by Hilton Als
Pryor: It was hell, because I had nobody to talk to. I was a child, right, and I grew up seeing my mother...and my aunties going to rooms with men, you understand...
Walters: Your grandmother ran a house of prostitution or a whorehouse.
Pryor: Three houses. Three.
Walters: Three houses of prostitution. She was the chief madam.
Pryor: ...There were no others.
Walters: Okay...Who believed in you? Who cared about you?
Pryor: Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor the Third.
The isolation that Richard Pryor feels is elaborated on from time to time, like a bit he can’t stop reworking. The sad bit, he could call it, if he did bits anymore, his skinny frame twisting around the words to a story that goes something like this: born in Peoria, on December 1, 1940. “They called Peoria the model city. That meant they had the niggers under control.” Grew up in one of the whorehouses on North Washington Street, which was the house of his paternal grandmother, Marie Carter Pryor Bryant. “She reminded me of a large sunflower—big, strong, bright, appealing,” Pryor wrote in his 1995 memoir, Pryor Convictions, and Other Life Sentences. “But Mama, as I also called her, was also a mean, tough, controlling bitch.”
Pryor called his father’s mother Mama, despite the fact that he had a mother, Gertrude. When Richard’s father, Buck Carter, met Gertrude, she was already involved in Peoria’s nefarious underworld, and she soon began working in Marie’s whorehouse. Everything in Richard Pryor’s world, as he grew up, centered on Marie, and he never quite recovered from that influence. “I come from criminal people,” he told one radio interviewer. At the age of six, he was sexually abused by a young man in the neighborhood (who, after Richard Pryor became Richard Pryor, came to his trailer on a film set and asked for his autograph). And Pryor never got over the division he saw in his mother: the way she could separate her emotional self from her battered body and yet was emotionally damaged anyway.
“At least, Gertrude didn’t flush me down the toilet, as some did,” Pryor wrote in his memoir. “The only person scarier than God was my mother...One time Buck hit Gertrude, and she turned blue with anger and said ‘Okay, motherfucker, don’t hit me no more...Don’t stand in front of me with fucking undershorts on and hit me, motherfucker.’ Quick as lightning, she reached out with her finger claws and swiped at my father’s dick. Ripped his nutsack off. I was just a kid when I saw this.” Pryor records the drama as a born storyteller would—in the details. And the detail that filters through his memory most clearly is the rhythm of Gertrude’s speech, its combination of profanity and rhetoric. Not unlike a routine by Richard Pryor.
Pryor soon discovered humor—the only form of manipulation he had in his community of con artists, hookers, and pimps. “I wasn’t much taller than my daddy’s shin when I found that I could make my family laugh,” Pryor wrote.
I sat on a railing of bricks and found that when I fell off on purpose everyone laughed, including my grandmother, who made it her job to scare the shit out of people...After a few more minutes of falling, a little dog wandered by and poo-pooed in our yard. I got up, ran to my grandmother, and slipped in the dog poop. It made Mama and the rest laugh again. Shit, I was really onto something then. So I did it a second time. “Look at that boy! He’s crazy!” That was my first joke. All in shit.
When Pryor was ten years old, his mother left his father and went to stay with relatives in Springfield, Illinois, but Pryor stayed with his grandmother. In a biography by John and Dennis Williams, Pryor’s teacher Marguerite Yingst Parker remembered him as “perpetually exhausted, sometimes lonely, always likable...He was a poor black kid in what was then a predominantly white school, who didn’t mingle with his classmates on the playground.” Pryor often got through the tedium of school by entertaining his classmates. Eventually, Parker struck a deal with him: if he got to school on time, she would give him a few minutes each week to do a routine in front of the class. Not long afterward, Pryor met Juliette Whittaker, an instructor at the Carver Community Center. “He was about eleven, but looked younger because he was such a skinny little boy. And very bright,” she recalled in the Williams book. “We were rehearsing Rumpelstiltskin and he was watching. He asked if he could be in the play. I told him we only had one part left, and he said, ‘I don’t care. I’ll take anything. I just want to be in the play.’...He took the script home and, unbeknownst to anybody, he memorized the entire thing.”
When Pryor was in the eighth grade, a teacher who was fed up with his classroom routines asked him to leave school. He slowly became absorbed into the mundane working-class life that Peoria had to offer, taking a job at a packing plant, running errands. When he was seventeen, he discovered that the black woman he was seeing had also been sleeping with his father. Then, in an attempt to escape, Pryor enlisted in the army, in 1958. He was stationed in Germany, where he was involved in a racial incident: a young white soldier laughed too hard about the painful black parts in the Douglas Sirk film Imitation of Life, and Pryor and a number of other black inductees beat and stabbed him. Pryor went to jail, and when he was discharged, in 1960, he returned to his grandmother’s twilight world of street life and women for hire.
Pryor had some idea of what he wanted to be: a comedian like the ones he had seen on TV, particularly the black comedians Dick Gregory and Redd Foxx. He began performing at small venues in Peoria, telling topical jokes in the cadence of the time: “You know how to give Mao Tse-tung artificial respiration? No. Good!” The humor then “was kind of rooted in the fifties,” the comedian and actor Steve Martin told me. “Very straight jokes, you know. The dominant theme on television and in the public’s eye was something Catskills. Jokes. Punch lines.” And it was within that form that Pryor began to make a name for himself in the local clubs.
But Pryor was ambitious, and his ambition carried him away from Peoria. In 1961, he left behind his first wife and their child, “because I could,” and began working the nightclub circuit in places like East St. Louis, Buffalo, and Youngstown, Ohio. In 1963, he made his way to New York. “I opened Newsweek and read about Bill Cosby,” Pryor told Donnie Simpson. “That fucked me up. I said, ‘God damn it, this nigger’s doin’ what I’m fixin’ to do. I want to be the only nigger. Ain’t no room for two niggers.’” In New York, Pryor began appearing regularly at Café Wha?. By 1966, he had begun to make it nationally. He appeared on a show hosted by Rudy Vallee called On Broadway Tonight. Then on Ed Sullivan, Merv Griffin, and Johnny Carson—appearing each time with marcelled hair and wearing a black suit and tie that made him look like an undertaker. But his jokes were like placards that read “Joke”: “When I was young I used to think my people didn’t like me because they used to send me to the store for bread and then they’d move.” Or “I heard a knock on the door. I said to my wife, ‘There’s a knock on the door.’ My wife said, ‘That’s peculyar, we ain’t got no door.’”
He was feted as the new Bill Cosby by such show-business luminaries as Bobby Darin and Sid Caesar, and other comedians and writers counseled him to keep it that way: “Don’t mention the fact that you’re a nigger. Don’t go into such bad taste,” Pryor remembers being told by a white writer called Murray Roman. “They were gonna try to help me be nothin’ as best they could,” he said in the Rolling Stone interview. “The life I was leading, it wasn’t me. I was a robot. Beep. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Sands Hotel. Maids are funny. Beep...I didn’t feel good. I didn’t feel I could tell anybody to kiss my ass, ’cause I didn’t have no ass, you dig?”
A drug habit kicked in. Then, in 1967, while Pryor was doing a show in Las Vegas, he broke down. “I looked out at the audience,” Pryor wrote. “The first person I saw was Dean Martin, seated at one of the front tables. He was staring right back at me...I checked out the rest of the audience. They were staring at me as intently as Dean, waiting for that first laugh...I asked myself, Who’re they looking at, Rich?...And in that flash of introspection when I was unable to find an
answer, I crashed...I finally spoke to the sold-out crowd: ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ Then I turned and walked off the stage.”
He was through with what he’d been doing: “I was a Negro for twenty-three years. I gave that shit up. No room for advancement.”
In the following years—1968 through 1971—Pryor worked on material that became more or less what we know today as the Richard Pryor experience. A close friend, the comedian and writer Paul Mooney, took him to the looser, more politicized environs of Berkeley, and Pryor holed up there and wrote.
The black folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston once wrote that, although she had “landed in the crib of negroism” at birth, it hadn’t occurred to her until she left her hometown that her identity merited a legitimate form of intellectual inquiry. It was only after Pryor had left Peoria and wrested a certain level of success from the world that he was able to see his own negroism, and what made it unique. As Mel Watkins writes, in his book On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying, after Pryor moved to Berkeley and met the writers Cecil Brown and Ishmael Reed he discovered that “accredited intellectuals” could share “his affection and enthusiasm for the humor and lifestyles of common black folks.” Pryor also discovered Malcolm X’s speeches and Marvin Gaye’s album What’s Going On. Both taught him how to treat himself as just another character in a story being told. He distanced himself from the more confessional Lenny Bruce—whose work had already influenced him to adopt a hipper approach to language—and “Richard Pryor” became no more important than the winos or junkies he talked about.
Pryor began to reconstruct himself first through the use of sound—imagining the sound of Frankenstein taking LSD, for example, or a baby “being birthed.” His routines from this time regularly involved gurgles, air blown through pursed lips, beeps. He also began playing with individual words. He would stand in front of an audience and say “Goddamn” in every way he could think to say it. Or he’d say, “I feel,” in a variety of ways that indicated the many different ways he could feel. And as he began to understand how he felt he began to see himself, to create his body before his audience. He talked about the way his breath and his farts smelled, what he wanted from love, where he had been, and what America thought he was.
In those years, Pryor began to create characters that were based on his own experience; he explored the territory and language of his family and his childhood—that fertile and unyielding ground that most artists visit again and again. The producer George Schlatter, who watched Pryor’s transformation at a number of clubs in the late sixties and the early seventies, told me, “Richard grew up in a whorehouse. The language he used, he was entitled to it. Now the kids coming up, they use the word fuck and that becomes the joke. Richard used the word fuck on the way to the joke. It was part of his vocabulary. It was part of his life experience.” As Pryor began to recall his relatives’ voices, he became able to see them from the outside, not without a certain degree of fondness. “My aunt Maxine could suck a neckbone, it was a work of art,” he’d say. Or:
My father was one of them eleven o’clock niggers. [Voice becoming more high-pitched] Say, say, where you going, Richard? Say, huh? Well, nigger, you ain’t ask nobody if you could go no place. What the fuck, you a man now, nigger? Get a job, that’s what—yeah! I don’t give a fuck where you go, be home by eleven. You understand eleven, don’t you, nigger? You can tell time, can’t you?...Eleven o’clock, bring your ass here. I don’t mean down the street singing with them niggers, either. I ain’t getting your ass out of jail no more, motherfucker. That’s right. [Pause] And bring me back a paper.
Pryor’s routines became richer in depth, in imagination—rather like the characters Edgar Lee Masters created for his brilliant, problematic Spoon River Anthology. But the most popular and best-known of Pryor’s characters—Mudbone, an old black man from Tupelo, Mississippi, whom Pryor created in 1975—also shows how a Pryor character can be too well drawn, too much of a crossover tool. Mudbone spoke with a strong Southern dialect and his tales were directly descended from the slave narratives that told (as the critic Darryl Pinckney described them) “of spirits riding people at night, of elixirs dearly bought from conjure men, chicken bones rubbed on those from whom love was wanted.” From “Mudbone Goes to Hollywood”:
Old Negro Man’s Voice: There was an old man. His name was Mudbone...And he used to sit right here in front of the barbecue shop and he’d dip snuff...and he’d spit...He’d been in a great love affair. That right. He had a woman—he loved her very much—he had to hurt her, though, ’cause she fucked around on him. He said he knew she was fucking around ’cause I’d leave home and go to work and come back home, toilet seat be up...So I set a little old trap for her there. Went to work early, you know, always did get up early, ’cause I like to hear the birds and shit...So this particular morning, went on to work. Set my trap for this girl. She was pretty, too. Loved her. Sweet as she could be. Breast milk like Carnation milk. So I nailed the toilet seat down and doubled back and I caught that nigger trying to lift it up. So, say, Well, nigger, send your soul to heaven, ’cause your ass is mine up in here.
Mudbone was the character that Pryor’s audiences requested again and again. But, as Pauline Kael noted in her review of Live on the Sunset Strip, Pryor became tired of him: “Voices, ostensibly from the audience, can be heard. One of them calls, ‘Do the Mudbone routine,’ and, rather wearily, saying that it will be for the last time, Pryor sits on a stool and does the ancient storyteller [who] was considered one of his great creations. And the movie goes thud...Pryor looks defeated.”
And he should: Mudbone was the trick he turned and got tired of turning—a safe woolly-headed Negro, a comic version of Katherine Anne Porter’s old Uncle Jimbilly. Compare Mudbone, for example, to the innovative and threatening Bicentennial Nigger character: “Some nigger two hundred years old in blackface. With stars and stripes on his forehead, lips just a-shining.” “Battle Hymn” theme music, and Pryor’s voice becomes Stepin Fetchit–like. “But he’s happy. He happy, ’cause he been here two hundred years...Over here in America. ‘I’m so glad y’all took me out of Dahomey.’” Shuckin’ and jivin’ laugh. “‘I used to could live to be a hundred and fifty, now I dies of the high blood pressure by the time I’m fifty-two.’”
By 1973, Richard Pryor had become a force in the entertainment industry. He now appeared regularly in such diverse venues as Redd Foxx’s comedy club in Central L.A., where the clientele was mostly black, and the Improv, on Sunset Strip, which was frequented by white show-business hipsters. And he behaved as badly as he wanted to wherever he wanted to—whether with women, with alcohol, or with drugs. “I got plenty of money but I’m still a nigger,” he told a radio interviewer. He had become Richard Pryor, the self-described “black greasy motherfucker,” whose new style of entertainment was just one of many innovations of the decade—in music (Sly and the Family Stone and the Average White Band), in acting (Lily Tomlin and Ronee Blakley), and in directing (Martin Scorsese and Hal Ashby). Cultural rebellion and political activism defined hip in Hollywood then—an era that is all too difficult to recall now.
“The idea of a black guy going out and saying he fucked a white woman was outrageous...but funny,” Schlatter told me. “White women dug Richard because he was a naughty little boy, and they wanted some of that. He was talking about real things. Nobody was talking below the waist. Richard went right for the lap, man.”
Pryor had directed a film called Bon Appétit a few years before—the footage is now lost. “The picture opened with a black maid having her pussy eaten at the breakfast table by the wealthy white man who owned the house where she worked,” he recalled in Pryor Convictions. “Then, a gang of Black Panther types burst into the house and took him prisoner. As he was led away, the maid fixed her dress and called, ‘Bon appétit, baby!’”
Each time someone asked why “that nigger was crazy,” Pryor upped the ante by posing a more profound question. On a trip to a gun shop wit
h David Felton in the early seventies, for example, Pryor asked the salesman, “How come all the targets are black?” The salesman smiled, embarrassed. “Uh, I don’t know, Richard,” he said, shaking his head. “I just—” “No, I mean I always wondered about that, you know?” Pryor said.
Pryor’s edginess caught the attention of Mel Brooks, who was already an established Hollywood figure, and in 1972 Brooks hired him to work on a script called Black Bart, the story of a smooth, Gucci-wearing black sheriff in the eighteen-seventies American West. This was to be Pryor’s real crossover gig, not only as a writer but as an actor, but the leading role eventually went to Cleavon Little. Whatever the reason for not casting Pryor (some people who were involved with the movie told me that no one could deal with his drinking and his drug use), there are several scenes in the film (renamed Blazing Saddles) that couldn’t have been written by anyone else. One scene didn’t make it in. It shows a German saloon singer, LilI Von Schtupp, in her darkened dressing room with Bart, whom she is trying to seduce.
Lili: Let me sit next to you. Tell me, schatzi, is it true vat zey say about the way you people are gifted?...Oh, it’s twue, it’s twue, it’s twue, it’s twue.
Bart: Excuse me, you’re sucking my arm.
Pryor’s best performances (in films he didn’t write himself) date from these years. There is his poignant and striking appearance in Sidney J. Furie’s 1972 film Lady Sings the Blues. As the Piano Man to Diana Ross’s Billie Holiday, Pryor gives a performance that is as emotional and as surprising as his work in “Juke and Opal.” And then there is his brilliant comic turn as Sharp Eye Washington, the disreputable private detective in Sidney Poitier’s 1974 film, Uptown Saturday Night—a character that makes use of Pryor’s ability to convey paranoia with his body: throughout the movie, he looks like a giant exclamation point. And as Zeke Brown, in Blue Collar, Paul Schrader’s 1978 film about an automobile plant in Detroit, Pryor gives his greatest sustained—if fraught—film performance. In an interview with the writer Kevin Jackson, Schrader recalls his directorial début:
