Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  In his element: on the set of Which Way Is Up? with director Michael Schultz and costar Lonette McKee. (Courtesy of Marcia Reed)

  For Richard, Which Way Is Up? was both grueling and delightful as an acting experience. He looked at the young, multiracial crew, so similar to his usual stand-up crowd, and every moment he was on camera—a great proportion of the shoot—he took upon himself the near-impossible task of keeping them in stitches. As Carl Gottlieb observed, “In the master [take], when we finished a scene and the director yelled, ‘Cut!,’ everybody who was holding in their laughter would let it out. The whole set would laugh—the grips, the cameramen, everybody.” Then it was time to reshoot the scene, with close-ups and cutaway shots, for coverage. “He’d do the scene,” Gottlieb continued, “and the laugh that he was used to getting wasn’t there. No fault of Richard, but everybody had heard the joke ten times. They were professionals. So in an effort to win the crew back, Richard would start ad-libbing. And he would always win them back.” A reporter for Mother Jones saw the crew “us[ing] sweaters to stifle their laughter at [Richard’s] elaborations and taradiddles”; given Richard’s refusal to repeat himself, she thought, the “script supervisor’s pencil must be down to a nubbin.” Schultz later said, “My hardest job on [Which Way Is Up?] was keeping the crew from laughing and spoiling the sound, or keeping the actors from cracking up.” Richard, he judged, was an actor who “can do the same scene ten different ways—all of them right.”

  When Richard was done with it, Which Way Is Up? was more anarchic and unpredictable than The Seduction of Mimi. It still had the bones of a political film, as its creators had intended, but in its guts it was a sex comedy, about the spectacles unleashed by human appetites. Richard’s Leroy Jones is a man at the mercy of his impulses, a chameleon whose foolishness takes on the color of each world he passes through. With his wife, Annie Mae, at the beginning of the film, he’s a fool for sex. When she lies in bed with her back to him, he wheedles her to uncross her ankles and serenades her with “Just a little lovin’, early in the mornin’”; rebuffed, he tortures himself by eavesdropping on the lovemaking between his father and stepmother in the next room. With his lover Vanetta, the liberated woman who supports the farm workers and subsists on a diet of carrot juice and organic food, Leroy is a fool for romance. He tries to jog alongside her until he plotzes headfirst into the ground; he dresses in flowing caftans that match hers; he promises his undying fidelity to her. And with “Sister Sarah,” the wife of the preacher who has given Annie Mae a child, he’s a fool for revenge—the fool of fools. He breaks his promise to Vanetta by courting Sister Sarah extravagantly, and the full weight of his confused life crashes down upon him. In trying to have it all, he loses everything.

  With Which Way Is Up?, Richard finally had license to be as sharp, vulgar, and as outré on-screen as he wished. He was free, as Newsweek later put it, to “gobble[] up his triple parts like a happy hog let loose in the garden.” There’s no Hollywood film that better testifies to his gifts as a comedian. In hilarious moments of physical comedy, he showed how he’d begun, in the 1950s, by studying the examples of Sid Caesar and Jerry Lewis. As Leroy, he scrunches up his face to make himself unrecognizable to a goon; as the Reverend Lennox Thomas, he sways with gleeful self-love while performing a guitar solo next to his pulpit; as Rufus, he tumbles like a bowling pin in the back of a pickup truck, his eyes wide with surprise yet flashing with anger. At the same time, the film revealed Richard as a disciple of Redd Foxx and other older black comedians of the Chitlin Circuit. In the roles of Rufus and the Reverend especially, he exhibits their ability to play with a cartoon of a character, to give an exaggerated performance but keep the language razor-edged and nimble.

  And then there was all that was original to Richard’s stand-up and that charged his performance as Leroy, the working-class everyman who can detect everyone’s bullshit but his own. Sometimes Leroy acts dumb because that’s how the powerful want him to act; sometimes he acts dumb because his appetites have led him astray; but even in his foolishness there is a winsome desire to figure out who he truly is, to solve the mystery of his potential. As one reviewer put it, Leroy might have been “a total heel, a coward, and an opportunist,” but he was also “a personification . . . of our own venal (and human) instincts.” We laugh not at the mayhem that Leroy causes—and that the film does not minimize—but at the all-too-human confusions within his character. Leroy wants to be both sensitive and macho, a man of the people and his own boss; he pulls on every string and watches his life unravel from all sides. Somehow Richard managed, as a performer, to stand within that confusion enough to make it sympathetic and stand apart from it enough to make it laughable.

  When Which Way Is Up? wrapped in early March, Richard could not have been more happy with the film or the people who had helped him make it. He took out a two-page ad in the trade papers, thanking by name the 117 members of the production, from studio executive Thom Mount to the film’s electricians, prop men, and makeup artists. He asked its still photographer for an eight-by-ten copy of every photograph she’d taken over the course of the production—all twenty-five hundred of them—so as to affix every aspect of the experience in his memory. “I’m going to save them for the rest of my life,” he said. “This film is the most special thing I’ve ever done.”

  Whoever tuned into NBC at nine o’clock on May 5, 1977, saw this: Richard pacing through the studio in a tuxedo, musing fitfully over how he might program his own TV special. Within the space of an hour, he was beset by all manner of black folks. He was thumped by a churchwoman until he promised to give a guest slot to her televangelist pastor; waylaid by a fan who informed him that his special would flop without her favorite music group; challenged by two kids to stay away from clowns and offer something “socially relevant”; and, lastly, browbeaten by a posse of militants who demanded that he deliver a message of “black unity and dignity and pride” through a humorless script of their own devising. On The Richard Pryor Special?, Richard played himself as the befuddled artist, helpless before the demands of all the people he had to answer to. He was a quizzical fellow in the country of the confident.

  In point of fact, while working on his first prime-time special, Richard had been fully in command. In the writers’ room, he had fielded ideas—from his right-hand man, Paul Mooney; from head writer, Rocco Urbisci—then played with them until they were his own. “Every time a writer would come up with something,” director John Moffitt remembered, “Richard would turn it around and make it better. So ultimately everything filtered through Richard.” He was determined to follow his own nose, to deliver a TV special that tossed variety show formulas out the window. As with his work on Lily Tomlin’s specials, he wanted his audience to think, not just slap their knees. When Mooney suggested adding Maya Angelou to a sketch centered on Richard’s wino, Richard embraced the idea—and kept embracing it even as Angelou composed a hard-hitting monologue, from the perspective of the wino’s wife, about the humiliations her husband had endured and then inflicted on her through his abuse. For its first seven minutes, Richard’s Willie is a wino in the tradition of stage drunkards; for its last four minutes, under the spell of Angelou’s monologue, he is an alcoholic who tears his wife’s heart to shreds. There is no effort to smooth out the difference or reconcile the viewer’s conflicting emotions. “The comedy turns into a touching essay, with reverberations within reverberations,” noted the New York Times.

  Angelou’s monologue wasn’t typical for the special, but then again, nothing was: the tone of the program was unpredictable in the extreme. The special could be dreamy, as when a group of beautiful black women danced languorously in a soft-focus adaptation of Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem Sweeties.” It could be high-concept absurd, as when an announcer presented “And the Pips”—the Pips without Gladys Knight—and the tuxedoed backup singers performed by themselves with impeccable nonchalance, the camera bouncing between them and an unattended microphone. It could be folks
y-absurd through Mudbone, here materializing as a gray-haired NBC shoeshine who related coming out to California with a traveling circus of black midgets. Or it could be confusingly offbeat, as when Richard played Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, offering a rebuttal to news reports of his derangement before shooting the announcer and ordering the execution, by machine gun, of a roomful of NBC executives.

  The machine-gunning of NBC execs was just one way that Richard’s program took aim at television itself. The question mark in the special’s title was well-earned; Richard was willing to question everything. For the special’s cold opening, John Belushi played the captain of a slave ship, lustily cracking his whip while his shackled slaves row his boat forward. The captain selects one of his captives for some unnamed task, but the slave prefers to leap into the ocean and be eaten by sharks. “He got off easy,” the captain says, and seizes another slave, played by Richard. Now he names the terrible fate for which the slave has been chosen: “You’re going to NBC, you’re going to do your own special!” Richard’s face convulses in horror: “No!” Richard enjoyed toying with the notion that being a crossover star was a fate worse than death.

  In his televangelist sketch, Richard took aim at the crossover urge from a different angle. As the Right Reverend James L. White, Richard arrived wearing an afro the size of Rhode Island, a white cape that belonged in the wardrobe of James Brown, and a white jumpsuit sparkling with gold sequins. Lit up with self-satisfaction, he danced down to a phone bank and delivered a fund-raising sermon on the wonder of money—when it boogalooed into his bank account and his alone. Reverend White was a glittering and glorious fraud, mocking those who told him to unload his hotels, boats, and flashy clothes: “That’s easy for you to say because you have none of those things.” And the surest sign of his fraudulence was the endpoint of his sermon, in which he went after the “crossover bucks,” “the Billy Graham dollar.” He petitioned to whites not on behalf of the “crippled children” or the “black orphans of Watts,” appeals that were fund-raising duds. Instead, he asked whites to support the “BTAM,” the Back to Africa Movement—and the phones rang off the hook. For all his soulful mannerisms, Reverend White was happy to exploit the idea of a black-free America if it could line his pockets. His last name was no coincidence.

  From one angle, Richard took absolutely nothing seriously on his special. He spoofed militants and fellow travelers, preachers and soul sisters, Idi Amin and slave drivers, himself and the network that had written him a fat check. From another angle, Richard was absolutely serious about his commitments—as serious as a firing squad. There was nothing ironic about the Maya Angelou monologue or the Langston Hughes adaptation, which together honored the grit and beauty of black women; nothing ironic about the sketch in which a multiethnic ensemble of kids sang the Stevie Wonder refrain “this world was made for all men.” It was a strange and unusual balance, this blend of irreverence and political seriousness, and Richard was willing to fight to achieve it. When John Belushi, the special’s lone guest star, felt himself upstaged by the actor Falstaff Wilde and threatened to leave the special, Richard told him simply, “John, I’m not changing anything. I hope you do the show.” Head writer Rocco Urbisci observed that once Richard thought a sketch was right, he was completely committed to it. “It’s not about your ego, it’s about the piece,” Richard would say. “If you are contributing to the piece, then screw your ego. Just do the job.”

  Which Way Is Up? and The Richard Pryor Special? spoke to a unique moment in Richard’s career. On-screen he was dramatizing the traps of success, the lures of “selling out” for the highest dollar or strongest ego boost. Meanwhile, off-screen he was trying to be as professional as a banker, and coming close enough to celebrate some of the biggest paydays of his life. He had found a way if not to bite the hands that fed him, then at least to nibble on them with pleasure. It all seemed to be working out beautifully. NBC was so happy with The Richard Pryor Special? that it asked him to deliver a series of hour-long programs, at the rate of three hundred thousand dollars each, and offered him the extraordinary sweetener of two million dollars to remain exclusively with the network for the next five years. Richard’s manager, David Franklin, having driven a hard bargain, compared Richard with the kings of TV comedy: “We wanted Richard to have an exclusive personal services contract with the network similar to what Bob Hope, Jack Benny, and Milton Berle have had. Richard is the first Black performer to have such a deal.” Richard celebrated the deal by presenting Franklin with the gift of a $52,000 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, complete with red leather interior.

  It was a time to be generous and repay old debts. For Mother’s Day weekend, Richard traveled back home to Peoria and gave his grandmother Marie the keys to a three-bedroom ranch house he’d bought for her in the suburb of Bartonville. He dressed in a suit and watched his fifteen-year-old son, Richard Jr., in a school play; he posed for Jet with Juliette Whittaker, his drama teacher from the Carver Center, both of them holding the Emmy he’d given her three years earlier. Marie exulted in how Richard had followed the advice she’d given him years before: “Now, baby, look. You’re going up and you can come down a lot faster than you come up, so don’t forget where you come from. Peoria is your home, these are your friends around here.” “Richard Pryor Proves You Can Always Go Home Again,” Jet sang in its headline.

  The one jangly note to Richard’s trip was supplied by the woman on his arm—who was not Pam Grier. As recently as March, Richard had told a reporter, “I adore [Pam Grier], she has meant so much to me. . . . I am thinking seriously about marriage”; the two would continue to figure as a couple in magazines through September. But their relationship had frayed. A clue to their difficulties was supplied by a response Richard gave, around the time of their trip to Barbados, to the question “What about women’s rights?” “As far as I’m concerned,” Richard told the interviewer, “somebody’s got to be in charge. I’m the man and I’m in charge. That’s the way I am and every woman that is mine will do what I say, my way.” His competitiveness with Pam could take extreme forms. After Pam beat him in tennis, he refused to talk to her for a day; when she gave him pointers, he barked back, “I’m supposed to take instructions and have you beat my ass too? No way.”

  From Richard’s point of view, Pam was too career-minded, too self-absorbed. “I was put off by how much I thought Pam believed that stardom belonged to her,” Richard reflected later, with some regret. “In my head there was only one Numero Uno, and it wasn’t her.” From Pam’s perspective, Richard was still an unknown quantity, a former addict who might yet relapse. When Richard pressed her to move in with him, she told him, “I don’t feel safe living here yet because I don’t know who you are.” As Pam took her distance from Richard, the structure she’d brought to his life began to dissolve. There were fewer healthy breakfasts, fewer morning tennis matches, and fewer drug-free afternoons.

  In Peoria, Richard was instead accompanied by Deboragh McGuire, a young black model whom he’d dated a year earlier; he introduced her to family and friends as his fiancée. Unlike Pam Grier, a proudly independent spirit, McGuire was accustomed to leaning on her man. When he met her, Richard recalled, she had been supported for years by a wealthy, older white man. Now, in Peoria, she was with a black version of the same.

  Juliette Whittaker observed the two of them together and asked Richard, “Why her?”

  “She’s young,” Richard said. “She loves me and she’s young.”

  “All right, if that’s your criteria,” said Whittaker.

  Whittaker tried to make conversation with McGuire but found her standoffish, always slipping away from a one-on-one chat. “She was afraid of me,” Whittaker concluded later. “She was afraid that if I didn’t like her, I would influence him. Why she thought I wouldn’t like her is something only she could answer, because I approached her with the greatest neutrality.”

  The film Blue Collar, which preoccupied Richard from mid-May through mid-July 1977, was a profoundly dou
ble-edged experience. Artistically, it was a triumph, the culmination of Richard’s quest to discover his capacities as a serious actor. Personally, it was a catastrophe, breaking his spirit and throwing him back into the hole of his cocaine addiction. Perhaps the most perplexing aspect of Blue Collar, for Richard, was that the genius behind it and the person who crushed his spirit were one and the same: screenwriter Paul Schrader, who was making his directorial debut with the film.

  Schrader was a uniquely seductive and unnerving presence within the art colony of New Hollywood. He had grown up in a hardcore midwestern fundamentalist household where whippings were common and worldly entertainments forbidden; it was only as a junior in high school that he sneaked into his first movie. In his twenties, after leaving behind the priesthood for film school, Schrader became an unusual mix of stern Calvinist and voluptuary aesthete. Fascinated with the spectacle of fire and brimstone, of punishers and punishment, he wrote some of the most memorably lurid scenes in 1970s cinema—a hand pushed down a sink’s garbage disposal and cut into pieces (Rolling Thunder); a cabbie on a murderous, blood-soaked rampage through a grimy New York City brothel (Taxi Driver). As an artist he was drawn, like Richard, to the darker corners of experience, but unlike Richard, he came to them with a heavy load of guilt and without the inclination to laugh at the inky abyss. His life and art were tightly coiled. On the butcher-block table where he wrote Taxi Driver, Schrader kept two props: a Smith & Wesson .38 (loaded when guests were not present) and a crown of thorns pounded out of brass, with thorns sharp enough to prick the skin and draw blood. A depressive and a control freak, he had gone through a period when he talked of blowing his brains out with the Smith & Wesson through a towel wrapped around his head. He liked big gestures but hated big messes.