Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him

by David Henry

  Not that anyone in Peoria was watching. Richard had called home prior to the show to let his grandma Marie know he was going to be on TV, but his grandfather Thomas answered the phone and, assuming that Richard was calling to ask for money, hung up at the sound of his voice. Even his own father missed the show. With three channels to choose from, Buck tuned in to the wrong one.

  But they all saw his second TV appearance, nine months later, on The Ed Sullivan Show.

  —————

  Richard left Peoria with a promise to Miss Whittaker that, one day, he would be on Ed Sullivan. As dreams go, it wasn’t that far-fetched. From the show’s very beginning in 1948, Sullivan openly defied social custom, his sponsors, and the wrath of southern network affiliates by presenting black entertainers on the same stage with whites. In the show’s first two seasons alone, Sullivan hosted Cab Calloway, W. C. Handy, Nat King Cole, Pearl Bailey (with whom he held hands!), Illinois Jacquet, Ethel Waters, Billy Eckstine, George Kirby, Jackie Robinson, Hazel Scott, and Count Basie, all a dozen years before Dick Gregory took a seat on Jack Paar’s couch.

  Sullivan was vaudeville for a cool medium, trotting out a weekly lineup of jugglers, dancers, puppeteers, mimes, animal acts, acrobats, fire-eaters, magicians, and comedians—usually propped up by a big-name Broadway, opera, or movie star—at eight o’clock every Sunday night from 1948 to 1971. Marveling at the litany of shows the other networks sent up against Sullivan over the course of his twenty-three-year run, John Leonard compared him to Yankee left-hander Eddie Lopat who “seemed to throw nothing but junk, and still they couldn’t hit him.” Or, as Fred Allen put it, Ed Sullivan would stay on the air as long as other people had talent.

  Comedy was the driving wheel of his show, but comedy, Sullivan understood, usually hinges on subversion, on pushing against the boundaries of decorum and comfort—either by tweaking the nose or rending the mask—and a reassuring punch line isn’t always enough to make an audience forget a negative impression. Comedians, then, were risky business. Sullivan insisted on feel-good humor that would build up rather than knock down, entertain rather than subvert. Therefore, every comedian who ever set foot on Sullivan’s stage first had to make the trek up Park Avenue to East Fifty-ninth Street where Sullivan and his wife, Sylvia, shared a six-room suite on the eleventh floor of the Delmonico Hotel and audition his or her act—every word of it—while Ed, a late riser who stayed out till all hours scouring the clubs for fresh talent and bits of gossip for his newspaper column, took his invariable midday breakfast of sweetened pears, iced tea, and a seared lamb chop brought up by room service.

  Ed never laughed. It just wasn’t in his nature. He seldom smiled. (“Ed’s the only person who can brighten up a room by leaving it,” Joe E. Lewis quipped.) If Ed really thought an act was hysterical, Jackie Mason once advised a young comic, he might part his lips. Curiously, the few who do recall getting chuckles from Sullivan never made it onto the show, a kindness, perhaps, intended to soften the blow when Ed’s son-in-law and producer, Bob Precht, delivered the bad news.

  Generations of comedians count these vetting sessions at the Delmonico among the most excruciatingly ego-bruising experiences of their lives. None more so than Joan Rivers, who lucked into her first appearance, on May 22, 1966, thanks to a slip of the tongue during the closing of the previous week’s show. “Next week, we’ll have Johnny Rivers,” is what Sullivan had meant to say. Instead, it came out as “Joannie Rivers.” Broadcast live, with no chance to do it over, they went out and booked her. (Johnny Rivers, meanwhile got bumped all the way back to March 19, 1967, sharing the stage with Cab Calloway, George Carlin, and the Lovin’ Spoonful. It would be his only appearance on the Sullivan show, whereas Joan got invited back nineteen times.)

  Producer Bob Precht tried repeatedly to book Richard on the show, but Sullivan just didn’t like the kid’s attitude. Precht was so convinced Richard would be a hit that he turned to Sullivan’s longtime golfing buddy, Alan King, for help. The caustic, cigar-smoking comic was Sullivan’s go-to guy who could always be counted on to come in from Great Neck for a last-minute appearance if a show was running short. (On one condition: King refused to follow rock ’n’ roll bands. The screaming teenagers screwed up his timing and just didn’t get his jokes.) Sullivan trusted King so implicitly that he was the only comedian ever granted dispensation from those midweek auditions at the Delmonico.

  “Ed, this kid is terrific,” King told him. Coming from King, that was all Ed needed to hear. And there Richard stood, fidgeting in his ill-fitting suit while an expressionless Sullivan, seated in his bathrobe, cut into his lamb chop and nodded for him to begin.

  —————

  “It was a surprise,” Richard’s sister-in-law, Angie, said. “We knew he was determined to go that route, but we were surprised to see that he had made it.” Everyone watched Ed Sullivan.

  When the Beatles made their first American television appearance on February 9, 1964, it was on The Ed Sullivan Show. The hysteria that attended their performance seemed fueled—at least in part—by the nation’s edgy fear and the deep desire to shake free the pall of the Kennedy assassination only twelve weeks earlier. The screams were real, even if rooted as much in terror as exuberance, the times growing darker and less predictable, and Sullivan for his part appeared both delighted and unnerved by the implications of his audience’s volatility—the audience no longer serving as mannered witnesses to spectacle but suddenly creating it.

  Then, in the autumn of that year, Richard went for a walk through Harlem with his old cohort from the Chitlin’ Circuit, Redd Foxx. People downtown in the Village often recognized Richard from The Merv Griffin Show or Ed Sullivan, but up in Harlem it was Redd Foxx who stopped traffic. He caused excitement, like a one-man parade for a returning astronaut. People stepped out of shops and restaurants, leaving their work to come and greet him. They leaned out apartment windows hollering, “Hey, Redd! Zorro!” On that walk, Richard came to realize that the scene unfolding before his eyes contained everything he ever wanted: for people in black neighborhoods to drop what they were doing and come running to greet him, to love him for who he was and for what he did.

  That Richard Pryor might find his voice by stepping off the stage and into the lives of his audience—that he might touch a nerve by illuminating the dysfunction and despair that united them all—appears now as inevitable as it was revolutionary. The bloody battles over civil rights and the graphic images flooding in from Vietnam—both finding their way onto family-dinner-hour newscasts—had done much to tear away the facade of warm gentility that most Americans had grown to expect when they flipped on their television sets.

  When Cassius Clay emerged in his new identity as World Heavyweight Champion Muhammad Ali, the country seemed stunned to find him as angry as he was lyrical and buoyant, and a boxer with more on his mind than mere sport. Frank Sinatra’s hands might always smell of lavender soap, but he was a brute nonetheless, and even he began to stop pretending otherwise. Live recordings of Sinatra bantering between songs with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. seem almost to quiver with a giddy, high-alert hum. Every joke, every wisecrack or aside from Sinatra and Martin hinges on the plain fact that these guys were sharing the stage with a mulignan. Sinatra and Martin berated Davis without mercy, ordering him off the stage, while Davis begged them to let him stay.

  SAMMY DAVIS: Can I sing with you guys? (apparently placing a hand on Martin)

  DEAN MARTIN: Hey, hey, hey, hey, HEY, HEY! I’ll dance with you, I’ll sing with you, I’ll swim with you, I’ll cut the lawn with you, I’ll go to bar mitzvahs with you—but don’t touch me!

  When Davis announced that he would next like to do a few impersonations, Sinatra broke in with, “Why don’t you do Paul Revere? Get on your horse, and get the hell out of here?” Then he thought of an even better zinger: “I tell ya what, do James Meredith of Mississippi.”

  Davis couldn’t have cared less, says Kathy McKee, his longtime girlfriend, confidante, and “mi
stress of ceremonies.” “Sammy was in another world. He was high as a kite. They all were. Everybody was blitzed. The money was flowing, the booze was flowing, the coke was flowing. It was all a big party. There was nothing negative to it ever at all. If anything personal went on inside Sammy about this, he didn’t show it.”

  Why would he? As a member of the Rat Pack, Sammy Davis Jr. was a standard bearer for the swingingest kind of postwar, pre-Beatles cool. It was all for laughs. All ring-a-ding-ding. There wasn’t a cushier, crazier gig on earth and coon-calling was just part of the shtick.

  —————

  In the wake of his breakthrough on Ed Sullivan, Richard and his new girlfriend, Maxine Silverman, went on the first of Richard’s many epic coke and booze binges that would go on for days and culminate in hallucinations of people from his past ganging up on him, casting accusations, demanding their due. In the depths of this delirium, he missed a second booking on the Sullivan show.

  When Richard didn’t show up for rehearsal, producer Bob Precht booked Lou Alexander, a comedian who’d been opening for Tony Martin at the Copa, to take his place. Alexander had a terrific seven-minute monologue about contact lenses that knocked them dead in rehearsal. Fellow guest Myron Cohen came up to him and said, “Tonight’s your night, kid. That routine you just did is gonna kill ’em.” But the show ran long, and at the last minute, Alexander was told he had to cut the bit by two minutes. “They cut my balls off,” Alexander said. “You take out two minutes, you’re killing me. I’m doing this in front of forty million people and editing onstage and you can see I’m white as a ghost. It was not a tenth as good as what I’d done that afternoon.” Sullivan walked over when he’d finished and said, “Very good job. Very nice.” But Alexander knew that was the end of it. He never went back on Sullivan again.

  Richard’s agent smoothed out the no-show with Sullivan’s people. Not only was he invited back, Sullivan granted him an unprecedented exception to the strict time limit he usually imposed on comedians. Russ Petranto, who had the job of keeping a stopwatch on the show, recalled Richard coming in and doing a long, semidramatic piece about a wino warning a young kid not to turn out like him. It ran more than seven minutes in rehearsal. “It was so brilliant you couldn’t stand it,” Petranto said. Both Precht and Sullivan refused to cut it, despite calls from the CBS censor objecting to the raw subject matter.

  Sullivan paid Richard five hundred dollars—more than he’d ever received for a single performance. He and Maxine went out to celebrate and bought their first hits of LSD.

  Later, and perhaps a result of the LSD, Maxine stabbed Richard in the arm during a fight, sending him to the emergency room. The doctor recognized him from TV and didn’t believe for a minute his story that he’d cut himself while practicing a knife trick.

  He and Maxine both knew they were no good for each other, but when Bobby Darin offered Richard a three-week gig opening for him at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas at twenty-four hundred dollars a week, he asked her to come with him and she went.

  —————

  A far cry from today’s retina-searing wonderland offering the family values crowd package deals on bacchanalian revelries with prix fixe absolution included in the gratuity, Las Vegas of the 1960s (as Tom Wolfe so memorably evoked it in the pages of Esquire) was then a nascent low-rise attraction, its skyline dominated by electric signage—neon pink champagne bubbles rising sixteen stories into the empty desert sky—beckoning to pensioners, mostly women, who wandered the casinos wearing hob-heeled shoes and the same shapeless print dress they had on the day before, as though headed down some Mississippi backroad to buy eggs, carrying around Dixie cups filled with coins to feed the slots in one hand, the other sporting, pre–Michael Jackson, a heavy-duty White Mule work glove so their palms didn’t callus from pulling the jackpot levers.

  A fierce current of Protestant rectitude ran just beneath the surface. This was the same Las Vegas, after all, where George Carlin, opening for the Supremes at the Frontier in 1969, would be suspended for doing a bit about having a small ass. When he was brought back to fill out the remaining dates on his contract the following summer, Carlin was permanently fired for saying this: “Listen, folks, I don’t say ‘shit.’ Buddy Hackett says ‘shit’ right down the street. Redd Foxx will say ‘shit’ on the other side of the street. I don’t say ‘shit.’ I’ll smoke a little of it.”

  So in Vegas, Richard would need to be on his best behavior, onstage and off. The characters in Richard’s head clamoring ever louder to be set free, to speak with their own voices—they would just have to wait. This was Las fucking Vegas. This was twenty-four-hundred dollars a week. He earned more that three-week engagement than he’d ever made in an entire year, even in the army.

  A WAY OUT OF HERE OTHER THAN THAT DOOR

  Richard loved Las Vegas—the money, the booze, the showgirls, the nonstop parties, seeing his name emblazoned on the marquee—but underneath it all he felt like a fraud. “I knew I wasn’t as good as the reviews said I was,” he said, “and I knew why.” Of course, it wasn’t hard for him to figure out why when so many people kept telling him. Don Rickles put it as succinctly as anyone when he came backstage to congratulate him after a show. “It’s uncanny,” he said, pumping his hand. “You sound just like Bill Cosby.”

  No matter the criticisms, Richard was now firmly established as a stand-up comic. What he wanted most, though, was to be a movie star. Much like Elvis Presley, Richard’s genius blossomed in front of a live audience, alone on a bare stage with nothing but a microphone in his hand. There no one could touch him. Yet he seemed to regard his sublime gift primarily as a stepping-stone to stardom on the big screen. And, again like Elvis, he didn’t much care how crappy, inconsequential, or demeaning those movies might be.

  “Give Richard the choice between being a stand-up star and a movie star, and he goes for the Hollywood bullshit every time,” Paul Mooney would write in his 2009 memoir, Black Is the New White.

  Richard was, after all, still the same kid from Peoria who had pasted his name on discarded movie posters and hung them on his bedroom wall.

  After their Vegas run ended, Bobby Darin threw Richard a Hollywood coming-out party at a posh restaurant in Beverly Hills that led Sid Caesar to cast him as a detective in The Busy Body, a loopy, celebrity-laden, cops-and-gangsters comedy that is of interest today only as Richard Pryor’s screen debut.

  The prospect of acting alongside Sid Caesar made him jittery enough. Richard had idolized Caesar as a skit comic on the NBC variety series Your Show of Shows since he was ten years old. Adding to his nervousness was the fact that he didn’t have a clue how movies were made. He’d performed in front of cameras on television, of course, but had never acted for a camera in a movie before, and he knew enough to know there was a difference. But he knew how to pretend. He channeled a little bit of Bogart, some Robert Mitchum, a dash of Steve McQueen. And it worked, more or less. Richard’s performance brought an element of unruffled, world-weary cool to an otherwise frothy concoction, and he more than held his own alongside Caesar and veteran costars Anne Baxter, Jan Murray, Robert Ryan, Kay Medford, Dom DeLuise, and Godfrey Cambridge.

  —————

  The Busy Body was released in March 1967. One night the following month, when Maxine was nine months pregnant, Richard went out into the backyard and stood gazing out at the moon. It seemed to beckon him. He got in his car and followed it all the way down to Tijuana. He drank and partied with the whores and tried to take his mind off Maxine and the prospect of once again being a father.

  On his way back, U.S. customs officials found the remnants of a bag of pot in his car. It was less than enough to roll a joint, he said, but it was enough to keep him from being present for the birth of his second—possibly third—child, Elizabeth.

  Richard admitted that he just didn’t care. “It’s nothing to be proud of. It’s just the way it was,” he wrote. The concept of fatherhood is one thing Richard clearly did not copy from Bill Co
sby. When TV talk show host Mike Douglas asked Richard what he had done that impressed his kids the most, he said, “I admitted I was their father.”

  —————

  W. E. B. DuBois deemed it a necessity for survival that African Americans maintain a dual identity, a double consciousness. One self they presented to white folks—the masters of slavery, industry, or finance—and one—the real one—they kept for themselves, “just between us.”

  Zora Neale Hurston wrote of how resistant and suspicious black folks in her native Florida were about sharing with outsiders the folk tales and lore they swapped so freely with each other in the evenings on store porches—reluctant to share even with her, Lucy Hurston’s daughter Zora, from over in Eatonville, now that she’d gone up north and come back with a college degree and a Chevrolet.

  They are most reluctant at times to reveal that which the soul lives by. And the Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive. You see we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioner, “Get out of here!” We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing . . . The Negro offers a feather-bed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries.

  The theory behind our tactics: “The white man is always trying to know into somebody else’s business. All right, I’ll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind. I’ll put this play toy in his hand, and he will seize it and go away. Then I’ll say my say and sing my song.”

  Richard’s trouble was that he had all but cut himself off from those places where he felt free to say his say or sing his song.