Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  While it’s difficult to generalize about a decade of filmmaking that produced E.T. and Blade Runner, Red Dawn and Platoon, Friday the Thirteenth and The Shining, one trend bears noting: the decline of a certain sort of “1970s movie” that sat uneasily within its supposed genre. There were fewer films that danced on the line between entrancing spectacle and affecting drama, like The Mack and Saturday Night Fever; fewer films that infused moments of jittery laughter into otherwise bleak stories of working-class life, like Blue Collar and Mean Streets; and fewer films that mixed low comedy and high politics, like Blazing Saddles, Car Wash, and Little Big Man.

  As these examples suggest, Richard thrived in precisely the sorts of films that became increasingly rare in the 1980s. For another index of the changes afoot in Hollywood, one might compare him to Eddie Murphy, his successor as the big marquee name among black actors after 1983. Murphy was clearly a comic in the Pryor mold: a talented physical comedian radiating a certain streetwise sass and cool, his mouth his weapon of choice. But Murphy, in 1980s roles like Axel Foley, had little of Richard’s bottom notes—his fragility, tenderness, or openness to emotional confusion. Or one might compare the two showbiz biopics, Lady Sings the Blues and Jo Jo Dancer, that framed Richard’s career in Hollywood. Both films, notably, were parables about the perils of being a black entertainer. In the first, the young Richard injected levity and some moral complexity into a movie that otherwise risked becoming a formula melodrama. In the second, the older Richard stripped out the complexity from his own life story. The character of his grandmother was made over as a simple, warmhearted soul full of the milk of human kindness—a far cry from the prickly, forceful woman whom Richard had known. Meanwhile, Richard largely erased from view his own capacity for violence and self-sabotage, portraying himself as the sad-faced victim of drugs and women. Jo Jo Dancer desperately needed the irreverent spirit of the young Richard Pryor to save it from itself. After 1980, that actor was unavailable.

  One would like to assign a happy ending to Richard’s acting career. Perhaps if he had stayed healthy into his sixth decade, his fearlessness might have come back, like a sleeping virus awakened, with the arrival of the post-Reagan era in entertainment. His TV series, though short-lived, was yet the godfather of cable comedy shows like In Living Color, Chappelle’s Show, and Key and Peele, and it’s easy to imagine a middle-aged Pryor as a wildly avuncular guest on them, goosing along the young’uns and stepping into a new version of himself. Perhaps, too, a healthy older Pryor might have fulfilled his dream of being a character actor—on the cast of Homicide or The Wire, say, or in the films of black-oriented directors like Spike Lee, John Singleton, or Lee Daniels. Between 1967 and 1986, Pryor’s work in Hollywood was largely split between cameos and starring roles, and it would have been nice for him to find his stride, at the end of his career, as an ensemble player.

  Yet Richard never had the chance to age gracefully in public view. In August 1986, after experiencing some trouble with his motor control and eyesight, he went to the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis for tests. The diagnosis that came back: multiple sclerosis, or MS, a degenerative disease of the nervous system. One of his first responses was to wonder if the MS was karmic payback. “[A]t the outset of life God gives you a certain number of angels,” he speculated. “They hover above you, protecting your ass from danger. But if you cross a certain line too many times, they get the hell away. Say, ‘Hey, motherfucker, you’ve abused us too many times. From here on, you’re on your own.” Part of the medical community might agree, in a way, with Pryor’s conjecture. Recent studies have suggested that, while MS has a strong genetic basis, individuals who engage in risk-associated behavior such as alcohol use, drug use, and smoking are more susceptible to the disease. In Utah, non-Mormons are roughly four times more likely to get it than Mormons—and Richard was no Mormon in the years preceding his diagnosis.

  MS is a cruel disorder for anyone: it slowly strips the sufferer of the ability to walk, to talk, or to control his bowels. But there was an extra layer of cruelty to Pryor’s coming down with it. From an early age, Richard had, like any number of humbly born athletes, actors, and dancers, made a future for himself by discovering and exploiting the resources of his body. His native expressiveness—the emotions he made instantly legible on his face, the energy he concentrated in his gestures—had always been at the foundation of his act. Now he felt his physical grace slipping away: he told one interviewer that the hardest part of having MS was not being able to jump around as he used to. By spring 1991, he was emaciated—a mere 115 pounds—and, though barely able to walk ten yards without help, living alone in a rented mansion at the summit of Bel Air. He spent his days holed up in his bedroom, clutching a .357 Magnum and worrying that, if he tried to move around, he might crack his head on his Spanish marble floor. He was close to broke from all his medical bills. It was, he later reflected, “the lowest point of my life.”

  With the help of old friends and lovers, Pryor shook off his solitude and rallied in 1993 for what became his farewell tour as a comedian. Sitting in an easy chair at center stage, he floated through a set of riffs on his life with MS. For the great part of Pryor’s career, he had seemed preternaturally youthful, the vulnerability of a child never far from the surface of his performances. Now he was prematurely aged: ancient at fifty-two, his legs giving out from under him, vulnerable because his frailty put him uncomfortably close to death’s door. “I don’t want to be alone when I die,” he said onstage at one point, and the audience knew that this was no idle conjecture. Then, Pryor-style, he cut the solemnity with a sacrilegious confession: “I want some motherfuckers fighting over my money.” The old, discomfort-inducing honesty was still there, charged now with a nearly unbearable pathos. One critic observed that when Pryor’s audience gave him a standing ovation at the end of his short set, it was “as emotionally drained as the comedian himself.”

  After that tour, itself abbreviated because he became too fatigued, Pryor kept an exceedingly low profile. When asked if he still saw himself as an entertainer, he spoke of that part of himself as if it were a ghost: “It’s not gone, but it’s fa-a-ar away. Like it’s through this veil and I can’t see it. I know where it is, but I can’t reach it.” “I’m going through a humbling experience these days,” he told another interviewer. “There was a time in my life when I thought I had everything—millions of dollars, mansions, cars, nice clothes, beautiful women, and every other materialistic thing you can imagine. Now I struggle for peace.”

  In 1994, he asked Jennifer Lee to return to him, and she did, taking on the roles of caretaker and, in the words of one journalist, “general aide-de-camp.” It was a time for looking backward and taking stock. Richard published his memoir in 1995, and then, in 2000, Jennifer helped pull together the boxed set . . . And It’s Deep Too!, a retrospective of his recording career as a stand-up. The following year, the two were married in secret—without the knowledge, even, of Richard’s children, several of whom had never warmed to the idea of Jennifer as a stepmother. As the MS took its remorseless course, Richard often withdrew into himself, the burden of company more weight than he wished to bear. He might take in a movie once a week, but rarely went out otherwise. He saw his children just once a month as his condition deteriorated—a limitation that frustrated them. His daughter, Rain, concluded that her father had become Jennifer’s “prisoner,” locked up in his own home. For her part, Jennifer maintained that she was just trying to protect Richard from undue stress.

  On December 10, 2005, nine days after his sixty-fifth birthday, Richard suffered a heart attack in the early morning. He was pronounced dead later that day at a nearby hospital. Newspapers and magazines mourned his passing in terms befitting the death of an icon. (Former senator and presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy died the same day, and Pryor’s death trumped his on front pages across America.) “The comic voice of a generation,” judged the Washington Post. In the New York Times, Mel Watkins underlined how Pryor had transformed b
lack and white America both: “He unleashed a galaxy of street characters who traditionally had been embarrassments to most middle-class blacks and mere stereotypes to most whites. And he presented them so truthfully and hilariously that he was able to transcend racial boundaries and capture a huge audience of admirers in virtually every ethnic, economic, and cultural group in America.”

  For all the glory of Pryor’s achievement as an artist, his funeral was a small, private affair at Hollywood’s Forest Lawn Cemetery. Mourners lit candles to help guide Richard’s passage to the spirit realm; Diana Ross broke spontaneously into a rendition of “Amazing Grace.” Richard’s casket was covered with sunflowers—flowers that he’d loved ever since, as a child, he discovered a patch of them in a vacant lot near his grandmother’s brothels. “I don’t know how they got started or who watered them, but every summer they headed up toward the sky as if they were trying to escape the ghetto,” he’d written in his memoir. “After realizing they couldn’t get out, they bloomed. Big. Like giant sunbursts.” Those hardy sunflowers spoke to the beautiful side of Richard, the side that brought startling radiance to places where few expected to find it.

  Of course there was another side to Richard, one darker and messier, and that lived on after his death, too. He had declared, on his 1993 concert tour, that he hoped to have “some motherfuckers fighting over my money,” and he got his wish. Upon discovering that Richard had named Jennifer as his executor and principal heir, his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, charged Jennifer, in civil lawsuits, with forging Richard’s name on their marriage license, committing elder abuse as his caretaker, and exploiting his frailty to gain control of his assets. Jennifer fought the allegations in court and prevailed. Unsurprisingly, the legal battle left a rift between Jennifer and several of Richard’s children: four years later, only Richard Jr. agreed to participate in Omit the Logic, the documentary Jennifer produced about their father. Richard Pryor had never led an uncomplicated life, and he did not die an uncomplicated death.

  There are two periods in comedy in America: before Richard Pryor and after Richard Pryor.” So declared actor-comedian Paul Rodriguez, and few practicing comics, whether born in 1929 or 1969, would beg to differ. Among the generation before Pryor, Mel Brooks has classed Pryor as “the funniest comedian of all time,” ahead of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harpo Marx; Bob Newhart has named him “the single most seminal comedic influence in the past 50 years.” Among the generation after Pryor, he has been called “the Picasso of our profession” (Jerry Seinfeld) and “the Rosa Parks of comedy” (Chris Rock). Comedians from Eddie Murphy and Damon Wayans to George Lopez and Margaret Cho have recalled the impact Pryor made on their young selves and offered a version of Bernie Mac’s economical tribute: “Without Richard, there would be no me.”

  But if Pryor was, in Wayans’s words, the artist who “started it all,” what exactly did he start? It’s easier to nod to the scale of Pryor’s achievement than to capture its precise contours. His artistic legacy is extremely various—and as packed with complexities as the personality he presented onstage. Pryor could be foul-mouthed and delicate, cruel and tender, straight-ahead and experimental. He could be the most hilarious and the most troubling of comedians. He could be soul brother number one and a trickster who slipped the bonds of race. How to encompass all these Pryors?

  We might start by refusing to pigeonhole him in the most obvious way. Conducting interviews for this book, I commonly heard the complaint that Pryor was misunderstood as an artist—that too often people mistook the headline-generating part of Pryor’s style, his use of obscenity, for the whole. “All they remember is the profanity,” said the poet-critic Amiri Baraka, “and they can’t get to the profundity.” Actor Tim Reid went so far as to suggest that “Richard has probably spawned more bad comics than any comic in history”: “they listened to his words but they didn’t understand his creativity.” For his part, Pryor himself grew frustrated when hip critics kept grouping him with Lenny Bruce, the other pioneer of obscenity in stand-up; he said he suffered from “the Lenny Bruce syndrome.” And considering Pryor’s approach to the stage, one can understand why the comparison rankled. Lenny Bruce was a satirist who made points; Pryor was a searcher who explored, in the words of Mudbone, how oftentimes “there is no point to be made.”

  Perhaps it’s best, for clarity’s sake, to isolate three different aspects of Pryor’s achievement: his legacy as a stand-up comic, as a social critic, and as a crossover artist.

  As a stand-up, Pryor was a revolutionary in the spirit of the high 1960s, suggesting that nothing was off-limits. Not only did he refuse to respect the boundaries of “good taste,” but more powerfully, he turned his own powers of scrutiny on himself and declared that nothing was off-limits there, either. His anxiety and his fury, his self-loathing and his cravings for intimacy, sex, and power—in other words, the parts of him that might have shamed or endangered him—were the lifeblood of his stage act. There was a swirling, centrifugal energy to Pryor’s stand-up; audiences were pulled deep into his inner drama. At the same time, Pryor had a finely honed capacity to fling himself outward and into character. His stage instantly became a carnival of working-class black life, or a free-fire zone where the battle of the sexes played out. Often, even a personal soliloquy evolved into a multicharacter playlet, his angels and demons manifesting as characters with their own voices and body language.

  To create these well-populated worlds, Pryor didn’t merely unzip his brain and let the characters out. Rather, he used his craft. In the tributes from his fellow comedians, one hears the admiration of those who understand the effort that goes into the look of effortlessness. In Pryor’s case, his craft was mastered over three decades, through lessons with a succession of teachers and collaborators. Over his first twenty years, he absorbed, from his grandmother, a gift for storytelling; from his father, an eye for the cruel yet telling detail; and from the examples of Jerry Lewis and Sid Caesar, an antic expressiveness that made caricature come alive. Over the next ten years, he discovered, with his comic friends in Greenwich Village, how to lose himself in improv; with Redd Foxx, how to make dirty jokes his own; and with Paul Mooney and his Berkeley writer friends, how to sharpen the political edge of his satire. Later, as he collaborated with the likes of Mel Brooks and Lily Tomlin, he remained open to what each could give him, whether as catalyst or sounding board. He perfected the art of dramatizing his own imperfections, and the world’s.

  As a social critic, Pryor is best summed up by the epithet his friend Paul Mooney coined for him: Dark Twain. Just as Mark Twain looked at the aftermath of the Civil War and meditated, with wit and troubling insight, on how people remained unfree after the watershed of emancipation, so Pryor skeptically sized up America in the moment after the freedom movements of the 1960s had washed over it. Having grown up in brothels, he never lost the raw, brothel-oriented point of view. The ugliness of the world was not something to be flinched at or avoided. He detested euphemisms because they dulled the hard smack of the truth; he wanted to bring his audience to its senses. And so he became, for many in the 1970s, a guide to how much and how little the world had changed after Black Power and Flower Power. Blacks might have a new set of rights on paper, but they were still brutalized by police, criminalized by the media, shunted off to prisons, or caught in the gears of the welfare bureaucracy. Lovers might talk more frankly about sex and pleasure, but they still talked past one another or stung one another with insults. And as for drugs, well, they might open the doors of perception, but they might also drop you into the abyss, or worse.

  With material like “Bicentennial Nigger” and “Black Death,” Pryor could be severe as he followed the logic of American violence to its brutal end. (Another connection with Twain: the finale of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court has the self-satisfied hero electrocuting twenty-five thousand knights until they have fused into “homogeneous protoplasm, with alloys of iron and buttons.”) Yet Pryor wasn’t the sort to deliver a mes
sage in italics or hand down a judgment from a mountaintop. He was allergic to self-righteousness and shuddered to find it in himself. Rather than hold himself up as a model of integrity, he presented himself as someone in danger of cracking up, reduced to a lesser version of himself, with just his mother wit to save him. Here he showed a way of handling the pressure of stereotype that later performers, of all backgrounds, found liberating. “The comedian who really moved me was Richard Pryor,” recalled Roseanne Barr. “I knew that he was inside the stereotype and fighting against it, that he was going to blow it up from the inside. I got that immediately. I thought, By God, I’m going to do the same thing being a woman.”

  Pryor’s work as a crossover artist is probably the most misunderstood and underappreciated aspect of his career. His Berkeley friend Ishmael Reed captured the common view when he wrote, upon Pryor’s death, that Pryor was a “comic genius who let Hollywood use him.” (Reed wished, for Pryor’s legacy as an artist, that the comic had resisted the charms of the film industry and stayed in Berkeley.) Reed’s view has taken hold for reasons that are easy to understand. Pryor was generally more unbuttoned on the concert stage than the sound stage, and he himself disavowed many of his films upon their release, offering that he’d been “hustled” or that he’d done a project just for the money. As he grew older he didn’t seem to shed these misgivings: in his memoir, he spent shockingly little time on the films that consumed much of his energy in the 1970s and after. And as few critics would dispute, Pryor’s movies after 1983 were often weak tea. It can be tempting, then, to draw a line between the “genius” Pryor and the “sellout” Pryor, with the “genius” Pryor conveniently color-coded as the “blacker” Pryor. His stand-up albums and concert films, powered by the creativity of a black man alone onstage, would fall in the “genius” category; his non-concert films would stand as evidence of how an obtuse Hollywood failed to adapt to the arrival of a formula-shattering black talent.