Becoming Richard Pryor (17 page)

New York City and the Road, 1962–1964

W
hen he first hit the road in the fall of 1962, Richard Pryor had reason to think he might spend the rest of his working life on it, touring the sort of showplaces, nestled in black communities, where “good Negro folks would never venture and stepping on a brother’s Florsheims has meant hospitalization.” An earlier generation of black comics—Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley, LaWanda Page, Pigmeat Markham—had ridden the Chitlin Circuit for the whole of their careers. With white-oriented clubs and TV networks closed to their style of gutbucket humor, Foxx, Mabley, and the rest had traveled from one “Bronzeville” to another, entertaining boisterous crowds between floor shows and R&B combos, and making a meager living at it. “We was so poor even poor folks didn’t speak to us,” said Page. “We traveled by bus or train, couldn’t afford hotels most of the time. Stayed in boardinghouses in the Negro neighborhoods. Every once in a while you’d get lucky and stay in somebody’s house. But most folks wouldn’t let you, because most of those show people would steal.”

Richard lived hand to mouth on the road for months at a time, working any venue that would have him. He bused, trained, and hitchhiked from Chicago to Cleveland to Pittsburgh, and picked up a few tricks along the way. “Every day was different, a surprise, an adventure through uncharted territory, and it forced me to sharpen my skills and learn my craft,” he remembered. It was a time for experimenting with material and delivery, for shaping what was admittedly a rough-hewn stage persona. In Youngstown, Ohio, he dressed down a hostile audience: “Hey, y’all can boo me now. But in a couple of
years I’m gonna be a star, and you dumb niggers will still be sittin’ here!” An emcee in East St. Louis advised him, “You’ve got to talk to the people. You always look like you want to kill them.”

By his own account, Richard’s time on the road was full of miscues and misadventures. He learned the hard way to be suspicious of his fellow show people when, after a three-week gig in East St. Louis, he woke up to discover that his “friends” had given him the slip and taken his clothes with them. In Youngstown, after suspecting that the owners of the Casablanca club were going to stiff him, he burst into their office and tried to claim his earnings. According to an embellished version of the incident that he performed onstage, he brandished a blank pistol to intimidate the owners of this “mafia club,” but found that he’d succeeded only in making himself a laughingstock. “Hey, do it again, Rich!” they said. “Put the gun away and do it again. Say ‘stick ’em up.’ Ha-ha-ha-ha! You fucking kid.”

In December 1962, Richard was in Pittsburgh when he discovered that his idol Sammy Davis Jr. had just headlined its Civic Arena. Desperate for work and hungry for advice, he tracked Davis down to his hotel room and knocked on the door. Davis’s handler wouldn’t let him in. Playing for time, Richard drew up a chair and camped outside the door. The handler called the police. When a couple of officers arrived, Richard put on his best adult voice and faked them out: “Officer, about that young fellow—he has lit out, so take it easy. But if he comes back, I’ll give you a call.” The police moved on. Richard sat back in his chair, awaiting his idol with an empty stomach.

Hours later, Davis came out for a breath of fresh air and, finding Richard parked in the hall, invited him into his room. Richard asked for a job. Davis let him bum a cigarette, then gave him a quick bit of perspective. Even for a major star like him, Davis admitted, the business was “a hard grind at best.” Still, what was to be done? “Daddy, swing—take it easy,” he counseled the young man.

Richard heard the advice and took solace in it, but hardly took it easy. While in Pittsburgh, he started dating a singer and, in an ill-considered moment, bragged that he was collecting cash from her, as
pimps do from their girls. Six hundred miles from Peoria, he was still shadowboxing with his father. When the singer caught wind of Richard’s boast and confronted him backstage, he panicked and gave her a beating so as to avoid, he thought, getting a beating himself. On January 1, 1963, police rousted Richard in the rooming house where he lived, charged him with aggravated assault and battery, and dragged him to jail. In court, he was given a suspended sentence, but appears not to have been able to pay the costs levied by the verdict—which meant his first extended stay in a jail cell, thirty-five days of incarceration.

The misadventures persisted when, sprung from jail, Richard tried his luck at clubs that weren’t on the Chitlin Circuit. On one hapless jaunt in the middle of 1963, he crossed the border to Canada and faced white audiences who, he remembered, were less receptive to his act. In Windsor, Ontario, he played a “hillbilly bar” where the audience, eager to see the voluptuous singer next on the bill, booed him off the stage in the middle of his James Cagney impression. At a Toronto nightclub, he was upstaged as well as thumped by his competition: a bear that guzzled beer before wrestling with customers. The bear “got a little bit carried away with the wrestling,” Richard recalled. “He went after me. You know—a bear’s a bear. You can’t out-wrestle a bear, especially a bear that’s had a few. And then the bear would get gentle, and stroke you and sit on you.” Meanwhile, at his hotel, he observed a group of huge, gay wrestlers acting much the same as that bear, swinging between violence and tenderness. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I mean, you’d see them brutally murdering each other in Saturday-night wrestling matches. And then you’d see them back at the hotel, kissing and holding hands. It was bizarre.”

Frustrated in Toronto, Richard caught yet another surprise. He flipped open
Newsweek
and was startled to read about a “smart new 24-year-old Negro comic.” The young comic,
Newsweek
observed, had begun his career onstage with some racial humor—by imagining, for instance, what would happen if a black man were elected president. (“Everything is OK,” says the black president. “Just a lot of ‘For Sale’ signs on the street.”) But then this comic—an athletic,
handsome type by the name of Bill Cosby—made a name for himself by scrubbing all race-related jokes from his repertoire. His signature routine revisited the first conversation between God and Noah, turning it into theater of the absurd:

Cosby was sly and wry, threading observational humor into shaggy-dog stories with little explicit political content. His act was a clear departure from the “sick” humor of comedians like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, who had laced early 1960s stand-up with strong doses of vinegar, gall, and topicality. “I’m trying to reach all the people. I want to play Joe Q. Public,” Cosby told
Newsweek
.

Richard was devastated. “Goddamn it,” he said, “this nigger’s doing what I’m fixing to do. I want to be the only nigger. Ain’t no room for two niggers.” Cosby represented literally the road not taken: rather than build his audience by working the Chitlin Circuit, where Richard had concentrated his energies, Cosby had focused on hip cafés in Philly and New York City. His big break had been a 1962 summer residency at the Greenwich Village café the Gaslight, where, according to the
New York Times
, his audience was “composed mainly of Bohemian youths in beards, college girls who discuss medical care for the aged, and tourists who are alternately bewitched and bewildered by what they believe is the ‘dolce vita’ of New York.” That audience had been Cosby’s pathway to the talent bookers and, from there, to national exposure via
The Tonight Show
. Cosby had been a pioneer in his approach not only to comedy, but to his career as a whole.

Though Richard would later be seen as the anti-Cosby—funky, experimental, and provocative where Cosby was clean, predictable, and safe—he had reason in 1963 to identify with Cosby’s quest for a crossover style and a crossover audience. Having grown up in a city where blacks were about 10 percent of the population, a microcosm of America as a whole, he was accustomed to maneuvering through largely white institutions and communities. At least since third grade, he had brought white friends and teachers into his world by teasing them with half-barbed invitations; later, at Harold’s Club, he had grown comfortable working a mixed audience. And even after his months on the Chitlin Circuit, Richard’s comedy still hewed closer to the models of his childhood idols (physical comedians like Red Skelton, Sid Caesar, and Jerry Lewis) than to profane comics like Redd Foxx, who played to largely black audiences. Given his childhood, Richard might never have described himself as “Joe Q. Public,” but now that Cosby had taken on the role, it probably sounded like an appealing title, or at least a good alias.

Posthaste, Richard bought a train ticket to New York City. He arrived there with ten dollars in his pocket and patent leather shoes on his feet, hoping to glide through the door that Cosby had opened. But first he had to find it. He had only the faintest idea where to start looking.

A
t the train station, Richard took a shower, threw on his well-worn suit, knotted his skinny tie, and splashed on some Canoe cologne. He walked out into the open air and felt dizzy beneath the crush of Manhattan—the skyscrapers, the press of Checker cabs on the avenues, the people racing down the sidewalks as if they all had an urgent appointment with destiny. “It was a lot to take in for someone with no place to go,” he remembered. “I heard alarms go off in my head and wondered what the hell I’d done.”

His first priority, above even finding a place to stay, was to get a gig. He was familiar with only one venue in Manhattan, the Apollo Theater, so he grabbed an uptown bus, which dropped him off at
125th Street in Harlem. Ah, Harlem, the home he was looking for: “In two blocks, I saw more black people than I’d ever seen in my life. Just two blocks, and it was beautiful and it was exciting. And I looked and I felt it and I loved it, and I wanted to be part of it. Everyone talks about ‘Don’t walk in Harlem.’ I felt safer than I ever felt in my life.”

Uncertain charms: one of Pryor’s first head shots, not long after his arrival in New York City.

(Courtesy of Getty Images)

He’d landed in the cradle of blackness—or had he? At the Apollo, he met the theater’s booking agent, who looked put-upon when Richard asked for work. “Yeah, right. Why don’t you try down at the Village?” the agent said. Richard looked at him uncomprehending; he’d never heard of any village in New York. “Downtown,” the booker explained, and pointed him out the door and out of Harlem.

So much for the soft cushion of the cradle. But Richard had the good fortune, after catching a downtown bus, to arrive in Greenwich Village at a choice moment in its scrappy history. “It was a time,”
actor-writer Buck Henry remembered, “when every doorway late at night had someone standing in it who would later be famous.” With America sitting on the edge of the cultural changes that came to be known as “the sixties,” bohemia was becoming, more than ever before, the incubator of the new comics, the new singers, the new talent.

In 1963, when Richard arrived, the
New York Times
described the Village as having a “Coney Island, carnival atmosphere,” complete with barkers who promoted their establishments to passersby. Coffeehouses offered a smorgasbord of artistic experiment, their freewheeling spirit typified by the twisted proverbs on the menu of the Bitter End: “One good mistress deserves another,” “Grasp the eye by the monocle,” “Cold meat lights no fire,” and so on. Bookshops stayed open until midnight, coffeehouses until dawn, and revelers kept the streets alive until the wee hours of the morning. The local avant-garde effervesced: it was the season of Andy Warhol and Pop Art’s explosion, of happenings galore, of art world productions like Carolee Schneemann’s
Eye Body
, in which the artist covered herself with grease, plastic, and chalk and had herself photographed nude with two garden snakes writhing up her torso. Buses filled with tourists crawled bumper to bumper through its narrow streets in a steady parade, their passengers looking down on the action. Performers in the Village in 1963 could justifiably feel that they were both on the edge of society and within its very nerve center.

Richard fell into a small bohemian pocket of the Village. With his friends he tried every drug the Village had to offer: he smoked reefer, got a codeine fix by buying terpin hydrate over the counter at a MacDougal Street drugstore, raided whipped cream cans at Village cafés for their nitrous oxide, and eventually found his way to cocaine. Meanwhile, he and his friends honed their chops in the Village’s hootenanny scene. The “hoots” were loosely structured amateur nights, where folk musicians and comedians performed in the hope of catching the eye of someone who would offer them a regular booking. Richard played the circuit, starting with the Café Wha? on Monday nights and the Bitter End on Tuesdays, where he sat nervously on a bench with
the other comics awaiting their turn—among them, Joan Rivers, who remembered him wearing a coat “with jacket sleeves lengthened so many times, he looked like an admiral.” He appeared to be still, at age twenty-two, in the midst of an awkward growth spurt. Though he became a regular at its cafés, he felt ill at ease in the Village whirl. He made the decision to rent a small, dark apartment on the other side of the East River, in Brooklyn, rather than locate himself in the Village proper. “I didn’t make the Village scene,” he said. “[P]eople were very snobbish to me in the Village—I don’t know why.”