Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  One didn’t need the supersensitivity of Richard Pryor to wonder: Why were the Panther stand-ins so free and easy with their berets and their blackness? Why, when Black Power made it onto prime-time TV, did the Partridge Family have to swoop in to save the ghetto? And less abstractly: Why, even when Richard was a “special guest star,” did he have to play second fiddle to the likes of David Cassidy and Danny Bonaduce? Richard’s frustration could be seen edging into his performance. When Danny swaggers with puffed chest alongside members of the Afro-American Cultural Society—so happy to be black!—Richard shoots Lou Gossett Jr. an incredulous look that says, in the words of an autobiographical screenplay Richard composed shortly afterward, “This can’t be happening to me.” And yet it was.

  Around forty-two seconds after 6:00 a.m. on February 9, 1971, Richard was lying naked in his bed in the Sunset Tower when he was awakened, along with the rest of Los Angeles, by a wrenching of the earth. His windows started rattling and popping out of their frames. He reached for his trusted companions—a samurai sword and a fifth of whiskey—and dragged himself outside. Los Angeles had become “the valley of the damned,” he recalled. Everyone was on the streets, alone, and shooting curious smiles at him—the black man left standing after the apocalypse—as if he “knew God or something.”

  The Sylmar Earthquake, as it became known, was the most powerful American temblor in two decades, the most destructive since 1933. It was so terrifying that eight of the fifty-five people whose lives it claimed died from heart attacks. Two hospital buildings crumbled; twelve overpasses collapsed into freeway lanes; broken gas lines set off hundreds of fires; and the aftershocks kept coming—at least sixteen big ones by the end of the day. Oddly and ominously, the tremor was centered in an area where no fault had previously been detected.

  For Richard the earthquake sealed his intuition that he was doomed in Los Angeles. “It was as if I was stuck to a funnel cloud that was tearing a path of destruction everywhere I went,” he remembered. “I sensed catastrophe around the corner and knew I had to get out.”

  At a show soon after, he was approached by Alan Farley, a gentle, shaggy-browed young man and one of his most erudite fans. Farley had a math degree from Cal Tech and, though white, had been chairman of the math department at the historically black Morehouse College; now he was living in Berkeley, working as a production assistant for the Pacifica flagship KPFA. When Alan casually offered Richard a ride up to the Bay Area and said he could crash at his Berkeley apartment for a spell, Richard took him up on both proposals. The Bay Area was the scene of Huey Newton’s trial and other countercultural spectacles; most important, it was not Los Angeles. Richard quickly scrambled his plans to make the move possible: a gig at the Gaslight in Greenwich Village was canceled, a week-long gig at San Francisco’s Basin Street West arranged in its place.

  After dreaming so big for half a decade in LA, Richard was ready to dream small, or just to sleep. He lay down in the backseat of Alan’s car as they drove up to the Bay Area and conked out. He brought with him not much more than the clothes on his back—traveling as light as when he had left Peoria, a no-name bound for the Chitlin Circuit, eight years before. Untethered, again.

  CHAPTER 14

  * * *

  I’m a Serious Mother

  Berkeley, 1971

  When Richard arrived in Berkeley in February 1971, he pursued his own version of the simple life. The trappings of his showbiz ascent—the Sunday baseball games with Aaron Spelling and Bobby Darin; the nights at the Daisy with the likes of Natalie Wood and Tony Curtis; the coke Olympics at the Redd Foxx Club, in which he competed with Jesse Owens–like intensity—he left behind in LA. In Berkeley, the mecca of the counterculture, he would try to whittle his life down and “learn to live on the least possible.” He would subsist, he said, on fruit—“an apple a day. And wear Levi suits and drive in a ’49 Packard and still be comfortable with it and not be uptight because of (my) surroundings.” He wanted to find his “lost soul” and thought the best way to start was “to cast off everything but the bare essentials . . . to renounce the past in order to discover the future.” As he wrote in his memoir: “House, car, clothes, women, friends—I tossed them all away.”

  Berkeley was a peculiar if perfect place for Richard to strip his life to the core—peculiar in that the city was a clamorous carnival of delights and distractions; perfect in that Richard was, like so many who migrated to Berkeley in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a seeker in search of himself. Starting in the fall of 1967, Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue had replaced San Francisco’s Haight Street as the main stem of hippie life in the Bay Area. It was the sort of street where drivers might find themselves taunted by someone in a bullfighting cape; where a police officer stood a fair chance of being tripped while in pursuit of a suspect on foot; where a long-haired man of college age couldn’t walk a few blocks without being propositioned by people dealing grass, speed, acid; where a group of street people sold tea from samovars and called themselves the Persian Fuckers. Novelist Ishmael Reed, who befriended Richard in Berkeley, remembered that the city was “crackling with information and ideas,” “sizzling” with the apocalyptic sense that “something great, something dramatic, was going to happen.”

  By 1971, the left in Berkeley was numerous, various, and pulsing with energies it could scarcely contain. The black revolution, the third-world revolution, the sexual revolution, the drug revolution, women’s liberation and gay liberation, the student movement, the prisoners’ rights movement, the environmental movement—all had put down roots in the city. The week that Richard arrived in town, the underground Berkeley Barb reported that three hundred demonstrators had protested FBI raids on two Berkeley communes by rushing the local FBI bureau, pounding on office doors, and baiting FBI agents with shouts such as “Come on out, motherfuckers!” and “You ripped off our dope. We want our dope back. What are you doing in there, getting high with our dope?”

  Even more telling, in its fervor and confusions, was a large-scale antiwar event held five days after the FBI protest. A crowd of more than three thousand took to the streets of downtown Berkeley to demonstrate against Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam War into Laos. A phalanx of the Women’s Brigade led the march, raising Pathet Lao and National Liberation Front flags and chanting, “Smash the State!” When a policeman grabbed a protester who had knifed the tire of a police car, half a dozen people clobbered the policeman until he had released his prisoner. When another police officer seized one of the clobberers, he was surrounded by a knot of protesters who ripped off his helmet, struck him to the ground, and kicked him in the head until he was lying in a pool of his own blood. Marchers felt an explosion, saw a soaring plume of black smoke: someone in their ranks, it seems, had stuck a fuse into the gas tank of an Atomic Energy Commission car and lit it.

  Yet for all the protest’s combative power, even the countercultural Barb judged it a failure. The crowd, it reported, acted like “a schizophrenic with multiple personalities, all at war with each other, crippling the whole body.” Rally organizers used their microphone time to attack one another, exposing the brewing feud between those who embraced violence and those who abhorred it. The two parties couldn’t agree on strategy—where to lead the people?—and so the rally dribbled to a close, the crowd dispersed with tear gas and wooden bullets. Ultimately it was just another day in Berkeley. A young woman composed a poem on a patch of lawn. The street musicians sang, without skipping a beat, “Hey, hey, the sun is shining bright, and I’m so very happy that I can’t keep myself from loving you.” Eight thousand miles away, the war in Laos pounded on, unchanged.

  In Berkeley, Richard found a mirror of his hopes and his disenchantment, and curiously enough, it may have been the feeling of shared alienation that was more galvanizing on a creative level. In Greenwich Village and the countercultural precincts of Los Angeles, he had already felt his audience’s appetite for the offbeat and had discovered his capacity to feed that hunger in ever-inventive w
ays. In the Bay Area, audiences were more than “far out.” They shivered with recognition at Richard’s bitterness about the American political scene, and thrilled when he sharpened his attack on their favorite targets—the war machine, institutionalized religion, the shallowness of the American dream—and twisted the knife.

  For the next seven months, Richard delved into his own agonies, exploring them from the inside out, revisiting the traumas of his life with an unblinking stare. He had been hurtling forward for eight years, trying desperately to hurtle upward; now he pressed the Pause button. He crawled into himself and ruminated. He experimented—in routines onstage, in bids at spontaneous poetry, in screenplays and in an avant-garde sound collage—with being unfunny. Death haunted his imagination. He fell into darker circles, let go of his obsession with the main chance, and reached for a new complexity in his performances, a new strength.

  Richard’s home base, at first, was the one-bedroom apartment of his fan Alan Farley, located in the downtown flatlands west of the University of California campus, not far from where the police fired tear gas a week before. Serendipitously, Richard had planted himself in the very epicenter of the Berkeley cultural earthquake. Known for its low rents, Richard’s new neighborhood attracted a fertile mix of Cal graduates looking to stay in the area on the cheap, hippies fleeing the high cost of living in San Francisco, and black locals with little stake in “the system.” In a survey of the electoral preferences of Berkeley’s black population in 1971, two political scientists found that the most radical blacks (those who supported, for instance, a separate police department for black Berkeley, with strong community control) lived in those mixed areas, like Richard’s, with a sizable infusion of young whites. Overwhelmingly black districts voted in a liberal, rather than radical, direction. The politics of Richard’s new neighborhood spoke, then, to a distinctive form of countercultural chemistry—the chain reaction where black groups like the Black Panther Party catalyzed the dreams of white radicals and, more surprisingly perhaps, the experiments of white radicals accelerated black political awakenings. Each group felt buoyed, or vindicated, by the convictions of the other.

  Richard and Alan’s relationship played out this chemistry on an intimate scale. A refugee from academia, Alan was remaking himself as a fledgling social critic, writing a “Media Monitor” column that stood up for the principle of free speech and attacked the timidity of network TV programming; Richard was free speech incarnate and someone who himself could benefit from Alan’s connections to KPFA, a hub of the Bay Area left, and other local institutions. During the workday, Alan managed the operations of KPFA; in his off-hours, he managed the operations of Richard. He gave Richard his bedroom, cooked meals for him, ferried him to friends’ homes at night, and made the odd business arrangement with a club owner, the press, or the radio station. Fortunately for posterity, he also followed Richard with taping equipment, recording his gigs, interviews, and radio shows, and lending the equipment to Richard when the aspiring auteur wanted to work out his ideas in real time.

  Richard kicked off his Bay Area sojourn on a triumphant and revealing note, with a successful weeklong engagement at the San Francisco nitery Basin Street West. Five years earlier, the Examiner’s Phil Elwood had complained that Richard was “unfunny and not original,” and was “insecure and ill at ease, despite his projected hipness.” Now Elwood, a high-profile critic of Bay Area nightlife, was knocked out by Richard’s performance, writing arguably the best review Richard had yet received—the sort of review that a performer clutches to his chest while falling asleep. Elwood pronounced Richard “a major figure among contemporary hip theatrical figures of American society,” an artist whose “stance, eyes, head, arms, cigarette-prop and even his pratfalls are handled with grace and perfect timing.”

  Elwood did more than praise Richard’s artistry, too. He underlined the political stakes of Richard’s new persona: “In the vernacular, he is one of the ‘baddest niggers’ around. That is, he’s one of the favorite acknowledged and respected spokesmen for the younger black community.” Elwood was probably exaggerating Richard’s “bad nigger” renown—‘Craps’ had yet to be released, and Basin Street West was one of the few nightclubs still open to Richard’s act—but his review had the assured air of righteous truth. Elwood noted Richard’s liberal use of “rough, raw and colorful words” and offered a ringing defense: “He will be offensive in vocabulary and theme only to those who are upset by words in themselves, or by reality.”

  Elwood was no outlier in praising Richard extravagantly. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Ralph Gleason crowned him “the very best satirist on the night club circuit.” Alan Farley took to the pages of the KPFA Folio to praise Richard’s “endless creativity” onstage, his “uncanny ability to perceive, evaluate and portray people and their attitudes accurately,” and his courage in facing the truth even though “it hurts him and it hurts us.” (The fact that Alan and Richard were housemates went unmentioned.) And Grover Sales, San Francisco magazine’s theater and film critic, hailed Richard regularly and vividly in his monthly column, calling him the “master of a hundred voices” and a “nervous, light-brown ferret” who “exposed the sickness of our time” by wielding “the salty, spermy motherwit of a black ghetto poolhall.” Bay Area critics all took Richard seriously as an artist and social commentator—and were among the local forces pushing him to take himself seriously, too.

  Richard soon demonstrated just how serious he could be. While staying at Farley’s apartment, he was approached by a producer at PBS to contribute some material to The Great American Dream Machine, an eclectic anthology program that mixed reportage with off-center comedy from the likes of Albert Brooks, Chevy Chase, and Marshall Efron. Targeted at younger viewers, the show cultivated a tilted sense of irony: a segment about the elderly utopia of Sun City might be set against, say, ten minutes of barroom palaver hosted by Studs Terkel or a pseudodocumentary about the “Famous School for Comedians,” where bow-tied lecturers demonstrated how to target someone with a cream pie (“Make sure that you hit one of three desirable areas”). Writing on spec for the show, Richard delivered “Uncle Sam Wants You Dead, Nigger,” a screenplay in tune with the antiwar rally that greeted his arrival in Berkeley. It was a scathing parable about a wasted life, and a veiled meditation on Richard’s own family life and his stint in the army.

  Richard’s screenplay tracked the life of Johnny, a young black man who’s set upon by voices: his father dismissing him as “just a heartache to me and your momma”; his mother lamenting that he dropped out of school; and a militant, named Dashiki, bidding him to fight his own fight and “join our army.” Johnny decides to enlist in the U.S. Army, partly to appease his father (to whom he’ll send his allotment money) and partly to live out his own dreams of grandeur. “I’m gonna get me some of them gooks, too, Jack,” he tells himself, “so when I go home, I’ll be a hero.” The screenplay then shifts to a field in the Vietnamese countryside, where a group of a farmers wave to the U.S. Army truck of Johnny’s regiment. Johnny thinks they’re simply waving, but his commanding officer thinks they’re signaling to bring on mortar fire and orders Johnny to kill them, which he does. Next, Johnny is ordered to harvest their ears for a body count, which he agrees to do, too, though with great reluctance.

  At the climax of the screenplay, Johnny looks at the bodies of his victims and sees the bodies of his own family, lying there dead. Before he can mutilate the bodies as ordered, a Vietnamese sniper in a distant bush fires at him; Johnny begins falling in slow motion. In the short film’s coda, we hear three voices marking his death as his body continues to fall to the ground: a black preacher eulogizing him with empty clichés (“he lived a good life, um hm”); a white guard at a graveyard, refusing to admit the body (“We don’t bury no niggers”); and Dashiki, with the last word, putting a harsh twist on the traditional military recruiting poster (“Uncle Sam wants you . . . dead, nigger”).

  It was Richard’s most straightforward politica
l statement yet. It underlined that the Vietnam War was an atrocity, a travesty that claimed the Vietnamese and young black Americans alike as its victims. It traced the violence not just to the officers ordering the killing but also, less obviously, to the black church, the black family, and a culture that preferred simple lies to complicated truths. And judging from a recording Richard left of the screenplay in which he acted out the film himself, it seems he intended the film as a showcase of his virtuosity, wherein he might play multiple roles in the manner of Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets or Peter Sellers in Doctor Strangelove. The silver-tongued preacher, the hard-ass father, the fire-breathing radical—these were familiar characters from his stage routines. Johnny was a version of his Private Crunk from Carter’s Army, lifted out of the context of the Good War and dumped into the horror of Vietnam. While Richard had played two roles in the ill-fated Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales, here he proposed doubling the challenge to four.

  Yet, like so many of Richard’s funky experiments from this period, “Uncle Tom Wants You Dead, Nigger” was not to be. The Great American Dream Machine rejected the script, perhaps because it was bleak rather than quirky. Its producers may have expected the Richard of the mid-1960s, the creator of light-fingered takes on the army and the media. In any case, they turned it down flat. Instead of seeing his film produced, Richard would have to settle for seeing his screenplay in print. At Alan Farley’s suggestion, he sent his treatment to The Realist, a San Francisco–based underground magazine that had just published the notorious “Disneyland Memorial Orgy,” a baroquely detailed image in which, among other things, Goofy penetrates Minnie Mouse, Doc sodomizes Dopey, and the remaining five dwarfs work on Snow White. Paul Krassner, The Realist’s irreverent editor, was more than happy to print Richard’s piece in the April/May issue.