Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him

by David Henry

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  The cover of Ebony’s October 1980 issue shows Richard perched on the hood of a Rolls Royce in a baggy white sweat suit with a pink towel around his neck, his arms raised in a flaccid pose as though flexing his muscles but not really. His smile is empty, his eyes are blank. The headline “I’ve Been Tried by Fire—Now I’m a New Man” recalls his line (and variations attributed to both George Carlin and W. C. Fields) “Cocaine made a new man out of me. And he wanted some, too.”

  The photos accompanying the interview by managing editor Charles L. Sanders show Richard with bandaged hands and a cigarette dangling as he leafs through a pile of get-well cards sent in by fans, shares a light lunch with his aunt Dee, and plays chess with David Banks. The article trumpets his newfound love of life. He has straightened up, he says, and is starting fresh, cleaning house, getting rid of the people who pulled him down.

  Richard was furious. Furious with his weak-ass self for what he had done. Disgusted with the people he thought he could trust, who said they loved him and then came in and looted his house. Took everything. Things Mama gave him. The crinkly old hundred-dollar bills her people carried upriver when they got run out of New Orleans that she never would spend so she would never be broke. Those were gone, too. He felt like crying.

  He had given up jokes, and now he was one. Dudes would strike a match, bob it up and down, and say, “Check this. You know what this is? Richard Pryor running down the street.” (Okay, that was pretty good. He might use that one.) But all the supermarket tabloids and People magazines with their inflammatory, pun-happy headlines about how he was the hottest thing in show business. Even Film fucking Comment. Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote a deep, moving piece about him and they had to go and change the title to “The Man in the Great Flammable Suit.” Motherfuckers. They call themselves educated. Didn’t they know fire was the only way he could save himself? The only thing that could purify his soul? Didn’t they teach the basics anymore?

  It’s everybody’s favorite story: Somebody dies and comes back to life. Jesus did it best, returning for a few hours, perhaps—no more than a day judging by scriptural chronology—then ascending forthwith to glory. But what kind of hero plays the fool by returning from the dead and then lingering around for another twenty-five years, a pitiable imitation of his former self?

  In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s time, there were no second acts in American life. Now, it seems, the second act is all. The years of hard work and achievement that bring fame or stardom merely count as the qualifying round, a setup for the crash and burn. That’s the show everybody wants to see.

  In this, too, Richard Pryor was a pioneer.

  After the fire, Richard perversely turned the myth of the hero on its head. When offered a way out of his devil’s bargain, he took it. He exercised the escape clause and never looked back.

  Richard Pryor the revolutionary, game-changing artist was pretty much finished. But Richard Pryor the celebrity movie star was just getting started. When Richard walked out onstage as a presenter at the 1981 Academy Awards ceremony, he was greeted with a standing ovation.

  Today, Richard’s rightful legacy as the world’s most brilliant stand-up comedian—even as he kicked to pieces the very notion of what stand-up comedy could be—has been largely overshadowed by the string of mostly mediocre movies he churned out in the 1980s. This is a travesty of the same magnitude as the fact that Frank Sinatra is now identified with “My Way,” the most un-Sinatra song in his catalog. There’s no drinking to forget, no blues in the night, no angel eyes, no ring-a-ding-ding. Or like Louis Armstrong, who, after setting the skies ablaze in an outpouring of work that almost single-handedly defined the shape of jazz, has come to be known for a straightforward cover of a middling show tune (“Hello, Dolly”) and a sappy ballad (“Wonderful World”) on which he doesn’t even play his horn. So Richard now is best known as Gene Wilder’s sidekick and for such atrocities as The Toy.

  Richard Donner’s queasy remake of the French film Le Jouet (1976, starring Pierre Richard), The Toy, writes Julian Upton, is “a witless and degrading farrago that casts Pryor as an expensive plaything for a spoiled little white boy. The Toy could have had allegorical potential, not just regarding Pryor’s career but for all those ethnic actors in Hollywood, but it fell far short of any such insight, and existed solely to show Pryor freaking out and looking scared.”

  One such scene early on in The Toy has Pryor caterwauling in bulging-eyed fright as he goes rolling head over heels down a department-store toy aisle in an inflatable Wonder Wheel. (This comes approximately eighteen minutes into the movie, which is as much as anyone enamored of Richard Pryor’s genius can comfortably watch in a single sitting.)

  “It’s a horrible, post-pro-slavery movie,” says Richard’s daughter Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor. “There are people who come up to me and say their favorite movie is The Toy, and I feel like saying, ‘Well, you’re racist.’ It’s very disturbing. I have not let my children watch that movie.”

  Elizabeth had been there on the set when her father and Jackie Gleason were filming The Toy. Richard always brought the family, says Elizabeth.

  Family was important to him. He made it a priority. He brought his children with him to things. We were on the set; we went to premieres and plays. It astounds me in retrospect, that he was able to do as much as he did, knowing what kinds of drugs he was using and the amount of alcohol.

  My father was such a sweetheart, but he could be horrible and he was attracted to horrible people, he really was attracted to some dark people, and I don’t just mean that in a drug-addicty sense. I never knew who was doing drugs and who wasn’t. My sister [Rain] is so different from me. She always understood what was going on around her. She would say to me, years later, things about “all the whores Daddy had around him,” and I was like, “What!” I was like, “You mean his friends that he would have over named Tiger and . . . ?” My brain doesn’t work like that. I just thought my father had a lot of different girlfriends. Some of the nicer people were prostitutes that he had around him, but some of the people he brought into his life were just truly terrible people.

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  A little more than a year after the fire and four years into their brutal on-again, off-again relationship, Richard and Jennifer Lee were married August 16, 1981, in Hawaii, in an intimate ceremony attended by a few friends, including Richard’s lawyer Skip Brittenham, who greeted Jennifer with a pen and a prenup. Alone in their room that night, Jennifer slipped into her wedding nightgown. Richard rolled over, turned out the light and told her good night. “Richard? Why the hell are you giving me the freeze on this night of all nights?” A glass Richard grabbed up from the nightstand barely missed her head, shattering against the wall with such force, a triangle-shaped shard lodged in the wood. “I can’t believe you just did that!”

  Richard leaped out of bed, grabbed her by the neck, slammed her head against the wall, and threw her on the floor. “Believe this, bitch. I’ll fucking kill you.” Jennifer ran outside and fell sobbing into the wet grass. She ripped her nightgown to shreds, stuffed it in the trash, put on a T-shirt, and cried herself to sleep on the living room couch. The next morning, she awoke to hear Richard on the phone in the next room asking Skip Brittenham if he could have the marriage annulled.

  “We patch things up,” Jennifer writes, “but the first blood has been spilled on our clean slate of matrimony.”

  The marriage continued in much the same vein for the next four months. In January 1982, once filming for Live on the Sunset Strip had been completed, the couple chartered a fully staffed hundred-foot-yacht for a belated two-week honeymoon cruise in the Caribbean. We’ll spare you the details. They are more of the same: glassware hurled, faces lacerated, deaths threatened, heads pummeled, hearts melted. Suffice it to say, the honeymoon brought their marriage to a swift end. “I’ve never met a man who needed love so badly and resisted it so much,” Jennifer writes.

  Not to say that Richard Pryor wa
sn’t loved; he simply could not trust anyone who said so. Those who knew him up close saw a man who felt undeserving of love, undeserving of most everything good that came his way. Richard at times mocked, abused, and pushed away those who loved him most. It’s as though he put them through hell as a test: You say you love me? Then here, take this. Let’s see if you love me now, motherfucker.

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  Live on the Sunset Strip was filmed over two nights in December of 1981. The first night was disastrous. There were problems with the sound system and the lights were set overly bright to accommodate cinematographer Haskell Wexler and his crew. Richard relied on Paul Mooney for cues—and reassurance—but couldn’t locate him in the audience. (An easy solution would have been to let Mooney wear the Day-Glo red tuxedo a friend of Jennifer’s had designed especially for Richard. Even Jennifer conceded that it made him look like “a monkey on acid.”)

  Richard walked onstage the first night and right away began talking about the fire and his freebasing, which cast a pall over the eager audience, packed with invited friends and well-wishers. Richard started shaky and never really found his groove. Less than halfway through his planned performance, Richard put himself and the audience out of their collective misery. He stopped midsentence. “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” he told them. “I’m not funny anymore. It’s better if I leave.” He set the mic down on the stool and walked off.

  Friends from the audience followed him out to his dressing-room trailer where they all held hands while the Reverend Jesse Jackson led them in a prayer for Richard in his hour of need. Richard, standing among them, looked shell-shocked and embarrassed.

  The experience left Richard badly shaken.

  He’d tried to come back too soon after the “accident,” everyone agreed in retrospect. Still, the producers had a movie to make. They talked him into giving the concert another try. It went much smoother the second night. Meticulous editing helped pick up the pace and eliminated the missteps and false starts that had marred the concert itself.

  Richard’s reenactment of the weeks-long freebase binge that led up to the fire contains some of his most fearless and personally revealing material ever. He turns his freebase pipe into a character that offers him refuge and assurance: “Time to get up, Rich, time for some smoke. Come on, now, we’re not gonna do anything today. Fuck your appointments—me and you are just gonna hang out in this room together.” Soon enough, the pipe gets the upper hand in the relationship. “You let me get a little low last night. I don’t like that.”

  “Only gradually,” Roger Ebert wrote in his review, “do we realize that the pipe is speaking in the voice of Richard Nixon.”

  He stops short of outright admitting that he’d deliberately set himself on fire, although he danced around other explanations, dropping coy rhetorical hints that it may not have been entirely accidental.

  “Have you ever heard of a motherfucker burning up freebasing other than me? If nobody else burned up freebasing, why do you think it happened to me? I did not burn up freebasing. I burned up because I quit freebasing.”

  Now here’s how I really burned up. My friends really know how it happened, okay? Usually before I go to bed, I have a little milk and cookies. One night I had that low-fat milk and that pasteurized shit, and I dipped my cookie in it and the shit blew up.

  That was a joke. A gag writer brought it to him and Richard Pryor paid for it.

  Live on the Sunset Strip was released on March 12, 1982, one week to the day after John Belushi was found in his bungalow at the Chateau Marmont dead of an overdose—too soon to assign any intentional meaning to the shot of the iconic West Hollywood hotel that appears in the film’s opening sequence.

  IS COMEDY STAND-UP POETRY?

  Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

  —Kurt Vonnegut

  Self-proclaimed comediologist and professor of English at New Mexico Highlands University, Eddie Tafoya makes a case that Live on the Sunset Strip is a modern American answer to Dante’s Inferno. “Just as Dante did for the world at the beginning of the Renaissance, Pryor provides for twentieth-century America a literary and spiritual assessment of the times. “In his immensely entertaining The Legacy of the Wisecrack: Stand-Up Comedy as the Great American Literary Form, Tafoya breaks Richard’s filmed performance down into twenty-eight separate bits, which he then roughly equates to the Inferno’s thirty-four cantos, and arrives at the conclusion that Richard is perhaps “the only person of the last century able to venture into the depths of this particular Hell.”

  Live on the Sunset Strip “belongs to the world of classical literature,” Tafoya writes.

  When taken as a single unit, the twenty-eight bits included in the performance tell a story with a classic mythological structure, one that begins with a rebirth and ends with a dual baptism by fire and water, a story that follows closely the initiation-separation-return hero cycle Joseph Campbell describes in his seminal book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

  As with Dante, the venture into the Dark Wood is initiated by the loss of female love. Just as Beatrice’s love is lost with her death and then returns with the message from Virgil, Mama Bryant’s love is lost and then resurrected in the person of Jennifer.

  Tafoya offers no evidence that Richard had any particular knowledge of or interest in Dante’s fourteenth-century epic. For this, we hold him blameless. The all-embracing scholar Guy Davenport published an essay that laid out in meticulous detail how Eudora Welty had transmuted the symbolism and imagery of the Greek myth of Persephone, queen of the underworld, in her novel Delta Wedding. When they later had occasion to meet, Welty chided Davenport in her playful way that it was news to her that Delta Wedding had anything to do with Persephone. That made no difference at all, Davenport insisted. The story, he said, had known it for her. Stories can do that. Just as Richard’s characters were wiser and more clear-eyed in their understanding of the world than he ever managed to be in navigating in his own life. But when he was all alone in command of a bare stage with no obstacles, he could go with them anywhere and not stumble.

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  Is stand-up comedy literature? It is if you accept Ezra Pound’s contention that literature is “news that stays news.” The oldest, mustiest, and most venerated literature we have managed to flourish for centuries as popular entertainment, delivered by performers equipped with nothing but breath, gesture, facial expression, and memory.

  Is it poetry? Our answer comes, fittingly enough, from Pound’s lifelong friend and sometime tormentor, the physician and poet William Carlos Williams, who, when he wasn’t treating jaundiced factory workers or delivering babies, wrote stanzas such as this, often on the backs of prescription pads while pulled over in his car on the side of a road in Rutherford, New Jersey. “It is difficult to get news from poetry,” he wrote, “yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

  “I GUESS THAT’S A SMILE. I HOPE THAT’S HIS FACE”

  “Richard’s black and doesn’t have the same career opportunities,” said Paul Schrader. “This is a racist society: people aren’t offering him the Oliver Sacks role that Robin Williams got in Awakenings.” The only role he ever got that had not been specifically written for a black actor was Corporal Eddie Keller, a returning Vietnam vet in an adaptation of James Kirkwood’s novel Some Kind of Hero.

  Eddie is released from a POW camp and comes home to find that his wife has borne him a daughter and fallen in love with another man. His mother has suffered a stroke and is now in a nursing home costing twelve hundred dollars a month, but his wife and her boyfriend lost all his savings in a business venture and the army is withholding his back pay because, in exchange for medical help for a dying buddy, he had signed a statement presented by his cap
tors admitting that the United States was conducting the war illegally.

  Once Paramount had signed Richard Pryor, they decided the movie ought to be a comedy. Some moments in the film are genuinely funny, but the jokes are jarringly off-key in what began as the earnest story of a man overwhelmed by absurdity as he tries to reassess his life. (Example: Eddie uses a water pistol to rob a bank, but the ruse gives way when—wait for it—the pistol starts to leak. Why on earth would he—a corporal in the 101st Airborne—fill the thing with water in the first place?)

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  The brutal opening scenes, set in a POW camp, are by far the best part of the film. For those first twenty minutes, Richard gives one of the best dramatic performances of his career. After that promising start, Some Kind of Hero goes wobbly. The movie works as well as it does only because Richard plays it straight. Vincent Canby, reviewing in the New York Times, wrote, “The performance, if not the script, is a series of revelations of the singular Pryor talent as the actor inhabits a particular character,” and he declares it Richard’s “most complete, most honest characterization to date in a fiction film.”

  Costar Margot Kidder detected a recurring pitfall in that “most directors didn’t direct him, they just let him go, thinking suddenly he could turn in a brilliant performance just by—I don’t know what they thought. They were a little intimidated by him.” Kidder admits that she “fell in love with him in two seconds flat.”

  Shooting a love scene, they nervously got in bed together.

  Then he looked up, and it was very genuine, and he went, “(Gasps) Richard Pryor’s in bed with Lois Lane!’ He was really adorable. He was a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful man. Much underrated as a human being. I mean, he was really generous and kind and thoughtful, and I think the best actor I’d worked with, in the sense of when you were in a scene with him, it was like doing a dance. He didn’t miss an eyelash-flicker. He was so in the present. And I remember saying to him, “God, you’re really a good actor. Why does everybody insist you be funny all the time?”