Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him (16 page)

“NIGGER, COME OUT OF THAT BLACK SKIN AND BE BLACK, NIGGER”

Al Bell couldn’t believe his ears when this skinny guy started his set at the Comedy Store. As the head of Memphis-based Stax Records, Bell commanded one of the largest African American–owned businesses in the United States, second only to Berry Gordy’s Motown.

Richard did this one bit—a routine he’d continue to refine over the next few years—where he imitated a guy on an acid trip. “I couldn’t believe what I saw,” says Bell. “The story he was telling as he played out the character was really penetrating as far as black people are concerned.” At the end of the routine, as the guy was coming down, his last line was, “Nigger, come out of that black skin and be black, nigger.”

“It left the audience stunned,” Bell recalls. In that one line “he had exposed so much about black people.”

The line was not some bumper-sticker slogan. It was mind blowing, like some kind of Zen koan. No matter how you turned it over in your mind, or it turned your mind over in you, you could never plumb its depths. The line kept turning in on itself, refusing to be translated into anything other.

“This man is a genius,” said Bell. “When you listen to the intelligence behind what he is talking about you really realize you’re talking about a literal genius.”

Bell had gone to catch Richard’s act at the behest of Forest Hamilton, son of jazz drummer Chico Hamilton and the head of Stax West, the record company’s new division based in Los Angeles. The twenty-six-year-old Hamilton’s job was to scout West Coast talent and establish Stax within the motion picture and television industries. Bell was in town to organize a daylong concert commemorating the seventh anniversary of the 1965 Watts rebellion.

Wattstax, as the concert came to be known, took place on Sunday, August 20, 1972, at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum featuring Stax recording artists Rufus Thomas, the Staple Singers, Kim Weston, Albert King, Little Milton, William Bell, Carla Thomas, The Bar-Kays, Luther Ingram, and Isaac Hayes among others. The Reverend Jesse Jackson flew in from Chicago, landing with less than an hour to spare, to deliver the invocation and to lead the crowd in his “I am somebody” call and response.

With more than one hundred thousand mostly African Americans sitting out in the hot sun all day in celebration of Watts, local media were just waiting for the whole thing to blow up. Security was minimal. Stax had requested that the LAPD assign only African American officers to work the event. It all wentbeautifully. The Stax organizers were pleased and relieved that not so much as a scuffle had been reported, but it didn’t necessarily make for engaging cinema.

Stax had hired director Mel Stuart (
Four Days in November; If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium; Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
) to helm a documentary of the event. The music was superb, of course, but even when interspersed with documentary footage and interviews filmed in area restaurants, barbershops, and on front stoops, the movie still felt incomplete. What the movie needed, Stuart decided, was “someone who would sum up what the picture was about, would lead us on to the next step, would really be the voice of the community.” A chorus, like the one in Shakespeare’s
Henry V
—“O for a muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention.”

Al Bell knew just the guy. “Hey, man,” he told Forest Hamilton, “go find Richard Pryor.”

Hamilton tracked him down at a small club in Watts. When they first walked in the place, Stuart recalls, “this rather big gentleman walked over to me and grabbed me and said, ‘What is this honky doing in my club?’ I thought my life was over. . . . Forest Hamilton, who weighed about three hundred pounds, grabbed this man, threw him against the wall, and the guy went
down.
Forest went over to him and said, ‘He’s got expertise, motherfucker!’ The guy looks up at me and says, ‘Shit, man, I didn’t know you had expertise. Come on in, man, come on in.’ ”

Less than five minutes into Richard’s set, Stuart knew that he was in the presence of a comedic genius. “I knew this was the chorus. Everything you see in this film is improvised by Richard. There’s no script. And he is the soul of the film.”

The decision to cast Richard as the film’s “wickedly funny commentator” was a superb stroke, according to
Newsweek
magazine’s reviewer. “Perhaps not even Dick Gregory can shape accumulated black experience into such biting bits of humor. [Pryor] is reason enough to see
Wattstax.
”

Richard’s role in the film was to spin documentary straw into comic gold. In one of the documentary segments shot in a Watts restaurant, a man tells how his “high yellow” brother made him first realize he was a nigger. The two had been playing with a group of white kids who excluded him, yet bonded with his lighter-skinned brother. When they got home, his brother called him a nigger and declared himself white. “I didn’t know what a nigger was,” the man says. “But my mother’s bad. Check this out. She said, ‘Cool. All right, then, I ain’t your mother because all my kids are niggers.’ ”

Richard wraps up the segment with this:

I think, like, niggers are the best of the people who were slaves, you know what I mean? That’s how we got to be niggers. Cause they stole the cream of the crop from Africa and brought them over here. And God, as they say works in mysterious ways and so he made everybody “nigger.” Cause we were arguing over in Africa about the Watusi and (
riffing on African-sounding tribal names
) the Ojuomboo, and Zamunga . . . in different languages. So he brought us all here. The best. The kings and queens. Princes and Princesses. Put us all together and called us one tribe: Niggers!

Watergate notwithstanding, the single greatest stroke of luck to ever befall the new wave of stand-up comedians came in December 1973 when Sammy Shore, called back to Las Vegas for a months-long engagement at the Hilton, left his wife Mitzi in charge of the Store.

In her husband’s absence, Mitzi Shore found her life’s calling. She put young comics to work painting the entire interior black—black walls, ceiling, tables and chairs—so when the single spotlight hit the comic on stage, there was nothing else to look at. She had them move the bar back by the kitchen. From now on, customers would order drinks from cocktail waitresses.

Mitzi Shore made the Store a place where comics could be seen, get exposure, commune and confer with their comic brethren, and workshop their material in front of an audience. She did it all for the comics. Which is why she thought she didn’t need to pay them.

By the end of the year, Mitzi took full ownership in a divorce settlement from Sammy. He must’ve known he was losing both his club and his wife when he made a visit to L.A. after only a month in Vegas. He barely recognized the place. Everything had been painted black. The floor was packed. And where was the bar? Sammy told his wife he wanted to do a few shows while he was in town. She said she would try to fit him in the next night’s lineup but couldn’t make any promises.

Back when Sammy Shore had been in charge of the Store, he gave his old-school pals full run of the place. There was no lineup or schedule. They went behind the bar to pour their own drinks and commanded the stage for as long as they pleased. The younger, less-known comics had to hang back and hope for a chance to go on. Mitzi turned that system upside down, giving preference to young up-and-coming comics and scheduling them in strict fifteen-minute time blocks.

The stream of young comics flowing into L.A. behind Johnny Carson’s move of
The Tonight Show
to Burbank swelled to a tidal wave after nineteen-year-old Freddie Prinze made his television debut on Thursday, December 6, 1973. So impressed was Carson with Prinze’s five-minute performance that, as Prinze started to leave the stage, Carson waved him over to the couch. Never before had a first-time comic been granted a sit-down chat with Johnny.

Over at the Comedy Store, jaws dropped. The comics crowded around the TV “recognized that they were seeing history,” writes William Knoedelseder in
I’m Dying up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy’s Golden Era.
Their reactions “ranged from ‘Holy shit,’ to ‘I can’t fucking believe this,’ to ‘Right on, Freddie!’ ”

Few comics failed to notice one more thing about Prinze’s
Tonight Show
debut: Johnny introduced him as “a young comedian who’s appearing here in town at the Comedy Store.” That statement put the Comedy Store on every comic’s map and created a new equation in their heads: One set at the Comedy Store plus one appearance on Carson equals the whole world. If it happened to Freddie, then it could happen to any of them. You could almost hear the suitcases being packed.

A young Jay Leno, sitting on his sofa in Boston, watched the same equation play out for his pal Jimmie Walker who was immediately signed to the new Norman Lear–Bud Yorkin series,
Good Times.
Leno had worked the same clubs with Walker. He was a better comic than Walker. He got bigger laughs. Yet there was Walker on TV, and there sat Leno watching him. He got up off his couch, booked a flight to L.A., packed a single suitcase, took his entire savings (fifteen hundred dollars) out of the bank, left his apartment unlocked, and, on his way out the door, told the neighbors in his building to help themselves to anything inside.

—————

Lily Tomlin remembers improvising a scene for her upcoming TV special at Richard’s house when Berry Gordy called to praise his performance in
Lady Sings the Blues,
guaranteeing him he would be nominated for an Oscar. After he hung up the phone, Tomlin remembers, Richard suddenly became the six-year-old boy from his “The Primpce and the Primpcess” fairy tale he’d performed the first time she saw him on
Th
e Ed Sullivan Show—“
shy, hopeful, and suddenly terrified, as if he had pulled off something he’d never expected.”

Although the Oscar nomination Gordy predicted never came to pass, Richard received universally outstanding reviews for his revelatory portrayal of Billie Holiday’s heroin-addicted piano player, a characterization inspired in part by his old friend Jimmy Binkley, the house pianist at Collins Corner back in Peoria. The movie brought him much attention but few acting offers. Perhaps he’d played the heroin-addicted piano man too convincingly. Along with the accolades, Richard earned a reputation for his erratic behavior, violent temper, and heavy drug use.

That reputation was not wholly undeserved. During filming of
The Mack,
now regarded as a blaxploitation classic (perhaps the most sampled movie in hip-hop and one of Quentin Tarantino’s acknowledged touchstones), Richard as “Slim” played sidekick to Max Julien’s pimp “Goldie.” Following one of many altercations with producer Harvey Bernhard, a coked-up Richard told Julien that he was going to kill the man. Julien declined Richard’s invitation to take part but stood back and watched from down the hallway as Richard, carrying a lead ball in a sock, knocked on the producer’s hotel room door. Because the production, filmed on location on the streets of Oakland, California, had been plagued with threats, interference, and outright assault from local gangs, Bernhard kept an around-the-clock bodyguard in his room and a .45 in his belt. As Bernhard recounted the scene to Julien the next day, he pulled his gun on Richard and challenged him to make his move, at which point, Richard wisely collapsed in laughter and assured Bernhard it had all been a joke. Richard and Julien, who contributed heavily to the script, both pushed back against Bernhard and director Michael Campus (who likewise shot
The Education of Sonny Carson
on the streets of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant) for their depiction of pimps and urban street life. In one instance, Richard went off script to create what turned out to be the film’s most riveting scene. Rather than play the scene as written, which called for him to turn his back on a pair of corrupt white cops (Don Gordon and William Watson)—an act that anyone with a lick of sense would recognize as suicidal, they protested to Campus—Richard’s Slim stands his ground, breaking down in real tears as he bitterly curses the two cops while allowing Goldie time to slowly walk away unscathed. After viewing the dailies, Campus had no choice but to use the scene as Richard had improvised it. It was too good not to.

The movie’s second-most-memorable scene comes when Slim and Goldie take prisoner a rival pimp (Dick Anthony Williams) who’d had Goldie’s mother killed, and order him, at gunpoint, to stick himself with the long stiletto he carried concealed in a walking stick. Richard’s smiling, near-hysterical command that the pimp stick himself—“Stick yourself, nigger. One more for me, now. Stick yourself! I’m tryin’ to help you. Don’t get angry. Be cool. Again!”—is still harrowing to watch. And it was all Richard’s idea. Williams’s character had previously pulled the stiletto during a confrontational pool-hall scene. In his commentary on the DVD release, Williams laughed, marveling, nearly thirty years later, at the workings of Richard’s mind. “I knew the dude was gonna come up with something from the pool table scene. He’s got a mind . . .”