PART TWO
Down along Manhattan’s MacDougal Street, Richard may have felt like a rube with his Jackie Wilson pompadour and shiny, narrow-cut suit that was perhaps a full size too small, but it took more than that to stand out in Greenwich Village in 1963. You could be anything there, and as such, everyone was unfurling a flag in hopes of staking a claim upon outrage and attention. It didn’t matter your discipline: it was all theater, and the tiny coffee shops were packed with performers—comedians, musicians, monologists, poets—all eager to survey the competition and glean some deft bits of stage business.
Beat poets, visual artists, and jazz musicians had, since the mid-1950s, become such a potent and magnetic presence in the neighborhood that they’d seemingly reset the clocks, filling the dark cafes and narrow ethnic restaurants with dense smoke at odd hours, spilling with their work from dim rooming houses and co-opted storefronts and animating the street corners of early morning hours, blurring the lines between friendly congregation and performance. Over egg rolls and scorched coffee, writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and filmmaker Robert Frank hashed out an informal manifesto, whereby the most gritty and unabashedly personal of experiences would be thinly veiled in their work, if at all. And just north, Zoot Sims, Mose Allison, and Al Cohn wandered in and out of the frame of the ever-open-and-revolving door of photographer W. Eugene Smith’s buzzing loft, nodding their heads through sprawling rehearsals of Thelonious Monk’s big band. Smith snapped pictures throughout and kept a reel-to-reel tape recorder endlessly turning, documenting thousands of hours of jam sessions and casual conversation, street noise, radio speeches and staticky baseball games— all with seemingly no thought to judging what of it might be relevant for posterity. At this juncture—where a random satellite photograph revealed Soviet missiles in Cuba, and a crowd member’s silent Super 8 footage served as the only recorded witness to an era-defining assassination—there was almost no such thing as irrelevance: something was happening here, even if you didn’t know what it was.
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The last years of the 1950s had left a flooded gully in its wake, like a psychic borderline snaking through an America that had imagined itself, in the years following the Second World War, to be modern and sufficiently settled: dreams had been assigned and sanctioned—handed out along with your honorable service discharge—and involved new cars, office jobs, pretty wives, and obedient children. But once upon the shore of 1960, it was clear that its sandy banks were trembling and perilous, and that the way forward was dark and overgrown with vines. The boiler room beneath the nation’s freshly paved surface was clanging and giving off wisps of rancid steam following decades of brutal violence, deep resentment, and the denying of the very humanity of great segments of the country’s population. And now, an imposing and abstractly treacherous cold war pushed back from the idealized future. In a quick few years, a stout crop of popular TV sitcoms sprang up, each a variation on a single theme: something alien is close and secretly among us, and one person is burdened with protecting all others from the unspeakable truth of their presence and power: My Favorite Martian, My Mother the Car, I Dream of Jeannie, The Munsters, Mister Ed, Bewitched—they all pointed to the growing anxiety of middle-class whites that nothing was as it appeared, and once the mask slipped, there would be no way of ever securing it back in place.
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By the middle sixties, the bohemian subculture would become so pervasive that no longer would the flustered secretaries and pressed businessmen cross the street to avoid bearded confrontation, but, rather, tour buses filled with middle Americans would crawl along Cornelius and West Fourth streets, craning for a glimpse of the dirty and drugged radicals they’d read about in Time magazine. This transformation had begun a scant few years earlier, centered in New York’s Greenwich Village. There, a grubby and baby-faced young folksinger named Bob Dylan was still nicking songs and banter from established acts like Jack Elliott and Dave Van Ronk, sharing cigarettes and kitchen scraps with Tiny Tim in the basement of the Cafe Wha? Painters Red Grooms and Bob Thompson were hustling canvases up Sixth Avenue in a scavenged baby carriage, and dressing sets for the impromptu theater pieces they helped stage in an empty shoe store. Ornette Coleman might be dressed in a burlap sack—like Moses being chased instead of followed—while Sun Ra paraded his Myth Science Arkestra along East Third Street like a barnstorming baseball team trying to drum up business en route to their weekly Monday night gig at Slug’s.
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Into this constantly shifting scene stepped Richard Pryor—straight from the Chitlin’ Circuit and the fading theaters of skittish northern and midwestern towns that had years before shaken off the dust of vaudeville and the swing era but found little in the grainy, flickering glow of distant television screens to take its place.
Looking back on the scene, screenwriter Buck Henry could remember, in his mind’s eye, walking along Bleecker or MacDougal streets late at night and seeing in every doorway someone who would later be famous. On any given night that autumn of 1963, a club hopper might see the top four stand-up comics of all time—(1) Richard Pryor, (2) George Carlin, (3) Lenny Bruce, (4) Woody Allen, as ranked by Comedy Central in 2005—within blocks of each other working the basket houses, where performers passed a basket or a hat to collect their pay, or appearing in all-night cafes housed in crumbling basements where patrons were requested to applaud by snapping their fingers rather than clapping their hands so as not to incur the wrath of apartment dwellers farther up the airshaft who were trying to sleep.
As outrageous as the Village characters believed themselves to be, however, they would have turned few heads among the players Richard encountered out on the Circuit, in the days before he made it to New York.
There was the hotel in Toronto favored by gay wrestlers where, after watching them try to murder each other in the ring, Richard was dumbfounded to see the same guys kissing and holding hands in the lobby.
There was the club where Richard opened for a wrestling bear who guzzled beer between bouts. One night when the furry star had a few too many, he pinned a terrified Richard to the floor backstage and gently began stroking him.
There was the Casablanca in Youngstown, Ohio, where Richard, upon learning from a tearful Satin Doll that the performers weren’t going to be paid, came to the rescue by pulling a starter pistol on the club’s reputedly mobbed-up Lebanese owners (reimagined as Italian for Live on the Sunset Strip and again in Jo Jo Dancer) and demanded their share of the take.
There was the female impersonator who enticed Richard with a bit of quid pro quo. He was relieved to find, when push came to shove, that she was in fact a she, passing as a female impersonator.
In Pittsburgh, he served thirty-five days of a ninety-day sentence handed down for assaulting a singer he had been seeing. Richard never denied the charge. He’d been talking trash about the woman behind her back, playing the pimp and bragging that she’d been giving him money. When she confronted him backstage, he claimed preemptive self-defense. “I thought she was going to do some serious damage to me so I beat her ass first.” It turned out her father was connected. When the cops burst into the rooming house in the middle of the night, Richard feared they’d come to work him over. But, he concluded, they must have felt sorry for this skinny kid with no muscles, trembling in his underwear. Instead, they gave him time to get dressed and then hauled him downtown.
In jail, he struck up a conversation with a fellow inmate who, it turned out, knew his aunt Mexcine and only had a few days left to serve. Upon his release, the inmate contacted Mexcine and she sent Richard twenty dollars, which he parlayed into seventy by playing the numbers. That was enough to buy his way out of jail and out into the freezing cold.
Back on the street, Richard heard that Sammy Davis Jr. was in town. He found his hotel and stationed himself in a chair at the end of the hallway hoping for a chance to meet the man who, along with Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, formed a holy trinity of African American performers of the day.
A hotel security cop gave him the once-over but didn’t question his reason for being there. And while no one would ever mistake the twenty-two-year-old Richard Pryor for hired muscle, it might have made sense because Davis had faced continual threats of assassination, lynching, and theater bombings ever since his marriage to the Swedish actress May Britt in 1960, a barrage that only intensified when their daughter, Tracey, was born a year later.
Once or twice, Davis peeked out to see if the skinny guy in the chair was still there. After several hours, someone from Davis’s entourage brought Richard a plate of food. The next morning, as Davis was leaving, Richard rose from his chair. “What’s happening?” Davis said. The two would become great friends a decade hence, but for now Davis smoked and nodded as Richard stammered out a brief résumé and asked if maybe he would give him a job. Davis gave him a cigarette and some encouragement. “But he was so jive,” Richard wrote. “Didn’t mind being a star one bit. It was a beautiful thing to see.”
And then there was the hooker in Baltimore who invited Richard home with her after his show at the Playboy Club. “I want you to hear something,” she said, and pulled out a translucent red vinyl LP from its jacket, set the phonograph arm down on side one of Lenny Bruce, American, and for once, Richard forgot all about the pussy.
On the second track, Lenny set the scene wherein a nine-year-old kid inadvertently discovers the mind-altering properties of model airplane glue. Lenny next followed the kid into a toy store where he nonchalantly asks the clerk for a list of innocuous items: a nickel’s worth of pencils, Big Boy tablet, some Jujubes, Tailspin Tommy book, and—slipping this in almost as an afterthought—two thousand tubes of airplane glue.
“That destroyed me,” Richard said. “I went fucking crazy.”
The epiphany of Richard’s first brush with Lenny Bruce was akin to what Colombian journalist Gabriel García Márquez experienced when he first opened a copy of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. “Holy shit!” is what he said, reliving that moment for an interviewer some thirty years later. “The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that.”
Before Lenny Bruce, most comics purchased their jokes from gag writers. And, once those jokes had been performed, there was little recourse against other comics stealing them, so common a practice that Milton Berle, the most famous and highest-paid comic on TV at the time—affectionately known as Uncle Miltie, Mr. Television, Mr. Tuesday Night by viewers—was called the Thief of Bad Gags by his fellow comics. Lenny’s brand of comedy changed all that, effectively trouncing the division of labor between gag writer and comedian, rendering the arrangement hopelessly passé, just as Bob Dylan had done to songsters in tin pan alley. (“Bob Dylan killed popular music,” an old-time recording engineer at Columbia Records’ New York studio was heard to say during an afternoon mastering session in the late 1980s, shaking his head with equal parts admiration and rue. Every songwriter now felt he should sing, and every singer thought he had something to say.) Gag writers and tunesmiths soldiered on, of course, but mainly as remnants of a time that had passed. Comics, like singers—if they wanted to be taken seriously—were expected to do their own stuff.
What Lenny Bruce did was revive the long-neglected tradition of storytellers, balladeers, satirists, and poets who delivered their oratory in the public square. He showed that a comedian standing in front of an audience could roam the same expanse of territory, plumb the same depths of humanity as a novelist, poet, or playwright could sitting over a typewriter.
Richard, in his moment of enlightenment, understood not only the alchemy Lenny practiced, he recognized, too, that he’d already amassed and absorbed everything he needed to work that same spell himself. He knew it better than he knew anything. He’d been learning it all his life from Buck’s emasculating tirades, his grandfather’s tall tales, Uncle Dickie’s boasts, the pool-hall hustlers’ mother-rhymes, the prayers of the revival preacher who tried to cast the devil out of him, and the lies told by whichever wizened Peorian it was who planted the seeds of Mudbone as he sent streams of tobacco juice hissing into the barbecue pit.
Where Lenny was cool and detached, standing on the outside looking in, Richard would crawl inside his characters, actually become them, and follow them wherever they might go. Which is why the restrictions of TV performance proved so problematic. “I have to be that person,” he told James Alan McPherson in 1975. “I see that man in my mind and go with him. . . . When I do the people, I have to do it true. If I can’t do it, I’ll stop right in the middle rather than pervert it and turn it into Tomism. . . . If I didn’t do characters, it wouldn’t be funny.”
Richard’s problem, McPherson concluded, was his conviction that objectionable language was essential to the characters he created. To stay within the confines of acceptable practices, he insisted, Richard had to pull back, resist giving himself over to characters who would invariably go where he couldn’t follow—not and stay on the air, anyway.
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In Buffalo, fellow comedian Donnie Simpson sold Richard on a vision of bigger paychecks and beautiful women awaiting them in Canada. Finding themselves stranded in Ontario, out of money and with no work, Richard flipped through the June 17, 1963, issue of Newsweek to see a full-page article about a young black comic named Bill Cosby.
What set Cosby apart from all other “Negro comedians,” the article said, was that he didn’t tell Negro jokes. “I’m trying to reach all of the people,” he said. “I want to play to Joe Q. Public.”
Richard was panic-stricken. “Goddamn it,” he told Simpson and anyone else who would listen, “this nigger’s doing what I’m fixing to do. Ain’t no room for two niggers.”
If that’s what Richard had in mind, Simpson asked him, what was his ass doing in Toronto? “You got to go to New York. That’s where all them bit cats are.”
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When he first started out in Philadelphia saloons and New York coffeehouses, Bill Cosby saw himself as the next Dick Gregory, until manager Roy Silver convinced him otherwise. According to Newsweek, his act at that time consisted of “one joke about the first Negro President of the U.S. (‘Everything is OK. Just a lot of “For Sale” signs on the street’) and 30 minutes of gall.” Cosby soon conceded that there was only room for one Dick Gregory.
Yet, by the time Richard arrived on the scene, Dick Gregory had all but abandoned his post as the country’s designated black comedian, turning his energy and attention more and more toward civil rights and racial justice, working the college circuit and staging hunger strikes that gave him the gaunt face, sunken cheeks, and protruding eyes of a wizened sage. His press conferences, commentator Ralph J. Gleason noted, had become more entertaining than his stage shows.
Never an overtly political animal or even a student of politics himself, Richard nonetheless possessed an acutely intuitive political savvy. He didn’t need a weatherman to gauge the brisk winds that sent hats flying and people chasing after them as they rolled down the streets. (Soon enough, men simply stopped wearing them.)
Cosby uplifted the race without ever mentioning the subject. But the ardor of Dick Gregory’s activism awoke even Lenny Bruce to deeper currents running through the nation. When Gregory asked him to join a march, Lenny demurred, reasoning that his legal battles stemming from drug and obscenity charges would only bring down more heat on the march. Gregory assured him that would not be a problem. The only thing that mattered, he said, was to “trick whitey, fuck up Boss Charley.”
Trick whitey? Fuck up Boss Charley?
Lenny had never heard that kind of talk before. Then it dawned on him that he’d never heard a black man express any type of hostility, ever. If you’re in traffic, he said, and you hear some guy yelling, “ ‘Hey, asshole, move it over dere!’ That’s never a colored driver, Mack. Isn’t that a little strange?”
Still, some in the civil rights movement, such as Whitney Young of the National Urban League, lamented Gregory’s activism, believing he could accomplish far more for the cause through performing his comedy on national television than he would in the marches and sit-ins. “We can find marchers and fasters and people who can run for political office,” Young argued, “but we don’t have many Dick Gregorys.”
By contrast, Cosby developed characters that had more in common with Red Skelton’s Mean Widdle Kid than with Dick Gregory’s cool scathing wit or, later, Richard Pryor’s Mudbone. Although Cosby’s material was clean and nonthreatening, he made the medium his message. The very notion of a cuddly color-blind black comic in the sixties was radical in and of itself, said critic Gerald Nachman. “He made folks feel good about America. The humor was just the icing on the cake; Cosby was the cake.”
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Richard arrived in New York City in the summer of 1963 with ten dollars in his pocket. He spent fifty cents on a shower at the Port Authority bus terminal, another dollar to have his suit pressed and shoes polished, bought a pack of cigarettes, splashed on some Canoe cologne, and headed uptown to The Apollo Theater in Harlem, the only place he knew to go. The man there took one look at him and suggested he try his luck down in the Village.
On the bus downtown, Richard struck up a hi-I-just-got-to-town conversation with a fellow passenger who offered him floor space in his rooming house on West Thirty-sixth Street until he got his bearings.
Soon Richard had a place of his own on Fourteenth Street and was sharing bills with the likes of Bob Dylan, Richie Havens, and Woody Allen at clubs like the Improv, the Gaslight, Cafe au Go Go, the Village Gate, and the Bitter End where performers would stop by in the afternoon to take a number, just like at a bakery or deli counter, to determine what order they would go onstage that night. Joan Rivers remembers waiting in that line with the skinny and “brilliantly shocking” young comedian whose jacket sleeves had been “lengthened so many times, he looked like an admiral.” Rivers would soon join the ranks of an unlikely assemblage of high-profile fans, including Hugh Masekela, Nina Simone, Budd Friedman, and Miles Davis, who took it upon themselves to promote Richard and champion his career.
While writing an article on Joan Rivers for Life, Tommy Thompson and the magazine’s entertainment editor Richard Meryman accompanied her to see Richard’s act at “some awful place in the Village where you walked down two steps—both literally and socially—when you walked into that club.” Even though there were only a few scattered people in the club that night, they all three were astounded by Richard’s improvisational flights of fancy. He was just incredible, Rivers says. “Funny, funny, funny. And sad. It was acting, it was comedy, it was social comment, it was everything.” Her awe only grew over time. Twenty years later (in the early eighties), she spoke of his stand-up characters as though they were actual people. “They’re brilliant and they’re ugly, but he makes them funny, and by the humor he takes you through the ugliness and into the humor and makes you aware of everything. Nobody can touch him.” Then, in a clear-eyed assessment almost unheard-of in a field so fraught with rivalry, she concluded, “In my own way, I may do some comparable things, but on a much more shallow scale. I do what’s painful for the middle-class woman. That’s a whole different thing. He does what’s painful for somebody who has really lived through pain.”
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During the last week of August and first week of September 1963, Richard shared a broom-closet-sized dressing room at the Cafe Wha? with pop singer Brian Hyland, who’d hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 three years earlier at the age of sixteen with “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” a novelty song that he followed with more enduring hits like “Let Me Belong to You” and “Sealed with a Kiss.”
“Richard projected such an endearing ease and vulnerability,” Hyland says, “he had the audience smiling with him from the moment he hit the stage. He was a master of voices and characters.” Hyland sat out front every night to watch Richard’s act and said he never did the same set twice. “His off-the-wall riffs always left the audiences roaring. He could do anything. I consider it one of the highlights of my career to have worked with the up and coming comic genius.”
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Nina Simone invited Richard to open for her at the storied Village Gate, a cavernous upscale club twice the size of the Cafe Wha?, where the stage consisted of a simple riser on the floor out among the tables.
On their opening night, Richard was so nervous he shook like he had malaria. Nina stood with him in the wings as he waited to go on. “I put my arms around him there in the dark and rocked him like a baby until he calmed down,” she wrote in her autobiography I Put a Spell on You. “The next night was the same, and the next, and I rocked him each time. He never stopped being nervous.” Or perhaps he just wanted to be rocked in the arms of Nina Simone.
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Miles Davis paid Richard out of his own pocket to open for his quintet’s weekend shows at the Gate. “He didn’t have a reputation yet, but I knew he was going to be a big star. I could just feel it in my bones,” Miles told Quincy Troupe. “I just wanted people to know how great this motherfucker was.”
Improv owner Budd Friedman ran a hard business—some called him a benign dictator—but he always had an indulgent spot for Richard Pryor. Richard once accused Friedman of taking advantage of him because he was black. “I was absolutely heartbroken,” he told Chuck Crisafulli of the Los Angeles Times. Friedman lay awake that night worrying that the kid might be right. Friedman’s wife, wanting to get some sleep herself, tried to reassure him: “You should have told him you take advantage of all performers, regardless of race, color, or creed.”
“I told Richard that line and he loved it. We had no trouble being friends again.” Friedman even played along with a costly gag the night Richard recruited J. J. Barry, and Martin Harvey Friedberg to join him for a bit of silent slapstick that knocked the crowd silly. Inspired as much by the Marx Brothers as the staged happenings and absurdist theater on display in the Village’s more high-minded venues, the three comedians set a table onstage and consumed a full meal in silence, grabbing food off each other’s plates, licking the dishes, and otherwise cutting up as the improvisational spirit moved them. The performance culminated in a smashing of plates that brought Friedman, on cue, into the act. He came out screaming, “Is this the way you treat my place!” whereupon he snatched away the tablecloth sending what dishes remained crashing to the floor.
Even though Richard drew attention and praise from all the right people, that Bill Cosby article in Newsweek still worried him like a bad tooth. His imagination filled with images of Cosby grabbing the headlines, the money, the precious few TV guest slots for black comics. Yet he’d never seen Cosby perform. One night between sets at The Cafe Wha?, Richard went around to the Bitter End to see Cosby’s act for himself. He was amazed to find that Cosby’s act was nothing like his own. His jokes were clean—no profanity, no politics, no racial axes to grind. As he walked back to the Wha? for his next set, Richard decided then and there that he would refashion himself in Cosby’s image. If Cosby did Noah and the ark, Pryor would do Adam and Eve. If Cosby spun stories of his childhood in the projects of Philadelphia, Richard would spin stories that sounded a lot like Cosby’s childhood in the projects of Philadelphia but set in Peoria.
On his debut Warner Bros. LP Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow . . . Right!, Cosby had a bit about the free entertainment provided by winos on the New York City subway. So Richard did one about subway drunks and pickpockets. Cosby parodied professional athletes doing television commercials for razor blades and hair tonic; Richard parodied commercials of real housewives captured on hidden cameras gushing about their laundry detergent.
Unfortunately, it worked: The accolades and bookings that came his way when he followed Bill Cosby’s lead put a half-decade-long stranglehold on his true genius.
When word got around the Village one night that a TV talent scout had dropped in at the Bitter End, Richard rushed over and begged owner Fred Weintraub to let him get up on stage. That’s all it took. And so, on August 31, 1964, Richard made his national debut on a summer replacement TV variety show On Broadway Tonight, hosted by Rudy Vallee.
Vallee, an amiable megaphone crooner from the 1930s, famous for his recordings of “The Whiffenpoof Song” and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” had been on the lookout for someone new to feature on his show. Despite mild grumblings from his producer, Irving Mansfield, Vallee saw Richard as just the sort of “out there” comic who would give his ratings a boost.
Despite his avowed determination to go full Cosby, Richard’s jokes were drifting toward pure Dadaism, such as this opening bit for the drawling hillbilly, a character that would take up permanent residence in his repertoire:
I heard a knock on the door. I said to my wife, “There’s a knock on the door. My wife said, “That’s peculiar. We ain’t got no door.”
Confronting the intruder (who’d presumably knocked before entering), Richard shifted into pitch-perfect mimicry of Cosby’s rapid-fire delivery, right down to the elongated vowels:
I grabbed the-eee crook. That was the-eee wrong move. He threw me down. I got up. He knocked me down. I got up. He kicked me down. I got up. He said get up. I said haaaaa! Then my wife threw him across the furniture. She slapped me. The police came. She beat them up. They took her away. Me and the crook livin’ happily ever after.
Always more comfortable when he could disappear into a character, Richard fidgeted between jokes and implored the studio audience to hurry their applause lest he run out of time before finishing his act. “Wait,” he said, “I’ve some more to tell you.”
The first words Richard spoke to Vallee’s nationwide television audience were, “I want to tell you a few things about myself because a lot of you probably don’t know me. I’m not a New Yorker; my home’s in Peoria, Illinois.” Here he paused for the customary applause that greets the mention of almost any American town, and then he let his face go slack when none was forthcoming.
Not that anyone in Peoria was watching. Richard had called home prior to the show to let his grandma Marie know he was going to be on TV, but his grandfather Thomas answered the phone and, assuming that Richard was calling to ask for money, hung up at the sound of his voice. Even his own father missed the show. With three channels to choose from, Buck tuned in to the wrong one.
But they all saw his second TV appearance, nine months later, on The Ed Sullivan Show.
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Richard left Peoria with a promise to Miss Whittaker that, one day, he would be on Ed Sullivan. As dreams go, it wasn’t that far-fetched. From the show’s very beginning in 1948, Sullivan openly defied social custom, his sponsors, and the wrath of southern network affiliates by presenting black entertainers on the same stage with whites. In the show’s first two seasons alone, Sullivan hosted Cab Calloway, W. C. Handy, Nat King Cole, Pearl Bailey (with whom he held hands!), Illinois Jacquet, Ethel Waters, Billy Eckstine, George Kirby, Jackie Robinson, Hazel Scott, and Count Basie, all a dozen years before Dick Gregory took a seat on Jack Paar’s couch.
Sullivan was vaudeville for a cool medium, trotting out a weekly lineup of jugglers, dancers, puppeteers, mimes, animal acts, acrobats, fire-eaters, magicians, and comedians—usually propped up by a big-name Broadway, opera, or movie star—at eight o’clock every Sunday night from 1948 to 1971. Marveling at the litany of shows the other networks sent up against Sullivan over the course of his twenty-three-year run, John Leonard compared him to Yankee left-hander Eddie Lopat who “seemed to throw nothing but junk, and still they couldn’t hit him.” Or, as Fred Allen put it, Ed Sullivan would stay on the air as long as other people had talent.
Comedy was the driving wheel of his show, but comedy, Sullivan understood, usually hinges on subversion, on pushing against the boundaries of decorum and comfort—either by tweaking the nose or rending the mask—and a reassuring punch line isn’t always enough to make an audience forget a negative impression. Comedians, then, were risky business. Sullivan insisted on feel-good humor that would build up rather than knock down, entertain rather than subvert. Therefore, every comedian who ever set foot on Sullivan’s stage first had to make the trek up Park Avenue to East Fifty-ninth Street where Sullivan and his wife, Sylvia, shared a six-room suite on the eleventh floor of the Delmonico Hotel and audition his or her act—every word of it—while Ed, a late riser who stayed out till all hours scouring the clubs for fresh talent and bits of gossip for his newspaper column, took his invariable midday breakfast of sweetened pears, iced tea, and a seared lamb chop brought up by room service.
Ed never laughed. It just wasn’t in his nature. He seldom smiled. (“Ed’s the only person who can brighten up a room by leaving it,” Joe E. Lewis quipped.) If Ed really thought an act was hysterical, Jackie Mason once advised a young comic, he might part his lips. Curiously, the few who do recall getting chuckles from Sullivan never made it onto the show, a kindness, perhaps, intended to soften the blow when Ed’s son-in-law and producer, Bob Precht, delivered the bad news.
Generations of comedians count these vetting sessions at the Delmonico among the most excruciatingly ego-bruising experiences of their lives. None more so than Joan Rivers, who lucked into her first appearance, on May 22, 1966, thanks to a slip of the tongue during the closing of the previous week’s show. “Next week, we’ll have Johnny Rivers,” is what Sullivan had meant to say. Instead, it came out as “Joannie Rivers.” Broadcast live, with no chance to do it over, they went out and booked her. (Johnny Rivers, meanwhile got bumped all the way back to March 19, 1967, sharing the stage with Cab Calloway, George Carlin, and the Lovin’ Spoonful. It would be his only appearance on the Sullivan show, whereas Joan got invited back nineteen times.)
Producer Bob Precht tried repeatedly to book Richard on the show, but Sullivan just didn’t like the kid’s attitude. Precht was so convinced Richard would be a hit that he turned to Sullivan’s longtime golfing buddy, Alan King, for help. The caustic, cigar-smoking comic was Sullivan’s go-to guy who could always be counted on to come in from Great Neck for a last-minute appearance if a show was running short. (On one condition: King refused to follow rock ’n’ roll bands. The screaming teenagers screwed up his timing and just didn’t get his jokes.) Sullivan trusted King so implicitly that he was the only comedian ever granted dispensation from those midweek auditions at the Delmonico.
“Ed, this kid is terrific,” King told him. Coming from King, that was all Ed needed to hear. And there Richard stood, fidgeting in his ill-fitting suit while an expressionless Sullivan, seated in his bathrobe, cut into his lamb chop and nodded for him to begin.
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“It was a surprise,” Richard’s sister-in-law, Angie, said. “We knew he was determined to go that route, but we were surprised to see that he had made it.” Everyone watched Ed Sullivan.
When the Beatles made their first American television appearance on February 9, 1964, it was on The Ed Sullivan Show. The hysteria that attended their performance seemed fueled—at least in part—by the nation’s edgy fear and the deep desire to shake free the pall of the Kennedy assassination only twelve weeks earlier. The screams were real, even if rooted as much in terror as exuberance, the times growing darker and less predictable, and Sullivan for his part appeared both delighted and unnerved by the implications of his audience’s volatility—the audience no longer serving as mannered witnesses to spectacle but suddenly creating it.
Then, in the autumn of that year, Richard went for a walk through Harlem with his old cohort from the Chitlin’ Circuit, Redd Foxx. People downtown in the Village often recognized Richard from The Merv Griffin Show or Ed Sullivan, but up in Harlem it was Redd Foxx who stopped traffic. He caused excitement, like a one-man parade for a returning astronaut. People stepped out of shops and restaurants, leaving their work to come and greet him. They leaned out apartment windows hollering, “Hey, Redd! Zorro!” On that walk, Richard came to realize that the scene unfolding before his eyes contained everything he ever wanted: for people in black neighborhoods to drop what they were doing and come running to greet him, to love him for who he was and for what he did.
That Richard Pryor might find his voice by stepping off the stage and into the lives of his audience—that he might touch a nerve by illuminating the dysfunction and despair that united them all—appears now as inevitable as it was revolutionary. The bloody battles over civil rights and the graphic images flooding in from Vietnam—both finding their way onto family-dinner-hour newscasts—had done much to tear away the facade of warm gentility that most Americans had grown to expect when they flipped on their television sets.
When Cassius Clay emerged in his new identity as World Heavyweight Champion Muhammad Ali, the country seemed stunned to find him as angry as he was lyrical and buoyant, and a boxer with more on his mind than mere sport. Frank Sinatra’s hands might always smell of lavender soap, but he was a brute nonetheless, and even he began to stop pretending otherwise. Live recordings of Sinatra bantering between songs with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. seem almost to quiver with a giddy, high-alert hum. Every joke, every wisecrack or aside from Sinatra and Martin hinges on the plain fact that these guys were sharing the stage with a mulignan. Sinatra and Martin berated Davis without mercy, ordering him off the stage, while Davis begged them to let him stay.
SAMMY DAVIS: Can I sing with you guys? (apparently placing a hand on Martin)
DEAN MARTIN: Hey, hey, hey, hey, HEY, HEY! I’ll dance with you, I’ll sing with you, I’ll swim with you, I’ll cut the lawn with you, I’ll go to bar mitzvahs with you—but don’t touch me!
When Davis announced that he would next like to do a few impersonations, Sinatra broke in with, “Why don’t you do Paul Revere? Get on your horse, and get the hell out of here?” Then he thought of an even better zinger: “I tell ya what, do James Meredith of Mississippi.”
Davis couldn’t have cared less, says Kathy McKee, his longtime girlfriend, confidante, and “mistress of ceremonies.” “Sammy was in another world. He was high as a kite. They all were. Everybody was blitzed. The money was flowing, the booze was flowing, the coke was flowing. It was all a big party. There was nothing negative to it ever at all. If anything personal went on inside Sammy about this, he didn’t show it.”
Why would he? As a member of the Rat Pack, Sammy Davis Jr. was a standard bearer for the swingingest kind of postwar, pre-Beatles cool. It was all for laughs. All ring-a-ding-ding. There wasn’t a cushier, crazier gig on earth and coon-calling was just part of the shtick.
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In the wake of his breakthrough on Ed Sullivan, Richard and his new girlfriend, Maxine Silverman, went on the first of Richard’s many epic coke and booze binges that would go on for days and culminate in hallucinations of people from his past ganging up on him, casting accusations, demanding their due. In the depths of this delirium, he missed a second booking on the Sullivan show.
When Richard didn’t show up for rehearsal, producer Bob Precht booked Lou Alexander, a comedian who’d been opening for Tony Martin at the Copa, to take his place. Alexander had a terrific seven-minute monologue about contact lenses that knocked them dead in rehearsal. Fellow guest Myron Cohen came up to him and said, “Tonight’s your night, kid. That routine you just did is gonna kill ’em.” But the show ran long, and at the last minute, Alexander was told he had to cut the bit by two minutes. “They cut my balls off,” Alexander said. “You take out two minutes, you’re killing me. I’m doing this in front of forty million people and editing onstage and you can see I’m white as a ghost. It was not a tenth as good as what I’d done that afternoon.” Sullivan walked over when he’d finished and said, “Very good job. Very nice.” But Alexander knew that was the end of it. He never went back on Sullivan again.
Richard’s agent smoothed out the no-show with Sullivan’s people. Not only was he invited back, Sullivan granted him an unprecedented exception to the strict time limit he usually imposed on comedians. Russ Petranto, who had the job of keeping a stopwatch on the show, recalled Richard coming in and doing a long, semidramatic piece about a wino warning a young kid not to turn out like him. It ran more than seven minutes in rehearsal. “It was so brilliant you couldn’t stand it,” Petranto said. Both Precht and Sullivan refused to cut it, despite calls from the CBS censor objecting to the raw subject matter.
Sullivan paid Richard five hundred dollars—more than he’d ever received for a single performance. He and Maxine went out to celebrate and bought their first hits of LSD.
Later, and perhaps a result of the LSD, Maxine stabbed Richard in the arm during a fight, sending him to the emergency room. The doctor recognized him from TV and didn’t believe for a minute his story that he’d cut himself while practicing a knife trick.
He and Maxine both knew they were no good for each other, but when Bobby Darin offered Richard a three-week gig opening for him at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas at twenty-four hundred dollars a week, he asked her to come with him and she went.
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A far cry from today’s retina-searing wonderland offering the family values crowd package deals on bacchanalian revelries with prix fixe absolution included in the gratuity, Las Vegas of the 1960s (as Tom Wolfe so memorably evoked it in the pages of Esquire) was then a nascent low-rise attraction, its skyline dominated by electric signage—neon pink champagne bubbles rising sixteen stories into the empty desert sky—beckoning to pensioners, mostly women, who wandered the casinos wearing hob-heeled shoes and the same shapeless print dress they had on the day before, as though headed down some Mississippi backroad to buy eggs, carrying around Dixie cups filled with coins to feed the slots in one hand, the other sporting, pre–Michael Jackson, a heavy-duty White Mule work glove so their palms didn’t callus from pulling the jackpot levers.
A fierce current of Protestant rectitude ran just beneath the surface. This was the same Las Vegas, after all, where George Carlin, opening for the Supremes at the Frontier in 1969, would be suspended for doing a bit about having a small ass. When he was brought back to fill out the remaining dates on his contract the following summer, Carlin was permanently fired for saying this: “Listen, folks, I don’t say ‘shit.’ Buddy Hackett says ‘shit’ right down the street. Redd Foxx will say ‘shit’ on the other side of the street. I don’t say ‘shit.’ I’ll smoke a little of it.”
So in Vegas, Richard would need to be on his best behavior, onstage and off. The characters in Richard’s head clamoring ever louder to be set free, to speak with their own voices—they would just have to wait. This was Las fucking Vegas. This was twenty-four-hundred dollars a week. He earned more that three-week engagement than he’d ever made in an entire year, even in the army.