INTERVIEWER: Colored.

  MR. WILSON [no longer meek]: Redneck.

  The tension ratchets up; both interviewer and applicant lose their composure, and the mental game of a “word-association test” degenerates into a slashing duel of insults:

  INTERVIEWER [raising his voice]: Jungle bunny.

  MR. WILSON [leaning in, agitated]: Honky!

  INTERVIEWER [accusingly]: Spade.

  MR. WILSON [hollering]: Honky honky!

  INTERVIEWER [confident, as if playing a trump card]: Nigger.

  MR. WILSON [grimly serious]: Dead honky.

  In a tour de force of physical comedy, Richard then seems to be dismantled by his rage. His nose wrinkles and twitches with a nervous tic that reaches up to his eyebrows; his mouth hangs open, frozen. When Chase’s interviewer fumbles, in a conciliatory tone, “I think you’re qualified for the job—how about a starting salary of five thousand dollars?” Richard’s Mr. Wilson can’t arrest the momentum of his anger, even as he looks more aggrieved than incensed. “Yo’ mama! Yo’ grandmama!” he shouts, his voice catching and his eyes moistening. The sketch ends with a fantastic act of reparations: Chase’s interviewer rewarding Mr. Wilson for his trials with an offer to work, at an annual salary of fifteen thousand dollars, as “the highest-paid janitor in America.”

  “Word Association Test” was the episode’s edgiest and most memorable sketch. It suggested that beneath the crust of much American life there was magma boiling; that for many white Americans—and not just pot-bellied sheriffs with thick southern drawls—words like spade and nigger tripped off their tongues with the same ease as tree and rain. But it also took this point and drove it home in a way that was witty and unpredictable. Richard’s character begins the interview at a disadvantage—the humble applicant trying hard to ingratiate himself and caught off guard by the series of epithets flung at him by his interviewer. He turns the tables not by coming up with more stinging epithets for white people but by refusing to play by the rules dictated to him. “Dead honky” defeats the “nigger” trump card as no single word could do; it transforms the word association test from a language game into a contest of wills, in which righteous courage is bound to prevail. Chase’s character crumbles; he is game master no longer.

  The sketch—a Saturday Night Live classic—has something of a fraught backstory. Both Paul Mooney and Chevy Chase have claimed to have conceptualized the sketch; neither of them has given credit to the other, and the two have gleaned quite different lessons from it. According to Mooney, the sketch was his response to how Lorne Michaels cross-examined him—How long have you been writing? How long have you been doing comedy?—when Richard first insisted that Michaels hire Mooney. “Easiest sketch I ever write,” Mooney remembered. “All I do is bring out what is going on beneath the surface of that interview with Lorne and the NBC execs in the jai alai greenroom.” For Mooney, the sketch was an act of aggression against NBC, one that also allowed Richard to channel the ill will he felt toward his costar: “Chevy Chase was the doll-baby . . . the darling of the discotheque with straight teeth, and Richard wanted to knock them out.” Once it was performed, the sketch assumed for Mooney a power that was more than personal, too. It was, he judged, “like an H-bomb that Richard and I toss[ed] into America’s consciousness. . . . The N-word as a weapon, turned back against those who use it, ha[d] been born on national TV.”

  For his part, Chase downplayed any enmity between him and Richard. In his memory, the sketch came about through a meeting of comic minds: “Richard’s attitude to it and my attitude toward it were one and the same.” And the final product spoke to a dimension in Richard and his art that Mooney didn’t mention: his essential generosity. While writing the sketch, Chase recalled “asking Richard for as many slang words for white people as he could come up with. [Richard] hesitated and then realized that there were many more for African Americans than he could think of for ‘whities.’ This is reflected in the sketch, and it was reflective of the lack of bigotry in the man.”

  It’s a conundrum: Mooney saw Richard as an artist who weaponized comedy to an unprecedente
d degree, while Chase saw him as an artist who, by nature, did not reach for arms. Could they both have been right—if not about who wrote the sketch, then about the Richard they loved and appreciated? The evidence of the job interview sketch suggests as much. As the slurs pile up, Richard’s Mr. Wilson throws off the awkward formality of the interview and comes to speak from a place of genuine, white-hot anger. He seems, as Mooney suggests, energized by his rage. But it’s too simple to see the righteously angry Richard as the one and only true Richard. At the opening of the sketch, his character can’t believe that the race card is being played, and even his most aggressive gestures are complicated by an internal debate that plays out in the quick ripple of his facial expressions. He’s undone by his anger as much as he finds himself through it. Richard’s performance might inspire a militant like Mooney, for whom Richard was an apostle of rage, and it might appeal to a writer-actor like Chase, for whom Richard was, at his core, a generous soul. The different fractions of Richard’s audience could come together at the crossroads where Richard stood, even if they couldn’t agree on where to travel afterward.

  Rob Cohen and John Badham caught a hint of the difficulties they faced courting their own crossover audience when they began screening Bingo Long at Universal. “What do you expect to do with this nigger epic?” asked Universal’s head of distribution, Hy Martin. According to Cohen, Universal president Ned Tanen was beside himself at a private screening. “What the fuck are they saying?” Tanen muttered at the characters on-screen, his ear unattuned to black dialect. “I don’t understand a goddamn word!” he said repeatedly, each time pounding the squawk box that was used to communicate to the projectionist—until the squawk box shattered into fragments of plastic and a dangling wire. Tanen stood up, the film still spooling. “Finish this!” he commanded Cohen and Badham, though it was unclear how they might ever satisfy him.