Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him (15 page)

He reached the same awakening in Berkeley. Only this time it would stick. The times were right and he was ready. The times were calling for a Richard Pryor.

Perhaps he had heard about Eldridge Cleaver’s embrace of Brother Merton, while reading
Seven Storey Mountain
in solitary confinement at Folsom prison, Merton who averred that all sin is “the refusal to be what we were created to be.”

Motown president Berry Gordy Jr. invited him to audition for a role in a movie he was developing with Paramount, a biopic of Billie Holiday starring Diana Ross. The part was so small the script didn’t even give him a name. He was simply “Piano Man.”

Right around that time Paul Mooney came knocking at Richard’s door, rousing him from his stupor, telling him to get his shit together. Enough with the wizard hats and dashikis and tie-dyed flower power. It was 1972. L.A. was the place to be.
Johnny Carson had just moved
The Tonight Show
from New York to Burbank.
And a new club had opened on the Strip where Ciro’s used to be. The place was owned by TV skit writer Rudy De Luca and old-school gag man Sammy Shore, whose regular gig was opening for Elvis in Las Vegas. They called it the Comedy Store. Sammy Shore didn’t know the first thing about running a club, but his wife Mitzi, did.

TV and movie producers were at the Store every night, booking talk-show slots and tossing out deals left and right to a whole new breed of comics.
And, in case Richard didn’t know it, he could run circles around them all.

A SCREAMING COMES ACROSS THE SKY

On Friday, January 14, 1972, NBC broadcast the first sitcom—the first network show of any kind—to star an all-black cast since
Amos ’N Andy
was taken off the air in 1953.

Producers Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin based the show on a British sitcom
Steptoe and Son
set in the Shepherd’s Bush area of West London featuring Albert Steptoe, a crusty old rag-and-bone man who mocks, belittles, and actively sabotages the social aspirations of his thirty-seven-year-old son, Harold. For their version, set in L.A.’s Watts neighborhood, Lear and Yorkin cast Redd Foxx in the father’s role and gave the character Foxx’s birth name, Sanford.

After thirty years as a top comic in black clubs and on adults-only “party” records, Redd Foxx became a star overnight. (It’s fun to imagine fans of the show who’d never heard Foxx do stand-up before—and that would include most of them—picking up one of his Laff LPs at the mall and hearing this on side 1, track 1: “Did you ever stop to think that if the Pilgrims had shot bobcats instead of turkeys we’d be eatin’ pussy on Thanksgiving.”)

Right away there was trouble with the network. Despite having the full weight and support of Lear and Yorkin and their hit series
All in the Family
behind him, Foxx ran into a brick wall when he insisted that black writers be hired for the show. Specifically, he wanted Richard Pryor and Paul Mooney. NBC wouldn’t budge, despite both their track records and the unassailable authenticity they would lend to the show.
*
 None of that mattered. The network insisted on using “established” writers. As Mooney has often observed, racism trumps capitalism. And nobody, it seems, likes being told that they don’t understand the black experience.

When Richard returned to Los Angeles from Berkeley, in the spring of 1972, he came back inspired to speak truth, using the raw language of the streets. He embraced
nigger
as an empowering term of endearment and spoke with startling candor about things many people at that time were uncomfortable admitting even to themselves: his homosexual experiences, masturbation, racial anger, his physical abuse of women, drug addiction, feelings of self-loathing, and the guilt he felt as a conflicted champion of black pride who also had an irresistible lust for white women.

I’m nervous up here. I ain’t had no cocaine all day. I love cocaine.

People don’t talk about nothin’ real, like jackin’ off. A lot of people didn’t jack off. I did! I used to jack off so much I knew pussy couldn’t be as good as my hand.

You go out with a white woman and sisters look at you like you killed your mama.

You can’t talk about fucking in America, right? People say you’re dirty. But if you talk about killing somebody, that’s cool. I don’t understand it myself. I’d rather come. I’ve had money and never felt as good as I felt when I come. Nothing else matters when you’re gettin’ the nut. Especially if it’s a girl.

Never fuck a faggot, ’cause they will
lie.
They always say, “I won’t tell.” They lie. They can’t wait till you finish fucking them. (
miming telephone
) “Well, guess who was here, honey. Girl, looka here, the nigger got more bitch in him than me.”

And the punch line? There wasn’t one. He wasn’t telling jokes, he was telling the truth: “Y’all act like you ain’t never sucked a dick or something. Y’all be, (
white voice
) ‘No siree, bob, never touched a penis in our life, we’re real men.’ I sucked a dick. You can get a habit from sucking dick. Become a dick junkie. You can only do it maybe three times. You do it more than that you get a habit.” It slipped the noose of anything that would have previously passed for nightclub comedy. To his amazement, audiences of all races loved it—and loved him for it.

—————

Richard had planned to kick off his return with a performance at the Apollo. Mooney suggested he woodshed his new act at the Comedy Store first. With one caveat. The Store was full of white comics, Mooney warned, who would steal his best lines and run with them to Vegas or
Th
e Tonight Show
. Richard knew better. “Ain’t nobody gonna steal nothing off me,” he said. “Motherfucker wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

No other comic ever used Richard’s material. It simply couldn’t be done. It wasn’t a matter of repeating his words but of taking possession of them. One would have to capture the genius of his performance. One might just as well caution Caruso or Michael Jordan against performing in public lest competitors try to copy them. Anyone was welcome to try. The exception proving the rule came when Eddie Murphy, employing his extraordinary skills at mimicry, included some ten or twelve minutes of vintage Pryor in his early concerts and called it homage.

When Richard took the stage at the Comedy Store, it was as if, in Mooney’s words, all the “copycat Cosby bullshit” had been burned off while he was in Berkeley. He had rid himself of all the impurities, like firing up some base. “This was the pure shit.”

Bill Cosby himself attended a pivotal performance: “Richard took on a whole new persona—his own—in front of me and everyone else. Richard killed the Bill Cosby in his act, made people hate it. Then he worked on them, doing pure Richard Pryor, and it was the most astonishing metamorphosis I have ever seen. He was magnificent.”

It was a metamorphosis Richard had labored over for years. Over the previous decade and a half, Richard had crossed paths with so many masters, stumbled onto so many pivotal scenes, and soaked up so many influences, from the African American traditions of boasts, toasts, and signifying that he’d learned from street-corner raconteurs and vaudeville holdovers in the clubs of Peoria, to touring the “black belt” nightclub circuit opening for the singer who inspired Duke Ellington’s “Satin Doll,” to sharing bills with the likes of Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Richie Havens, and George Carlin in the Greenwich Village of the early sixties, to Sunday nights on
The Ed Sullivan Show
and weekday afternoons on
Merv Griffin,
to mingling in Rat Pack–era Las Vegas; from West Hollywood clubs of the late sixties and guest roles on sitcoms and TV shows such as
The Young Lawyers, The Mod Squad
, Wild Wild West,
and
The Partridge Family,
to his eye-opening and mind-expanding friendships with the Black Panthers and literary lights in Berkeley at the dawn of the seventies.

—————

There had been glimpses of a new Richard Pryor in the monologue sequences scattered throughout
Dynamite Chicken,
for the few who ever saw the movie. A still-rough-around-the-edges version of his new self could be heard on his second LP,
Craps (After Hours),
an underground hit for West Coast indy label Laff Records, best known for the bacchanalian cover photos, replete with comic-strip speech balloons, that graced “adults only” party records such as Wildman Steve’s
Eatin’ Ain’t Cheatin!!!
and
Th
at Ain’t My Finger . . . It Just Ain’t Your Day
by the team of Mantan Moreland and Livingood. Laff producer David Drozen went through hours of material recorded live at the Redd Foxx Club in Hollywood in January of 1971 and spliced together a ragtag assemblage of thirty-one tracks, sixteen of which were less than a minute long, with some clocking in under twelve seconds, such as “Being Born”: “I’m one of the few people that remember being born. And I’d like to do it for you. (
beat
) Could I have a lady volunteer?”

But when Richard reemerged on the scene in West Hollywood, he blew everything wide open. As when Dylan released “Positively 4th Street” as a single, a whole crop of young songwriters saw that songs could be about anything. Joni Mitchell remembers it was unlike any song she had ever heard: “I remember thinking ‘the American pop song has finally grown up.’ You can sing about anything now. ‘You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend.’ Just in that statement was a different song than any I had ever heard. . . . The potential for the song had never occurred to me. . . . But it occurred to Dylan. I said, ‘Oh God, look at this.’ And I began to write.”

Stanley Kubrick undertook
2001: A Space Odyssey
in part to test his conviction that “if it can be written or thought, it can be filmed.” Kubrick believed that filmmakers should grant themselves the same freedom a novelist has when buying a ream of paper. Young comedians began to see their craft in the same light. Freed from the conventional setup–punch line–topper formulas that had been around since vaudeville, the world of stand-up opened wide, as the music world would for hip-hop artists a decade later. Stand-up comedy was suddenly the freest art form ever, able to absorb and incorporate any and all of the performing arts from dramatic acting, mimicry, burlesque, music, magic tricks, improvisation, mime, buffoonery, confessional memoir, poetry, Pentecostal preaching, social commentary—they could take it anywhere. Comics could lip-synch to a phonograph playing the
Mighty Mouse
theme song, if they wanted, or smash watermelons with sledgehammers.

—————

Change was in the air. Everyone could feel it. The old ways were unraveling. And there was plenty more excitement where that came from. On the other end of the continent, nighttime security guard Frank Wills noticed that someone had put tape over the latch of an office door to keep it from locking. He peeled off the tape, closed the door, making sure the latch caught, and thought little of it until he came back around an hour later. When Wills saw that the same door had been taped back up again, he called the D.C. police. Something fishy was going on at the Watergate complex. It would prove to be the single greatest gift this generation of TV and nightclub comics could ever hope for.

It’s cold-blooded in jail. Nixon wouldn’t have lasted two days. They’d have turned him out. Niggers was waitin’ on Nixon to come to jail. “What’s happenin’ Tricky Dick? Ha-ha-haa. Yeah. I’m gonna see how tricky you are.” Can’t you just see Nixon? “Let me make one thing perfectly clear . . .”

The divide between so-called serious art and popular entertainment—between high and low culture—fell apart, revealing itself as a sham, a figment, a judgment.
Village Voice
columnist and downtown theater critic Laurie Stone had this epiphany while sitting through yet another solo performance in some forgotten loft space. The show’s absurdist confessional humor wasn’t working. No one in the theater was buying it. She could almost smell the tang of flop sweat emanating from the actor onstage, yet everyone sat there, silent and respectful. Stone endured it for the duration only because she was getting paid, and the thought occurred to her, “There are comedians in clubs doing better monologues than this.” She persuaded her editors at the
Voice
to allow her, henceforth, to review stand-up comedy in the same space as serious solo theater.