Becoming Richard Pryor (52 page)

A wary relationship: Richard Pryor eyes
Bingo Long
director John Badham. (Courtesy of Bonnie Leeds)

As shooting moved forward in Macon, Richard started to perceive a racial subtext in his interactions with Badham—a subtext to which Badham, who had never worked with a black cast, was oblivious. One night during filming, Badham asked Richard to jump off a balcony and onto a padded platform that was set several feet below. Richard wavered; he had a fear of heights, and here was this director eagerly pushing him to jump over the edge.

Cut to: Cohen, in his production office at the Macon Hilton, receiving Badham’s distressed call from a pay phone. “Richard just left the set,” Badham reported, “and I think he said he’s going back to LA. And we have to shoot with him the rest of the night.” Cohen made a beeline for Richard’s rental house, in an affluent white area near Mercer University.

“I hate that fucking cracker!” Richard vented to Cohen. “He don’t tell no nigger to jump and the nigger jump!” He was ready to quit the film and fly home, he said.

Cohen tried to explain that there had to be a misunderstanding here—a first-time director mishandling his actors—but then spoke honestly about his own stake in the matter. “Do it for me,” he pleaded. “Don’t ruin my career. This means so much. I’ve fought so hard to get this movie on—a movie that a year ago Hollywood thought they would never make. We’re doing it for a major studio, it’s going to get a major release.”

Richard relented. “I’m doing this for you,” he told Cohen. “So don’t forget it.”

Convinced that Badham put too low a premium on the well-being of his black actors, Richard remained standoffish. On one occasion, Badham tried to line him up for a shot in which a knife was thrown at Richard’s character’s foot. Richard said, sensibly, “You don’t need me to be my foot”—a point that Badham could not dispute. “He was very concerned about his safety,” the director observed later, “and you can’t criticize him for that.”

Near the end of the shoot, as if to fulfill Richard’s prophecies, the director attempted to execute a razzle-dazzle shot of the ballplayers’ motorcade as it sped through a country crossroads—and almost killed James Earl Jones. In Badham’s plan, the camera car would pass through the crossroads on the path opposite the one taken by the ballplayers’ motorcade, pulling the viewer into a tense trajectory and heightening the sense of motion. But the driver of the camera car didn’t understand the plan in full—didn’t understand that he was supposed to beat the players’ motorcade to the
intersection. He kept slowing down, and Jones, who led the motorcade, had to swerve off to the side to avoid a head-on collision between his motorcycle and the camera car. The crew rushed to Jones, who was unhurt. Badham apologized profusely, and Jones laughed it off.

Richard had been hundreds of feet behind the near collision and, having stood on the brakes of his character’s yellow Franklin convertible, had come to a stop; he was safe. But he had also seen enough; he left the set in a black Cadillac and did not return that day.

The next morning, at 6:30, when Badham strolled out of the Hilton to take his car to the set, a scowling Richard approached him and demanded an apology.

“For what?” Badham said disingenuously.

“You almost got me killed.”

“No, it was James Earl.”

“Well, you don’t care about me, so I’m going home.”

Badham mentally calculated how many scenes Richard had left, then said, “Well, I can help you with that. If you do go home, just don’t fly out of the Macon airport. Go to Atlanta because it’s a lot easier.” And, having stood his ground, Badham stepped into the town car and drove off.

Rob Cohen managed to persuade Richard to travel to the set anyway. They were scheduled to film a slapstick scene in which Richard’s character rips his pants while sliding into second base, revealing his colorful undershorts. As Charlie Snow, Richard was supposed to shrug off the indignity and laugh with the crowd. As Richard Pryor the actor, he was in no mood for shrugging.

“I’m not doing shit until I get my apology,” Richard told Badham. The director wondered if there was menace in Richard’s tone—the actor was holding a glass of water, and Badham thought he might throw it in his face—but then he saw, beneath the threat, an undercurrent of sadness. Badham heard himself saying, “I’m really sorry that this is upsetting you a lot.” It was more an acknowledgment of
Richard’s feelings than a heartfelt admission of regret, but Richard took it as genuine and played his scene.

While Richard’s feud with Badham threatened to torpedo the production, his feud with costar Billy Dee Williams threatened much worse. Once, Richard observed Williams speaking to his, Richard’s, new girlfriend, who was visiting from out of town, and once was enough: Richard accused Williams of trying to steal her away from him. Given Williams’s talents as a charmer, it was easy to understand the source of Richard’s panic. Cohen riffed, “If there was a vagina within ten feet of [Billy Dee], he went into a mode, what I call the V-mode—where he starts talking really low and all that. He’d say things like, ‘I love your hair. How much time do you spend on it every day?’ . . . And you know, he was very successful with women. He was the black man that every white woman who had a black fantasy wanted, because she knew he was good and powerful and charming, a lovely man.”

Richard fumed, talking often of bringing his gun with him on the set—to handle the threat of Williams once and for all, to put in the ground the fantasy of suavity he represented. Williams tried to de-escalate the feud. After one altercation, he grabbed Cohen in the film’s production offices and insisted, “You got to calm that guy down!” When Cohen asked what had happened, Williams couldn’t say; he was so whipped up as to be inarticulate. Cohen decided to put as much physical distance between his two actors as possible, moving Richard to the director’s dressing room—unbeknownst to Badham, who alighted upon Richard there and needed to have the situation explained to him by the second assistant director: “We had to move him away from Billy Dee. He was threatening to kill Billy Dee.” When the filming of
Bingo Long
wrapped without a violent incident, the crew breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Still, it would be wrong to adduce that Richard was simply seething during
Bingo Long
’s production. He had a warm rapport with the former Negro League and major league ballplayers—people of great gusto and no pretensions—who were cast as his teammates in
the film. “We work hard and play hard,” said Leon “Daddy Wags” Wagner, formerly of the San Francisco Giants and Cleveland Indians. Unsurprisingly, the “playing hard” portion found a home in Richard’s rented house, with the assistance of his grandmother Marie, who joined him in Macon for a spell. One night she prepared a classic soul food feast—fried chicken, oxtail stew, okra, string beans, peach cobbler—for some twenty-five members of the cast and crew. Richard spun a few tracks from his most recent album, but his voice on the stereo had to compete with the wisecracks flying all around him. “We blow Richard’s mind,” Wagner told a reporter. “He been used to being a funny motherfucker with a quip here and there. But we come on so black, man, that we have to pick Richard up off the ground.”

Richard felt at home, too, among the people of “James Brown country.” When the crew set up at a four-way intersection in one of Macon’s black neighborhoods, its residents started to converge upon the film’s three stars. At the first sight of the crowd, Billie Dee Williams and James Earl Jones vanished to their dressing rooms. Richard stood calmly in the center of the intersection as he was enveloped by a crowd that grew from a straggling few to several hundred. He chatted, slipped into a character or two; he enjoyed the back-and-forth with a crowd that cherished him and expressed their love not by gawking but by channeling their warmth. When he was performing for such a crowd, Richard’s cynicism and jealousy went into remission, and he rose above his apprehensions about himself and others; he felt magnified into a better and larger version of himself. And as part of the gift of his comedy, he magnified his audience as he reflected them, giving them a sense of the extraordinary in their ordinary lives.

Around this time, Richard distilled that feeling of reciprocity into the form of a motto. He took to wearing a yellow-and-black running suit, inspired by an obscure 1974 Jamaican film and emblazoned with its title: “Every Nigger Is a Star.”

W
hile Badham prepared
Bingo Long
for release, Richard rode the tailwind of . . .
Is It Something I Said?
, the follow-up to
“That Nig
ger’s Crazy,”
and his first album of new material for Warner Bros. He had recorded the album during a May 1975 run at the Latin Casino, not far from Philadelphia; after so many larger concerts, he’d been amped to play a more intimate club, a dinner theater with terraced tables, in front of a black audience. For him, the recorded show was “one of my best ever,” its memory almost sacred: “The comedy gods have many tentacles, you know. And they swoop down and touch you at different times. But when they do it’s like salvation. Or deliverance. It’s as close to flying as man gets. The magic doesn’t happen often, but when you’re on and rolling nothing that I’ve ever touched comes close.”

Is It Something
was a potent distillation of Richard’s latest stand-up act. On it, he recorded for the first time the character of Mudbone, that most garrulous and glorious of his comic creations. He spoke of his cocaine addiction for the first time, too, observing himself with an astonishment that sometimes carried over into bafflement: “I must’ve snorted up Peru. I could’ve bought Peru for all the shit I snorted. Could’ve just given up the money up front and have me a piece of property.” He took aim at the legal system, capping his riff on his experience at the courthouse with a stinging one-liner, courtesy of Paul Mooney: “You go down there looking for justice, and that’s what you find—just us.” And he spoke frankly about sex, the desperation and double-talk of the bedroom. He gave voice to the man who pleads with his girlfriend during a breakup (“Take the TV, but leave the pussy, please”), as well as the woman who hesitates to kiss the mouth that has pleasured her (“It’s bad for your teeth”). The negotiations around sex seemed to turn everyone into an absurd version of him- or herself. Witness the father who scolded his daughter for offering up only a kiss to the man who took her out on an expensive date: “Hey, girl, get your ass down here!
. . . Thirty-five dollars is a lot of money, you must be rich. You are?
Wake up your mama, too!”

Released in August 1975, . . .
Is It Something I Said?
rocketed to the No. 1 position on
Billboard
’s R&B chart, sealing the love affair between Richard and his black audience. But its appeal extended
further: it broke the Top 15 of
Billboard
’s overall album chart. The record heralded Richard’s acceptance by the hip white audience that he hadn’t courted for four years, since he left Berkeley behind. In the interim, while he’d been preoccupied with establishing and deepening his connection with black America, that white audience had come to him.

R
ichard’s hosting of
Saturday Night
(later
Saturday Night Live
), in December 1975, was a related experiment in cultural cross-breeding, bringing him in contact with the still-tender, and overwhelmingly white, creative team behind the show. In the run-up to his guest appearance, the mood around the set was tight with worry. Members of Richard’s entourage, it was said, were carrying guns; Richard himself was viewed as combustible in the extreme. Michael O’Donoghue, the show’s head writer, visited Richard in his hotel room and ran a joke by him, one written for the Weekend Update sketch: “A man should not be judged by the color of his skin, but by the size of his nostrils.” Richard bristled and started to object; O’Donoghue cut him off in midsentence. Richard lifted up a cognac bottle and offered, with a burst of laughter that was hard to read, to brain O’Donoghue with it. For the rest of the week,
Saturday Night
’s head writer took a leave from his own show rather than tangle with its host.

Meanwhile, Lorne Michaels was feeling heat from NBC executives, who argued that the show needed a five-second delay so that any expletives could be bleeped. Michaels acceded to the request, unwilling to bet his show’s future on Richard’s ability to restrain himself. But he did so under conditions of the utmost secrecy. All the clocks in the studio were synchronized to the five-second delay, and the staff who knew of it vowed not to let the secret slip. Michaels feared that his host would walk off if he learned of the delay—an utterly justified concern. In his memoir, Richard said, “If I’d known, I never would’ve shown up.”

The show that Richard delivered did shake up
Saturday Night
, though not in the way NBC execs had feared. (Richard said “ass”
twice, but stayed clear of four-letter territory.) With his demands in Miami, Richard had already integrated the show—from the writers’ room to the stage to the audience. Now he made the show his own—and race conscious as never before. In a small but symbolic move, he even took control of the photo stills that served as “bumpers” between sketches and commercial breaks, supplying photos of his grandmother, uncle, and children to replace the usual images of New York City street life.