Becoming Richard Pryor (54 page)

Los Angeles, Toronto, Madison, 1976

I
’m not a success yet,” Richard told a reporter at a train station in Toronto, in May 1976, while filming the scenes in
Silver Streak
that would shoot him into the Hollywood stratosphere. “I’ve got my foot in the door and a bit of my shoulder and I hope nobody slams it.”

It was a peculiar statement, given the dimensions that Richard’s life had begun to assume. . . .
Is It Something I Said?
had won for him his second straight Grammy, beating out albums by George Carlin, Lily Tomlin, and Monty Python. Richard felt confident enough to crow to the
Los Angeles Times
, “Some people say there’s no ‘best’ in comedy. They’re wrong. I’m the best.” With the proceeds of his records and concerts, he opened a sleek office for Richard Pryor Enterprises on the Beverly Hills stretch of Sunset Boulevard, complete with black-and-gold décor and a fishbowl stocked with exotic underwater plants. He bought—with a hefty down payment in cash—a Spanish-style hacienda on a three-and-a-half-acre parcel in the city of Northridge, in the flat northern reaches of the San Fernando Valley. The grounds, formerly owned by an heir of the Wrigley Chewing Gum fortune, encompassed two guest cottages, a tennis court, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a stable for horses, and a large main house equipped with an aviary on the main floor and a screening room in the basement. Visitors approached via a long circular driveway that curved around a front lawn that held an orange grove.

Richard had installed himself in a home fit for a Hollywood star or mogul—with one twist: it had been thirty years since Northridge was a preferred neighborhood of stars or moguls. In the 1930s and ’40s,
actors such as Barbara Stanwyck, Walter Brennan, and Zeppo Marx had settled in large haciendas like Richard’s so that they could own horses and enjoy a semblance of the rural life. Jack Oakie—the Old Hollywood comedian whom Richard didn’t want to become—lived just a few miles away from Richard’s estate, and had even served as the city’s honorary mayor. But Northridge, or “Valleywood,” had lost its rustic allure by the mid-1970s, not least because it had been absorbed into the larger suburban explosion of the San Fernando Valley. The actors and producers of Richard’s day preferred Malibu, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, or the elevated neighborhoods that straddled the spine of Mulholland Drive from the Hollywood Hills through Encino. Zealous about his privacy, Richard had, in effect, put at least seven miles between himself and those Hollywood players who might try to court him. An electronic gate rather than a hand-lettered sign now kept the unwelcome away.

For all his achievement, Richard felt his success was just a collapsible illusion. While the main house was being renovated to his specifications, he lived in the guesthouse at the back of his estate, and suffered a recurring dream: men with briefcases coming to his door and asking incredulously, “You mean you
own
this house, Mr. Pryor?” And then there was the matter of his stalled Hollywood career. He had accepted his most recent part, that of thief Grover Muldoon in
Silver Streak
, “because nobody asked me to do anything else.” It was a “modern Willie Best,” he said of the part, referring to the black bit player who popped up in more than a hundred screen comedies of the 1930s and ’40s, always confined to the role of the simple-minded porter, or the simple-minded valet, or the simple-minded deliveryman.

Richard had reason to be dubious about the role as it was handed to him. In screenwriter Colin Higgins’s original conception,
Silver Streak
was half romantic comedy and half thriller, the story of an unassuming book editor who takes a train trip for some quiet time and finds himself falling in love and getting entangled in a murder. Higgins was Australian, openly gay, and a graduate of UCLA film school; he had earlier scripted the offbeat
Harold and Maude
, and with
Silver
Streak
he took pleasure in drawing winkingly upon the conventions of classic Hollywood, in particular, Hitchcock’s
The Lady Vanishes
and
North by Northwest
. Higgins’s script delighted the studios: it was purchased for four hundred thousand dollars, an industry record at the time, and Paramount budgeted over five million dollars for the film. Gene Wilder, fresh from the successes of
Blazing Saddles
and
Young Frankenstein
, committed to the leading role of book editor George Caldwell. The adept Arthur Hiller (
Love Story
,
The Hospital
,
The Man in the Glass Booth
) agreed to direct.

Unfortunately, Higgins’s spirit of winking homage extended to Hollywood’s old racial conventions. In his script, Grover Muldoon is a cartoon who wants to be a cartoon—a perfectly self-sacrificing helpmate, devoid of any sense of irony. When the arch villain calls him an “ignorant nigger,” Grover shoots back lamely, “Bullshit! I got a high school diploma!” The final proof of the friendship between Grover and Gene Wilder’s character is that they can banter in “Amos ’n’ Andy” voices and assume the roles of a blackface minstrelsy routine, Tambo and Mister Bones. “Hey, brother, is that a train?” Grover asks, after the Silver Streak has smashed through the wall of the station. Talking now with “black style,” George replies, “I don’t know, Mister Bones. Looks to me like a kind of bicentennial display.” Everyone bursts out laughing.

Nowhere was Higgins’s affinity with the racial ways of Old Hollywood more apparent than in what became the film’s most famous scene, where Grover blacks up George in a train station men’s room, coaxing him to apply shoe polish to his face and then coaching him how to pass as black—all done to help George evade the police on his tail. Here Higgins used the character of Grover to dissolve any qualms that might attach to the use of blackface: it’s Grover, the streetwise black man, who gives George permission to become a caricature of blackness. When George shrinks at the disguise, Grover downplays its meaning: “Just think of it as an instant suntan.” When George objects that blackface will fool no one, Grover makes himself the butt of a joke: “When I was a kid I thought Al Jolson was a brother.” After
Grover instructs George on how to strut his stuff “like you’re king of the Shitkicker’s Ball,” he brightens at how his pupil takes to his lesson. “C’mon, Mister Bojangles. Let’s get going,” he tells George with an indulgent smile. And when a blacked-up George bops past the cops, Grover smooths his passage by using a phrase that Richard Pryor, as a stand-up comic, made famous: “That is one crazy nigger,” Grover tells the cops, who nod in happy agreement.

To his credit, Gene Wilder worried that the scene as scripted would be the film’s “Achilles heel.” “Before casting started,” Wilder recalled, “I told Laddie [producer Alan Ladd Jr.] that I thought there was only one person who could play that scene with me and keep it from being offensive, and that was Richard Pryor.” (The producers were already recruiting Richard for the role and worried enough about his reliability that they considered hiring two black actors and shooting every Grover scene twice.) Wilder also advised Higgins, once Richard was cast, to expand the parameters of Richard’s part. Higgins obliged, adding Grover to the film’s final scene so that its happy ending includes Grover stealing a Dodge Dart and riding off through the wreckage of the train station. Higgins also added more cartoon dialogue: George blesses Grover’s getaway just as Grover blesses George’s earlier fooling of the cops—with the announcement, “That is one crazy nigger.”

Richard, in other words, was being asked to play a role that bowdlerized his main stand-up persona. When he arrived in Canada to shoot the movie, his response to the material was forthright: he would rewrite his part in the moment of acting it, sometimes with grace notes of irony, sometimes with startling revisions. From Gene Wilder’s perspective, it was an education in the art of improvisation. On their first day of shooting together, helicopters hovered over them; prop guns were firing in all directions. “I jumped into a ditch next to [Richard]—as I was directed to do—and Richard said his first line, and I answered,” Wilder recalled. “Then he said some line that wasn’t in the script, and I answered with a line that wasn’t in the script. No thinking—just spontaneous reaction. That was the start of our im
provisatory relationship on film.” Wilder had a bit of practice as an improviser, from a fund-raising tour he had made on behalf of dovish presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy in 1968, but nothing like Richard’s expertise from his years as a stand-up. “Richard was my teacher: no thinking—just immediate, instinctive response,” Wilder said.

Director Arthur Hiller sensed a special chemistry between his two actors and avoided in-depth rehearsals of their scenes in favor of shorter run-throughs. “I didn’t want to lose the spontaneity of their comedic relationships,” he said. Their scenes crackle with energy, the nebbishy George always a hair trigger away from a neurotic episode, exasperated but entranced by Grover’s heedless cool.

Around six o’clock on May 13, Hiller took his two stars into the men’s room of Toronto’s train station for a light run-through of the blackface scene, which they were to film the next day. Richard withdrew into himself, so quietly that Hiller didn’t notice anything amiss. But Wilder did. On the walk back to the hotel, he probed Richard.

“I’m going to hurt a lot of black people,” Richard said.

“How?”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s too late.”

“It’s not too late. We can talk to Arthur; I can call Laddie . . . but you have to tell me what it is.”

“You’re a nice guy, Gene, but I don’t want to talk about it. And I don’t want to do this film. I want to get out of it.”

“I’m in room 1504, Richard. If you change your mind, just call me.”

Fifteen minutes later, Richard phoned Wilder. In Wilder’s room, he brainstormed a better way to frame the scene. In the original, a white man stumbles into the bathroom and is fooled into thinking that George, in blackface, is actually a black man. In Richard’s version, it would be a black man who wanders in and, rather than being fooled, gives the strutting George a bit of further instruction: “You might be in pretty big trouble, fella, but for God’s sake, learn to keep time.”

The next day, with the cameras rolling, Richard kept reshaping the scene. In the script, the blackface is a goof that Grover Muldoon embraces; in the scene Richard plays, it’s a ruse Grover unmasks. When George hesitates to put on the shoe polish, Grover doesn’t sell it as an “instant suntan”; he remarks bitingly, “What? Are you afraid it won’t come off?” And when George yells, “It’ll never work!” Grover doesn’t sell the disguise by speaking of his own gullibility as a child. He pivots George to look at his half-blacked-up face in the mirror; George’s face relaxes into a sort of guileless curiosity. For a moment, George is a white man entertaining what it would be like to lose his whiteness. “Look at that,” Grover says, then snaps George out of his reverie with a cynical lesson about race and Hollywood. “Al Jolson made a million bucks looking like that.”

Playing the American skin game: George Caldwell (Gene Wilder) takes lessons from Grover Muldoon (Richard Pryor) in
Silver Streak
. (Courtesy of the author)

In Richard’s reformulation of the scene, blackface was the perfect ruse for George precisely because white people favored a counterfeit of blackness to the truth of it; they preferred not to look too closely at the world around them. In one bit of dialogue that, sadly, was cut from the final scene, George protests, “You dummy, you got oxblood shoe polish!” Grover shoots back that it won’t matter: “All the police look for is to see if you got color, any color.”

When Richard had finished with it, the scene in the men’s room was not just more acerbic than the script had allowed. It was also, in its way, more believably affectionate. Grover offers George the props of cool—his mirrored shades, his purple satin jacket from the Eighty-Second Airborne Division (embroidered with the message “When I Die I’ll Go to Heaven Because I’ve Spent My Time in Hell”), his way of dancing—but he also underscores that props do not make the man. He clues George into how easy it is to perform a caricature, and how ridiculous it is to bear the weight of one. And in revealing something of the complexity of race in America, Grover seems less like a prop himself in the plot—in fact, he seems a better competitor for the love of George than Hilly, the confusingly drawn secretary played by Jill Clayburgh. When, a few scenes later, Grover and George say good-bye on camera for the first time, they moon at each other but say little, as awkward as soldiers who’ve held one another under fire, embarrassed by how intimate they’ve become. And when Grover turns up again at the film’s end, it seems less like the non sequitur it is than a tying of a knot, a necessary form of emotional closure. The film’s more credible love story is between the two men.

It’s not too much to say that, with his performance, Richard saved
Silver Streak
from itself. Upon the film’s release in December 1976, critics agreed that the film limped along until Richard “goose[d] it into some semblance of life,” as Molly Haskell wrote in the
Village Voice
: “Pryor, a comic genius who is turning into one of the great film presences, does what no one else in the film can do: makes it look as if it knew where it was going.” Another observed, perceptively, “One suspects Pryor wrote his own material because his scenes are more outrageous, more inventive than the rest of the film.” In the consensus view, Richard was the one surprising element of the film: “For about fifteen minutes, Pryor gives the picture some of his craziness. Not much of it, but some—enough to make you realize how lethargic it was without him” (
The New Yorker
); “What furtive sprightliness
Silver Streak
manages to work up is attributable mostly to Pryor, sly-eyed and fast-mouthed, an unbeatable antic spirit” (
Time
).