Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  Meanwhile, Richard’s personal life was as vexed as his professional life. Around the time of The Richard Pryor Special? he had been balancing three different women: Pam Grier, Deboragh McGuire, and aspiring actress Lucy Saroyan. Once, all three of them had converged at his home to meet his grandmother Marie, who was visiting, and had sat chatting with her in his den while Richard hid in his bedroom like a little boy. Afterward, Richard asked Marie which one he should marry. The queen maker of the Pryor family tossed out the premise of the question. “I wouldn’t give a nickel for any of those bitches,” she said.

  By August, Richard’s love life had become still more crowded and confused. Pam remained in the picture, albeit at the edges of the frame; Deboragh had become his “fiancée,” then had fallen away, but was alive in his mind; Lucy was working to remodel his home and was still enmeshed in his affairs; a new woman, Lucy’s friend and assistant Jennifer Lee, had caught his eye; and then there were many more women who were partners for a night. When Jennifer Lee began working on Richard’s home remodel, she noticed that, on most mornings, a different woman would straggle out of his bedroom and out of his house, never to be seen again. For his part, producer-writer Rocco Urbisci remembered that, every day on the set of The Richard Pryor Show, a new woman would materialize at his office, announcing that Richard had promised her a job as a production assistant. Urbisci eventually created “Satin Doll,” a production number that required comely ladies as dancers in its jazz nightclub, in order to put this company of women to work as extras on the TV show.

  Somehow Richard kept up appearances on the publicity tour that he undertook in August to promote the release of Greased Lightning, the first film he’d carried. To the outside world, he was not a ticking bomb but a “new black superstar,” “one of Hollywood’s hottest properties.” If Silver Streak had sparked mainstream America’s curiosity with Richard, Greased Lightning eased him into its good graces. Ultimately, producer Hannah Weinstein had created, over the objections of director Michael Schultz, a quite old-fashioned piece of Americana, a heartwarming Capraesque fable about a little guy from a small town who bucks the system with the help of friends and family. Time’s Richard Schickel wrote, in a representative review, that “it is impossible to believe that any real life could so unerringly follow the classic lines of so many biopix past. The cheerfully determined young man struggling to support his family while trying to fulfill his ambitions, the opposition from the Establishment in his field, the early heartbreaks, the ultimate triumph—all this is the familiar stuff of a hundred celluloid dreams.”

  Yet it was also true that Richard put a wry spin on those old formulas. He gave Greased Lightning a bottom note of black pride and inflected the movie with just enough of his loose-limbed energy to make it an invigorating ride. “There is not a more likable movie currently on view than Greased Lightning,” concluded Schickel in the same review that noted its slavish embrace of biopic conventions. Filmgoers agreed: the movie went on to gross almost triple its four-million-dollar budget. Warner Bros. took notice, too: the studio signed Richard to a contract for a minimum of four films at a million dollars per film, an impressive pendant to his lucrative contract with Universal.

  In interviews of the time, Richard managed to radiate an alternately humble and embattled confidence. He was an artist following his own path, whatever the consequences. Sure, “NBC would love to make me a household word. . . . But I’m not interested in being a household word. I’m interested in my art.” And yes, Warner Bros. had signed him to a multipicture deal, but “[i]f I disappoint them, it’ll become a one-picture deal.” With so much at stake, then, was he taking a risk by splitting himself between comedy and more serious acting jobs? “Hell, the atom split. Why shouldn’t I?” he asked.

  At this peak moment of his career, he still carried within him the sense of being an underdog—still felt as if he was flirting with oblivion. “Hey, you know what I feel like?” he told the New York Times. “You ever drop a dime and can’t find it? That’s me, the dime you can’t find. Rolling down the road, and landing in the hobo’s pocket.” He lit up mischievously at the comparison. It tickled him to think of himself as a hobo’s treasure, something lost and barely found.

  Never edit yourself in these meetings,” Richard instructed his writers, in the conference room at NBC’s Burbank studios. “Please don’t do that.” His writers followed Richard’s gonzo lead: the four episodes of The Richard Pryor Show constitute one of the oddest cultural experiments ever to be sponsored by a major network. NBC’s Dick Ebersol, the young executive who had worn down Richard’s resistance to TV through an extended charm offensive, later turned on the very show he’d labored so hard to bring into existence. By the time Richard delivered the fourth episode, Ebersol told the show’s director, lividly, “I’ll never work with him again.”

  And yet: Ebersol couldn’t have asked for a stiffer blast of fresh air in NBC’s prime-time lineup. The New York Times judged it a “cause for wonder” that “so much social complexity could be presented as comedy to a mass audience.” The Washington Post praised The Richard Pryor Show as “the most perilously inventive comedy hour to hit prime time in years.” At its best, Richard’s series was weirdly riveting and brilliant. At its worst, it was unpredictable to the point of seeming purposeless. And sometimes its best and its worst were one and the same. TV critics couldn’t agree on which sketches worked, perhaps because few of them “worked” in the standard ways. A sketch that one critic hailed as a “devastating, bittersweet episode—beautifully played, beautifully designed” could register, with another critic, as mere “icky wistfulness.” Richard was following his muse and sowing bewilderment in his wake.

  In this experiment, Richard was supported by a multiracial ensemble recruited by Paul Mooney from the pool of stand-ups at the Comedy Store, Richard’s preferred club for trying out new material. Some in the ensemble—Robin Williams, Sandra Bernhard, Tim Reid (WKRP in Cincinnati), Martha Warfield (Night Court)—later achieved some measure of fame in film or on TV; at the time, all of them were scuffling comedians. “He loved them,” said director John Moffitt of the feeling between Richard and the rest of the cast. “He tried to give those comics as much presence as possible. And they loved him.” For Richard, the dynamic harkened back to his apprentice days at New York’s Improv, where he larked onstage until the early hours of the morning, riffing and rolling. Tim Reid remembered a feeling of pure discovery on set: “We came in with no structure, no rules. Most of the stuff was improv. We would have a theme, and we would all come out, and we would just go. And they would run the tape. Sometimes the tape would run for thirty minutes and then Moffitt had to figure out how to get a sketch out of it.” The mood on set was devil-may-care—and yet the actors knew that the devil did, in fact, care. Reid continued: “We all knew that we were too far. We were beyond the point of the network being able to accept and absorb what we were doing. You know, they sent spies on the set. They had guys dressed in street clothes to come to our rehearsals to try and find out what the hell we were doing. And we would always pick them out. We would laugh and make fun of them.”

  It’s not hard to imagine what worried the cautious-minded at NBC. In “Star Wars Bar,” the first sketch of the first show, Richard dropped Mudbone into the Star Wars cantina, where he was a bartender ministering to a pack of intergalactic irregulars. (Director George Lucas loved Richard’s comedy so much that he loaned the show the actual masks from the film.) The sketch brought the raw atmosphere of the Famous Door, the Pryor family’s bar in 1940s Peoria, to a galaxy far, far, away. Brushing up against a troglodyte in a monk’s hood, Richard’s bartender declares, “You look just like a nigger from Detroit I know.” The troglodyte grunts and motions to his companion, an imp with a bald and horned head. “Oh, I see,” returns Richard. “Well, why don’t you go upstairs and get a room? . . . If that’s your type, well alright.” Later, a huge, tentacled creature starts devouring Richard, who calls desperately for his bouncer, Fuzz
, to remove him from its grip. Rescued, he suggests to Fuzz, “Take him in the back room. And while you’re back there, get a little octopussy.” Suffice it to say that, over on ABC, the Fonz was not making double entendres about interspecies sex.

  In the show, Richard was drawn to explore the full spectrum of off-color humor: the silly, the risqué, the politically pungent, the macabre. In a spoof of spaghetti Westerns, a smart-alecky villain asks Richard’s gunslinger, “How’s your ass?” To which Richard replies, after a pregnant pause, “You mean my donkey? It wasn’t nice of you boys to shoot my donkey.” In “The 40th President of the United States,” Richard played the first black president at a press conference, trying to project an air of competence. The sketch begins as a satire of political doubletalk (the neutron bomb is a “neo-pacifist weapon”), but evolves into an exercise in ever-more-improbable racial fantasies: under President Pryor, the jazz of Miles Davis will be piped into space; there will be more black NFL quarterbacks; Huey Newton will be head of the FBI. White reporters wriggle in their seats. A southern newsman uses his question to launch the ultimate insult—“Now, after your tenure, if your mother goes back to being a maid, right, will your momma do my house?”—and the presidential press conference degenerates into a miniature race riot, with black and white reporters at one another’s throats.

  And then there was Bo Jaws, a faith healer preying on the poor, sick, and maimed in a bayou tent revival. “Let Bo Jaws handle it!” shrieked Richard, in a Rastafarian fright wig and with a crazed gleam in his eye, in the strangest sketch of the show’s premiere. “Handling it,” for Bo Jaws, means pitching a cripple out of a wheelchair and telling her to crawl; molesting a pair of Siamese twins (they complained they never had any fun); and putting a brown paper bag over the head of an ugly woman. Like the Reverend James L. White from Richard’s TV special, Bo Jaws is a fraud, but he has been so consumed by his own fraudulence that there’s no longer any daylight between him and his act. The sketch closes with Bo Jaws exorcising the devil within himself by slicing his body three times with a knife, wrapping the “devil’s serpent” around his neck, and kissing a live snake. (Urbisci swapped out the fake one used in rehearsal, unbeknownst to Richard.) Bo Jaws’s congregation moans and writhes in ecstatic worship as the sketch fades out; there’s no end in sight to their pain. “As a vitriolic lampoon of pseudo-religious fervor this is not particularly funny,” wrote the Washington Post appreciatively, “but it is unquestionably alarming.” The sketch made a singular impression: comedian Dave Chappelle, who had his own struggles with television as a medium, later told Urbisci that it was his favorite.

  As Richard was pushing his show to the edge of what network TV might handle, he was also pushing his own body to the brink—drinking and snorting just as he had predicted. He had a habit of filling up a water glass with vodka (no ice) and draining it over the course of the meeting in the writers’ room. Cocaine, though it could be found everywhere on set, was especially plentiful in his dressing room. Sometimes he finished the day passed out on the floor. While filming “Star Wars Bar,” he delayed getting into his makeup, then was so blotto with the cameras rolling that he spoiled much of a first run-through of the scene. John Moffitt pleaded with Richard for one more take; Richard felt he couldn’t do it, then reluctantly agreed. A few days later, when Moffitt showed Richard a meticulously edited version of the sketch, Richard was shocked. “I don’t remember doing it,” he told Moffitt. He had ad-libbed, with fitful brilliance, then blacked out.

  “Let Bo Jaws handle it!”: the twisted imagination of The Richard Pryor Show. (Courtesy of the author)

  And yet it would be wrong to conclude that Richard was less than fully invested in his show. When informed that the first episode had run eighty-five thousand dollars over budget—in part because, with “Satin Doll,” he confected a glossy twenty-minute mini-movie complete with song-and-dance numbers in period style—Richard turned to his manager and deadpanned: “write a check.” The check was written.

  Though Dick Ebersol tried to protect the first episode of The Richard Pryor Show from network interference, there was a limit to Ebersol’s power, and Richard breached it with the visual joke set to open the program. As with his special, Richard wanted to launch his show by making fun of TV itself. At first he and his writers came up with the idea of NBC executives pressing Dr. Frankenstein to operate on Richard and a white man. The doctor would hook up their brains and, after a mysterious medical procedure, the white man would rise and talk jive; Richard would rise and say, in a voice closer to Andy Williams’s than his own, “I’m so glad to be on TV.” Richard ditched the Frankenstein idea in favor of a more pointed treatment of what exactly network TV threatened to do to him:

  RICHARD [in close up]: Good evening, ladies and gentleman, and welcome to The Richard Pryor Show. . . . People say, “Well, how can you have a show? You’ve got to compromise, you’ve got to give up everything!”

  Is that a joke or what? Well, look at me. I’m standing here naked.

  [Camera pulls back to take in the top half of Richard’s body; he’s wearing no clothes.]

  I’ve given up absolutely nothing.

  [Camera pulls back to take in Richard’s entire body; instead of having genitalia, he’s as smooth and sexless as a doll.]

  So enjoy the show!

  [Richard breaks into a wide grin; theme music starts up; Richard starts wincing; his grin now looks tortured.]

  NBC’s West Coast office had originally approved the segment in a slightly less explicit form—without the lines about “standing here naked” and “not giving up anything”—but it refused to air the final version. The show’s producers appealed the decision by sending the video to the New York office of NBC chief censor Herminio Traviesas, who was categorical in his judgment: the sketch was unacceptable in any form; it had to be cut. A vice president of broadcast standards explained the logic of the decision: “We don’t do genital jokes. . . . [W]e just think television is not quite ready for that. It’s a matter of either compromising our principles or his production company realizing its responsibility to present programming that is suitable for television.”

  Richard was in no mood for compromise, either. Four years earlier, he had seen Lily Tomlin locked in a similar skirmish, fighting for the integrity of her own show, but while Tomlin battled her network as if in a chess game, Richard’s preferred strategy was to threaten to go nuclear. On the Monday before his first show was set to air, he held a press conference at NBC studios in which he screened the censored segment and said he was prepared to walk away from the series unless NBC reconsidered its decision: “if we can’t find a reasonable means of dealing with it, then Tuesday night’s (taping of the second episode) probably will be the last. Everybody will say I’m crazy if I quit, that I’m the crazy nigger who ran off from NBC, but this is stifling my creativity and I can’t work under these conditions.” When a journalist asked whether NBC shouldn’t have some control over what it aired, Richard broke up the audience with his reply: “They do, and that’s why they’re Number 3.” Over the next two days, NBC didn’t budge, and neither did Richard: he refused to create an alternative opening segment.

  Still, the offending segment did air—on the local CBS affiliate in LA, which covered the dustup in its early-evening and late-night newscasts. The press coverage favored Richard. “Maybe if NBC hired Farrah Fawcett-Majors they’d ask her to cut her hair,” wrote Washington Post critic Tom Shales. “Maybe they’d give Nureyev a desk job. Maybe if they reunited The Beatles it would be on condition that they promise not to sing. It makes as much sense as giving Richard Pryor a prime-time hour of comedy and then expecting him to be safe, sane, and squeaky-clean.”

  As always for Richard, censorship was felt as both a political and a personal affront. He told Jet, “I’d like to get the names of these people who say they’re protecting the public by trying to prevent my form of communication. That’s a political decision, not a moral one.” “It’s an insult to me,” he
told Shales. “[W]e don’t intend to do any further work for NBC if we can’t get it on the air the way we do it. They’re treating us like children.” A more judicious soul might have looked at the first episode of The Richard Pryor Show and marveled at how much—references to “octopussy” and a threesome with Siamese twins!—had slipped past the censor’s blank gaze. But Richard had an all-or-nothing approach to his art; he would not back down, even though the battles took their toll. “All of us could use some bandages,” said a NBC executive. “If each program causes this much consternation, I don’t see how any of us can continue.”

  The following week was, relatively speaking, a cooling-off period for Richard and NBC. The second episode of The Richard Pryor Show did not generate another battle between him and the network; it was outré but not risqué. It also gave the network a sense of how little it could use one episode of The Richard Pryor Show to predict the next. “Every piece that Richard did was different,” director John Moffitt observed. “You will find that in every variety show there’s a safe corner, we go to this little element week after week . . . and that never happened with Richard. And I don’t think it would have happened if we did the ten shows or more.” Averse to the usual variety show formulas, Richard had no interest in recruiting “special guest stars” or in generating the sort of easy chatter that other shows used as filler or segues. His show was structured instead like a collage, with the viewer left to make his or her own connections between the parts and the whole. NBC’s executives might have questioned the entertainment value of such a collage-like approach, but its censors put up no roadblocks.

  The one sketch that did rile the network was also the most memorable segment of the second show: a satire of rock fandom so disturbing that it was cousin to the midnight movie emanations of Richard’s Berkeley period. In “Black Death,” Richard plays the leader of a glam-metal band, modeled after KISS, whose musicians make their stage entrance by popping out of coffins. His bandmates are ghoulish monks in cowls, robes, and white pancake makeup. Richard sports a thick reddish mane of hair, teased out with spikes, and his body is encased in a skintight purple and metallic costume that is at once ludicrous and heavily armored. After strutting his stuff onstage, Richard’s singer proceeds to exterminate his audience; the sketch is about overkill, in every sense of the word. “I’ve got some reds, they’re bad for you,” he sings in a voice that is halfway between Dylan and Hendrix, then throws bags of poison pills at his audience. Bodies fall limp to the ground. Richard’s singer sprays toxic gas at the audience, and more bodies fall. Then he machine-guns the crowd until there is no one left standing. All the while, Black Death kicks out the jams, and every audience member bops until he or she drops. Surveying the final pile of corpses, Richard’s singer mutters the stock countercultural response to the world’s strangeness: “Far out.” But there was nothing stock to the sketch. It took the logic of heavy metal’s fascination with the dark side and stretched it to the grimmest of conclusions.