Becoming Richard Pryor (60 page)

On the couch: Smokey (Yaphet Kotto), Jerry (Harvey Keitel), and Zeke (Richard Pryor) in
Blue Collar
’s morning-after scene. (Courtesy of the author)

The “couch scene” was the last scene filmed for
Blue Collar
. By that point, in mid-July, the movie’s leads disliked one another so much
they couldn’t stand to make eye contact, and they disliked Schrader so much that they couldn’t bear to film standard cutaway shots. The scene was shot, by necessity, in one seemingly endless take: Schrader’s actors wouldn’t give him anything else. After Schrader said, “Cut,” Richard made for his car and drove off. The movie was over. In the can was an indelible film that took one of Richard’s great themes onstage, self-sabotage, and projected it onto a broader canvas, until it seemed like self-sabotage was the worrisome fate of the American working class.

“It changed my life,” Richard said of his work on
Blue Collar
. “I had a whole struggle going on—getting that deep, revealing that pain.” According to Schrader, Richard later accused the director of putting him back on cocaine, a charge that Schrader dismissed as “a stretch.” Still, it was true that working on
Blue Collar
was a shattering experience for him, one that left him uncertain as to who he was or what he would become. Reflecting on his career and the way forward, he told one interviewer that no line of work was safe. His own bruised feelings were part of a bigger picture: “the world around us is crumbling to make way for new life.”

Los Angeles, 1977

I
n early July, after another exhausting day on the set of
Blue Collar
, Richard returned home for a meeting with the creative team behind his TV series.
The Richard Pryor Show
was set to premiere in two months, and the meeting was framed as your average brainstorming session; a reporter for
Newsweek
sat in. After batting around ideas for the first of ten shows, Richard cut everyone off. “I don’t feel this in my heart. It just stops
here
,” he said, pointing to his head. “Two years ago there was great shit on TV. Now people walk around being outraged, numb from the shock.” He confessed to having an epiphany while watching comic Flip Wilson in a small role on
The Six Million Dollar Man
as a special guest star. Flip had recently been a giant, with his own TV show. Now he was chewed up and used up, a nonentity. “I don’t want that to happen to me,” Richard said.

He started thinking aloud. “You know something? I don’t want to be on TV. I’m in a trap. I can’t do this—there ain’t no art.” He broke into tears. “I bit off more than I can chew. I was turning into a greedy person. They give you so much money you can’t refuse.” The creative dynamic in the room, he felt, was all wrong: “I need a straight, square person like Bob Ellison”—the esteemed script doctor, an alum of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
, who had punched up Richard’s special and then been removed from the team for the series. “I hated Bob Ellison’s motherfucking guts, but he made me work. Y’all love me, sit around nodding and smiling.”

When a writer begged him to think about what the show might accomplish, Richard said, unforgettably, “You want to see me with
my brains blown out? I’m gonna have to be ruthless here because of what it does to my life. I’m not stable enough. I don’t want to drink and I don’t want to snort and I can’t do it no other way.” He was pulling out of the show. That decision made, Richard announced it was time to relax. His housekeeper fetched a sock, filled with cocaine, that he kept hanging in his closet. Richard emptied it on the table and encouraged everyone to help themselves.

Over the next several days, Richard discovered that it wasn’t so easy to walk away from NBC. His manager, David Franklin, had already invested a great deal of the network’s first payment in a parcel of Atlanta real estate. NBC, reeling from an especially poor season, didn’t cotton to having a hole in its new programming schedule. The show’s writers, with their own hopes for the series, hired a plane to buzz over Richard’s house with a banner that read “Surrender Richard.” After several weeks of negotiations with the network, Richard agreed to continue with the show; NBC agreed to whittle his commitment down from ten episodes to four, with the possibility of more if Richard wanted. Somewhere in the shuffle of summer, too, NBC seems to have decided to hedge its bets with Richard’s show: the network shifted it from 9:00 p.m. on Thursday to the more daunting time slot of 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday, where
The Richard Pryor Show
would now compete against ABC’s two nostalgia-fueled hits,
Happy Days
and
Laverne and Shirley
. It was an unlikely matchup that one columnist called “electronic hari kiri” for NBC: Richard facing the Fonz in America’s family hour. The series moved forward, with the first episode to be taped in late August.

Meanwhile, Richard’s personal life was as vexed as his professional life. Around the time of
The Richard Pryor Special?
he had been balancing three different women: Pam Grier, Deboragh McGuire, and aspiring actress Lucy Saroyan. Once, all three of them had converged at his home to meet his grandmother Marie, who was visiting, and had sat chatting with her in his den while Richard hid in his bedroom like a little boy. Afterward, Richard asked Marie which one he should marry. The queen maker of the Pryor family tossed out the premise
of the question. “I wouldn’t give a nickel for any of those bitches,” she said.

By August, Richard’s love life had become still more crowded and confused. Pam remained in the picture, albeit at the edges of the frame; Deboragh had become his “fiancée,” then had fallen away, but was alive in his mind; Lucy was working to remodel his home and was still enmeshed in his affairs; a new woman, Lucy’s friend and assistant Jennifer Lee, had caught his eye; and then there were many more women who were partners for a night. When Jennifer Lee began working on Richard’s home remodel, she noticed that, on most mornings, a different woman would straggle out of his bedroom and out of his house, never to be seen again. For his part, producer-writer Rocco Urbisci remembered that, every day on the set of
The Richard Pryor Show
, a new woman would materialize at his office, announcing that Richard had promised her a job as a production assistant. Urbisci eventually created “Satin Doll,” a production number that required comely ladies as dancers in its jazz nightclub, in order to put this company of women to work as extras on the TV show.

Somehow Richard kept up appearances on the publicity tour that he undertook in August to promote the release of
Greased Lightning
, the first film he’d carried. To the outside world, he was not a ticking bomb but a “new black superstar,” “one of Hollywood’s hottest properties.” If
Silver Streak
had sparked mainstream America’s curiosity with Richard,
Greased Lightning
eased him into its good graces. Ultimately, producer Hannah Weinstein had created, over the objections of director Michael Schultz, a quite old-fashioned piece of Americana, a heartwarming Capraesque fable about a little guy from a small town who bucks the system with the help of friends and family.
Time
’s Richard Schickel wrote, in a representative review, that “it is impossible to believe that any real life could so unerringly follow the classic lines of so many biopix past. The cheerfully determined young man struggling to support his family while trying to fulfill his ambitions, the opposition from the Establishment in his field, the early heartbreaks, the ultimate triumph—all this is the familiar stuff of a hundred celluloid dreams.”

Yet it was also true that Richard put a wry spin on those old formulas. He gave
Greased Lightning
a bottom note of black pride and inflected the movie with just enough of his loose-limbed energy to make it an invigorating ride. “There is not a more likable movie currently on view than
Greased Lightning
,” concluded Schickel in the same review that noted its slavish embrace of biopic conventions. Filmgoers agreed: the movie went on to gross almost triple its four-million-dollar budget. Warner Bros. took notice, too: the studio signed Richard to a contract for a minimum of four films at a million dollars per film, an impressive pendant to his lucrative contract with Universal.

In interviews of the time, Richard managed to radiate an alternately humble and embattled confidence. He was an artist following his own path, whatever the consequences. Sure, “NBC would love to make me a household word. . . . But I’m not interested in being a household word. I’m interested in my art.” And yes, Warner Bros. had signed him to a multipicture deal, but “[i]f I disappoint them, it’ll become a
one
-picture deal.” With so much at stake, then, was he taking a risk by splitting himself between comedy and more serious acting jobs? “Hell, the atom split. Why shouldn’t I?” he asked.

At this peak moment of his career, he still carried within him the sense of being an underdog—still felt as if he was flirting with oblivion. “Hey, you know what I feel like?” he told the
New York Times
. “You ever drop a dime and can’t find it? That’s me, the dime you can’t find. Rolling down the road, and landing in the hobo’s pocket.” He lit up mischievously at the comparison. It tickled him to think of himself as a hobo’s treasure, something lost and barely found.

N
ever edit yourself in these meetings,” Richard instructed his writers, in the conference room at NBC’s Burbank studios. “Please don’t do that.” His writers followed Richard’s gonzo lead: the four episodes of
The Richard Pryor Show
constitute one of the oddest cultural experiments ever to be sponsored by a major network. NBC’s Dick Ebersol, the young executive who had worn down Richard’s
resistance to TV through an extended charm offensive, later turned on the very show he’d labored so hard to bring into existence. By the time Richard delivered the fourth episode, Ebersol told the show’s director, lividly, “I’ll never work with him again.”

And yet: Ebersol couldn’t have asked for a stiffer blast of fresh air in NBC’s prime-time lineup. The
New York Times
judged it a “cause for wonder” that “so much social complexity could be presented as comedy to a mass audience.” The
Washington Post
praised
The Richard Pryor Show
as “the most perilously inventive comedy hour to hit prime time in years.” At its best, Richard’s series was weirdly riveting and brilliant. At its worst, it was unpredictable to the point of seeming purposeless. And sometimes its best and its worst were one and the same. TV critics couldn’t agree on which sketches worked, perhaps because few of them “worked” in the standard ways. A sketch that one critic hailed as a “devastating, bittersweet episode—beautifully played, beautifully designed” could register, with another critic, as mere “icky wistfulness.” Richard was following his muse and sowing bewilderment in his wake.

In this experiment, Richard was supported by a multiracial ensemble recruited by Paul Mooney from the pool of stand-ups at the Comedy Store, Richard’s preferred club for trying out new material. Some in the ensemble—Robin Williams, Sandra Bernhard, Tim Reid (
WKRP in Cincinnati
), Martha Warfield (
Night Court
)—later achieved some measure of fame in film or on TV; at the time, all of them were scuffling comedians. “He loved them,” said director John Moffitt of the feeling between Richard and the rest of the cast. “He tried to give those comics as much presence as possible. And they loved him.” For Richard, the dynamic harkened back to his apprentice days at New York’s Improv, where he larked onstage until the early hours of the morning, riffing and rolling. Tim Reid remembered a feeling of pure discovery on set: “We came in with no structure, no rules. Most of the stuff was improv. We would have a theme, and we would all come out, and we would just go. And they would run the tape. Sometimes the tape would run for thirty minutes and then Moffitt had to figure
out how to get a sketch out of it.” The mood on set was devil-may-care—and yet the actors knew that the devil did, in fact, care. Reid continued: “We all knew that we were too far. We were beyond the point of the network being able to accept and absorb what we were doing. You know, they sent spies on the set. They had guys dressed in street clothes to come to our rehearsals to try and find out what the hell we were doing. And we would always pick them out. We would laugh and make fun of them.”

It’s not hard to imagine what worried the cautious-minded at NBC. In “Star Wars Bar,” the first sketch of the first show, Richard dropped Mudbone into the
Star Wars
cantina, where he was a bartender ministering to a pack of intergalactic irregulars. (Director George Lucas loved Richard’s comedy so much that he loaned the show the actual masks from the film.) The sketch brought the raw atmosphere of the Famous Door, the Pryor family’s bar in 1940s Peoria, to a galaxy far, far, away. Brushing up against a troglodyte in a monk’s hood, Richard’s bartender declares, “You look just like a nigger from Detroit I know.” The troglodyte grunts and motions to his companion, an imp with a bald and horned head. “Oh, I see,” returns Richard. “Well, why don’t you go upstairs and get a room? . . . If that’s your type, well alright.” Later, a huge, tentacled creature starts devouring Richard, who calls desperately for his bouncer, Fuzz, to remove him from its grip. Rescued, he suggests to Fuzz, “Take him in the back room. And while you’re back there, get a little octopussy.” Suffice it to say that, over on ABC, the Fonz was not making double entendres about interspecies sex.