Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him (17 page)

Richard similarly threw himself into every role that came his way during this time and, in 1973, turned in some of the finest performances of his career, mostly in films that had poor showings at the box office. Not one of them was a comedy. As would most always be the case, Richard did his funniest and most incisive work when he embodied broken or conflicted characters from within and played them in earnest instead of for obvious laughs. There’s no better example of this than the “Juke and Opal” sketch written by Jane Wagner for
Lily,
Tomlin’s comedy-variety special that aired November 2, 1973, on CBS.

Tomlin, without benefit of complexion-enhancing makeup, plays Opal, the black owner of a cafe frequented by Juke, a scruffy young drug addict played by Richard in a green fatigue jacket. Opal serves him potato soup (“something nourishing”) and talks with him about getting on methadone.

Their teasing, flirtatious banter—“You irritate the lining of my mind,” Opal tells him—is interrupted by the entrance of a couple of social workers doing community research. “We’d like to ask you a few questions,” the young woman announces as they come through the door.

Juke openly admits, when asked by the survey takers, that he’s addicted to drugs but objects when the young woman makes note of his answer. “Don’t write it down, man. Be cool. That’s not for the public. I mean what I go through is private.” Before he answers any more, Juke has a few questions of his own: “Who’s Pigmeat Markham’s mama? You ever been mugged in the same neighborhood more than once? Do you know who ‘Boo’ Diddley is?”

When Opal gives Juke ten dollars from the register, the young man tries to intervene. “You really shouldn’t give him the money. You know what he’s going to do with it.” Opal covers for Juke by saying he’s going to buy her more potatoes.

After the couple leaves, Juke gives the ten back, saying he’s not buying any more potatoes. He’s going to try. “You know, I think I’m kinda crazy about you,” he says. “You a sweet woman.” As he leaves, he hesitates at the door and says, “I’ll think about you. Be glad when it’s spring.” Then one last word: “Flower!”

Writing for the
New Yorker
in September 1999, Hilton Als said the nine-and-a-half-minute sketch “remains, a little over a quarter of a century later, the most profound meditation on race and class that I have ever seen on a major network.”

Perhaps the greatest testament to how convincingly Tomlin embodied the black cafe owner Opal can be found in the lack of viewer outcry when she and Richard’s Juke exchanged a brief kiss on the lips as he put up his hood to head back out into the cold. It was rare—and risky—for a black man to kiss a white woman on primetime television in 1973. In this instance, no one seemed to notice.

—————

The troubles—and triumphs—that would mark the entire of Richard’s sketchy TV career were fully on display when an improvised skit pairing Richard’s little-boy character Billy with Tomlin’s rocking-chair preschooler Edith Ann wandered afoul of program practices. Director Rick Wallace called, “Cut!” when Richard’s character remarked that he had “bigger titties” than Tomlin’s Edith Ann.

Lily followed Richard to his dressing room and tried to talk him back, but he said he just couldn’t do anymore. It was as though the ordeal of fully embodying and then abandoning or being less than true to a character caused Richard psychic distress, if not physical pain.

“You can’t stop a guy like Richard Pryor when he’s on a roll,” says Richard’s friend David Brenner. “If you interrupt him, he’s done. It’d be like if you went down on the track when someone’s running and said, ‘Listen, I want to change your sneakers. I think you’ll do better with these.’ You can stop a guy like me and I can be back in an instant. I’m being the real me—the funny me—but I don’t get into these great characters, these dimensions.”

“I felt ridiculous,” Richard told David Felton of
Rolling Stone.
“My kid couldn’t get into it. So I can’t go onstage and it be in my mind that this kid can’t say something, ’cause the kid is wrecked, as a kid. I mean, I was ready to cry as a kid, ’cause I
was
the kid, you dig?

“That’s the way I see kids. I just get fascinated talking to ’em, ’cause it’ll be honestly sweet and whatever they say is innocent. And if they say ‘tittie,’ you can’t tell a kid they can’t say ‘tittie.’ They deal with real shit.”

Lily
scored big in the ratings, got great reviews, and won its writing team (including Richard) an Emmy for Best Writing in Comedy-Variety, Variety or Music category. CBS never aired the show again.

—————

Richard, Billy Dee Williams, and director Sidney J. Furie were all riding high on the success of
Lady Sings the Blues
when they regrouped for the action-thriller
Hit!
about a federal agent (Williams) who seeks revenge after his teenage daughter dies of a drug overdose. Knowing that his superiors would never allow such an operation to proceed through official channels, Williams takes it upon himself to recruit, finance, train, and transport to France a small band of private American citizens who have each suffered personal tragedies as a result of illegal drugs. They seek vengeance not against street-level junkies and pushers but by going up against the nine leaders of a Marseilles drug syndicate who control product and distribution.

Mismarketed as a blaxploitation film
, Hit!
confounded the genre with its ensemble cast of multiracial and cross-generational heroes. Even the wealthy French villains are portrayed in identifiably human terms. One French kingpin, for example, disappointed by his sumptuous lunch, rails against big oil polluters, the “pigs who use the sea for a sewer,” doing such harm to aquatic life that “it will soon be impossible to eat a decent bouillabaisse.”

With its tagline “To pull off a job no one would ever dare you need a team no one would ever believe,” the movie’s lineage can be traced to
Dirty Harry
and
The French Connection
by way of
The Seven Samurai.

The cautiously mistrustful camaraderie between the characters played by Richard and Billy Dee Williams is palpable throughout the movie, drawing method inspiration from their off-screen friendship. Williams enjoyed hanging out with Richard and Mooney but was so uptight about his career he avoided being seen with them in public. He wanted to be a leading man. Richard had a reputation for the kind of trouble that could screw that up.

There’s a scene—one of several—in which Richard clearly goes off script while flirting with fellow vigilante Gwen Welles in the backseat of the van driven by Williams. As they approach the Seattle Ferry dock, Richard chuckles, reading aloud from a sign at the entranceway: “Seattle Ferries from eight to six.” Then, affecting an effeminate lisp: “My, my . . . business must be brisk.” Williams shoots Richard a scathing look. Richard doesn’t let up. “Why don’t they name a ferry boat the
Lesbian
? (
lisping again
) ‘I’m taking the
Lesbian
to the island.’ ”

Williams mutters something incomprehensible as he climbs out of the van. Whatever he says seems intended for Richard’s ears, not ours. Richard, for his part, reacts with a bewildered, what-the-fuck’s-bugging-him expression. Then, playing to Welles, he foppishly slaps a glove across the back of the driver’s seat and, lisping again, delivers this: “He’s gone to ask the Marquis de Sade who we should recruit.”

Later, while piloting a boat across French waters, Richard half mutters half sings, “I gotta get laid, I gotta get laid . . .” then breaks into a blues-inflected sea shanty, sounding a bit like the later-day Tom Waits:

I bet they have some weird bitches here

I bet they have some weird bitches here

I bet they got some Eskimos

and all they do is suck your toes

I bet they have some weird bitches here

He doesn’t play it for laughs. It’s all completely in character, a man laboring to cheer himself against a sense of impeding doom. No one else is even listening. His somber cohorts down on deck are staring out across the water, grimly contemplating the illegal and potentially suicidal nature of the mission they are about to undertake.

As he docks the boat, Richard calls down to the man shagging their line, “Tie it off there, me lad. Where’s the pussy?” When he gets no reply, Richard looks at his hand and says, “Well, Rosie, looks like it’s you and me again tonight.” Then, planting a kiss on his gloved palm, says, “I love ya, baby.”

As the climax approaches and the bodies of French kingpins begin piling up, Richard even coaxes a teary laugh from the heroin-addicted character played by Gwen Welles as she begins to fall apart, crying to him that she can’t go through with the other hits. She’s scared and she doesn’t like killing people. Richard, whose scuba-diving character had surfaced alongside a drug lord’s yacht with a speargun and harpooned him in the chest, barks back at her in the voice of a shit-talking hustler, “You think you got troubles, nigga? I lost a motherfuckin’ spear. Cost me forty-seven boxtops. I saved for six months. Shit! Had a gold tip on it and everything.”

The few critics who bothered to give
Hit!
any notice complained that the film provided a scant twenty minutes of thrills, and only after the audience had endured an hour and fifty minutes of setup and character development. All true. For audiences expecting a blaxploitation thrill ride, Furie’s art-house pacing, often disorienting camera work, and generous attention to character and detail made for slow going. It would not be released on DVD until April of 2012 and has yet to find the audience it deserves.

—————

In
Some Call It Loving,
an oddly sad and atmospheric film inspired by John Collier’s much livelier satiric short story, “Sleeping Beauty,” jazz musician Zalman King becomes obsessed with a spellbound woman (played by Mia Farrow’s younger sister, Tisa) on exhibit in a carnival sideshow. Richard, for the most part, is wasted as King’s drug-addled friend who is insistent in explaining the deeper meaning of a lopsided heart he has painted in glow-in-the-dark red on the wall above a urinal in the men’s room of a jazz club where King is performing. Midway through the film, Richard’s character dies of an overdose for no apparent reason (story-wise) other than perhaps writer-director James B. Harris’s concern that he might bring more oxygen and light than his otherwise claustrophobic fantasy could bear. This was, after all, the same James B. Harris who, nine years earlier, walked away from his production partnership with Stanley Kubrick over what he believed was Kubrick’s misguided decision to adapt Peter George’s cold war novel
Red Alert
as a comedy and call it
Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

—————

Although Richard is onscreen for less than five minutes of Sidney Poitier’s
Uptown Saturday Night,
he manages to steal the scene—if not the entire movie—out from under Bill Cosby and Poitier both. (Screenwriter Richard Wesley had originally envisioned Redd Foxx and Richard in the Cosby and Poitier roles.) Penelope Gilliatt, reviewing the 1974 comedy for the
New Yorker,
calls Richard’s performance as private detective Sharp-Eye Washington masterly: “He takes not the faintest notice of his clients’ shy attempt to hire him.” While they regard his quick-wittedness as the mark of a good detective, his “mind is obviously more on making a quick exit, which he does by way of window and a fire escape—or possibly a water pipe—waving goodbye professionally as if he had everything under control.”

—————

What’s so striking about these movies—however uneven or ill-conceived—is that directors and producers cast Richard Pryor because of his brilliance as an actor, because of what he could actually
do.
They allowed him to bring his rage, his mischief—his badass self—and they gave him room to occupy his characters with pathos and human foible. That’s why they hired him. As Pauline Kael wrote, “Pryor shouldn’t be cast at all—he should be realized. He has desperate, mad characters coming out of his pores, and we want to see how far he can go with them.”

This was the artistic capital he would trade on a few years later when his name had become a box-office draw and studios began throwing millions at him. At those rates, the stakes were too high. He had to tone it down. Instead of going inside and embodying his characters, he had to stand outside where he could keep an eye on them.

“The movies that they had him ultimately do were very forgettable,” says Franklyn Ajaye. “Hollywood always takes the bite out of any comedian. If you’re a comedian they just bring you on to do something silly. Woody Allen did the best because he did his own thing. Richard was a phenomenal comedian, but they softened the edges when they brought him the money for the movies. But, look, I don’t know how anyone can turn down three, four million dollars.”

If the studios and networks weren’t willing to risk his mayhem, it was only because they didn’t need to. His name—the Richard Pryor brand—was by that time worth more than any performance, worth more than they were paying him. All he had to do was show up and hit his mark. By then, there was no going back.

“LET IT STAY HEAVY IF NOT HARD”

Mel Brooks initially turned down the chance to do
Blazing Saddles
when his agent David Begelman showed him the screen treatment—then titled “Tex X”—written by fellow Begelman client Andrew Bergman. Brooks was only interested in developing projects of his own. But he was at a career low. No acting jobs were coming his way, he couldn’t get his own projects off the ground, and Warner Bros. would pay him well to shape the treatment into a script that he would then direct. “I figured my career was finished anyway,” he said.

To help him with the script, he hired Bergman and the team of Norman Steinberg and Alan Uger, writers he had worked with before. The script would also need the contributions of an authentic black voice. After Dick Gregory turned him down, he went to Richard Pryor.

Richard, by all accounts, threw himself into the project with abandon, spinning out gags and situations like an inspired Rumplestiltskin—even offering up bits from
Black Stranger,
a cowboy screenplay he’d written while in Berkeley. What’s most impressive, he showed up every day and on time.

“I decided this would be a surrealist epic,” Brooks told Kenneth Tynan in a
New Yorker
profile. “It was time to take two eyes, the way Picasso had done it, and put them on one side of the nose, because the official movie portrait of the West was simply a lie. For nine months we worked together like maniacs. We went all the way—especially Richard Pryor, who was very brave and very far out and very catalytic. . . . They wrote berserk, heartfelt stuff about white corruption and racism and Bible-thumping bigotry. We used dirty language on the screen for the first time, and to me the whole thing was like a big psychoanalytic session.”

Impressed by what he’d seen from Richard during their months of writing the screenplay together—the way Richard would jump up and act scenes out—Brooks became convinced that he would be outrageous in the title role of “Black Bart,” as the script was then called. Brooks had been delightfully surprised when the studio accepted their profane, illogical, irreverent, madcap script, requesting only a few minimal changes to rein in the running time. So he was perhaps more stunned than he might have been when Warner Bros. flatly refused to consider Richard for the part. He lacked acting experience, they said. What they didn’t expressly say was that he had a reputation for being erratic and uncontrollable and was known to have drug problems. There was no telling what he might do.

Richard was dumbstruck when he got the news from his friend Cleavon Little that he’d signed on for the role. That Richard would later share a Writers Guild of America award for Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen did little to ease the pain. His name was inadvertently left off the early prints of the film.

“Richard wrote it and Mel Brooks chased him out,” director Michael Shultz said at the time. “Mel Brooks was trying to get total credit for the picture. . . . To be outmaneuvered and ripped off at that early stage in his career is something that’s a little hard for him to get over. I’d feel the same way.”

Knowing that Richard had been slated for the role makes watching the movie a bit of a disappointment, says film scholar James Monaco. “You keep thinking what Pryor could have done. He is exactly what’s missing from
Blazing Saddles.
He might have injected the necessary evil gleam. Little was too rational and simply too attractive to energize the film.” Had he played the role, Pauline Kael wrote, Richard would have made the sheriff “crazy—threatening and funny both.”

Besides all that, it would have teamed Richard with Gene Wilder two years before
Silver Streak.

Cleavon Little did a fine job, Mooney allows. “He’s okay, but he’s not a genius. On the other hand, can you picture
Blazing Saddles
with Richard Pryor in the lead? Ridiculous, right?”

Take a look at the televised performance of Richard playing both a man and a woman going through a breakup in his routine “When Your Woman Leaves You” or embodying all participants in a bar fight in “Nigger with a Seizure,” and then imagine what he could’ve done with the scene in
Blazing Saddles
where Bart holds off a mob of angry townspeople by putting a gun to his own head and taking himself hostage, barking them back with, “Hold it! Next man makes a move, the nigger gets it.” The crowd recoils with a collective gasp. The town doctor says, “Listen to him men, he’s just crazy enough to do it.” Bart then embodies both hostage and hostage-taker simultaneously.

AS HOSTAGE-TAKER:
Drop it or I swear I’ll blow this nigger’s head all over this town!

AS HOSTAGE:
(
terrified “darkie” voice
) Oh, lordy, lord! He’s desperate! Do what he say, do what he say!

It broke Richard’s heart that he never got to play it. It was his scene.

Richard was further devastated to learn that the studio wanted to cut his cowboys-farting-around-the-campfire scene and that Brooks had agreed to it.

Yes, Brooks agreed to cut the fart scene—and the scene where the horse gets punched in the face and all derogatory references to black people—but he never had the slightest intention of following through. “It’s what I always tell young filmmakers,” he said. “Say yes, yes, yes to every damn fool thing the producers ask, then ignore it all. No one ever notices.”

—————

After the heartbreak of
Blazing Saddles,
Richard fell into a dark and bitter depression. Mooney urged, pestered, and cajoled him to get back up on his feet. Stand-up was the only forum in Hollywood where a black man could speak his mind without the town “going all Frankenstein on his ass.” Frankenstein’s monster was their in-joke metaphor for Hollywood:

Just like Dr. Frankenstein, producers want to stitch together body parts and build their own stars, their own monsters. . . . I always thought of Frankenstein’s monster as a black man. All the white people are always chasing him. “Get him! Get him!” . . . The villagers are terrified of him, just like crackers are terrified of the black man. And when they catch him, he whups villager ass, just like a black man. He throws motherfuckers all over the place.

But Richard had to be a movie star. Anything less would be failure in his eyes.

Contemplating the spectacle of Richard Pryor—a solo performer without peer—setting his true gifts aside to perform in such arid fare as
Adiós Amigo
, incomprehensible camp like
The Phynx,
*
 and nearly everything he did after 1979 is even more mind numbing than that of Elvis Presley abandoning his country-stewed brew of roots, blues, and gospel rhythms to star in insipid teen movies with barely functioning story lines held together with bubble-gum pop confections and rear-projection backdrops. (On the flip side, consider that Shakespeare, according to a theory put forth by professor Felix Schelling, wanted most of all to be a poet, only resigning himself to writing crowd-pleasing plays because he couldn’t make a living from his verses.)

And then in February, while Richard grieved through the theatrical release of
Blazing Saddles
and the attendant reviews praising Cleavon Little, he got a call from Forest Hamilton at Stax West. Buoyed by the success of
Wattstax,
and perhaps egged on by Motown’s
Lady Sings the Blues
—if Berry Gordy could make Oscar-caliber movies, then Stax owner Al Bell figured he could, too—Stax produced
Darktown Strutter’s Ball,
directed by William Witney and starring Trina Parks, under the Stax-Netter Films banner (a partnership with former MGM vice president Doug Netter, despite Netter’s having threatened Stax with a lawsuit over the inclusion in
Wattstax
of Isaac Hayes’s performance of the MGM-controlled “Theme from
Shaft
”).
Darktown Strutters
(as it was eventually released, then reissued in the 1980s as
Get Down and Boogie!
) turned out to be not at all what Stax’s vice president of advertising and publicity Larry Shaw had envisioned when he read the script.

As the head of Stax West in Los Angeles, Forest Hamilton was tasked with monitoring the progress of the film. He called Shaw up and said, “This film is crazy. It ain’t going nowhere we thought it was going.”

“It was going into very white folks comedy,” Shaw concurs. “Slapstick, pies in the face, weird Batman sounds—horrible. We couldn’t stand it.”

Everyone agreed that Richard had elevated
Wattstax,
taking it from being a mere document of a historic event and turning it into a genuine
movie.
Shaw wondered if maybe Richard could work the same magic on
Darktown Strutter’s Ball.
Hamilton arranged a special screening for him. Shaw was there, watching from the back of the projection room and, at some point, noticed that he didn’t see Richard’s head anymore. He found him on the floor, crouched down below seat-level, crawling toward the door. He said, “Please, Shaw. I know I owe you a few favors, but don’t ask me to do this.”

Fair enough, Shaw said. How about doing a record instead?

Stax’s new comedy label Partee Records had released only a handful of LPs, mostly minor efforts by major comics such as Timmie Rogers, Moms Mabley (
I Like ’Em Young
), and the now highly collectable
At Last . . . Bill Cosby Really Sings.

Richard gave them
That Nigger’s Crazy,
recorded live at Don Cornelius’s
Soul Train
studio in San Francisco with all new material he’d been developing at the Store.

My uncle said, “Boy, don’t you ever kiss no pussy. I mean that. Whatever you do in life, don’t kiss no pussy.”

I couldn’t
wait
to kiss a pussy. He’d been wrong about everything else. Woman had to beat me off. “That’s enough, that’s enough! Please. Two days . . .”

“You crazy!” some guy in the audience yells.

“Huh?”

“
YOU CRAZY
!”

“Yeah!” Richard agrees. Absolute glee in his voice.

—————

Th
at Nigger’s Crazy
was a phenomenon, marking the emergence of Richard in full possession of his genius, the Richard Pryor we know today. Greg Tate, looking back on the LP in an obituary piece for the
Village Voice,
wrote:

You have to go to Chekhov or Edward P. Jones to find small lives rendered with as much epic detail and epiphanal force as Pryor unveils on “Wino & Junkie,” a hellacious and ruthlessly hilarious vision of life beneath the underdog that erects a totem to Black male oblivion out of the parsed lines his Boswell wino relates about his junkie Johnson.

James Alan McPherson wrote that Richard “enters into his people and allows whatever is comic in them, whatever is human, to evolve out of what they say and how they look into a total scene. It is part of Richard Pryor’s genius that, through the selective use of facial gestures, emphases in speech and movements, he can create a scene that is comic and at the same time recognizable as profoundly human.”

Richard renders his downtrodden characters in purely human terms, unsullied by any trace of sentimentality. “These portraits were wonderfully specific,” writes Richard Zoglin, “yet evocative of a whole community—unmistakably black yet too recognizable to be mere instruments of a racial agenda. . . . stand-up comedy had never seen anything like it.”

JUNKIE:
Pops . . . nigger, listen to me!

WINO:
Don’t you hit me no more, boy. I’ll dust your junkie ass off. You know I will, nigger. You rile me, boy. I’m ashamed to see you like this.

JUNKIE:
Ashamed to see
me
? What about this shit out here? Niggers just fuckin’ with me, man . . .

(
trails off, long silence
)

Was I finished?

The self-validating logic of Richard’s junkie at times recalls Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff.

JUNKIE:
I went to the unemployment bureau, baby. Bitch sittin’ behind the desk—ugly motherfucker come tellin’ me talkin’ ’bout, “You have a criminal record.” I say, “I know that, bitch! I’m a criminal!”

(In
Henry IV, Part 1,
when Prince Hal chides Falstaff as a rogue and a stealer of purses, the corpulent and debaucherous knight reasonably answers, “Why, Hal, ’tis my vocation, Hal; ’tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation.”)

His junkie goes from comedy to pathos with whiplash-inducing abruptness.

JUNKIE:
My father say he don’t want to see me in the vicinity. Just ’cause I stole his television. That’s the politics, baby. I’m sick, pops. Wonder can you help me? My mind’s thinking about shit I don’t want to think about. I can’t stop the motherfucker, baby. Movin’ too fast for the kid. Tell me some of that ol’ lies of yours, make me stop thinkin’ about the truth.

Richard Lewis remembers Richard workshopping these routines at the Comedy Store. “He was absolutely fearless. He would say anything.” And reveal anything.

You ever be with a woman you wanted to be with for a long time, man, and you finally get with her and you come in about four seconds? And you be panicked, jack, trying to be cool. “Oh, God! Lord don’t let her know . . . just let it stay heavy if not hard.” (
as woman
) “You’re not moving as much as you were . . .”