Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  Richard’s performance at the Shrine Mosque capped the hoopla of “Richard Pryor Days” with an anticlimax. The Ashanti Umoja Center, an institution born out of the defiance of Black Power but now promoting, in the spirit of the times, a program of self-help through craft making, presented Richard with a large plaque. Richard promised, jokingly, to wear it in good health. Then he performed a set that, at twenty minutes, was breathtakingly short—a replay of his twenty-minute performance at the Carver Center in 1969. He had just slayed audiences from Oakland to Harlem, but at the Shrine Mosque, he checked himself, as if unable to relax into the artist he’d become. Juliette Whittaker and his family sat in the audience, and after a salty routine about the differences between black sex and white sex, Richard worried aloud, “Boy, my grandmother’s gonna beat my ass when I get home.” For a performer wedded to the ideal of flowing in the moment, the internal censor was the least welcome of guests—harder to handle, perhaps, than stodgy enemies like the manager of Richmond’s Coliseum.

  Richard would return to Peoria for family occasions—birthdays, funerals, graduations—but he never gave a concert there again.

  It was just Richard’s luck to have his first hit album released by a record company at the exact moment that its assets were frozen or otherwise tied up. By the end of September, “That Nigger’s Crazy” had spent four weeks in the number one R&B slot, and he had some two hundred thousand dollars in unpaid royalties owed him by Stax. His mind-set at the time is suggested by the name of the corporation he founded to pry those monies from Stax’s grip: Pay Back Inc. Stax gave Richard possession of his master tapes in an attempt to settle its debt, but Richard still pressed forward with legal action, suing various Stax-related entities for ninety-five thousand dollars in remaining obligations. One day, seething at home, he pointed a gun at the framed gold record of “That Nigger’s Crazy” hanging on his wall, and from that point forward, the record had two holes: the one given to play it on a turntable, the other supplied by the impact of his bullet.

  Still, the breakout success of the record created a set of remarkable opportunities for Richard—among them the chance, in November, to cohost The Mike Douglas Show for a week. A few months before, he had appeared on the show as part of a panel that included Martha Mitchell, the free-talking wife of Nixon’s attorney general, and the wives of three leading U.S. senators. Mike Douglas worried that the mix of guests was “like nitro and glycerin,” but Richard and Martha surprised everyone with their rapport. One of the senators’ wives said, “We live, eat, sleep, and breathe politics,” and Martha chimed in naughtily, “Together?” That was Richard’s cue:

  RICHARD [trying to help]: She thought you were talking about an orgy.

  MARTHA: Thank you, Richard.

  RICHARD: Sure . . . You know, we’ve met before, on the first Amtrak train to Chicago.

  MARTHA: I remember that. I christened that train. You were on that train?

  RICHARD: Yaz, ma’am. I was the porter.

  MARTHA: How nice. Did you carry my bags?

  RICHARD: Oh yes’m.

  MIKE DOUGLAS: Did she give you a tip?

  RICHARD: Uh-huh. Blue Boy in the fifth.

  Tickled by such repartee and aware that “That Nigger’s Crazy” had raised Richard’s profile considerably, Mike Douglas asked him to come back as a cohost, and gave him the latitude to choose a number of his guests. He drew from his family in Peoria (his grandmother Marie, his uncle Dickie), his teenage idols (Sammy Davis Jr., Harry Belafonte), younger, hip performers (Ben Vereen, Sly Stone, Freddie Prinze), and some fellow partisans in the battle for free speech (gadfly Gore Vidal and actor George C. Scott, fresh from a tussle with the Motion Picture Association of America Ratings Board over his latest film). And so, in the last week of November 1974, The Mike Douglas Show became considerably blacker and more unpredictable than usual. Effectively, Richard had been given the chance to curate his life, his world, on national TV.

  Several segments offered access to parts of Richard he rarely displayed in public. Juliette Whittaker came on as the week’s surprise first guest and set the tone by reducing him to tears with her mere presence. He choked up when Sammy Davis Jr. praised him as “one of the finest straight actors we have in this business,” shone with pride as his grandmother cooked a soul food meal of greens and fried chicken on set, and took obvious pleasure in playing mentor to Freddie Prinze. On the other side of the emotional spectrum, he threw down his drumsticks in frustration when a jokey performance with Sly Stone went awry. And it wasn’t just Richard who felt loose. In the middle of the week, he sparred on camera with boxer Joe Frazier, whom he had teased earlier at a club date in Philadelphia. Frazier got his revenge by knocking the wind out of Richard with a dead-serious punch to the gut.

  In a week of unanticipated interactions, no exchange was more unusual, or more telling, than a tense skirmish between Richard and Milton Berle. Berle was one of the guests whom Richard hadn’t suggested. In the 1950s, Berle had been, with his outlandish costumes and his file of more than four million jokes, the king of prime-time TV as host of Texaco Star Theater. Now the sixty-seven-year-old comedian was appearing on the show to promote his autobiography, a sobering book in which Uncle Miltie dropped his toothy grin and told of his soul-crushing Jewish mother and his desultory if star-studded sex life. In an age that preferred topicality and candor to vaudevillian japes, he was coming clean—and refurbishing his reputation by revealing the agony-rich inner life he had hidden from view.

  From the moment he stepped on The Mike Douglas Show, Berle tried to control its tone. He addressed George C. Scott as “Sir Walter Scott” and hailed Richard with “Oh my God, Dick Gregory—haven’t seen you in years.” He joked that, just as Richard had won an Emmy for writing the Lily Tomlin special, he’d won an Emmy for writing a Pinky Tomlin special years ago. But the one-liners fell flat. (Mike Douglas had to remind the audience that Pinky Tomlin was a 1940s crooner.) “Is this the real audience?” Berle asked Douglas in a stage whisper.

  When Berle described getting roughed up by two mobsters who hated his act, Douglas pulled Richard into the conversation, and it careered into unforeseen territory:

  MIKE DOUGLAS: Anything like that every happen to you, Richard?

  RICHARD: Never happened to me, no.

  MILTON BERLE: I saw your act—it should have.

  RICHARD: I think Milton Berle is a funny man. I’ve seen him work—I’ve been on shows where all us young guys were dying, trying to get laughs, and Milton was there with cards, trying to help us out.

  MIKE DOUGLAS: I saw Milton do one of the kindest things . . .

  RICHARD: I never saw him do anything kind.

  MILTON BERLE: You mean for “your kind.”

  RICHARD: Oooh.

  MILTON BERLE: No, I’m kidding.

  RICHARD [mock-speechifying, raising his finger]: “Black people of America . . .”

  [Berle silences Richard by putting his hand over Richard’s mouth, then looks at his hand disdainfully, as if it were dripping with germs, and shakes it.]

  This scuffle—in which Richard tendered a compliment, then hedged it, and Berle played a number of race cards clumsily—was a prelude to what Mike Douglas called “one of the strangest moments that I’ve ever experienced.” Berle started talking about a central tribulation of his life, a love affair that produced a child whom he had never met, and Richard couldn’t abide the seriousness that attended its telling. He failed to stifle a nervous laugh. Berle bristled, “I wish, I wish, Richard, that I could have laughed at that time at your age,” then gathered himself and picked up his story. And again Richard punctured the solemnity. When Berle made a point of refusing to name the woman involved, Richard blurted out, “Eleanor Roosevelt.”

  The audience tittered at the absurd suggestion; the hostilities between the two comics escalated. Berle oozed a sense of his own moral superiority, but somehow he couldn’t come out on top:

  MILTON BERLE: Richard, let me tell you something, baby. I
told you this nine years ago and I’m going to tell you this on the air in front of millions of people. Pick your spots, baby.

  RICHARD [imitating Humphrey Bogart]: All right, sweetheart.

  MILTON BERLE: Pick your spots . . .

  RICHARD: I’m sorry, Milton, I’ll be honest, I’m crazy.

  MILTON BERLE: No, you’re not crazy. . . . [Taking Richard by the chin and forcing him to look into his own eyes] I want to ask you why you laugh.

  RICHARD: I laugh because it’s funny, man. It’s funny to me. It ain’t nothing to do with you.

  MILTON BERLE: Because it never happened to you.

  RICHARD [turning away from Berle, eyes lifting up to the ceiling]: No, no, it’s just the insanity of all this is funny. Do you understand? I’m funny and I laugh, and so I’m crazy and so I apologize because I don’t want to hurt your feelings and because I respect what you do. But I don’t want to kiss your ass.

  The audience roared at Richard’s final obscenity. Berle threw up his hands, pivoted toward Douglas, and shut Richard out of the rest of the conversation. Given that the talk show had lost its usual bearings, there was no more need for the schmoozy civility that was its default setting.

  The dustup between the two comedians was the talk of the comedy circuit for weeks after. Older comedians thought Berle had put Richard in his place, while younger comedians thought Richard had held his ground. Inadvertently, as they jousted for position on Mike Douglas, the two comedians had revealed the contours of the generation gap in American comedy.

  Berle represented a generation of largely Jewish comics who, rooted in vaudeville, catered to mainstream audiences with routines that were wacky and physically witty but not topical or edgy. He kept asking Richard why he’d laughed because the older comedian seemed to know in advance the right answer and was angling for a confession: Richard was ill-mannered, inconsiderate. There could be nothing funny about fathering an illegitimate son, and so the laughter had to be a marker of insensitivity and disrespect—an up-and-coming comedian thinking he had the right to steal Berle’s “spots.” Deepening the indignity from Berle’s point of view, Richard was stealing those spots with obscenities like ass, the cheapest of comic shortcuts. A decade earlier, Berle had counseled Lenny Bruce to save his act by editing out the dirty words.

  For Richard, his laughter was a genuine enigma. Just as he struggled to explain the laughter at his stand-up shows, where the audience howled when he talked about being beaten by his father, strip-searched in jail, or low-rated sexually by his woman, so he struggled to explain why he laughed on Mike Douglas. Pressed by Berle to defend himself, he responded by searching the ceiling: he was laughing at his own “craziness” and at “the insanity of all this,” the cosmic machinations that had put him on a talk show with Uncle Milty as he bared his soul on national TV. He certainly wasn’t laughing for the reason Berle posited—“because it never happened to you.” Berle might always have cordoned off his personal experience in the making of his comedy, but Richard’s method was exactly the opposite: post-Aladdin, he had tunneled into his experience, again and again, rescuing laughter from what others might see as mere affliction. Unlike Berle, he wouldn’t need to wait until he was sixty-seven to speak his personal truth.

  The rest of the week on Mike Douglas was a great vindication for Richard. He had long considered himself an outsider to mainstream America: the boy born to brothels, the black artist in white Hollywood. Now he was enjoying pride of place on national TV, able to invite friends and family to join him at the welcome table. In particular he wanted everyone to see his beloved grandmother Marie through the lens of his love—as a savvy woman of the world, tough and self-possessed and admirable. When Marie appeared on Mike Douglas on Richard’s final day as cohost, she rose to the challenge and then some, acting as if it were the most natural thing to regale the studio audience with tales of Richard’s delinquency, or to guide Mike Douglas through the ins and outs of soul food cooking. She wore muted colors, a mink stole that Richard had given her, and a sly, guarded smile that suggested she had gone toe to toe with Life and had never backed down. Sammy Davis Jr., slated to perform after her, said it was “unbelievable” how she commanded the stage: “There ain’t no sense in nobody going on. The show belongs to her.” Two years later, when talking with an interviewer about how much his family mattered to him, Richard said, “Having my grandmother with me on The Mike Douglas Show was the greatest moment in my life.”

  At the end of his week as cohost, Richard was set to turn thirty-four, and his agent, Murray Swartz, threw together a birthday party for him at his home in Philadelphia, where Mike Douglas was taped. Richard’s grandmother and uncle Dickie attended, along with fellow Mike Douglas guests like Sammy Davis Jr. and pianist-composer Michel Legrand.

  Legrand sat in with a jazz trio that Swartz had hired for the party, and it was as if Richard were swept back to the jazz clubs in Peoria where, a decade earlier, he had begun his career as an entertainer and sometimes scatted to Clark Terry’s “Mumbles,” a comic tune and one of Richard’s favorites. At the party, in front of an audience that embraced both his family and his showbiz accomplices, he started scatting in full seriousness and didn’t stop. For five minutes, he was part of the ensemble, winging the chord changes and riding them, reaching for something beyond himself. The party carried on until close to daybreak.

  Now that he was a bona fide sensation, Richard left behind his modest bungalow on the grounds of Yamashiro and moved, with Patricia, to a larger home above the Sunset Strip with a swimming pool, billiards room, and a gym outfitted with a punching bag. In his bedroom, he placed a large aquarium in which saltwater fish glided serenely back and forth. On his front door he posted a sign that began on a decorous note: “To avoid ill feeling and/or unpleasantness, please be aware that uninvited guests are not welcome at any time, whatsoever. To avoid rejection, please do not take the liberty of ‘dropping by.’ Sincerely and Respectfully, Occupant.” Then an addendum: “Yeah, nigger—this means you.”

  The new home did not arrest the tailspin of Richard and Patricia’s relationship, just gave it a new, smarter setting. In the middle of one dinner party with Sammy Davis Jr. and his wife, Altovise, Richard punched Patricia twice, the first time for laughing at apparently the wrong joke, the second for asking why he had hit her. (The Davises sent Patricia a bouquet of two dozen purple roses and a card that read, “You deserve a purple heart for being able to deal with the nigger we love so much.”) It was hard, too, for her to avoid the spectacle of Richard’s infidelities. After she organized swimming lessons for his children Elizabeth and Rain, she discovered that he was dallying with the swimming instructor in the pool house. Another afternoon, she stumbled upon him in bed with a man, a Jet editor. The scene did not provide an occasion for Richard to reflect upon the state of their relationship or the depth of his sexual need. Furious, he accused Patricia of “fuck[ing] up my fun” and beat her for the intrusion.

  In these difficult last days of their relationship, Richard’s cruelty to Patricia was sharpened by his theatrical imagination. While in a low mood, he would hibernate in their bedroom, alone with his saltwater fish and his guns. Patricia would bring him his meals on a tray, knowing that if she incurred his displeasure, for whatever reason—the wrong food, the wrong time—he might throw the tray at her. One afternoon she heard a couple of gunshots and ran to the bedroom, fearing the worst. The drapes were drawn, the room shrouded in darkness, the floor covered by water. The glass in the aquarium had shattered, leaving the fish to wriggle helplessly on the floor. Richard was lying in bed, his face blood red, his body limp.

  Patricia gasped, then did a double take. When she looked more closely, she saw that Richard had merely slathered himself with ketchup. The gunshots were a ruse, a test of her love and loyalty: he wanted to catch her expression at the moment she thought she’d lost him. He was unharmed, though the same couldn’t be said of his fish or the hardwood floors, which buckled after absorbing an aquarium’s wor
th of saltwater, and had to be replaced.

  If the women in Richard’s life saw the worst of his vindictiveness, Patricia perhaps saw the worst of the worst. In their final fight as lovers, he ripped her nightgown from her body and her jewelry from her ear, yelling, “Bitch, I bought this,” then threw her, bleeding and naked, out the front door. Desperate for clothes, Patricia climbed the fence of their home and stole into the pool house, where she put on a bathing suit and terrycloth robe, then hoisted herself back over the fence and walked down to Sunset Boulevard, a refugee dressed as if for a pool party. A while later, she called Richard to see if she could pick up her clothes; he surprised her by saying yes. When she arrived at the door, a sickening smell rose up at her. Her floor-length sable coat—the gift Richard had tendered in apology in Sausalito—was burning in the fireplace. Her other clothes had been slashed with scissors.

  Richard’s dark mood encroached on his relationship with his manager Ron DeBlasio, too. DeBlasio had recently put to bed the messy business with Stax and had negotiated a generous deal (including a fifty-thousand-dollar advance) with Warner Bros. for the rights to “That Nigger’s Crazy.” As late as March 1975, the bond between Richard and his manager had seemed solid: when DeBlasio informed Richard that “That Nigger’s Crazy” had won the Grammy, the two erupted into giddy laughter and Richard said, significantly, “We did it.” But during Richard’s depressive episodes, DeBlasio’s sanguine attitude to his career rang hollow. When DeBlasio called him up with “three great things” to “jump him out” of his depression, Richard shot back, “Is that all you got?” and hung up the phone. He felt damaged by his tax troubles and remarked, to the press, that he had yet to find his financial footing: “My house is rented and I don’t have a whole lot of money in the bank. Let me put it this way. I ain’t rich enough to worry about nobody kidnapping my kids hoping for some big ransom.”