Becoming Richard Pryor (36 page)

Elwood was no outlier in praising Richard extravagantly. The San
Francisco Chronicle
’s Ralph Gleason crowned him “the very best satirist on the night club circuit.” Alan Farley took to the pages of the
KPFA Folio
to praise Richard’s “endless creativity” onstage, his “uncanny ability to perceive, evaluate and portray people and their attitudes accurately,” and his courage in facing the truth even though “it hurts him and it hurts us.” (The fact that Alan and Richard were housemates went unmentioned.) And Grover Sales,
San Francisco
magazine’s theater and film critic, hailed Richard regularly and vividly in his
monthly column, calling him the “master of a hundred voices” and a “nervous, light-brown ferret” who “exposed the sickness of our time” by wielding “the salty, spermy motherwit of a black ghetto poolhall.” Bay Area critics all took Richard seriously as an artist and social commentator—and were among the local forces pushing him to take himself seriously, too.

Richard soon demonstrated just how serious he could be. While staying at Farley’s apartment, he was approached by a producer at PBS to contribute some material to
The Great American Dream Machine
, an eclectic anthology program that mixed reportage with off-center comedy from the likes of Albert Brooks, Chevy Chase, and Marshall Efron. Targeted at younger viewers, the show cultivated a tilted sense of irony: a segment about the elderly utopia of Sun City might be set against, say, ten minutes of barroom palaver hosted by Studs Terkel or a pseudodocumentary about the “Famous School for Comedians,” where bow-tied lecturers demonstrated how to target someone with a cream pie (“Make sure that you hit one of three desirable areas”). Writing on spec for the show, Richard delivered “Uncle Sam Wants You Dead, Nigger,” a screenplay in tune with the antiwar rally that greeted his arrival in Berkeley. It was a scathing parable about a wasted life, and a veiled meditation on Richard’s own family life and his stint in the army.

Richard’s screenplay tracked the life of Johnny, a young black man who’s set upon by voices: his father dismissing him as “just a heartache to me and your momma”; his mother lamenting that he dropped out of school; and a militant, named Dashiki, bidding him to fight his own fight and “join our army.” Johnny decides to enlist in the U.S. Army, partly to appease his father (to whom he’ll send his allotment money) and partly to live out his own dreams of grandeur. “I’m gonna get me some of them gooks, too, Jack,” he tells himself, “so when I go home, I’ll be a hero.” The screenplay then shifts to a field in the Vietnamese countryside, where a group of a farmers wave to the U.S. Army truck of Johnny’s regiment. Johnny thinks they’re simply waving, but his commanding officer thinks they’re signaling to bring
on mortar fire and orders Johnny to kill them, which he does. Next, Johnny is ordered to harvest their ears for a body count, which he agrees to do, too, though with great reluctance.

At the climax of the screenplay, Johnny looks at the bodies of his victims and sees the bodies of his own family, lying there dead. Before he can mutilate the bodies as ordered, a Vietnamese sniper in a distant bush fires at him; Johnny begins falling in slow motion. In the short film’s coda, we hear three voices marking his death as his body continues to fall to the ground: a black preacher eulogizing him with empty clichés (“he lived a good life, um hm”); a white guard at a graveyard, refusing to admit the body (“We don’t bury no niggers”); and Dashiki, with the last word, putting a harsh twist on the traditional military recruiting poster (“Uncle Sam wants you . . . dead, nigger”).

It was Richard’s most straightforward political statement yet. It underlined that the Vietnam War was an atrocity, a travesty that claimed the Vietnamese and young black Americans alike as its victims. It traced the violence not just to the officers ordering the killing but also, less obviously, to the black church, the black family, and a culture that preferred simple lies to complicated truths. And judging from a recording Richard left of the screenplay in which he acted out the film himself, it seems he intended the film as a showcase of his virtuosity, wherein he might play multiple roles in the manner of Alec Guinness in
Kind Hearts and Coronets
or Peter Sellers in
Doctor Strangelove
. The silver-tongued preacher, the hard-ass father, the fire-breathing radical—these were familiar characters from his stage routines. Johnny was a version of his Private Crunk from
Carter’s Army
, lifted out of the context of the Good War and dumped into the horror of Vietnam. While Richard had played two roles in the ill-fated
Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales
, here he proposed doubling the challenge to four.

Yet, like so many of Richard’s funky experiments from this period, “Uncle Tom Wants You Dead, Nigger” was not to be.
The Great American Dream Machine
rejected the script, perhaps because it was bleak rather than quirky. Its producers may have expected the Richard
of the mid-1960s, the creator of light-fingered takes on the army and the media. In any case, they turned it down flat. Instead of seeing his film produced, Richard would have to settle for seeing his screenplay in print. At Alan Farley’s suggestion, he sent his treatment to
The Realist
, a San Francisco–based underground magazine that had just published the notorious “Disneyland Memorial Orgy,” a baroquely detailed image in which, among other things, Goofy penetrates Minnie Mouse, Doc sodomizes Dopey, and the remaining five dwarfs work on Snow White. Paul Krassner,
The Realist
’s irreverent editor, was more than happy to print Richard’s piece in the April/May issue.

If the rejection of “Uncle Tom Wants You Dead, Nigger” by
The Great American Dream Machine
was one sign that Richard’s Bay Area sensibility had trouble traveling outside the Bay Area, another was his late-April gig at the Improv, his old New York City stomping ground, in front of a largely white audience. Richard was approached by Improv regular Michael Blum, a young would-be director, who asked Richard if he might film a show for a sample reel, something that Blum could shop around to get more work for himself. Richard agreed.

In Blum’s film, released fourteen years later under the title
Live and Smokin’
, Richard is jittery, his face beaded with flop sweat, as he rolls out material that slayed mixed audiences at Basin Street West. According to Blum, “the room was filled with a lot of people who looked up to Richard” but remembered him as “a sweetie with these all-white gloves”; they were blindsided by the Richard of
‘Craps
.
’
When Richard describes how the white johns of his childhood were conned by the faked enthusiasm of the black prostitutes he knew, the crowd reacts with befuddled silence. When he riffs on sexual taboos—how a fringe benefit of “being a Negro” was “fucking white girls,” how he tried to keep his sex with gay queens on the down low—he is met with murmurs, side talk. “This ain’t as funny as we thought it would be,” he observes.

Richard was usually a master at curing a sour atmosphere in a room. At other shows, when audiences sat stone-faced to provocations
like “Remember the old days, when giving head wasn’t cool?”, he might snap back with “Oops! Guess those days ain’t old!,” throw out his body in an ironic buck-and-wing, and save the moment. He could be cruelly ingenious, too, at silencing hecklers. When one woman kept complaining about a jibe of his, he performed an elaborate pantomime in which he grabbed, stomped, shredded, and pulverized her; sprinkled her into make-believe rolling papers and smoked her; then finished her off by announcing, “This ain’t shit!” to the hoots of the crowd.

At the Improv show captured in
Live and Smokin’
, though, Richard seemed at a loss. After some audience members made a move to leave, he cracked, “I hate to see folks leave when I be talking. I hope y’all get raped by black folks with clap, and ain’t nothin’ worse than the black clap.” The cruelty was there, but the ingenuity was not. Richard needed an audience who knew how to play off him, who would follow his cues even if it meant that everyone was staggering and tripping, fumbling for a foothold together. At the Improv, he staggered alone.

O
n the night of May 21, 1971, Richard was caught in another jam: stuck on a delayed flight from New York City, unable to reach a gig at Mandrake’s, the music club just a half mile from Alan Farley’s apartment in the Berkeley Flats. Unbeknownst to Richard, he was also running late for a rendezvous with his Berkeley destiny, the clock ticking down to an encounter that would both ground him and help set him free as a black artist.

Mandrake’s itself was another case study in the interracial give-and-take of the counterculture. Its owner was Mary Moore, a white woman married to a black jazz saxophonist. Named after a root fabled for its magical properties, the club paid tribute to the black roots of American music, its programming a mix of the best jazz and blues artists (Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker) and groove-oriented bands (Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen, Country Joe and the Fish) that drew a younger,
whiter audience. Whatever the music, the club’s atmosphere was loose, feel-good, participatory: the audience prided itself on being adventurous. A week before, jazzman Roland Kirk walked out the door while still blowing on his saxophone, and the audience followed him into the street and around the block, happy to have discovered their very own Pied Piper.

It was a good crowd for Richard, in other words. But where was he? Mary Moore called to the stage Country Joe McDonald, who found a guitar and tore into “Louie, Louie,” trading the song’s famously unintelligible lyrics with a delighted audience.

In the middle of “Louie, Louie,” Country Joe was cut off; Richard had manifested himself. “A slim shadow slipped on to the stage,” recalled novelist Cecil Brown. “He then crossed the stage into the little spotlight and came out of the shadow. . . . We fell under the spell of Richard’s voices.” For Brown, who was teaching English classes at UC Berkeley at the time and had never seen Richard perform, the show was a revelation: here was a brilliant satirist in the line of Juvenal, Jonathan Swift, and Mark Twain. And yet he was also a living, breathing link to the black oral tradition, a descendant of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, an avatar who took folklore and made it dynamic and new. Brown felt a special connection: “I was one of the only blacks in the audience and Pryor glanced over at me through the entire routine as if I were a witness to what he was telling this white audience.”

After the show, Brown followed Richard to the parking lot, looking the picture of hipness himself, with his black leather jacket, black knitted cap, and “Free Huey” button. They clasped hands in the Black Power handshake.

“How long are you going to be performing in Berkeley?” Brown asked.

“I live here now,” Richard replied, upbeat. “You can come by and hang out with me.”

The friendship would be a consequential one, cutting a window onto a new reality for Richard. Brown was, like Alan Farley, extremely
well educated (with an MA in English from the University of Chicago), but unlike Farley, he shared with Richard a raucous and fearless sense of humor: the two were fellow provocateurs, with a common affection for the con man, the player, the teller of tall tales. Brown had recently published
The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger
, an incendiary novel that the
New York Times
described as “a nightmare dreamed on a bed of nails.” The novel’s protagonist, George Washington, was cousin to Richard’s Super Nigger, a mischief maker in the age of Black Power, living by the motto “All is jive.” He jives his way from Harlem to Copenhagen, mastering his world through lies, put-ons, and superior cocksmanship, until he realizes he has been screwing himself all the while, surrendering to other people’s fictions of him. Trying to let go of his final illusions, he dreams of publishing a book seven hundred pages long, with each page blank except for the phrase “KISS MY BLACK ASS” and a footnote on the bottom reading “MY BLACK BALLS TOO.”
Jiveass
was extremely piquant—“flimflamboyantly erotic,” in the words of the
Times—
and it struck an exposed cultural nerve. For a brief period in 1970, Brown was the writer of the moment, fielding raves for his best-selling novel, appearing on
The Tonight Show
with Bill Cosby and Jane Fonda, and selling the book’s screen rights. His house in the Berkeley hills hosted the sort of parties that brought together novelists and actors, professors in tweeds and hipsters in beads.

Brown and Richard became running buddies, and through Brown, Richard was drawn into a circle of black intellectuals who breathed in the Bay Area’s bohemian spirit: Ishmael Reed, Claude Brown (no relation to Cecil), Al Young, and others. “He had never been around highly educated, professional black writers and artists of that stature,” reflected his Berkeley friend Joan Thornell. “I think he was fascinated by that.” Richard noted later that his new friends were “uncompromisingly black,” but it was perhaps more important that they were uncompromisingly artists, dexterously exploring the tangle of sex and race in American life, and lobbing rhetorical bombs at the pieties of the left and the right.

Chief among the bomb throwers was Reed, a free-ranging satirist who spoofed black literature classics like
Invisible Man
in his first novel (
The Free-Lance Pallbearers
), parodied the Western genre in his second (
Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
), and was in the middle of writing a third (
Mumbo Jumbo
) that turned the detective novel inside out. Richard and Reed traded notes, giving themselves an education that, in Reed’s words, “was not on the curriculums when we were going to school.” As part of that education, Reed gave Richard a biography of Bert Williams, the black vaudevillian who wore blackface but imbued his act with pathos and complex hilarity. Richard felt a special connection, too, with Claude Brown, author of the best-selling
Manchild in the Promised Land
, the autobiographical story of a Harlem boy who is pulled out of his childhood and into a life of drug dealing and petty crime. Richard and Brown’s friendship began with a 3:00 a.m. phone call placed from Cecil Brown’s home, in which Richard came on the line with the impertinent question “Hey, motherfucker—is all that shit (in
Manchild
) true?”