Becoming Richard Pryor (18 page)

Part of that awkwardness came from his inability to tap into his past. On the one hand, he had a fund of experience, from his first twenty years in Peoria, that made the most “far-out” adventures of the avant-garde seem thin by comparison, mere playacting. On the other hand, the prevailing zeitgeist, in the form of Bill Cosby, was blowing him in the exact opposite direction—away from his underworld past and toward a squeaky-clean future. Before arriving in Greenwich Village, Richard had been transfixed by Cosby’s example; after catching him in action, in between his own sets at the Cafe Wha?, he was stunned by his talent. “The man was amazing. Truly amazing,” Richard recalled. “Do you hear me? I was amazed.”

For a few months he tried to remake himself as “Richard Cosby,” studying Cos’s records to divine the secret of their success. Much of Richard’s act had been made up of impressions—“screaming takeoffs,” wrote the
Philadelphia Tribune
—of Alfred Hitchcock, character actor Walter Brennan, and Sammy Davis Jr. Now he would slip mid-act into the kind of storytelling that Cosby was known for, in an unattributed impression of his new idol. Here’s how, in one routine, he described the arrival of a burglar in his home:

The rhythms, the make-believe scenario, the wacky, absurdist ending—these were pure Cos. When his fellow comics confronted Richard on his raiding of Cosby’s act, he had a simple reply: “I’m going for the bucks.”

The critics picked up on the bald act of emulation, too. In what may have been the first media coverage of Richard’s career, on March 19, 1964, the
New York Herald Tribune
declared that “Comedian Richard Pryor has got guts. He uses Bill Cosby’s style, mannerisms, inflections, and much of Cosby’s material without batting an eyelash. Be yourself, Richard, so we can pan (or applaud) you on your own.” Manny Roth, the owner of the Café Wha? and Richard’s first manager, gave him a more profound version of the same advice. Roth told him, “You can’t be Cos, you just can’t be Cos. It’s going to be hard enough just being Ritchie, Richard Pryor . . . You’ll never be Cosby in a million years. But you know what? You’re going to be bigger and better than Cos.”

Bigger and better than Cos? Bigger than the
Tonight Show
performer whose first album had soared up the charts? In 1964, such soothsaying was hard to fathom, much less credit. Yet the insight behind the advice was unimpeachable. Temperamentally, Richard could never hope to become Cos, whose strength onstage came from his preternatural composure. Cosby’s relaxed intensity made his audience trust that they could lean back in their seats and enjoy the ride. Richard’s strength, on the other hand, was his supersensitivity, his ability to tune into the lower frequencies of human interaction. Unlike Cos, Richard never took on an air of unqualified success; he was forever an underdog, and had all the anxiety and embattlement that followed that fate. If Richard wanted to live up to his promise, he needed to channel his anxiety rather than run away from it.

R
ichard found camaraderie, and a partial solution to his dilemma as a comic, among “a bunch of hobos looking for work”—the comedian friends he made in the Village. Together, they scraped for their ten minutes onstage and passed around a hat afterward for loose change. Though some hailed from more comfortable backgrounds, all of them were hungry—for experience, for action, for a break. They made a ragged army of individualists: Henry Jaglom, a loquacious actor-comedian who came to the Village by way of his parents’ luxury apartment building on Central Park West; J. J. Barry, an earthy, hefty performer once described as an “upright hippo of a man”; Bob Altman, a shaggy-browed stock analyst who would soon give up his day job and become the frenetic comic known as Uncle Dirty; Martin Harvey Friedberg, a sweet-tempered man who brought pathos to scenes of utter hilarity; and Burt Heyman, who worked for the United Jewish Appeal before committing to comedy full time. Richard was the one black performer in the bunch, but in observance of an unwritten rule of bohemia, the comics focused on their common present rather than on their multiple pasts. All of them were in transition from one life to another, where it was hoped the old rules wouldn’t apply.

The group found a second home at the Improvisation, a coffeehouse that had opened in the spring of 1963 at Forty-Fourth Street and Ninth Avenue, two miles north of the Village. (In an early
Village Voice
advertisement, The Improvisation called itself the home of “everyone you haven’t seen since they left the Village.”) Later known simply as the Improv, the café started as an after-hours hangout for the Midtown theater set. The
Herald Tribune
found it a “happy espresso oasis” where “local ‘gypsies’ (show business people)” went to “unwind after the curtain”; the likes of Judy Garland were known to give impromptu performances, singing and swinging until 7:00 a.m. Soon comedians like Richard and his gang started taking over the club, whose loose-jointed feel served their purposes, too. In the early hours of the morning, when the Improv’s audience dwindled to what Henry Jaglom called “the dregs”—a nightlife crew of “the hookers
and the cab drivers and the drunks”—Richard would tell his friends, “Come on up, let’s get up and fool around,” and then two or three or four of them would take the stage, performing for nothing other than the joy of performance. Thus was born an important, if rarely noticed, experiment with the form of group improv.

In part, Richard and his fellow improvisers took their cues from the innovative exercises, or games, developed by the Chicago theater group the Compass. These games were designed, in the words of one critic, “to almost fool spontaneity into being”: they asked actors to surrender to the flow of interaction, to collaborate with the audience as well as their fellow performers, and to rely on their bodies to put over their character’s story.

For Richard, who had felt the limitations of his written material, group improv unlocked his genius as a performer. “He would just investigate. The commitment was very full,” said Jaglom. In one sketch at the Improv, Richard had played a fortune-telling vending machine that answered someone’s questions about their future in installments, one dime’s worth at a time. With other comics, the sketch had lasted three minutes; with Richard as the vending machine, seducing and goosing the paying customer, it lasted forty. During another bit, Richard started removing his shirt in an apparent non sequitur. A beat later, his shoes came off. Then his pants. And then, to everyone’s astonishment, he pulled off his underwear. “That was against the law at that point,” Jaglom reflected. “I was screaming, and other people were screaming, with laughter. Other people were really mad: ‘Put your pants on! What are you, crazy? They’re going to close us down.’ I remember clearly saying in my journal, ‘This guy has no limits. He’s free.’”

Though Richard’s improv often came out of these theater games, it frequently had less of a pretext or conceptual frame. Much of it was high-concept larking—the result of someone’s brain flash. Richard and his buddies might pretend to be an officer and his platoon of soldiers, a Mafioso and his mark, or a fellowship of samurai warriors (anticipating Richard’s famed samurai hotel sketch with John Belushi
on
Saturday Night Live
). Or they might go outside the club and transform the Improv’s picture window into a make-believe aquarium, the sudden setting for a four-man water ballet. In their improvs, all lines were to be crossed, including the one that separated “onstage” from “offstage.” Once, Richard and his comic friends sat eating an entire meal, of rice pilaf and chicken, under the lights onstage, with the audience watching. After a while, Richard started eating with his hands, touching off an avalanche of anarchy: soon all the comics were acting like cavemen, licking their dishes and throwing them on the floor. Budd Friedman, the Improv’s owner, charged the stage; the comics expected him to scold them. “So that’s the way you feel about it, hunh?” Friedman said—then yanked away the tablecloth so that absolutely everything crashed to the ground.

Present at the creation: sketch by Henry Jaglom, “Richy Pryor ’66 The Improv.”

(Courtesy of Henry Jaglom)

Richard and his friends probably wouldn’t have considered
themselves avant-garde, but their improv was taking them close to the edgier performance scenes of the Village, where it was more important to create a spectacle than to advance a well-made plot. At the same time that they had their caveman banquet, flouting social decorum onstage, the Village avant-garde had the “flesh jubilation” of
Meat Joy
(1964), a ritual play where men and women, stripped to their underwear, writhed together and rubbed raw chicken and sausage on their bodies. With their affection for improvisation and their frank sensuousness, Richard and the avant-garde were on parallel paths to points unknown.

The Improv was generally a hospitable home for Richard’s explorations, with Budd Friedman and his then-wife, Silver, happy to stoke the merriment and the madness. At the Improv’s first birthday party, an after-hours party for regulars in the spring of 1964, Richard disappeared into the men’s room near the tail end of a set by a self-serious chanteuse and emerged having ditched his button-down shirt, sports coat, pants, and underwear. Clad only in his felt hat, shoes, and socks, he pranced sweetly across the stage, exposing his nether parts to his audience and toying with their expectations about how black men were supposed to measure up. “Well, there goes another myth,” quipped Silver, in the spirit of Richard’s escapade.

Yet not every audience at the Improv could match the freewheeling spirit of the guests at the Improv’s birthday party. One night on the early side of a weekend evening, Richard sat next to Silver and eyed the Improv crowd for several minutes. “I think I’ll go downtown,” he said finally.

“Not enough action for you?” she asked.

“Maybe later.”

“What are you looking for?”

“Openness.” Then he lit off in search of it.

R
ichard found a type of openness in his unexpected friendship with Henry Jaglom. Later known as a director of more than fifteen independent films, Jaglom came from a spectacularly wealthy Jewish
family: his father, formerly the finance minister of the Free City of Danzig, had been so important to the German economy that Hitler wished to make him an “honorary Aryan” so he might keep brokering trade between the two territories. Henry himself was a student at the University of Pennsylvania and the Actors Studio in Manhattan, and had been affiliated with an offshoot of the Compass theater group in Boston; by temperament he was an intellectual and an idealist, involved with the Congress of Racial Equality’s effort to desegregate Madison Avenue. Just two years before, Richard had been living under his father’s roof with a stepmother who tricked to put food on the table. Now he was Henry’s regular guest at the Jagloms’ luxury apartment on Central Park West, where Louis XV furniture decorated the rooms, Renoir and Degas paintings hung on the walls, and family dinners were elaborate affairs with servants setting out finger bowls. Richard played it cool, as if he were to the manner born. He never admitted any disorientation to his well-off friend.

Precisely because of the unacknowledged distance between the two of them, Richard and Henry made a perfect bohemian pair: the black outsider bonding with the artistic son of a Jewish import-export financier. Richard had been born into the sex trade and had flunked out of it; Henry had been born into money and had felt himself an imposter. They met up, providentially, on the stage of the Improv, where creativity required no credential.

Their friendship revolved around the pursuit of comedy. They took long walks around the city until sunrise, debating a seemingly trivial question (“What’s more funny, a chicken or a duck?”) as if it got at the finer points of their art. They lingered at the Improv after everyone else had left for the night, and competed to see who could make the other one crack up. On one occasion, Richard started spilling condiments on his face to get a rise out of Jaglom. Ketchup spattered his ears—no laugh from Jaglom. Mustard splattered his eyes—no laugh. Finally, Richard took the entire tray of condiments and dumped them over his head, so that he was dripping with a chaos of color. Still no laugh. Then Richard delicately picked up a small
napkin and, in the middle of this mess, dabbed a corner of his mouth with the utmost elegance. “I fell on the ground in what I still remember as the hardest, longest laugh of my life,” Jaglom said. “His instincts were always brilliant and they always topped everyone else’s.”

At Jaglom’s home or at a friend’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, the two smoked dope together and brainstormed their future. They put special effort into developing a comic TV show, inspired by their peripatetic travels around New York City, that would star the two of them as a pair of detectives. If it had been picked up, it would have been the first of the interracial buddy comedies that Richard would develop. Unfortunately the show went nowhere, and eventually Richard and Jaglom were scooped by the ubiquitous Cosby, whose shadow seemed to envelop Richard even when he was not chasing it. In November 1964, it was announced that Cosby and Robert Culp would star as a black-and-white pair of world-traveling CIA agents in a show titled
I Spy
.