Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him

by David Henry

  In her husband’s absence, Mitzi Shore found her life’s calling. She put young comics to work painting the entire interior black—black walls, ceiling, tables and chairs—so when the single spotlight hit the comic on stage, there was nothing else to look at. She had them move the bar back by the kitchen. From now on, customers would order drinks from cocktail waitresses.

  Mitzi Shore made the Store a place where comics could be seen, get exposure, commune and confer with their comic brethren, and workshop their material in front of an audience. She did it all for the comics. Which is why she thought she didn’t need to pay them.

  By the end of the year, Mitzi took full ownership in a divorce settlement from Sammy. He must’ve known he was losing both his club and his wife when he made a visit to L.A. after only a month in Vegas. He barely recognized the place. Everything had been painted black. The floor was packed. And where was the bar? Sammy told his wife he wanted to do a few shows while he was in town. She said she would try to fit him in the next night’s lineup but couldn’t make any promises.

  Back when Sammy Shore had been in charge of the Store, he gave his old-school pals full run of the place. There was no lineup or schedule. They went behind the bar to pour their own drinks and commanded the stage for as long as they pleased. The younger, less-known comics had to hang back and hope for a chance to go on. Mitzi turned that system upside down, giving preference to young up-and-coming comics and scheduling them in strict fifteen-minute time blocks.

  The stream of young comics flowing into L.A. behind Johnny Carson’s move of The Tonight Show to Burbank swelled to a tidal wave after nineteen-year-old Freddie Prinze made his television debut on Thursday, December 6, 1973. So impressed was Carson with Prinze’s five-minute performance that, as Prinze started to leave the stage, Carson waved him over to the couch. Never before had a first-time comic been granted a sit-down chat with Johnny.

  Over at the Comedy Store, jaws dropped. The comics crowded around the TV “recognized that they were seeing history,” writes William Knoedelseder in I’m Dying up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy’s Golden Era. Their reactions “ranged from ‘Holy shit,’ to ‘I can’t fucking believe this,’ to ‘Right on, Freddie!’ ”

  Few comics failed to notice one more thing about Prinze’s Tonight Show debut: Johnny introduced him as “a young comedian who’s appearing here in town at the Comedy Store.” That statement put the Comedy Store on every comic’s map and created a new equation in their heads: One set at the Comedy Store plus one appearance on Carson equals the whole world. If it happened to Freddie, then it could happen to any of them. You could almost hear the suitcases being packed.

  A young Jay Leno, sitting on his sofa in Boston, watched the same equation play out for his pal Jimmie Walker who was immediately signed to the new Norman Lear–Bud Yorkin series, Good Times. Leno had worked the same clubs with Walker. He was a better comic than Walker. He got bigger laughs. Yet there was Walker on TV, and there sat Leno watching him. He got up off his couch, booked a flight to L.A., packed a single suitcase, took his entire savings (fifteen hundred dollars) out of the bank, left his apartment unlocked, and, on his way out the door, told the neighbors in his building to help themselves to anything inside.

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  Lily Tomlin remembers improvising a scene for her upcoming TV special at Richard’s house when Berry Gordy called to praise his performance in Lady Sings the Blues, guaranteeing him he would be nominated for an Oscar. After he hung up the phone, Tomlin remembers, Richard suddenly became the six-year-old boy from his “The Primpce and the Primpcess” fairy tale he’d performed the first time she saw him on The Ed Sullivan Show—“shy, hopeful, and suddenly terrified, as if he had pulled off something he’d never expected.”

  Although the Oscar nomination Gordy predicted never came to pass, Richard received universally outstanding reviews for his revelatory portrayal of Billie Holiday’s heroin-addicted piano player, a characterization inspired in part by his old friend Jimmy Binkley, the house pianist at Collins Corner back in Peoria. The movie brought him much attention but few acting offers. Perhaps he’d played the heroin-addicted piano man too convincingly. Along with the accolades, Richard earned a reputation for his erratic behavior, violent temper, and heavy drug use.

  That reputation was not wholly undeserved. During filming of The Mack, now regarded as a blaxploitation classic (perhaps the most sampled movie in hip-hop and one of Quentin Tarantino’s acknowledged touchstones), Richard as “Slim” played sidekick to Max Julien’s pimp “Goldie.” Following one of many altercations with producer Harvey Bernhard, a coked-up Richard told Julien that he was going to kill the man. Julien declined Richard’s invitation to take part but stood back and watched from down the hallway as Richard, carrying a lead ball in a sock, knocked on the producer’s hotel room door. Because the production, filmed on location on the streets of Oakland, California, had been plagued with threats, interference, and outright assault from local gangs, Bernhard kept an around-the-clock bodyguard in his room and a .45 in his belt. As Bernhard recounted the scene to Julien the next day, he pulled his gun on Richard and challenged him to make his move, at which point, Richard wisely collapsed in laughter and assured Bernhard it had all been a joke. Richard and Julien, who contributed heavily to the script, both pushed back against Bernhard and director Michael Campus (who likewise shot The Education of Sonny Carson on the streets of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant) for their depiction of pimps and urban street life. In one instance, Richard went off script to create what turned out to be the film’s most riveting scene. Rather than play the scene as written, which called for him to turn his back on a pair of corrupt white cops (Don Gordon and William Watson)—an act that anyone with a lick of sense would recognize as suicidal, they protested to Campus—Richard’s Slim stands his ground, breaking down in real tears as he bitterly curses the two cops while allowing Goldie time to slowly walk away unscathed. After viewing the dailies, Campus had no choice but to use the scene as Richard had improvised it. It was too good not to.

  The movie’s second-most-memorable scene comes when Slim and Goldie take prisoner a rival pimp (Dick Anthony Williams) who’d had Goldie’s mother killed, and order him, at gunpoint, to stick himself with the long stiletto he carried concealed in a walking stick. Richard’s smiling, near-hysterical command that the pimp stick himself—“Stick yourself, nigger. One more for me, now. Stick yourself! I’m tryin’ to help you. Don’t get angry. Be cool. Again!”—is still harrowing to watch. And it was all Richard’s idea. Williams’s character had previously pulled the stiletto during a confrontational pool-hall scene. In his commentary on the DVD release, Williams laughed, marveling, nearly thirty years later, at the workings of Richard’s mind. “I knew the dude was gonna come up with something from the pool table scene. He’s got a mind . . .”

  Richard similarly threw himself into every role that came his way during this time and, in 1973, turned in some of the finest performances of his career, mostly in films that had poor showings at the box office. Not one of them was a comedy. As would most always be the case, Richard did his funniest and most incisive work when he embodied broken or conflicted characters from within and played them in earnest instead of for obvious laughs. There’s no better example of this than the “Juke and Opal” sketch written by Jane Wagner for Lily, Tomlin’s comedy-variety special that aired November 2, 1973, on CBS.

  Tomlin, without benefit of complexion-enhancing makeup, plays Opal, the black owner of a cafe frequented by Juke, a scruffy young drug addict played by Richard in a green fatigue jacket. Opal serves him potato soup (“something nourishing”) and talks with him about getting on methadone.

  Their teasing, flirtatious banter—“You irritate the lining of my mind,” Opal tells him—is interrupted by the entrance of a couple of social workers doing community research. “We’d like to ask you a few questions,” the young woman announces as they come through the door.

  Juke openly
admits, when asked by the survey takers, that he’s addicted to drugs but objects when the young woman makes note of his answer. “Don’t write it down, man. Be cool. That’s not for the public. I mean what I go through is private.” Before he answers any more, Juke has a few questions of his own: “Who’s Pigmeat Markham’s mama? You ever been mugged in the same neighborhood more than once? Do you know who ‘Boo’ Diddley is?”

  When Opal gives Juke ten dollars from the register, the young man tries to intervene. “You really shouldn’t give him the money. You know what he’s going to do with it.” Opal covers for Juke by saying he’s going to buy her more potatoes.

  After the couple leaves, Juke gives the ten back, saying he’s not buying any more potatoes. He’s going to try. “You know, I think I’m kinda crazy about you,” he says. “You a sweet woman.” As he leaves, he hesitates at the door and says, “I’ll think about you. Be glad when it’s spring.” Then one last word: “Flower!”

  Writing for the New Yorker in September 1999, Hilton Als said the nine-and-a-half-minute sketch “remains, a little over a quarter of a century later, the most profound meditation on race and class that I have ever seen on a major network.”

  Perhaps the greatest testament to how convincingly Tomlin embodied the black cafe owner Opal can be found in the lack of viewer outcry when she and Richard’s Juke exchanged a brief kiss on the lips as he put up his hood to head back out into the cold. It was rare—and risky—for a black man to kiss a white woman on primetime television in 1973. In this instance, no one seemed to notice.

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  The troubles—and triumphs—that would mark the entire of Richard’s sketchy TV career were fully on display when an improvised skit pairing Richard’s little-boy character Billy with Tomlin’s rocking-chair preschooler Edith Ann wandered afoul of program practices. Director Rick Wallace called, “Cut!” when Richard’s character remarked that he had “bigger titties” than Tomlin’s Edith Ann.

  Lily followed Richard to his dressing room and tried to talk him back, but he said he just couldn’t do anymore. It was as though the ordeal of fully embodying and then abandoning or being less than true to a character caused Richard psychic distress, if not physical pain.

  “You can’t stop a guy like Richard Pryor when he’s on a roll,” says Richard’s friend David Brenner. “If you interrupt him, he’s done. It’d be like if you went down on the track when someone’s running and said, ‘Listen, I want to change your sneakers. I think you’ll do better with these.’ You can stop a guy like me and I can be back in an instant. I’m being the real me—the funny me—but I don’t get into these great characters, these dimensions.”

  “I felt ridiculous,” Richard told David Felton of Rolling Stone. “My kid couldn’t get into it. So I can’t go onstage and it be in my mind that this kid can’t say something, ’cause the kid is wrecked, as a kid. I mean, I was ready to cry as a kid, ’cause I was the kid, you dig?

  “That’s the way I see kids. I just get fascinated talking to ’em, ’cause it’ll be honestly sweet and whatever they say is innocent. And if they say ‘tittie,’ you can’t tell a kid they can’t say ‘tittie.’ They deal with real shit.”

  Lily scored big in the ratings, got great reviews, and won its writing team (including Richard) an Emmy for Best Writing in Comedy-Variety, Variety or Music category. CBS never aired the show again.

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  Richard, Billy Dee Williams, and director Sidney J. Furie were all riding high on the success of Lady Sings the Blues when they regrouped for the action-thriller Hit! about a federal agent (Williams) who seeks revenge after his teenage daughter dies of a drug overdose. Knowing that his superiors would never allow such an operation to proceed through official channels, Williams takes it upon himself to recruit, finance, train, and transport to France a small band of private American citizens who have each suffered personal tragedies as a result of illegal drugs. They seek vengeance not against street-level junkies and pushers but by going up against the nine leaders of a Marseilles drug syndicate who control product and distribution.

  Mismarketed as a blaxploitation film, Hit! confounded the genre with its ensemble cast of multiracial and cross-generational heroes. Even the wealthy French villains are portrayed in identifiably human terms. One French kingpin, for example, disappointed by his sumptuous lunch, rails against big oil polluters, the “pigs who use the sea for a sewer,” doing such harm to aquatic life that “it will soon be impossible to eat a decent bouillabaisse.”

  With its tagline “To pull off a job no one would ever dare you need a team no one would ever believe,” the movie’s lineage can be traced to Dirty Harry and The French Connection by way of The Seven Samurai.

  The cautiously mistrustful camaraderie between the characters played by Richard and Billy Dee Williams is palpable throughout the movie, drawing method inspiration from their off-screen friendship. Williams enjoyed hanging out with Richard and Mooney but was so uptight about his career he avoided being seen with them in public. He wanted to be a leading man. Richard had a reputation for the kind of trouble that could screw that up.

  There’s a scene—one of several—in which Richard clearly goes off script while flirting with fellow vigilante Gwen Welles in the backseat of the van driven by Williams. As they approach the Seattle Ferry dock, Richard chuckles, reading aloud from a sign at the entranceway: “Seattle Ferries from eight to six.” Then, affecting an effeminate lisp: “My, my . . . business must be brisk.” Williams shoots Richard a scathing look. Richard doesn’t let up. “Why don’t they name a ferry boat the Lesbian? (lisping again) ‘I’m taking the Lesbian to the island.’ ”

  Williams mutters something incomprehensible as he climbs out of the van. Whatever he says seems intended for Richard’s ears, not ours. Richard, for his part, reacts with a bewildered, what-the-fuck’s-bugging-him expression. Then, playing to Welles, he foppishly slaps a glove across the back of the driver’s seat and, lisping again, delivers this: “He’s gone to ask the Marquis de Sade who we should recruit.”

  Later, while piloting a boat across French waters, Richard half mutters half sings, “I gotta get laid, I gotta get laid . . .” then breaks into a blues-inflected sea shanty, sounding a bit like the later-day Tom Waits:

  I bet they have some weird bitches here

  I bet they have some weird bitches here

  I bet they got some Eskimos

  and all they do is suck your toes

  I bet they have some weird bitches here

  He doesn’t play it for laughs. It’s all completely in character, a man laboring to cheer himself against a sense of impeding doom. No one else is even listening. His somber cohorts down on deck are staring out across the water, grimly contemplating the illegal and potentially suicidal nature of the mission they are about to undertake.

  As he docks the boat, Richard calls down to the man shagging their line, “Tie it off there, me lad. Where’s the pussy?” When he gets no reply, Richard looks at his hand and says, “Well, Rosie, looks like it’s you and me again tonight.” Then, planting a kiss on his gloved palm, says, “I love ya, baby.”

  As the climax approaches and the bodies of French kingpins begin piling up, Richard even coaxes a teary laugh from the heroin-addicted character played by Gwen Welles as she begins to fall apart, crying to him that she can’t go through with the other hits. She’s scared and she doesn’t like killing people. Richard, whose scuba-diving character had surfaced alongside a drug lord’s yacht with a speargun and harpooned him in the chest, barks back at her in the voice of a shit-talking hustler, “You think you got troubles, nigga? I lost a motherfuckin’ spear. Cost me forty-seven boxtops. I saved for six months. Shit! Had a gold tip on it and everything.”

  The few critics who bothered to give Hit! any notice complained that the film provided a scant twenty minutes of thrills, and only after the audience had endured an hour and fifty minutes of setup and character development. All true. For audiences expecting a
blaxploitation thrill ride, Furie’s art-house pacing, often disorienting camera work, and generous attention to character and detail made for slow going. It would not be released on DVD until April of 2012 and has yet to find the audience it deserves.

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  In Some Call It Loving, an oddly sad and atmospheric film inspired by John Collier’s much livelier satiric short story, “Sleeping Beauty,” jazz musician Zalman King becomes obsessed with a spellbound woman (played by Mia Farrow’s younger sister, Tisa) on exhibit in a carnival sideshow. Richard, for the most part, is wasted as King’s drug-addled friend who is insistent in explaining the deeper meaning of a lopsided heart he has painted in glow-in-the-dark red on the wall above a urinal in the men’s room of a jazz club where King is performing. Midway through the film, Richard’s character dies of an overdose for no apparent reason (story-wise) other than perhaps writer-director James B. Harris’s concern that he might bring more oxygen and light than his otherwise claustrophobic fantasy could bear. This was, after all, the same James B. Harris who, nine years earlier, walked away from his production partnership with Stanley Kubrick over what he believed was Kubrick’s misguided decision to adapt Peter George’s cold war novel Red Alert as a comedy and call it Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

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  Although Richard is onscreen for less than five minutes of Sidney Poitier’s Uptown Saturday Night, he manages to steal the scene—if not the entire movie—out from under Bill Cosby and Poitier both. (Screenwriter Richard Wesley had originally envisioned Redd Foxx and Richard in the Cosby and Poitier roles.) Penelope Gilliatt, reviewing the 1974 comedy for the New Yorker, calls Richard’s performance as private detective Sharp-Eye Washington masterly: “He takes not the faintest notice of his clients’ shy attempt to hire him.” While they regard his quick-wittedness as the mark of a good detective, his “mind is obviously more on making a quick exit, which he does by way of window and a fire escape—or possibly a water pipe—waving goodbye professionally as if he had everything under control.”