Becoming Richard Pryor (33 page)

“I’m so happy, so excited,” Richard told the 175 people in the audience. “Nobody ever asked me to come here before.” He thanked the Afro-American Black Peoples Federation and offered that he was proud to be black himself, and proud to do what he could for the black community. He did some quick, hilarious impressions—of LBJ, of Nixon, of being born—and performed a few routines that touched on his childhood, name-checking friends in the audience and local institutions such as the Irving School, the Carver Center, and State Park.

After twenty minutes onstage, he left to catch a plane for Chicago, where he was performing that night at the Hilton. As was customary in his life, there was little time for reflection; he doesn’t appear to have stopped back at the hospital for a last good-bye to his mother. One of his relatives remembered that, shortly after Richard’s visit, Gertrude left for New York City—to die there. The plan to resettle her in LA was scuttled for reasons unknown, and Gertrude vanished from Richard’s life just as she had vanished after his parents’ divorce. She left little trace: while Richard revisited the deaths of his stepmother and father onstage and in print, evoking their impact on him and his family, he would never mention Gertrude’s passing. It’s hard to tell if the irrevocable loss of his mother was too sore a subject or, given the turbulence of his life at the time, no subject at all.

W
hile Richard burrowed into the making of his underground movie, his former amateur baseball teammate, producer Aaron Spelling, came calling with a different sort of opportunity. ABC had signed Spelling to create ten “Movies of the Week,” and Spelling thought of them as “
Playhouse 90
on film,” a revival of the 1950s anthology program but with the resources of a small film production. A maestro of the mainstream, Spelling sensed he could carve out a niche for these prime-time movies by using them to put a human face on the political troubles of the late 1960s. He came to cast Richard in two Movies of the Week whose plots revolved around racism:
The Young Lawyers
(1969), a generation-gap drama about two jazz musicians railroaded by a bigot for a crime they didn’t commit; and
Carter’s Army
(1970), a
Dirty Dozen
–style film in which a ragtag all-black World War II platoon is sent on a suicide mission behind German lines.

Spelling’s TV movies telegraphed a broader change afoot in prime-time programming, as network executives made a bid for the younger viewers they feared lost to rock music and films like
Bonnie and Clyde
and
Easy Rider—
hipper forms of entertainment. The late 1960s had brought a trickle of youth-themed programs:
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
smuggled an antiwar and countercultural sensibility into the genre of the variety show, for instance, while the Aaron Spelling–produced
Mod Squad
featured three young “hippie cops” on the drug beat in LA. In 1970 the trickle became a cataract. Network executives premiered a host of TV shows, following the template of
The Mod Squad
, in which young and idealistic characters grappled with issues like inner-city poverty, antiwar resistance, and drug addiction, usually with the help of some crusty authority figure.
Storefront Lawyers
,
The Young Lawyers
,
The Young Rebels
,
The Interns
,
Dial Hotline
—these gave the 1970/71 season the nickname the “Season of Social Relevance.”

Richard’s career got a notable boost from the trend. He played a drug-running trumpeter with Miles Davis mannerisms in
The Mod Squad
, a Detroit nightclub owner in trouble with the Mob in
The Partridge Family
, a jazz musician who steps into the wrong cab in
The Young Lawyers
, and a black GI who flirts with desertion in
Carter’s Army
.

Most of these shows were as formulaic as
Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales
was freewheeling, turning the murk of late 1960s politics into brightly lit morality tales. The sniper who tries to pick off Richard’s trumpeter is brought to justice by the Mod Squad; the gangster named “Heavy,” happy to crush the ghetto’s spirit of community, is sunk when feisty red-haired Danny Partridge joins forces with the Afro-American Cultural Society; the bigoted father attempting to cover up his affair with his son’s wife is exposed by a salt-and-pepper team of young lawyers. After the initial surprise of these shows’ topicality, there was little surprise in their execution, the dastardly villain always foiled by a team of heartwarmingly interracial heroes.

Carter’s Army
was an exception, the best of the lot by far—“one of
those curious flicks,” in the words of the
Philadelphia Tribune
, “which made you hate yourself for liking it.” A black World War II service battalion, used to serving food and digging latrines for white GIs who see combat, is called upon to secure a strategically vital bridge. The white officer put in charge of the mission, Captain Carter (Stephen Boyd), is a drawling southerner who low-rates his men’s potential and is given to such lines as “Boy, don’t let me catch you ’round no white women.”

Sure enough, the black GIs pull out a squeaker of a victory and the white officer comes to respect them as men, but the movie squeezes some compelling drama out of its familiar premise. Its script is tight, its ensemble cast of six
black actors delivering a nuanced portrait of a company of men. Richard’s character, the weak-willed private Jonathan Crunk, finds gusto in his friendship with the mountainous Big Jim (Rosey Grier); the tightly coiled lieutenant (Robert Hooks) bonds with an older physics professor (Moses Gunn); the hotheaded Harlemite (Billie Dee Williams) toys with knife-throwing, while the dreamy kid (Glynn Turman) writes in his diary about scenes of combat he’s never experienced. It may have been part of the formula for the six to dwindle to five, then four, then three, but the strength of the acting meant that each death evoked a shudder of loss.

Carter’s Army
took risks, too, with its surprisingly astringent ending, which might have earned the Black Panther seal of approval. After the black brigade captures the bridge in a death-defying maneuver, a caravan of Allied troops comes streaming by. The first truck bears a Confederate flag on its hood. A white soldier yells, “What you boys standing around for?”; another adds, “Hey, boys, you better get some latrines dug!” and tosses a shovel at their feet. Richard’s Private Crunk, coughing a bitter laugh, throws down his rifle. What was he risking his life for, exactly? In the film’s final moments, the white captain (a now-former bigot) breaks the shovel in two and hands the rifle back to Crunk. He’ll be needing that rifle, it seems, for whatever war comes his way.

For Richard,
Carter’s Army
was an initiation into the guild of black actors, just as
A Time for Laughter
had initiated him into the guild of black comedians two years before. Hooks and Gunn were experienced stage players who had recently helped launch the Negro Ensemble Company, a New York theater group that sought to offer black writers and actors the chance to explore black life with a free hand. “We got to calling ourselves ‘the soiled six.’ There was a great feeling of togetherness,” Richard said. “At one point in the picture, one of the men in the unit is killed en route to the dam. When the actor who played him didn’t come into work the day after that scene was filmed, I think we all thought that he had really died. It was one of the most unusual experiences I’ve ever been through.”

The intensity on the set registered in Richard’s performance, his meatiest dramatic role to date. “I play a coward and that was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he said. “My natural instinct is to be funny and I really had to fight with myself not to make the character a lampoon.” He won that struggle: in a raw four-minute scene that anticipates Richard’s later indelible portrayals of fear in
The Mack
,
Blue Collar
, and elsewhere, his Private Crunk is so terrified that he sees Germans in the waving branches of a darkening wood and fires wildly at the phantoms. When no Germans fall at his feet, he crawls into a ditch and huddles in the fetal position, crying out, “Shoot ’em!”

Richard’s fear had little in common with the eye-popping, teeth-chattering, ‘feets-don’t-fail-me-now’ cowardice of earlier black and blackface comedians. It was immense but not cartoonish, and hinted at something tragic and new from a black male actor in the age of Black Power: a near-total vulnerability. Richard was physically lean but never seemed to flex his muscles with total confidence, and was convincingly fragile on-screen. After his various crackups and breakdowns of the past few years, he had the capacity to bring a trembling energy to his roles as an actor—if only a director knew how to use it.

O
n July 16, 1969, Shelley gave birth to a daughter, and the parents named her Rain, after the weather of that summer day. For the first time in his life, Richard made it to the hospital, flowers in hand,
for the birth of one of his children. But his dedication as a father was short-lived. Five days later, Shelley waited in vain to be picked up from the hospital. After a cab dropped her off at their home, she walked in to discover Richard in bed with their housekeeper. She locked herself in the bathroom and sobbed; Richard remained outside, unapologetic. Later, he would bring other women to their home, flaunting his infidelity to the point of inviting Shelley into a threesome. His attention remained fixed on his needs rather than on his baby and her around-the-clock demands.

Meanwhile, Richard and Shelley had a visitor who lived, during daylight hours, in the den of their two-story Hancock Park home. For twelve hours a day, five days a week, Penelope Spheeris sat parked in front of a Moviola editing machine, trying to give shape to the shapeless
Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales
. According to Spheeris, the atmosphere in the house was claustrophobic, crackling with tension. Richard had a collection of samurai swords above the fireplace, and he passed the hours standing above Penelope at the Moviola, tossing out ideas in his bathrobe, his Courvoisier and cocaine near at hand.

At times the line between art and life would collapse, the plot dynamics of the film bleeding into the dynamics of Richard and Shelley’s marriage. Working at the Moviola, Penelope might be wrestling with a snippet of dialogue like “Get out of here, you pig-faced motherfucker!” while in the kitchen Shelley labored to cook soul food for Richard and his circle of black friends. “Come on, get our food together! Can you make some chitlins, Miss Shelley?” they razzed her as they trooped en masse through the kitchen, playing the race card with the same abandon as the film’s characters. Paul Mooney liked to call Shelley “the White Lady” to her face, and when he did, Shelley grimaced and Richard cackled. She had reason to feel, like the white protagonist in the film, that she was being put on trial for all the racial crimes in American history.

By December 1969, Penelope had about forty minutes of film that was, at best, experimental, and Richard and Shelley had a marriage that had gone sour. One day, when Shelley came downstairs and saw a
too-familiar tableau—Penelope in front of the Moviola, Richard sitting nearby with his Courvoisier and coke—something in her broke.

“I’m sick of this movie and sick of your shit,” she said. “You have a wife and daughter. It would be nice if you would acknowledge us from time to time.”

Richard was apparently sick of the movie, too: he rose to his feet and attacked the Moviola, yanking the film’s one two-thousand-foot reel out of the bin. He ripped it to pieces in a whirlwind of effort, returning the film to the incoherence in which it had been born. Penelope sat motionless in the editing chair, too dazed to stop him. Months of her work lay in tatters; some scraps of celluloid were no more than four inches long.

Shelley repaired to the bathroom, where she undressed to take a shower. Richard, like his film, was at loose ends: he dashed out of the house and made for his car. According to Spheeris, Shelley noticed him leaving and, playing her own mad part in their
folie à deux
, ran naked to his car. He was pulling out of the driveway, so she threw herself on the car, her body plastered on the hood, her face looking at Richard’s through the windshield and the car motoring away as though everything were normal.

Penelope grabbed an extra coat, jumped into her car, and took off in pursuit. Richard’s car traveled a block and a half with a nude Shelley on top, until finally he reached a red light at Wilshire Boulevard. Shelley scrambled off the car and ran around to the window, banging on it and begging him to come back. Richard looked past her; the light changed to green, and he peeled away. By the time Penelope caught up with Shelley and offered her the coat, Richard was gone.

A
stonishingly, this was not quite the end of Richard’s film or his marriage; both limped on. Penelope spliced back together a working print, and Richard arranged a private showing of the film in a UCLA screening room for Bill Cosby, who Richard hoped would finance a final edit. Around the same time, Cosby had, without batting an eyelash, put up a fifty-thousand-dollar loan to help director
Melvin Van Peebles launch another off-center, X-rated exercise in black guerrilla filmmaking,
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
. Despite his wholesome persona onstage, Cosby was sympathetic to black artists who strayed from the snug spot in the American mainstream that he had seen fit to occupy.

Cosby watched Richard’s film at UCLA and managed just one sentence when the lights came back on: “Hey, this shit is weird.”

It was to be the last verdict on the film.
Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales
was shelved for good; only a few minutes of soundless footage remain. Richard had attempted to bring his own vision of the black revolution to the screen and had been outdone in militancy by an Aaron Spelling TV movie in which he costarred. He felt scooped, too, by director Robert Downey Sr., a fellow low-budget absurdist who had trained his gimlet eye on the racism of corporate America in
Putney Swope
. “I liked it very much,” Richard told an interviewer, “and I was mad that a white cat did it. See, nigger, you let a honky beat you at your own game. . . . He took a chance, see, and the gods favored him.”