by Scott Saul
Fortunately for Richard, the machinery of Hollywood was getting overhauled: the traditional levers were no longer the only levers. Starting in 1969, the studios had entered the throes of an economic crisis so deep as to feel existential. Box office attendance had slumped from its record high of 78.2 million a week in 1946 to a low of 15.8 million a week in 1971. “The movie industry was more on its ass than any time in its history, literally almost wiped off the face of the earth,” said Peter Bart, Paramount’s vice president of production in the 1970s. The heads of the studios had tried to replicate the blockbuster success of mid-1960s family entertainment like The Sound of Music with musicals like Doctor Dolittle, Sweet Charity, and Paint Your Wagon, and had discovered that, after the cultural revolution of the sixties, they no longer knew how to bring together young and old at the movie theater. They laid one major egg after another. “These were aging gentlemen who did not remotely understand where their audience had gone,” said Ned Tanen, who headed up Universal’s just-created youth division. “They looked at a movie like Easy Rider, and they said, ‘What in the hell is this?’ It’s against everything they thought was a value in the country; they were still worshipping the grand ol’ flag. But suddenly they were looking at these movies where everybody was dropping acid, was fucking in the park. Even I, who was much younger, didn’t know who was a star anymore.”
In a desperate search for new ideas and new energies, the studios started seeding low-budget experiments. Screenwriter-director Paul Schrader recalled, “Because of the catastrophic crisis of ’69, ’70, and ’71, when the industry imploded, the door was wide open and you could just waltz in and have these meetings and propose whatever. There was nothing that was too outrageous.” Or, as Columbia’s Peter Guber put it, “It was like the ground was in flames and tulips were coming up at the same time.”
Richard became one of those tulips. Within a year of his return to LA, he would ad-lib his way from a bit part to a supporting role in Lady Sings the Blues, one of 1972’s top-grossing movies; would put his stamp, as a screenwriter, on Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, a smash hit that would generate a new formula for Hollywood comedy; and would inject his share of inspired madness, as both actor and writer, to The Mack, the film that brought “the pimp” to mainstream America. He entered into three very different productions—a biopic, a genre parody, an urban drama—and skewed them so that they broke free from their original trajectories.
He could do so because Hollywood was cutting loose from its old moorings, in terms both of the stories it told and of the people it trusted to supervise the telling. In “New Hollywood,” a production might be driven forward by a music executive like Motown’s Berry Gordy (Lady Sings the Blues); it might be tied to a comedy auteur with a zinging spirit and a track record of spotty art house success, like Brooks (Blazing Saddles); it might be helmed by a red diaper baby who, after growing up around Harlem, had developed into a filmmaker with a love of cinema verité, like Michael Campus (The Mack). These were the mavericks who reached out to Richard, willing to risk, in Brooks’s words, the “bananaland” where he would take them.
Richard’s companion of the time, Patricia Heitman, attributed to him an almost supernatural disruptive power. “Believe it or not,” she said, “if he would have a watch, the crystal would break within twenty-four hours. It was this energy field that Richard had on his body.”
“Toothsome twosome”: Richard Pryor and Patricia Heitman at the NAACP Image Awards dinner in 1974. (Courtesy of the Institute for Arts & Media, Cal State, Northridge)
Around the start of October, the couple had arrived in Los Angeles in style, the two of them zipping around town in Patricia’s new car, a red Ferrari, and settling temporarily at the Mediterranean Village, a large West Hollywood apartment complex populated by a complement of actors and high-class prostitutes. But as the two waited for filming on Lady Sings the Blues to begin, their relationship became more asymmetrical, uncomfortably close in its bare outline to the relationship Richard had witnessed between his father and stepmother. Earlier, Richard had forced Patricia to quit her job; now he helped himself to what she had salted away from a decade of working for Pan Am, dipping into those savings to support his cocaine habit.
It was not the smart move to have an addict in charge of the household budget. Paying for coke took first priority; food was an afterthought. At one point, their cash depleted, Richard ordered Patricia to go down to their local supermarket and bring back some food. Dutifully she trooped over, in a lynx fur coat, and stashed a tomato and an onion in one coat pocket and a potato in the other: the noblewoman in furs reduced to a petty thief. Her Ferrari was shortly stripped from her, too—sold off to plug another financial hole.
While Richard’s nights were spent in search of the perpetual party, his days were soon spent performing a sharply ironic role, as the confidant of a great artist destroying herself through drugs. When he was first cast in Lady Sings the Blues, the glossy biopic of jazz singer Billie Holiday, his part had exactly one scene and one line. He was the piano player who, after a young Billie fumbles an audition as a dancer, implores the exasperated nightclub owner to try her out as a singer: “Hey Jerry, give the girl a chance.” It was a thin role, but Richard projected a personality onto it, modeling his character after Jimmy Binkley, the upbeat jazz pianist he’d known at Collins Corner a decade before, in Peoria. He cocked his fedora at a rakish angle and, when the cameras rolled, gave his line a wry topspin.
The gambit worked. Lady producer Jay Weston recalled that Richard delivered his single line “in such a funny, drawling way that when we looked at the dailies that night, someone said, ‘Let’s keep him in the scene tomorrow, where she sings her number.’” Given more room in the scene, Richard improvised a stream of patter on camera—“You’ve never heard [‘All of Me’] like this. Church! Take you home!”—with a spieling delivery that the Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris later called “mumbly-magical.”
The movie’s creative team set about revising the script as the film was being shot. The originally nondescript “piano man” became Billie’s best friend “Piano Man,” and his scenes gradually expanded to a third of the film. His death at the hands of two drug dealers—with Billie looking on, powerless—became, astonishingly, the movie’s emotional climax, the event that sends her into a final tailspin. Richard ended up the third-billed star on the picture, just beneath Diana Ross and Billie Dee Williams, its two romantic leads.
Richard was glad to pick up the extra work. Signed originally for five hundred dollars, he started receiving multiples of that amount every day to improvise in tandem with Diana Ross and develop his character in real time. The two found a groove, both of them stretching outside their comfort zone—singing for Ross, stand-up for Richard—and seizing the chance to act. “We became real close,” Ross remembered. “Every day, it wasn’t a job. We just worked together really easily.”
In his scenes Richard was, alone among the film’s actors, given the freedom to ad-lib his entire performance, and the character who emerged from that improv was both the Jimmy Binkley facsimile he originally intended and much more. Quick with a quip, his Piano Man brought out the earthy humor of the jazz world. After Billie shuddered at the sight of nightclub singers using their private parts to pick up tips from customers, Piano Man jibed about one performer: “Don’t worry about her—what she misses on the top, she picks up on the bottom. One day she picked up the tabletop.” When put in the place of toasting Billie on the happy occasion of her anniversary at the club, he took the opportunity to roast the club owner:
We got old cheapie to spring for something. . . . Everything’s beautiful. He even paid the band since you been here. A beautiful year! Look at the girls, look at their uniforms. Even the hos are making money!
Without Richard’s Piano Man, Lady Sings the Blues would have had no leavening agent; the down-home humor of Billie Holiday’s world would have been sacrificed on the altar of the film’s high production values.
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p; Yet Richard may have left his greatest imprint by adding a layer of emotional and ethical complexity to a film that put forward, as its moral hero, Billie’s husband Louis McKay (a choice much disputed by those familiar with the real-life Billie, who wrote, of the men in her life, “I was as strong, if not stronger, than any of them”). As played by Billie Dee Williams, McKay was magnetic and suave, a do-right man who aimed to steer Billie away from drugs and toward a conventional family life. The movie’s villains, like the masked southern Klansmen who ram an American flag through the window of Billie’s tour bus, were drawn with a similarly broad brush.
As long as Richard’s Piano Man was alive and on-screen, he stood for a middle way between the hero-villain poles of this melodrama. His attitude—hip, sympathetic, vulnerable—suggested that it was possible to live with the struggles of Billie Holiday and not be ensnared or defeated by them. Usually Billie looked pathetic when high on drugs—slack-jawed and slumped in a bathroom, say, her hair a mess. With Piano Man, she found a disjointed camaraderie in her high. In the scene in which they take heroin together, the dialogue is loose:
BILLIE HOLIDAY: Hey, you know what?
PIANO MAN: Chicken butt!
[Billie sings “God Bless the Child” while Piano Man accompanies her on harmonica.]
BILLIE: You got your own harmonica. [Rubbing her nose] I got my own harmonica.
PIANO MAN: I got my own high, too.
The scene doesn’t glamorize drug use, but neither does it condemn it. It’s a scene of release for Billie and Piano Man—from everyday pressures, from logic, from the burden of performing for watchful eyes. Eventually there will be hell to pay—the dealers come after Piano Man, who has stolen the heroin for Billie, and beat him senseless—but in the moment, the drug offers Billie and Piano Man exactly what they’re looking for.
Here and in other scenes, Richard’s improvisations played into the hidden strengths of director Sidney Furie, who, before impressing Hollywood with the hit spy thriller The Ipcress File (1965), helmed The Leather Boys (1964), a gritty treatment of England’s gay biker subculture. Piano Man’s last three scenes with Billie Holiday felt almost as if they belonged to a different film, something closer to The Leather Boys than a mainstream musical biopic like Funny Girl: the scenes were open to emotional confusions and seemed as if they might go in any number of directions as they played themselves out. They were intriguingly off-balance, like the character Richard improvised into existence.
Despite Richard’s achievement as an actor in Lady, there was a hall-of-mirrors quality to his playing Piano Man at this moment in his life. On-screen he was the addict’s boon companion, hip and sweet. He’d shaved off his moustache and beard for the part, and looked again like the Cosby wannabe of 1965. Offscreen he was the addict himself, and in danger of falling into the same self-sabotaging traps that Lady largely warned against. One day on set, as the crew waited for Richard to perform the scene where Piano Man is beaten to death for stealing drugs for Billie, Richard shut himself in his trailer and wouldn’t come out; he was incapable of being the consummate professional. According to producer Jay Weston, Berry Gordy broke the impasse by relaying a curt message to Richard through a production assistant: “Tell him if he doesn’t come out right now, I will take a baseball bat and break his knee.” Fortunately, Richard came out of his trailer—and performed the scene flawlessly. A perfectly happy ending: Richard avoiding a beat-down in real life by taking a beat-down in front of the cameras.
But Richard’s addiction threatened others beside him. The night before shooting his scenes, he typically partied—drinking heavily, doing drugs—until three or four in the morning, waving away the fact that the Motown Productions limousine was set to arrive just a few hours later at his home, a former gardener’s cottage on the grounds of Yamashiro, a jewel of a Japanese restaurant set in the Hollywood Hills. Day after day, when the limo pulled up, he was dead asleep, unwakeable.
One morning after a late-night card game, Patricia tried to rouse him.
“Bitch, if you touch me one more motherfucking time,” Richard said, “I’m going to beat the shit out of you.”
“The car is here,” Patricia pleaded. “Richard, please.”
Richard punched her in the face, and Patricia ran off, leaving the limo driver to handle him.
A half day later, he returned home from the day’s shoot. Patricia was wearing a bandage on her nose; one of her eyes was bruised a shade of black.
“Who fuckin’ did this to you?” Richard shouted. “I’ll kill the motherfucker!”
After his work on Lady Sings the Blues, Richard spent the next six months settling with Patricia in their modest cottage on the grounds of Yamashiro. For all the brashness of his personal style, Richard was attracted to the serenity of Japanese gardens. At night, in his more solitary moods, he would pace around the restaurant’s expansive grounds in a Japanese jacket and wooden clogs, the lights of Los Angeles spread out before him as he weaved through the gardens’ concentric paths. There was no way for guests to drive up to the cottage entrance, and Richard appreciated the extra bit of isolation; it was quiet, private.
Then writer Norman Steinberg called with an intriguing proposal, and Richard was whisked out of his isolation and into the Judeo-comic maelstrom that surrounded a short man by the name of Mel Brooks. Brooks had a problem on his hands, for which, he thought, Richard was the solution. Brooks was putting together a send-up of the Western for Warner Bros., in which the arrival of a hip black sheriff in town would expose all the clichés and double-talk of Hollywood’s “Old West.” “I decided that this would be a surrealist epic,” Brooks said of the project that became Blazing Saddles. “It was time to take two eyes, the way Picasso had done it, and put them on one side of the nose, because the official movie portrait of the West was simply a lie.”
When he reached out to Richard via Steinberg, Brooks had already assembled three Jewish writers to collaborate on the screenplay, and sensed he needed a black writer to complete his team. “If you have three Jews in a room,” explained Andrew Bergman, who had written the original scenario and was the first writer to join Brooks’s team, “you’re going to be very skittish about writing jokes about a black man—what’s permissible, what isn’t permissible. . . . Richie gave us license, which was an enormous gift.” Brooks was more specific on why he needed Richard: “I said, ‘I can’t say the N-word. I need him—he has to bless it. I need a black guy to bless that word.’”
For his part, Richard was thrilled. As a child, he had been enamored of B-Western star Lash LaRue, with his stylish black cowboy suit and whip-snapping panache, and as a teenager, he had fallen in love with Sid Caesar through Our Show of Shows, whose stable of writers famously included Brooks, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, and Woody Allen. Now these two early love affairs were reawakened: Richard had the chance to create a cockeyed Western with an actual black cowboy at its center, and to do so with one of the creative geniuses behind the TV show he’d loved. Even better, Brooks was seeking to recapture, in his writers’ room, the formula he felt had worked so well on Our Show of Shows: “lock a bunch of weirdos up together and come up with a great script.” Richard eagerly accepted the job, with two small conditions. He needed train fare to New York City and a bottle of brandy waiting for him in the writers’ room.
His first day on the new job at the Warner Bros. building at 666 Fifth Avenue, Richard arrived late. He settled into his chair in the sixth-floor executive conference room. Brooks started to explain how the film was shifting from its original conception. While he listened, Richard pulled out a little locket, opened it, tipped out some coke, and snorted it without missing a beat.
He pushed the locket over to Brooks: “Brother Mel?”
“Never before lunch,” Brooks joked.
The other writers held their tongues, stunned; at least one of Richard’s cowriters had no idea what this curious white powder was. They were nice Jewish boys, even if they had wayward imaginations. That night, Brooks phon
ed Andrew Bergman and asked, “Did you see that?”
Richard may have been the only Blazing Saddles writer to snort coke and kill a bottle of Courvoisier over the course of a day’s work, but in one crucial respect he fit in perfectly: he had the fearlessness that comes from having nothing to lose. Later, Blazing Saddles would be seen as one of those smash hits that change the culture. It ushered in a wave of genre spoofs (Young Frankenstein, Airplane, Top Secret) that lent Hollywood comedy a new knowingness; it established a highbrow-lowbrow formula that has kept The Simpsons going for twenty years and counting; and not least and not best, it opened up the Pandora’s box of fart jokes. But at the point of its conception, Blazing Saddles was a small studio movie, with no stars attached or to come, and the four men who gathered around its writers’ table were either untested or on the skids. Steinberg was a fledgling writer with no film credits; Bergman, a history PhD who had just failed to land an academic job. Brooks himself felt washed up after the box office disappointments of The Producers and The Twelve Chairs; one reason he wanted to re-create the writers’ room of Our Show of Shows was to shuck off his recent failures. Then there was Richard, who had made a name for himself, then decided it wasn’t the name he wanted. Their response, as writers, to their shared precariousness was to go berserk, to forget about pleasing anybody other than themselves—or, as Brooks put it, to write “for two weirdos in the balcony. For radicals, film nuts, guys who draw on the washroom wall—my kind of people.”
