Becoming Richard Pryor (35 page)

Fortunately, the can-do spirit of the Partridge Family saves the day—saves the ghetto, in effect. The Partridges brainstorm the idea of hosting a benefit in the form of a block party; Keith Partridge (David Cassidy) writes a song—“sort of an Afro thing”—for the occasion; the Partridges and Sam fan out through the neighborhood, collecting donations; and the braggadocious Danny Partridge (Danny Bonaduce) enlists the help of the local Afro-American Cultural Society, whose paramilitary airs and black berets are cribbed from the Black Panther stylebook. As might be expected, the block party is an extraordinary success, the Mob rebuffed, the club saved.

Yet there’s more, a final joke at someone’s expense. As the Partridge Family bus is about to pull away, the leader of the Afro-American Cultural Society sprints over, breathless, to meet up one last time with Danny. He commands Danny to stand at attention, then unrolls a scroll and proclaims, “For your dedication and service in helping our community, I’m hereby making you an honorary member of the Afro-American Cultural Society.” He hands the scroll and a black beret to Danny, who enthuses to his mother, Shirley, “Look, Mom, I’m official. Maybe I can start my own chapter at home.” The ever-
indulgent mother replies, to a burst of canned laughter, “We’ll talk about that in the bus, Danny.”

One didn’t need the supersensitivity of Richard Pryor to wonder: Why were the Panther stand-ins so free and easy with their berets and their blackness? Why, when Black Power made it onto prime-time TV, did the Partridge Family have to swoop in to save the ghetto? And less abstractly: Why, even when Richard was a “special guest star,” did he have to play second fiddle to the likes of David Cassidy and Danny Bonaduce? Richard’s frustration could be seen edging into his performance. When Danny swaggers with puffed chest alongside members of the Afro-American Cultural Society—so happy to be black!—Richard shoots Lou Gossett Jr. an incredulous look that says, in the words of an autobiographical screenplay Richard composed shortly afterward, “This can’t be happening to me.” And yet it was.

A
round forty-two seconds after 6:00 a.m. on February 9, 1971, Richard was lying naked in his bed in the Sunset Tower when he was awakened, along with the rest of Los Angeles, by a wrenching of the earth. His windows started rattling and popping out of their frames. He reached for his trusted companions—a samurai sword and a fifth of whiskey—and dragged himself outside. Los Angeles had become “the valley of the damned,” he recalled. Everyone was on the streets, alone, and shooting curious smiles at him—the black man left standing after the apocalypse—as if he “knew God or something.”

The Sylmar Earthquake, as it became known, was the most powerful American temblor in two decades, the most destructive since 1933. It was so terrifying that eight of the fifty-five people whose lives it claimed died from heart attacks. Two hospital buildings crumbled; twelve overpasses collapsed into freeway lanes; broken gas lines set off hundreds of fires; and the aftershocks kept coming—at least sixteen big ones by the end of the day. Oddly and ominously, the tremor was centered in an area where no fault had previously been detected.

For Richard the earthquake sealed his intuition that he was doomed in Los Angeles. “It was as if I was stuck to a funnel cloud
that was tearing a path of destruction everywhere I went,” he remembered. “I sensed catastrophe around the corner and knew I had to get out.”

At a show soon after, he was approached by Alan Farley, a gentle, shaggy-browed young man and one of his most erudite fans. Farley had a math degree from Cal Tech and, though white, had been chairman of the math department at the historically black Morehouse College; now he was living in Berkeley, working as a production assistant for the Pacifica flagship KPFA. When Alan casually offered Richard a ride up to the Bay Area and said he could crash at his Berkeley apartment for a spell, Richard took him up on both proposals. The Bay Area was the scene of Huey Newton’s trial and other countercultural spectacles; most important, it was not Los Angeles. Richard quickly scrambled his plans to make the move possible: a gig at the Gaslight in Greenwich Village was canceled, a week-long gig at San Francisco’s Basin Street West arranged in its place.

After dreaming so big for half a decade in LA, Richard was ready to dream small, or just to sleep. He lay down in the backseat of Alan’s car as they drove up to the Bay Area and conked out. He brought with him not much more than the clothes on his back—traveling as light as when he had left Peoria, a no-name bound for the Chitlin Circuit, eight years before. Untethered, again.

Berkeley, 1971

W
hen Richard arrived in Berkeley in February 1971, he pursued his own version of the simple life. The trappings of his showbiz ascent—the Sunday baseball games with Aaron Spelling and Bobby Darin; the nights at the Daisy with the likes of Natalie Wood and Tony Curtis; the coke Olympics at the Redd Foxx Club, in which he competed with Jesse Owens–like intensity—he left behind in LA. In Berkeley, the mecca of the counterculture, he would try to whittle his life down and “learn to live on the least possible.” He would subsist, he said, on fruit—“an apple a day. And wear Levi suits and drive in a ’49 Packard and still be comfortable with it and not be uptight because of (my) surroundings.” He wanted to find his “lost soul” and thought the best way to start was “to cast off everything but the bare essentials . . . to renounce the past in order to discover the future.” As he wrote in his memoir: “House, car, clothes, women, friends—I tossed them all away.”

Berkeley was a peculiar if perfect place for Richard to strip his life to the core—peculiar in that the city was a clamorous carnival of delights and distractions; perfect in that Richard was, like so many who migrated to Berkeley in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a seeker in search of himself. Starting in the fall of 1967, Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue had replaced San Francisco’s Haight Street as the main stem of hippie life in the Bay Area. It was the sort of street where drivers might find themselves taunted by someone in a bullfighting cape; where a police officer stood a fair chance of being tripped while in pursuit of a suspect on foot; where a long-haired man of college age
couldn’t walk a few blocks without being propositioned by people dealing grass, speed, acid; where a group of street people sold tea from samovars and called themselves the Persian Fuckers. Novelist Ishmael Reed, who befriended Richard in Berkeley, remembered that the city was “crackling with information and ideas,” “sizzling” with the apocalyptic sense that “something great, something dramatic, was going to happen.”

By 1971, the left in Berkeley was numerous, various, and pulsing with energies it could scarcely contain. The black revolution, the third-world revolution, the sexual revolution, the drug revolution, women’s liberation and gay liberation, the student movement, the prisoners’ rights movement, the environmental movement—all had put down roots in the city. The week that Richard arrived in town, the underground
Berkeley Barb
reported that three hundred demonstrators had protested FBI raids on two Berkeley communes by rushing the local FBI bureau, pounding on office doors, and baiting FBI agents with shouts such as “Come on out, motherfuckers!” and “You ripped off our dope. We want our dope back. What are you doing in there, getting high with our dope?”

Even more telling, in its fervor and confusions, was a large-scale antiwar event held five days after the FBI protest. A crowd of more than three thousand took to the streets of downtown Berkeley to demonstrate against Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam War into Laos. A phalanx of the Women’s Brigade led the march, raising Pathet Lao and National Liberation Front flags and chanting, “Smash the State!” When a policeman grabbed a protester who had knifed the tire of a police car, half a dozen people clobbered the policeman until he had released his prisoner. When another police officer seized one of the clobberers, he was surrounded by a knot of protesters who ripped off his helmet, struck him to the ground, and kicked him in the head until he was lying in a pool of his own blood. Marchers felt an explosion, saw a soaring plume of black smoke: someone in their ranks, it seems, had stuck a fuse into the gas tank of an Atomic Energy Commission car and lit it.

Yet for all the protest’s combative power, even the countercultural
Barb
judged it a failure. The crowd, it reported, acted like “a schizophrenic with multiple personalities, all at war with each other, crippling the whole body.” Rally organizers used their microphone time to attack one another, exposing the brewing feud between those who embraced violence and those who abhorred it. The two parties couldn’t agree on strategy—where to lead the people?—and so the rally dribbled to a close, the crowd dispersed with tear gas and wooden bullets. Ultimately it was just another day in Berkeley. A young woman composed a poem on a patch of lawn. The street musicians sang, without skipping a beat, “Hey, hey, the sun is shining bright, and I’m so very happy that I can’t keep myself from loving you.” Eight thousand miles away, the war in Laos pounded on, unchanged.

In Berkeley, Richard found a mirror of his hopes and his disenchantment, and curiously enough, it may have been the feeling of shared alienation that was more galvanizing on a creative level. In Greenwich Village and the countercultural precincts of Los Angeles, he had already felt his audience’s appetite for the offbeat and had discovered his capacity to feed that hunger in ever-inventive ways. In the Bay Area, audiences were more than “far out.” They shivered with recognition at Richard’s bitterness about the American political scene, and thrilled when he sharpened his attack on their favorite targets—the war machine, institutionalized religion, the shallowness of the American dream—and twisted the knife.

For the next seven months, Richard delved into his own agonies, exploring them from the inside out, revisiting the traumas of his life with an unblinking stare. He had been hurtling forward for eight years, trying desperately to hurtle upward; now he pressed the Pause button. He crawled into himself and ruminated. He experimented—in routines onstage, in bids at spontaneous poetry, in screenplays and in an avant-garde sound collage—with being
un
funny. Death haunted his imagination. He fell into darker circles, let go of his obsession with the main chance, and reached for a new complexity in his performances, a new strength.

R
ichard’s home base, at first, was the one-bedroom apartment of his fan Alan Farley, located in the downtown flatlands west of the University of California campus, not far from where the police fired tear gas a week before. Serendipitously, Richard had planted himself in the very epicenter of the Berkeley cultural earthquake. Known for its low rents, Richard’s new neighborhood attracted a fertile mix of Cal graduates looking to stay in the area on the cheap, hippies fleeing the high cost of living in San Francisco, and black locals with little stake in “the system.” In a survey of the electoral preferences of Berkeley’s black population in 1971, two political scientists found that the most radical blacks (those who supported, for instance, a separate police department for black Berkeley, with strong community control) lived in those mixed areas, like Richard’s, with a sizable infusion of young whites. Overwhelmingly black districts voted in a liberal, rather than radical, direction. The politics of Richard’s new neighborhood spoke, then, to a distinctive form of countercultural chemistry—the chain reaction where black groups like the Black Panther Party catalyzed the dreams of white radicals and, more surprisingly perhaps, the experiments of white radicals accelerated black political awakenings. Each group felt buoyed, or vindicated, by the convictions of the other.

Richard and Alan’s relationship played out this chemistry on an intimate scale. A refugee from academia, Alan was remaking himself as a fledgling social critic, writing a “Media Monitor” column that stood up for the principle of free speech and attacked the timidity of network TV programming; Richard was free speech incarnate and someone who himself could benefit from Alan’s connections to KPFA, a hub of the Bay Area left, and other local institutions. During the workday, Alan managed the operations of KPFA; in his off-hours, he managed the operations of Richard. He gave Richard his bedroom, cooked meals for him, ferried him to friends’ homes at night, and made the odd business arrangement with a club owner, the press, or the radio station. Fortunately for posterity, he also followed Richard with taping equipment, recording his gigs, interviews, and radio
shows, and lending the equipment to Richard when the aspiring auteur wanted to work out his ideas in real time.

Richard kicked off his Bay Area sojourn on a triumphant and revealing note, with a successful weeklong engagement at the San Francisco nitery Basin Street West. Five years earlier, the
Examiner
’s Phil Elwood had complained that Richard was “unfunny and not original,” and was “insecure and ill at ease, despite his projected hipness.” Now Elwood, a high-profile critic of Bay Area nightlife, was knocked out by Richard’s performance, writing arguably the best review Richard had yet received—the sort of review that a performer clutches to his chest while falling asleep. Elwood pronounced Richard “a major figure among contemporary hip theatrical figures of American society,” an artist whose “stance, eyes, head, arms, cigarette-prop and even his pratfalls are handled with grace and perfect timing.”

Elwood did more than praise Richard’s artistry, too. He underlined the political stakes of Richard’s new persona: “In the vernacular, he is one of the ‘baddest niggers’ around. That is, he’s one of the favorite acknowledged and respected spokesmen for the younger black community.” Elwood was probably exaggerating Richard’s “bad nigger” renown—
‘Craps’
had yet to be released, and Basin Street West was one of the few nightclubs still open to Richard’s act—but his review had the assured air of righteous truth. Elwood noted Richard’s liberal use of “rough, raw and colorful words” and offered a ringing defense: “He will be offensive in vocabulary and theme only to those who are upset by words in themselves, or by reality.”