by David Henry
Richard Pryor was the first black American spoken-word artist to avoid this. Although he reprised the history of black American comedy—picking what he wanted from the work of great storytellers like Bert Williams, Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley, Nipsey Russell, LaWanda Page, and Flip Wilson—he also pushed everything one step further. Instead of adapting to the white perspective, he forced white audiences to follow him into his own experiences.
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Even Richard’s most triumphant LPs deliver but a slice of Richard’s genius as a stand-up comic. So much of his performance is physical—his facial expressions, contortions, his mimicry/mimetic movements. If not for Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, the full glory of a Richard Pryor performing at the height of his powers and firing on all cylinders would have been lost to posterity, the stuff of legend. But the movie exists. It is proof that on the night of December 28, 1978, in Long Beach, California, at least, no one could touch him.
But what of the countless unrecorded and vaguely recalled routines Richard conjured up in clubs, on the road—settings where his genius most reliably took wing—that lived only in the space of a moment, never to be seen or heard again? Like other true artists—Bob Dylan, for example—even on his major tours when he performed the same bits night after night, he never did them the same way twice.
We sometimes come across tantalizing scraps of recollected performances, such as the one sociologist and jazz enthusiast Joan Thornell saw at the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C. Richard did a series of one-man skits, concluding with his portrayal of Richard Nixon as the devil. “The transformation visually was something, and he was right on it . . . The lights went red, and he got into it as an actor would get into a role. He out-Laurenced Olivier.” Thornell attended the show with a psychiatrist friend who declined the opportunity to meet Richard after the show. “That man is so disturbed that he frightens me,” was his diagnosis. “I fear for him. I fear for his safety. He doesn’t have any personal defenses. These have left him. He’s very interesting, but very frightening.”
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Fortunately, David Brenner was at the Improv in New York the night Richard did this bit about a nine-year-old kid on the roof of a tenement building, stoned, and threatening to jump off and kill himself. Here’s Brenner’s re-creation of the scene:
So a crowd gathers. There’s the white priest and the black minister and the white cops and the gang members and the people screaming for him to jump . . . I think he even put the mayor in there somewhere. And of course Richie played all those parts, plus the nine-year-old kid. It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen or heard in my life. He was such a great actor. When he became these people, he was those people. When he became the white cop who goes up and tried to talk him out of it, he was this white cop. You know how Richie could do those great white voices: “Well, uh, what are you doing, son? Do you really want to jump?” And when he became that nine-year-old boy, he was a nine-year-old boy on the precipice of a roof in Harlem ready to jump. And the kid was hysterically funny. The lines he came up with for this kid . . . The routine went on for fifteen minutes . . . twenty minutes, whatever it was. And then Richie stops talking. He stares down like he’s up on top of this roof at the edge of the stage. And he jumps.
He jumps.
It ends with the nine-year-old boy, stoned, leaping off the roof and killing himself. He lands hard with both feet on the floor and then walks off down the aisle, through the audience, in dead silence. Richie took an audience where there were people wiping their faces with tears from laughing so hard, to people actually crying, all in a millisecond. It’s still the most devastating thing I’ve ever seen a comedian do.
A late-afternoon sun pushes in through the drawn Venetian blinds. The room is crowded with a hospital bed, vital function monitors, and a rolling table scattered with prescription bottles. Richard wears a plush dressing gown open at the neck revealing savage scars from extensive third-degree burns, scars that have grown hard and leatherlike. A large console television occupies the opposite wall, and the fizzy revelry of a game show seems to mock the convalescent gloom of the waning day.
Richard squints his eyes against a harsh light, peering out through the blinds. His hands are unsteady as he fumbles for a cigarette and a plastic butane lighter that repeatedly sparks but fails to ignite. He finds a match.
Richard nods, half dozing through a TV newscast, the cigarette smoldering between twitching fingers, as a news anchor interrupts with breaking news and announces the death of comedian Richard Pryor.
It takes a few moments to fully grasp what’s being said. Richard tries to call out, but is unable to speak. He frantically pushes the Call button on the controls next to his bed, but there is no immediate response.
Richard fumbles in his nightstand, scattering pill bottles and overturning a water glass. He lifts a Magnum pistol from the drawer. It wobbles, heavy in his shaking hands, as he aims it in the direction of the TV.
The first shot is wild, missing the screen but splintering the corner of the cabinetry. Using both hands to steady his aim, Richard fires again, this time blasting out the TV screen, shattering the image of Eddie Murphy, standing at the gate outside his home in Beverly Hills, having begun a spontaneous eulogy.
Rocco Urbisci recalls that Richard was in a panic while preparing for Live on the Sunset Strip. He had an hour and a half to fill and he didn’t know if he could do it. He had the married-to-a-honky-ass-bitch routine, the trip to Africa with the gazelles and the lions, the funky-smelling hack driver, his realization that there are no niggers, and his whole freebase-inferno thing, but the pressure was on and he was still coming up short. Everybody was rooting for him, but he knew they would be secretly delighted if he fell on his ass.
He had this one other bit, too, about the one time he’d truly been brave. He pulled a gun—a starter’s pistol, really—on Mafioso club owners in Youngstown, Ohio (Dean Martin’s cousins, probably, from over in Stubenville), when he was touring the Chitlin’ Circuit with Satin Doll and the man said they weren’t going to get paid. He had the accent down, but he didn’t know any Italian words. He called Rocco.
Ring, ring, ring . . .
“Rocco? It’s Richie.”
“Hey, Richie. What’s up?”
“What’s the funniest word for a kind of food in Italian?”
That’s easy. “Scungilli.”
Perfect.
“It means squid.”
Richard didn’t give a fuck what it meant. It was funny.
He went out there and made up four or five words just riffing on the word scungilli. “Hey, Carmichael, give him a plate of sunninio, some fugazi, sprinkle a little scuggi on it, some guzolli . . .”
“If George Carlin had asked me about scungilli,” says Rocco, “he would have done three minutes on the etymology of the word and done it exactly the same way every night. And both bits would have been genius.”
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And then there was the afternoon Richard called Rocco up, speaking in a whisper, all conspiratorial-like, the way he always did when mischief was afoot.
“Rocco,” he said. “It’s Richie.”
“Oh. Hey, Richie. What’s up?”
“Come over to the house for dinner, but don’t bring your wife.”
“Okay. I won’t bring my wife.”
“I’m not being disrespectful, it’s just guys.”
Richard could have called anybody, but this was for Rocco. He knew Rocco would love this, and he needed a witness.
“I’m sitting there at his table,” Rocco told us. “I’m the only white guy. Across from me is Miles Davis. At the other end of the table is Oscar Peterson. I don’t say a thing. There’s nothing for me to say. Then Miles Davis says, ‘Rich, who’s the cracker?’
“Richard told him who I was. We went in his den and Oscar Peterson played for an hour.
“Now,” he said, his voice catching with emotion, “you tell me how much that’s worth.”
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People we’ve spoken with in the course of writing this book have, one after another, expressed regret that they had not gone to visit Richard in the confinement of his final years. One who did visit him often was Robert Townsend. He sprang from his chair at Joe’s kitchen table one December morning and enacted for us a scene he had witnessed in Richard’s living room. A highly animated Hispanic caregiver was giving a tour of the house to a newly hired employee. She pointed to the framed photos of Richard posed with his famous pals, attempting in vain to impress upon her the magnitude of the man it was now her job to attend. There was a glazy-eyed Richard posing with a glazy-eyed Robin Williams. Richard with Jack Nicholson, Dave Letterman, Mitzi Shore, Eddie Murphy . . .
“Sí, sí.” Townsend nodded, in character as Richard’s new caregiver, then smiled and said, in practiced English, “Nice family.”
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In 2002, Pryor and Jennifer Lee married for a second time, a bond they entered into primarily for the purpose of granting Jennifer the authority to oversee his care and manage his affairs. She dug in and fended off all comers, especially children and ex-wives. Their visits—those she allowed to visit—were strictly limited and closely monitored. Even at Richard’s funeral, Jennifer’s guest list was strictly enforced. Deboragh Pryor and Janis Gaye, wife of Marvin and Richard’s dear friend of more than thirty years, were turned away.
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On a Christmas getaway to Hawaii with his children in 1983, Richard experienced what he described as a moment of clarity. It was December 20. His daughters begged him to come with them to the beach, but he stayed back at the house by himself so he could smoke his base.
“I looked at myself. I was alone in the house. I said, ‘Richard, how did you end up back here? Alone.’ It was like myself going, ‘You schmuck, what are you doing?’ ” He had smashed or thrown pipes away so many times before. “This time was different because I wanted it so bad. I dropped it all in the garbage. And I went to the beach and I found my kids.”
An avid fisherman who never learned to swim, he allowed Rain to lead him into the water. It was, says Rain, “an expression of trust, almost unheard of for him.”
She cradled his body, keeping him buoyed on his back in the supportive salt water out beyond the breaking waves. It was beautiful.
“I’ll tell you,” he wrote. “It was that instant, man, something happened to me. Something really big . . . It was like in the hospital when I started feeling grateful that I was alive.”
He opened his eyes and understood he was alone. Rain had let go. It was just him and him alone, floating on the surface. That sound of the ocean’s water lapping at his ears may have been his children, back on shore, clapping.
EPILOGUE: GOING TO MEET THE MAN
Our final meeting with Richard Pryor took place on Monday, September 9, 2002, the day after our grandmother, Edna Haltiwanger Derrick, died at age ninety-three.
Jennifer Lee Pryor threw open the door before we even rang the bell. With a cigarette poised aloft in one hand, she greeted us each with hugs. She was asking us a question. Maybe something about if we had any trouble finding the place, but our attention was fixed on the slumped figure with his back to us parked in a wheelchair in the center of the room.
His caregiver, a motherly Hispanic woman with an easy smile, stood by at her post with a plastic tub of supplies: soft washcloths and medical-looking devices of uncertain purpose. Jennifer placed her hand on Richard’s shoulder, her voice going up half an octave and a few decibels whenever she spoke to him. “These are the guys who are writing about you,” she reminded him. The project we had come to discuss that day was a screenplay based on his life.
His hands were flopping in his lap. The ravages of multiple sclerosis. He summoned up the effort to suck back some drool and said a simple hello.
We told Richard about our grandmother, about how she had taught her Ladies’ Bible Class at Thrift United Methodist Church in Paw Creek, North Carolina, just the previous Sunday, as she had done most every week for the past half century or so. He, having no choice, listened with rapt attention.
We got a laugh from Richard when Joe—we forget how the subject came up—quoted what our mother had said to him as he was approaching his fortieth birthday. “You know that midlife crisis you’re supposed to have?” she had said to him. “Well, I have some advice for you—skip it.”
Richard Pryor laughed. A sharp, guttural bark but clearly a laugh.
“Midlife crises . . .” Jennifer repeated. “We know all about those, don’t we, Richard?” and she gave his head a playful rub. When she took her hand away, Richard’s caregiver, ever on duty to wipe away his drool, leaned down and pressed her face in his thinned gray hair and bestowed upon the crown of his head a kiss.
He was tired. His grunted replies were growing softer, the spark in his eyes dimming. We said our good-byes with a squeezing of hands amid talk of big plans and assurances of good things ahead. Neither of us saw him again save once, in a vision, through a glass darkly, on his way out.
JOE’S POSTSCRIPT
In early December of 2005, only a few short months after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast and raised the water levels around New Orleans high enough to breach its faulty levees and swallow much of that beloved city whole, British singer/songwriter Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint—pianist, songwriter, producer, arranger and patriarch of Crescent City musicians—were holed up in a recording studio on Piety Street in the neighborhood of Bywater, just on the bowl’s rim of the city’s lower Ninth Ward.
The Piety Street studio is housed in a late-nineteenth-century building that had once been a post office and, as such, is a heavy slab fortress, standing flat and gray on a quiet corner. On December 10 of that wicked 2005 season, it was a rare building being occupied along that stretch of the ward, and one of the few that had electricity and running water (though it was still without phone service). The floodwaters had stopped a mere block away from the building’s front door, and when one stepped outside of its bunkerlike confines after dark, the surrounding row houses and storefronts were darker than the night sky, and lifeless by comparison.
Late on this Saturday night, Elvis, Allen, myself (being their producer), our engineer, and a small band of musicians were working doggedly to finish the project we’d begun eleven days earlier in Los Angeles, everyone exhausted, raw and emotional, charged and anxious, as we hurried to add a few last flourishes to some sixteen songs before the curtain came down in earnest, and all of us would scatter either home or back out on the road, far from this seemingly godforsaken war zone.
All in attendance were bleary and stooped. The horn players, natives of New Orleans, had, to a man, all lost their homes. Allen Toussaint moved through the room with an elegant buoyancy that defied not only his own losses (friends, a home, a lifetime’s worth of possessions), but the weight of seeing his beloved hometown washed away to a ruin that was as heartbreaking as it was preventable.
Pushing on toward midnight, Allen stood in a dark, glass-walled isolation booth, layering a deft backing vocal to one of his own songs cut earlier that afternoon. He was lit dimly from below by a single small bulb clamped to his music stand. The lights of the control room, though few, were enough to reflect the room’s own image back from the glass, rendering Allen barely visible on the other side of it, and then only as a faint, floating, ghostly presence . . . his gray afro and thick mustache catching shards of light as he nodded and grooved along to the music he heard through headphones.
As tape was being spooled back to the beginning of a verse, I peered hard at Allen’s face as it continued to bob and weave in the silence between takes, and I offered, without much forethought, “Allen, you know, in this light, you look just like Richard Pryor—had he taken better care of himself, of course. You look like his ghost moving in that room.”
Allen said not a word to me in response to this but met my gaze intently, smiled broa
dly, and nodded, affirming his own understanding of how he might appear to me in that moment.
Toward the end of that same hour, my cell phone rang loudly from the back of the control room. Everyone turned to look, since none of us present had ever been able to find coverage within the cold, thick walls of the old building.
Scrambling down the hall and out onto the frigid, pitch black street, hoping not to lose the call, I said, “Hello?” and at first mistook the noise on the other end for pure static, only to realize that far from this decimation, in Southern California my wife stood joyfully crowded in a theater full of revelers for our son’s winter holiday concert. She didn’t speak but simply held the phone high above her head as people sang and cheered and the high school jazz band lurched into a raucous swing number. And then the call faded.
I stood teary and alone now on the corner of Piety and Dauphine streets and noticed something I hadn’t a moment before: a half block away, a single strand of Christmas lights threaded around a wrought-iron stair rail . . . blinking on and off from the stoop of a seemingly abandoned and powerless townhouse. The joy and music of the quick call had disappeared in my hand, but the phone still showed a signal and blinked with a new message waiting—received, oddly, in unison with the call that had just sneaked through somehow.
“Hey, Joe? Joey . . . hello. I’m sure you’ve had dozens of calls already, but I just wanted to say, you know . . . that I am really sorry. I just heard.”
Richard was dead.
Just nine days following his sixty-fifth birthday, Richard Pryor, whom I had come to know and who had so intensely occupied my thoughts and work for so long now, had finally loosed those spidery fingers and let himself rise like smoke, up and out of his frail, useless, earthly frame to which he’d been tethered for years, unable to speak—but not unable to hear and brood.
Drifting, I concluded, on his way to making one last haunting stop in Peoria, Richard seemed now to have materialized in front of me for a fleeting moment of farewell in the frightened, fighting city of New Orleans that, like himself, had for so long wildly—scandalously, anomalously—flowered up in glorious defiance of all that surrounded it; a strange specter of beauty laid at the threshold of an otherwise dispirited country never far from the throes of violent transformation.
