Becoming Richard Pryor (23 page)

Not long after arriving in LA, they settled into a home on Ferrari Drive, in the uplands of Beverly Hills, where their neighbors were guaranteed to be white and well-heeled. (As late as 1980, Beverly Hills had a black population of 1 percent.) If Richard felt a twinge of regret about leaving Harlem behind, the feeling wasn’t strong enough to make him choose a racially integrated neighborhood like Baldwin Hills, the affluent mid-city enclave favored by black entertainers like Earl Bostic and Ray Charles.

A photograph taken by
Ebony
the following year catches the mad force of his desire for mainstream success. Richard is airborne, leaping high underneath the street signs marking the intersection of Hollywood and Vine, dreamland’s epicenter. His whole body is tense with the effort—his eyes wide, his mouth open, his arms shooting out from his sports coat to reveal his cuffs, his legs splayed out. He looks like someone crazed, and a little terrified, with his own eagerness.

For all his antic energy, Richard smoothly infiltrated the Hollywood in-crowd. After rehearsing the
Kraft Summer Music Hall
during the day, he wandered at night to the Daisy, a private Beverly Hills club run by fashion maven Jack Hanson, who had, with his Jax slacks, created a line of tight pants that clung “like oil to water” to the slim hips of stars such as Audrey Hepburn and Candice Bergen. Pryor, himself a fan of the lean, pipe-cleaner fit, befriended Hanson and his wife, Sally, and was soon part of the club, part of a world that updated Old Hollywood glamour for the mid-1960s moment. On a typical night at the Daisy,
Doctor Zhivago
’s Omar Sharif might be found shooting pool, Tony Curtis sipping an Irish coffee at the bar, Natalie Wood relaxing after a vigorous Frug on the dance floor. The club limited its membership to around four hundred; paparazzi and autograph chasers were banned. “The Daisy, on any given night, is a noisy, frenzied circus of the most gorgeous women imaginable,” wrote one reporter granted entrée, agog. “It is a place where this great montage of thigh-high miniskirts and glued-on Jax pants are doing the skate, the dog, the stroll, the swim, the jerk, the bomp, the monkey, the fish, the duck, the hiker, the Watusi, the gun, the slop, the slip, the sway, the sally and the joint. Like all good Beverly Hills children, Daisy dancers never even sweat. . . . Compared to The Daisy, all other discotheques
are slums.” For Richard Pryor, who had known actual slums, the Daisy was alluring and probably a little unreal. It became his favorite haunt, and the incubator of his new Los Angeles life.

A flying leap: Pryor at the iconic intersection of Hollywood and Vine, 1967. (Courtesy of Johnson Publishing Company, LLC)

On Sunday afternoons, Richard joined a select group of Daisy regulars who gathered at Barrington Park, in nearby Brentwood, to play a game of sandlot baseball. The weekend games breathed in an air of casual Hollywood luxury. Jack Hanson (manager-shortstop) and actor Peter Falk (centerfield) rolled up in their Rolls-Royces; actor Kevin McCarthy (team photographer), in his Porsche convertible. No one sported a uniform: some wore polo shirts, some pajama tops, some no shirts at all; one player went sockless and shoeless in the outfield. The Daisy team faced off against a team organized by a lumber broker, also filled out with Hollywood types—actors and producers and executives. Singer Bobby Darin and actor Ryan O’Neal were Richard’s teammates. When he wasn’t on the diamond, Richard presided over the PA system as a play-by-play announcer, announcing every “sensational catch” or “tremendous triple” or “dazzling throw” as if the World Series hung in the balance. Nancy Sinatra, Suzanne Pleshette, and any number of young women cheered from the bleachers. The games ended, typically, with scores too high for anyone to have kept track, and everyone was treated with coffee and ice cream courtesy of La Scala, a restaurant favored by the film colony. Over the next six years, no fewer than three of Richard’s fellow ballplayers—Aaron Spelling, James B. Harris, and David Wolper—would cast him in films they produced.

Richard’s day job on the
Kraft Summer Music Hall
, meanwhile, was a letdown. He joked with Sandy Gallin about the utter squareness of the show, which always ended with host John Davidson serenading older audience members with the Tin Pan Alley songs of their youth. Given how retro the program was, and how geared toward a white audience, Richard may justifiably have felt like he was back at Peoria’s Blaine-Sumner Elementary School, the fly in the buttermilk. He kept his distance from the other cast members and sometimes skipped rehearsals, which fueled speculation that drugs were keeping him away. Richie Pryor seemed “really in his own world,” Davidson remembered.

Matching outfits: on
Kraft Summer Music Hall
with host John Davidson. (Courtesy of the author)

Viewers of the TV program, though, would have had a hard time detecting any disaffection on Richard’s part. He wore the same crewneck sweater, white slacks, and white buck shoes as every other male performer on the show, and carried himself in general like the happiest goofball in the world. “Smile a happy face and sing your cares away”: so the cast sang in chorus at the show’s opening, and when Richard was introduced as a guest performer, he went cross-eyed, stuck out his tongue, and waved like a child, with both hands, at the camera. In the show’s segments, he played well with others. For a medley of “river songs”—“Shenandoah” and so on—he added his voice to the three-part harmony and tap-danced with abandon when the spotlight fell on him. In another bit, where the cast performed some hokey children’s circle games, he slapped his thigh to the beat and recited a rhyme that would never have played in Peoria’s red-light
district: “My girl, she went a-golfing, and boy did she have fun / She wore her new silk stockings and got a hole in one.” His guest stand-up segments were variations on his TV-friendly work for
Merv Griffin
: “Rumpelstiltskin,” the pantomimes, his failure as a pickup artist. Though familiar to Richard, they were deft enough that his fellow cast members were struck by how much he moved the straitlaced audience. As he’d learned to do at Blaine-Sumner, he had gauged his surroundings and donned the mask of class clown.

In the August 1 program, Richard had the courage to let that mask slip for a few minutes. Davidson announced that, though Richard “had been a guest many times” and “had always been a clown,” he had learned that Richard’s “secret desire” was “to be a singer,” so he yielded the stage to Richard Pryor, crooner. The last time Richard had bared this side of himself, he was auditioning for Harold Parker at Harold’s Club in 1961, and his vocals had been a mess. Not this time. Accompanied at first only by a stand-up bass, he launched into a slinky rendition of the blues standard “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” a song about a man who splurges on his friends when his money is rolling in, only to find himself deserted when he goes broke. As the horns arrived to punctuate the chorus, Richard raised his voice by a full octave and belted the song’s cynical moral with showstopping energy and utter conviction. “Nobody wants you, nobody needs you when you’re down and out”: a strange thought, perhaps, for someone who had just moved into a new house in Beverly Hills and been awarded membership in the most exclusive of social clubs. But Richard seemed to feel the fragility of his success. Even as he was flying high, he reminded himself what it would be like to plummet to the ground.

R
ichard’s fantasy of being a torch singer was probably stoked by his budding friendship with one of his sandlot baseball teammates, the singer Bobby Darin, who took Richard under his wing not long after they shared their first Daisy baseball game. Darin was the most connected, and the hippest, entertainer to sponsor Richard’s career yet. Through “Splish Splash” and a raft of Hollywood films, Darin had established himself as a teen idol; through “Mack the Knife” and his incandescent cabaret act, he had become a sensation among older audiences. He was also a self-styled industry iconoclast—a performer who followed up his smash hit “Mack the Knife” with a heartfelt R&B tribute album to Ray Charles, then albums of country-and-western and folk music. By August 1966, like Richard, he felt himself veering off from the core of his audience, the folks who filled New York City’s Copacabana or Las Vegas’s Flamingo Hotel to hear him perform Tin Pan Alley standards. He had just recorded the folk-rock “If I Were a Carpenter,” a song that wondered aloud: would you still love me if I wasn’t who I appear to be?

A “wing-dang-doodle” of a time: Maxine Silverman, Bobby Darin, and Richard Pryor at the party Darin hosted in his honor. (Courtesy of Henry Langdon)

Darin promoted Richard with characteristic élan. He signed him up as the opening act for his August 1966 return to the Flamingo hotel—a gig that promised $2,400 a week, more than Richard had ever made—and in anticipation of the gig, staged a party at his elegant Bel
Air home to fête his new protégé. The invitation declared that, according to astronomers, a new star was to descend upon Darin’s home, a star that hailed from “the constellation Talent” and was named Richard Pryor. Darin promised everyone a “wing-dang-doodle” of a time, and the party itself was a head-turning celebrity summit. Old-school comedians Milton Berle and Groucho Marx were there, with cigars poking from their pockets or cradled in their fingers. Singers Connie Stevens and Diana Ross tripped the light fantastic with Darin, who seemed liberated by the recent announcement that his wife, Sandra Dee, had filed for divorce. He was looking as sharp as ever, with a matching polka-dot ascot and pocket handkerchief. Meanwhile, Richard, the guest of honor, seemed uncomfortable with all the attention. He arrived wearing a cable-knit sweater over a T-shirt, dressed not for his “coming out” party but for a casual night at home, spent parked in front of the TV.

Early in the evening, Richard discovered he was right to be nervous. Sitting across from him was Groucho, who had seen Pryor’s recent appearance on
The Merv Griffin Show
, where Richard had met his idol Jerry Lewis for the first time. After an earnest moment in which Richard had praised Lewis as “the god of comedy,” the two had regaled Merv’s audience by spitting water on each other.

“Young man, you’re a comic?” Groucho asked Richard.

“Yes,” Richard replied, walking into the trap. “Yes, I am.”

“So how do you want to end up? Have you thought about that? Do you want a career you’re proud of? Or do you want to end up a spitting wad like Jerry Lewis?”

“Huh?” Richard stammered. His idol a spitting wad?

“Do you ever see plays?” Groucho asked.

“No.”

“Do you ever read books?”

“No.”

The questions, and Richard’s humbling answers, hung in the air. After the party, he turned over Groucho’s slap-down in his mind. Here he’d been, breathing the same oxygen as the entertainers who
had defined American comedy for twenty years, and what did he have to show for himself?
The Kraft Music Hall
? He’d left one kind of brothel for another. “Wake up, Richard,” he told himself. “Yes, you are an ignorant jerk, pimping your talent like a cheap whore. But you don’t have to stay that way. You have a brain. Use it.”