Becoming Richard Pryor (19 page)

Richard and Jaglom’s friendship had a dynamic equilibrium, one occasionally troubled by the great social gap that separated the two of them. With his connections to the Compass theater ensemble, the Actors Studio, and (ironically) the black-led Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Jaglom was plugged into larger institutions—and Richard was a lone integer, struggling to find his own voice as an artist and a man. Once, Jaglom complained to Richard about performing before a cold audience with the Compass; the troupe was skewering JFK from the left, Jaglom said, and the audience refused to go there. Richard immediately put the focus on the race of the performers: “I bet there’s nobody black in the show.” Jaglom drew back. For all his civil rights involvement, he hadn’t thought twice about the all-white cast to which he belonged.

Politics gradually turned into a sore spot in their friendship. Starting in the summer of 1963, New York’s CORE launched a series of direct-action protests, most notably against the city’s all-white building trades. CORE leaders anticipated that white construction workers and the New York Police Department might harass their rank and
file, so they set up training workshops in the practice of nonviolent protest. Jaglom tried to convince Richard to go up to Harlem with him so they could train and be activists together. He admitted that he had his own doubts about whether he had the right temperament for nonviolence. If people spat on him, Jaglom thought he might “get killed because I couldn’t control my temper.”

Richard responded, “You’re all fucking crazy. You just pull out a gun and shoot ’em.” He was the grandson of Marie Pryor, who believed in the power of razors, guns, and big hands.

Jaglom replied that the brave ones were those, like Martin Luther King Jr., who controlled themselves for the sake of the movement. Himself, he didn’t think he could handle the abuse.

“Of course you can’t,” Richard clinched the conversation. “Who the fuck wants to be able to do it?”

Richard had taken so much abuse already—much more than Jaglom knew or, for all his worldliness and right-thinking politics, could imagine—and he wasn’t about to sign up for another dose. He was ripe for something other than the civil rights movement of 1963. His progressive Jewish-American friend might find resonance with Martin Luther King Jr. and his insistent idealism, but Richard was waiting for a movement that would call upon America’s fear of payback, not just its conscience; a movement that would not be shy about wielding a gun.

F
or Richard in the mid-1960s, improv became more than an art form to be practiced onstage. It was a way of life, a survival tactic, a means of turning his frustration and rage into the stuff of a joke. When he and his comic buddies gathered at each other’s apartments, they would play improv games until daybreak. Richard would raid a steamer trunk full of props for inspiration. If he took out a hammer, one of his comic friends might grab it and riff, “What kind of toothpick is this? I’m not going to be able to get the meat out of my teeth with this thing,” then pass it on to the next comedian.

On one occasion, Richard removed a toy gun from the steamer
trunk and told J. J. Barry that he was going to shoot him unless Barry convinced him otherwise. For a full hour, it seemed, Barry begged, pleaded, and sweated for his life, until everyone assumed that Richard would put the gun away. Instead, he shot him—and Barry bounced against the walls, writhed, and groaned for another half hour, his life leaking out of him drop by drop. Finally he seemed dead, truly dead.

Then his body twitched—at which point Richard shot him again, quickly, perhaps to put him out of his misery or perhaps just to make sure the deed was done. The rest of the comics sat mesmerized. Richard had stayed in character through all of Barry’s theatrics—even as no one knew what his character was, exactly. He was singular and mysterious, and nothing like the funny young fellow “Joe Q. Public” that his idol Cosby played onstage and that he had himself tried to incarnate for a while. There was power in being honestly unpredictable, he was discovering, though he was not yet an expert at tapping it. The honesty part was the sticking point.

New York City, 1964–1965

M
anny Roth met Richard Pryor when the “scared little black kid” washed up at the Cafe Wha? asking for him by name and looking for a spot on his stage. Despite the twenty-two-year age difference that separated the two of them, they felt a special affinity with each other. Roth, one of the Village’s many Jewish entrepreneurs, had been raised in Newcastle, Indiana, part of an Orthodox Jewish family in a tiny blue-collar town thick with churches, not far from the northern hub of the Ku Klux Klan. His parents, like Richard’s family, operated a makeshift midwestern tavern, serving beer, pickled pig’s feet, and pickled ham on the bone to workers from the local Chrysler plant. (Roth’s mother, who tended the bar, grimaced every time she had to handle the nonkosher ingredients.) The young Manny grew up sensing that Jews and blacks shared something, if only by way of other people’s enmity. When, in the mid-1950s, he moved to Greenwich Village and set up his first café-theater, he made a point of welcoming black theater artists such as Sidney Poitier and Lorraine Hansberry to his establishment.

Roth’s Cafe Wha? didn’t look like much. Bob Dylan remembered it as “a subterranean cavern, liquorless, ill lit, low ceiling, like a wide dining hall with chairs.” But what it lacked in ambience, it made up for in variety. Dylan, who like Richard played his first gig in New York City there, remembered catching, in its afternoon shows, “a comedian, a ventriloquist, a steel drum group, a poet, a female impersonator, a duo who sang Broadway stuff, a rabbit-in-the-hat magician, a guy wearing a turban who hypnotized
people in the audience, [and] somebody whose entire act was facial acrobatics.” In other words, “anybody who wanted to break into show business.”

Richard began as just another young performer taking advantage of the Wha?’s open mike, but soon Roth promoted him to a slot in the evening shows at fifteen dollars a set, or seventy-five dollars a week. Not long after, Roth offered to serve as Richard’s manager—the first (and last) time he took on that sort of job. He saw in Richard’s search for himself, in his desperate hunger for success, a mirror of his own inner struggle. “I was the craziest of the crazies when I hit the Village, the neediest of the needy,” Roth said. “I was just as lost as he was.” Perhaps, in helping Richard find his path, he might chart his own. His friends Roy Silver and Fred Weintraub had groomed Bill Cosby into a crossover phenomenon (in part by pruning the racial humor from his act), and Roth hoped for a piece of their action. Higher motives mixed with the frank pursuit of a payday.

Manny worked hard to prime Richard in mind and body, to prepare him for the break that could change both their lives. “What Pryor needed most was a father figure, and I became that father figure by default—certainly not by choice,” Roth observed. A health nut himself, he took the comic to the YMCA, where they swam and lifted weights. Together they pored over the daily newspapers, looking for headlines to weave into Richard’s act. They rehearsed Richard’s routines over and over, refining jokes and sharpening his delivery. Manny warned Richard not to amble like Cos, not to dawdle. “Faster, faster! Pick up the pace!” he advised Richard at the first sign of a
longueur
. “You need to crank it up.” He hoped Richard could match Cos’s success, but suspected that he would arrive there only by way of a hyperkinetic style all his own.

When, in March 1964, Richard landed a gig at the Living Room, a Midtown club frequented by showbiz types, it seemed their efforts were going to reap some rewards. Manny classed up Richard’s act by buying him a couple of suits and shirts, ties, socks, shoes, cufflinks—a whole new professional wardrobe, “everything for the
big time.” They even traveled up to Harlem together to get Richard’s hair set in a fresh conk.

On the Living Room’s stage, Richard opened his act with an effusive tribute to his wonderful manager, Manny. Then he crashed onstage, stumbling through “a half-assed show” that, as Manny recalled, was so embarrassing that both of them “walked out with our tails between our legs.” Doubling the misfortune, the gig attracted Richard’s first notice in the trade press.
Variety
praised his “avant garde viewpoint,” “healthy instinct for irreverence,” and “feel for expression,” but counseled him to proceed with caution in his career: “there is still much for him to learn before he can go into commercial rooms. He is still in the coffeehouse stages as far as this audience was concerned on his opening night. He has the approach of an intellectual entertainer, and [his] writing seems to be for clever effect rather than laughs.”

And so the big time was put on hold. Richard returned to the clubs operated by Manny’s friends in the Village—the Village Gate, the Bitter End, and the rest. He had no choice but to follow
Variety
’s counsel and hone his chops among the bohemians. Meanwhile, Manny discovered that, as Richard’s manager, damage control was a considerable part of his job. When he was once ruffled onstage at the Cafe Wha?, Richard attacked someone in the audience with a fork. (Fortunately the Wha? carried only plastic cutlery.) Then there was Richard’s relationship to money, which seemed to jump out of his pockets and land in the hands of others. He could be shockingly mercenary: in the middle of a pro bono gig for NYU students, he stopped mid-show, wondered out loud why he was performing for free, then walked offstage. He often asked Manny for small amounts of cash, and if he didn’t get the money, he would threaten to skip his gigs. Perennially broke, he would sign contracts without reading them so that he could get a ten- or twenty-dollar advance. Once he dropped into the Wha? and asked Manny for some cash to pay a cab fare. Manny gave him five dollars for the fare, which was a dollar and fifty cents. Richard handed the driver the full five and said, “Keep the change.”

Five months after the Living Room gig, Richard was given a second
chance to impress a mainstream audience when he appeared in a late-August taping of
On Broadway Tonight
, a televised variety show hosted by crooner Rudy Vallee. The program was designed as a showcase for young performers: its studio audience was sprinkled with “America’s leading starmakers,” there to judge the talent in the room and work their starmaking magic on anyone they favored. (Producer David Susskind, who had boosted the careers of black actors Sidney Poitier, James Earl Jones, and Cicely Tyson, was on hand for Richard’s TV debut.) Vallee introduced Richard with a set of fibs that most likely had come from Richard himself: the young comic was a former army paratrooper; his comedy had been broadcast by the U.S. government; and he was proudly indebted for his talent to his father, Leroy, “a song and dance man back in those wonderful days of vaudeville.” Richard’s past had been rewritten so that he came off as a plucky, patriotic, and natural-born entertainer, the sort of Yankee Doodle Negro whom Rudy Vallee and his show’s middle-aged studio audience might clasp to their bosoms as one of their own.

Once introduced, Richard Pryor strutted onstage, wiped his nose, fidgeted with his tie, cleared his throat—and kept the lies coming:

There were some serious misrepresentations here: Richard was raised an only child, not one of eleven kids; his mother was a light-skinned black, not Puerto Rican; and his family lived in brothels and houses, not tenements. The jokes were confected out of a New York state of mind, the Puerto Ricans belonging to Spanish Harlem and the multiethnic tenements to the Lower East Side. It was as if Richard could talk onstage about his childhood only by relocating it to New York City, the new home he’d chosen for himself.

“I’m from an average-type family”: keying into the expectations of his audience.

(Courtesy of the author)

The rest of Richard’s seven-minute routine skittered from one joke to another at a rapid-fire clip. The setups were quick, the punch lines coming every ten seconds—just like he and Manny had planned—and often punctuated by a goofy look on Richard’s face: