Becoming Richard Pryor (24 page)

It was hard for Richard to use his brain when his ego was being so insistently, and distractingly, stroked. A few days after Darin’s party, he arrived in Vegas and marveled with Maxine at seeing his name in lights on the Flamingo marquee. It was, he said, “as big a thrill” as he’d had “up to that time.” He delighted, too, in the Strip’s “around-the-clock hustle”: by the mid-1960s, Vegas had evolved, as a sin city, into the best world that money could buy, a startlingly upscale version of the Peoria of Richard’s childhood. The just-opened Caesars Palace had reclaimed the banner of imperial Rome for the age of Populuxe. From the outside it looked like a fourteen-story Coliseum, while from the inside it looked like the largest bachelor pad in existence, with waitress “goddesses,” in tunics and sandals, instructed to introduce themselves with “I am your slave.” The Flamingo itself was the first luxury hotel on the Strip, and had already become iconic. The Rat Pack had robbed its casino in
Ocean’s Eleven
; Elvis and Ann-Margret had frolicked around its pool in
Viva Las Vegas
.

Being an opening act for Bobby Darin at the Flamingo meant basking in an air of complete adoration. During the first week of their engagement, Darin demolished the all-time attendance record for the Flamingo’s showroom. The sellout crowds welcomed Richard’s act, which, despite Groucho’s advice, remained a smooth amalgamation of the sketches he performed on
Merv Griffin
: spoofs of New York, “Rumpelstiltskin,” and the rest.

Yet if Vegas offered itself as a blank canvas for Richard’s fantasies, he grew indifferent about painting it. Sure,
Variety
praised his “wonderfully kookie style,” but he was still being lumped into “the Bill Cosby school of reminiscing and identifiable storytelling.” Don Rickles, ostensibly coming backstage to praise his act, merely slipped in the knife. “It’s uncanny,” he said. “You sound just like Bill Cosby.”
It was the same connection Manny Roth had made two years ago and a world away, during Richard’s first hungry months in Greenwich Village, when he still had the excuse of being the freshest arrival in town.

B
ack in LA, Richard was both making it and not making it—getting his first roles as an actor in TV and film, and then struggling with what to do with them. He took a supporting part in
The Busy Body
, a Sid Caesar vehicle that offered him the chance to work with one of his childhood heroes. He leapt at the opportunity, playing a circumspect, fumbling police detective to Caesar’s blabby, fumbling mobster. It was a part that Cosby would have invested with his reserves of calm and competence. Richard tried to give the role an inflection he’d crowd-tested in his work on
Merv
—the “cool guy” who always seems on the verge of a crack-up.

Unfortunately, he suffered a crisis of confidence on set. He felt himself “tiptoe[ing] around the cameras [and] lights,” and wondered, “What the fuck am I doing here?” Acting in a film didn’t come as naturally as he’d expected. “I did every actor that I’d ever seen in the movies in this one role. I walked in the door like Steve McQueen. I took my hat off like John Wayne, even did some Charlton Heston.” The end result was a muddle: he voiced the role in an artificially deep register, as if he were a kid playing a grown-up. His performance was mannered, jokey—like pretty much every other performance in the film. A mashup of
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
and Hitchcock’s
The Trouble with Harry
,
The Busy Body
lacked the star power of the former and the control of the latter, and it found little favor with audiences or critics.
Time
dismissed it as a “tasteless Runyonesque rehash.” The
Chicago Tribune
complained, “Producer-director William Castle . . . used to make supposedly horror movies that in actuality were funny. In ‘The Busy Body,’ he has made a supposedly funny movie that in actuality is a horror.” The film did nothing to elevate Richard among the ranks of working actors.

His first role in a TV series—a background part on the fall 1966
premiere of
The Wild Wild West
—suggests that he was not exactly being choosy in his auditions. Richard played a dim-witted ventriloquist, outfitted in red turban and magenta dashiki, part of a group of carnival show assassins. It was no one’s proudest moment: at one point, the show’s hero exercises his wit by asking Pryor’s character, “Who’s the ventriloquist and who’s the dummy?” To
Variety
, the episode was patently ludicrous. “For real-life stuff,” the critic jibed, “viewers will have to turn the dial to ‘Green Hornet’ or ‘Tarzan.’”

Fresh from these experiences as an actor, Richard traveled back to Peoria for the first time since he’d left in 1962, and was received with a warmth so novel that it felt disorienting. His old friends, who had doubted his prospects, hailed the conquering hero. The cops who had treated him like a juvenile delinquent now vowed that they had believed in his talent all the while. His father, an unsentimental character for as long as he could remember, told a
Peoria Journal
Star
reporter that when he and Ann first caught Richard on TV, “the thrill of our son making it good tugged at our hearts and brought a tear or two.” Richard tried to reconnect with Peoria and embrace his new stature: he played cards, went fishing, got drunk. He pulled three or four friends over to the Pere Marquette Hotel, where he had worked as a shoeshine, and finally achieved a dream he’d held inside himself since he was a boy. He sat at the picture window of its restaurant, where he could enjoy a lordly view of Main Street, and ate a lordly lunch.

Still, bitterness leaked out of him. He lashed at a
Journal Star
reporter when she suggested that blacks were getting more exposure on TV. “It’s a sham,” he said, “a trick that deludes. You see more Negroes on TV because what they are selling, sells to the Negro. Now, they are getting worse parts, but more of them.” It’s not hard to divine the sources of Richard’s frustration, given his recent work on the
Kraft Summer Music Hall
and
The Wild Wild West
.

He was in a more positive frame of mind when discussing how he developed his comic material. “I can walk two blocks down the street and see funny things, comical happenings all around me. Now, I can put these local, human, real things into a skit, and they come out funny,” he said, noting that this method had taken him two years to hone. “I have a lot of people to thank for these funny bits,” he continued. “My grandma, the boss of the whole family, has lots of material there. I’ve got a 13-year-old cousin, Denise, who they say is just like me. She’s a source with her little jokes. My uncle, Richard, and my grandpa Tommy Bryant—what they do gives me material. I called my grandpa to tell him I was going to be on TV. All I said was ‘grandpa’ and without letting me finish, he said, ‘I ain’t got a quarter,’ then hung up.”

It was the first time Richard had publicly articulated the change he felt brewing in his comedy, the turn to the close observation of his family and neighborhood. There was a good bit of premature optimism in his self-assessment: when he discussed his family or his social life onstage over the last two years, he’d still tended to present a fantasy version of his life—for instance, in the oft-repeated joke about belonging to a family with eleven kids (repeated on the
Kraft Summer Music Hall
in June), or in his self-presentation as the most harmless of souls. And he had exercised his imaginative license for good reason: the
Kraft Summer Music Hall
was not about to lend its stage to a comic who pulled back the veil on Peoria’s brothels, replicated his obscenity-laced bull sessions with his friends, delved into his violent relationships with women, or described the psychedelic horror show of an acid trip.

But if Richard misstated, to the
Peoria Journal Star
, what he’d already achieved in his comedy, his remarks pointed with clarity to the journey that lay ahead of him. He was poised to discover whether the larger following he’d built—a crowd that ranged from the dope-smoking hipsters of the Troubadour to the elderly gents and ladies in the
Kraft Summer Music Hall
audience—would follow him or abandon him as his comedy turned to the nitty-gritty of his life. Would Ed Sullivan, or even Bobby Darin and Henry Jaglom, remain simpatico if his comedy itself were no longer so congenial in spirit? His hurtling journey toward success was turning into a hurtling journey to find himself, and the velocity was becoming severe.

Los Angeles and Las Vegas, 1967

T
he summer of 1967 may have been known, to flower children in San Francisco, as the Summer of Love, but for black Americans it was a long hot summer of reckoning. Ghetto residents looked around and wondered whether, for all the promises of the civil rights movement and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, their lives had really changed. Jobs were still scarce, their schools still substandard, and their streets still patrolled by police forces with the air of an occupying army. The political temperature was rising steadily. “If America don’t come around,” black militant H. Rap Brown threatened at a rally in Cambridge, Maryland, in July, “we should burn it down, brother.” He pointed to a nearby school as a sign of America’s moral dereliction. Later that night, flames enveloped the school and the nearby business district.

More than a hundred cities across America burned, in fact. In Newark and Detroit, blacks tangled with police, National Guardsmen, and paratroopers in battles that left twenty-six and forty-three dead, respectively. By the fall of 1967, the mood of black America had turned urgent and desperate. “Violence is as American as cherry pie,” “These rebellions are but a dress rehearsal for real revolution”: so declaimed Brown, and his cynicism and zeal proved infectious. “On certain corners in American cities,”
Ebony
reported, “black brothers can be heard kidding one another about being tuned out of the revolution if they haven’t yet purchased a Butane gas lighter.” The revolution called for action, even as it was unclear—aside from setting one’s neighborhood on fire—what form that action might take.

Richard Pryor was living in Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, not Watts, but the summer of 1967 was his season of reckoning, too, scissoring his life in half. On the one side was the accommodating, fresh young fellow who was Bobby Darin’s protégé; on the other, a man who felt the pulse of black America in his own racing heartbeat and saw no way to express the truth of his experience without resorting to a healthy dose of obscenities. Richard’s comic act was in transition to something unforeseen, something rooted in the sense of emergency all around him.

W
hile opening, in January 1967, for the upbeat cabaret act of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé at the Sands hotel in Las Vegas, Richard made his first bold move of 1967: he criticized the Vietnam War from the stage. The Sands was no countercultural hole-in-the-wall like the Café Wha?. The clientele of its Copa Room supped on prime sirloin, French peas forestière, and Boula Boula Amontillado, and expected their entertainment to be similarly rich, buttery, and smooth. The crowd booed and hissed Richard; a woman whose son was posted in Vietnam stood up and ripped him to shreds. Richard was shaken by the vehemence of the response—and though Bobby Darin was on hand to console him afterward, he couldn’t hold himself together. His agent, Sandy Gallin, remembered fielding a call from Jack Entratter, the bearish, Mob-connected president of the Sands, who screamed into the phone that Richard was “fucking crazy. He’s right now swinging from chandeliers in the lobby.”

Gallin somehow got Richard on the phone and tried to reason with him. He was playing “the top place in the United States”—did he really want to burn his bridges? On this occasion, Richard took the path of conciliation. He patched himself up and, this time, left Vegas with his reputation intact.

A month later, Richard was whipped by headwinds coming from the exact opposite direction. He stepped into a role on the hour-long TV special
A Time for Laughter: A Look at Negro Humor in America
—and was given a trenchant lesson in the politics of culture, courtesy of
singer Harry Belafonte, the show’s producer, and William Attaway, Belafonte’s creative partner and the show’s main writer. Both Belafonte and Attaway had strong radical credentials, the former as Martin Luther King Jr.’s confidant and the benefactor behind 1961’s Freedom Rides, 1964’s Freedom Summer, and much else; the latter, as a writer with roots in the proletarian literature movement of the 1930s. Their shared frame of mind was defiant. “A whole people has been disenfranchised, subhumanized and put through culturally crippling experiences,” Belafonte argued in an
Ebony
interview. “How did we as a people survive? We have survived through our dignity and integrity and a rich sense of humor.” Attaway laid out the aims for the show in related terms: “Negro humor has often been loud and bitter. In the show we tried to give the reasons behind the bitterness and what has grown out of the bitterness.”

For
A Time for Laughter
, Belafonte and Attaway brought together a comic wrecking crew without precedent on American television. Their cast stretched from Chitlin Circuit veterans like George Kirby, Redd Foxx, Pigmeat Markham, and Moms Mabley to relative newcomers like Dick Gregory and Godfrey Cambridge. Foxx and Mabley, who had seventy-five years of stage experience between them, were making their prime-time TV debuts—proof of the cultural segregation the program sought to challenge. According to Richard, he snuck into the project through the back door. “They wanted Bill Cosby,” he explained sheepishly. “He was contractually committed so they took me. There was a time in my career when it wouldn’t have mattered. For about a year I was Bill Cosby.”

A Time for Laughter
schooled Richard in his own history, his own dilemmas. Narrated by Sidney Poitier, the show suggested that, when it came to blacks, comedy in America had developed along two tracks. One track was the tradition of blackface minstrelsy, here presented as a story of theft and caricature. The program began with the legendary meeting, around 1830, of black stable hand Jim Crow and the white minstrel “Daddy” Rice: it showed Rice emulating Crow’s dance steps, then scoped outward to a gang of white min
strels blacking up with burnt cork, creating a grotesque counterfeit of what they had seen. When Jim Crow protested, “That ain’t fair,” the blackface minstrels responded unnervingly, “Now that ain’t fair, yuk, yuk, yuk.” The echo telegraphed a larger, weighty history of unequal interchanges, in which questions of fairness were laughed away. At the close of the segment, a chorus of blackface performers belted out, “And dat’s how darkies was born”—a shockingly harsh illustration of how white audiences had wrested black images away from actual black people.