Becoming Richard Pryor (46 page)

What had so inflamed the network’s executives? A critic praised
Lily
, later, as “probably the most radical departure from television and comedic conventions we will see on the tube this season,” and “Juke and Opal” was Exhibit A for how wayward the special became, how much it purposefully ran off the rails. “Everybody kept saying it wasn’t funny, but we wanted to do little poems,” said Jane Wagner.

A radical departure from TV conventions: Lily Tomlin as Opal, Richard Pryor as Juke. (Courtesy of the author)

As a “little poem,” the sketch doesn’t explain, much less overexplain, its two main characters. The nature of Juke and Opal’s relationship is subtly enigmatic, starting with the question of Opal’s racial identity: Lily deliberately left Opal’s race open-ended, disguising her hair behind a scarf and giving her a clipped accent that could be either poor white or poor black. (Some viewers thought Opal mixed-race or black; others assumed she was white.) The two might be former lovers, or prospective lovers. They’re reaching, albeit gingerly, toward some new intimacy: Juke plays Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” on Opal’s jukebox, and after she turns down his invitation to dance, she hangs back behind the counter, looking at him slyly and dancing with herself. Both of them have a generally wounded look to them, but we can’t tell whether they’ve been wounded by one another or simply the world. “The world” arrives at Opal’s diner in the form of two young social workers, a pair of well-meaning types who would never enter her Silver Spoon Café for the food. Here they come armed with a community questionnaire. As soon as they arrive, an invisible thread snaps; the dancing stops; “Let’s Stay Together” fades out. We feel the fragility of what Juke and Opal have, and the value of Opal’s diner as a haven for irregulars, a warm spot in a cold city.

Opal has a wry working-class knowingness to her. When one of the social workers, defending himself, says about his questionnaire, “Try to understand—we don’t make up these questions,” she counters, “Try to understand—we do make up these answers.” Yet Opal also looks beyond her world. Her greasy spoon is named, with who knows how much irony, “Opal’s Silver Spoon Café.” The sketch begins and ends with a similarly free-floating juxtaposition: the hash slinger Opal watching, on her TV, a Julia Child–like chef instruct viewers on how to prepare a cold lobster salad and bananas flambé.

As Juke, Richard was at his best as an actor. He modulated the
junkie character he’d performed in his stand-up, preserving that character’s vulnerability but making him more multifaceted. With the social workers, Juke is acerbic; he steals the questionnaire out of their hands and puts them on the defensive with improvised questions like “Who’s Pigmeat Markham’s mama?” With Opal, he’s undefended, transparently working through his conflicting needs. He wants both her affection and the heroin he craves, and for most of the sketch, he’s willing to leverage the former for the latter, angling to borrow ten dollars from her so he can get high.

By the end, though, a gear has shifted in Juke’s mind; he has started to see himself through Opal’s watchful and loving eyes. He gives her back the ten dollars and makes a modest promise: that he’ll try to stay clean. The end of the sketch is filled with similar small but meaningful gestures; nothing is italicized for our benefit. Juke leans in, and the two kiss briefly, their faces obscured by the camera angle. Then, exiting the diner and heading into a swirl of cold wind outside, Juke leaves her musing on better times to come: “I’ll think about you. Be glad when it’s spring, flower.”

All told, “Juke and Opal” was closer to the best stage drama than the usual sketch comedy, and CBS hoped to have none of it. A CBS executive, on seeing the special as a whole, called it a “$360,000 jerk off.” “Juke and Opal” in particular was objectionable in so many ways: it was too long, it wasn’t funny, and to top it off, it smuggled in a kiss between a black actor and a white actress. Lily negotiated like Talleyrand to preserve the sketch. She offered to can “War Games” if she could keep “Juke and Opal,” and the network agreed to this lesser of two evils—under the condition that she sweeten the sketch with a laugh track (so that viewers would think it was, indeed, funny) and move it to the end of the show (where it wouldn’t spoil the ratings). Lily took the deal.

Lily
premiered, with “Juke and Opal” intact, on November 3, 1973. To CBS’s chagrin, it attracted few viewers, ranking fifty-first out of sixty-six shows on prime time that week. Yet those in the know noticed. Six months later,
Lily
picked up Emmy Awards for
best comedy-variety special and for the best writing on a comedy-variety special. A year after that,
Lily
writer Lorne Michaels used Lily’s specials as a model for his own
Saturday Night Live
, inspired by how she threw together “political stuff and mood pieces and moments of truth.”

It was probably no coincidence that Richard and Lily’s two sketches together revolved around courtships that were bold but hazy: their own relationship had the same tenor. For Richard, Lily was one of his few unrequited adult crushes. “I love Lily,” he told
Rolling Stone
in 1974, then confessed:

Witnessing Lily’s creativity was “sensual” for Richard. “[T]he deeper and funnier it got,” he wrote of their collaboration, “the more I wanted to get in her pants.” Fortunately, one might say, Lily didn’t return those particular affections. Though instantly seduced by Richard as a performer, she was never seduced by him as a man: by 1973 she had been committed to Jane Wagner for several years and would remain so. As a consequence, Richard and Lily had a less troubled connection, uninflected by the possessiveness that Richard felt toward the other women in his life.

The only strains in their relationship, in fact, came when Lily was acting not as an artist onstage but rather as a feminist in conversation, questioning the prerogatives of men. When at one point Richard took her to an after-hours joint, she engaged some working girls with a rap about how they should consider keeping their earnings for themselves. Richard hustled her out, intuiting that she was taking them, and herself, to a dangerous place. And when she trespassed on Richard’s own prerogatives, even his darling Lily wasn’t granted a free pass. At a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard once, she started
talking feminism with Patricia. Richard became so incensed that he turned their table over, letting the dishes clatter to the floor, and stormed out of the restaurant.

For Richard, there was life onstage and life off-, and the onstage life was where he had the license to check his ego and admit his vulnerabilities. Collaborators like Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner offered him the equivalent of an airtight alibi: with them he could flow into characters and explore his better self, with no worries of getting caught. It was no easy thing to bridge the worlds of on- and offstage. Even Lily, who had a more integrated sense of herself than Richard, acknowledged the difficulty of being at home with her variousness. When an interviewer asked her how she felt when she saw herself on TV, she shot back a riddle of her own: “What does a chameleon see when it looks at itself in the mirror?”

R
ichard’s collaboration with Lily was a shaft of light in an otherwise dim time for his career. In 1972 he had worked on six films; after
Hit!
wrapped in February 1973, he worked on none for nine months, and the only role he could anticipate was a small, low-paid cameo in Sidney Poitier’s
Uptown Saturday Night
. The stalling of his film career puzzled him. “I’ve been trying to be a booty star,” he said in October 1973. “I was in about three movies and thought, ‘Shit, you get one movie, you get a whole bunch of motherfuckin’ movies’. . . . I ain’t had a motherfucker call me about nothin’.” Richard had done more, too, than simply wait for the phone to ring. Fresh off his work on
Blazing Saddles
, he wrote and tried to peddle
The Black Stranger
, a revisionist Western wherein the odd team of a voodoo woman and a black gunfighter drive out a villain who, suspiciously, acts a whole lot like John Wayne. The
Los Angeles Times
announced that Richard was setting up a production deal; none materialized publicly.

It was out of desperation that Richard came back to stand-up comedy. “I was starving to death,” he said, explaining why he’d returned to the stage after years of avoiding it. “Kiss my ass, Jack! I have to get back to work.” His manager Ron DeBlasio had a more sanguine view
of Richard’s situation: he saw Richard as a breakout performer and, given the recognition of his film and TV work, thought he should now play concerts, not club dates. DeBlasio booked Richard for a midnight concert at Washington, DC’s Kennedy Center. It was an intense scale-up in capacity, from a DC club like the Cellar Door (220 seats) to the Kennedy Center’s stately Concert Hall (2,465 seats). Richard wondered if he was ready.

As preparation for the Kennedy Center show, Richard played a series of woodshedding dates at LA’s Comedy Store in October 1973, and you can hear his nerves and rustiness as a performer on the recording of his first show there. He opened with “Wino and Junkie,” a routine that had customarily been his closer, and raced through it at a jumped-up clip. Then, for apparently the first time, he welcomed the audience with what became his signature greeting during his heyday: “Hope I’m funny . . . ’cause [this] audience has been known to kick a little ass.” Later, perhaps, this line became a mere reflex, but at this point he truly feared having to face the music. His new routines were untested or unelaborated, his old routines polished past the point of feeling fresh to him. Half an hour into the show, he made another unprecedented gesture: he asked the audience for requests. “Whoah, horsey,” a line from “Rumpelstiltskin,” his oldest and tamest of routines, bounced back at him—reminding him why he never asked for requests. They lashed him to an older version of himself, one he’d long tried to outrun.

Richard barely made it to DC for his Kennedy Center gig, delaying his trip to the LA airport to the last possible minute. In the run-up to the show, he was “a nervous wreck,” according to DeBlasio. He couldn’t eat; he was irritable; he turned away from conversations or joined them to deliver insults. Backstage at the Kennedy Center, though, he came upon some head-turning news: his midnight concert was a sellout. In DC’s black community—and especially among those for whom the witching hour marked just the start of their Saturday night—the name “Richard Pryor” was golden.

Onstage, Richard beheld an almost exclusively black audience packing the lower level, box seats, and two balconies, and he kicked
into gear. He rode the crests of laughter, loosely switching between his established routines and his riffs on news of the day, like the energy crisis: “Ain’t gonna affect us, ’cause I don’t know no nigger buys more than $2 worth of gas anyway.” The
Washington Post
wrote that he kept the audience “guffawing in the aisles,” and couldn’t help observing that “his scatological, outrageously lewd humor struck an interesting note of contrast in the Center’s sedate Concert Hall.” Never before, it’s fair to say, had a comic speculated frankly on a president’s sexual prowess (or lack thereof) from its stage.

The tide was turning for Richard. Shortly after the concert, DeBlasio fielded a phone call from Murray Swartz of Queen Booking, possibly the top agency representing black talent and certainly the top black-owned agency. After drifting nearly four years without an agent, Richard signed with Queen, and found himself in the illustrious company of Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Sammy Davis Jr., and Gladys Knight and the Pips. Soon he was routinely selling out large venues like New York’s Lincoln Center and playing still-bigger arenas like the Oakland Coliseum. But it wasn’t simply Queen’s muscle that opened doors: Richard’s breakthrough as a stand-up was powered by a live show that slayed audiences and by a little album that forever altered the DNA of American comedy.

“T
hat Nigger’s Crazy”
was recorded in February 1974 at a San Francisco nightclub operated by
Soul Train
host Don Cornelius, and in front of an audience that was 90 percent black. Richard’s instructions to DeBlasio, who was in charge of producing the record, were minimal but insistent: “Remember black people.” After his experience with his first album, he wouldn’t allow his material to be cherry-picked for the so-called mainstream. Richard himself came up with the album’s title (sometimes forcibly abbreviated in ads as
“That N—— Crazy”
) and with the album’s cover, on which his face opens up in a grin that falls halfway between impish and diabolical. Shamelessness was his starting point and his forte.

“That Nigger’s Crazy”
was an Everlasting Gobstopper of an album, changing flavors the more one savored it. On the first pass, it simply floored contemporary listeners with its audacity. When Richard confessed how he prayed to God after a too-quick ejaculation (“Lord, don’t let her know . . . just let it stay heavy if not hard”); when he imitated a cop in naked love with his power (“Put your hands up, take your pants down and spread your cheeks!”); or when, in the character of the swaggering Oilwell, he taunted a cop (“Boy, you hit me with that stick, I’m gonna bite your dick!”), he was uttering the unutterable. As the crazy nigger, he gave voice to repressed anxieties, affronts, wishes—things too painful to remember or too dangerous to dwell upon.