Becoming Richard Pryor (34 page)

Black Sun Productions was defunct; Richard’s marriage, heading for a similar fate. Not long after their dramatic argument over his film, he moved out of the home he shared with Shelley, distancing himself from his responsibilities as a husband and father. In June 1970, Shelley finally filed for divorce, citing “irreconcilable differences.” Her action meant that a full trifecta of women had recently taken Richard to court: in 1969 his first wife, Patricia, and his companion Maxine had separately sued him for child support, the latter case producing a year-long bench warrant for his arrest when he defaulted on paying legal fees.

Richard let his phone be disconnected, went incommunicado with the world, courted the void. He couldn’t be found when Shelley’s attorney tried serving him with a copy of her legal complaint.

I
n 1970, Richard was in danger of becoming a second-string character actor, called up whenever there was a part for a streetwise black dude. He rarely worked the nightclub circuit anymore. He had rung
in the New Year, in fact, by cutting off his relationship with Mister Kelly’s, the Chicago nightspot that was the premier supper club between New York City and Las Vegas. When its owner asked Richard, in advance of a multi-week holiday engagement, to “keep it clean,” Richard replied that he would do the same act he was performing elsewhere, or no act at all. When the owner called his bluff, Richard pulled out of the gig at the last minute, to the owner’s fury. Other clubs, such as Lennie’s on the Turnpike, decided to drop Richard, too. The gigs Richard did play had a new spring-loaded tension, his white audience sometimes squirming in their seats at the “niggers,” “bitches” and “motherfuckers” whizzing in their direction. “Just listening to nigger bum talk can get them uptight,” Richard told the
Washington Post
, reflecting on the new atmosphere at his shows. “The deeper you get, the more uptight they get. It scares them. They haven’t heard this stuff. But it’s the truth.”

Still, it wasn’t just the “uptight” club owners or audience members who started doubting Richard’s ability to deliver as a performer. The black critic Charles Brown, who had earlier enthused about Richard’s comedy, suggested in the
Los Angeles Times
that Richard “could use some self-discipline” and complained about his “confused and erratic” delivery: “He would start a story, drift to another, forget what he was talking about, and at last ask the audience to refresh his memory.” In May 1970, Redd Foxx groused that Richard was too often a no-show at Redd’s nightclub, a venue where the younger comic was free to use whatever language appealed to him. And from still another angle, a white critic from the countercultural
Los Angeles Free Press
accused Richard, in a review of a Bitter End West show that drew a nearly all-white audience, of “pandering”—of “keeping up the Stepin Fetchit image” for “all the $4.00 cover-plus-one-drink-minimum hip liberals.” All those
N
-words, the
Free Press
said, were simply Pryor’s way of “using our prejudices to work for him.” The problem was not that white audiences became uptight (as Richard saw it), but that they loosened up, flattered themselves for their open-mindedness and tolerance, over the course of the show.

The rumbling chorus of complaint narrowed Richard’s options considerably. By 1971 there were only four clubs “in the world,” he felt, whose doors were still open to him: the Cellar Door in Washington, DC; Maverick’s Flat in LA’s Crenshaw corridor; Basin Street West in San Francisco; and Mandrake’s in Berkeley.

With no manager to help him handle his business decisions and with his debts to his drug dealer mounting, Richard turned for help to Louis and David Drozen, the father-and-son team behind Laff Records, an independent label that specialized in bawdy comedy records from the likes of Skillet and Leroy, LaWanda Page, and Mantan Moreland. Laff reveled in raunch, and given the saltiness of Richard’s new act, there was a decent fit between his comedy and a label that zestily pressed albums with titles like
Elsie’s Sporting House
,
Mutha Is Half a Word
,
Two or Three Times a Day
, and
That Ain’t My Finger
. But Richard wasn’t exactly negotiating with the Drozens from a position of strength. “When we signed Richard Pryor,” David Drozen remembered, “we gave him an advance of five thousand dollars. He had to have it or otherwise he was going to get killed. He said ‘if I don’t get this I’m going to die.’”

The four-album contract Richard signed with Laff on December 9, 1970, was a harsh comedown from the $50,000 two-album contract he’d signed with Reprise two years before. Laff agreed to pay him $1,000 immediately and another $4,000 upon the recording of his first album for the label, and then another $27,500 for the next three albums. In return, Richard gave them exclusive rights to his comedy for two years, along with the option for two more years, during which time Laff would release a minimum of three more records. Richard had generated one comedy record in his first thirty years; now he was looking at generating at least seven albums in the next four. One imagines that, feeling the heat of his unpaid debts, he didn’t trouble himself with such niggling details.

The fruit of Richard’s desperation was
‘Craps’ (After Hours)
, an album that later became a cult classic and a creative touchstone for generations of black comedians. It was his
Sun Sessions
, the small-label effort that revealed the shape of his creativity when he was performing for
himself above all. Mostly recorded at the Redd Foxx Club,
‘Craps’
was casual, scatological, and scalding in its originality. Unlike Richard’s first album, which was sequenced as a series of short polished plays,
‘Craps’
felt intimate and conversational, with Richard rapping about the facts of life and the facts of
his
life. His first album had seven tracks;
‘Craps’
had thirty-two—and was only six minutes longer.

Instead of going high concept, Richard mostly went low. There was the eleven-second “Masturbating,” for instance, with its quick riff on how women put up a sexual smokescreen (“That vibrator is for my
back
”), followed, twenty minutes later, by the pointed seventeen-second confession of “Jackin’ Off” (“People don’t talk about nothin’ real . . . like jackin’ off . . . I used to jack off so much I knew pussy couldn’t be as good as my hand”). Although
Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales
had stalled out as a production, the comedy on
‘Craps’
was conceived alongside it and did what that film had aspired to do: it brought together the sexual revolution and the black revolution in a madcap mésalliance. Unlike the film,
‘Craps’
didn’t have to be coherent. It just had to be funny—and it was.

The best routines found a dark vein of comedy in the same racial injustices that elsewhere were occasioning sit-ins, rallies, and boycotts. Richard had been performing some of them since 1966, but once collected together and pressed on vinyl, they seemed to chart a decade in the life of a young black man growing up in the pincers of the law. The subject matter was militant, but Richard’s routines winked at life’s absurdities. When he and his teenage friends were entrapped by Peoria’s curfew, it was the black cop who was their nemesis, and for good reason: “The black cop had to do more shit to keep his job. He had to whup more niggers than the white cop.
‘I ain’t gonna lose my pension, nigger
!’” Richard spoofed police lineups, inventing one where the suspects acted like they were “in show business”:

Then there was the gloss on human anatomy that Richard felt compelled to deliver as a result of being strip-searched himself. “You talk about degrade a nigger,” he said. “They degrade you immediately. I don’t know what they be looking for. What you be looking for in my
ass
? Ain’t nothing in my ass. If I had a pussy, I might dig it because you can hide something in your pussy. But in your ass—what am I going to hide in my ass? A pistol? We’ll come out with a .45?
‘Up against the wall, motherfucker’
?”

Balanced against Richard’s account of his skirmishes with the law was an unvarnished portrait of the black community’s chippies, hustlers, jackleg preachers, and winos. He took his audience to the inner sanctums of the black experience—the “members only” all-night clubs, storefront churches, barbershops—and captured the human variety he found there, channeling voice after voice with an ease that suggested there was no limit to their number. The exponents of Black Power claimed there was a fundamental difference between white life and black life in America; Richard brought that difference to vivid life, his every
N
-word a stabbing reminder of the American caste system. And he openly punctured the optimistic talk of interracial fellowship:

Or, as he quipped in another performance at the time, “Blacks are the same as whites . . . except the whites have all the money and guns.”

In the four decades since the release of
‘Craps
,
’
many critics have noted how the album brought the language of the street to stand-up, but fewer have observed the equally fundamental change it registered: Richard was now using the ugly details of his intimate life as fodder for his comedy. Previous to
‘Craps
,
’
his autobiographical skits tended to be ironically observational, in the manner that
Seinfeld
later made famous, or backward looking, with Richard reliving his childhood. On
‘Craps’
he put his marriage to Shelley up for examination and poked its sore spots:

The sexual candor, the capacity for violence that Richard owned up to, the mix of vulnerability and menace that radiated off him as a result—these were new ingredients not just in his stand-up but in American comedy as a whole. The battle between the sexes might have been at the core of stand-up since the heyday of Henny “Take my wife, please” Youngman, but Richard’s confessional comedy drew blood—as when, in the struggle for a butcher knife, his wife scratches his neck and denies the damage, provoking Richard to retort, “Nail polish, my ass!”

Richard couldn’t have spoken so frankly about sex if the counterculture hadn’t challenged older ideas of discretion;
‘Craps’
might have been banned if it had been released just a few years earlier. Still, Richard’s vision of sex had more in common with the topsy-turviness of the blues than the free-love ethic of Woodstock. He acted for his audience as a voice of skeptical wisdom, a guide to the familiar troubles that persisted after the sex-and-drugs revolution had supposedly freed people from their hang-ups. Sexual competition: “I don’t have no advice for married people except don’t take them on an orgy, because
they always say things like ‘you never touched
me
like that.’” Jealousy: “I had to quit [smoking dope] too, since I’d wake up in the middle of the night and say to her, ‘Are you fucking the paper boy?’” In an absurd reversal, the multiplication of sexual partners meant simply that there were more ways to be betrayed: “I got the guilties after [me and my wife’s best friend] fucked. I had to tell my woman because I thought she knew. . . . ‘I did it! I fucked Ethel!’ ‘You fucked Ethel?’ She went and kicked Ethel’s ass. She was fucking her too.”

There was a strange dynamic here: in detailing his failed connections with his various lovers, Richard was reaching for an unpredictable intimacy with his audience. “I was the only dude in the neighborhood who would fuck this faggot,” he said in a quick but shocking aside. He let down his guard and confessed to the unmentionable:

But it’s embarrassing because I met the dude ten years later
.

A bundle of need, Richard presented himself as someone driven to have sex with a man, black macho be damned. But there was another level of need directing him onstage: the need to admit his embarrassment and, through his rapport with his audience, move beyond embarrassment, beyond shame.

W
ith
‘Craps’
in the can, Richard had produced an album unlike any other, but his life was still bottoming out, consumed by the chase for the next high. He was living in the Sunset Tower, a thirteen-floor Art Deco gem that rose grandly over the Strip and had once been a haven for the Hollywood film colony, with residents ranging from John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe to Preston Sturges and Frank Sinatra. Over the course of the 1960s it had lost much of its aura and was
now known for having the best-kept prostitutes in Hollywood.

If Richard had chosen, on January 29, 1971, to flick on his TV and watch the episode of
The Partridge Family
in which he guest-starred, he would have caught a perfect parable of the limits of his career at the time. He played A. E. Simon, a Detroit entrepreneur who, along with his brother, Sam (Lou Gossett Jr.), has sunk his ambitions into a club that represents the ghetto’s dreams of uplift and self-reliance. “We started this place out to be a community club, a place for our people to go,” says Sam, sitting in an oversize cane chair that replicates the chair Huey Newton used as a would-be throne in an iconic photograph. “They don’t have much, so we don’t charge much.” But the soul brothers’ dream is foundering: their club is in hock to the Mob, and since the lily-white Partridge Family, instead of the Temptations, have been sent to perform at their club, there’s little chance that they can raise the funds to save it.