On Friday the thirteenth of January 1961, Dick Gregory sprinted over twenty blocks of frozen Chicago sidewalk in slick-soled dress shoes to make a club date that would forever alter not only the course of his own life but Richard’s, too. And, for that matter, the lives of every African American comedian who followed in his wake.
A call had come in at the last minute that the Playboy Club needed a replacement for Professor Irwin Corey who had canceled his performance that evening in the Carousel Room. Could Gregory fill in for him?
He borrowed a quarter from his landlord for carfare, then, in his excitement, boarded the wrong bus. Realizing his mistake, he signaled for a stop, got out, and ran.
Dick Gregory, along with Nipsey Russell, Bill Cosby, and Godfrey Cambridge, belonged to a new generation of black comedians unencumbered by the deferential buffoonery of vaudeville or minstrelsy. Gregory, especially, did not flinch from skewering white audiences on issues of race: “Wouldn’t it be a hell of a thing if this was burnt cork and you people were being tolerant for nothing?” and “Everyone I meet says, ‘Some of my best friends are colored,’ even though you know there ain’t that many of us to go around.”
Perched on a stool in a three-button Brooks Brothers suit, Dick Gregory possessed an unflappable cool, taking long, contemplative drags on his cigarette and exhaling well-timed streams of smoke into the spotlight before delivering his punch lines. Not even the inevitable catcalls of “nigger” could rock his composure. “According to my contract,” he replied to one such heckler, “the management pays me fifty dollars every time someone calls me that. So will you all do me a favor? Everybody in the room please stand up and yell ‘nigger.’ ”
The pace of his delivery was so dependent upon the draw of his ever-present cigarette—Winstons only—he once chewed out a stagehand at the hungry i for buying the wrong brand. “Look,” he told the gofer, “the timing of the drag that I’m using on this cigarette is part of my act. I can’t suddenly change.”
When Gregory arrived, out of breath, at the Playboy Club that night, he was told to go home. A mistake had been made. They were very sorry, but they hadn’t realized the room had been booked by a convention of frozen-food executives from the South—not the best audience for Gregory to break in with. They offered him fifty dollars and said they would try to work him in again soon. “But I was cold and mad and I had run twenty blocks and I didn’t even have another quarter to go back home,” Gregory wrote. “I told [the room manager] I was going to do the show they had called me for. I had come too far to stop now. I told him I didn’t care if he had a lynch mob in there. I was going on—tonight.
“He looked at me and shrugged. Then he stepped aside and opened the door to the top.”
I understand there are a good many Southerners in the room tonight. I know the South very well. I spent twenty years there one night.
Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant and this white waitress came up to me and said, “We don’t serve colored people here.” I said, “That’s all right. I don’t eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.”
About that time these three cousins come in. You know the ones I mean, Klu, Kluck, and Klan. About that time the waitress brought me my chicken and they say, “Boy, we’re givin’ you fair warnin’. Anything you do to that chicken, we’re gonna do to you.” So I put down my knife and fork, I picked up that chicken and I kissed it.
At the end of his show, the frozen-food execs gave him a standing ovation. They handed him money as he left the stage. One of them said, “You know, if you have the right managers you’ll die a billionaire.”
Hugh Hefner came down for the second show to see what all the excitement was about and immediately signed Gregory to a three-year contract, beginning with a three-week run that was held over through March 12.
“And, just like that,” Phillip Lutz would write in the New York Times, “with little fanfare or protest, nightclub comedy was integrated.”
Time magazine of Friday, February 17, featured a prominent article on Gregory, and the following Monday morning a call came from someone on Jack Paar’s staff inviting him to appear on The Tonight Show.
“My wife took the call and she’s so happy,” Gregory said. “I got on the phone and said, ‘No, I don’t want to do this,’ and I hung up and started cryin’. ”
Gregory had long dreamed of appearing on The Tonight Show, sometimes practicing for hours in front of the mirror after the show signed off at 1:00 a.m., imagining how he would comport himself and what he would say to Paar when his opportunity finally came, as he was sure it would. Then one night he went out drinking with singer Billy Eckstine who began “cussin’ Paar out to me. [He] told me, ‘Hey, man, that motherfuckin’ Jack Paar, he ain’t never let a nigger sit on the couch.’
“I was so embarrassed, so humiliated, I never told my wife that I could not do the Paar show. It was just a personal thing.”
Fortunately, Gregory’s phone rang again. This time it was Paar himself.
“Dick Gregory?”
“Yes.”
“This is Mr. Paar. How come you don’t want to work my show?”
“I just don’t want to work it.”
“Why?”
“Because the negroes never sit on the couch.”
There was a long pause and he said, “Well come on in, you can sit on the couch.”*
While Paar and Gregory exchanged a few canned jokes (“What kind of car you got?” “A Lincoln, naturally”), so many phone calls came in to the NBC switchboard in New York the circuits blew out. The calls, Gregory says, were coming from “white folks who were seeing a black person for the first time in a human conversation.”
Gregory had been earning $250 a week at the Playboy Club. After sitting on Jack Paar’s couch, he said, his salary jumped to $5,000. “What a country!” he would say. “Where else could I have to ride in the back of the bus, live in the worst neighborhoods, go to the worst schools, eat in the worst restaurants—and average $5,000 a week just talking about it?”
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Back in Peoria, Richard Pryor was watching, stretched out on the couch in his in-laws’ living room while his pregnant wife slept upstairs. Agitated by deferred dreams, Benzedrine, and the long, leaping shadows cast by the black-and-white TV, he chewed on bits of paper and flicked spitballs until the walls and ceiling were stuccoed with the stuff.
His sister-in-law Angie got stuck with the job of sweeping his dried up spitballs down. “He was just a mess,” she says. “He wouldn’t go to work. He would just sit around all day making spitballs and throwing them on the walls and ceiling.”
One day he went off in the head. I don’t know what he had taken, but he climbed out our second floor window and said he was going to kill himself and my sister was pulling him back in and begging him to go lay down. Well, she couldn’t do anything with him, so my dad finally got tired of fooling with him and he went upstairs. We had a state hospital here called Bartonville. They would pay you to bring people in, you know. Twenty-five dollars if you brought crazy people in. So my dad went upstairs and he said, “Hey!” He says, “Pat’s tired of fooling with you,” he says, “so we’re gettin’ ready to call Bartonville and we’re gonna have you picked up and we’re gonna get that $25 for you.” So Richard’s like, “WHAT?” My dad says, “Yeah, because, you know, something’s wrong with you.” And so he says, “Well, I better stop then, hadn’t I?” Daddy says “Yeah.” He says, “Pop, I’m gonna lie down and take a nap.” We didn’t have any more trouble out of him playing crazy after that. But he was just a weird guy. Real weird.
He was real quiet and shy otherwise, though. He had a whole lot of different sides to him, but the majority of the time he would sleep all day and sit up all evening and watch television and chew on paper. But he watched everything around him at all times. That’s how he gathered material, you know.
Patricia delivered their son six months into her pregnancy. Born April 10, 1961, Rodney Clay Pryor weighed just one pound three ounces, “the smallest preemie ever to survive in Peoria at that time,” according to Angie. “He stayed five weeks in the hospital before he was strong enough for Pat to bring him home.”
After his son came home, Richard moved out.
“Why’d I split? Because I could.”
Finding himself once again living under his father’s roof, Richard doubled down on his resolve and began performing at Collins Corner, another notorious black-and-tan club owned by local businessman Carbristo “Bris” Collins. There he was quickly promoted from opening act to emcee at a salary of seventy-two dollars a week.
Stripper-turned-fire-dancer LaWanda Page, then billed as “the Bronze Goddess of Fire,” recalled Collins Corner as the first club she ever played outside of her hometown of East St. Louis. “It was a dump,” she said. “It was the kind of place where if you ain’t home by nine o’clock at night you can be declared legally dead. They all walked around with knives in there. You better had one, too.”
Richard would soon cross paths with Page** when they played the Faust Club together in East St. Louis. “Me, Richard Pryor, Chuck Berry, and Redd Foxx all worked there around that time,” she said. “Richard was doing an act where he sang along with doing comedy. He was a very quiet, polite person offstage. Onstage he was doing true-to-life stuff even then, and he was very funny.”
Richard later told Rolling Stone’s David Felton how his army training had served him well when he first started out on the Chitlin’ Circuit. “Like you’d suck a fire-dancer’s pussy in the dressing room, and in her next job she’d try to get you as the emcee. Shit, if I hadn’t been able to give head, I’d probably still be in St. Louis at the Faust Club.”
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Given the irregularity of Richard’s club engagements, Buck tried to steer his son toward a more stable career as a pimp and, in Richard’s telling, even threw in a whore to get him started. For a time, Richard thought he had it made: steady work at two clubs and a woman working for him. Plus, he could have all the sex he wanted with her without any messy emotions or romantic strings attached.
Things quickly fell apart, though, when his woman demanded that he beat her. “I had no idea what she was talking about,” he admitted to Sander Vanocur of the Washington Post. “I didn’t know there was any romantic connotation to physical violence.” Richard’s stunned inaction only infuriated her. She began screaming at him to hit her and he went crazy, “fighting as if it were a real fight.” When his father saw the girl, bruised and battered, he blew up. “What the fuck are you doing?” he yelled. “You don’t know how to beat a whore! Get your ass outta here!” He was serious. Buck was so disgusted he banished Richard from his house for good.
The elder Pryor told the story somewhat differently to Jean Budd of the Peoria Journal Star, after his son had made it big. “Richard was beginning to run around with the wrong group. So I said one day to my wife, ‘Okay, that’s it—he goes.’ That’s probably the best thing we ever did for him—make him go out on his own.”
In either case, Richard grabbed up a few clothes, stuffed twenty dollars in his pocket, and hit the streets. He was twenty-two.
By law, Richard was still married to Patricia. He was father to a year-old son and possibly a five-year-old daughter who was just as likely his half sister. Yet the only thing keeping him in Peoria, he said, was the price of a bus ticket.
When Richard told his woes to a troupe of mostly transvestite dancers and backup singers performing with the headliner at Collins Corner, they invited him to come along with them to their next gig at the Faust Club in St. Louis.
“I couldn’t believe my luck,” he wrote. “One minute kicked out of the house, no prospects. The next I was on the road in show business.”
Before leaving town he went and said good-bye to Miss Whittaker at the Carver Community Center. Recalling his decision years later, she would say, “I guess he did what Gauguin did.” She may or may not have been the only resident of Peoria who would have compared Richard to the nineteenth-century postimpressionist French painter who abandoned his family and homeland to pursue his muse in the South Sea Islands, but she is likely the only one who would’ve made the comparison a favorable one.
“I believe there was a gift given to me, probably when I was a child,” Richard would say. “That God searched me out and found me and said, ‘Try that one.’ Somebody said, ‘Uh? That one?’ And God said, ‘Try him, I’m telling you there’s something about him.’ ” Or, as he explained it after a few months on the road to a hostile audience in Youngstown, Ohio, “Hey, y’all can boo me now. But in a couple of years I’m gonna be a star and you dumb niggers will still be sittin’ here.”
Richard was ready to shake the dust of Peoria off his feet. He would go out there and show them all. The ones who’d told him he wasn’t shit. Not least of all, his father.
He pawned a typewriter he’d borrowed from his half sister Barbara Jean for bus fare and, unbeknownst to Patricia, had their son’s name legally changed to Richard Franklin Pryor Jr.
“Does the champ know this is a benefit?!”
Richard Pryor climbs into a ring with Muhammad Ali who, in answer to Richard’s clowning and faux preening, theatrically scowls and mouths carefully constructed words from deep in his corner: “I’m going to kick your ass.”
Two equally implausible characters, each of whose rise now feels as inevitable as it once seemed implausible; both slipping through the cracks of trauma and circumstance that helped define an era even as they failed to contain the men they marked; both escaping, skipping out onto a wire—or beneath one—that was sharp, swaying, and electrified. Like Parker and Miles and Dylan and Picasso and Malcolm, they picked at a lock only to find the door already free and swinging, dark and unguarded; sneaking in and onto a vacant seat that had never really been wholly occupied.
Ali literally beat his chosen new name free from the lips of Ernie Terrell who had clamped down on it and refused its utterance and legitimacy. And then he finished him.
Richard made Ed Sullivan’s stage a back alley wherein he leaned and hid out, flashing anger and grief; sucking down self-loathing even before it was forced upon him; setting the place on fire and giving away the whole of his secret heart for nothing.
* While acknowledging the significance of Dick Gregory’s appearance on the show, Paar clarified in his memoir P.S. Jack Paar that the first black performer to sit on The Tonight Show couch had been Diahann Carroll. The young ingénue and singer, who vaulted to stardom on Broadway at the age of nineteen in Harold Arlen and Truman Capote’s 1954 musical House of Flowers, appeared on the show no fewer than fourteen times during Paar’s tenure (1957–62). Paar invited her to sit on the couch after the Jewish American satirist and publisher of the Charlotte Israelite Harry Golden had been on the show outlining his “Vertical Integration Plan,” by which integration could be achieved simply by removing the chairs from any segregated facility. As Golden explained it, southern whites had no objection to standing and talking with black people but would never sit with them. “I suddenly realized,” Paar wrote, “that in our year or more on The Tonight Show, while there were black performers on, I had not actually sat down with one and talked. This may seem a strange thing to say now, but I do it only in the historical context. It just had not been done on any program or panel show that I knew of.”
** The fire-dancing Page later became a popular stand-up comic in her own right. Billed simply as LaWanda, she was known for her signature line “I’m gonna tell it to ya like it tea-eye-IS, honey” and her raunchy, uncut humor.
LaWanda had little interest in crossing over. Like Rudy Ray Moore, Skillet & Leroy, Wildman Steve, and Tina Dixon, she’d found her niche; she never tried to clean up or water down her act for the sake of reaching a wider audience, and she likely would have continued performing X-rated material for predominantly black audiences and recording risque “party” records for the rest of her career had it not been for the intervention of Redd Foxx, her friend since childhood, who saw to it that she got the role of the Bible-thumping Aunt Esther on Sanford and Son.