Becoming Richard Pryor (32 page)

And so his vision of the black revolution would come to cinematic life through a cash infusion from Herb and Bunny Bonis. Super Nigger depended, in material terms, on the white wife he cheated on and, behind her, on the white in-laws who regarded him with suspicion. If that irony weren’t rich enough: Herb had earned the money as the personal manager of Danny Kaye, the effervescent Jewish comedian who came up from the Borscht Belt, and who had made his stage debut Jolson-style, in blackface, in his Brooklyn kindergarten’s production of
The Watermelon Fantasy
. It was an intergenerational, interracial transfer of funds, from the center of the political spectrum to its leftward edge.

The production gradually took shape over the course of 1968 and early 1969. In its first outline,
Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales
was propaganda pure and simple. When art director Gary Burden visited Richard’s home in June 1968 for the cover shoot of Richard’s first album, he observed that Richard was brainstorming “a documentary . . . of black people taking over the world, and he had all these storyboards on the wall of black warriors mowing down the white pigs.” But the project took a surprising turn in the wake of the trial of Black Panther Huey Newton, cofounder of the Black Panther Party. That trial was the major Black Power media event of 1968, a political shocker in a summer of shockers, and Richard’s creative imagination was jolted by its electricity.

The trial was touched off by an arrest gone wrong. Nine months earlier, Newton had been stopped on the streets of Oakland by police officer John Frey, who contacted headquarters to notify them he was stopping a “known Black Panther vehicle.” In Newton’s account, he
took out a criminal law textbook and questioned whether Frey had reasonable cause for the arrest; Frey snarled, “You can take that book and shove it up your ass, nigger,” then punched Newton in the face with a force that sent him tumbling to the ground. A struggle ensued, and when it ended, Newton had taken a shot in the abdomen; a supporting officer had been shot in the arm, knee, and chest; and Officer Frey had died from bullets to his leg, chest, and stomach.

In another time, another place, the death of a white police officer in a firefight with a black radical would have been an open-and-shut case, and Newton would have picked up a one-way ticket to death row. But the Black Power movement had cleared open a space in the American legal system, broadening the relevant “facts of the case” until they encompassed the larger social forces that had sent a young black radical and a young white police officer on a collision course. In a striking reversal, Newton’s trial put the American status quo, more than Huey Newton himself, up for cross-examination: in the words of legal historian Mark Weiner, defending Newton meant “questioning the assumptions that made his acts criminal in the eyes of the law.” Newton’s lawyer Charles Garry did not even touch on the shooting incident until a few days before he called Newton to the witness stand, convinced that “the only way Newton could be defended was to take him in the context of his world and see the facts from that viewpoint.”

The Newton trial was high rhetorical drama, with Newton’s life hanging in the balance. Garry audaciously compared Newton to Jesus Christ, likening the Panther message of self-defense to the instructions found in the Gospel of Matthew: “Think not that I come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.” In his closing argument, Garry called for not just the exoneration of his client but the abolition of the ghetto:

Garry’s argument worked, in part. In its verdict on September 8, 1968, the jury held that, while Newton had shot Officer Frey, he had been provoked by the lawman. It lowered the charge from murder to manslaughter; instead of facing execution, Newton faced a potential sentence of two to fifteen years.

In the aftermath of the Newton trial, Richard began contributing significantly to the Black Power movement. In January 1969, during his run at Mister Kelly’s nightclub in Chicago, the Black Panther Party chapter of that city courted his support, and he responded warmly, donating a thousand dollars in cash to the cause. He agreed to make a special trip to Peoria to perform a benefit for the city’s fledgling Afro-American Black Peoples’ Federation. And he headlined a Congress of Racial Equality fund-raiser at the Apollo Theater at a moment when the organization championed black nationalism and community control.

Yet in his art, Richard rarely traveled a straightforward route. He ripped the premise of
Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales
from the headlines of the Newton trial, but he also turned history upside down in his imagination. Scribbling his screenplay in a spiral notebook with tattered pages, he created an odd mixture of pornography, black comedy, and Black Power agitprop. The trial of a black man in a white man’s courtroom became the trial of a white man in a black man’s courtroom. No longer a grandiose vision of black people taking over the world, the film shrank to the scale of a chamber drama and become less programmatic, more offbeat. Richard recalled:

After that memorable kiss-off, the white man was put on trial “for all the racial crimes in U.S. history.” He pled his case in a basement courtroom, in front of a black judge and a jury stocked with pimps, prostitutes, winos, and drug addicts. The judge had a plate of cocaine and a bottle of liquor in front of him; the jury was similarly well furnished.

Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales
was half lurid, half loopy, and fully avant-garde. In one scene, the white man was stripped to his underwear and made to lie on the floor in the courtroom. A gang of black men arrived with sponges and buckets of water. They soaped him up and rinsed him off—an event billed as a “car wash.” When the time came for the jury to reach its verdict, it didn’t deliberate over the man’s fate but yelled out his sentence like members of a lynch mob: “Kill the motherfucker!,” “Hang him!,” “Shoot him!” In his cocaine-whirred imagination, Richard had conceived a vision of revolution as a travesty of justice, a kangaroo court. Blacks were granted a fantastic power, only to abuse it.

Tellingly, Richard set himself up to perform two opposing, color-coded roles in the film: he was both the lawyer for the defense, kitted out in white hat and long white leather coat; and the lawyer for the prosecution, resplendent in darker duds. He played out his own internal drama, becoming the white man’s closest ally and his most committed antagonist. For Richard, there was no golden mean, no middle ground. Between his assumed identities as defense lawyer and prosecutor—as between Clark Washington and Super Nigger—there was only an unbridgeable gap.

Now, as the director of a film moving into production, he faced the challenge of finding a form that could contain the energies splitting him, and his country, in two.

Los Angeles and Peoria, 1969–1971

A
round the turn of 1969, Richard Pryor strutted onto the UCLA campus in a broad-brimmed hat and ankle-length brown leather coat. He was hailed by two young people, film student Penelope Spheeris and her then-boyfriend, who recognized Richard from TV and asked him why he was on campus.

“I’m looking for film students to do a movie,” Richard answered.

“You just found them,” Penelope replied. She worked at the tech office of the film school—the first woman employed there—and could arrange to borrow some equipment for a while. It was the first of many acts of creative generosity that Richard received from a woman who later became known as the sharp-eyed director of offbeat music documentaries like
The Decline of Western Civilization
and mainstream comedies like
Wayne’s World
and
The Beverly Hillbillies
. Spheeris signed up to work the camera; her boyfriend, the sound recording. Soon after, Richard recruited the cast from the UCLA student body and his circle of friends, many of whom didn’t require makeup or costuming, according to Spheeris, “to look like pimps and whores.”

Shooting began in February 1969 at a soundstage in Gayley Studios in Westwood and at a private home in Beverly Hills, where Richard staged the abduction of the white man by several Black Panthers. But not long after the film fell together, it started falling apart. Richard had his screenplay in that spiral notebook, but he preferred to improvise. What worked at 3:00 a.m. in a New York comedy club, though, didn’t translate so well in film production: Richard had little
concern for such crucial technical matters as continuity and coverage, to say nothing of the cost of film. And then there was the influence of cocaine, which made him believe his every brain flash was pure inspiration, regardless of the film’s prevailing arc. “[Richard] would go out and shoot a couple more days and come back,” recalled Spheeris. “When you’re doing a bunch of coke like that, you can’t really make a cohesive story. . . . You think of so many things and you try them all, and nothing is cohesive enough to make sense.”

It was one thing to have a trickster as a character on-screen, where his amorality could be a source of delight, and quite another to have him installed in the director’s chair, where that same amorality had considerable drawbacks. Production funds were diverted into the bottles of Courvoisier and mounds of cocaine that Richard kept on hand. One actor on the film recalled that Richard promised him two dollars per hour on set and, after seventeen hours of work, wrote him a check for thirty-four dollars. Somehow Herb and Bunny Bonis’s thirty-thousand-dollar wedding gift had dwindled or been misplaced; the check bounced.

In the film’s early months of production, though, Richard was upbeat about what the film signified for his career. In March 1969, when he traveled to Peoria to headline a benefit for its Afro-American Black Peoples’ Federation, he told the
Peoria Journal Star
that he was shifting away from nightclub work and into film; his production company, Black Sun, was gearing up for more; his career had achieved escape velocity. He boasted for the benefit of the hometown audience, “I can make whatever I want—$300,000, $400,000 a year.” The
Peoria Journal Star
commented, with a touch of hyperbole, that Richard had experienced “the most meteoric rise in show business of any single entertainer in many a year.”

T
he trip to Peoria was a rush job, a whirlwind visit that lasted only a matter of hours. It was Richard’s first return since the death of his father, and he didn’t choose to linger among the ghosts of his past, even as he was brushed with intimations of another loss to come.

He arrived at the Peoria airport just before noon and was whisked to Methodist Hospital to visit his mother, Gertrude. After Buck’s death six months earlier, Gertrude had reentered the Pryor family circle, living at 1319 Millman with her former mother-in-law, Marie, and three other members of the Pryor family. In the twenty-three years since her divorce from Buck, she had remarried a man by the last name of Emanuel, though she was no longer with him; had filled out in weight and lost several of her front teeth; and had contracted a cancer that was sapping her strength. No more than fifty, she had been ravaged by time but strove to keep up her appearance. Before Richard’s visit to her hospital room, she had put herself together as if it were Sunday.

Richard hadn’t dealt much with Gertrude for decades. Still, he felt the impulse to shield her and care for her. When, a few years earlier, she had arranged to attend a performance of her son on
The Merv Griffin Show
, he had taken her shopping at Bonwit Teller and Saks beforehand to buy a new pocketbook. He wanted her to look nice, to feel nice, he said. But during the taping, when the camera found her and lingered, Richard went rigid, wanting to protect her from the scrutiny. “You’ve got it on her too long. Turn it off,” he snapped.

Now Richard tried to make the best of his precious few minutes with his mother in the hospital. “Hiya, mom,” he said softly. He gave her a hand mirror he had brought as a present, then enveloped her with a hug and kiss. She lay back down in her bed. Two photographs hint at the mixed emotions that seem to have washed over him in the hospital room. In one, he looks at Gertrude warmly and appears to have just cracked a joke; her eyes are crinkling at the edges, her mouth wide with laughter. In another, he clasps Gertrude’s hand but is turned away from her, his eyes blank and distant, his face a mask of resignation. The two photos suggest a son torn between his desire to boost his mother’s failing spirits and his confusion over what he was truly capable of doing. He told the
Peoria Journal Star
that he aimed to fly Gertrude out to Los Angeles so she could live with him. It was an impractical idea: Richard could hardly attend to his pregnant wife,
much less care for his dying mother, and the “House of Pain” was unlikely to serve as a good hospice. But after the deaths of Ann and Buck in the space of a year, Gertrude was his last living parent, and he must have felt a stab of dutifulness.

Yet Richard had less than two hours before he was supposed to be onstage at the Carver Center. He rushed from the hospital to visit other family—his granduncle Herman, his grandmother and grandfather at their pool hall. (His five-year-old son, Richard Jr., was not on his itinerary.) Then he was off to the auditorium that had fed his early dreams.

Richard’s benefit performance at Carver, his first in Peoria since his father kicked him out of his house in 1962, recalled performances past. His old Carver mentor Juliette Whittaker beamed from the front row. As in the old talent shows, he was the sole comedian, sharing the bill with local singing groups and bands. But how much had changed since his debut in “Rumpelstiltskin” thirteen years before! The name of the group sponsoring the benefit—
the Afro-American Black Peoples Federation—hinted at how Peoria had been swept and shaken up by its local civil rights revolution. The Nation of Islam had put down roots, opening its first local temple on Peoria’s South Side a month before Richard’s visit. Twelve black men with guns, organized under the auspices of the “Afro-American Service Patrol,” now watched over Peoria’s black community on a nightly basis—and did so with the blessing of city hall and the
Peoria Journal Star
, who appreciated its tough-on-crime stance. Black high school students, under the auspices of the local NAACP, were pressing for school reform, boycotting classes and advocating for more black teachers and black-oriented history books. And just two days before Richard arrived in town, Bradley University bowed to student pressure and established a black culture theme house. Even the bands that now shared the bill with Richard at Carver had names redolent of black pride: the Struts, the Ace of Spades, Peggy and the Soul Setters.