Becoming Richard Pryor (42 page)

Campus asked, “What are you doing? Who are you?”

Richard deflected the brunt of the question. “This is family. It’s okay—these are my cousins.”

The substance abuse, combined with Richard’s insomniac sleep schedule, took its inevitable toll on his body. When acting out a scene of drunken camaraderie between Slim and Goldie at a bar, Richard was so wasted on booze and coke that Michael Campus needed to prop him up during filming. If Campus lost his grip for a moment, Richard hit the floor.

Meanwhile, Richard continued to simmer over his unpaid work on the film’s script, his anger spilling out on set and off. In the early hours of September 27, at the tail end of a punishing day of filming, he told Campus, “I want my fucking scene now.”

Campus snapped at Richard: the reason for the delay, he said, was that his two stars were talking too much. He turned away.

Richard snagged Campus’s attention by insulting his mother—a cruel touch, as Richard knew she had died early and tragically, when Campus was a child. Then, without another word, Richard charged at the director and clocked him so hard on the jaw that Campus reeled and fell to the ground, unconscious.

“How’d you like that blow?” Richard asked the limp body on the ground. Then, to everyone: “Did I get him? Did I really get him?”

The security crew trained their guns on Richard, and Max Julien rushed to grab and protect him. “You can’t shoot him. No, you got to shoot me,” Julien said, making himself a human shield. The security crew stood down, and Richard was escorted back to the Marriott.

Yet he was not done with the day’s mayhem. At 3:00 a.m., he knocked on the door of Julien’s room, carrying a homemade weapon—a sock with some metal in it, some coins or some iron balls—and appealed to Julien to join him on a late-night visit to Harvey Bern-hard. Julien demurred, and the two embraced. Richard said, “You know, sometimes even if you love people, you’ve got to cut them loose,” and he wandered off on his lonely journey down the hall toward Bernhard’s room, sock in hand.

“Harvey, you know I really love you and am sorry,” he began with Bernhard. “I wanted to come in here and apologize for beating up Michael.” Then, as if disgusted by his act of ingratiation: “I came in here to kill you.” He swung the sock.

Bernhard was sitting, groggily at first but increasingly awake, next to a coffee table on which he’d left an extremely sharp knife, one he used to peel almonds. “I was going to throw the coffee table on top and cut his throat,” Bernhard recalled. But before he could execute the maneuver, his wife walked into the room and started talking about the good heart of her husband, Harvey. The temperature in the room shifted; Richard’s bravado collapsed. “I can’t take this shit,” he said, and left.

The next day, he borrowed fifty dollars from Bernhard’s sister and went back down to LA. The manager of the Marriott pulled Bernhard aside so that he could see the state of Richard’s room at checkout. It looked as if a hurricane had torn through it: broken lamps,
broken chairs; a total shambles. As for the film, Richard’s character, Slim, would have to be written out of his remaining scenes.

P
erhaps the whole production cut too close to the bone, too close to the pain of Richard’s past. Just as he had played second fiddle to his father, Buck, for two decades in Peoria, so here he was playing the mack’s sidekick, the wannabe who voices the vulnerability that his emotionally armored friend cannot. In some of the film’s most famous scenes—some of Richard’s best acting work, too—Slim steals the spotlight with his cracked-up pain. In one, he refuses to walk away from two dirty cops who ask him and Goldie to beat it. Slim is perceptive enough to know that as soon as he and Goldie turn their backs, they might be shot for “resisting arrest,” and bold enough to defy a shotgun pointed at him by a cop. But Slim isn’t as collected as he is perceptive. He sucks in his mouth; his eyes widen with fear. “I ain’t runnin’ no fucking place,” he says. “I ain’t no track star.”

The scene then sputters unforgettably, as if some actor in it were going off script (which Richard in fact was doing, improvising around Slim’s pain). The cops leave abruptly when a group of onlookers—potential witnesses—appears. Goldie walks away somberly, bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders in the form of a hip brown suede cape. Alone now on the street, his friend receding into the distance, Richard’s Slim can’t stop talking, even though he’s talking only to himself. He spits out the words with a teary-eyed fury:

As Slim raves on alone, talking about a “we” that doesn’t exist, the camera gradually pulls back to reveal a new detail of his outfit: along with a pink floral shirt and gray satin vest, he’s wearing a pair of
crimson knee pants that seem designed for a child. Neither the pimping game nor these brave words have made a man of Slim; neither has restored him to himself.

In all, Slim’s monologue furnishes one of the strangest half minutes in 1970s film. To fantasize about revenge is, for Slim, to fall apart—to become too intimate with his pain. But his defiance is, in its weakness, also exquisitely human. It connects him to those who’ve felt that they were living, literally or figuratively, with someone who pointed a gun in their direction; links him to those who have wanted to stand up for themselves but doubted their power to do so. Max Julien observed, “I know ladies who’ve been abused, and they saw that scene and they realized they didn’t want to be abused anymore. It said, ‘Don’t touch me again.’”

The Mack
could never escape being a fly-by-night production—its acting was uneven, its plotting forced—but with Richard’s help, it fingered something raw and profound. Upon its release in the spring of 1973, it rose to become the fourth-highest-grossing movie in the United States, despite the fact that it was largely limited to inner-city theaters.

R
ichard seemed to live
The Mack
in his mind, to be possessed by the spirit of its script. In Los Angeles around the time of the film’s production, he relayed to his girlfriend, Patricia, a version of what he had told Michael Campus. “Bitch,” he said, “you’ve got to go out and bring back some money.”

Shell-shocked, the former Pan Am stewardess drove to the Beverly Wilshire hotel and sat at its bar. She waited for something to happen, and when nothing did, she repaired to her car, on a side street off Wilshire Boulevard, and started sobbing. A group of men heard her crying and asked what was wrong. When she told them, one of the men, an actor, offered her a hundred dollars. She felt she couldn’t take it under the circumstances.

When she came home empty-handed to their cottage in the hills, Richard flew into a rage. He had an empty bottle of Courvoisier in one hand and a mostly empty bottle of Courvoisier in the other, and started beating Patricia’s head with them.

Patricia threw up her hands to shield herself. Richard yelled, “Be a woman! Put your hands down!”

Patricia pivoted, ran into one of the cottage’s small bedrooms, and locked the door. A little while later, she heard a terrifying chopping sound. Richard had taken the small hatchet that she used to chop wood for their wood-burning fireplace and was attacking the door that stood between them.

The hatchet made short work of the door. “Please, Richard, I love you, I love you,” Patricia said, in a naked bid to calm him.

Richard stood over her, addled by the drugs and agitated by his anger, and began choking her. When Patricia looked into his eyes, he seemed off in some faraway place.

Then, all of a sudden, he felt sick and doubled over, vomiting. He had shrunk into a helpless child making a mess on himself. “Mama, mama, help, help,” he said, before passing out.

Patricia looked at herself. She was on her hands and knees; her white dress was smeared with blood, her lip swollen. She decided that she was through with Richard.

She saw a light outside, and left the cottage for it. She met a woman, who offered her some clean clothes—the woman’s mother, a heavyset woman, had just died and left a closet full of them—and then the two drove to a hospital. There Patricia was treated for a broken nose and three cracked ribs. She contacted a writing friend of Richard’s, who lent her enough money to return to Sausalito.

About a year after arriving with Richard in Hollywood, Patricia came back to Sausalito in a dead woman’s oversize clothes, and crashed with an old friend.

Los Angeles, Marseilles, Cannes, 1972–1973

T
here’s probably a cobra crawling around in there,” Richard said, pointing to a bale of hay. He was on the outskirts of the Chino men’s prison, talking to a Paramount publicist and waiting for his scene. Flies buzzed about; cows lowed in the distance, their smell traveling over the wind. Inmates were gathering on the edge of the shoot, curious. Their rural prison worksite was being used as a location for
Hit!
, director Sidney Furie’s follow-up to
Lady Sings the Blues
, and the inmates had stopped pitching hay for a moment to catch a glimpse of Hollywood in action.

The publicist was asking Richard about the arc of his career, and Richard had turned unusually reflective, musing on the traps into which he’d fallen. “I want to do something to show that I have depth,” he said. “It’s time to branch out, time to stretch my talents as far as they will go.” He dangled a piece of hay between his fingers. “The happy-go-lucky comic—that’s an act. I like to do parts. But I don’t want to be one-dimensional, to lock myself in.”

A crew member called Richard for his scene. His character, Mike Willmer, was supposed to spot the man (now a convict) who had raped and killed his wife, then attack him in a sort of fugue state. It was a scene in which Richard was expected to move, in a matter of seconds, from a state of guarded congeniality to one of throttling, homicidal rage.

Richard brushed the hay off his pants. “Being a character, man, that makes me come alive,” he said. He spread his hands as if taking in a larger piece of the world. “You’ve got to separate who you are
and who the character is. There’s such excitement in that real moment when you achieve that character—it’s like being in your conscious and your subconscious at the same time.”

He then took off to prepare for his scene. The publicist watched him pace the length of the parking lot and noted his intensity: “Shoulders stooped, eyebrows furled, his movements suggest a rock that is about to precipitate a landslide.”

Nineteen seventy-three seemed as if it might be Richard’s landslide year, but it was instead a half-and-half year—of artistic breakthroughs and professional struggles. It was the year when he started being courted as a film actor, did some of the best TV work of his career, and, through his contribution to the landmark documentary film
Wattstax
, established himself as black America’s most nimble color commentator. Perhaps most important, it was the year his self-understanding shifted, the year when he recognized—partly as a result of his brief and enchanted collaboration with Lily Tomlin—how much he loved falling into character. Sometimes that character was a wino or a junkie, a preacher or a cop, a pimp or an average Joe like
Hit
’s Mike Willmer. Sometimes it was a more vivid version of his ordinary self, raised through the magic of the stand-up stage into some combination of Everyman and avatar: the man who, by turning his life story into an act, gave it shape and resonance.

For this artist in love with character, the one thing he abhorred was losing the flow of character, the flow of dialogue between his “conscious” and “subconscious.” From this point forward especially, Richard responded poorly—with frustration, rage, sabotage—when asked to hew closely to a script or, worse, to censor himself. Presented with a bale of hay, he couldn’t help but imagine the cobra crawling around inside it.

F
or many in Hollywood, of course, Richard’s irreverence was his great selling point. On a Saturday night in October 1972, director Mel Stuart caught a rare Pryor performance—in “a half-empty room” of a “dull-ass club” in a part of LA that Stuart had never visited—
and was convinced within three minutes that he was in the presence of “the comic genius of our time.” And not just a comic genius: the performer who could fix his film
Wattstax
—rescue it from its baggy rough cut and give it a through line.

When Stuart arrived at that club, he was wrestling with only the latest of the many challenges that had dogged his film.
Wattstax
had been conceived, in the manner of the concert film
Woodstock
, as a celebration of a community drawn together through music—in this case, the thousands of black Angelenos set to attend a concert organized by Stax Records, the powerhouse soul music label. Stuart, a documentarian whose résumé included mainstream fare like
The Making of the President: 1964
and
Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
, agreed to make the film “on one condition: I am the only white person on the set.” Watts was a foreign world to him; he knew he needed the palpable sense of camaraderie that only black camera operators could provide. The community had exploded into riot just seven years before, and he felt it was justifiably wary of outsiders. But how to get blacks behind the camera? Hollywood’s technical unions had only a tiny number of blacks on their rolls. The film’s producers held an open call, drew on union apprenticeship programs and university workshops—and managed to recruit forty-five black technicians to film the concert, an unprecedented number on a Hollywood shoot.

On August 20, 1972, the Los Angeles Coliseum rocked to Wattstax the concert. Some ninety-two thousand people paid a nominal one dollar per ticket to see and hear Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers, Rufus Thomas, and others. But after Stuart’s editors sorted through the one hundred thousand feet of film that his cameramen had shot, he was left nonplussed (not unlike later film reviewers, who noted the music’s lack of oomph on-screen). “It’s a newsreel,” he told the film’s creative team. “I don’t do newsreels.” The music was there, but the spirit behind the music was not. So Stuart sent his cameramen out to Watts’s soul kitchens, barbershops, and stoops, where they filmed hang-loose conversations about topics such as the blues, the police, and the black church.