by Scott Saul
In its original form, the sketch was harsher still. Richard and his writers had wanted to start it with a public hanging—with the promoter asking for a volunteer from the audience to be hanged, and with the audience watching as a young man was sacrificed for the show. The noose went up, the banner for Black Death came down, and the music began. NBC objected, understandably. “We crossed the line on that one,” Rocco Urbisci reflected. “You can’t hang somebody on TV.”
Richard did not threaten to quit over this edit. The sketch was still pungent and brutal—a dream of murdering your audience for loving you too much, too blindly, too voraciously. It was not strictly autobiographical (Richard was a fan of jazz and soul music, not heavy metal), but it spoke to the aggression that was never far from the surface of his stand-up after the late 1960s. Whenever his audience seemed to be enjoying itself too easily, Richard felt something must be wrong. Often, whether motivated by cruelty or anger or simply a desire for his version of a dynamic equilibrium, he searched for his audience’s weak spot and, finding it, lashed out.
Ludicrous and armored: Pryor as the lead singer of Black Death. (Courtesy of the author)
On the night of September 18, when Richard took the stage of the Hollywood Bowl as a headliner of the “Star-Spangled Night for Rights,” the event had, according to one journalist, “all the makings of a ‘cabaret’ version of Woodstock.” Less than fifteen minutes later, when Richard ended his ten-minute performance by asking the audience to “kiss my happy, rich black ass,” the benefit concert was closer to “a ‘cabaret’ version of Altamont.” The good vibes had dispersed; a night of unity had turned into a hot, steaming mess. Many in the crowd booed or shouted curses: “Richard Pryor, you just committed professional suicide!” “Kiss your ass, hell! I’d like to put a hot poker up it!” Others cheered a provocateur who, before he had dismissed the crowd as self-serving “faggots,” had spoken bravely about the joy of gay sex and exposed the fault lines of the gay rights movement. And still others sat pole-axed, trying to grasp how, in coming to the Hollywood Bowl, they had taken a detour into the Twilight Zone. “In more than 14 years of covering the great, near-great and terrible of show business, I have never seen anything like it,” wrote John Wasserman in the San Francisco Chronicle. “To call what happened bizarre would not, for me, do it justice. It was like watching a person come unglued in front of you and then, as in a cartoon, disappear piece by piece.”
Richard’s meltdown at the Hollywood Bowl was, in its own way, a vintage Pryor performance: artful and impulsive, merciless and hapless, and above all, devilishly attuned to the hidden dynamics of the moment. The driving force behind the benefit concert had been the Save Our Human Rights Foundation, a San Francisco group composed largely of gay professionals, formed in response to the antigay crusade spearheaded by Anita Bryant and other Christian conservatives in Florida. The foundation hoped to do for gay rights what the American Cancer Society had done for cancer: “to educate people, but in a nice glossy way.” Dignity was of utmost concern. When the show’s producer discovered that one of his performers, a comedy act, would satirize Anita Bryant directly, the act was removed from the bill; the appeal for “human rights” meant always aiming for the moral high ground.
Until Richard strolled onstage, the foundation’s “Star-Spangled Night” had occupied that rarefied perch without anyone questioning the thinness of the air in the upper altitudes. The seventeen thousand people assembled at the Bowl, mostly gay men, sang the national anthem “with the volume and fervor usually associated with conventions of the veterans of foreign wars.” Actor Christopher Lee launched the evening’s entertainment by reciting, to the swell of an orchestra, a solemn monologue titled “The Ascent of Man” (“What is life? . . . it is to be free . . . every life shall be a song”). Performers before Richard avoided specific mention of gay life, much less gay sex; in the words of another observer, it was “an evening of unspoken assumptions.” Richard’s friend Lily Tomlin came the closest to striking a direct chord when she reminisced about the 1950s as a time “when sex was dirty . . . and, of course, no one was gay, only shy.”
Unglued: Pryor asking his Hollywood Bowl audience to kiss his “happy, rich black ass.” (Courtesy of AP Photo/Lennox McLendon)
Over the course of the evening, Richard grew increasingly allergic to the atmosphere of moral superiority. He despised euphemisms, and yet here he was headlining a gay rights benefit that couldn’t put the word gay in its title. He felt the victim of a bait and switch; like at least one other black artist on the program, he’d originally been asked to perform for a human rights rally, pure and simple. Other resentments gathered on top of the first one. He scanned the sea of faces in the audience and spotted only a handful of black people, which alarmed him. And he noticed that the Lockers, a young black dance group on the bill, kept suffering from poor treatment. When the dancers asked stagehands for help with the lights, the stagehands paid no notice; when the dancers performed their high-spirited moves onstage—one jumped over six chairs in a single bound—the audience sat in their seats. An hour later, just before Richard was set to perform, the formerly indifferent stagehands leapt to fix the lights for two white ballet dancers; and the formerly blasé audience applauded them, with their delicate pas de deux from Le Corsaire, as if they were “some bad motherfuckers.” Backstage Richard saw the fire marshal dress down a Locker for setting off a small explosive onstage as a special effect, and he saw the show’s promoters refuse to come to the dancer’s defense. To Richard, all this was racism in action. He simmered, and awaited his turn onstage.
When he walked in front of the audience, finally, Richard didn’t speak for a little while; he prowled back and forth like a pent-up animal. Then he pounced with a one-liner that had tongues wagging across West Hollywood the next day. “I came here for human rights,” he said, “and I found out what it was really about was about not getting caught with a dick in your mouth.” The crowd erupted in laughter. “You don’t want the police to kick your ass if you’re sucking the dick, and that’s fair,” Richard continued. “You’ve got the right to suck anything you want!” With three sentences, Richard had outflanked all the other performers on the bill—some of whom, like Lily Tomlin, had open ties to the gay community—by stripping away the airy talk of “human rights.” He had brought into the open the basic demand of the gay struggle: sexual freedom in the face of police harassment.
Then he went even further. “I sucked one dick,” he said. “Back in 1952. Sucked Wilbur Harp’s dick. It was beautiful, but I couldn’t deal with it. Had to leave it alone.” The crowd roared. Richard minced no words and spared few details: “It was beautiful because Wilbur has the best booty in the world. Now I’m saying booty to be nice. I’m talking about ass-hole. Wilbur had some good ass-hole. And Wilbur would give it up so good and put his thighs against your waist. That would make you come quick.” With that confession, Richard became perhaps the first major Hollywood celebrity to talk graphically about his own positive experience of gay sex—and certainly the first to do so in front of tens of thousands of people. (He himself had talked, on ‘Craps,’ of “fucking the faggot,” but it was a sheepish confession, not a proud one.) Having spoken of the joy of gay sex, Richard then spoke of the romance it kindled in him: “I was the only motherfucker that took Wilbur roses. Everybody else was bullshitting. I took Wilbur [the roses] and said, ‘Here, dear.’” Again the crowd hooted in delighted disbelief.
Now that he had worked the audience into the palm of his hand, Richard became indecisive. He appeared diffuse, addled by some combination of drugs, alcohol, and the complexity of his feelings. Speaking softly into the microphone, as if musing to himself, he asked, “How can faggots be racists?” He recounted what he’d observed with the Lockers—the disinterest of the crowd, the intimidation of the fire marshal, the disrespect of the show’s promoters—and then his tone shifted. His anger grabbed hold of him, and he aimed pure scorn at the audience: “I hope the police catch you motherfu
ckers and shoot your ass accidentally, because you motherfuckers ain’t helpin’ niggers at all.” Howls rose up from the crowd. He won back some of their sympathy by reminding them that, while everyone else had “skirted the issue,” he was ready to say, “I have sucked a dick.” Then he threw that sympathy away with a rant that pitted women’s rights against welfare rights (“Motherfuck women’s rights. The bitches don’t need no rights. What they need to do is pay the people on welfare.”). The crowd booed in response, and Richard goaded them back: “Yeah, get mad. ’Cause you’re going to be madder than that when [Police Chief] Ed Davis catches you motherfuckers coming out of here in the lot.”
It was hard to tell where Richard’s allegiances lay. Was he on the side of the police or the side of sexual freedom? Or simply on the side of Richard? “I wanted to test you to your motherfuckin’ soul,” he continued, as if the anger he’d unleashed was a thought experiment on his part, a trial he’d designed to winkle out the truth in their hearts. The gay people in the audience, he determined, were the same gay people who, a decade earlier, had looked the other way at the black community’s desperation: “When the niggers were burning down Watts, you motherfuckers were doing what you wanted on Hollywood Boulevard, didn’t give a shit about it.” With that, he hoisted his backside into the air, asked the crowd to kiss it, then walked off to a chorus of boos, a smattering of applause, and thousands of sullen faces. The show’s choreographer came onstage and cried in anguish, “I hope you realize that was unplanned and everybody involved is very, very embarrassed about it.” He was promptly booed, too. A producer came on to apologize, and he was shouted down as well. Richard had left a mess that no apology could clean up.
It took two weeks for the firestorm sparked by Richard’s performance to blow through the LA and Bay Area press. (The Los Angeles Times devoted over a full page to the original event, then ran seventeen letters in two installments in response to it.) The bad feeling lingered. Among the commentators, most numerous were the moralists who judged Richard an obscene homophobe who should never have been permitted onstage at the Bowl. “His ‘street’ language was abusive, filthy, and racist,” wrote one audience member, typically, in the Los Angeles Times. “It takes a certain talent, genius (if you will) to insult 17,000 people—black, white, male, female, straight, gay, rich and poor—at one time.” Others thought Richard wrong in his sweeping comments about gay racism. “[M]ost of us in the gay rights movement (which does not include all gay men and women) were previously involved in other civil rights movements such as those for black and women’s liberation,” an activist explained. “Now we are fighting for our own rights and we need support, especially from those we have supported in the past.”
Yet Richard did have his defenders among the gay community’s outliers, those further from its power centers, who praised him for forcing the community to examine its own blind spots. A member of Bay Area Gay Liberation, a group to the left of the Save Our Human Rights Foundation, wrote that “Much too often we see the gay rights movement trying only to get a bigger piece of the pie for ourselves—only too willing to do so at the expense of Third World peoples and of women”; the campaign against Anita Bryant had failed, he observed, for precisely this reason. A Los Angeles Times reader wrote, on a more personal note: “Being a black homosexual and living here practically all my life, I can say that the California homosexual is the most extreme of bigots. He hates blacks, fats, women, and himself most of all. Pryor’s actions were crude, but sadly true. If one refuses to believe, let any person who is fat, black, ugly or female try going to a gay club alone.” (In fact, as LA’s gay activists noted to their displeasure on other occasions, the city’s biggest gay disco admitted few nonwhites or women, and its gay baths tended to have a “pull up your shirt” rule that excluded any man who wasn’t well toned.) Lily Tomlin was closest to this third camp: she felt that gay men tended to look down upon lesbians, and she appreciated how Richard had asked everyone to consider their prejudices. “When you hire Richard Pryor, you get Richard Pryor,” she’d told the show’s producer before the event. When her prophecy was fulfilled, she was bemused rather than horrified.
Lost in the swirl of postmortems was the taboo Richard had broken and the fact of his early life that he had revealed. Part of the silence is understandable: a family newspaper, for instance, was not about to quote a line like “Wilbur had some good ass-hole.” But other distortions were more complicated. The outrageousness of Richard’s remarks seems to have inspired either mishearing or disbelief. Several journalists reported that Richard had said that he experimented with a gay man and “didn’t like it”—a twisting of his actual remark that it was “beautiful” but that he “couldn’t handle it.” Jet’s correspondent called Wilbur Harp a “presumably fictitious Midwestern homosexual,” as if a male sex partner for Richard Pryor had to be a figment of the comic’s crazed imagination.
Yet Richard was not confecting his story out of thin air. According to his friend Cecil Grubbs, Wilbur Harp was a gay teenager in Peoria in the 1950s, at a time when there was little in the way of a gay community there. In the late 1950s, he and Richard whiled away the hours at the Blue Shadow bar in Peoria. In the mid-1960s, according to Harp’s brother Hillis, Richard and Wilbur crashed for weeks at the same apartment in Chicago, the would-be comedian bunking with the would-be cosmetologist. Even after Richard moved to his Northridge estate in 1976, the two were still close enough for Richard to invite Wilbur out to Los Angeles for a weeklong vacation. Whether or not Richard and Wilbur truly had sex is probably unknowable—Harp is dead, so he cannot speak for himself—and is perhaps less important than the fact that Richard wished, on that night, for it to be true. He was seeking to convey something about himself and the world in which he was raised, a world distant from the affluent gay audience at the Bowl. “In my neighborhood whatever you were was cool,” he said in a related 1975 interview. “You could be a thief, murderer, or closet queen. There was a faggot . . . that turned more tricks than the prostitutes but nobody ridiculed him. Dudes avoided him during the day but could be seen creepin’ around his house late at night. It didn’t matter. We were all part of a community.”
Sometimes, as at the Hollywood Bowl, Richard slammed into the fact that he wasn’t in Peoria anymore and that he had lost that community; that no matter how large his estate in the San Fernando Valley, he would continue to feel out of place; that no matter how high he rose in Hollywood’s pecking order, his sensibility would never match up with that of its right-thinking, liberal precincts. The debacle at the Bowl left him reeling, besieged. Several days later, he continued to justify himself to the Sentinel, LA’s black newspaper, by emphasizing how poorly the Lockers had been treated: “My feeling is that they cannot pay me enough to keep quiet when something is wrong. And this was wrong.” (The Lockers, for their part, kept out of the fracas.) As the controversy raged on, Richard did not calm the waters by issuing an apology of his own.
Instead, Richard continued to act out the polarities of his Hollywood Bowl performance in his own life. In the week following the gay rights benefit, he made two impulsive and startling commitments. The first was to Deboragh McGuire, whom he proposed to and married within the space of a few days. The second was to an experimental piece of gay theater, which he included in his prime-time TV show in total defiance of NBC.
CHAPTER 23
* * *
Can I Speak to God Right Away?
Los Angeles, New York City, Peoria, 1977–1978
When a star in a galaxy takes on too much mass, it begins to collapse into itself. Its core becomes weaker until it can no longer support the weight of its outer layers, which fly into the core and crush it. Sometimes, though, in one of nature’s mysteries, the star’s life does not end there: the collapse touches off a fresh nuclear reaction, a process of runaway fusion that flings the outer layers back out into the universe. A supernova is born, a galaxy illuminated.
This seems a fair description of Richard Pryor’s life
starting in mid-September 1977. He was consumed in the flurried motions of his own collapse: he married one woman while falling in love with another; he finished off his TV show with two episodes that careened between slapstick, satirical diatribe, experimental theater, and the most tender of pantomimes; he wasted himself on drugs to the point of hospitalization and near death. And then, through a chain reaction that remained mysterious even to him, he produced a brilliant account of his life in the form of a low-budget, seventy-eight-minute film that dispensed with all the frills of Hollywood moviemaking in favor of giving the audience a single man alone on a stage with just his microphone, his talent, and his demons for company. Richard Pryor: Live in Concert defeated Superman at the box office and gave birth to more comics, good and bad, than any other film in history. It even gave birth to a new Richard.
