At Lily Tomlin’s request, Richard volunteered to take part in a star-studded benefit for gay rights at the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday, September 18. The “Star Spangled Night for Rights” (subtitled “A Celebration for Human Rights”) was organized by the San Francisco–based Save Our Human Rights in response to an anti-gay campaign fronted by California senator John Biggs and former Miss America and orange-juice shill Anita Bryant. The capacity crowd of seventeen thousand Hollywood luminaries included Paul Newman, Cher, Alice Cooper, Norman Lear, Chevy Chase, John Travolta, and Truman Capote.
Richard arrived in good spirits and reportedly enjoyed the first half of the show, laughing and applauding from the wings while watching his friend Lily Tomlin, Christopher Lee, David Steinberg, a young dance troupe called the Lockers, the band War, and going on just head of him, two members of the Los Angeles Ballet Company.
Richard opened the second half of the show unprepared. (He was, after all, doing this for free, as were the others.) But he could riff on human rights for twenty minutes, easy.
He started off haltingly, feeling his way. “I came out here for human rights . . . and I found out what it’s about . . . what it’s really about is . . . is it’s about not getting caught with a dick in your mouth.”
The crowd went wild. Richard warmed to his topic.
“I’ve sucked dick, and it was beautiful . . . but I couldn’t deal with it. I went home and didn’t tell nobody.”*
After several minutes of playing to the crowd, his mood changed. He stumbled over his words, seemingly talking to himself.
“Shit. This is really weird. What the fuck? I never seen this much traffic in my life . . . I seen cars all the way from where to what . . . coming to this motherfucker this evening . . . to give us some money . . . to suck a dick?”
The crowd got restless and he turned on them, dropping the word faggot as freely, if not as affectionately, as he did nigger. “I came here for human rights, but I’m seeing what it’s really about. Fags are prejudiced. I see the four niggers you have dispersed. White folks are having good fun here tonight.”
Here he was, a notorious pussy hound, an embodiment of hetero cool in the late 1970s—an era when most Americas couldn’t even pick up on the signals telegraphed by the Village People when they sang about the delights of staying at the YMCA—with some nine million dollars in studio contracts, and he’d just come out and boasted to a crowd of seventeen thousand assembled in one of the most conspicuous places on earth not only that he’d sucked cock, but that he liked it. That it was beautiful. (He’d said as much before, in clubs, and in a performance filmed at the Improv in 1971, but that movie, Live and Smokin’, had not yet seen the light of day.) Perhaps it was starting to sink in on him that he’d better walk that back, and do it fast.
This is an evening about human rights, and I’m a human being. I just wanted to see where you was really at, and I wanted to test you to your motherfucking soul. I’m doing this shit for nothing. But I wanted to come here and tell you to kiss my ass with your bullshit. You understand? When the niggers was burning down Watts, you motherfuckers was doin’ what you wanted to do down on Hollywood Boulevard. Didn’t give a shit about it.
Then he turned his back to the audience, hiked up the tail of his jacket, thrust out his backside and said, “You Hollywood faggots can kiss my rich happy black ass.”
“I thought they would kill him,” says composer Van Dyke Parks, in attendance that night with his wife, Sally. “Seriously. I was scared Richard wouldn’t get out of there alive.”
An L.A. Times reviewer wrote that Richard’s remarks “jolted the audience, confused them, in the end angered them . . . It was left to Tom Waits to recover the audience and he tried nobly with songs including the old Four Lads tune ‘Standing on the Corner.’ But his was an unenviable task—following Pryor and preceding Miss Midler. He finished quickly.”
Bette Midler knew what to do. She pranced out and reclaimed the crowd with, “Who wants to kiss this rich happy white ass?”
Lily Tomlin, who had invited Richard to take part in the show, tried to shrug it off, saying, in effect, that when you ask for Richard Pryor, you get Richard Pryor.
“I don’t know,” she said years later, “maybe he was high.” Then: “Duh! What am I saying? Of course he was high.”
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That was Sunday. Late Tuesday, Richard knocked on Rocco Urbisci’s office door to ask if it would be okay if he came in late the next morning. Sure, Rocco said. It was his show. Rocco didn’t ask the reason why, but Richard volunteered, “I’m getting married.” And then he sort of laughed. Rocco congratulated Richard, wished him good night, then picked up the phone and ordered a cake.
Richard came in late the next day still sporting his white wedding tux. Everyone crowded around as he introduced his new bride, Deboragh. Urbisci had the presence of mind to grab up a bouquet of flowers and, pretending a jubilant gesture, plunged their stems into the decorated cake, rendering illegible the inscription congratulating Richard and Pam Grier.
“Are you sure that was Deboragh?” Rocco asked when we interviewed him for this book. “I didn’t recognize her. She looked about seventeen. I figured she was just some girl he knocked up.”
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Richard was wrung out from the nonstop ordeals of Greased Lightning, Which Way Is Up? (produced through the provisions of his Universal deal), doing the special and then butting heads with NBC over creative control of his weekly TV show in between the insanity of filming Blue Collar and facing fallout over the Hollywood Bowl kerfuffle. Plus, he had married again. As soon as they finished taping the final episode of his show on October 12, he and Deboragh took off for a brief and belated honeymoon in Hawaii. They were there just long enough for Richard to fall in love with the place and buy a parcel of land in the isolated community of Hana on the easternmost tip of Maui. From there, he was off to New York to finish filming The Wiz, then home to Peoria, and then he had a heart attack.
* In 2002, we had the opportunity to read through Richard’s first attempt at writing his memoirs. He had filled the unruled pages of two and a half leather-bound volumes before abandoning the project in the early 1980s. The volumes were unnumbered, undated. The first volume opened with the confession that he’d had sex with men maybe ten or twelve times and they had been among the most profound experiences of his life. “Does that make me a fag, a queer, a bisexual or what?” he had written. “The answer is none of the above. It just makes me, me. My sexual preference is for women, but what makes a man? His words? His actions? Am I a straight acting queer, or a queer who just happens to love pussy?”