Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him (10 page)

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.

—————

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.

—————

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.”

—————

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?”

—————

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?”

—————

Nine months later, Richard did a nearly identical version—minus the “goddamn”—on the premiere installment of
Th
is 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.”

—————

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.”

—————

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.