Becoming Richard Pryor (48 page)

Fortunately for Richard, he could generate some buzz for himself by touring. He island-hopped across the archipelago of urban America—Detroit, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, San Jose—and performed, night after night, for largely black crowds. He saw hustlers and their women filling the most expensive seats in the front rows: they were the core of his core audience, and especially good at working the word on “the street” on his behalf. He started feeling something new and electric, something he’d tasted with his
Wattstax
experience—black America coming together around his humor:

Richard gave pleasure—the pleasure of shared disenchantment—to those who had expected little from Richard Nixon, more from Huey Newton, and been disappointed by both.

The tour in support of
“That Nigger’s Crazy”
was a runaway success: sold-out concert halls, crowds caught up in “thunderous roars of laughter and applause,” his best-ever reviews in the black press (“the number one comedian in the world”). There was just one
snag. On August 4 he was set to perform, on a rare stop south of the Mason-Dixon Line, for a sell-out audience of twelve thousand in Richmond, Virginia, when the venue’s manager warned DeBlasio that a municipal ordinance prohibited the use of foul language in a city-owned building. DeBlasio passed on the message to Richard, who was not interested in censoring himself. His act was his act, and he had not trimmed swear words from his live show since 1968, the last time he played Vegas. That night at Richmond’s Coliseum, he began with some swipes at Nixon, then was moved by the rowdy spirit of the crowd to his raunchiest and raciest material. He delivered a “blue—no, purple—routine,” what the
Richmond Post-Dispatch
called “porn.”

For whatever reason, the police held back. Richard had his own explanation: “They was going to arrest me during the show, but with 12,000 niggers there enjoying themselves, they had second thoughts.” Richard returned to his hotel room, seemingly having tempted fate and won. At 1:30 in the morning, however, Richmond police turned up at his hotel room and arrested him for “conducting himself in a disorderly manner in public.” A black cop, slapping handcuffs on Richard, said, “Listen, brother, this pains me.” At booking, another black cop told Richard he loved
“That Nigger’s Crazy,”
then sent Richard off to his first stint in a southern jail. Richard spent a long fifteen minutes in lockup while the police processed the five-hundred-dollar bond posted by DeBlasio. At his release, the state scheduled a trial date for August 19.

Then the prosecution did nothing: on August 19 the state attorney’s office announced it was dropping the charges against Richard. The decision was a sign that performers like him now held the upper hand; strictures against obscenity had relaxed since his flameout at the Aladdin and the demise of Lenny Bruce. In a world where
Deep Throat
was a date movie, it was hard to convict a performer for swearing in front of consenting adults. Adults-only entertainment—XXX films, peep shows, massage parlors, underground nightclubs for those of every erotic predisposition—had taken hold in major cities across
America, assisted by a 1973 Supreme Court ruling that gave the local community, not the federal government, the right to determine what counted as obscene. The Richmond Coliseum’s manager had tried to get the old machinery in motion, but even in the Old Dominion, the principle of free speech carried the day.

With the wind at his back, Richard took the opportunity to repay a long-standing debt. On August 23 he journeyed to his hometown of Peoria, carrying with him the Emmy he’d won in May for cowriting his second special with Lily Tomlin. For the first time, his name was up on the marquee of the Shrine Mosque, one of the city’s larger venues. Officially he was there as part of “Richard Pryor Days,” a celebration sponsored by Peoria’s Ashanti Umoja Center. Yet Richard didn’t milk the occasion to grandstand. The afternoon of his show, he presented his Emmy to Juliette Whittaker, his old mentor from the Carver Center, at a ceremony at a preschool that Juliette had established. “It was our award,” Richard explained later. His first experience of a writers’ room had been in Juliette’s upstairs office at Carver.

Juliette accepted the Emmy on behalf of all those black children who’d been involved in Peoria’s youth theater. “This is an inspiration for all of us,” she said. “Not that everyone can win an Emmy, because we know that’s impossible, but this is the impossible dream come true.” Then Richard cut the ribbon on another gift he’d provided for Juliette: a redwood playground set, with a steep slide and fireman’s pole. (Fearless in many ways, Richard was yet afraid of heights and refused to slide down the slide.) He proved eager to provide for the children who came into Juliette’s care. The next year, when Juliette founded a progressive elementary school named the Learning Tree, Richard became its financial angel, providing need-based scholarships for as many as seventy children at a time. Miss Whittaker unlocked the generosity within him; she touched that part of Richard that yearned for the innocence of childhood, an innocence he’d never been allowed.

Richard’s performance at the Shrine Mosque capped the hoopla of “Richard Pryor Days” with an anticlimax. The Ashanti Umoja Cen
ter, an institution born out of the defiance of Black Power but now promoting, in the spirit of the times, a program of self-help through craft making, presented Richard with a large plaque. Richard promised, jokingly, to wear it in good health. Then he performed a set that, at twenty minutes, was breathtakingly short—a replay of his twenty-minute performance at the Carver Center in 1969. He had just slayed audiences from Oakland to Harlem, but at the Shrine Mosque, he checked himself, as if unable to relax into the artist he’d become. Juliette Whittaker and his family sat in the audience, and after a salty routine about the differences between black sex and white sex, Richard worried aloud, “Boy, my grandmother’s gonna beat my ass when I get home.” For a performer wedded to the ideal of flowing in the moment, the internal censor was the least welcome of guests—harder to handle, perhaps, than stodgy enemies like the manager of Richmond’s Coliseum.

Richard would return to Peoria for family occasions—birthdays, funerals, graduations—but he never gave a concert there again.

I
t was just Richard’s luck to have his first hit album released by a record company at the exact moment that its assets were frozen or otherwise tied up. By the end of September,
“That Nigger’s Crazy”
had spent four weeks in the number one R&B slot, and he had some two hundred thousand dollars in unpaid royalties owed him by Stax. His mind-set at the time is suggested by the name of the corporation he founded to pry those monies from Stax’s grip: Pay Back Inc. Stax gave Richard possession of his master tapes in an attempt to settle its debt, but Richard still pressed forward with legal action, suing various Stax-related entities for ninety-five thousand dollars in remaining obligations. One day, seething at home, he pointed a gun at the framed gold record of
“That Nigger’s Crazy”
hanging on his wall, and from that point forward, the record had two holes: the one given to play it on a turntable, the other supplied by the impact of his bullet.

Still, the breakout success of the record created a set of remarkable opportunities for Richard—among them the chance, in November,
to cohost
The
Mike Douglas Show
for a week. A few months before, he had appeared on the show as part of a panel that included Martha Mitchell, the free-talking wife of Nixon’s attorney general, and the wives of three leading U.S. senators. Mike Douglas worried that the mix of guests was “like nitro and glycerin,” but Richard and Martha surprised everyone with their rapport. One of the senators’ wives said, “We live, eat, sleep, and breathe politics,” and Martha chimed in naughtily, “Together?” That was Richard’s cue:

Tickled by such repartee and aware that
“That Nigger’s Crazy”
had raised Richard’s profile considerably, Mike Douglas asked him to come back as a cohost, and gave him the latitude to choose a number of his guests. He drew from his family in Peoria (his grandmother Marie, his uncle Dickie), his teenage idols (Sammy Davis Jr., Harry Belafonte), younger, hip performers (Ben Vereen, Sly Stone, Freddie Prinze), and some fellow partisans in the battle for free speech (gadfly Gore Vidal and actor George C. Scott, fresh from a tussle with the Motion Picture Association of America Ratings Board over his latest film). And so, in the last week of November 1974,
The Mike Douglas Show
became considerably blacker and more unpredictable than usual. Effectively, Richard had been given the chance to curate his life, his world, on national TV.

Several segments offered access to parts of Richard he rarely displayed in public. Juliette Whittaker came on as the week’s surprise first guest and set the tone by reducing him to tears with her mere presence. He choked up when Sammy Davis Jr. praised him as “one of the finest straight actors we have in this business,” shone with pride as his grandmother cooked a soul food meal of greens and fried chicken on set, and took obvious pleasure in playing mentor to Freddie Prinze. On the other side of the emotional spectrum, he threw down his drumsticks in frustration when a jokey performance with Sly Stone went awry. And it wasn’t just Richard who felt loose. In the middle of the week, he sparred on camera with boxer Joe Frazier, whom he had teased earlier at a club date in Philadelphia. Frazier got his revenge by knocking the wind out of Richard with a dead-serious punch to the gut.

In a week of unanticipated interactions, no exchange was more unusual, or more telling, than a tense skirmish between Richard and Milton Berle. Berle was one of the guests whom Richard
hadn’t
suggested. In the 1950s, Berle had been, with his outlandish costumes and his file of more than four million jokes, the king of prime-time TV as host of
Texaco Star Theater
. Now the sixty-seven-year-old comedian was appearing on the show to promote his autobiography, a sobering book in which Uncle Miltie dropped his toothy grin and told of his soul-crushing Jewish mother and his desultory if star-studded sex life. In an age that preferred topicality and candor to vaudevillian japes, he was coming clean—and refurbishing his reputation by revealing the agony-rich inner life he had hidden from view.

From the moment he stepped on
The Mike Douglas Show
, Berle tried to control its tone. He addressed George C. Scott as “Sir Walter Scott” and hailed Richard with “Oh my God, Dick Gregory—haven’t seen you in years.” He joked that, just as Richard had won an Emmy for writing the Lily Tomlin special, he’d won an Emmy for writing a Pinky Tomlin special years ago. But the one-liners fell flat. (Mike Douglas had to remind the audience that Pinky Tomlin was a 1940s crooner.) “Is this the real audience?” Berle asked Douglas in a stage whisper.

When Berle described getting roughed up by two mobsters who hated his act, Douglas pulled Richard into the conversation, and it careered into unforeseen territory:

[
Berle silences Richard by putting his hand over Richard’s mouth, then looks at his hand disdainfully, as if it were dripping with germs, and shakes it
.]

This scuffle—in which Richard tendered a compliment, then hedged it, and Berle played a number of race cards clumsily—was a prelude to what Mike Douglas called “one of the strangest moments that I’ve ever experienced.” Berle started talking about a central tribulation of his life, a love affair that produced a child whom he had never met, and Richard couldn’t abide the seriousness that attended its telling. He failed to stifle a nervous laugh. Berle bristled, “I wish, I wish, Richard, that I could have laughed at that time at your age,” then gathered himself and picked up his story. And again Richard punctured the solemnity. When Berle made a point of refusing to name the woman involved, Richard blurted out, “Eleanor Roosevelt.”