Becoming Richard Pryor (31 page)

Perhaps it was their rhyming family backgrounds that led Mooney to appreciate Richard’s wicked wit and accept his adolescent selfishness. Like Richard, Mooney was raised by a grandmother who dispensed hard discipline and earthy wisdom. The moral center of the family, Mooney’s “Mama” had a phrase for every occasion. When a child started getting out of line, she announced, “I’m passing out lollipops and whoopin’s, and I’m fresh out of lollipops.” If she spotted a con artist in her midst, she warned, “A cow always knows where the weak fence is.” If she thought someone too deferential, she advised, “A dog that will bring a bone will take a bone.” And like Marie Pryor, Mooney’s grandmother was tough-minded about sex and money. If the women of the family were too loose with their favors, she might say, “A hard dick knows no names” or (Mooney’s favorite) “A wet pussy and a dry purse don’t match.”

Starting around the fall of 1967, Pryor and Mooney grew closer, bonding through a mixture of friendship and creative collaboration. For the next two decades, Mooney was at the center of Richard’s inside circle. He was the audience member whose hearty laugh rang out from the crowd and emboldened Richard onstage; the sounding
board who, after a show, rapped with Richard for hours about which lines killed and which lines died; the quick-witted conversationalist who supplied Richard’s comic act with some of its most unforgettable lines (for which he was compensated generously). He was also the drug-free confrère who could be counted on to handle the logistics—Where’s the party? Where’s the car?—that Richard had no head for. And Mooney did so without judgment; he didn’t press his relatively clean lifestyle on Richard or anyone else. Quite the contrary. When Mooney inevitably declined an offer of coke, Richard had a customary response to the purveyor. “I get Mooney’s share,” he would say merrily, and snort it up in full.

With Mooney at his side, Richard began haunting black-oriented clubs like Maverick’s Flat and the Redd Foxx Club, and feeding on the energy in their rooms. John Daniels, the owner of Maverick’s Flat, had aspired to open, in the words of the
Los Angeles Times
, “a black Playboy Mansion, with comfortable pillows and good-looking boys and girls dancing to the beat.” He ended up with something even more interesting: a club, on black LA’s Crenshaw Strip, that was wholesome and decadent, psychedelic and soulful, fun-loving and experimental. On the wholesome side, Maverick’s Flat served ice-cold Coca-Cola, not alcohol, and was open to teens. It hosted beauty pageants, casting calls, and a conference on the redevelopment of the ghetto. It was unpretentious enough that visitors like Diana Ross, when told there were no seats available, would sit on floor pillows; loose enough that Muhammad Ali would take over as a DJ, dropping his rhymes on the audience. But Maverick’s also had a very adult vision of sophistication. It stayed open until 4:00 a.m. and drew everyone from Stokely Carmichael and Sidney Poitier to Robert Mitchum and Marlon Brando (who was almost kicked out for not wearing shoes). One of Maverick’s exquisitely decorated walls featured an image of a nude black couple nesting with intertwined legs in a celestial love seat, four long-stemmed wineglasses at their side, a red planet blazing in the distance amid twinkling stars. The Temptations’ “Psychedelic Shack” was inspired by the club’s décor.

Meanwhile, the Redd Foxx Club, on La Cienega Boulevard in the Mid-City neighborhood, returned Richard to the days of his first performances at Collins Corner. Foxx wielded a switchblade and a small black Derringer to keep his employees in line (and to protect himself from overeager creditors). Richard judged that Redd “ran the club like a gangster, treating friends like relatives and enemies with scorn. People were beat up regularly.” In other words, it felt like home. The room was so intimate that Bill Cosby described it as “an aisle.” As at Collins Corner, the nearly all-black audience at Redd’s place was rambunctious and free with its backtalk: according to one performer, “a comic with his wits about him could stand there and do fifteen or twenty minutes just trying to slow them down long enough for him to tell one planned story or do one planned piece of material.” Some comedians might have clenched under the pressure; Richard surrendered to it. “I loved getting on that stage and just tripping—adlibbing new routines and so on,” he recalled. And the club was free in another way, too: Richard remembered snorting so much cocaine with Redd in the small hours at the club that he felt they were competing in “the coke Olympics.”

Onstage at Maverick’s or the Redd Foxx Club, Richard could say anything he wanted. It was an extraordinary feeling, this sensation of creative freedom. For him, the worm was turning: those parts of himself that had been buried, by shame or censorship, were now his creative fuel. According to Mooney his two favorite words at Maverick’s, in order of frequency, were
motherfucker
and
nigger
. Richard’s use of the
N
-word, in particular, was a stark sign of where his newfound freedom was taking him.
Nigger
has been called “the nuclear bomb of racial epithets,” and comics before Richard, such as Lenny Bruce and Dick Gregory, detonated the word sporadically in their act. Richard leaned on it often, and found more flexible uses for it. He might use the word, while in character, to sharpen an insult (“Say, nigger, what the fuck wrong with you? You gonna slam the door in my face, as much money as I spent in this raggedy motherfucker?”). Or he might use it, in his own voice, as a blanket term (“Niggers nowadays be serious.
The same niggers who was winos is in the Panthers now, doing something for the community”). Though it served occasionally as a punch line, especially if Richard pronounced it as a white person might (“Look up in the sky . . . it’s Super Nigger!”), usually it was a basic form of oral punctuation, something between a comma and an exclamation point—there to supply a pause and underscore his latest poke at the audience.

Richard’s use of the
N
-word kissed his entire audience with lightning. Instantly, it established a rapport with those blacks who had never heard a comedian address them in the language of their closest friends and family, and who, in the age of Black Power, were eager to leave
Negro
behind in pursuit of blackness. Less obviously, it connected Richard to those white audience members who wanted to eavesdrop on the black community’s inside language, letting them join his black fans in a grand gesture of refusal. Whenever the
N
-word came out of Richard’s mouth, it expressed a basic stance to the world of the kibitzers and star makers, the world of Bobby Roberts and the Aladdin hotel. It was the same stance taken by Clark Washington to his boss: You can’t fire me, I quit. I’ll make it on my terms, or on no terms at all.

A jazz critic for the
Oakland Tribune
judged that Richard “had an act the like of which has never, to my knowledge, been done before in a conventional nightclub.” Bill Cosby remembered that “Richard would walk in [the Redd Foxx Club], and he’d blow Foxx away. He’d blow me away, with no problem. That was mainly because Richard was bringing in a new kind of language at the time—not really bringing it in, but using it and using it well.” “Using it well”: Cosby appreciated that Richard was not simply dropping
N
-bombs and
F
-bombs willy-nilly. He’d found a way to control their power.

I
n a dope-fueled brainstorming session with Paul Mooney, Richard announced that he was going to make a movie. TV was too confining—his last speculative foray in that medium had been his untimely idea, with Henry Jaglom, of an interracial buddy comedy—
but filmmaking was opening up to anyone with a sixteen-millimeter camera.

“We’ll get our friends together and do it,” Richard told Mooney.

“Where we gettin’ the money?” Mooney asked.

“Me,” Richard said. “I’ll put it up. I’ll produce.”

“Who’s gonna direct?”

“Me.”

“Who’s gonna be in it?”

“Everybody we know.”

From the start the film was powered by an insane level of ambition on Richard’s part; he supposed that he would be the film’s writer, director, producer, and star. He founded a production company and gave it the resonant name of Black Sun.

Richard had toyed for a while with the idea of making his own film. During his Greenwich Village days, he had bought a sixteen-millimeter camera: Manny Roth remembered him wandering around New York City for a full day and night, his camera trained on whatever sights and sounds snagged his interest. And just in the two years since he’d moved to Los Angeles, the barriers to independent filmmaking had been lowered dramatically. Several new types of low-budget movies competed with the glamour films churned out by the major studios. Director John Cassavetes pioneered a mode of personal filmmaking that was untidy, urgent, and actor-driven. Skin flick auteur Russ Meyer produced grindhouse classics such as the S/M melodrama
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
(1966) or
Mondo Topless
(1966), in which a group of “busty buxotic beauties” (San Francisco strippers) perform and discuss the realities of sex work. On the exploitation end, American Independent Pictures (AIP) dominated the field, latching onto the counterculture with a boomlet of motorcycle gang and hippie films.

In Richard’s case, it was his involvement with the AIP film
Wild in the Streets
that both inspired and goaded him to sit in the director’s chair. His fascination with the process of moviemaking deepened on its set. “I can spend hours watching people on the set do their ‘thing,’” he said. “Everybody here has their certain ‘thing’ and it’s amazing to
watch their concentration. Take the makeup man. You’d think that his work was the only thing seen on the screen. The same with all the people here. I guess that’s why American pictures have the reputation of being so technically perfect.”

It seems likely, too, that the tabloid quality of the film itself helped spur Richard to believe in his own tilted vision.
Wild in the Streets
was a mad parable about a groupuscule of young rock musicians (including Richard’s Stanley X) who convince an opportunistic politician to lower the voting age in America so that teens can vote. The franchise thus expanded, psychedelic chaos ensues: LSD contaminates the nation’s water supply; the leader of the band gets elected president on the motto “Down with experience!”; everyone over thirty is packed off to concentration camps, where they pass their lives in a stupor, dazed by the daily dose of acid they’re forced to drop. The movie feels as zonked out as its characters, delighting in rapid plot reversals, kaleidoscopic cinematography, and a tone that oscillates between comedy and horror before landing squarely on the latter.

Yet
Wild in the Streets
also gave Richard a taste of the limits of independent filmmaking.
The New Yorker
’s Pauline Kael called the film a “cheap commodity,” which “in its blatant and sometimes funny way of delivering action serves to remind us that one of the great appeals of movies is that we don’t have to take them too seriously.” Richard certainly valued irreverence, but the on-screen evidence suggests he did not enjoy how much
his
character wasn’t to be taken seriously. As Stanley X, drummer and “author of
The Aborigine Cookbook
,” Richard was a trivial, token presence in the white rock star’s entourage—the black militant there to balance out the gay guitarist, the vegetarian acidhead, and the teenage Japanese masseuse. He was part of the scenery, and he intoned his few lines with an aloofness that suggested he wasn’t going to fight to become something else. After one particularly limp moment of repartee (“You’ve got a big mouth”; “You’ve got a square head”), the camera focuses on Richard, who puts his hands together on his lap, rolls his eyes up to the ceiling with a look of scorn, and lays a heavy topspin on his single word of dialogue: “Wow.”

Worse was the unthinking racism that, according to Paul Mooney, came at Richard from the same below-the-line technicians whose professionalism he admired. Hanging out on the set with Mooney, Richard observed some set decorators spraying the streets with a shiny substance that made them glisten with the look of fresh rain. “What’s that stuff?” Richard asked.

“It’s called ‘nigger-size,’” a set decorator answered. His tongue didn’t pause over the word; his eyes didn’t meet Richard’s to gauge his reaction.

“Nigger-size?” Mooney asked.

“Yeah, it’s what we nigger-size the streets with.” This was established Hollywood lingo, it seems. The two black men on set looked at each other and shook their heads.

W
hen asked later about the film that went variously by the name of
Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales
,
Bon Appetit
, and
The Trial
, Richard told the
Peoria Journal Star
that “an angel is helping finance it.” It was a coy remark that papered over the serious political ironies that underlay the production of his film and shaped his marriage to Shelley.

By the fall of 1968, their marriage was fraying at the ends. If their relationship had originally been conceived as a countercultural experiment in interracial loving, it was colored now by the brooding vision of Black Power, in which battles between black and white were taken as the baseline of American politics. Mooney called Richard and Shelley’s home the “House of Pain”; arguments began with insults and ended with Richard administering blows. Lady Cocaine, along with various other women, had supplanted Shelley in Richard’s favor. He spent long nights at the home of his drug dealer, racking up debts and becoming deeply hooked. On one occasion, when Shelley flushed Richard’s cocaine down the toilet, he jabbed her, with a boxer’s efficiency and strength, in her head and pregnant belly, knocking her to the floor just as Buck had knocked down Gertrude. Shelley was at a loss—unsettled by his cocaine binges, demoralized by his faithlessness, shaken by his physical abuse.

What to do? She hit upon an inspired idea: she could invest her parents’ wedding present—thirty thousand dollars, waiting in a bank account—in the Black Power screenplay that had become Richard’s pet obsession. By working together on the film, she hoped, the two of them could breathe new vitality into their marriage. When she proposed the idea, Richard quickened: he was happy to take the money and lose himself in a movie of his own creation.