Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  Despite the pushback from Universal execs, the team behind Bingo Long had reason to be proud. The final film struck a remarkable balance between sweetness and asperity: it had something of the zip of a screwball comedy—Pauline Kael called it a modern black version of the 1930s football musical Pigskin Parade—but its levity was spiked with a hanging sense of raw injustice, of opportunities lost and never recovered. (Badham’s next film, Saturday Night Fever, was a similarly unstable compound: half Busby Berkeley musical, half Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets.) Its tone was set by the 1939 newsreel that opened the film, in which quick reports of the Fascist storm gathering over Europe were juxtaposed with the gee-whiz story of a masochist who swallowed razor blades and stubbed out cigarettes on his tongue for pleasure. The world, it seemed, was breezily perverse.

  Onto this historical stage arrived Bingo Long’s ballplayers, wayward heroes for a wayward age. Here Badham coaxed unexpected nuances from each of his three principals. Williams was zesty rather than stiffly debonair as team impresario Bingo Long; Jones cut his usual grandiloquence with a joyful sense of mischief; and Richard delivered a performance that was economical and suggestive. “Pryor calculates every line and gesture for small, explosive effect,” wrote Time. His Charlie Snow was both ingenious and hapless—“a fellow of wit and resource,” continued Time, whose life is “a slowly losing battle against absurdity.” He was also the character who imported a different strain of comedy into the film: it was never Charlie Snow who was shown putting on a high-stepping show for white folks. Instead, he put on a show for himself, “Carlos Nevada” being the alias of the witty lady killer he aspired to be. Whether he was talking about “getting my bat ready” before sliding into bed with a white woman, or cracking wise to a man holding a razor to his chest, he always seemed to be projecting a bravado in which he didn’t fully believe. He might pass himself off as Cuban, but he couldn’t shed the inner anxieties at his core.

  Upon Bingo Long’s release in the summer of 1976, critics heaped praise upon it, and on Richard’s performance in particular. The Washington Post called the film “irresistible,” predicting that it “should become one of the most popular movies of the year” and that “Pryor was heading for next year’s Academy Award for best supporting actor.” New York’s tough-minded John Simon commended Badham for the “dizzy old cinematic devices [he kept] up his tricky mitt” and noted the movie’s “engagingly bumptious vitality,” a “picaresque élan made more unusual by the supersession of the single picaro by two sardine-packed cars of pranksters.” Similar positive notices could be found from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to the Chicago Tribune and Village Voice. Universal rolled out a promo campaign that seeded articles on the Negro Leagues in newspapers across the country, and tried to capitalize on the runaway success of The Bad News Bears, the summer of 1976’s other baseball film, by staging an exhibition game between the casts of the two films and by publicizing a letter, from the actor who played Bad News catcher Engelberg, that hailed Bingo Long as “the best movie I’ve ever seen.”

  All that Bingo Long needed, then, was an audience that could appreciate it half as much as Engelberg. In its second week of wide release, boosted by the wave of good press, Bingo Long became the third-most popular film in America. But then the audience disappeared: the film had no legs, petering out at a disappointing $2.8 million for Universal. The poor totals couldn’t simply be blamed on the failure of the film to cross over to whites, either. Even in its release at the Apollo Theater, the trend was the same: a big opening followed by a trailing off.

  What had gone wrong? Let’s Do It Again, the sequel to Uptown Saturday Night, had been released in late 1975 and drawn $11.8 million in rentals, double that of its predecessor. Motown’s earlier two vehicles for Diana Ross, Lady Sings the Blues and Mahogany, had put up impressive box office totals, too: $9.1 million and $6.9 million, respectively. But Bingo Long, with its curious mix of the zany and the melancholy, was neither comedy nor melodrama. It was something more interesting, and perhaps harder to digest for audiences on either side of the color line. Or maybe it suffered from being everyone’s second-favorite baseball movie of the season. In any case, later bids for the elusive crossover audience would not follow its lead. When Richard became the crossover star par excellence in the next few years, it would be through a fluke that, only in retrospect, would seem like the workings of grand design.

  CHAPTER 20

  * * *

  Hustling

  Los Angeles, Toronto, Madison, 1976

  I’m not a success yet,” Richard told a reporter at a train station in Toronto, in May 1976, while filming the scenes in Silver Streak that would shoot him into the Hollywood stratosphere. “I’ve got my foot in the door and a bit of my shoulder and I hope nobody slams it.”

  It was a peculiar statement, given the dimensions that Richard’s life had begun to assume. . . . Is It Something I Said? had won for him his second straight Grammy, beating out albums by George Carlin, Lily Tomlin, and Monty Python. Richard felt confident enough to crow to the Los Angeles Times, “Some people say there’s no ‘best’ in comedy. They’re wrong. I’m the best.” With the proceeds of his records and concerts, he opened a sleek office for Richard Pryor Enterprises on the Beverly Hills stretch of Sunset Boulevard, complete with black-and-gold décor and a fishbowl stocked with exotic underwater plants. He bought—with a hefty down payment in cash—a Spanish-style hacienda on a three-and-a-half-acre parcel in the city of Northridge, in the flat northern reaches of the San Fernando Valley. The grounds, formerly owned by an heir of the Wrigley Chewing Gum fortune, encompassed two guest cottages, a tennis court, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a stable for horses, and a large main house equipped with an aviary on the main floor and a screening room in the basement. Visitors approached via a long circular driveway that curved around a front lawn that held an orange grove.

  Richard had installed himself in a home fit for a Hollywood star or mogul—with one twist: it had been thirty years since Northridge was a preferred neighborhood of stars or moguls. In the 1930s and ’40s, actors such as Barbara Stanwyck, Walter Brennan, and Zeppo Marx had settled in large haciendas like Richard’s so that they could own horses and enjoy a semblance of the rural life. Jack Oakie—the Old Hollywood comedian whom Richard didn’t want to become—lived just a few miles away from Richard’s estate, and had even served as the city’s honorary mayor. But Northridge, or “Valleywood,” had lost its rustic allure by the mid-1970s, not least because it had been absorbed into the larger suburban explosion of the San Fernando Valley. The actors and producers of Richard’s day preferred Malibu, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, or the elevated neighborhoods that straddled the spine of Mulholland Drive from the Hollywood Hills through Encino. Zealous about his privacy, Richard had, in effect, put at least seven miles between himself and those Hollywood players who might try to court him. An electronic gate rather than a hand-lettered sign now kept the unwelcome away.

  For all his achievement, Richard felt his success was just a collapsible illusion. While the main house was being renovated to his specifications, he lived in the guesthouse at the back of his estate, and suffered a recurring dream: men with briefcases coming to his door and asking incredulously, “You mean you own this house, Mr. Pryor?” And then there was the matter of his stalled Hollywood career. He had accepted his most recent part, that of thief Grover Muldoon in Silver Streak, “because nobody asked me to do anything else.” It was a “modern Willie Best,” he said of the part, referring to the black bit player who popped up in more than a hundred screen comedies of the 1930s and ’40s, always confined to the role of the simple-minded porter, or the simple-minded valet, or the simple-minded deliveryman.

  Richard had reason to be dubious about the role as it was handed to him. In screenwriter Colin Higgins’s original conception, Silver Streak was half romantic comedy and half thriller, the story of an unassuming book editor who takes a train trip for some quiet time and finds himself fallin
g in love and getting entangled in a murder. Higgins was Australian, openly gay, and a graduate of UCLA film school; he had earlier scripted the offbeat Harold and Maude, and with Silver Streak he took pleasure in drawing winkingly upon the conventions of classic Hollywood, in particular, Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes and North by Northwest. Higgins’s script delighted the studios: it was purchased for four hundred thousand dollars, an industry record at the time, and Paramount budgeted over five million dollars for the film. Gene Wilder, fresh from the successes of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, committed to the leading role of book editor George Caldwell. The adept Arthur Hiller (Love Story, The Hospital, The Man in the Glass Booth) agreed to direct.

  Unfortunately, Higgins’s spirit of winking homage extended to Hollywood’s old racial conventions. In his script, Grover Muldoon is a cartoon who wants to be a cartoon—a perfectly self-sacrificing helpmate, devoid of any sense of irony. When the arch villain calls him an “ignorant nigger,” Grover shoots back lamely, “Bullshit! I got a high school diploma!” The final proof of the friendship between Grover and Gene Wilder’s character is that they can banter in “Amos ’n’ Andy” voices and assume the roles of a blackface minstrelsy routine, Tambo and Mister Bones. “Hey, brother, is that a train?” Grover asks, after the Silver Streak has smashed through the wall of the station. Talking now with “black style,” George replies, “I don’t know, Mister Bones. Looks to me like a kind of bicentennial display.” Everyone bursts out laughing.

  Nowhere was Higgins’s affinity with the racial ways of Old Hollywood more apparent than in what became the film’s most famous scene, where Grover blacks up George in a train station men’s room, coaxing him to apply shoe polish to his face and then coaching him how to pass as black—all done to help George evade the police on his tail. Here Higgins used the character of Grover to dissolve any qualms that might attach to the use of blackface: it’s Grover, the streetwise black man, who gives George permission to become a caricature of blackness. When George shrinks at the disguise, Grover downplays its meaning: “Just think of it as an instant suntan.” When George objects that blackface will fool no one, Grover makes himself the butt of a joke: “When I was a kid I thought Al Jolson was a brother.” After Grover instructs George on how to strut his stuff “like you’re king of the Shitkicker’s Ball,” he brightens at how his pupil takes to his lesson. “C’mon, Mister Bojangles. Let’s get going,” he tells George with an indulgent smile. And when a blacked-up George bops past the cops, Grover smooths his passage by using a phrase that Richard Pryor, as a stand-up comic, made famous: “That is one crazy nigger,” Grover tells the cops, who nod in happy agreement.

  To his credit, Gene Wilder worried that the scene as scripted would be the film’s “Achilles heel.” “Before casting started,” Wilder recalled, “I told Laddie [producer Alan Ladd Jr.] that I thought there was only one person who could play that scene with me and keep it from being offensive, and that was Richard Pryor.” (The producers were already recruiting Richard for the role and worried enough about his reliability that they considered hiring two black actors and shooting every Grover scene twice.) Wilder also advised Higgins, once Richard was cast, to expand the parameters of Richard’s part. Higgins obliged, adding Grover to the film’s final scene so that its happy ending includes Grover stealing a Dodge Dart and riding off through the wreckage of the train station. Higgins also added more cartoon dialogue: George blesses Grover’s getaway just as Grover blesses George’s earlier fooling of the cops—with the announcement, “That is one crazy nigger.”

  Richard, in other words, was being asked to play a role that bowdlerized his main stand-up persona. When he arrived in Canada to shoot the movie, his response to the material was forthright: he would rewrite his part in the moment of acting it, sometimes with grace notes of irony, sometimes with startling revisions. From Gene Wilder’s perspective, it was an education in the art of improvisation. On their first day of shooting together, helicopters hovered over them; prop guns were firing in all directions. “I jumped into a ditch next to [Richard]—as I was directed to do—and Richard said his first line, and I answered,” Wilder recalled. “Then he said some line that wasn’t in the script, and I answered with a line that wasn’t in the script. No thinking—just spontaneous reaction. That was the start of our improvisatory relationship on film.” Wilder had a bit of practice as an improviser, from a fund-raising tour he had made on behalf of dovish presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy in 1968, but nothing like Richard’s expertise from his years as a stand-up. “Richard was my teacher: no thinking—just immediate, instinctive response,” Wilder said.

  Director Arthur Hiller sensed a special chemistry between his two actors and avoided in-depth rehearsals of their scenes in favor of shorter run-throughs. “I didn’t want to lose the spontaneity of their comedic relationships,” he said. Their scenes crackle with energy, the nebbishy George always a hair trigger away from a neurotic episode, exasperated but entranced by Grover’s heedless cool.

  Around six o’clock on May 13, Hiller took his two stars into the men’s room of Toronto’s train station for a light run-through of the blackface scene, which they were to film the next day. Richard withdrew into himself, so quietly that Hiller didn’t notice anything amiss. But Wilder did. On the walk back to the hotel, he probed Richard.

  “I’m going to hurt a lot of black people,” Richard said.

  “How?”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s too late.”

  “It’s not too late. We can talk to Arthur; I can call Laddie . . . but you have to tell me what it is.”

  “You’re a nice guy, Gene, but I don’t want to talk about it. And I don’t want to do this film. I want to get out of it.”

  “I’m in room 1504, Richard. If you change your mind, just call me.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Richard phoned Wilder. In Wilder’s room, he brainstormed a better way to frame the scene. In the original, a white man stumbles into the bathroom and is fooled into thinking that George, in blackface, is actually a black man. In Richard’s version, it would be a black man who wanders in and, rather than being fooled, gives the strutting George a bit of further instruction: “You might be in pretty big trouble, fella, but for God’s sake, learn to keep time.”

  The next day, with the cameras rolling, Richard kept reshaping the scene. In the script, the blackface is a goof that Grover Muldoon embraces; in the scene Richard plays, it’s a ruse Grover unmasks. When George hesitates to put on the shoe polish, Grover doesn’t sell it as an “instant suntan”; he remarks bitingly, “What? Are you afraid it won’t come off?” And when George yells, “It’ll never work!” Grover doesn’t sell the disguise by speaking of his own gullibility as a child. He pivots George to look at his half-blacked-up face in the mirror; George’s face relaxes into a sort of guileless curiosity. For a moment, George is a white man entertaining what it would be like to lose his whiteness. “Look at that,” Grover says, then snaps George out of his reverie with a cynical lesson about race and Hollywood. “Al Jolson made a million bucks looking like that.”

  Playing the American skin game: George Caldwell (Gene Wilder) takes lessons from Grover Muldoon (Richard Pryor) in Silver Streak. (Courtesy of the author)

  In Richard’s reformulation of the scene, blackface was the perfect ruse for George precisely because white people favored a counterfeit of blackness to the truth of it; they preferred not to look too closely at the world around them. In one bit of dialogue that, sadly, was cut from the final scene, George protests, “You dummy, you got oxblood shoe polish!” Grover shoots back that it won’t matter: “All the police look for is to see if you got color, any color.”

  When Richard had finished with it, the scene in the men’s room was not just more acerbic than the script had allowed. It was also, in its way, more believably affectionate. Grover offers George the props of cool—his mirrored shades, his purple satin jacket from the Eighty-Second Airborne Division (embroidered with the message “Wh
en I Die I’ll Go to Heaven Because I’ve Spent My Time in Hell”), his way of dancing—but he also underscores that props do not make the man. He clues George into how easy it is to perform a caricature, and how ridiculous it is to bear the weight of one. And in revealing something of the complexity of race in America, Grover seems less like a prop himself in the plot—in fact, he seems a better competitor for the love of George than Hilly, the confusingly drawn secretary played by Jill Clayburgh. When, a few scenes later, Grover and George say good-bye on camera for the first time, they moon at each other but say little, as awkward as soldiers who’ve held one another under fire, embarrassed by how intimate they’ve become. And when Grover turns up again at the film’s end, it seems less like the non sequitur it is than a tying of a knot, a necessary form of emotional closure. The film’s more credible love story is between the two men.

  It’s not too much to say that, with his performance, Richard saved Silver Streak from itself. Upon the film’s release in December 1976, critics agreed that the film limped along until Richard “goose[d] it into some semblance of life,” as Molly Haskell wrote in the Village Voice: “Pryor, a comic genius who is turning into one of the great film presences, does what no one else in the film can do: makes it look as if it knew where it was going.” Another observed, perceptively, “One suspects Pryor wrote his own material because his scenes are more outrageous, more inventive than the rest of the film.” In the consensus view, Richard was the one surprising element of the film: “For about fifteen minutes, Pryor gives the picture some of his craziness. Not much of it, but some—enough to make you realize how lethargic it was without him” (The New Yorker); “What furtive sprightliness Silver Streak manages to work up is attributable mostly to Pryor, sly-eyed and fast-mouthed, an unbeatable antic spirit” (Time).