Becoming Richard Pryor (20 page)

When the audience broke into applause, Richard seemed uncomfortable with the delay it posed to his routine, cutting through it with “Wait, I got some more to tell you” or bending down in a mock curtsy, as if the applause had turned him into an abashed debutante.

His main persona was the bungler or schlemiel. He was the bachelor who sliced himself when he tried to cut open a can of coffee, and who stabbed himself when he tried to pry open a can of evaporated milk. He was the straphanger who, when he tried to foil a pickpocket, ended up socking the dentures out of an eighty-year-old lady instead. He was someone—only incidentally a black man—who was trying to navigate the big city, yet always falling into its traps. He was Bill Cosby’s younger, skinnier brother, the one who blew his cool as much as Cosby kept his.

In only one joke did the race-conscious Pryor make a cameo appearance, and the joke’s racial subtext was probably lost on the studio audience:

This time the punch line wasn’t accompanied by a goofy look. Richard’s eyebrows lifted and his eyes widened in anger, as if to suggest that the threat was not an empty one. And then, before anyone
could absorb the shift in tone, his face recomposed itself into a mask of congeniality, and he was on to the next joke.

After Richard’s turn on
On Broadway Tonight
, the starmakers did not call. Even Richard’s folks back home in Peoria had little to say: they had tuned their TV to the wrong channel, they told him, and by the time they discovered their mistake, his performance was over. If his Improv friends had seen his TV debut, they might have been startled by the conventionality of his act: he stuck to his script, delivered his punch lines, and remained clearly within the bounds of decency. He did such a fabulous job of blending into the woodwork that, in the end, no one noticed him at all.

T
he Bitter End hired Richard for the entire month in October when he and Manny returned to the Village. The Café au Go-Go—a large brick-walled cellar where Lenny Bruce was notoriously arrested by the NYPD for obscenity—picked Richard up for a few shows, and installed him in the spring of 1965 as its house comic. But despite his success in the Village, Richard had begun to question the terms of his crossover act.

He wasn’t alone. In the mid-1960s, many black artists and intellectuals started wondering if they’d lost course by catering too much to white expectations of what was “proper” for black folks. Nationally, the alliance between blacks and white liberals—an alliance that had undergirded the civil rights movement and been embodied in Richard’s friendships with Henry Jaglom and Manny Roth—was cracking under the pressure of events such as the September 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four black girls and convinced many black Americans that nonviolent protest was not enough to protect their community.

In New York City, black activists were disillusioned to discover that local whites, no matter how sympathetic to Martin Luther King Jr.’s actions down south, balked when the civil rights movement showed up at their doorstep. After a black-led boycott in early 1964 pulled hundreds of thousands of children out of their schools (the
largest civil rights boycott of the era), the
New York Times
advocated a “self-imposed curb on speechmaking” and opined sourly that “A racial balancing of all the city’s schools remains as impossible after the boycott as before.” Black activists looked at the difficulty of the tasks ahead—turning broken schools into engines of opportunity, slums into livable neighborhoods—and felt a combustive sense of urgency. White liberals, and some black liberals, too, were chastened by that same difficulty. They looked to study the problems, grasp their complexities, and find a workable, targeted approach to them. Meanwhile, the middle ground between these two positions seemed to be disappearing. In July 1964, the month before Richard’s debut on TV, the shooting of a black ninth-grader by a white policeman touched off several days of battles between black Harlemites and the NYPD, with black rioters hurling Molotov cocktails and bricks at armed officers, who shot back.

Richard’s political feelings in this period are hard to trace with exactitude, perhaps because they weren’t well defined. He was more a tongue-tied witness to events than the trenchant commentator he would become. But in his acquaintance with poet-playwright LeRoi Jones, a fellow black bohemian, he felt the pull of a certain articulacy, a slashing anger that put the white world on notice. At the time, Jones was known primarily for his play
Dutchman
, an Off-Broadway sensation in which a white woman propositions a black man on the subway, inflames him into a rage, then stabs him in the chest and enlists the other passengers to throw his body off the train. Though married to a Jewish woman himself, Jones had an astringent view of the undercurrents of jealousy and desire that ran between blacks and whites in America. And he had an uncompromising vision of how honest an artist had to be: “[The artist] is a man who would say not only that the king has no clothes,” he wrote, “but proceed from there to note how badly the sovereign is hung. Such a man is, of course, crazy. . . . We’re all ravers, in one fashion or another.” By mid-1964, Jones had become a prominent voice of black radical disenchantment.

It was Henry Jaglom, ironically, who introduced Richard to Jones,
by taking him to an intimate staging of a Jones play at the Actors Studio. In the post-play discussion, Jaglom attacked what he saw as the play’s slanted treatment of race, and Jones responded with a stark challenge and an ad hominem attack: he was not prepared to listen to anything Jaglom said about his play or race in America; Jaglom was part of a system of oppression and had no right to comment on his work unless he was prepared to kill his own parents. Jaglom was shocked. He was coming at the race issue from a progressive angle, he felt. And his parents, as Jews escaping the Nazis, had only recently come to America—how could they be held responsible for slavery and its legacies? Jones was unperturbed. He repeated that if Jaglom wanted to be taken seriously, he needed to be willing to kill his parents. At this point, Jaglom looked to his good friend Richard—his collaborator onstage, his partner in dreaming, his political sounding board—for some moral support. To Jaglom’s chagrin, Richard kept his silence. It was a turning point in their relationship, a sign that they were not just
compañeros
in comedy, but separate particles: white and black, legit and illegit, rich and not rich at all. That night the two migrated from the Actors Studio to the Improv, where they assumed the stage as if nothing had happened. But “something had been broken,” Jaglom reflected.

Near the time of the face-off at the Actors Studio, Richard met Jones, this time without Jaglom, at the well-heeled apartment of the publisher of
Kulchur
, an avant-garde magazine for which Jones served as music editor. The apartment was a hipper version of the Jagloms’ luxury residence: original paintings by Picasso and Modigliani, rather than Degas and Renoir, hung on the walls. Richard, Jones, and the son of
Kulchur
’s publisher were talking politics, and the publisher’s son wanted to know how he might become more involved in the cause, whatever that entailed for a young white radical. “What can I do to help?” he asked Jones.

“Cut your father’s throat,” Jones said. It was a well-practiced, all-purpose answer to white would-be allies in 1964.

Richard started to interject something, but Jones cut him short with a look and one word:
“Richard
.”

The son hemmed and hawed; Richard watched. He was entranced by the power of Jones’s sharp cruelty, by the paralyzing effect it had on the white kid in the room. The kid who seemed to have everything in the world, who seemed born into knowingness, was suddenly and indelibly at a loss.

“Reality is best dealt with,” Jones told Richard privately at another moment. It was professional advice in the form of a Zen koan, and Richard tried to straighten his head so that he might follow it.

O
n February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom, killed by a shotgun blast that ripped a seven-inch hole around his heart. For LeRoi Jones, as for many black radicals, the death of Malcolm was a shattering event: the most charismatic spokesman for black liberation had been cut down at the very moment when his message felt most vital. Within a few weeks, Jones left behind his Jewish wife, their two children, and their world of friends in Greenwich Village and moved to Harlem, a neighborhood he had never known from the inside. There he founded the Black Arts Theatre Repertory/School, an all-black cultural organization that aspired to be the handmaiden of the black revolution. His dalliance with bohemia behind him, he was now fully committed: “[b]ack in the homeland to help raise the race.”

Richard Pryor wasn’t there yet. He had an affinity with Jones, but it was hard enough to be a struggling comedian without taking on the revolutionary struggle, too. And while Jones had been a resident of bohemia for a full decade, Richard was just starting to sample its freedoms—not least among them, the freedom to date white women.

In early 1965, Richard fell for one in particular, an Audrey Hepburn lookalike by the name of Maxine Silverman. Maxine was a savvy bohemian with a hard-earned sense of independence. Her parents—working-class Jews from Boston, a cabdriver and a department store clerk—had expected their daughter, first, to be well behaved. When she wasn’t, they tried to pound the mischief out of her with an ironing cord, or locked her in a closet to teach her a lesson. (Throughout her life, she went to sleep with the TV on, as she couldn’t stand to be in the dark.) By sixteen she had had an abortion. By age twenty-one she had split for New York City with a girlfriend and become a devoted follower of jazz, Lenny Bruce, and haute couture. Holly Golightly had Tiffany to spark her dreams; Maxine had Henri Bendel, where she could eye, but not buy, the latest dresses and accessories.

A vivacious beauty: Maxine Silverman at the beach in 1961, posed with Phillip Wylie’s
Opus 21,
a novel of sexual and political discovery.

(Courtesy of Elizabeth Pryor)

Maxine was a prickly, vivacious beauty. When she first caught Richard onstage, she saw him as a Lenny Bruce wannabe: he’d dropped the word
shit
into his routine, and she thought it was a cheap way to get a laugh (and told him so). But she warmed to his aura of innocence—he seemed to her like the sweetest, most darling person she’d ever seen—and not long after they met, she was willing to ditch her then-boyfriend and take a chance on love. Richard thought Maxine was “the cutest white girl I’d ever seen,” who “grooved right along with me in treating life like a party” and “knew things, sophisticated things that I’d never learned, like which forks to use at a nice
restaurant.” After he caught some commercial breaks, they moved in together, in a classy doorman building at Fifty-Seventh Street and Ninth Avenue.

Their relationship was high drama. It began as a comedy of misrecognition—Maxine taking Richard’s sweetness as the whole of his personality, Richard taking her vivacity as the whole of hers—and evolved into something considerably darker. Both of them had grown up in homes where abuse and affection were mixed up like feathers in a whirlwind, and they practiced on each other what had been practiced on them, probably without knowing why. Petty quarrels flared into knock-down, drag-out fights, fanned by Richard’s discovery of a different kind of “white lady”: cocaine.

In his memoir, Richard recalls one of the few occasions when Maxine got the last jab. An actor friend broke into their apartment late at night and shook Richard awake. Richard’s signature, it seems, had been illegible on a two-hundred-dollar check he had written so that his friend could fly out to LA for an audition—a check that would have cleaned out his bank account, and that Maxine had asked him not to write. The bank had sent the actor back to get another signature.

Richard did not wake easily. “I’m sleeping. Ask Maxine,” he said.

The friend woke Maxine, who became incensed—that Richard hadn’t listened to her, that the argument was coming around again, that he was fobbing this actor off on her—and ended up on their apartment’s balcony, screaming. Soon there was a roundelay of rage: Richard “angry at Maxine for getting angry while this actor was angry at both of us for fucking up his big chance.”

In the heat of the moment, Maxine grabbed a knife and fumed, “I’m gonna cut you, motherfucker.”

Richard egged her on. “Go ahead, bitch.”

She sprang at Richard, swiping across his left arm with a slash of the knife, cutting half an inch into the flesh.

Blood spurted out. Richard, in a fugue state, staggered to his friend Bruce Scott’s apartment upstairs. “Holy shit, she nailed you good!”
Scott exclaimed. He brought Richard inside, where, in silence, he cleaned the wound and wrapped it in gauze. Finally, Richard asked, “You want to come along? I’m going to rent a car and drive around.” Scott feared that Richard might, with his hundred-yard stare, drive himself off some forlorn cliff in suburban New Jersey, and so, around seven in the morning, the two found themselves in a rental car tooling aimlessly around the Garden State. Richard sat quietly with his gauze-packed arm on the wheel, mulling over something and revealing nothing on the long ride. He wanted a companion who would put no demands on him—who would just be there.