Richard loved Las Vegas—the money, the booze, the showgirls, the nonstop parties, seeing his name emblazoned on the marquee—but underneath it all he felt like a fraud. “I knew I wasn’t as good as the reviews said I was,” he said, “and I knew why.” Of course, it wasn’t hard for him to figure out why when so many people kept telling him. Don Rickles put it as succinctly as anyone when he came backstage to congratulate him after a show. “It’s uncanny,” he said, pumping his hand. “You sound just like Bill Cosby.”
No matter the criticisms, Richard was now firmly established as a stand-up comic. What he wanted most, though, was to be a movie star. Much like Elvis Presley, Richard’s genius blossomed in front of a live audience, alone on a bare stage with nothing but a microphone in his hand. There no one could touch him. Yet he seemed to regard his sublime gift primarily as a stepping-stone to stardom on the big screen. And, again like Elvis, he didn’t much care how crappy, inconsequential, or demeaning those movies might be.
“Give Richard the choice between being a stand-up star and a movie star, and he goes for the Hollywood bullshit every time,” Paul Mooney would write in his 2009 memoir, Black Is the New White.
Richard was, after all, still the same kid from Peoria who had pasted his name on discarded movie posters and hung them on his bedroom wall.
After their Vegas run ended, Bobby Darin threw Richard a Hollywood coming-out party at a posh restaurant in Beverly Hills that led Sid Caesar to cast him as a detective in The Busy Body, a loopy, celebrity-laden, cops-and-gangsters comedy that is of interest today only as Richard Pryor’s screen debut.
The prospect of acting alongside Sid Caesar made him jittery enough. Richard had idolized Caesar as a skit comic on the NBC variety series Your Show of Shows since he was ten years old. Adding to his nervousness was the fact that he didn’t have a clue how movies were made. He’d performed in front of cameras on television, of course, but had never acted for a camera in a movie before, and he knew enough to know there was a difference. But he knew how to pretend. He channeled a little bit of Bogart, some Robert Mitchum, a dash of Steve McQueen. And it worked, more or less. Richard’s performance brought an element of unruffled, world-weary cool to an otherwise frothy concoction, and he more than held his own alongside Caesar and veteran costars Anne Baxter, Jan Murray, Robert Ryan, Kay Medford, Dom DeLuise, and Godfrey Cambridge.
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The Busy Body was released in March 1967. One night the following month, when Maxine was nine months pregnant, Richard went out into the backyard and stood gazing out at the moon. It seemed to beckon him. He got in his car and followed it all the way down to Tijuana. He drank and partied with the whores and tried to take his mind off Maxine and the prospect of once again being a father.
On his way back, U.S. customs officials found the remnants of a bag of pot in his car. It was less than enough to roll a joint, he said, but it was enough to keep him from being present for the birth of his second—possibly third—child, Elizabeth.
Richard admitted that he just didn’t care. “It’s nothing to be proud of. It’s just the way it was,” he wrote. The concept of fatherhood is one thing Richard clearly did not copy from Bill Cosby. When TV talk show host Mike Douglas asked Richard what he had done that impressed his kids the most, he said, “I admitted I was their father.”
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W. E. B. DuBois deemed it a necessity for survival that African Americans maintain a dual identity, a double consciousness. One self they presented to white folks—the masters of slavery, industry, or finance—and one—the real one—they kept for themselves, “just between us.”
Zora Neale Hurston wrote of how resistant and suspicious black folks in her native Florida were about sharing with outsiders the folk tales and lore they swapped so freely with each other in the evenings on store porches—reluctant to share even with her, Lucy Hurston’s daughter Zora, from over in Eatonville, now that she’d gone up north and come back with a college degree and a Chevrolet.
They are most reluctant at times to reveal that which the soul lives by. And the Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive. You see we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioner, “Get out of here!” We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing . . . The Negro offers a feather-bed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries.
The theory behind our tactics: “The white man is always trying to know into somebody else’s business. All right, I’ll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind. I’ll put this play toy in his hand, and he will seize it and go away. Then I’ll say my say and sing my song.”
Richard’s trouble was that he had all but cut himself off from those places where he felt free to say his say or sing his song.
It didn’t happen overnight, as Richard often claimed, but he set about tearing down the wall between his two selves with a decisive and defiant act on Friday, September 15, 1967, his opening night at the Aladdin Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
It was a move, everyone knew, that once done he couldn’t undo.
Gazing out at the crowd, the bullshit reached critical mass. His eyes landed on Dean Martin, of all people, seated at a table down front, his cigarette curling smoke up into the spotlight as he waited for the comic to give him something to laugh about. A realization slammed hard into Richard’s chest that Mama—his grandmother Marie—wouldn’t be welcome in the room, would not be allowed a seat at the table. “I was looking out at the audience,” he would tell Paul Mooney, “and it hit me that all those motherfuckers out there wouldn’t make room for Mama if you put a gun to their heads.”
And if Mama wasn’t welcome in that place, he had no business being there either. As it was, he knew that the only way he could enter that room was by way of the stage or through the kitchen. No matter how glamorous or lucrative, the stage door was still a service entrance.
That’s when his inner High John the Conqueror kicked in, his Stagolee, his Bad Nigger. “Every black man harbors a potential bad nigger inside him,” psychiatrists William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs would write in their landmark Black Rage, published just nine months later. “The bad nigger is bad because he has been required to renounce his manhood to save his life. The more one approaches the American ideal of respectability, the more this hostility must be repressed. The bad nigger is a defiant nigger, a reminder of what manhood could be.”
So standing on that Las Vegas stage, Richard leaned into the mic. “What the fuck am I doing here?” he said, and left the stage.
Moments later, he was trapped. He’d turned the wrong way when exiting the stage and found his path blocked by the theater’s soundboard. Recalling the venerable comic gag where a man, filled with righteous anger, storms out of a room slamming the door behind him, only to emerge, sheepishly, moments later from what turned out to be a closet, Richard had no intention of crossing back in front of that audience. He edged his way along a narrow passage in the dark and squeezed through a tiny gap between the proscenium and a soundboard that was so tight he drew blood scraping his face against the brick wall, a scene that conjures up images of passing through a birth canal.
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One rumor, started by Richard himself while joking with a reporter, had him running naked through the casino, leaping up onto one of the tables and waving his cock in the air while yelling, “Blackjack!”
The most entertaining account—still current in some circles—has it that Richard whipped out his dick onstage and began pissing either on or in the general direction of a coterie of “very special people” (read high-powered mobsters) who were so incensed that their henchman seized him on the spot and trundled him off to await a swift and certain execution, a sentence rescinded thanks to appeals from a delegation of black entertainers led by Bill Cosby who, as the story was related by novelist Claude Brown, gave the performance of his life, down on his knees streaming crocodile tears. “The boy is sick,” Brown had Cosby plead. “We’ll look after him. I’ll look after him. He won’t do it again. That’s a promise.” The mobsters finally relented and delivered a shell-shocked Richard Pryor into Cosby’s care.
Richard, in his book, says the mobster incident never happened.
His agent and the Aladdin’s management, however, did give him a thorough dressing-down. He would never work in that town again, they told him. He never did.
Two months later, though, he was back on Ed Sullivan.
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Richard would forever after describe his Aladdin meltdown as his personal and professional epiphany, marking the B.C.–A.D. divide in his life, although the transition was in no way so decisive or abrupt. He’d long been keeping it real, doing real-life material in friendlier venues, yet more than a year after the Aladdin incident, according to Mooney, his transformation was nowhere near complete. He continued channeling Cosby, was still unhappy with himself. He still did not know who or what, exactly, he wanted to be. All he knew was that he had to get over, to keep pushing ahead till he found what felt right. What his meltdown onstage at the Aladdin did was cut off any means of easy retreat.
The Vegas walk-off wasn’t entirely driven by artistic angst. The storms were raging all around him. Maxine had filed suit for child support, claiming that they had lived together as husband and wife—a characterization Richard neither could nor would deny. He had often introduced Maxine as his wife and addressed her as such in letters. She had legally taken his last name and would keep it for the rest of her life.
Following his breakup with Maxine, Richard moved into a hundred-dollar-a-month room in the notorious Sunset Tower Motel. Coming in late one night, he got into an altercation with the night-shift desk clerk. Richard claimed he had no recollection of ever striking the guy, but the police report said he punched him in the face and broke his glasses. The clerk successfully sued him for seventy-five thousand dollars.
Richard, at that point, said, “Fuck it.” He tried to make himself invisible, at least as far as the System was concerned. He threw away his driver’s license and stopped carrying any type of ID. He closed his bank account, stopped cashing paychecks—there is the perhaps apocryphal story of a friend who started leafing through a book in his apartment and found a months-old check for eighty thousand dollars that Richard was apparently using as a bookmark—stopped paying parking tickets or income tax.
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Richard’s appearances on Ed Sullivan and Merv Griffin, his run in Vegas, and his movie with Sid Caesar all put him in a caste above all the other climbers he mingled with at bungalow parties around L.A.
It was at one such gathering on Sunset Boulevard that Richard walked up to the drop-dead gorgeous model Carol LaBrea and said to the guy she was with, “Let’s all take off our clothes and have an orgy!”
Those were the first words Richard Pryor ever spoke to Paul Mooney.
“Let’s go, let’s do it, man. Look at these ladies! Let’s all get in bed and have a freak thing!”
Mooney’s attention had been drawn to Richard from the moment he and his date walked in the door. “Right away I sense he is different,” Mooney writes. “He is smiling and laughing. Everything pleases him. He knows there are lots of women and drugs around, and that fills him with childish delight. Like a kid in a candy store. . . . And right away, the first thing out of his mouth, he says he wants to go to bed with me.”
Richard’s date worked for ex–football star Jim Brown and did some moonlighting on Sunset Strip dancing in the cages at Whiskey a Go Go. So did Carol LaBrea. Maybe that’s where Richard had seen her before. He knew her from somewhere. What he didn’t know was she was Mooney’s half sister.
Despite this questionable first impression, Mooney would become Richard’s most trusted lifelong friend, champion, and collaborator.
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Mooney found it impossible to be angry with Richard. “He’s so obviously without guile. He just has no inhibitions. . . . No other considerations figure into his actions, nothing else other than ‘I want it.’
“For everybody else in the world, an attitude such as this would come off as totally insufferable. But Richard makes it work because he’s completely open and vulnerable. Sure, he’s selfish. But he’s selfish with the innocence of a four-year-old. . . . He makes me feel protective toward him.”
The first time they went to a party together, Mooney sized up the room filled with dope smoke, the cocaine laid out on the table, and told Richard he was cutting out. He’d been to enough parties like this to know that he hated them. “Sometimes it seems like everybody in L.A. is high but me,” he writes. Richard was flabbergasted to learn that Mooney didn’t do drugs. He didn’t drink; at least not the way Richard drank.
He persuaded Mooney to stay. They could just hang out and talk—and Richard would take Mooney’s share of the drugs being passed around.
“I get Mooney’s share!” became Richard’s cheerful refrain whenever they were out together and someone broke out the powder.
Remembering how often he heard that phrase, Mooney reckons that he single-handedly doubled Richard’s drug intake.
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When Richard went back to New York to open for Miles Davis at the Village Gate in the winter of 1968, Miles bestowed upon him a magnanimous vote of confidence by flipping the bill. He sent a member of his entourage to Richard’s dressing room to tell him there’d been a change in plan. “Miles is gonna play first,” he said. Miles had decided to make him the headliner.
After the show, Miles took him to a midtown apartment to meet a woman known as Gypsy Lady who provided them with the best cocaine he’d ever had. They “chopped and snorted until the sun crept through the windows and then we disappeared like vampires.”
“From now on you get your coke from her,” Miles instructed him.
During that same engagement at the Village Gate, Richard caught the eye, and the fancy, of Shelley Winters who came backstage afterward and offered him a part in her upcoming movie Wild in the Streets.* Richard was more than happy to pay the price of admission, according to Mooney, getting “Wild in the Sheets” with Miss Winters, “the most cock-hungry actress in Hollywood.”
Richard, for his efforts, was able to get Mooney a job on the film as his stunt double, and his new girlfriend, Shelley Bonus, a role as an uncredited extra playing a “tripped-out hippie chick.” With her long blonde hair, miniskirts, white patent-leather go-go boots, and outsized tinted glasses, she fit the part perfectly, although Shelley insisted she was no hippie. Hippies were filthy. She was a flower child.
American Pictures International’s Wild in the Streets was an over-the-top election year romp in which rock star Max Flatlow (Christopher Jones in a role turned down by Phil Ochs) makes a devil’s bargain to deliver the youth vote for Senate candidate Johnny Fergus (Hal Holbrook) and ends up being elected president in a landslide victory at age twenty-four, running as a Republican, by giving fourteen-year-olds the right to vote, spiking the water supply with LSD, and consigning adults over the age of thirty to reeducation camps. Richard played Stanley X, the nonobservant Black Muslim drummer in Max Frost’s band (also an anthropologist and author of The Aborigine Cookbook, according to the voiced-over introduction). With its pre-Woodstock split-screen sequences, acid-trip camera work, and swirling score by space-age composer Les Baxter, the movie garnered an Oscar nomination for best editing and achieved a cult status that endures unto the present day. Although he made good use of the opportunity to observe firsthand how movies were made, the film itself was a disappointment to Richard, one that sent him spiraling into yet another bout of “What the fuck am I doing here?” soul searching.
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On nights when he wasn’t performing, Richard liked to hang out with Redd Foxx at his Jazz Go-Go club on Adams off Western, snorting coke and flirting with the cocktail waitresses while Foxx regaled him with stories of the old days, back before he and Richard had worked together on the Chitlin’ Circuit.
Foxx told him how, while working in Chicago in the late 1930s, he and three members of a washboard band eager to make their names in show business, hopped a freight train bound for New York, where Foxx—still going by his birth name John Elroy Sanford—became fast friends with a Detroit hustler by the name of Malcolm Little. Because they shared matching “mariney complexions” and red hair, friends took to calling them “Chicago Red” and “Detroit Red,” respectively.
The two Reds worked together at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, a Harlem eatery and jazz club at 763 St. Nicholas Avenue near West 148th Street, Little as a waiter, and Sanford—taking over a job previously held by Charlie Parker—as a nine-dollar-a-week dishwasher. The two shared a bed of newspapers on a nearby rooftop.
“We had about 500 pounds of newspapers up there,” Foxx told Ebony magazine. “Newspapers is some of the warmest stuff going.”
“Chicago Red” became famous as Redd Foxx, and “Detroit Red” as Malcolm X. Foxx would point with pride to the passage in the Autobiography where Malcolm said, “Chicago Red was the funniest dishwasher on this earth. Now he’s making his living being funny as a nationally known stage and night-club comedian. I don’t see any reason why old Chicago Red would mind me telling that he is Redd Foxx.”
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Richard met his future second wife, Shelley Bonis—she preferred to spell it Bonus—at a dance club just before filming began on Wild in the Streets. Her father, Harold Bonis, was a show-business Brahman who had managed comedian Danny Kaye for more than three decades.
As husband and wife, Richard and Shelley set out to live as flower children in their own private Eden. Mooney once drove up to the cabin they shared above Laurel Canyon to find them, literally, hugging trees. Shelley arranged flowers in Richard’s hair, recited poetry to him. They gave each other rocks as gifts. They gave the rocks names.
Richard would later depict the two of them existing in this blissful state from the stand-up stage. “ ‘Oooh, a rock for me?’ If I gave that bitch a rock today, she’d hit me over the head with it.”
Shelley took him to task for not being informed or politically aware of his people’s struggles, for not reading books. So did Groucho Marx.
At the party Bobby Darin had thrown for him when he first arrived in L.A., Richard found himself cornered by the great comedian, who, to Richard’s chagrin, recalled seeing him on The Merv Griffin Show when he and fellow guest Jerry Lewis, desperate for laughs, began spitting on each other.
“Do you ever see plays? Do you ever read books?” Groucho scolded. “Do you want to end up a spitting wad like Jerry Lewis, or do you want a career you can be proud of?”
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Shelley, being more hip to the literary and political writings that informed black consciousness, encouraged Richard to read young black poets, along with the writings of Angela Davis, Malcolm X, and the prison writings of former rapist and eventual Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver published in the Catholic literary quarterly Ramparts and later collected in the best-selling Soul on Ice.
In reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Richard would learn that the One True God first appeared to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad (then Elijah Robert Poole) in 1931 in the person of Mr. Wallace D. Fard, then posing as a seller of silks in Detroit. This was but one of several revelations that Malcolm shares in his book—another being that an evil scientist named Yacub (Jacob of the Old Testament) had created a race of white-skinned devils “6,600 years ago”—that can be jarring to Malcolm’s political admirers unfamiliar with the Lost-Found Nation of Islam as preached by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
Richard, we can imagine, would have been delighted to learn of Mr. Muhammad’s 1931 encounter with God in the flesh on the streets of Detroit. The story melds perfectly with his portrayal of the black preacher who “first met God in 1929, outside a little hotel in Baltimore.” (If, in fact, Malcolm’s account of Elijah Muhammad’s encounter with the One True God on the streets of Detroit is what sparked Richard’s routine, he clearly demonstrates how well he knows his craft, as any student of comedy can attest that his elongated “nineteen twenny-nahhhh-nah” is much funnier than 1931.)
“Richard puts on an outrageous character I instantly recognize from my childhood,” Mooney writes. “It’s the kind of pompous, self-inflated preacher every black churchgoer knows.”
Richard performed a nascent version of the routine in May 1968 at P.J.’s, an after-hours club on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood.
I was walking down the street eating a tuna fish sammich. That’s right, in 1929 you’d eat anything you could get. And I hear this voice call unto me, and the voice has power and majesty. And the voice said, “Pssst . . .” I walked up to the voice and I said, “What?” And the voice got holy and magnificent, and the voice said to me, “Gimme some of that sammich.” And every since that day I’ve been able to heal, because I didn’t give up none of my sammich. I said, “If you’re God, make your own goddamn sammich. Don’t be messin’ with me.”
(In some performances, God beckons to the preacher from down a dark alley. “However,” his preacher concludes, “I did not venture down that dark alleyway, because it might not have been the voice of God but two or three niggers with a baseball bat.”)
“I hear the true voice of the preacher in the bit,” Mooney says.
Mooney was struck, too, by what he didn’t hear.
Richard didn’t crack a single joke. No punch lines. No toppers.
“My God,” Mooney thought. “He’s left jokes behind. Is he going to leave me behind, too?”
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Nine months later, Richard did a nearly identical version—minus the “goddamn”—on the premiere installment of This Is Tom Jones, a TV show taped at BBC Elstree Centre/ATV Studios in Hertfordshire, England, and broadcast Friday, February 7, 1969 on ABC.
Jones had not been familiar with Richard before he came on the show. He believes the network booked him as a way of testing the waters, as they wanted to align themselves with the rising wave of black performers.
“I thought he was really funny,” Jones says, “but sort of . . . scared, almost. Very skittish and quiet.” Then he made one of the female production assistants cry. “It seems Richard’s car wasn’t waiting as it was supposed to be after the taping, and he screamed at her that if his car wasn’t there in five minutes he would rip her head off and ram it up her ass. Maybe he was just trying to be funny, acting out as if he was outraged by something stupid. But it upset a lot of people.”
When the two men met again, many years later, Richard seemed genuinely thrilled to meet the Welsh soul singer saying, “Wow, great to finally meet you, man.” Jones was embarrassed to remind Richard that not only had they met before, but that he’d been a guest on Tom’s show. “He kind of said . . . ‘Oh yeah . . . yeah, man . . . that’s cool,’ but I’m not really sure he remembered.”
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So many of Richard’s friends over the years—colleagues, cohorts, and business associates—have said the same thing, arriving at nearly identical metaphors, to the effect that there was a big emptiness somewhere at his core, a hole he kept trying to fill with drink and drugs. A pain he kept trying to numb.
“There’s something desperate about Richard stuffing his face with dope and drink. Something is bothering him, something deep down at the root of his soul,” Mooney writes. “I know if I had an album, a Las Vegas date, or a film role, I’d let myself be happy for at least a little while. Those are the kinds of shots that every stand-up wants to nail. It’s what we are all working for. It kills us that Richard has it and it can’t make him happy.”
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Just as the soda fountain and pay phones at Schwab’s drugstore became “headquarters” for Hollywood actors and dealmakers in the 1940s and ’50s, so Duke’s Coffee Shop, at 8585 Santa Monica Boulevard, was to the musicians and comics who performed in West Hollywood clubs during the 1960s and ’70s.
Duke’s was a greasy-spoon diner on the ground floor of the Tropicana Motel, a haven for actors, musicians, writers, poets, film producers, and rock stars. Owned by Dodger pitcher Sandy Koufax, it became like a West Coast incarnation of New York’s Chelsea Hotel but with a motor court and Astroturf around the pool.
It was at Duke’s one midafternoon in September 1968 that a morose Richard Pryor, recently returned from his father’s funeral in Peoria, sat nursing a hangover with brandy-laced coffee when Paul Mooney came bouncing in and took the seat opposite him.
“Oh, man,” Mooney said, “I just saw a lady so pretty somebody should suck her daddy’s dick for a job well done.”
For a moment, Richard simply stared back at him. Then he laughed.
“You know you can die happy when you make Richard Pryor laugh,” Mooney writes. “His laugh is like ripping open a bag of joy.”
Richard used the line that very night during his set at Doug Weston’s Troubadour, amending it slightly but significantly to “Coming here tonight I saw a woman so motherfucking beautiful gorgeous that it made me want to suck her daddy’s dick for a job well done.” The place exploded. Afterward, Richard slipped a ten-thousand-dollar watch on Mooney’s wrist as payment for the gag.
Richard recorded his first LP on Dove/Reprise during his September run at the Troubadour, but he didn’t include Mooney’s line on that record. He didn’t commit it to vinyl until That Nigger’s Crazy, nearly six years later, when he incorporated it into the “Wino & Junkie” routine he’d been refining and expanding and digging deeper into for years, dating back to when an awed Ed Sullivan allowed his performance to run overtime rather than ask him to cut it.
Here’s how Richard’s junkie made use of Mooney’s line:
JUNKIE: I saw a bitch, she was so fine. . . . Shot bolts through my heart, baby.
WINO: Nigger, you wouldn’t know a fine woman if you tripped over her.
JUNKIE: This bitch was fine, pops. I ain’t lyin’. Bitch was so fine I wanted to suck her daddy’s dick. Is that fine enough for your ass?
Richard’s junkie blurred the edges of that line, opening it up. There is no longer any quid pro quo. He wants to suck her daddy’s dick, not as a reward for a job well done but more like some sort of primal desire to get at the source—the essence—of the woman’s beauty. It gets a huge laugh, but it’s not really a joke anymore.
The junkie, like many of Richard’s characters, seems to know more about life than his creator does. Or perhaps, through his characters, Richard came to know more about life than he could process. They carried him into deeper, more turbulent waters than he could navigate.
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Richard was at a stage in his development where, according to Mooney, “he never knows what he’s going to say. The words just spill out. I’ve done enough improv to know how tough it is to do what Richard’s doing. Just a man and a microphone, saying whatever’s on his mind at the moment, developing it on the spot into a routine.”
The title track of his Laff Records album Rev. Du Rite includes a young woman’s astonishingly emotional testimony of how she sought out the faith-healing Reverend Du Rite to cure her of a runny nose. Richard’s trembling, feminine voice is so pitch-perfect, it seems he has disappeared completely into the character. At first, the audience laughs but then falls into a rapt silence until the Reverend reappears to provide what can best be described as comic relief.
Sometimes his spontaneous muse led him into more bewildering territory. In “Boobs,” another track released on Rev. Du Rite, a stripper stands trial for exposing her breasts in public.
The hapless stripper is asked to describe her boobs (“I dunno. They’re just a pair of ordinary ones. They hang kinda low . . .”) and further asked if they have a criminal record. The prosecutor then turns on her and thunders, “Is it not true that you took your boobs and touched them on the grave of John Dillinger in 1948? Thus, I hereby say to you that you have had your boobs associating with the underground! If you’ll pardon the expression.”
There is scarcely a murmur from the crowd.
“Little hip for you folks, huh?” Richard breaks character. “Face it, that was kind of wild. I’ll get out of it, though. Don’t sweat it.”
That connects. He gets an appreciative chuckle, but he doesn’t get out of it. When his from-out-of-nowhere gender-reversing twist at the end gets more groans than laughs, Richard hurls it right back at them: “Yeah, well, I’m disappointed in you, too.”
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Then there is the stunning versatility of “Hank’s Place,” a nearly eleven-minute ensemble piece set in a Peoria after-hours club patronized by hillbilly johns, thugs, hustlers, a stuttering cop who orders an underage Richard out of the joint, and a carpenter who offers to recushion Hank’s craps table in such a way that “the dice always tell the truth.”
Richard peoples the stage with no fewer than nine characters who argue, hustle, cajole, and otherwise interact with each other as they pass in and out of the room. And, like a vaudeville juggler, he keeps all the plates spinning. A telling moment comes about a third of the way through when, at the conclusion of his minute-long monologue as “Black Irma,” the audience rewards him with a spontaneous outburst of applause. Not laughter for a punch line, mind you, but an ovation of the sort usually reserved for a virtuoso guitar solo or a scene in a play. Stand-up comics don’t get this kind of response, but Richard does.
Richard and the audience both seem to know they are witnessing an artist in the process of discovering his genius. Yet, for all his giddiness, Richard is fully in control, letting this fish he’s hooked carry the line out, reeling it back in, then letting it out farther.
“He speaks what he hears on the streets, at parties, and during drug transactions,” Mooney writes. “What Richard does is knock down the walls between who he is onstage and who he is off it, until there’s less of a difference between the two.” W. E. B. DuBois’s double consciousness. “His routines are no longer comic confections whipped up in some comedy kitchen. They come straight out of his bent life.”
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It was 1969. The year the Beatles broke up. Judy Garland and Jack Kerouac died. The year Ohio’s roiling and oil-slicked Cuyahoga River caught fire, and the United States instituted a draft lottery. American families sitting down to dinner in front of their TV sets were confronted with images of the My Lai massacre, the Stonewall riots, and the Manson murders. It was the year U.S. cities, one after another, began to riot and burn, as Chicago and Paris had done the year before.
It was also the year of Woodstock, where music and drugs and mud created a legend, and then, only a few months later, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival where Hell’s Angels were hired to provide security and, on that day, they were the Man. They knew firsthand how the Man conducted his business. They busted some heads, knocked Jefferson Airplane’s bassist Jorma Kaukonen unconscious mid-performance and, during the Rolling Stones’ spectacularly raw and raucous set, stabbed a spectator to death right next to the stage. The Maysles brothers’ terse documentary film Gimme Shelter attests to the fact that, aside from the brutality, it was a fantastic show, and most in attendance didn’t know about the stabbing until they saw it on the news the next day; but just the same, a curtain had come down, and it signaled the end to a generation’s utopian dream. The sixties were over. Anger, violence, and fear dragged the Aquarian flower children into darkness as it always did.
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Having burned his bridges in Vegas, dissatisfied with Wild in the Streets, and equally unenthusiastic about the few other film roles that had been floated his way, Richard and Shelley decided to make their own movie from a script—or, more likely, an idea for a script—Richard had been kicking around. They convinced themselves that Richard’s movie would shake up the world.
Shelley thought, too, that it might save their marriage, and so she sank into it the whole thirty thousand dollars her parents had given them as a wedding present, despite their misgivings about the marriage. It was pretty much all the money they had in the world. Shelley, though, was willing to risk it because, at that time, in that place, everything seemed possible. The heady euphoria of those drug-infused times inclined them both to believe that the plans they made were revolutionary and, once unleashed, would spark a raging fire. That was a common phenomenon of the times, as great creative minds disappeared behind closed doors and into a coke-stoked paranoia that told them all, one way or another, that their visions were potent enough to be dangerous. More often than not, though, the same manic fears kept many artists from completing anything, lest their vivid and grand presumptions about the relevance of what they incubated in dark rooms, curtains drawn and taped together—attended by enabling friends, hangers-on, and sycophants—not be met in kind.
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Twenty-two-year-old film student Penelope Spheeris and her boyfriend, Bobby Schoeller, were walking across UCLA’s campus toward Melnitz Hall when this black cat crossed their path about thirty feet ahead of them wearing a long brown leather coat and a big wide-brimmed hat, very odd looking for a college campus even then. “Oh my God,” Bobby said. “That’s Richard Pryor!” Penelope had never heard of Richard Pryor, but Bobby pulled her along saying, “Come on, let’s talk to him.”
They introduced themselves, curious to know what he was doing on campus. Richard explained that he was looking for some film students to help him make a movie; Penelope said, “You found her.”
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The movie’s title changed several times. Today, it is generally referred to as Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales. Few who were involved had a clear idea of what the movie was supposed to be about, but the consensus recollection is of a surreal allegorical tale concerning a white man standing trial before an all-black jury and judge. The man is charged either with raping a black woman or, according to some recollections, for the collective crimes of whites against blacks throughout history. Nobody ever saw a script, although they did see Richard from time to time consulting a spiral notebook of frayed, handwritten pages.
“Richard was crazy on the set, okay? We would assume that,” says Penelope. “Pretty screwed up all the time on coke.”
The cast consisted of a lot of friends and character types—Paul Mooney and comedian Franklyn Ajaye among them. Members of the jury had plates or mirrors of cocaine in front of them, and the judge swigged from a bottle of booze.
“They all looked like crack heads,” Penelope says.
The movie’s cast and crew were never sure what sort of domestic mayhem they might walk into when they reported for work at Richard and Shelley’s Hancock Park house. Massive amounts of coke coupled with Richard’s samurai sword collection did little to calm jittery nerves.
For Franklyn Ajaye, the filming was not a pleasant experience. The first day they met, Ajaye remembers that Richard was screaming at his wife in the kitchen. “It was a pretty rough scene.”
When the two comedians came to know each other later on in the seventies, appearing regularly on The Midnight Special and The Tonight Show, and together on Flip Wilson’s show and in the movies Car Wash and Stir Crazy, Ajaye never mentioned to Richard that he’d been in his movie. “I doubt he remembered me from that, and I never saw it. I don’t know if he ever finished it. I didn’t even know what it was called.”
Ajaye recalls that his character had to wash the man standing trial, “like in a car wash or something. It was kind of a strange-ass fucking movie.” Ajaye put in a seventeen-hour day for a fee of thirty-four dollars and Richard paid him with a bad check. “It certainly didn’t make you want to be in movies, I can tell you that,” he says with a laugh.
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A few weeks into the filming, Penelope Spheeris fainted behind the camera. When she came to, Richard was standing over her in his all-white pimp costume. She heard him saying to someone, “Hey, this bitch is pregnant!”
“Oh, Richard, shut up!” she said. “I am not!”
Richard knew it before she did. He was psychic about some things, Penelope now says. It stands to reason that any extrasensory powers Richard might possess would naturally be attuned to detecting pregnancy.
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In March 1969, Richard took time out from working on the movie to visit his mother, Gertrude, who was gravely ill in Peoria. At her hospital bedside, Richard presented her with the gift of a simple hand mirror he’d bought at the airport, not even bothering to wrap it. He sat on the edge of her bed and looked away with nothing very certain to say, nursing his shame and the bitter memory of his grandma Marie—the only woman he ever called Mama—coaching him, at the age of ten, on what he should say when the custody judge called his name so that he could come live with her in that big bustling bawdy house filled with lust, signifying, knife fights, the groans of hard-earned delight, and the thumping of heavy furniture audible through the walls instead of with this woman, his actual mother. She died a few months later.
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After completing filming on Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales, Penelope spent more than a year at Richard and Shelley’s house, often putting in twelve-hour days cutting the film on a Movieola set up on a table in the den back by the kitchen.
There would always be arguing going on upstairs between Richard and Shelley, “and it would just be—oh, God—it would be so hard to work because I couldn’t hear because they were yelling at each other.”
A lot of their arguing had to do with Richard’s friends. They were always around. Paul Mooney was a “very, very, very smart guy,” Penelope says, “but he really got on Shelley’s nerves. Paul was like a character out of Alice in Wonderland, always sitting around, smug, making brilliant but insulting comments about everything and everybody. She would be cooking in the kitchen and Paul would keep harassing her, doing a southern drawl and saying shit like, ‘Miz Shelley, are you gwine to fix us some greens and beans and ham hocks?’ It drove her crazy. He and Richard clicked so well because they both had this thing that they were going to erase racism.”
In the midst of this frenzy, Rain came into the world.
Rain Pryor was born July 16, 1969. Richard and Shelley took it as a sign that their daughter arrived on the day of the Apollo 11 liftoff, the world’s first manned space mission destined for the moon. They called her Rain because it rained that day. It was so weird to have rain in July in L.A.
Rain, her parents believed, was destined to make a mark on the world: a biracial child born in the Age of Aquarius during the Summer of Love, at the dawn of the space age, as the first man embarked to set actual foot upon another celestial sphere, heralding the future, now arrived, where race distinction would be a thing of the earthbound past.
“They both really believed if they both had a child they would start a color revolution,” Rain says. “They would change the way America looked at race.”
Shelley envisioned her newborn daughter as a window out onto a bright and open field. She may be excused for not knowing that the die had long before been cast, the pattern well established: whenever a child was born unto Richard Pryor, he turned tail and ran.
Richard would follow the same dance steps nearly every time he wanted out of a relationship, as if they were outlines painted on a floor. As he did with other women, Richard did his best (worst) to make Shelley push him away. But she wouldn’t, and remained, either unwilling or unable to acknowledge as significant any breach of his against her vested vision of their life together. On the day he was to bring Shelley and their infant daughter home from the hospital, he never showed. A nurse finally called Shelley a cab, and when she walked into their bedroom, babe in arms, she found Richard in bed with their housekeeper, as he surely knew she would. But even that wasn’t enough. Shelley forgave him. The worse he treated her, the tighter she clung.
Richard returned to New York for roles in two films, You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You’ll Lose That Beat and Dynamite Chicken.
Not released until September 1971, You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It was a disjointed counterculture satire written, produced, and directed by twenty-seven-year-old Peter Locke (who, in 1983 with Donald Kushner, would form Kushner-Locke Productions). New York Times reviewer A. H. Weiler described it as the “wacky saga” of a “young, confused middle-class hero tilting against the windmills of the Establishment.” Over the course of the eighty-five-minute film, the hero (played by Zalman King) goes up against “his doting mother, a crazy old lady; the Puerto Rican minority municipal madness in the form of a new job ferreting out ‘revolutionaries’ supposedly out to bomb our highways; group therapy; Madison Avenue advertising; Women’s Lib; abortion, and even unrewarding marriage and fatherhood. . . .
“Mr. Locke is partial to more than a few gross sequences,” Weiler wrote, “some of which are funny, such as the one involving Richard Pryor, the TV and nightclub comic, who plays a gibbering lush in a men’s room.” The film is also notable for its sound track, which comprises the first recordings ever released by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, some two years before they formed Steely Dan.
Richard took top billing in the barely acknowledged and largely forgotten Dynamite Chicken—a frenetic hodge-podge of performances, skits, interviews, and archival footage that writer-producer-director Ernie Pintoff presented as “a multi-media movie magazine inspired by the TV generation.” The film included rapid-fire clips of John & Yoko, Andy Warhol, Al Capp, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Muddy Waters, Malcolm X, the Ace Trucking Company, Lenny Bruce, Jimi Hendrix, Sha Na Na, Robert Mitchum, and on and on. Interspersed throughout the movie, a scruffy-looking Richard in a paint-spattered work shirt does perhaps eight minutes of stand-up material outdoors amid the rubble surrounding a boarded-up cinder-block building. A text crawl at the beginning of the film states:
In the late ’60’s, Penelope Gill, Chairperson of the Daughters of the American Civil Patrol, filed this special report:
“On June 18, I attended a Richard Pryor performance in the company of policewoman Elsie Schoenberg, #6492. During his presentation, Mr. Pryor used the following words on several occasions:
bullshit
shit
motherfucker
penis
asshole
The substance of Mr. Pryor’s dissertation was primarily based on denouncing the Military, the Pope, the President and the Police.
In addition, Pryor greatly offended us by graphically illustrating how family, friends and luminaries pass gas.”
Perhaps being on set for the filming of You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It reinvigorated Richard’s resolve to complete Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales. Upon his return to California, he arranged to show the movie to Bill Cosby and asked Penelope to reserve a screening room at UCLA.
* The Green Berets starring John Wayne is often erroneously cited as Richard’s second film role by commentators who generally express puzzlement as to why he would be billed as Richard “Cactus” Pryor. They might well be puzzled, too, by the fact that he never once appears onscreen. The role of Collier was, in fact, played by the son of vaudevillian Richard “Skinny” Pryor. Born January 7, 1923, Cactus was a popular Austin, Texas, media personality and a close friend to John Wayne, who, coincidentally, introduced Richard “Cactus” Pryor to the cast and crew of The Green Berets as “the funniest man alive,” some years before that mantle would be more prominently and lastingly bestowed upon Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor.