Becoming Richard Pryor (49 page)

The audience tittered at the absurd suggestion; the hostilities between the two comics escalated. Berle oozed a sense of his own moral superiority, but somehow he couldn’t come out on top:

The audience roared at Richard’s final obscenity. Berle threw up his hands, pivoted toward Douglas, and shut Richard out of the rest of the conversation. Given that the talk show had lost its usual bearings, there was no more need for the schmoozy civility that was its default setting.

The dustup between the two comedians was the talk of the comedy circuit for weeks after. Older comedians thought Berle had put Richard in his place, while younger comedians thought Richard had held his ground. Inadvertently, as they jousted for position on
Mike Douglas
, the two comedians had revealed the contours of the generation gap in American comedy.

Berle represented a generation of largely Jewish comics who,
rooted in vaudeville, catered to mainstream audiences with routines that were wacky and physically witty but not topical or edgy. He kept asking Richard why he’d laughed because the older comedian seemed to know in advance the right answer and was angling for a confession: Richard was ill-mannered, inconsiderate. There could be nothing funny about fathering an illegitimate son, and so the laughter had to be a marker of insensitivity and disrespect—an up-and-coming comedian thinking he had the right to steal Berle’s “spots.” Deepening the indignity from Berle’s point of view, Richard was stealing those spots with obscenities like
ass
, the cheapest of comic shortcuts. A decade earlier, Berle had counseled Lenny Bruce to save his act by editing out the dirty words.

For Richard, his laughter was a genuine enigma. Just as he struggled to explain the laughter at his stand-up shows, where the audience howled when he talked about being beaten by his father, strip-searched in jail, or low-rated sexually by his woman, so he struggled to explain why he laughed on
Mike Douglas
. Pressed by Berle to defend himself, he responded by searching the ceiling: he was laughing at his own “craziness” and at “the insanity of all this,” the cosmic machinations that had put him on a talk show with Uncle Milty as he bared his soul on national TV. He certainly wasn’t laughing for the reason Berle posited—“because it never happened to you.” Berle might always have cordoned off his personal experience in the making of his comedy, but Richard’s method was exactly the opposite: post-Aladdin, he had tunneled into his experience, again and again, rescuing laughter from what others might see as mere affliction. Unlike Berle, he wouldn’t need to wait until he was sixty-seven to speak his personal truth.

The rest of the week on
Mike Douglas
was a great vindication for Richard. He had long considered himself an outsider to mainstream America: the boy born to brothels, the black artist in white Hollywood. Now he was enjoying pride of place on national TV, able to invite friends and family to join him at the welcome table. In particular he wanted everyone to see his beloved grandmother Marie through the lens of his love—as a savvy woman of the world,
tough and self-possessed and admirable. When Marie appeared on
Mike Douglas
on Richard’s final day as cohost, she rose to the challenge and then some, acting as if it were the most natural thing to regale the studio audience with tales of Richard’s delinquency, or to guide Mike Douglas through the ins and outs of soul food cooking. She wore muted colors, a mink stole that Richard had given her, and a sly, guarded smile that suggested she had gone toe to toe with Life and had never backed down. Sammy Davis Jr., slated to perform after her, said it was “unbelievable” how she commanded the stage: “There ain’t no sense in nobody going on. The show belongs to her.” Two years later, when talking with an interviewer about how much his family mattered to him, Richard said, “Having my grandmother with me on
The Mike Douglas Show
was the greatest moment in my life.”

At the end of his week as cohost, Richard was set to turn thirty-four, and his agent, Murray Swartz, threw together a birthday party for him at his home in Philadelphia, where
Mike Douglas
was taped. Richard’s grandmother and uncle Dickie attended, along with fellow
Mike Douglas
guests like Sammy Davis Jr. and pianist-composer Michel Legrand.

Legrand sat in with a jazz trio that Swartz had hired for the party, and it was as if Richard were swept back to the jazz clubs in Peoria where, a decade earlier, he had begun his career as an entertainer and sometimes scatted to Clark Terry’s “Mumbles,” a comic tune and one of Richard’s favorites. At the party, in front of an audience that embraced both his family and his showbiz accomplices, he started scatting in full seriousness and didn’t stop. For five minutes, he was part of the ensemble, winging the chord changes and riding them, reaching for something beyond himself. The party carried on until close to daybreak.

N
ow that he was a bona fide sensation, Richard left behind his modest bungalow on the grounds of Yamashiro and moved, with Patricia, to a larger home above the Sunset Strip with a swimming
pool, billiards room, and a gym outfitted with a punching bag. In his bedroom, he placed a large aquarium in which saltwater fish glided serenely back and forth. On his front door he posted a sign that began on a decorous note: “To avoid ill feeling and/or unpleasantness, please be aware that
uninvited guests
are not welcome at any time, whatsoever. To avoid rejection, please do not take the liberty of ‘dropping by.’ Sincerely and Respectfully, Occupant.” Then an addendum: “Yeah, nigger—this means you.”

The new home did not arrest the tailspin of Richard and Patricia’s relationship, just gave it a new, smarter setting. In the middle of one dinner party with Sammy Davis Jr. and his wife, Altovise, Richard punched Patricia twice, the first time for laughing at apparently the wrong joke, the second for asking why he had hit her. (The Davises sent Patricia a bouquet of two dozen purple roses and a card that read, “You deserve a purple heart for being able to deal with the nigger we love so much.”) It was hard, too, for her to avoid the spectacle of Richard’s infidelities. After she organized swimming lessons for his children Elizabeth and Rain, she discovered that he was dallying with the swimming instructor in the pool house. Another afternoon, she stumbled upon him in bed with a man, a
Jet
editor. The scene did not provide an occasion for Richard to reflect upon the state of their relationship or the depth of his sexual need. Furious, he accused Patricia of “fuck[ing] up my fun” and beat her for the intrusion.

In these difficult last days of their relationship, Richard’s cruelty to Patricia was sharpened by his theatrical imagination. While in a low mood, he would hibernate in their bedroom, alone with his saltwater fish and his guns. Patricia would bring him his meals on a tray, knowing that if she incurred his displeasure, for whatever reason—the wrong food, the wrong time—he might throw the tray at her. One afternoon she heard a couple of gunshots and ran to the bedroom, fearing the worst. The drapes were drawn, the room shrouded in darkness, the floor covered by water. The glass in the aquarium had shattered, leaving the fish to wriggle
helplessly on the floor. Richard was lying in bed, his face blood red, his body limp.

Patricia gasped, then did a double take. When she looked more closely, she saw that Richard had merely slathered himself with ketchup. The gunshots were a ruse, a test of her love and loyalty: he wanted to catch her expression at the moment she thought she’d lost him. He was unharmed, though the same couldn’t be said of his fish or the hardwood floors, which buckled after absorbing an aquarium’s worth of saltwater, and had to be replaced.

If the women in Richard’s life saw the worst of his vindictiveness, Patricia perhaps saw the worst of the worst. In their final fight as lovers, he ripped her nightgown from her body and her jewelry from her ear, yelling, “Bitch, I bought this,” then threw her, bleeding and naked, out the front door. Desperate for clothes, Patricia climbed the fence of their home and stole into the pool house, where she put on a bathing suit and terrycloth robe, then hoisted herself back over the fence and walked down to Sunset Boulevard, a refugee dressed as if for a pool party. A while later, she called Richard to see if she could pick up her clothes; he surprised her by saying yes. When she arrived at the door, a sickening smell rose up at her. Her floor-length sable coat—the gift Richard had tendered in apology in Sausalito—was burning in the fireplace. Her other clothes had been slashed with scissors.

Richard’s dark mood encroached on his relationship with his manager Ron DeBlasio, too. DeBlasio had recently put to bed the messy business with Stax and had negotiated a generous deal (including a fifty-thousand-dollar advance) with Warner Bros. for the rights to
“That Nigger’s Crazy.”
As late as March 1975, the bond between Richard and his manager had seemed solid: when DeBlasio informed Richard that
“That Nigger’s Crazy”
had won the Grammy, the two erupted into giddy laughter and Richard said, significantly, “We did it.” But during Richard’s depressive episodes, DeBlasio’s sanguine attitude to his career rang hollow. When DeBlasio called him up with “three great things” to “jump him out” of his depression, Richard
shot back, “Is that all you got?” and hung up the phone. He felt damaged by his tax troubles and remarked, to the press, that he had yet to find his financial footing: “My house is rented and I don’t have a whole lot of money in the bank. Let me put it this way. I ain’t rich enough to worry about nobody kidnapping my kids hoping for some big ransom.”

Their relationship unraveled in a single conversation. Freddie Prinze, then breaking out as the star of TV’s
Chico and the Man
, had courted DeBlasio as his own manager, and Richard felt DeBlasio’s attentions wandering to the younger actor-comic. DeBlasio came to the conversation with a sense of blamelessness: Richard had personally introduced him to Prinze and had agreed to his taking on Prinze as his client. And Prinze was asking DeBlasio to manage his career because he considered Richard “my best friend in the business” and admired what DeBlasio had done for him.

“Our relationship has changed,” Richard told DeBlasio, in a mood for summary judgments. “We’re not fucking anymore.”

“So that’s it?” asked DeBlasio.

“Yeah, motherfucker, that’s it,” Richard said.

“I’m sorry you feel that way. I just don’t understand it. I thought it was okay.” DeBlasio paused, then noticed a piece of lint on his pants, which he picked off.

“That’s right, that’s how I feel,” Richard said. He mimicked DeBlasio by picking a piece of lint off his own pants. And with that, he gave the brush-off to the manager who, he felt, had done the same to him. DeBlasio might have helped elevate Richard from someone blackballed by the industry to a Grammy-winning star, but in Richard’s mind, he was also guilty of a betrayal, and their intimacy had come to an end.

The firing of DeBlasio created a vacuum that Richard filled by engaging the services of David Franklin, a black businessman-lawyer who proudly wore the nicknames Big Dollar Dave and the Smiling Cobra. Franklin was, in his line of work, as extraordinary a personality as Richard. He was short, husky, light-skinned, baby-faced, and
blue-eyed, and spoke with a disarming stutter. Yet he knew how to command a room and close a deal; he talked often of what it meant to have “real power.” Unlike Richard, he came from the world of the black middle class—his grandfather had sat on the Presbyterian Board of Missions—and he had brash self-confidence, which he described as a necessity. “A Black man in this country can hardly afford to be modest,” he explained in an
Ebony
profile that dubbed him “The Man Who Makes Multimillionaires.” “If you don’t do it for yourself, nobody is going to do it for you.”

By the time Richard met him, Franklin had made his name in politics and entertainment. As a ringleader of Atlanta’s “Young Turks,” he had masterminded the successful mayoral campaign of his law partner Maynard Jackson and helped break the back of the old racial order there. And in 1973, just a few years after starting to represent talent, he had negotiated a $5.5 million, ten-album deal with Atlantic Records for Richard’s friend Roberta Flack—the most lucrative contract ever for a black female performer. In the context of that coup, Richard’s fifty-thousand-dollar advance from Warner Bros. didn’t seem quite so generous. Flack herself set the wheels in motion for Pryor and Franklin’s partnership, telling Richard that if his business matters were handled by Franklin, he wouldn’t need to worry about being “ripped off . . . by white people” again. She wanted Richard to “have someone around who’d protect him.”

Franklin came to Richard’s home and proposed a novel business arrangement. He would himself handle the duties of manager, agent, lawyer, and tax accountant, so Richard could dispense with paying for these services separately. Unlike the usual manager, too, he would be paid a salary rather than a percentage of Richard’s earnings; Richard would therefore not face ever-escalating costs as a by-product of his success. And the two of them would operate without a written agreement: Franklin assured Richard that, in Richard’s words, “we would always be brothers and everything would be all right . . . If we didn’t want to be together then we wouldn’t need any paper to keep us together.”