Becoming Richard Pryor (44 page)

D
inged for the lead role in
Blazing Saddles
, Richard was disappointed with the scripts that did come his way. “I don’t want to become Jack Oakie the rest of my life,” he told the
Los Angeles Times
, referring to the rubber-faced actor of the 1930s and ’40s—the epitome of the second or third banana, punching up scenes with a wisecrack or double take. “Always getting those parts, over and over, just to fill in. I don’t want to do that.”

Director Sidney Furie, just coming off
Lady Sings the Blues
, made
Richard the first offer he felt he shouldn’t refuse: a supporting role as a mechanic-turned-assassin in
Hit!
The film reunited much of the cast of the earlier film, including Richard and Billie Dee Williams, and below the line, its cinematographer and editor. Conceptually
Hit!
was a “Lincoln-doctor’s-dog of a movie,” borrowing as many bankable formulas as possible.
The French Connection
,
Mission: Impossible
,
The Dirty Dozen
,
Death Wish
—all were blended together in its story of a federal narcotics agent (Williams) who, after his daughter dies of a heroin overdose, assembles an improbable team to assassinate the nine kingpins of a Marseilles-based drug syndicate. As in
Lady Sings the Blues
, Richard was there to give a comic accent to a film that otherwise threatened to become grim, and was allowed to improvise his dialogue in that vein.

During
Hit!
’s production in late 1972, Richard grew closer to Billie Dee Williams. On December 27, when Billie Dee married his girlfriend, Teruko, at a civil ceremony in Beverly Hills, Richard served as his best man and Patricia as Teruko’s maid of honor. When the justice of the peace asked the group “Which ones of you are getting married?” Richard joked, “Me and Billie.”

Their relationship, like most intimacies in Richard’s life, was vexed. Richard was jealous of Billie, of his leading man looks and laidback, honey-voiced charm. (In his memoir Richard wrote, sparingly, of his frequent costar: “I didn’t know anyone more aware of their image.”) Meanwhile, according to Patricia, Billie craved Richard’s creative understanding of character. During the filming of
Hit!
, he turned often to Richard for advice about how to play a scene; afterward, he called Richard a “genius” to the press. And then there was this bombshell, just planted and waiting to go off: what with all the evenings that the two couples spent together, playing dominoes and poker at each other’s homes, Patricia and Billie were drawn into an affair around the date of Billie’s wedding.

In the meantime, Richard and Patricia traveled together to Marseilles for the shooting of
Hit!
, arriving on New Year’s Eve at an elegant old-world hotel that faced the Mediterranean. An orchestra was
playing in the ballroom; Patricia felt she’d been transported to some version of Versailles. Then, one day, upon returning to their hotel room, she found Richard in bed with a prostitute. Brazen as ever, he insisted Patricia join in the action. When she refused, he beat her for spoiling his party, stripped off her clothes, and threw her naked out of the room. She found a sheet, wrapped herself in it, and, with the help of the hotel staff, settled in a separate room. Then, in a moment of inspiration, she recalled a conversation she’d had, when she and Richard had first moved to LA, with a call girl who’d evened the score with an abusive lover.

After getting her clothes and putting herself together, she went to a hardware store and bought a can of powdered rat poison. She stole into Richard’s hotel room and sprinkled the poison in his socks and underwear; she’d heard that it stung terribly on contact with human skin. She knew Richard would be filming a scene the next day in a wetsuit and relished the idea of him being trapped in tampered underwear, his groin on fire. Then she folded up his clothes with care, concealing her handiwork; gathered her passport and things; and left for the United States. She wasn’t around for the filming of Richard’s scene, but was sure that her plot worked—that Richard felt his nether regions burning up.

Watching Richard’s scenes from
Hit!
now, with an awareness of their backstory, he seems foiled less by Patricia’s sabotage than by the film’s too-stiff sense of itself. A pulp vigilante film with a tabloid sensibility,
Hit!
delivers some familiar pleasures—
New York
’s Judith Crist, one of the film’s few defenders, said that “The secret of the film’s success is professionalism”—but it is also ponderous where it cannot afford to be. In a typical pan,
The Hollywood Reporter
offered that director Sidney Furie had “made the bizarre choice of giving this thin, incredible story the look of a superproduction, thereby exposing its emptiness.” Richard’s character is stranded in the movie’s humorless landscape, a jive non sequitur.

Film critics did pay attention to Richard’s performance, and noted its peculiar angle toward the rest of the film. “Pryor’s humor pierces through his characterization to mock the whole movie with energy
and finesse,” wrote
Time
. The
Hollywood Reporter
praised Richard’s improvising, then chimed: “His work may relieve the tension of watching something so bad, but certainly doesn’t add to the reality.” It was easy to enjoy Richard’s dialogue but hard to admire the craft of the scenes in which his character, Mike Willmer, was placed. Take this exchange between Willmer, who has just speared one drug kingpin with his harpoon, and his teammate, a willowy and whey-faced call girl:

As a whole, Richard’s performance in
Hit!
was oddly split. In its first half, he seemed determined, as he told the Paramount publicist, to break new ground for himself as an actor: on-screen he was serious and reticent, as if husbanding his resources. In the second half, he became a comedian again. He relied on old reflexes—and old routines—to generate some energy for the film and fell victim to a hoary trap, the Jack Oakie syndrome that he was trying to escape.

O
n February 4, 1973, Richard spent three hours getting his hair braided and wrapped in leather so that he might arrive, at the Los Angeles Music Center that evening, resplendent: the cock of the walk in impeccable cornrows. The occasion was the premiere of
Wattstax
, one of the most singular openings in Hollywood history. It was the first premiere held at the cultural acropolis of downtown LA. And in keeping with the ambitions of the film’s producers, it brought together the glamorous and the gritty, the powerful and the out-of-
luck. A range of politicians—including Richard Nixon’s staff assistant and the deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee—consorted with musicians like Isaac Hayes and Rufus Thomas, professional celebrities like Zsa Zsa Gabor, and, more strikingly, a collection of gang members and welfare mothers bused in from Watts. Because the recommended dress on the premiere’s gold-plated invitation was “bizarre,” the spirit of the evening was ghetto fabulous in its early ’70s heyday. Redd Foxx peacocked in an orange-printed polyester knit suit, Raymond St. Jacques in a full-length orange monkey-fur coat, Jim Brown in a floor-length white wool coat over a jumpsuit.
Wattstax
’s producers had turned the Music Center into what the
Los Angeles Times
called “a fashion free-for-all.”

For Richard,
Wattstax
marked a turning point in how he was perceived as a performer. Before
Wattstax
, he’d been largely a player on the fringe: the one black comic in countercultural productions such as
Wild in the Streets
or
Dynamite Chicken
, the kooky cameo player, the offbeat comic. After
Wattstax
, he had a new platform and a new authority—as an expert on the black “street.” For all Richard’s showbiz ambitions, it wasn’t a larger role he had actively sought. “I’m not equipped politically to be a spokesman for an organization or a group,” he said while promoting
Wattstax
. “I don’t like giving my mind up. I don’t like anybody in the back of my funnel closing off the sunshine. No, I always felt I was a revolution just by doing and speaking the way I speak and saying what I think and living my life the way I live it.” And yet here he was in
Wattstax
, his private revolution setting the barometer for everyone else in the film. When the next Watts Summer Festival rolled around, “that crazy nigger” was asked to serve as grand marshal of its parade. And when Councilman Tom Bradley, on a trajectory to become LA’s first black mayor, held a fund-raiser for his campaign, Richard was chosen to headline it. He was less radioactive than he’d been for years.

For film critics nationwide, Richard’s
Wattstax
monologues were something of a revelation: few had heard
‘Craps’ (After Hours)
or seen Richard perform after he’d dropped off the nightclub and talk-show circuit in 1970, and so his new act seemed to come out of nowhere. To them, Richard was “wickedly funny” (
Newsweek
), or “breathtakingly irreverent and ironic” (
Los Angeles Times
), or “the most talented black comedian to emerge since Bill Cosby” (
Tulsa World
). Even those less captivated by
Wattstax
singled Richard out for praise. The
Boston Herald-American
judged that “Without Pryor’s wise rudder,
Wattstax
would probably be a ship lost at sea”: the film needed his complex stance to the world, “composed of equal amounts of self-love, self-hate and bemused irony.” The
Seattle Daily Times
went so far as to suggest that “Perhaps Pryor should have directed ‘Wattstax.’ It needs more of his irreverent involvement.” According to many, he had carried the film.

Up and coming: Pryor shaking hands with soon-to-be-elected LA mayor Tom Bradley at
Wattstax
’s premiere. (Courtesy of the
Los Angeles Daily Journal
)

A bit abashedly, Richard plugged
Wattstax
with interviews in the press and on TV programs such as
Soul Train
and
Black Omnibus
, but despite his efforts, the film underperformed at the box office. Its producers had hyped it as an artistic and civic landmark, hosting premieres not just across the country and in London, but also at the United Nations (for African dignitaries) and in Washington, DC (for Nixon’s White House and members of Congress). They had plugged it, in ads, with the tag line “You Can’t Judge a Movie by Its Color,” and tried to entice white viewers with the explicit promise that it would “be enjoyed by
all
movie-goers.” Still, the white audience for the film didn’t show.

In the final promotional push, the producers looked to a
Wattstax
screening at the Cannes Film Festival to generate some buzz. So Richard journeyed, along with his manager and the film’s producers and director, to the Côte d’Azur.

It was a magical French interlude, the opposite of his troubled time in Marseilles the previous winter. The sun gleamed off the Mediterranean; the roulette wheels spun; and
Wattstax
coproducer David Wolper opened his deep pockets so that the entourage could luxuriate in the romance of Cannes. They stayed at the sumptuous Hotel Carlton, and at a certain point Wolper asked Richard if he wouldn’t mind hanging on a few extra days so as to meet with a group of African directors. “We’ll move you to one of the bungalows,” said Wolper matter-of-factly. Richard and Ron DeBlasio were led to their new bungalow suite and started laughing at their absurdly good fortune. The sea was at their eye level; they were in the best room of the best hotel, they felt, in all of France.

With DeBlasio and his
Wattstax
compatriots, Richard relaxed and took in the Cannes parade. Ladies of the night were out in full daylight; aspiring starlets strolled the Croisette promenade in see-through swimsuits. Richard was garrulous and open. When, at the hotel bar, a sad-faced girl asked him if he wanted to buy a stuffed toy, he didn’t brush her off, but gave her double the price.

It was a time to be proudly and playfully black. Richard talked with African filmmakers about how racism was not limited to the American South; he exulted at seeing writer James Baldwin. He gave a press conference that, according to the
Los Angeles Times
, was “one of the uproarious delights of the festival.”