Becoming Richard Pryor (6 page)

(Courtesy of Barbara McGee)

Buck did not last long as an enlisted man. Well before his time in the army, he had bristled against shows of discipline: as early as 1931, he was arrested in Decatur for disorderly conduct. The army was a poor match for a man of his temperament and ego. After seven months, in July 1944, it gave him a Section 8 discharge (“mentally unfit for service”) at the height of the military’s large-scale deployments in Europe and the Pacific. It was as if he had been declared unsuitable even as cannon fodder. One intriguing detail from the traces he left in Army records: Buck’s pay was docked for ten days of lost time. By whatever means—going AWOL, drinking too much, taking too many drugs—he had absented himself from his military obligations for that interval. Buck returned to Illinois with $68.72 in back
pay, cut off from veteran’s benefits: no unemployment benefits, no education benefits, no home loans, no disability checks, no military burial—none of the entitlements that helped lift so many working-class veterans of World War II into the American middle class.

Judging from his subsequent actions in Peoria, Buck didn’t come back from his tour of duty with much respect for military men. On the afternoon of February 12, 1945, a black sergeant from Camp Ellis was strolling down North Washington Street, a block from Marie’s brothels, with a billfold carrying $106 in cash. Buck and another man jumped him, dragged him into a sunken space off the sidewalk, pummeled him, and took his money, wristwatch, Ronson lighter, and pocketknife. Buck was indicted by a grand jury for assault and robbery. The sergeant had been staying at the exact address where Buck’s brother and sister let rooms, so it’s possible that Buck was tipped off to look out for the black soldier with a wallet stuffed with money.

For the most part, Buck’s post-service violence was directed at a closer and easier target: his wife. They worked together at the Famous Door—Gertrude as a waitress, in a close-fitting white uniform; Buck as a bartender—but at home they fought constantly. Typically, in the heat of argument, he would knock her down, then leave the room with her still splayed on the floor. In the space of one month in late 1945, according to Gertrude’s divorce papers, Buck once struck her and kicked her in the face; once beat her so badly that she was “compelled to seek refuge with friends”; and once threw a chair at her before beating her face and body, again forcing her to take refuge. Gertrude’s flights went unexplained to the young Richard. Even later in life, he half-blamed his mother for abandoning him: “Gertrude drank a lot. She’d be home for six months or so, then one day she’d leave the house as if she was going to the store, say goodbye and be gone for six months. How’d that make you feel, Rich?”

Though her divorce filing painted her as the victim of domestic abuse, Gertrude was sometimes capable of throwing a few punches herself. On at least one occasion, according to Richard, she managed to get the better of her husband through a supremely well-aimed swipe. Buck, wearing
undershorts and a T-shirt, had been beating her in their bedroom, and finally Gertrude drew the line: “Okay, motherfucker, don’t hit me no more.” Buck hit her again. Gertrude shot back, “Don’t stand in front of me with fucking undershorts on and hit me, motherfucker”—and then, lightning-quick, she clawed his crotch. Buck ran to his mother’s brothel two doors down, and the four- or five-year-old Richard saw him bust in, his undershorts wet with blood, crying, “Mama! Mama!” The boy struggled to reconcile his father’s panic and his mother’s air of satisfaction. When, soon after, she hugged Richard and rubbed his head, she “confused my ass just by being so nice to me.”

All told, Richard’s sentimental education was none too sentimental. Just as a young Marie and a young Buck had watched their respective parents go at it, so Richard now watched
his
parents do the same; he absorbed the message that love was tangled up in violence. He believed to the end that his father truly loved his mother: “He felt that deep kind of love that doesn’t ever do a person good, that ends up kicking you in the ass, leaving you crying and tormented.” This was love in the spirit of the blues—crazy love, love as damnation, love as possession by devils, with little tenderness to act as a countervailing force. Buck eventually admitted to Richard that “he was glad Gertrude had gone. He loved her so much, he said he probably would’ve killed her.”

On December 31, 1945, Gertrude decided she’d had enough. She fled North Washington Street with her son, telling no one in the Pryor family where she was going. She wanted a clean break for both of them: no more Buck or Marie, or the family business. The Pryors scrambled to find her and Richard, to no avail: Gertrude was no longer in Peoria. Many days later, she disclosed her whereabouts—in Springfield, seventy miles away—when she filed a legal petition for divorce.

The divorce was ugly, with the custody of the five-year-old Richard at the center of it and the two sides jousting for the judge’s sympathies. The stakes for Richard’s future were stark: would he end up with Gertrude and her parents on the rural outskirts of Springfield, sharing space with livestock, or would he remain with Buck and Marie, surrounded by the sex trade? The court battle was a curious
shadow-puppet show where no one could mention the fact that they had all been involved in illegal activities—and, more specifically, that Buck’s family ran a brothel where Gertrude had worked. Both parties presented themselves to the judge as upstanding citizens and fine parents. In her suit, Gertrude claimed that she had “always conducted herself in a manner becoming an affectionate and virtuous wife,” while Buck had acted with “extreme and repeated cruelty.” She asked for custody and some financial relief.

In his counterclaim, Buck denied everything—that Gertrude had ever been compelled to leave for fear of her safety, that he had ever struck her on any of the days enumerated—and went on the offensive. Most likely he benefitted from the strategic counsel of Marie, who had learned in Decatur how to bend the law to her own use. Exploiting Gertrude’s professional life to undercut her suit, Buck argued that she had “committed adultery with divers other persons to your counter-plaintiff unknown.” (Notably, Buck alleged that she had committed adultery on the exact same day when, she claimed, he had struck her; he let the judge draw his own conclusions.) He labeled her an unfit mother, accusing her of child abandonment under cover of “taking refuge.” By leaving Peoria with Richard in tow, Buck argued further, she had essentially kidnapped the child. Last, he added that as an army veteran, he was a fit person to take custody of Richard.

This final claim was simply too much for Gertrude. How could someone who’d been kicked out of the army draw upon the great reservoir of gratitude felt toward those who had served honorably? Her one formal response to Buck’s counterclaim was an “affidavit of non-military service” clarifying that Buck was no longer with the army. But Gertrude did not contest, on paper, the substance of Buck’s suit. She did not bring up, for instance, how he had fathered a child by another woman. Nor did she make what seems the most obvious claim for custody of her child: with her, Richard would not be raised inside a brothel.

On March 26, 1946, Justice John T. Culbertson (a future Illinois Supreme Court judge) heard the case in Peoria County Circuit Court. Richard sets the scene vividly in his memoir: Buck and Marie dressed
him up in his Sunday best and coached him to tell the judge that he wanted to stay with Marie, not Gertrude. In court, he remembered saying exactly that—“I’d like to be with my grandma, please”—and remembered feeling shattered by the experience. “I broke my mother’s heart,” he wrote. “But, Ma, I thought that they were going to kill me if I said that I wanted to live with you.”

If Richard Pryor had ever consulted the records of his parents’ divorce, he would have discovered that this recollection—of betraying his mother and asking the judge to give custody to his father—was a trick of his memory. He thought he was ten at the time when, in fact, he was only five, and the testimony of a five-year-old child would hardly have been the decisive factor in awarding custody, then or now. (The judge’s three-page ruling does not mention Richard having any preference for his guardian.) In an even greater discrepancy, the judge’s decision stated that Richard was living in Springfield “at the present time.” If true, then it seems improbable that he was coached in any testimony by his father and grandmother, as he was not living with them before the court date.

In his ruling, Judge Culbertson came down hard on Gertrude. Though there was generally a presumption, in custody battles, that the mother would be better fit to care for young children, Culbertson did not give Gertrude an inch of sympathy. Buck was a “true, loving, affectionate and dutiful husband”; Gertrude, an adulterer and a mother who had repeatedly deserted her child. Culbertson decried how, at the time of the hearing, Richard had been “abandoned” in Springfield, though most likely he was simply staying at the home of Gertrude’s parents. He awarded the full “custody, control and education” of Richard to Buck, and explicitly prohibited Gertrude from “any interference” in Richard’s upbringing; she had no visitation rights. After his ruling, Gertrude would be involved in her son’s life only at Buck’s discretion.

It seems a curiously extreme ruling in retrospect. The testimony of the gentler parent was deemed a fraud; the testimony of the more abusive parent was taken on faith. Sole custody was given to a father who never found a way to talk to his son—a man whom Richard later
summed up this way: “He had a child but he didn’t need a child.” But Culbertson was responding to the panic stirred up, at the tail end of World War II, by a perceived spike in adultery among war brides: in one notorious case, a sailor came home from the Pacific to discover another man wearing his old clothes and living with his wife and son. Such stories offered a quick explanation for a divorce rate without precedent in American history. In 1940, one in six marriages had ended in divorce; in 1946, with so many wartime marriages unraveling upon the husband’s return, the ratio stood at one in four. It was tempting to believe, as Culbertson simplified matters in his ruling, that the adultery of a wife like Gertrude was the root cause of a marriage falling apart, and that a man cuckolded was a man who deserved the indulgence of the court. To find the source of trouble,
cherchez la femme
.

Why would Richard have fabricated a memory of having betrayed his mother in court? Possibly, at some point, his father or grandmother had suggested that he was living with them, not Gertrude, because he had
chosen
them, and that suggestion swelled into a story in the young child’s imagination. Or possibly, like many children of divorce, Richard felt that he was somehow at fault for the unhappiness of the parents, and so he invented a scene where he was responsible for his mother’s distress, grasping for a strange kind of power in a situation that made him feel powerless.

It’s easy to understand, though, why Richard’s mind would have circled back to the courtroom and the judge’s decision to send him to his father and grandmother. It was the pivot point of his early childhood. It deprived him, for good, of his right to be a child, but gave him in return his material as an artist. “I got my bizarre sense of humor from the fact that I was scared,” he observed. Unlike his soft-edged mother, Buck and Marie were extraordinarily gifted at instilling fear; their livelihoods depended upon it.

Instead of remaining on a farm next to a garbage dump, in a city that revolved around state government, Richard was headed back to Peoria, brothel bound.

Peoria, 1946–1952

F
rom an early age, Richard gravitated toward the movies, spending as much time as he could in the cool, dark sanctuary of Peoria’s downtown cinemas. The curtains would open at movie palaces like the Madison, Majestic, and the Rialto, and Richard would drift into his dream of being a leading man. In his mind, he assumed the lean of John Wayne, the musculature of Tarzan, the fiery look of Kirk Douglas, the uncanny force of Boris Karloff. He was promiscuous with his fantasies, quickly projecting himself into another place, another time, another persona. For an hour or two, it no longer mattered that his home life was chaos or that he was expected to sit in the back of the house just because he was black. His affection extended even toward a theater he called the Funky London, where cockroaches and rats vied for a nibble of his popcorn. “I used to live in the movie houses,” he remembered. “No movie opened that I didn’t sneak in to see.”

In his pantheon of cinematic heroes, one star loomed largest: Lash LaRue. “I wanted to be just like him, I wanted to
be
him,” he said. Lash LaRue may have been the most unlikely leading man in 1940s Hollywood, and was certainly the odd man out when it came to Westerns of the time. Unlike John Wayne or Roy Rogers, LaRue dressed head to toe in black—black Stetson hat, black cape, black neckerchief, black shirt, black pants, black boots—and rode a black horse. He looked and sounded like Humphrey Bogart, bringing a city kid, gangster inflection to his roles on-screen. He had a gangster’s sense of style as well, cocking his Stetson at a jaunty angle and strutting in high-heeled boots. His eighteen-foot bullwhip, ever coiled
above his six-shooter, was his weapon of choice. One flick of the wrist and
—snap!—
the whip would snatch a gun from the hand of a villain. Another flick and—s
nap!
—the whip would loop around the legs of another villain and bring him to the dust. In “quality” Westerns, it was the villain who sported a whip, perhaps because a whip is less efficient than a gun and more of a plaything. LaRue was strictly B-grade, his heroics verging on camp. He was the sort of fellow who’d woo a lady by grabbing a bouquet of flowers for her—with his bullwhip.

The young Richard found in Lash LaRue the perfect alter ego. Here was an actor whose everyday looks didn’t keep him from being a star; a man who could wear black from head to toe and punish his enemies brutally yet remain broadly sympathetic; a hero with so much panache that he punctured the seriousness of the films he starred in, turning them into parodies of themselves. (Fans of
Blazing Saddles
, take note.) Most of all, here was someone who, in claiming the whip hand himself, was never humiliated, never burned, by the sting of the lash.