Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him (21 page)

More than an hour of the 114-minute
Silver Streak
has unspooled before Richard’s character shows up, but once he does, the film is all his. Author and Gannett movie critic Marshall Fine wrote that “the script, by Colin Higgins, owes a big debt to Alfred Hitchcock; but the mystery isn’t all that mysterious and the comedy isn’t all that hilarious—at least not until Richard Pryor shows up, which is at least halfway through the film. Things definitely pick up from there.” As was often the case when Richard played supporting roles, his onscreen arrival underscored how plodding and lifeless the movie had been up until that point. “For about fifteen minutes,” Pauline Kael wrote in her
New Yorker
review, “Pryor gives the picture some of his craziness. Not much of it, but some—enough to make you realize how lethargic it had been without him.” Arthur Hiller realized it, too, and immediately ordered a rewrite of the script so as to keep Richard on for the duration of the picture. Hiller credits Richard with improvising some of the movie’s best lines and for suggesting a simple change that turned a potentially embarrassing scene into one of the biggest laughs in the film. Hiller felt a nagging concern about the scene in a train station men’s room where Wilder, concocting a disguise to sneak past police, blacks up with shoe polish, dons a floppy hat, and flails hopelessly off the beat with a portable radio pressed to his ear. A white man who comes into the restroom is completely fooled. Richard suggested that “instead of a white dude being fooled by the disguise, have a black dude come in who isn’t fooled.” It completely flipped the scene and made it work.

Silver Streak
was the first—and the best—of four films Richard and Wilder would make together. In the ones that followed, they would share star billing, but for Richard there was something gratingly minstrel-like about the whole arrangement. Hadn’t that all died out with vaudeville? It felt like he was Rochester to Gene Wilder’s Jack Benny. Television could always be counted on to bring up the rear of social progress, but surely the movies had moved on, hadn’t they? Even Humphrey Bogart’s Rick and Dooley Wilson’s Sam had a better understanding than that. (But then, it was
Casablanca,
and there was a war on.) Again, Pauline Kael observes that Richard’s performance rings false only when the script asks him to show pure-hearted affection for Gene Wilder. Interracial brotherly love “is probably the one thing Richard Pryor should never be required to express.” When he does, she wrote, “you have never seen such a bad actor.”

—————

Richard finally won his first starring role playing Wendell Scott, America’s first black stock-car racing champion in
Greased Lightning,
opposite Pam Grier and Beau Bridges. The project was developed by writer-director Melvin Van Peebles, best known at the time for
Watermelon Man
and the breakout blaxploitation classic
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.
Filming came to a halt over creative disputes between Van Peebles and the film’s producers. Van Peebles left the project, and Richard, faced with the wheels coming off his first star vehicle, called Michael Schultz and begged him to take over as director. Schultz felt conflicted. Rightfully, the film belonged to Van Peebles and he didn’t want to step on his toes. At the same time, Schultz was busy developing another star project for Richard, one he anticipated would be the first movie to star Richard Pryor had Van Peebles not cut in ahead of him. Ultimately, Schultz agreed to finish
Greased Lightning,
reasoning that he could do a good job with it and he didn’t want Richard coming out with a bomb before he secured financing for his own Pryor movie. And, he notes, Melvin Van Peebles could not have been more gracious. “He had a substantially black crew and was shooting in Georgia and they were all going to leave with him in protest against the producer—who really wound up being a pill—and Melvin said, ‘No, no. Stay. I want you to support Michael and Richard and do the best you can and make this movie happen.’ ”

Richard had invited Kathy McKee to come with him for the location shooting in rural Georgia. She was reluctant at first. She knew that artists can be moody when they’re working. “During filming is not the best time to be with someone.” Especially Richard, especially in his first lead role. But she assumed Richard would rent some palatial suite for the two of them where she could have her privacy. Instead, as he often did, “he rented this little shack of a house out in no man’s land where he could walk right outside the house and fish. That’s all he wanted to do.” Kathy hated it. She hated the South. She hated being out in the sun getting bit by mosquitoes. And the whole time Richard was having an affair with Pam Grier. “He didn’t think I knew that, but of course I knew that. I’m not stupid. But I didn’t care. I just wanted to go home.” After two weeks she did, which must have given Richard pause.

—————

Richard’s first project under his deal with Universal was
Which Way Is Up?,
an adaptation of
Th
e Seduction of Mimi,
Lina Wertmüller’s dark comedy about political struggles and sexual politics among grape growers in Italy’s wine country. The film was to be directed by Michael Schultz, and Richard picked his Berkeley pal novelist Cecil Brown and
Jaws
co-screenwriter Carl Gottlieb to transplant the story to California’s citrus groves and amp up the laughs.

We get a glimpse of Richard’s workload—and the skewered rapport between him and Gene Wilder—in this dual promotional interview, ostensibly in support of
Silver Streak.
Interviewer Roger Ebert graciously stands aside as Wilder pursues his own line of questioning:

WILDER:
What are you doing next?

RICHARD:
It’s a movie called
Which Way Is Up?
This Italian director, Lina Wertmüller . . .

WILDER:
No! Oh, my God! I’ll kill myself!

RICHARD:
What you moaning about, man?

WILDER:
You’re going to work with Lina Wertmüller? She passed right by me and saw you and said, “I must have that young man?”

RICHARD:
You didn’t let me finish. She made this movie called
The Seduction of Mimi,
and this will be a remake, set among the grape pickers of California.

WILDER:
I would have killed myself out of envy.

RICHARD:
And then I’m in a remake of
Arsenic and Old Lace.

WILDER:
Oh, my God! My favorite play next to
Hamlet.
All black cast, I suppose, nothing for me.

RICHARD:
And then I’m doing
Hamlet.

Richard threw his whole heart into
Which Way Is Up?,
playing multiple roles: orange picker Leroy Brown who works his way up in the farmworkers’ union, Leroy’s gray-haired father for which he drew heavily upon Mudbone, and a philandering minister. When filming wrapped in April, Richard bought two full-page facing ads in
Variety
to thank nearly 120 crew members by name and invited them all to a extravagant wrap party. The film’s still photographer, Marsha Reed, snapped more than twenty-five-hundred photos during production. Richard ordered an eight-by-ten-inch print of each one. “I’m going to save them for the rest of my life,” he said. “This film is the most special thing I have ever done.”

The film’s producer Steve Krantz told an interviewer that Richard “is a wonderful man, but deeply troubled. He needs emotional help.”

Which Way Is Up?
did decent business at the box office but received mostly disappointing reviews when it was released in November 1977. By that time, Richard was so over his head with work that he barely noticed.

“LET’S GET HIM BEFORE SOMEBODY ELSE DOES”

Richard had sworn off appearing on talk shows six years earlier because, as he said, there would always come a point in the conversation when the host would turn to him and say, “Isn’t America wonderful, Richard?” And he would have to say, Yes, Merv/Mike/Joey/whoever, it sure is. Then the host would say, “See, guys? He said it. What’s the matter with the rest of you?”

On May 4, 1977, Richard and Chevy Chase both went on
The Tonight Show
to plug their respective TV specials, airing back to back on NBC the following night. Chase had left
Saturday Night
midway through its second season to pursue a solo career. Carson and Chevy had met for the first time the previous day. Although he was noticeably cool toward Chase, Carson could barely conceal his glee over Chase’s painfully inept performance as the comic actor, visibly flustered, stumbled over even the simplest questions groping for witty replies but coming up with none.

Carson asked Chevy to demonstrate, for the benefit of folks at home who may not have seen it, the pratfall that made him famous on
Saturday Night.
Using a chair and a glass of water for props, Chase gives an overlong introduction, explaining what it is he’s about to do, what makes it funny, then instructs the audience (growing noisy and restless) on the proper way to land when taking a fall. Finally he does it. Applause. As he steps up onto the riser, returning to his chair, he trips and falls again.

Chevy became less tongue-tied once Richard came out and took the guest chair next to Johnny. Being pushed out of the spotlight seemed to energize Chevy. His comic style being better suited to the role of a sideline taunter than ball carrier, he kept leaning over from the couch into Richard’s frame and repeatedly interrupting with ineffective wisecracks. After suffering a number of verbal smackdowns from Richard—with the audience clearly on Richard’s side—Chevy attempted to make amends by saying that he had seen Richard’s special and that it was “hilarious. Not
quite
as funny as mine, but, really, it’s quite good.” Richard remained unmoved. When Johnny asked Richard if he’d seen Chevy’s special, he answered, “I don’t like Chevy.”

—————

Carson went to a station break. When they came back, he asked Richard if he ever went back to visit Peoria. As a matter of fact, he told Johnny, he was going back that very weekend to spend Mother’s Day with his grandmother and to see his son perform in a talent show. When Johnny asked Richard what his son’s talent was, Chevy interrupted yet again, saying, “He’s a hooker.” Richard turned on him.

RICHARD:
Huh?

CHEVY:
Nothing.

RICHARD:
What was it you said?

CHEVY:
(
raising his hands to protest his innocence
) Hey, I didn’t say nothing, man. I didn’t say nothing.

RICHARD:
I was going to ask you, why didn’t you tell Johnny you was going to take over his show?

(
oooohs from the audience
)

CHEVY:
I knew you’d bring that up and Johnny and I, we’ve discussed it and neither of us cares.

RICHARD:
That monologue you were doing with the chair is a perfect replacement for Johnny.

CHEVY:
A lot of chair falls. My opening monologue will be a fall over a chair tonight, thank you very much.

CARSON:
You guys better be big hits tomorrow night.

RICHARD:
I’ve got mine. I love show business. That’s the only reason
I’m
in.

(
more oooohs from the audience at the punch he’d just landed
)

It’s informative—and fun—to see Carson’s bemusement as he watches the two men spar. Carson had put in his time, honing his craft for more than a quarter century, starting out at a local radio station in Omaha, emceeing church dinners, hosting variety shows and quiz programs before getting his own sketch comedy show,
Carson’s Cellar
at KNXT, the Los Angeles CBS affiliate, in 1951. He wrote for Red Skelton and hosted more game shows before finally achieving success with
Who Do You Trust?
on NBC in New York. He did that for six years before being tapped to host
Th
e Tonight Show.
And now people at the network—important people—thought this clod had the chops to take over his job? Chevy Chase, the overnight sensation who’d been hired on as a writer for
Saturday Night,
then added to the cast at the last minute despite having so little experience beyond performing in a few improv comedy troupes and providing voice talent on the
National Lampoon Radio Hour
? They wouldn’t think so after tonight.

—————

The excitement over Richard and his special was palpable within NBC even before the show aired and the reviews and Nielsen ratings came pouring in. The network rushed to sign him to a weekly comedy-variety series for the coming fall season. “The terms of the contract were almost unprecedented in television,” said network publicist Kathi Fearn-Banks, “and NBC was taking a real chance.” Their attitude was, “Let’s get him before somebody else does.”

“They offer what he calls ‘bad money,’ ” Mooney writes. ”So much cash that he can’t refuse it: $2 million a year. ‘What am I going to do, Mr. Mooney?’ I know him well enough to know he’s not really asking. The answer is already clear. ‘You’re gonna take the fucking money and run,’ I say.”

The irony is that Richard—the child in Richard—still believed in the transforming power of television. “One hundred and twenty-seven million people watch television every night,” he said at the time. “One week of truth on TV could just straighten out everything.”

—————

The framing device for the special has a clean-shaven, tuxedoed Richard striding through the hallways of NBC between sketches as various characters accost him with suggestions for the show. LaWanda Page, who he’d known since her fire dancing days on the Chitlin’ Circuit, essentially revamped her Aunt Esther persona from
Sanford and Son
to play Sister Mabel Williams, his “sister’s aunt’s cousin on your father’s side. I’ve known you since you were a baby.” Richard doesn’t remember her. “It’s so good to see you having your own show. All my years of prayin’ for you finally paid off.” All she demands of him in return is that he give his holiness the Reverend James L. White a prime-time spot on his show.

—————

Richard’s Rev. White, a funkier, more media-savvy incarnation of his signature minister character, descends a grand spiral staircase in a gold-trimmed white jumpsuit and enormous afro as the choir sings “For the Love of Money.” Behind him, church volunteers wait by the mostly silent phones for viewers to call in with their donations. The church’s financial problems, White says, are due to not getting the “crossover bucks.”

Most of our money comes from the minorities around the world and, although there are a lot of them, they don’t have as much as one rich white person. What we’re looking for—we’re looking for the Billy Graham dollar. We want the money honey. So we offered a little message to the white folks not sending in money. We’re not begging for the crippled children. And we’re not begging for the orphans, the black orphans of Watts. We’re not begging for them, no. And we’re not begging for the black old-folks home either. This money is to go to the BTAM: The Back-to-Africa Movement.

Every phone instantly rings.

—————

Mooney cast poet Maya Angelou—formerly a singer, dancer, and actress
*
—as the long-suffering wife of Richard’s wino character Willie who, after an extended sketch in a neighborhood bar, makes his way across the street to his house. He stands reeling for a moment before climbing the front steps. “Please God, don’t let me be sick. Get me though this one and I’ll get through the next one myself.” Willie staggers past his wife and collapses facedown on the couch where he remains, dead to the world, as Angelou delivers a wrenching monologue recounting her life with Willie, what he once was and what he has become. Angelou wrote the monologue herself, and as Mooney says, “It gets to the soul of what goes on.” After her first run-through in rehearsal, studio crew members were in tears.

Richard’s concept that the show should give voice to those who are seldom heard is most poignantly expressed by his musical guests “And the Pips,” minus front woman Gladys Knight. Richard brought her background singers Merald Knight, Edward Patten, and William Guest out of the shadows and gave them the spotlight to perform their backup harmonies and synchronized dance moves to “Heard It Through the Grapevine” and “Midnight Train to Georgia,” while an unattended microphone marked the spot where Gladys normally commanded centerstage.

—————

Five days after his special aired, Richard signed an exclusive five-year personal services contract with NBC to do a weekly series of at least ten shows, star in two specials, and serve in a creative capacity on a third special that would function as a showcase for new talent. For this he would receive $750,000. After the first year, he had the option to cancel the deal or renegotiate for more money for the next four years.

That same month, lawyer David Franklin renegotiated his Universal contract for five more movies and more money. Richard signed to do Paul Schrader’s
Blue Collar,
play the title role in
The Wiz,
and costar with Jackie Gleason in a proposed sequel to
The Sting,
a film that never came to be.

Franklin kept handing him more contracts to sign, more than he could possibly keep track of, even if he’d tried.

By midsummer, David Franklin brought Richard yet another multipicture deal, this time with Warner Bros., calling for him to star in, at minimum, four movies over the next four years, with the understanding that the studio would share Richard’s services with Universal on an alternating basis. The films were to be jointly produced by Warner Bros. in association with Richard Pryor Enterprises, with Franklin as executive producer, at a guaranteed one million dollars per film plus fifty percent of the profits.

David Franklin had been a godsend. (In actuality, it was singer Roberta Flack who sent him to Richard.) The Atlanta-based attorney straightened out Richard’s finances, renegotiated contracts, made certain he was paid his various royalties on time, retired Richard’s more than six hundred thousand dollars in outstanding debt, and settled his alimony and child-support obligations. Further, Franklin established Richard Pryor Enterprises as a corporation to ease his tax burden, and Black Rain, a production company named for Richard’s youngest daughter. He also encouraged Richard to move out of his Hollywood Hills bungalow and buy himself a house. Which he did, a Spanish villa with two guest houses situated on an eight-acre estate in the Northridge section of the San Fernando Valley with the Santa Monica Mountains providing a natural fortification against Hollywood.

Franklin’s associate, Michael Ashburne, recalls that Richard went to the bank one afternoon and withdrew a million dollars. He took the cashier’s check down the street and deposited it in a different bank. When Ashburne asked him why he’d done such a thing, Richard said, “I wanted to see if the money was really mine.”

Richard told an audience that if his father were alive and “I told him how much money I had, he’d say, ‘Boy, you’s a lyin’ motherfucker! Joe Louis never made that much money.’ ”

—————

When he appeared on
Th
e Tonight Show
to promote his special, Richard announced that he would be in Detroit later that month filming Paul Schrader’s
Blue Collar,
a story about auto assembly-line workers. Then he issued an advisory to that city’s police: “I’ll be jogging in the morning, police, me and Rashon [Khan; Richard’s bodyguard], two black men, we’ll be jogging, we’re not robbing anyone, do not shoot us accidentally as we’re jogging in the streets of Detroit.”

Johnny Carson hung his head and sighed.

“You have to announce these things,” Richard told him.

—————

Blue Collar
was Paul Schrader’s first film as a director. Although he’d amassed considerable prestige—if not Hollywood clout—when Martin Scorsese directed his original screenplay
Taxi Driver
,
Blue Collar
was still a tough sell, to the leading actors as well as to Universal. Schrader ran into resistance from the studio when he told them the story was about three assembly-line workers, two black and one white. Surely he misspoke. He meant the other way around, right? But no. The movie would have been a disaster in 1977 if the sole black protagonist had been the betrayer or the one betrayed. Those burdens the two black guys had to share.

Schrader was roundly criticized for fomenting vicious rivalries between Richard and his costars in the film, Yaphet Kotto and Harvey Keitel. In convincing the three ambitious actors to sign onto the film, Schrader—unintentionally, he says—left each with the impression that they had the starring role. Once filming began, they each became embroiled in a three-way cock fight for the lead. Richard emerged as the apparent victor. The movie’s poster featured not one but two images of Richard—and Richard alone—headlined with a blurb from Vincent Canby’s review in the
New York Times
: “Richard Pryor has a role that makes use of the wit and fury that distinguishes his straight comedy routines.”