Becoming Richard Pryor (65 page)

“A Rebuttal,” the final sketch of
The Richard Pryor Show
, was a fitting send-off—an encapsulation of Richard’s experience on the TV show as a whole. A white-whiskered Richard came on the news in the person of Santa Claus to offer an “editorial,” which in his case was a rant about the difficulties of pleasing the multitudes. A flask of whiskey sat conveniently at Santa’s elbow; toy cars and airplanes were scattered everywhere in front of him. He talked, with faux cheeriness, of being overworked to a breaking point:

[
Takes a swig from the flask
.]

[
CENSORED flashes on the screen with a long beep
.]

Confessing that he had gone “dingy,” Santa groused about having, every day, to answer four million letters (many composed by children with extremely poor handwriting!); explained that Rudolph’s nose was red because, like Santa, he was a sniffer; talked leeringly of the “ho” in “ho ho ho”; and then blacked out at the news desk. The whiskey—or was it the burden of having to try to please everyone in the world on an impossible schedule?—had felled him. He couldn’t hold the stage.

I
n early November,
Which Way Is Up?
—the movie Richard had called “the most special thing I’ve ever done”—opened to the most stinging mainstream reviews of his career. Producer Steven Krantz had fretted, before its release, that the film might antagonize critics with its ripe dialogue, ribald plot, and clear put-down of big business. What he hadn’t anticipated was that among a certain set of critics—white, older—it would be labeled racist and intolerable. The
Los Angeles Times
’ Charles Champlin, who had earlier applauded Richard in
Wattstax
and
Greased Lightning
, wrote, “If ‘Which Way Is Up’ isn’t racially offensive, what in God’s name is? It takes the oldest stereotype of all—of blacks as oversexed or sexually obsessive children, and I would expect the NAACP to be in the streets with placards.”
Variety
’s Arthur Murphy blew a gasket: “Pryor’s career seems now at a crossroads, where his increasingly annoying brand of reverse racism must vanish. . . . [T]his film brings into focus the fact that a lot of his material exploits in a shallow fashion the very character stereotypes that, literally, millions of people have, not without difficulty in many cases, managed to overcome.” About the character of Richard’s reverend, Murphy huffed: “a Ku Klux Klan propaganda film couldn’t do it better.”

And yet—the NAACP did not protest; the Ku Klux Klan did not claim
Which Way
as its own; and though Universal partly dumped the movie in second-string theaters in black neighborhoods,
Which Way
succeeded beyond the wildest expectations of its creative team. Five months after its opening, Krantz could tout it as the most commercially
successful black film in history, with twenty-three million dollars in domestic and foreign rentals. And in some circles—left-leaning or black—it was seen as the exact opposite of racist. The
Village Voice
hailed the film as director Michael Schultz’s “first major” black film, one which invited the black audience to identify with its spirit of “chastened survival” rather than the “defeatism” of Wertmüller’s
Seduction of Mimi
. The black-themed magazine
Cause
celebrated
Which Way
for moving beyond the “false and empty macho images” of blaxploitation; it was an “upbeat, positive film of Black identification.” As with his TV show and performance at the Hollywood Bowl, Richard had cleaved audiences apart, delighting some in the act of antagonizing others.

Critics like Champlin and Murphy saw only the outer mask of the movie. They asked if the film offered, in the characters Richard played, role models for black life, and they just as quickly determined that it didn’t: Leroy Jones was a weak-willed opportunist; his father, Rufus, a self-satisfied satyr; the Reverend Lenox Thomas a hypocrite of the highest order. These critics missed that, far from the Hollywood mainstream, there had long been a comic tradition in which black performers played with the most shameful of stereotypes—the dissolute preacher, the cheating gambler, the hot-tempered “coon”—and in a complex move, both entertained the stereotypes and shuffled them off. Richard located himself in this tradition of self-conscious caricature: after
Which Way
’s release, he expressed interest in making a biopic about the vaudevillian Bert Williams, who was the tradition’s most gifted turn-of-the-century exponent, a black man turning blackface to account.

For Richard, the demand to be a “role model” was a trap that would have him forever playing safe parts like
Greased Lightning
’s Wendell Scott. He was an artist, not a spokesman, and as an artist, he was drawn to the poetry of failure. His major theme was self-sabotage, and it was difficult for him to play a self-saboteur without coming in the vicinity of stereotypes about black foolishness. In a perceptive review of
Which Way
, the
New York Times
’ Vincent
Canby noted the difficulty and delicacy of Richard’s balancing act. Canby judged Richard “one of the few actors . . . who manages to be funny—sometimes outrageously so—while giving every impression of being furious with his audience and removed from his material. This distance from his characters, however, allows him to play black stereotypes in a way that sends up the stereotypes while getting every last laugh from them.” This balancing act had its dangers: Bert Williams described himself as “whittling on dynamite.” Richard was a fellow whittler. His caricatures, if not handled with the proper finesse, always threatened to blow up in his face.

A great number of contemporary black-themed comedies might claim
Which Way Is Up?
as their Hollywood ancestor. The
Barbershop
movies,
Friday
and its sequels, the spoofs produced by the Wayans brothers, the Madea films of Tyler Perry—all these have rooted themselves in the sort of gutbucket humor that takes everyday buffoonery and magnifies its dimensions to the point of cartoonishness. They’ve also courted critical disapproval and controversy as a result—been derided, like
Which Way Is Up?
, as low-brow, or been faulted for refusing to offer positive images of the black community.

Yet the comparison also reveals the uniqueness of
Which Way
Is Up?
. Unlike these other movies,
Which Way
was both a sex comedy and a film grounded in the spirit of
la causa
. The farmworkers’ struggle was the backdrop against which Richard’s Leroy Jones proved himself a fool, so trapped within his macho psychodrama that he couldn’t see how he’d become a pawn in the larger power play between a corporation and its workers. In its final scene, Leroy had to watch his soul mate, Vanetta, drive off with his friend Chuy, a pro-union firebrand who has none of Leroy’s wishy-washiness. Leroy’s only heroic gesture is his very last: he tells his corporate patron to “shoot me in the ass ’cause that’s the only part of me you’re ever gonna see” and walks down the open road, jaunty for once, no longer pulled by someone else’s string. Leroy may not have the faintest idea where he is going, but at least he feels himself moving forward. The credits roll over his image as it recedes into the horizon.

W
ith his TV series in the can, Richard had hopes of pulling himself away from the bad habits that had gotten him through its production. He anticipated that when he and Deboragh traveled to Maui for a true honeymoon, his soul might find some rest. Instead, the bad habits clung to him. On the first night, he found himself reeling—drunk and covered with his own vomit in the shower while his new wife complained about the shabbiness of their accommodations. There were bugs, apparently, and their bungalow had no room service. “Are we going to eat cornflakes for a week?” she demanded. That night set the tone for the week that followed. Richard’s mind wandered from his honeymoon and his bride: he kept telephoning LA to speak with Jennifer Lee, who came to feel that Richard’s marriage was, oddly, “bringing us even closer together.”

Back in New York City for another shoot on
The Wiz
, Richard journeyed farther down the road of excess. “I caroused with sleazy, doped-up nogoodniks all night,” he recalled. “I was as lit as the white suit I wore playing the Wiz himself. I answered my wake-up calls by saying, ‘Oh, shit, I made it again.’”

On November 9, with Deboragh at his side, Richard flew to Peoria for a belated celebration of his grandmother Marie’s seventy-eighth birthday. The next afternoon, he went fishing with Deboragh, Marie, and Uncle Dickie. The day was beautiful, the weather bracing and fresh, but Richard was unable to relax into the peaceful rhythm of casting lines. Back in his hometown, he itched to satisfy the cravings that his early years had planted in him. He and Dickie skipped out on the fishing trip to have some private time with two women who, according to Deboragh, were the “two most unattractive white women ever—dogs.” In his memoir, Richard himself called his partner an “ugly whore.” It was as if he were a prisoner of his drift, spiraling down into the black hole of his addictions and testing his new wife to see how much she would mutely bear witness to his vanishing act. Deboragh refused to look on passively; she packed her bags for LA.

In the middle of sex with the prostitute, Richard felt his heart race and hammer. He gasped for air and had trouble finding it; he felt sick.
He was reprising the family theme—death by sex—that his father had established a decade earlier. Still, he paid little attention at first to the discomfort; a racing heart was nothing new to him. Then the pain arrived—a starburst of pain in his chest—and he dropped the pretense that this was his body’s business as usual. Somehow he brought himself to his grandmother and cried, “Mama! Mama! Help me, Mama!”

When everyone in his family rallied to rush him to the hospital, Richard saw a dark subtext. “They were probably closer to death than I was,” he observed. “They saw their money supply gasping for air, moaning, and writhing in pain. They probably wondered if this wasn’t some sick joke. Me coming home to die in front of them. They weren’t going to have none of that shit. Not about to lose my fame and money.” Richard was thirty-six years old, the most sensational rising star in black Hollywood, and at risk of frittering himself to death.

On November 10, the day after Richard was admitted to the emergency room of Methodist Medical Center, a radio station in Los Angeles reported that he had died. The news was false: Richard was at that moment recovering, in the hospital’s coronary care unit, after a restless night. Five hundred phone calls poured into the hospital from various friends and well-wishers, among them Aretha Franklin, Olivia Newton-John, and Sammy Davis Jr. According to the
Peoria Journal Star
, every caller seemed to believe that they had a special relationship with Richard—that he would return their calls if only the hospital took the care to pass along their number. But Richard was in no mood to plug back into the world. After being discharged from the hospital, he told a reporter, “I was on a treadmill, and you often just get on it and don’t look back for a while.” He was ready to dial back on his commitments. Talking to himself as much as the reporter, he said, “Success is no good if you don’t have your health.”

T
hirteen months later, Richard took the stage of Long Beach’s Terrace Theater and performed his experience of his heart attack. In the interim, he had publicly destroyed his marriage to Deboragh—had shot it full of holes on New Year’s Eve, just a little while after telling an
Ebony
reporter, “We’re going to be very happy together a long time, because it’s the first time I’ve admitted I don’t know anything.” Without skipping a beat, he had taken up with Jennifer Lee, who matched him in her appetite for the drama of life: the two were swept up in the blizzard of Richard’s cocaine use, and for years ran themselves ragged with the intense form their love took. (Lee’s memoir,
Tarnished Angel
, is at once a love story and a wiredrawn account of the insanities unleashed by cocaine—how, under its influence, petty jealousies get magnified into crazed vendettas.)

A new act in the making: Jennifer Lee and Richard Pryor in 1978. (Courtesy of Jennifer Pryor)

Then, starting in the summer of 1978, Richard righted himself by returning to stand-up. He had been mandated, by the judge in the car-shooting case, to submit to psychological counseling, and in tandem with those private therapy sessions, and with Jennifer at his side, he used the stage of the Comedy Store to retell the story of his life. After a month of woodshedding—a fever of lucidity—he had come up with a new act: over an hour of fresh material, which he then performed in concerts across America.