Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him (5 page)

“It was kind of embarrassing in front of all those people,” Richard recalled. “He prayed over me and says for that devil to come out! . . . I didn’t feel anything. I couldn’t see it. Maybe . . . it’s still in there.”

BACKING UP WHILE SWIMMING

As it turned out, Richard’s salvation came in the person of Miss Juliette Whittaker.

A native of Houston, Texas, Miss Whittaker took a job as director of Peoria’s Youth Theater Guild at the Carver Community Center in the late 1940s soon after graduating with a degree in drama from the University of Iowa.

The first time Richard showed up at the community center, they were in the midst of rehearsing a play based on the fairy tale
Rumpelstiltskin.
All the parts had been cast, but Richard was so eager and insistent, Miss Whittaker gave him a role as a servant. He was a “skinny little kid” in his midteens, she remembered, although “he looked about nine.”

One day, the boy playing the king was absent and Richard begged her to let him fill in. He knew the king’s lines. He knew everyone’s lines. “The other kids just broke up, he was so funny. When the original king retuned, even he had to admit that Richard was better in the part.

“So Richard stayed on the throne,” she was fond of saying, “and he hasn’t come down since.”

After that, he won the title role in
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
(set to the music of Bizet), and played the lead in
The Vanishing Pearl.

“You know that label they use now—hyperactive? Well, they didn’t have that label then. . . . He had a quick mind, was very good with puns. He could see the biting satire in things people would say. He could take your words, twist them, and throw them back at you. And this used to make the other kids very angry because they weren’t used to fighting with words.”

Miss Whittaker suspected that Richard hid his talent from the menfolk in his family. “It wasn’t quite masculine.” Not that his father or uncle had any problem with stage performers. Their world was populated with musicians and comics and female dancers. Buck had done a little vaudeville singing himself. Drama, though, was for sissies. “Nobody from the family, as I recall, would ever come to the plays,” Miss Whittaker told biographer Jim Haskins. “They didn’t take it seriously.”

After observing Richard tell jokes to entertain the kids building sets for one of her plays, Miss Whittaker asked him to be the official host and emcee for the Carver Community Center’s talent shows. He took the job seriously, trying out material on the teenagers who hung out in the candy store across the street.

One of his most memorable bits was his takeoff on the popular 1950s TV show
Person to Person
in which Edward R. Morrow interviewed celebrities while touring their opulent homes. Richard’s parody had Murrow interviewing a poor black southern sharecropper. Miss Whittaker recalled that he imitated both Murrow and sharecropper to perfection. “Mr. Murrow,” Richard-as-sharecropper would say, “this is my table and that there’s my chair. And that’s my chair and this is my table. Now the table lost a leg in ’44 and we put—oh, yassuh, the wall? We papered it with newspaper. Goes all the way back to 1914.”

“I’ve never forgotten this routine,” Miss Whittaker said, “because just when you’d think he’d exhausted the possibilities of this chair, this table, and this newspaper, he would say something else. . . . No props. He was just showing it to us. And we were seeing it because he could do that.”

In another bit, Richard mimed a scuba diver confronted by a shark. “It was so funny, the way he got out of the water, backing up from this shark,” she said. “It’s hard to show someone backing up, swimming, but Richard did.”

Richard worked whatever odd jobs he could find, mostly through family connections: driving a truck for his father’s carting company or racking balls for tips at Pop’s Pool Hall at the corner of Sixth and Sheridan. Anytime Richard failed to show up for rehearsal at the community center, Pop’s Pool Hall was the first place Miss Whittaker would look. The place would fall silent when she walked in—more out of disapproval than respect, she felt—and Uncle Dickie would say, “Fine. Take him, take him.”

“When you walked in that joint to get me,” Richard told her later, “they’d be cussin’ and fussin’, and you’d walk in and that place would be just like a church.” Guys who had pool cues “raised in the air to strike somebody would suddenly freeze,” she said. “Then the minute I’d leave they’d go back to whatever they were doing.”

She could not have known then that his pool-hall loitering would be every bit as essential to his developing genius as the hours he spent rehearsing at the community center. He watched everyone, soaking it all up, holding it in store for future use.

—————

In 1956, Miss Whittaker turned thirty. Having dedicated herself to the Carver Community Center for a full eight years, time seemed to be passing her by. She left Peoria for New York City to take a shot at her lifelong dream of appearing on Broadway. It didn’t take her long to decide she wasn’t cut out for the fierce competition on the Great White Way. She eventually returned to her post in Peoria, but her absence came at a time that made Richard’s life seem all the more desolate.

After a stint shining shoes at the Hotel Père Marquette, Richard landed his first real job in a meatpacking plant as a shaker of cowhides. It was grueling and foul-smelling work, folding and loading the heavy hides onto railroad cars bound for Chicago. At the end of each shift he would walk home—or more frequently to
Yakov’s Liquor Store
—his fingers cramped and frozen and his trousers crusted stiff with slaughterhouse slime.

Richard
spent his free time at Yakov’s, washing down pickled pigs feet with ice cold beer and contemplating a bleak future which, he began to fear, might well mean buying a pair of steel-toed shoes and
lugging a lunch pail to and from the Caterpillar plant five days a week
, spending his evenings and his pay “watching TV, getting fucked up, and chasing pussy. Work, pension, die.”

One day at the plant, Richard went upstairs to inquire about a better-paying job that had opened up in the beef-cutting department. He took one look at the men in their blood-slicked rubber aprons knocking the brains out of cattle with sledgehammers and changed his mind—as did one of the bulls waiting its turn in line: the bull suddenly bucked free of his stall and, in Richard’s account, “ran through the shop, upstairs and downstairs, snorting and butting and kicking everything in his path.” Police finally shot the bull as it ran down the street. Perhaps Richard saw parallels between the bull’s circumstances and his own.

—————

Gamely attempting to follow in his father’s footsteps, Richard entered a Golden Gloves boxing competition. “He won his first fight in the first round,” Buck later told a newspaper reporter. “And I think he did it by telling a joke, which made the guy double up. And then he punched him out.” If true, that would mark the pinnacle of his brief career.

“I always boxed them niggers that looked like they’d just killed their parents. You know, them rough niggers that could strike a match on the palm of their hand. Niggers would come and be beatin’ themselves up. I’d say, ‘Well, he don’t give a fuck about me. He’s beatin’ his own ass!”

—————

As luck would have it,
Richard
’s stepmother operated an establishment on North Aiken Street right next door to Ray LeRoy, “the George Burns of Peoria.” LeRoy worked a steady gig as the house comedian at Mike and Mike’s Show Lounge and his place was a favorite hangout for black entertainers on the Chitlin’ Circuit passing through town.

Richard
worked himself into the circle, shyly hanging back, content to listen to the veterans talk trash and tell their stories of life on the circuit and to dream of the day when he would be one of them. “I don’t know exactly when it happened, but suddenly he was always there,” LeRoy remembered. “We would say to each other, ‘Isn’t he the politest little fella?’ He was about seventeen, I guess—real thin then.” Eventually
Richard
got up enough nerve to ask if he could look though LeRoy’s prized gag books. LeRoy was flattered. “I had a lot of material for him to look at—wrote most of it myself. It was mostly stand-up material. He used to sit for hours going through my scripts and books and gags.”

—————

At seventeen, Richard fell in love with a girl named Susan whom he described as a Sophia Loren–type from a poor family. They made a secret love nest in the garage of a house his family owned on Goodwin. “She wore me out,” Richard told
Spin
magazine in 1988. Susan’s orgasms were so intense, he claimed, that “when she would come, she would faint. I thought I killed her.” The fun ended, as it often would for Richard, when his girlfriend got pregnant. He went home in tears, he told Barbara Walters in a 1980 interview. “My mother said, ‘What’s wrong with you, boy?’ Father says, ‘There ain’t nothing wrong with him, he got some girl pregnant.’ ” This rattled Richard all the more. Did his father know
everything
he did? In this case, his father knew because the girl had told him so herself. Buck had been sleeping with her, too. (Richard’s aunt Mexcine cryptically assured him the child was not his. “I was out in the chicken shack,” she told him, “and someone else said it was his baby.”)

Richard was not present when Susan gave birth to a daughter, Renee, in April 1957. Later in life he came to accept Renee, reasoning that, even if she were not his daughter, she was likely his half sister. Either way, she was family.

His more immediate response was to flee Peoria and enlist in the army.

—————

Military service would not provide the easy way out Richard had imagined. The first time he tried, after bragging to everyone he knew that he was going off to Chicago to join up, he flunked the entrance exam and they sent him back home. He was so embarrassed, he told Janet Maslin of the
New York Times,
he hid in the house for months. When he did venture out, he wore a costume uniform. It fooled his friends but not their parents.

On his second try at enlisting, he got in. After spending eight weeks of basic training in plumbing school—covered in shit, once again—at Fort Leonard Wood, he shipped out to the
military installation in Baumholder, Germany, just south of Idar-Oberstein
, then
the largest concentration of American troops outside the United States. The soldiers’ collective buying power had brought about an infusion of bars, dancehalls, and sex-trade workers, prompting the West German government to declare the region a “moral disaster area.”

No great student of world history, Richard had supposed that racial attitudes would be more enlightened in Germany. The bars and clubs there, he quickly discovered, were even more segregated than they had been in Peoria. “Out of like 150 bars,” he wrote, “only three let in blacks.” The worst of it came from his fellow soldiers. Cornered by three guys wielding tire irons in the armory one day, Richard made good use of his basic training. Much to their surprise, he grabbed a length of lead pipe and bashed one of them over the head. (“Really?” David Felton asked him in a 1974
Rolling Stone
interview. “An enemy or one of ours?” “No, a white cat,” Richard said. “One of yours.”)

Although Richard had gone into the army with the idea of making it his career, he spent the majority of his two-year stint in the stockade for stabbing a fellow soldier. Prior to his incarceration, he had a love affair with a married woman, a poignant encounter that stayed with him for the rest of his life—so much so that he ruminated on the relationship in the closing pages of his autobiography.

And, as he told Felton in that same
Rolling Stone
interview, the army was where he learned to eat pussy. “I gave some head for the first time in my life when I was in Germany. That was an experience. I’ll never forget how it felt on my head, her pussy . . . her hairs and all . . . I knew I would be doing it again.“

If it seems improbable that a man of Richard’s upbringing would be a cunnilingual virgin at the age of eighteen, consider the African American male’s well-documented aversion to going down on a woman. As he described it on
That Nigger’s Crazy:
“My family only fucked in one position—up and down. 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 the pussy. He’d been wrong about everything else.” And this from
. . .
Is It Something I Said?
: “Niggers will not admit to giving up no head. (
in character
) ‘Uh-uh. Noooo. Not the kid! Uh-uh. Nah, I ain’t no termite.’ Be lying their ass off. And black women like head, but they won’t kiss you afterwards.”

—————

Richard got his first taste of success outside of Miss Whittaker’s theater group by performing in amateur shows on the base
, developing a routine on army life in which he assumed the role of an incomprehensible drill sergeant, which he included on his first Warner Bros. LP,
Richard Pryor.
But then came the first of what would be a career-spanning string of self-inflicted derailments. During a screening of the Douglas Sirk movie
Imitation of Life,
a
melodramatic
tear-jerker about a struggling black woman whose light-skinned daughter rejects her in order to pass for white
, a white soldier in Richard’s unit began laughing a little too loudly at
inappropriate times.