Becoming Richard Pryor (30 page)

When he traveled with Shelley to Peoria—their second funeral there in less than a year—the extended family was gathered in mourning at 1319 Millman. Richard’s aunt Maxine, known for her warmth, approached Richard and caustically summed up her brother Buck: “Your father fucked everything. Just be glad he didn’t fuck you.”

“Tender thought,” Richard wrote in his memoir, dripping sarcasm. But Maxine’s barb might have been the most direct acknowledgment Richard ever received of how dangerous his father was, and how the abuse he took from Buck was a mere fraction of the violence Buck meted out to others over his lifetime. Richard never appears to have discovered that his father molested his sister. But it seems Maxine knew, at the least, what her brother was capable of.

In Peoria it fell to Richard, the prodigal son returned, to make the funeral preparations and pay for them. He went to the funeral home and picked out an average-looking casket, then was accused by his family of being cheap—What kind of casket is that? Did you try to save money? Didn’t they have anything fancier?—when his choice was made public. “It was as if they were beating me up because they
didn’t know what else to do,” Richard speculated. So it had been with his family when Buck was alive; so it was now that he was dead. Richard was the whipping boy who, when he tried to make good, just set himself up for another thrashing.

Buck’s funeral rites were curious, if fitting for a man of his character. Since Buck had never been a churchgoing man, much less a Catholic, he could not be given a church service at St. Patrick’s Church like his wife, Ann. And since he had received a Section 8 discharge from the army, he could not be honored with a veteran’s burial. Phone calls were made, and a compromise was found: the funeral would be held in the gymnasium attached to St. Patrick’s parochial school.

Six days after Buck’s death, his open casket was placed at center court at 10:00 a.m. The bleachers were pulled in to accommodate the hundred people who came to pay their respects, no small number of whom were prostitutes. Richard later claimed on
The Tonight Show
that there was a basketball team practicing layups on the side of the gym during the service—a blatant exaggeration. But as in much of his comedy, the exaggeration magnified the truth as much as it distorted it. Buck was a man who held nothing sacred, and even his funeral was profane to the core.

Richard himself felt that his father wasn’t quite dead, couldn’t be dead. When he visited the casket for the last time, he expected his father to wink at him. Instead, he saw Buck laid out in his finest suit, motionless. He bent down and stashed a little money in Buck’s pocket, “just in case there [was] any action up there.” Money was what people everywhere seemed to appreciate, and what Richard had. After the priest who had arranged the gymnasium service concluded the burial, Richard slipped him a single five-hundred-dollar bill, the most stunning honorarium of the priest’s forty-five-year career.

The burial put the body of Buck in the ground, but it couldn’t remove Buck from Richard’s head, where he was more alive than ever, more approachable and engaging than ever. When Richard was a child, Buck had been a source of terror. When he shared a roof with Buck as a young adult, there had been little back-and-forth, just exchanges punctuated by “yes, sir” and “no, sir.” But now that Buck
was dead, Richard found that “the conversation flowed” and that he “couldn’t stop talking to him.” Buck had transitioned fully into the spirit realm of Richard’s imagination, where, like all Richard’s characters, he spoke freely, without a muzzle, and traveled freely, without a leash. He wouldn’t go away.

Los Angeles, 1968–1969

I
n “Super Nigger,” one of his favorite routines from 1968, Richard gave a hint of the double life that he started leading after his father’s death:

On its surface, the routine was another one of Richard’s media spoofs, like his snoozer of a talk show or his war movie where Marines attack a beachhead screaming, “Apple pie!” and “Mother!” In this satire of the whiteness of superhero comics, the reporter Clark Kent was demoted to the janitor Clark Washington, shuffling in the time-honored manner of a blackface minstrel; Superman was demoted to Super Nigger, a superhero at first mistaken for the “crow” in “Jim Crow.” In the routine’s major twist, Richard’s superhero was both less and more than the Man of Steel—less community-minded and more interesting. He fought not to advance “truth justice, and the American way” but to protect the interests of number one; the fire might destroy half of Metropolis and wouldn’t bother him a bit if it didn’t threaten his private cache of drugs. Super Nigger was a trickster in the tradition of Brer Rabbit, a creature of wit and appetite, comically and guiltlessly amoral.

Below the surface, Richard’s routine was a parable about the trap he felt himself falling into—and the freedom he craved. The character of Clark Washington stood for the outer life that Richard, like so many working-class black men, had assumed as his fate. (Richard had even mopped the floors of a strip club as a teenager.) For all Richard’s success, he felt that he was still wearing a mask of mild-mannered subservience, still cleaning up someone else’s mess. What better evidence than the film and TV roles that were coming his way? The bit player supporting someone else’s star production, that was Richard—the one black comedian in a variety show’s stable of performers (
Kraft Summer Music Hall
), the one black musician in a rock star’s entourage (
Wild in the Streets
), the one black henchman in an arch villain’s crew (
The Wild, Wild West
). It didn’t help that these productions were too cornpone or blinkered to connect with his artistic imagination. No wonder Clark Washington wanted to quit his day job.

Super Nigger, meanwhile, represented Richard’s hidden self, the all-powerful black trickster, as marvelous as Captain Marvel and as disreputable as the
N
-word itself. “Super Nigger” was what Richard called himself when he snorted cocaine and became the life of the party. It was also what he imagined himself becoming at his best moments as an artist: the comedian who sucker-punched America in the gut when it expected to be tickled in the ribs. He yearned not just to be a star but to be like no star ever before; not just to win over Hollywood but to overturn its conventions.

There were a number of signs, heading into 1969, that Richard was growing weary of the Clark Washington role. In April 1968 there was his blunt and bitter admonition, to those assembled at the Hollywood Bowl for the Martin Luther King Jr. benefit, that “money don’t mean shit.” The subsequent assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the escalating Vietnam War, the police riot in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention in the summer—all these fed, for Richard as for many others, a deepening pessimism about the American experiment. In November 1968, on a Canadian talk show as part of his first album’s promo tour, he refused to engage in niceties when the conversation turned to American politics. Asked if he dreaded the possibility of segregationist George Wallace becoming president, Richard shrugged and said, “Wallace is president. Wallace has always been president.”

When the talk focused on racial problems in Mississippi, Richard raised his finger and offered to draw his own personal outline of the shape of Mississippi. It was the shape of the continental United States. “The United States won’t be the United States much longer,” he prophesied. Democracy had been hollowed out. Even whites were becoming “slaves, just like the black man. Chicago proved that. Chicago proved the people don’t matter.” But wasn’t he, the interviewer probed, an example of the opportunities open to blacks in America? “Sure, I made it big as a comic,” Richard replied, “but I couldn’t as a brain surgeon. You can make it if you think white, but not if you think black.”

Faced with the stark choice, in his mind, between “thinking white” and “thinking black,” Richard explored both options over the course of 1969 and 1970. He pursued two careers at once, a decision that split his personality in two. On the one hand, he kept taking on acting roles in middle-of-the-road entertainment—ABC Movies of the Week,
The Partridge Family
—even though he was uneasy with the compromises entailed. On the other hand, he committed himself to the cultural underground. He lent his talent to causes such as the Sky River Rock Festival, an outdoor music event that was held on an organic raspberry farm outside Seattle and served as the blueprint for all the let’s-get-naked-and-dance festivals to come. He canceled contracts with clubs that asked him to avoid obscenities and performed at smaller clubs to largely black audiences. And he made a movie himself, called
Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales
, in which the black revolution and the sexual revolution were supposed to meet and strike up sparks. Hoping to become Super Nigger and superstar, he worked as the film’s screenwriter, producer, director, and lead actor, and spent more than a year on this visionary if shambolic project.

A few weeks in late 1968 were typical of Richard’s mixed itinerary. Just after Thanksgiving, he chatted with Johnny Carson on
The Tonight Show
, sharing the guest slots with comedienne Lucille Ball and then-California governor Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy. Two weeks later, the counterculture had its turn: Richard headlined a benefit in Long Beach for the Los Angeles chapter of the Diggers Creative Society, an anarchist group that aimed to usher in a world beyond capitalism and the profit motive, and that was known for staging happenings that blended free theater, free food, and free love.

A week later, it was Squaresville again. He traveled to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, for
Operation: Entertainment
, a patriotic variety show taped in front of a live army audience. Perhaps it was the dissonance of performing for troops about to be shipped out for a war he didn’t support, or maybe it was the strangeness of returning to the army base where, a decade earlier, he had gone through basic training, but almost as soon as he arrived, Richard snapped. He demanded to see the commanding officer. His room was not satisfactory. Richard’s agent, Sandy Gallin, received a panicked call from the show: Richard was threatening to quit. But later, when the cameras were rolling, Richard assumed the stage, dusted off his zany “Kill Class” routine, with its wooden-eared corporal barking orders and taking a kick to his groin—and performed it with total conviction. He acted as if the new Richard, the Richard who thought American democracy a fraud, were a figment of someone else’s imagination.

I
n the drama of his double life, it was the trickster who offered the greater fantasy of power and deeper experience of intoxication, and 1969 and 1970 were the years in which Richard lost himself in that alter ego, whose amorality allowed for nastiness as well as artistic derring-do. The nasty side came out, behind the scenes, in Richard’s dealings with his manager, Bobby Roberts. Richard begrudged Roberts for diluting the force of his comedy: he said he wished people could play his first album’s
cover
rather than the album itself. He grew frustrated with the poor sales of the album, which didn’t even crack the Top 100, and he blamed Roberts, who was co-owner of the album’s imprint on Reprise, for this, too. Meanwhile, Richard’s lifestyle, with his cocaine habit siphoning off his money, made him hungry to get paid.

In a conversation with the album’s producer, Robert Marchese, in Laurel Canyon, Richard wondered aloud: why, if he had signed a two-album, fifty-thousand-dollar contract, had he gotten so little money up front? Marchese explained that the amount did not include the expenses that Reprise deducted for the production of the first album, and that Reprise was still holding on to a good deal of the total amount, waiting to see how much the second album cost.

“What am I going to do about this?” Richard asked.

Marchese answered that Howlin’ Wolf, “the greatest blues singer ever,” made sure to bring his gun into his negotiations with the Chess brothers, who ran his record label. And he usually got his money.

Richard apparently proceeded to follow the lead of Howlin’ Wolf, as he understood it. At a meeting with Bobby Roberts over the first album’s royalties in Sandy Gallin’s office, Richard pulled out a gun and, without too much of an explanation, pistol-whipped his manager. It’s unknown if Richard walked away with money as a result, but other results were more clear cut. Reprise Records would not record a second album, and Richard and Bobby Roberts were no longer a team. For a while afterward, the industry deemed Richard literally unmanageable. Sandy Gallin tried to pick up the slack as best he could, but Richard’s nightclub work took a noticeable dive in frequency.

Richard’s falling-out with Roberts was an index of a broader change in his life. He was leaving Hollywood and hunkering down in a much blacker world, a world in which his new friend Paul Mooney, a fellow comic, was both his ballast and shadow partner. The two had met, about a year before, at a crowded party at Mooney’s bungalow on Sunset Boulevard. Without so much as an introduction, Richard looked at the woman who was with Mooney, considered the woman on his own arm, and then proposed, “Let’s all get in bed and have a freak thing!” (The “free love” ethos of Laurel Canyon seemed to have rubbed off on him.) The orgy never materialized: Mooney’s “woman” was in fact his half-sister. But the misfire set the terms for the friendship that followed. From the get-go, Mooney saw Richard as uninhibited and “without guile”—“selfish with the innocence of a four-year-old,” he recalled, always living in “Richard Pryor’s Eternal Present.”