Becoming Richard Pryor (21 page)

Usually the violence between Richard and Maxine went the other way. Richard could be brutal, and she never knew how far he might go. Two years later, when they lived together in Beverly Hills, she wrote a secret message on the back of a picture in their home: “If anything happens to me, Richard Pryor did it.” He might put her in the grave somehow, she thought bleakly, but he wouldn’t get away with it.

Still they considered themselves, for a while, husband and wife. Maxine called herself “Mrs. Maxine Pryor” early in their relationship and never dropped the title; Richard called her his wife, though he hadn’t yet divorced his first wife, Patricia. In the manner of bohemians, they preferred informal vows to any official ceremony in a church, temple, or city hall. Cigar bands, not wedding bands, were exchanged between them. Richard cried out to be taken care of, and Maxine tried to take care of him, in her fashion. When Richard debuted on
The Ed Sullivan Show
in May 1965—the biggest break of his early career—he turned to Maxine to pick out his tie.

T
he routine that opened the doors in Richard’s professional life was a five-minute farce, a version of his theatrical debut in a children’s production of
Rumpelstiltskin
. “Rumpelstiltskin” was his calling card as a comic, a work of mini-theater that he used successfully to audition for Ed Sullivan’s and Merv Griffin’s shows. And like much of his early act, it was an elaborate scrambling of the facts of his life.

At age fourteen, Richard had made his stage debut at the Carver Center in a production of
Rumpelstiltskin
that had lived up to Juliette Whittaker’s exacting standards of professionalism and artistry. In his routine, Richard backdated the routine to his kindergarten year at Irving School, substituted a nasally white “Mr. Conrad” for the elegantly black Miss Whittaker, and converted his fellow performers from aspiring thespians to “little kiddies” who can’t seem to get their lines or characters straight:

And so it goes, in this burlesque of a fairy tale. The boy playing the fairy godmother introduces himself as the fairy “godfather,” then confusedly corrects himself. Rumpelstiltskin brags about the wicked power of his magic dust, then blows it by mistake into his own face and gasps.

For Rumpelstiltskin, Richard drew upon that part of himself that had stayed forever in kindergarten, the part that was not wised up and that wanted to believe in fairy-tale happy endings. (His kindergarten year at Irving School marked the moment, in his life, of his parents’ divorce and his separation from his mother.) The sketch was a hilarious portrait of the guilelessness of children, rendered by a comedian who hankered after innocence even as he knew how absurd it was to walk innocently among the wolves of the world. With his narrow shoulders and pipe-cleaner legs still suggesting the gawkiness of adolescence,
Richard
looked
young, too—young enough that the years seemed to melt away when he played kindergarteners. And unlike Bill Cosby, whose sketches often revolved around children, too, he didn’t seek to correct their behavior or interject himself as an authority figure when they misbehaved and struggled to stay “on script.” There was joy in their comedy of errors, delight in how they slipped out of the roles they were given. The only grown-up in the sketch, the self-important teacher Mr. Conrad, was the character who came off most poorly.

Artistically, “Rumpelstiltskin” was a watershed for Richard. With it, he found a way to collapse the techniques of group improvisation he’d learned at the Improv into his solo act as a stand-up comedian. Instead of joining a handful of actors onstage to play a theater game, he became all the actors himself and made the rules of the game into the premise of the routine. “Rumpelstiltskin” set the template for later virtuosic sketches such as “T.V. Panel,” “Prison Play,” and “Hank’s Place,” in which he effortlessly seemed to incarnate character after character and spun the anarchy of their interaction into comedic gold. Though these sketches were carefully crafted and sometimes repeated word for word from performance to performance, they had a bracing sense of spontaneity built into them. They
felt
improvised even if they weren’t, perhaps because the people within them, like all children and all good improvisers onstage, tended to be searching for the truth of their character rather than in possession of it.

Practically, “Rumpelstiltskin” marked a new stage in Richard’s career, and for a very simple reason: both Ed and Merv loved it, and loved him. Right after his debut with Merv Griffin, he became a regular, notching more than twenty appearances on the show in less than a year. After he performed “Rumpelstiltskin” on
Ed Sullivan
, he was signed to a multi-show contract that kept him on the program every two months. The television exposure changed his life: he left behind Manny Roth, who, after all, had the Café Wha? to attend to, and teamed up with General Artists Corporation, a powerhouse talent agency that represented everyone from the Beatles and the Supremes to Nancy Sinatra and fellow up-and-comer George Carlin.

Soon Richard would be recognized as a “lean, literate, quick-witted kook,” the man with “the most elastic face in show business.” He had graduated from the coffeehouses of the Village and was becoming a national, not just a local, act.
Jet
reported, breathlessly, that this “newest and youngest of the Negro comics” was “being stormed by teen-agers every time he does a TV show.” As the appearances piled up, he found himself in an unprecedented situation: making more money than he could spend.

B
ack in Peoria, Richard’s family was dealing with legal trouble more serious than the cat-and-mouse games of his early childhood. The police were cracking down on the Aiken Avenue area where Peoria’s brothels had migrated after the bulldozing of North Washington Street, and for the first time in twenty years, his father and stepmother faced the threat of prison time.

The trouble began on May 28, 1965, when Sheriff Ray Trunk was fiddling with a padlock at 405 Aiken Avenue, a house shuttered by court order. He heard a tapping sound from the house next door, at 409 Aiken; a woman was knocking on the window and signaling him to come over. He approached, and the front door cracked open; the woman invited him to sneak around to the back. Instead, Trunk pushed open the door and arrested the two women he found in the front room as suspected prostitutes. He explored the house and, coming upon Richard’s stepmother Ann in another room, asked if she ran the place. When, according to Trunk, she said yes, she was hauled off to jail on prostitution charges.

Three months later, the Pryors suffered another impromptu raid at 409 Aiken. On September 18, an undercover Illinois state trooper wangled his way into the house; a twenty-one-year-old working girl propositioned him, and, after money changed hands, he revealed himself as an officer of the law. The trooper was ill prepared for what came next. Several people—among them Buck Pryor, fifty years old and built like a refrigerator—grabbed the girl and ran into the streets. It was a lucky if impulsive move. Buck eluded capture for a day, and
though he was charged with being the brothel’s proprietor, in the end there was not enough evidence to substantiate the charge. He got off with just a twenty-dollar fine, for resisting arrest.

Richard’s stepmother was not so fortunate. On October 6, 1965, a Peoria judge declared Ann guilty of operating a brothel, and the assistant state’s attorney recommended a three-month jail term. Ann’s lawyer pleaded in court for a fine, not jail time, and put his client on the stand to make a case for extenuating circumstances. She was dying of oral and nose cancer, Ann said; she had recently been operated upon in a hospital in Chicago, and her condition required regular follow-ups there. She also testified that she was out of the game, a madam no more, and pointed to the fact that she was attending night school at Midstate College of Commerce, studying typing and office work.

Ramrod-straight Peoria had no sympathy for Ann. The president of Midstate College of Commerce, indignant to have been used for an alibi, dismissed her from its rolls after the story of her announced reform hit the newsstands. “If we had known her identity, we would never have accepted her,” he said, and refunded her tuition forthwith. In late October the judge quadrupled the sentence recommended by the state’s attorney, imposing the maximum of a one-year prison term for her offense. If his sentence stuck, Ann was likely to die in the Illinois State Reformatory for Women, ninety miles from her home.

The Pryor family rallied to her cause, quickly raising two thousand dollars for her bail. Their lawyer shot off an appeal to a higher court, and Ann was free pending its resolution. She was playing out her string, though it was far from clear how much string she had left.

For Buck and Ann, their son Richard—once a nuisance and irritant in the household—was now a source of consolation. In the days after the judge pronounced his sentence, Richard was headlining the Blue Angel in Chicago, and the two drove the three hours to watch him perform. “Sure enough, high above in big lights was the name Richard Pryor,” Buck recalled to a reporter in 1966, playing the proud father. “We knew then that he had found what he’d always wanted.” And Buck got a piece of what he wanted out of Richard’s success,
too: twenty thousand dollars in cash, handed freely from Richard so that Buck could buy a new home in Peoria, separate from the Aiken Avenue house that had just been raided twice.

For Richard, the generosity of that gift was inversely proportional to the amount of time he wished to spend in Peoria. He was trying to become the name on a bigger marquee, the star twinkling above his family and their troubles. Except in the controlled world of his imagination, he had not returned to his home in the three years since he left, and that was how he liked it.

Los Angeles, New York City, Peoria, 1965–1966

L
ate October 1965, an apartment in a West Hollywood high-rise
: Henry Jaglom, still an underemployed actor, is writing furiously in his journal with different-colored pens, having just dropped acid for the first time. He had been given the stuff—little known outside certain bohemian circles in Hollywood and San Francisco, and still perfectly legal in California—from a friend at Jane Fonda’s July Fourth bash in Malibu, and had held on to it for months, hesitant to experiment with his own psyche. Now he feels his world buzzing. The celestial harmonies of Bach are manifesting to him in a wash of color; flowers are growing out of the walls and the colored pens he’s holding. He looks at himself in a mirror and observes that he has undergone the most stunning metamorphosis. His hair is blond and flowing, his neck elongated, his back sprouting wings until he seems like a cross between a swan and an angel.

An interruption: the phone rings. It’s his friend Richie Pryor, in town for a set of gigs down the hill at the Troubadour, a hotbed of the new comedy and folk-rock.

“I’ve got something that is so incredible,” Jaglom says. “It will make you feel so great.” Richard hardly needs that strong a sales pitch.

Later that night, Jaglom is lying naked on the bathroom floor when he hears a scream from the living room. He emerges from the bathroom to find Richard howling at the window, getting ready to hurl himself six floors down. The living room carpet now seems to Jaglom like high grass, taller than his body, but he runs across it, feeling like a knight on a horse, charging to save the princess—only
Richard is the princess he needs to rescue. Arriving at the windowsill, he grabs Richard’s ankle so tightly that his fingernails break through the skin, and he holds Richard there for what seems, in LSD time, like an eternity.

Why has Richard tried to climb out the high window? It’s not so much that he’s aiming to kill himself—nothing so coherent as that—but rather a sign of how intensely the acid has unhinged him. He’s crying, raving: about the ugliness he feels, about the pain he’s seen since he was a child, about the meanness of his life. When he looked in the mirror, at Henry’s well-intentioned suggestion, he had glimpsed the opposite of what Henry had seen. There had been a devil looking back, the devil inside. The window had been his escape route.

How differently these two friends traveled through the high times they shared! Henry was cushioned by his privilege and his optimism; Richard, always at risk of falling—or throwing himself—into the abyss. And so the same LSD that had heightened Henry’s love affair with himself, enveloping him in a nimbus of glory, had trapped Richard at the top of a dark tower, swarmed by memories from his past and anxieties from his present. Dropping acid together, the white actor and the black comic had never been farther apart.

B
ack home in New York City in late 1965, Richard put on his game face. He was writing new material constantly, and for good reason: with near-weekly appearances on
Merv Griffin
, he needed to keep his act fresh. He prepped for the shows with his agent, Sandy Gallin, an energetic player who would later manage Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin, and Michael Jackson, and who took on many of the duties of a manager with Richard. “What are you going to do with him?” Gallin had been asked when he first signed Richard to General Artists Corporation. “He can’t put three sentences together without saying ‘fuck’ or ‘nigger.’” Gallin was charged with trimming the swear words from Richard’s act.