Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  Richard’s wedding, on September 22, 1977, was both a product of his inner chaos and an attempt to manage it. For over two years, he and the twenty-five-year-old Deboragh McGuire had been on-again, off-again lovers. In August, during one of their frequent “off” periods, Richard had dreamed of prying her from the grip of her other lovers, of possessing her once and for all. Yet he was curiously passive, relying on the mechanisms of his celebrity to reconnect with her. In a late-summer interview with Jet, he used the magazine to put out a feeler in her direction. “There is a very special lady out there who I’m still really in love with. It’s tough trying to get over her,” he said, hoping that Deboragh might read the interview and discern that he was talking about her.

  In the meantime, Richard was drawn to the sharp, tough-minded Jennifer Lee, who was supervising his home renovation. He felt that she’d “seen things,” that she’d tapped into experiences beyond him. In fact, Jennifer had grown up in an affluent pocket of upstate New York, the daughter of a lawyer father who defended civil rights workers and a mother who traced her lineage back to white abolitionist John Brown. Jennifer came by her tough-mindedness honestly. During her childhood, her mother had suffered violent mood swings, and self-medicated with Miltown and cocktails. In the early 1970s, the family had fragmented, her mother institutionalized after a psychotic break, her father traveling to Europe to find himself. Jennifer had been floating since dropping out of Manhattan’s Fitch College—a little modeling here, some acting there, and, according to her memoir, a full dose of the freedom and heartache that arrived with the sexual revolution. In her film work, she carried herself with a hard-won, slightly aloof intelligence.

  Richard approached Jennifer gingerly. For their first date, he invited her to a political fund-raiser for UN ambassador Andrew Young at the Beverly Wilshire hotel, a subdued and high-class affair; the two held hands under the table. On the limo ride home with David Franklin and his black date, the evening turned sour when Franklin’s companion questioned whether Jennifer could ever truly understand a black man like Richard. At the door to Jennifer’s bungalow, Richard tried to make things right. He brought her closer, kissing her, and opened up: “I’m sorry for what she said in the car. I don’t know what you’ve heard or read about me. But I don’t see colors. I don’t believe in prejudice. We’re all people, you know? That’s hard enough.”

  At summer’s end, Richard’s thoughts on the state of his love life were captured in a question-and-answer session with the audience of his TV show. Asked if he had plans to marry in the near future, he felt free to be indecently casual: “If the pussy good,” he quipped. When a black woman asked him to divulge one of his “wildest dreams,” he replied—perhaps with his budding romance with Jennifer in mind—“One of my wildest dreams is to be able to fuck a white woman and y’all don’t fuck with me.” Deboragh did not appear to be on his radar.

  Then, around the time of the Hollywood Bowl benefit, the issue of Jet carrying Richard’s appeal to a “very special lady” arrived on newsstands—“like a drumbeat going out,” in Richard’s words. Deboragh heard the drumbeat and phoned him. “I told her,” Richard said later, “we couldn’t go on any longer the way we had been and that we had to get married.” Deboragh hesitated at Richard’s proposal; she felt she needed to think it over. Richard hung up, got hammered on cocaine and vodka, worked himself into a lather, then drove to her home and banged on her door. When he got no answer, he screamed for her through it. The door opened a crack; Deboragh refused to let him in. Several days later, she yielded. “Okay, you win,” she told him over the phone. “I’ll marry you.”

  The wedding was scheduled in a few days’ time, as if both of them were uncertain they could hold together their engagement for much longer. Richard worried about disturbing the fragile equilibrium that had led her to agree to marry him. Slated to start filming the title role on Motown’s The Wiz just after his scheduled wedding, he told Wiz producer Rob Cohen that he had to back out of the upcoming shoot in New York; he needed to give his bride her honeymoon. Cohen, who had befriended Richard on Bingo Long, begged him to reconsider: “We can’t shoot without you. If you don’t show up, that’s a week down on the movie. We’re so over budget. We’re all going to die.” Richard refused to budge. Cohen promised to get back to him with some sort of workaround.

  While Richard played the devoted husband-to-be in his conversation with his producer, his commitment to Deboragh wavered in the company of Jennifer Lee. The night before his wedding, he stood in his bedroom with Jennifer, the two of them admiring an antique child’s desk she had placed there. The desk made him feel like a happy kid, he told her. Their eyes locked in silence. “I’m feeling something dangerous I shouldn’t be feeling,” he confessed, then pulled her into their first kiss since his engagement to Deboragh.

  She asked, with genuine perplexity, “You’re getting married, right?”

  “Supposed to be,” Richard said.

  “So how come you’re kissing me like this?”

  “I guess I want it all.”

  Soon the two were kissing in the bathroom, with Jennifer pressed against the black marble. The bell at the gate rang, the intercom crackled, “It’s me, Deboragh”—and the electric circuit of their connection was broken. Jennifer ran out of the bathroom and through the living room to the kitchen, where she collided with a tetchy Deboragh, who was absorbed in her own woes. “I’ve got the worst hangover,” she complained. “Never again.”

  A sudden affair: Richard Pryor and Deboragh McGuire at their post-wedding reception. (Courtesy of AP Photo)

  The next morning, bride and groom were joined in holy matrimony, and in total intoxication. Richard showed up drunk; Deboragh arrived an hour late and, according to Richard, “had to be revived after taking too many Quaaludes.” One of Richard’s daughters wore black to convey her thoughts on the union. The ceremony took place at his home, with little effort made to disguise the fact that it was a construction site. Richard and Deboragh recited their vows surrounded by unfaced cabinets, torn-up floors, and stacks of lumber. “Thank God you were drunk when I got there,” Richard remembered Deboragh saying afterward, “because if you’d seen what I looked like . . .”

  For their wedding reception, Richard and Deboragh traveled to NBC studios in Burbank, where Richard was responsible for wrapping up the third episode of his TV show. Earlier, producer Rocco Urbisci had made preparations for a party with confetti and a cake; he’d assumed Pam Grier was the bride, so the cake carried the frosted message “Congratulations Richard and Pam.” Apparently Grier, too, had thought she was in contention to be the bride: Urbisci recalled fielding, on the morning of the wedding, a phone call from an incensed Grier, in which she explained that she was going to visit a certain “motherfucker” and “shoot his ass.” Urbisci notified security; Grier was kept at bay. But he forgot about the infelicitous inscription on the cake. When the bride and groom arrived at the studio and the cake was brought out, Urbisci had to grab some roses from a prop table and hurriedly scatter them over the cake to cover the name “Pam.”

  On the occasion of his third formal marriage, Richard told the cast members of his show, “This is the first time I’ve been married—in my heart.” Deboragh, a first-time bride, owned up to her bewilderment at the speed of things. “I’m still in shock,” she said, her eyes glassy. “It’s unbelievable . . . I got him.”

  After finishing the taping of his show, Richard went with his bride to the airport, where they were treated to the workaround that Wiz producer Rob Cohen had orchestrated, with Richard’s permission. A private jet stood waiting for them, its cabin transformed into an airborne honeymoon suite. Seats were cleared out to make room for a large bed; candles, white balloons, and white chocolate set the mood; curtains were closed. The newlyweds took off on a red-eye for Oz, via LaGuardia Airport.

  The next day in New York City, Cohen telephoned Richard about picking him up for rehearsal, and got no answer. He ran over to Richard’s hotel room an
d pounded on the door, and received the same nonresponse. At last, a bleary-eyed Richard arrived at the door and joined Cohen for the drive over to the rehearsal space at the Hotel St. George, in Brooklyn Heights. In the limo, Richard brooded; his wedding night hadn’t lifted him out of his dark mood. He vented to Cohen about how NBC had promised him freedom and yet censored him to bits.

  Cohen tried to convince Richard that The Wiz would be different, that there was fabulous energy on the set, a wildness of ambition. The producer had plenty of material to work with: the day Richard arrived in town, the New York Times reported that The Wiz was laying down twenty-six miles of yellow-brick vinyl across the city’s boroughs and remaking the World Trade Center’s plaza into the Emerald City’s main square, with a dance sequence that required four hundred dancers, twelve hundred costumes, and thirty-eight thousand colored-lightbulbs. Richard shrugged at Cohen’s patter.

  Then Cohen had an idea. When they reached the St. George, he didn’t hand Richard over to Wiz director Sidney Lumet. Instead he promised to show Richard how much everyone appreciated his presence, and led him through the corridors of the hotel. Richard followed, exhausted to the point of docility, incognito in a baseball cap and T-shirt.

  Cohen arrived at the hotel’s ballroom and opened its doors, revealing an astonishing scene: four hundred dancers sashaying and pirouetting to the burbling funk of Quincy Jones in a rehearsal of the Emerald City sequence. Four hundred lithe, black bodies, clothed in unitards and tights that advertised just how beautiful they were. It was a pageant of black grace.

  “Welcome,” Cohen said to his star.

  Some of the dancers in the front row noticed the man in the baseball cap next to Cohen, and stopped dancing. Another five stopped; another twenty, fifty, one hundred stopped—until the entire would-be population of Emerald City stopped to stare at their Wiz. A ripple of applause swelled into the cascade of a standing ovation.

  Richard nodded and smiled at the dancers. When the applause died down, he switched into character to address the crowd. “We are gathered here today,” he declaimed in the voice of his silver-tongued reverend. Before he could finish his sentence, the dancers fell down on the floor in laughter. They knew the character, the routine, the wicked wit to come, and they tingled with anticipation. Richard stretched out into an impromptu monologue, preaching to a congregation that delighted in his every turn of phrase. The dynamic was the opposite of that at the Hollywood Bowl a week before. The worries he had carried within him—a TV show on the rocks, a marriage that seemed to be spinning off course from its very first moments—melted away as he met an audience that loved him as one of their own and, in loving him that way, put him back in the flow of character, the flow of life.

  After a few days on The Wiz’s set, Richard returned to the purgatory of his own making in Los Angeles: he needed to complete the fourth, and final, episode of The Richard Pryor Show. Though he was submitting to an obligation that, by all reports, he would have preferred to be released from, he was never someone who “worked to rule.” In fact, the last two episodes of his program showcase his imagination at its most chaotic—as experimental as he ever allowed himself to be in his stand-up. And in some ways, they are even more revealing of the full compass of his imagination. Whereas onstage he was often anchored by the details of his actual life, in his TV show Richard used the freedom of sketch comedy, the freedom of implausibility, to project himself into a series of fantasies.

  The second-to-last episode, taped just after the Hollywood Bowl fiasco, was the series’ most exploratory moment, and arguably its finest. Five of the episode’s segments were driven by pantomime, as if Richard were curious to see what he could express without opening his mouth. In “Mr. Fixit,” the spirit is Chaplinesque—the bowler hat on Richard’s head, the cranked-up action, and the rickety piano soundtrack all point back to the era of silent comedy. Richard plays a mechanic who, as he goes about repairing Paul Mooney’s car, dismantles it instead with his every touch—until, at the end, he pats Mooney casually on the shoulder and Mooney’s arm falls off. In “Separate Tables,” a vivid parable of civilization and its discontents, Richard and his team paid homage to the famously sensual eating scene in the 1963 comedy Tom Jones. Richard sits facing Marsha Warfield at an upscale restaurant, both of them dining alone. After some coy eye contact, they communicate with each other through their food: Richard slowly slurping a spaghetti noodle, Warfield savoring a bite of her corn on the cob. As their passion builds, Richard becomes more frustrated and discombobulated—not just delighting in his food à la Tom Jones, but rubbing his salad over his face, or squeezing his grapes in his fist until they squirt at him. The two diners dive at each other and start writhing on the restaurant’s floor, at which point the maître d’ takes a hose and nonchalantly sprays them with the equivalent of a cold shower. The diners return to their tables, their respective dates arrive, and they carry on as if nothing happened—as if they were obedient creatures of decorum. Their sopping clothes tell a different story.

  More poetic was a sketch that Rocco Urbisci and John Moffitt considered a disappointment, though it might be better to consider it a sketch about disappointment. “Once Upon a Time” lasted eight slow-moving minutes and aimed to return viewers to a time in their lives when they could be stirred by the simplest of amusements. The setting: a washed-out junkyard, a depressive’s version of the habitat of Bill Cosby’s Fat Albert. A calliope toots mechanically in the distance. A handful of kids watch as a gray-haired Richard, wearing a battered top hat and tails, plays the roles of ringmaster, lion tamer, tightrope walker, and clown in a traveling circus that is pure make-believe. With a toy whip and toy pistol, Richard evokes a lion tamer bringing an imaginary beast to heel on an upturned garbage pail; with the simple prop of a chair, he becomes a high-wire artist balancing himself with one leg raised in the air. The children clap enthusiastically, but the piece is forlorn in mood, mourning the loss of childhood even as it celebrates the pleasures of it. The spell of Richard’s imaginary circus is broken by the shout of a mother offstage, telling the kids to stop playing in “that dirty junkyard.” The kids flee, leaving Richard alone. Though the sketch ends on a somewhat optimistic note—with a lone black boy, presumably a younger version of Richard, coming back to the junkyard, finding Richard’s top hat on the ground, and putting it on—it’s mostly a sobering meditation on the power of play, a power that can seem life-giving one moment and trivial the next. At the age of thirty-seven, Richard had created a portrait of the artist as an old man, so out of phase with the world of responsible adulthood that he seemed unreal, or unbelievable.

  The searching qualities of “Once Upon a Time” found an echo in “New Talent,” the strangest of all sketches ever aired on The Richard Pryor Show. The curious segment had a curious backstory to match: Rocco Urbisci had received an audition tape from actress Kres Mersky and had been riveted by an experimental monologue of hers, part of a one-woman show she’d performed in LA. In the piece, Mersky’s character sits in a bathrobe and talks intensely to an unseen person, or perhaps just to herself, about how she’s “fallen in love again”—this time with a woman in her rooming house. With some graphic detail, she recounts a tryst with her lover in a clearing in a park. Then she toys with her audience by revising her story repeatedly, each time promising to divulge what “actually” happened. Actually the woman took her by force; no, actually she took the woman by force; no, actually she never went to the park at all but instead just stayed at home, reading a book on “violence and seduction.” Urbisci played the monologue for Richard, who loved it and brightened at the subversive idea of smuggling it into their series. In a testament to his freethinking spirit, Richard did not bat an eyelash at turning four minutes of his show over to a little-known actress performing a monologue that nowadays would be labeled performance art, and queer performance art at that.

  Once Richard and Urbisci had agreed to feature Mersky’s piece, the practical question then became: how to segue into it? T
hey settled on an ingenious solution: Richard would camp it up as Little Richard, in a high pompadour and glittering cape, singing “Good Golly Miss Molly”; his performance would quickly dissolve into static and snow; and Mersky’s monologue, presented in black and white, would fade in. When her monologue was over, the static and snow would return, and Little Richard would finish his song. For unsuspecting viewers at home, it might seem that their TV set had begun to fail or that NBC’s signal had been jammed by a local public-access station. Yet, at the same time, the figure of Little Richard was more than just a comic non sequitur. With his pancake makeup, tweezed eyebrows, and leering lusciousness, the early rock-’n’-roller was a rollicking example of the sexual confusions that, in a more minor key, drove Mersky’s monologue. One good gender bender deserved another; “Miss Molly” wasn’t the only one who loved to ball. And so, just a few days after Richard’s crack-up at a gay rights benefit, his director shot Mersky delivering her monologue about gay desire and Richard whooping and blowing air kisses as the glammy rock-’n’-roller.

  NBC tried to kill the segment as it was being produced, but Richard was adamant, threatening, as ever, to pull out of his show. Kres Mersky looked on, astonished that her little piece was causing such a ruckus. Apparently NBC didn’t think Richard was bluffing; the sketch went through. The strength of Richard’s commitment to it begs the obvious question of why, in the context of the fallout from his Hollywood Bowl appearance, he was willing to endanger his show for a provocative piece of gay theater. If it was a statement, what sort of statement was it? Perhaps we might simply say that Mersky’s sketch was the sort of “gay culture” Richard could get behind. It suggested that when a woman fell in love with another woman, the result was just as complicated, just as riddled with the problems of power and submission, as when a man fell in love with a woman, or a woman with a man. The sketch did not glide over gay sex with euphemisms or vague talk, but came back again and again to that clearing in the park, where the two women met for something between good sex and rape. (In the final version that aired, these graphic moments were blacked out, emphatically, with the silent message “Censored”—a decision that forced the viewer’s imagination to fill in the blanks.) Like Richard’s own “Wino and Junkie,” Mersky’s monologue was explicit but elusive, and a far cry from the sort of self-congratulatory bombast—“The Star-Spangled Banner,” “The Ascent of Man”—that set the tone for the Hollywood Bowl benefit. It beguiled the viewer into a space of troubling uncertainty.