Becoming Richard Pryor (45 page)

At Cannes: Pryor on the Croisette with director Mel Stuart and associate producer Forrest Hamilton. (Courtesy of Traverso Photos)

One day, at Richard’s urging, he and director Mel Stuart sat down to play chess. Richard happened to sit in front of the black pieces and Stuart in front of the white ones.

When Stuart made the first move, Richard said, “No, black goes first.”

“No, white goes first,” said Stuart. “You can have white, I’ll take black, but the white has to go first because the whole game, all the moves, the moves of the bishops and the pawns, they’re all set in a certain pattern and everything’s going to get mixed up and it’s going to be hard to play.”

“No, black goes first.”

“No, white goes first.”

“No, black goes first.”

Stuart folded up the chess set and said, “No game today. We’ll play tomorrow.” The next day, he returned with a red and green set. Trickster had met trickster. Richard jumped into playing without a problem—and with, one imagines, a smile at how he’d managed to hold on to his principles.

Richard was in fine form, too, when the
Wattstax
entourage drove to Monaco to meet Grace Kelly at the Prince’s Palace. Wolper was exquisitely well connected—he’d made films for both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon—and had met Kelly on an earlier project, so he thought he could swing an audience with the princess. The group set off in a rented van large enough for forty but holding eight, and upon arrival they drove into the gates of the castle. There, an older official looked them up and down and informed them stiffly, “Princess Grace can’t see you today. She’s busy. But you can see the mosaics on the inner wall of the castle.”

Entrance denied, Richard dropped into character. “Wait a second,” he yelled up at the parapets in the thick voice of his wino. “I don’t wanna see no goddamn mosaic! I wanna see Princess Grace! Now, Richard come all this way—shit, man, what am I supposed to do?
Grace! Richard’s down here!
”

The palace guards came at Richard with their pikes. A hefty member of the
Wattstax
gang picked Richard off his feet and shoved him back into the van. “It was so true and so funny,” remembered Mel Stuart. “We had come all this way, and we were going to look at the mosaics?”

They drove back to Cannes along the gentle curves of the Grande Corniche, a famously romantic road. The Alps were behind them, the Mediterranean spread in front of them, their bus sweeping along the ledge two thousand feet above the ocean. At the top of the route, they stopped at La Chaumière, an elegant restaurant with a fireplace crackling in the center of its dining room. During their meal, David Wolper—who paid for everything and had chosen the restaurant, one of his favorites—noticed tears running down Richard’s face.

“What’s wrong?” Wolper asked.

“Nothing,” Richard said. “Spending this day in the South of France—I just never knew the world could be so beautiful.”

A
few days later, Richard was back at his low-slung cottage in the Hollywood Hills. Cannes was a waste of time, he told Patricia. There was good blow, and in steady supply, but the French didn’t understand his sense of humor. No one knew how to translate
motherfucker
.

Los Angeles, the road, 1973–1974

W
hen invited to work with new collaborators in the early 1970s, Richard devised little experiments to see how his world would collide with theirs. With filmmakers like Mel Brooks, James B. Harris, and Mel Stuart, he would remove some cocaine from, say, a tinfoil package, as casually as one might unwrap a chocolate bar, snort a little for himself, then offer the astonished onlookers a toot for themselves. (One did not need to take the toot to pass his test, just refrain from judgment.) With actress Lily Tomlin, who hoped Richard might lend his talents as an actor to her first TV special, the tests were more elaborate. “I had to jump through hoops for him,” Lily remembered. “I’m sure he was testing if this white girl was okay to work with.”

He began with the neighborhood test. He took Lily to a black part of Los Angeles to observe how she behaved and was received. Lily had grown up in a working-class ghetto in Detroit, where success “meant, if you were a girl, not getting pregnant; if you were a boy, not going to jail.” On the streets of black LA, she was at ease—and greeted with cheers of enthusiasm. People recognized her from
Laugh-In
, the comedy sketch show where she had developed unforgettable characters like Edith Ann, the most audacious of five-year-old girls, or Ernestine the telephone operator, pinch-faced and punchy, snorting to herself in self-amusement.

Satisfied with the results of the first test, Richard asked the loose-limbed actress to accompany him to a porn theater. He had probed her for any racial hang-ups; her sexual hang-ups were next. A committed feminist, Lily agreed to go but only if she could pay her own way. So Richard escorted her, on this odd Dutch date, to the Pussycat Theater on Santa Monica Boulevard. Nearby, a sign winked “Nude Live Girls.”

Soul mates: Lily Tomlin and Richard Pryor in a 1974 photograph by Annie Leibovitz. (Courtesy of Annie Leibovitz/Contact Images Press)

However Lily comported herself at the Pussycat, it worked. Soon after, Richard invited her to his Hollywood Hills cottage, where they brainstormed her TV special. “We had conversations that spiraled into the ozone,” Richard recalled. “In minutes, we’d create enough characters to populate entire neighborhoods.” Richard found in Lily a comedian who, like him, was wedded less to the pursuit of laughs than to the pursuit of character, and who was willing to lose herself in the act of imagination. “We are soul mates,” Richard reflected in 1977. “I mean the characters we do literally take possession of us. You’re O.K. as long as you keep an eye on what’s happening, as long as you don’t get scared or tighten up. Because then you lose control over yourself and the character takes over completely. I’ve never seen it happen to any other entertainers but Lily and me.”

The collaboration between these two soul mates was brief, beginning in late 1972 and ending a year later, but it left a considerable imprint on Richard’s psyche. Working with Lily enlarged his
sense of himself: unguarded in her presence, he found new reserves of both fearlessness and tenderness. For the first time, he was working with a fellow performer who was equally committed to the battle for free expression—who was willing, even, to lead the charge to create something sharp and poetic on prime-time TV. “The networks feel [that] certain things don’t belong in variety shows,” Lily quipped at the time, “but what I’ve always hated about variety shows is that they have no variety.” Together, the two of them produced some of the most remarkable television moments of the 1970s—scenes of interracial affection that didn’t aim for Movie-of-the-Week “significance” and so, in their roundabout way, were able to achieve something more striking. They avoided the easy laughs and went for the hard ones instead. As the
Los Angeles Times
observed, Lily’s TV work made “the 11 o’clock news afterward seem like a situation comedy.”

F
rom the start, Lily grasped Richard’s potential as an actor. She urged her creative partner, Jane Wagner, to write a sketch that could tap into the full array of Richard’s abilities, “something he’d be proud of.” A white Tennessean by birth, Wagner was yet deft at capturing the flow and hardship of black life. She had earlier written
J.T
., an unusually bracing TV movie about a black boy who, estranged from his mother and his school, devotes himself to nursing a wounded cat back to health. In a shocking departure from the usual formulas, Wagner had the cat get run over by a car. For Lily and Richard, Wagner delivered “Juke and Opal,” about a woman who runs a hash house and the man who drifts into her establishment looking for some mixture of companionship and drug money. Three decades later,
New Yorker
theater critic Hilton Als hailed the ten-minute “Juke and Opal” as “the most profound meditation on race and class that I have ever seen on a major network.” But when Lily submitted the draft of her special’s script to CBS, the script came back with “Juke and Opal” excised by the producer the network had selected.

For this first special, titled
The Lily Tomlin Show
, Richard and Lily were left then with a more limited sketch, one that put Lily’s Tasteful
Lady and Richard’s wino together in an elevator for a short and unpredictable ride. The premise was simply to watch these two characters, a snob and a derelict with dignity, duel in an enclosed space. At rehearsal, the network was horrified at Richard’s improvised sallies. “You ever kiss a black man?” his wino (here named Lightning Bug) teased. “You better get off of here before you get pregnant.” To make matters worse, the staging of the sketch coincided with the premiere of
Wattstax
, for which Richard had styled his hair in cornrows with white leather braiding, and he played up the unfamiliarity of his coif. “He was telling people it had been tied up with some white people’s skin,” Lily recalled. “And it made all these people in suits just blanch. They didn’t know what to do.”

The sketch’s most provocative moments—the ad libs that called out the threat of interracial sex—were edited out, but the larger sketch survived, and with it, a quick portrait of an unlikely intimacy. “I don’t believe a thing you’re saying,” says the Tasteful Lady, to which Lightning Bug responds, “I don’t, either.” The sketch ends on a promising note, the Tasteful Lady softened by Lightning Bug’s roguish charm:

The courtship is improbable but believable, since these two socially distant characters share a hidden affinity. Like so many of Richard’s and Lily’s characters, they are misfits who speak their own truth, and with a beguiling confidence and authority. “I always want them to be strong,” Lily said of her characters. “I never like to do anybody who’s defeated. . . . The person I love most of all is somebody who conventionally looks out of place, and who thinks she’s wonderful. There’s nobody more beautiful than that.”
She might as well have been speaking of the headstrong characters who populated Richard’s stage, from his wino to his chippies to the members of his family he impersonated—characters who, through the force of their personality, acted as if no stigma were attached to them. By trapping the Tasteful Lady and Lightning Bug in an elevator together, Richard and Lily dramatized the secret solidarities that cut across lines of class.

The Lily Tomlin Show
was a winner in the Nielsen ratings, a solid eleventh for the week, and when CBS asked her to deliver another show in the fall, she was determined to leverage her success and gain more artistic freedom on her second special, titled simply
Lily
. She brought in new writers like Off-Off-Broadway playwright Rosalyn Drexler and future
Saturday Night Live
producers Lorne Michaels and Herb Sargent. The “Juke and Opal” sketch, she decided, would not be cut this time; the producer who’d deleted it from the first special was not invited back. Plotting her moves strategically, Lily also decided to bring back “War Games,” an antiwar sketch that network execs had previously quashed, scandalized by the idea of a mother telling her son, playing soldier in the backyard, “Come on, leg or no leg, supper’s on the table.” Perhaps Lily could use “War Games” as a bargaining chip if the network tried to block “Juke and Opal” for a second time.

As on the previous special, Richard’s improvising spirit put him at loggerheads with CBS. In a new sketch, featuring Lily’s Edith Ann and Richard as a young kid, Richard made up the guileless riff “I have titties bigger than your titties . . . boys have titties—first, boys have titties . . . then girls.” The network reps panicked and put a stop to the scene, and Richard felt so deflated that he left the soundstage. When Lily met him in his dressing room and urged him to give it another try, he said, “I can’t do more.” He told a journalist later, “I can’t go onstage and it be in my mind that this kid can’t say something, ’cause the kid is wrecked, as a kid. I mean, I was ready to cry as a kid, ’cause I was the kid, you dig. That’s the way I see kids; I just get fascinated talking to ’em, ’cause it’ll be honestly sweet, and whatever
they say is innocent. And if they say ‘tittie,’ you can’t tell a kid you can’t say ‘tittie.’ They deal with real shit.” The sketch was scrapped; Lily recorded Edith Ann solo instead.

“Juke and Opal” had no off-color language to which the network could object. It was remarkably restrained as it tracked the arm’s-length intimacy between Juke, a man struggling to throw off a heroin addiction and get a job, and Opal, who operates her diner with a mix of sensitivity and bottom-dog wit. (“Don’t hand me that jive about job training,” she tells Juke. “You trained, all right. You highly skilled at not working.”) Still, “Juke and Opal” was troubling to the network for other reasons. During its taping, Lily was standing on its set, waiting for another take, when she noticed that everyone else had left. “I go into the hall, and everyone is standing around in a huddle,” she recalled. “They had just got the word to ‘stop taping this. We don’t want this on the air.’”