Becoming Richard Pryor (64 page)

A
fter a few days on
The Wiz
’s set, Richard returned to the purgatory of his own making in Los Angeles: he needed to complete the fourth, and final, episode of
The Richard Pryor Show
. Though he was submitting to an obligation that, by all reports, he would have preferred to be released from, he was never someone who “worked to rule.” In fact, the last two episodes of his program showcase his imagination at its most chaotic—as experimental as he ever allowed himself to be in his stand-up. And in some ways, they are even more revealing of the full compass of his imagination. Whereas onstage he was often anchored by the details of his actual life, in his TV show Richard used the freedom of sketch comedy, the freedom of implausibility, to project himself into a series of fantasies.

The second-to-last episode, taped just after the Hollywood Bowl
fiasco, was the series’ most exploratory moment, and arguably its finest. Five of the episode’s segments were driven by pantomime, as if Richard were curious to see what he could express without opening his mouth. In “Mr. Fixit,” the spirit is Chaplinesque—the bowler hat on Richard’s head, the cranked-up action, and the rickety piano soundtrack all point back to the era of silent comedy. Richard plays a mechanic who, as he goes about repairing Paul Mooney’s car, dismantles it instead with his every touch—until, at the end, he pats Mooney casually on the shoulder and Mooney’s arm falls off. In “Separate Tables,” a vivid parable of civilization and its discontents, Richard and his team paid homage to the famously sensual eating scene in the 1963 comedy
Tom Jones
. Richard sits facing Marsha Warfield at an upscale restaurant, both of them dining alone. After some coy eye contact, they communicate with each other through their food: Richard slowly slurping a spaghetti noodle, Warfield savoring a bite of her corn on the cob. As their passion builds, Richard becomes more frustrated and discombobulated—not just delighting in his food à la
Tom Jones
, but rubbing his salad over his face, or squeezing his grapes in his fist until they squirt at him. The two diners dive at each other and start writhing on the restaurant’s floor, at which point the maître d’ takes a hose and nonchalantly sprays them with the equivalent of a cold shower. The diners return to their tables, their respective dates arrive, and they carry on as if nothing happened—as if they were obedient creatures of decorum. Their sopping clothes tell a different story.

More poetic was a sketch that Rocco Urbisci and John Moffitt considered a disappointment, though it might be better to consider it a sketch
about
disappointment. “Once Upon a Time” lasted eight slow-moving minutes and aimed to return viewers to a time in their lives when they could be stirred by the simplest of amusements. The setting: a washed-out junkyard, a depressive’s version of the habitat of Bill Cosby’s Fat Albert. A calliope toots mechanically in the distance. A handful of kids watch as a gray-haired Richard, wearing a battered top hat and tails, plays the roles of ringmaster, lion tamer, tightrope
walker, and clown in a traveling circus that is pure make-believe. With a toy whip and toy pistol, Richard evokes a lion tamer bringing an imaginary beast to heel on an upturned garbage pail; with the simple prop of a chair, he becomes a high-wire artist balancing himself with one leg raised in the air. The children clap enthusiastically, but the piece is forlorn in mood, mourning the loss of childhood even as it celebrates the pleasures of it. The spell of Richard’s imaginary circus is broken by the shout of a mother offstage, telling the kids to stop playing in “that dirty junkyard.” The kids flee, leaving Richard alone. Though the sketch ends on a somewhat optimistic note—with a lone black boy, presumably a younger version of Richard, coming back to the junkyard, finding Richard’s top hat on the ground, and putting it on—it’s mostly a sobering meditation on the power of play, a power that can seem life-giving one moment and trivial the next. At the age of thirty-seven, Richard had created a portrait of the artist as an old man, so out of phase with the world of responsible adulthood that he seemed unreal, or unbelievable.

The searching qualities of “Once Upon a Time” found an echo in “New Talent,” the strangest of all sketches ever aired on
The Richard Pryor Show
. The curious segment had a curious backstory to match: Rocco Urbisci had received an audition tape from actress Kres Mersky and had been riveted by an experimental monologue of hers, part of a one-woman show she’d performed in LA. In the piece, Mersky’s character sits in a bathrobe and talks intensely to an unseen person, or perhaps just to herself, about how she’s “fallen in love again”—this time with a woman in her rooming house. With some graphic detail, she recounts a tryst with her lover in a clearing in a park. Then she toys with her audience by revising her story repeatedly, each time promising to divulge what “actually” happened. Actually the woman took her by force; no, actually she took the woman by force; no, actually she never went to the park at all but instead just stayed at home, reading a book on “violence and seduction.” Urbisci played the monologue for Richard, who loved it and brightened at the subversive idea of smuggling it into their series. In a testament
to his freethinking spirit, Richard did not bat an eyelash at turning four minutes of his show over to a little-known actress performing a monologue that nowadays would be labeled performance art, and queer performance art at that.

Once Richard and Urbisci had agreed to feature Mersky’s piece, the practical question then became: how to segue into it? They settled on an ingenious solution: Richard would camp it up as Little Richard, in a high pompadour and glittering cape, singing “Good Golly Miss Molly”; his performance would quickly dissolve into static and snow; and Mersky’s monologue, presented in black and white, would fade in. When her monologue was over, the static and snow would return, and Little Richard would finish his song. For unsuspecting viewers at home, it might seem that their TV set had begun to fail or that NBC’s signal had been jammed by a local public-access station. Yet, at the same time, the figure of Little Richard was more than just a comic non sequitur. With his pancake makeup, tweezed eyebrows, and leering lusciousness, the early rock-’n’-roller was a rollicking example of the sexual confusions that, in a more minor key, drove Mersky’s monologue. One good gender bender deserved another; “Miss Molly” wasn’t the only one who loved to ball. And so, just a few days after Richard’s crack-up at a gay rights benefit, his director shot Mersky delivering her monologue about gay desire and Richard whooping and blowing air kisses as the glammy rock-’n’-roller.

NBC tried to kill the segment as it was being produced, but Richard was adamant, threatening, as ever, to pull out of his show. Kres Mersky looked on, astonished that her little piece was causing such a ruckus. Apparently NBC didn’t think Richard was bluffing; the sketch went through. The strength of Richard’s commitment to it begs the obvious question of why, in the context of the fallout from his Hollywood Bowl appearance, he was willing to endanger his show for a provocative piece of gay theater. If it was a statement, what sort of statement was it? Perhaps we might simply say that Mersky’s sketch was the sort of “gay culture” Richard could get behind. It suggested that when a woman fell in love with another woman, the result was just as complicated,
just as riddled with the problems of power and submission, as when a man fell in love with a woman, or a woman with a man. The sketch did not glide over gay sex with euphemisms or vague talk, but came back again and again to that clearing in the park, where the two women met for something between good sex and rape. (In the final version that aired, these graphic moments were blacked out, emphatically, with the silent message “Censored”—a decision that forced the viewer’s imagination to fill in the blanks.) Like Richard’s own “Wino and Junkie,” Mersky’s monologue was explicit but elusive, and a far cry from the sort of self-congratulatory bombast—“The Star-Spangled Banner,” “The Ascent of Man”—that set the tone for the Hollywood Bowl benefit. It beguiled the viewer into a space of troubling uncertainty.

By the time Richard started taping the final episode of his show on October 11, both he and the network were looking forward to the end of their relationship.
The Richard Pryor Show
had shed viewers until it was in the basement of the Nielsen ratings; Richard was as volatile as a tropical weather system, flashing between indifference and defiance, resignation and anger. His last show had both more filler and more minutes of caustic performance that had to be left on the cutting-room floor. As part of his kiss-off to NBC, he expanded one of his Mudbone monologues into a sixty-five minute, expletive-soaked “sustained sleight of comic imagination,” in the words of the
New York Times
. Exactly twenty-two words of it were suitable for broadcast.

Richard’s mixed feelings were in full evidence at the comic roast held on his behalf and aired, in severely edited form, on the last episode. At the event Marsha Warfield teased Richard about his compulsive womanizing: “Richard Pryor is a real humanitarian. He’s raised a lot of money for young students. In fact, he’s paid half the girls at the local high school to keep their mouths shut.” Robin Williams offered, under the cover of a jibe, some wisdom about the nature of Richard’s talent: “This man’s a genius. Who else can take all the forms of comedy—slapstick, satire, mime, and stand-up—and turn it into something that would offend everyone? . . . All he wants is a
loose director, a tight script, and a warm place to rehearse.” And Paul Mooney took the occasion to deliver a heartfelt tribute: “Richard Pryor is a lot like a child. . . . He’s innocent in a lot of ways, and in a lot of ways he’s not so innocent, and he’s a beautiful human being and I love him dearly. I’m really glad we did this, and I really mean that.” He hugged Richard, who rose to a standing ovation from the cast.

Richard took the podium and cut the mood with an improvised, and never-aired, series of insults that started light and became increasingly savage. “Thank you, I’m thrilled. It’s not often that amateur people get a chance to be on television,” he began. A few minutes later he was mocking Tim Reid’s manhood (“We wanted to give him a job because he had the shortest thing of any black man in America, and we didn’t want white people to know”); cutting down Marsha Warfield as “a big black gorilla” whom the show had adopted from the zoo (“We fixed her hair, and she’s been acting the fool ever since”); skewering a tubby cast member without mercy (“He has a wedding band on him, but Mrs. Hippo isn’t here tonight”); and eviscerating his friend David Banks as the ultimate pimp (“I first met him in church—he tried to get an angel to sit on my face”). It was an exercise in over-the-top cruelty, virtuosic in its spontaneity but hitting uncomfortably close to the bone. Then Richard reversed himself and turned sentimental: “I have a special place in my heart for everyone here. I really love them because they are brilliant people and they have made the show possible.” Just as he had thanked the whole crew of
Which Way Is Up?
when it wrapped, so he singled out his show’s set and lighting designers along with the writers and actors. The show had wrecked him—afflicted him with a set of responsibilities he couldn’t manage—but it had also put him at the center of a singular troupe of young artists, who had thrilled at the risks he took for his art and had buoyed him up.

The last two sketches of the final episode stand as a fitting emblem of all that Richard accomplished on his show and all that he suffered for it. In the haunting “Gun Shop,” he played a man who, as he walks through the shop and peruses the merchandise, hears each gun talking
to him. A rifle drawls, “I don’t like you, boy. Come on down to my part of the country—I’ll show you law and order.” A pearl-handled pistol murmurs, “Mrs. Mercer said I used to make her feel sexy. We finally got a mugger. The last thing he saw was the fire that came out of my eyes.” Richard continues to drift and be assailed by voices. A Saturday-night special, afflicted with status anxiety, jabbers, “You don’t think I have class—I got class! I killed more people than anybody in this room”; a Luger pistol brags of itself as “a weapon of ethnic purity.” Each gun, it seems, is trapped in its own pathology, hungering to visit its particular brand of destruction on the world. The sketch ends with Richard leaving the store, rattled and empty-handed; a gun revolves on a carousel until it’s pointed straight at the viewer.

Haunted by voices: Richard Pryor in “Gun Shop.” (Courtesy of the author)

With “Gun Shop,” Richard was taking aim at himself. The actor spooked at the gun shop was, after all, the same person who had pistol-whipped an early manager, shot up his first gold record over frustrations with his record label, and acquired an arsenal that encompassed
a Walther .380 automatic, a Colt .357 Magnum, an antique flintlock, and a shotgun. It takes nothing away from the power of the sketch to note that, at a New Year’s Eve party just ten weeks after “Gun Shop” aired, Richard seized a gun and, in a fury, unloaded it into a Mercedes that had previously contained his wife and friends. Demons are not so easily cast out that they can be ventilated and exorcised in a six-minute sketch. But what is remarkable is that Richard was able to see those demons with such piercing clarity and get others to share his vision of himself. In his art, he achieved the sort of ironic distance that was impossible to maintain in the churning slipstream of his life.