Homey Don't Play That!

by David Peisner

  “If I get drafted, who is going to be the token black on Saturday Night Live?” he asks, before suggesting someone who could take his place in the military. “This is the man whose very name scares the hell out of me,” he says, holding up a photo of Garrett Morris. “I know he’s a little over-age, but word has it that he has a lot of free time right now.”

  When Lou Gossett Jr. hosted the show during season eight, he and Eddie began a sketch playing a father and son, at odds with each other, living in poverty, until they abruptly break character to deconstruct the black stereotypes on display in that very sketch, bringing the white writer to the stage to upbraid him. In a later season, Eddie fronts a reggae band who play their catchy, upbeat tune, “Kill the White People,” to a shocked audience at an all-white VFW hall. In a memorable turn on Eddie’s final season on the show that seems to directly echo one of Pryor’s sketches as guest host nine years earlier, Eddie undergoes elaborate makeup to be transformed into a white man. As “Mr. White,” he experiences the joys of living in the white world—impromptu cocktail parties on public transportation; free, no-questions-asked loans from banks—as part of an undercover exposé.

  Dick Ebersol, who’d been an NBC executive at the show’s creation and ran the show from when Doumanian was fired until Michaels returned in 1985, said, “Eddie is the single most important performer in the history of the show. He literally saved the show.”

  SNL gave Eddie a weekly dialogue with viewers who, in turn, saw him in a different light than they’d seen Pryor, Cosby, Flip Wilson, or any other black comic before him. Cocksure and charismatic, Eddie was a rock star. This was reflected in the iconic movie roles that helped define his career in the early eighties—48 Hrs., Trading Places, and Beverly Hills Cop.

  “Eddie changed American acting a little bit,” said Chris Rock, who hadn’t yet begun his standup career back then. “I remember the way black guys used to act in movies before 48 Hrs. There was a sidekick way of acting that Eddie didn’t incorporate. There’s the Negro Ensemble way of acting—very earnest: ‘I’m representing my race!’ Murph was one of the first black actors who acted like a normal person. It’s almost like not acting.”

  Eddie isn’t in 48 Hrs., Trading Places, and Beverly Hills Cop to be the wisecracking comic relief. He is those films. He is their entire reason for being. He swaggered through every scene, in total control. As he did on SNL, he made it impossible to take your eyes off him.

  Keenen had met Eddie just before this explosion began, but for the most part, their friendship was forged during Eddie’s meteoric rise. He watched his friend go from a guy who couldn’t get over doing booger and fart jokes at the Improv to one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, all in a couple of years. None of it surprised him.

  “Eddie never felt like because he was black that was going to be an obstacle for him,” said Keenen. “Everything about Eddie was organic.” Keenen, who’d been such a devotee of Pryor, sensed that Eddie’s appeal was different. Lots of white people certainly loved Richard Pryor, but white people wanted to be Eddie Murphy. “I remember watching 48 Hrs., and the scene when he goes into that bar, when he puts the cowboy hat on and says, ‘There’s a new sheriff in town.’ The audience went crazy. I sat there going, ‘He’s a superstar.’ There is a new sheriff in town.”

  It was more than just a Hollywood moment. In much the same way that blaxploitation films had a decade earlier, 48 Hrs. laid bare the naked racism that the black community often felt from the white establishment. Consider what was going on in the country at the time: In New York City, increasingly draconian policing and public safety tactics in the seventies had polarized the city. The “War on Graffiti” overwhelmingly targeted black and Latino youth, disingenuously connecting their tagging with high crime rates. By the end of the decade, over a quarter of the white population of the city—more than 1.2 million residents—had departed.

  The Civil Rights Movement had done little to alter African-Americans’ relationship with the police in the seventies and eighties. At best, that relationship might be described as wary; at worst, it was outright antagonistic. And hardly without cause. In early 1979, Eulia Love, a thirty-nine-year-old Los Angeles resident, was shot eight times and killed by LAPD officers after a dispute in her home regarding a twenty-two-dollar gas bill. No officers were disciplined, and LAPD police chief Daryl Gates later said one of the officers involved was “just as much a victim of this tragedy as Eulia Love.” Later that same year, Arthur McDuffie, a thirty-three-year-old black ex-Marine, was beaten to death by Miami police officers following a high-speed chase. After the officers involved were acquitted by an all-white jury the following year, several days of rioting broke out in Miami’s black neighborhoods, resulting in eighteen more deaths, fires, hundreds of injuries and arrests, and more than one hundred million dollars in property damage. These weren’t isolated incidents. By 1982, official complaints about police misconduct in New York City were at an all-time high.

  Then-president Ronald Reagan had a history of demonizing African-Americans. He’d opposed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. In his 1976 presidential campaign, he told tales of “welfare queens” driving Cadillacs, and “strapping young bucks” using food stamps to indulge in steak dinners. In 1980, he told an audience in Philadelphia, Mississippi—a town where civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964—that he believed in “states’ rights,” the phrase long used to advocate for segregation. When in 1981 the U.S. Civil Rights Commission released a report on school desegregation critical of the Reagan administration, Reagan dismissed the chairman and vice chairman of the commission that very day. In January 1982, he authorized dropping a federal case against Bob Jones University, which was under threat of losing its tax-exempt status because it prohibited interracial dating. Then there was the one-billion-dollar cut to Medicaid, and massive cuts to the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program—budgeting decisions that disproportionately impacted African-American families.

  The message of all this was abundantly clear: Black lives didn’t matter. Eddie’s character in 48 Hrs., Reggie Hammond, would certainly have felt that. He opens the film incarcerated and is sprung on a forty-eight-hour leave to help Nick Nolte’s character, Jack Cates, with an investigation. Cates’s treatment of him would be startling if it wasn’t played for laughs: Hammond is physically brutalized and assaulted with racial slurs. That Hammond still swaggers through the story as its hero, winning over Cates in the process, may be a Hollywood fantasy, but the fact that Eddie made Hollywood fantasize about such things feels like a mark of progress in and of itself.

  Trading Places boasted a similarly empowering agenda in even balder terms. The film’s plot centers around an actual sociology experiment: Can an impoverished, uneducated black man succeed in the business world if granted the same advantages as a wealthy, white Ivy Leaguer? That he can serves as a loud rebuke to Reagan’s notion of “welfare queens” and the ongoing political demonization of minorities. That Eddie could sell both these narratives to many of the same people who’d never have endorsed their messages was proof of his potency as a performer.

  As Eddie himself once put it, he was “the first black actor to take charge in a white world on-screen. That’s why I became as popular as I became. People had never seen that before. Black-exploitation movies, even if you dealt with the Man, that was in your neighborhood, never in their world.”

  It may be a stretch to say that Eddie’s widespread popularity laid the groundwork for civil rights icon Jesse Jackson’s announcement in November of 1983 that he’d be seeking the Democratic nomination for president. But Jackson winning five nominating contests and nearly 20 percent of the overall votes for the nomination certainly felt like proof that a bigger cultural shift was under way.

  6

  “This Is What They Think of Us”

  On a busy stretch of highway in Southern California, a police car eased alongside Keenen Ivory Wayans. Keenen hadn’t lived in Los Angeles long and hadn’t had
many run-ins with the LAPD.

  “What are you doing?” the cop asked.

  Keenen was puzzled. “I’m walking,” he said.

  The cop shined his flashlight into Keenen’s eyes.

  Now it was the officer’s turn to be puzzled. “But why?”

  Keenen’s compass had been pointed west for a while, but it had been the encouragement of his old friend and mentor, Chris Albrecht, that convinced him to move to California in 1980. Albrecht had transitioned from club management to a job as an agent at the powerhouse talent agency ICM. His mandate was to sign comics and Keenen was one of his first signings.

  Los Angeles is a tough place for an aspiring actor and comedian. Nearly any other place, that ambition, that creative drive, sets you apart, makes you special. In Hollywood, it makes you a cliché. For Keenen, when he arrived, it was even worse. He wasn’t just a cliché. He was a cliché without a car.

  His years of living in poverty were good training for the life of a struggling actor. He could survive on two dollars a day, no problem. He could stretch a can of corn, a potato, and some chicken into two days’ worth of meals. But the lack of transportation was a challenge.

  “I walked until I was able to buy a bike,” he said. He walked ridiculous distances—from Hollywood to places like Encino and Westwood, five, ten, fifteen miles away—which garnered strange looks from passers-by, and one night, the attention of the cops. “Walking is suspicious behavior in Los Angeles.”

  In California, Keenen began going on auditions and found his way to the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard. If the Improv in New York had invented the comedy club, the Comedy Store refined it. Opened in 1972 by veteran comic Sammy Shore—who ceded control of the club to his ex-wife Mitzi in 1974 to lower his alimony payments—the Store became the West Coast counterpart to the Improv. It was home base for comics like Richard Pryor, Jay Leno, Richard Lewis, Robin Williams, David Letterman, Garry Shandling, Marsha Warfield, and Paul Mooney. Just as at the Improv, comics auditioned to become “regulars,” but Mitzi streamlined the rather slapdash clubhouse feel her ex-husband had nurtured at the Store, creating the business model that came to define modern comedy clubs: Two-drink minimums. Opener, middle act, closer. Open-mic nights.

  The night Keenen auditioned at the Comedy Store, another young, black comic new to town was auditioning too. Arsenio Hall had packed his clothes and his beanbag chair into a small U-Haul, then driven out from Cleveland on the first day of 1980. He and Keenen began getting spots at the Store’s second location, in Westwood, where back then, Mitzi often broke in newer acts.

  “The young comics who couldn’t work at the main Comedy Store had to go to Westwood,” said Arsenio. “You’d see me, Howie Mandel, Sam Kinison. We were all young and most of us sucked.”

  In 1981, Keenen scored a development deal with NBC, and was subsequently cast as Irene Cara’s boyfriend in Irene, a television pilot made for the singer that hoped to piggyback on the success of her recent film Fame.

  “This was a dream come true,” said Keenen. He’d had a huge crush on Cara since seeing her in the film Sparkle when he was sixteen. Back then, he’d even told a friend that he was going to move to California and marry her one day. He couldn’t have known then that he’d actually have a shot. But, alas, the love affair was not meant to be. The Irene pilot aired once but wasn’t picked up, and Keenen’s relationship with Cara never went further than a few on-screen kisses. “I was a young, naïve boy and she was a woman,” he said.

  Still, Keenen had made his network television debut and felt like the town was starting to open to him. He called Robert Townsend, who was still back in New York, and convinced him to move to Los Angeles.

  “I’ll fly back and we can drive your stuff out,” Keenen told him. “We can write a script in the car.” In New York, the two rented a small U-Haul for nineteen dollars a day, packed Townsend’s Queens apartment into it, and set off for California. They did, in fact, write their first script together on the ride out—about a basketball team stuck in a haunted house—but the road trip itself might’ve made better fodder.

  “We almost killed each other,” says Townsend. “We were like, ‘We’re best friends! We can write a script! You drive, then I’ll drive!’ ” The trip went off the rails almost immediately. Keenen suggested a route through the South, but the idea of two young black men driving through the rural South in 1980 set off alarms for Townsend.

  “Keenen goes, ‘Man, I’m in great shape. Anything go down, I’ll be handling my business,’ ” Townsend recalls, laughing. “I was like, ‘Okaaay.’ ” Before they could get down South, Keenen insisted on a stop in Washington, D.C.

  “He’s like, ‘I want to see this girl,’ ” says Townsend. Problem was this girl had a dog. Keenen was allergic to dogs. Cut to the middle of the night: Keenen’s face is swollen, he can’t breathe, and Townsend is hustling him out of the apartment and back onto the road. The man who was so confident that he was in such great shape that he could handle his business in the rural South spent the first leg of that journey hopped up on Sudafed, waiting for his face and glands to return to normal size.

  Keenen had one other winning idea.

  “He wanted to stay at Days Inn because he had the best experience as a kid at a Days Inn. We get to Days Inn, they were so prejudiced!” Townsend laughed at the memory. “They were like, ‘Nigger, get out of here!’ ”

  If the New York comedy scene could be an alienating place for a young black man, Los Angeles wasn’t exactly rolling out the welcome mat either. In fact, it’s almost impossible to overstate what a wasteland Hollywood was for African-Americans in the early eighties.

  Television was in its post–Good Times, pre–Cosby Show drought. Michael Moye, who was a writer on both Good Times and The Jeffersons, says he was the only African-American writer at the time he joined the staffs of both those ostensibly black shows. Most of the other writers were older white men, contemporaries of the shows’ creator, Norman Lear, and thus Moye, in his twenties at the time, was often thrust into the role of being the expert on all things black.

  “I was used as a quote ‘stamp of approval’ for some things,” says Moye. “If there was a cultural element of a script, no matter how small, the producers would run it by me. I worked alone at that time, so I did have a tendency to feel like a bit of an outsider, which is ironic [on shows where] the cast is black.” (Interestingly, Moye, feeling pigeonholed as a “black writer,” broke out of this mold by helping develop Silver Spoons—“there was virtually no show whiter than that”—before going on to co-create Married with Children. “As you might expect,” he says, “I got no questions about culture at Silver Spoons.”) Moye was one of the lucky ones. He had work.

  The prospects for African-Americans in the film world were even drearier. With the blaxploitation era well in the rearview mirror, there weren’t really any “black films” being made by Hollywood studios or even larger independent operators. Starring roles for black actors who weren’t Eddie Murphy were scant. Richard Pryor had starred in a string of moderately successful films in the late seventies (Silver Streak, Which Way Is Up?) and one in 1980 (Stir Crazy), but after setting himself on fire while freebasing cocaine during the making of 1981’s Bustin’ Loose, his film work grew steadily more depressing: the uneven Some Kind of Hero, the borderline offensive The Toy, and, well, Superman III. And that was, comparatively speaking, a success story for black actors during this period. Bill Cosby’s entire early-eighties output was playing Satan in Disney’s forgettable and forgotten The Devil and Max Devlin. Sidney Poitier had shelved acting at that point to get a chance to direct one decent movie (Stir Crazy) and one not-so-decent one (Hanky Panky). Besides Murphy and Pryor, arguably the biggest African-American star of the era was James Earl Jones, whose two big starring roles were in a cartoonish fantasy flick (Conan the Barbarian) and playing a guy who wears a mask for an entire film until he’s replaced on-screen by a white actor when his mask comes off (Return of the Jedi). The on
ly black directors besides Poitier who seemed to work at all were Michael Schultz, a Negro Ensemble Company alum who had established a relationship with Pryor, and underground filmmakers like Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep, My Brother’s Wedding), Julie Dash (Illusions), and Jamaa Fanaka (Penitentiary), who’d come of age in the so-called L.A. Rebellion movement, and whose films were rarely seen outside film schools and art-house theaters.

  This is the Hollywood Keenen, Arsenio, and Townsend were walking into. Keenen split time between standup and going on auditions, an already demoralizing process that was made much more so when the only parts available seemed to be pimps, drug dealers, slaves, and domestic help. The title of Donald Bogle’s landmark 1973 history of African-Americans on the big screen, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks, was still sadly apt. As Townsend put it, “You’ve got this dream, then you get to Hollywood and find yourself on line to play some crack dealer. You’re like, ‘Wow. This is what they think of us.’ ”

  Keenen and Townsend both found that as well-spoken, educated black men, they didn’t fit what casting directors were looking for. As Keenen said, “I’m from a family of ten in the projects and I find out that I’m not ‘black enough.’ ”

  Occasionally, this led to unintentional comedy. Like the time a white British director demonstrated to Townsend how to play a black pimp a little “blacker.” Or when Keenen read the script for a part he booked as a street thug on a mercifully short-lived TV series called The Renegades, which was filled with odd street jargon that he and his fellow black actors didn’t even understand.