Dynomite!: Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times--A Memoir (24 page)

After a weekend alone on the road I came home to find Lilly more quiet than usual. She said nothing was wrong, but I knew something was. I finally coaxed it out of her: She was pregnant. She said she was happy about that. But I was not. I never wanted to have kids. When I was with wild-child Barbara, her desire to have children was a stumbling block in our relationship. I never thought I would be a good father. I never had the role model that would show me how to be one.

Lilly was understandably upset about my reaction. She said I would not have to take care of the child, that she would do everything. But like marriage, I felt that if you made a commitment, then you should stick to it. If I was going to be a father, then I was going to be a father. It would have to be “us,” not “her.” And I was not capable of “us.” A couple of days later she had an abortion.

The drive home from the doctor was somber and silent. We never talked about the abortion again. She fell into her regular routine and was as nice and easy as ever with me. But when she went into the spare bedroom to study at night, I could hear her softly crying. Increasingly, she spent more and more time in that room.

I was on the road as much as ever. One night I met a woman at a club and we went to a hotel room. After the abortion this was the first time I had slept with another woman. A neon sign flashed over the bed board proclaiming the obvious: I am not good enough for Lilly. I recognized that I was too selfish to be able to be a bigger part of her life. When I returned home, I told her I would get her an apartment of her own. She never said a word, which said a lot—in her heart she had already moved on. We found an apartment she liked and she moved in. I took care of her for more than a year after that.

Lilly would have been a great mother. I know she was the best woman I have ever been with. I wish I had known that at the time.

At least I didn’t have a drug problem to go with my relationship problem. Just like Freddie, Richard Pryor had a drug problem and a woman problem. His second marriage (he was married seven times to five different women) was to Shelly Bonis, a blonde Cher look-alike from Beverly Hills, and they had a daughter, Rain. I remember once going to Richard’s house in Northridge to babysit her, and there was a carafe of cocaine on the coffee table. Richard pointed to it proudly and said, “Walker, I have your whole year’s salary on that table!”

Pryor was hardly the only one indulging back then. Danny Aiello and I went to see Richard at a Madison Square Garden concert produced by Sid Bernstein and headlining Sly and the Family Stone. Compared to Sly, Richard was a weekend warrior. As we stood backstage Sly announced that he would not go on until he was given a brick of cocaine. The wheels were quickly set in motion. But the delivery would take a while.

Singer Kathe Green went on. Then Richard went on—and was booed off the stage as comics always are when opening for a rock act. The coke still had not arrived. They sent out Rare Earth, Motown’s token white act, and told them to stretch their time. By the end of their set Sly had scored his coke. He was now also very stoned. He walked on wearing a fur coat and a fur hat, and he then proceeded to fall off the stage.

I had no desire to imitate Sly or Richard or Sam Kinison, who was in the worst shape of anyone I ever saw when he performed at the Riviera in Vegas one New Year’s Eve. Surrounded by his Outlaws of Comedy, including Carl LaBove, Jimmy Shubert, and Allan Stephan, Sam sat in a chair in his dressing room. It was pitch-black except for one small light, but I could see a small pile of cocaine on the table next to him.

“Hey, Sam, how are you?”

“Jimmie Walker?”

“Yeah, man. I just came to see the show.”

He mumbled something incomprehensible and then tumbled off his stool. Carl picked him up and placed him back on the stool.

A Riviera exec who was there was worried. “Are we going to be able to get him on stage?” he asked. Carl took him to a corner of the room where they had an animated conversation.

“Oh yeah! Everything’s good,” I heard Carl say as they came back to us.

“You have to go on now,” Carl told Sam.

Sam slurred, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Two of the Outlaws grabbed Sam under his arms and carried him to the edge of the stage.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome the new year with Sam Kinison!” The crowd went wild.

The Outlaws gently pushed him onto the stage. I was amazed that Sam regained a little of his senses. But he was so wasted. He tried to do his material, but he was physically unable. He forgot his bits. He staggered around. He fell down. I have never seen anything like that on stage before or since. Afterward some fans asked for their money back; the Riviera turned them down, saying, “but he was on stage.”

I suppose the strangest thing is that Sam did not die from drugs but rather a car accident a couple years later. If you had seen him that night at the Riviera, you would have thought he would not be on this earth another twenty-four hours.

Being drugged held no joy for me. All I needed to avoid temptation was think of my uncles, Cornelius and Herbert, and how alcohol destroyed them. My view was not a secret; I had a reputation in town for not partaking, though I never preached about it. Freddie and Richard would say, “You’re a pussy!”

In turn I had called Pryor “the wildman” since our New York days, when he wore a tie-dyed shirt and big Afro and was a staple at the Café Wha? and the Village Vanguard. One year a local publication named him the Best Comic in the Village, and the next year I was the winner. We became friends after he was kicked out of his apartment. I asked him why he got kicked out.

“I haven’t paid the rent for two months,” he said matter of factly. “I’m going to need a place to stay.”

I was working at WMCA, so I had a little change. I gave him $175 to get a room in some fleabag hotel for a month. We were friends thereafter, but he remained “the wildman.” He only got wilder when, after his success with Gene Wilder in movies such as
Silver Streak
, Columbia Pictures gave him $40 million for a five-year deal. That could buy a lot of coke!

Once, while he was working on new material, he performed at the Comedy Store hours a night for two weeks straight. He was coked up and getting frazzled. At one of those shows a guy yelled up to the stage, “Hey, Richard, my girlfriend fucked your wife the other night!” Pryor jumped into the audience and pounded the guy.

Maybe the drugs gave him courage, because he was not always so brave. Back in New York he had hooked up with a pretty little white girl, a waitress named Susan. I made it a double date by taking out her girlfriend. We went to Small’s Paradise, a Harlem club owned by Wilt Chamberlain (Malcolm X was a waiter there in the 1940s). It seemed like there were a thousand black people in the club—and our two white chicks. We were at the bar when two black women came over and spat, “Are you with these white bitches?”

Richard looked at me—an admitted coward—looked at the seething black women, and said, “No!” We both walked away from the bar, leaving our dates to fend for themselves.

Another time a bunch of us went to Chinatown after a show at the Improv, including Pryor and a white comic named Bob Altman, who went by the name Uncle Dirty and wrote for Richard. Dirty was always bragging about something—how much money he made, how he was the hottest comic, something. We were having dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and Dirty boasted about his twentieth-degree black belt and that he was a martial arts champion.

For whatever reason Richard decided he was not going to pay the check. He told the waiter that he found a cockroach in his food and instructed us to get up and walk out with him. As we approached the door a dozen Chinese waiters, cooks, and others formed a wall to block us from leaving.

“You know that martial arts stuff you were talking about?” Richard said to Dirty. “You’re going to need it now!”

Of course, we knew Dirty was full of shit and we couldn’t fight our way out of a takeout bag. We went for our wallets.

Legend has it that when he was playing a Vegas date, a casino owner tried to convince Richard to tame his act a little. Richard snapped. He rushed into the casino itself, ripped off his shirt, jumped onto a card table, and yelled, “Blackjack!” Even if that did not happen, no one would have been surprised if it had. Anything was possible around Richard.

One day in June in 1980 I got a call around midnight. It was my agent.

“Did you hear about Richard Pryor?” he asked.

“What? Drug overdose?”

“Close,” he said. “He was freebasing coke while drinking 151-proof rum. The alcohol ignited and he caught on fire!”

“So why are you calling me?”

“He was supposed to do a new movie with Mel Brooks,
The History of the World, Part I
. Since he won’t be available, I got you a meeting with Mel this morning.”

“Geez,” I said, “Richard’s still smoldering!”

That’s Hollywood. I went to the meeting, but Gregory Hines ended up with the part.

The drugs and the madness ensured that Richard was rarely in any physical or mental condition to put together an act. He could never have done it on his own. There was brilliance that came out of him, but Richard would never have remembered any of it. He had the characters, like the wino, who gave Richard pathos—funny but also sympathetic. He also had the energy and he did the performance. But it was Paul Mooney who helped radicalize him, collaborated with him, wrote down his bits, arranged his act, and put it all together for him. Mooney also got Richard’s ass on stage. And then to get Richard to do a performance again and again—that was a yeoman’s job. Without Mooney there would not have been a Richard Pryor, and he does not get near enough credit for that. Every black comic who has followed in Pryor’s footsteps, from Kevin Hart to Dave Chappelle, owes Mooney a debt of gratitude.

No one, however, could have reined in Andy Kaufman—because there was no Andy Kaufman; he was always someone else.

I was at the Improv in New York when he first appeared as Tony Clifton. As one comic finished up, Budd went on stage to bring on the next act.

“Oh,” he said, supposedly interrupting his introduction. “I think I see a young man in the audience who used to work here as a singer and now he has his own room in Vegas. One of the brightest talents in show biz today, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Tony Clifton!”

Andy sat in the audience sporting a cheesy suit, black toupee, mustache, and sunglasses. The audience didn’t know who Tony Clifton was, but they politely applauded.

“I wonder,” Budd said, “if it’s possible for Tony to come up and sing a song. Maybe if we give him a round of applause, he’ll come up.”

Again, some applause.

Clifton said, “Nah, nah.”

Budd fired them up. “Ladies and gentlemen, a little more applause, let’s get him up here!”

Onto the stage trotted Clifton. He looked around for a minute and said, “This place is a fuckin’ dump! How much does it cost to get in here?”

Someone yelled, “Seven bucks.”

“Really? You paid seven bucks to come to this fuckin’ dive? I don’t know why I’m up here. This is shit.”

From the back of the club a woman’s voice was heard. “Hey Mr. Clifton, where are you working in Vegas?” It was one of the waitresses, maybe Bette, Liz, Shelley, or Elayne.

“Excuse me, who the fuck are you?” answered the ticked-off Clifton.

“You said you had your own room in Vegas,” she said. “We might come out there and see you.”

“Are you here with your boyfriend?” Clifton asked.

“Yeah.”

“He’s paying for your drinks too?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what I mean. These fuckin’ broads, man. They come to the fuckin’ show, they don’t pay a fuckin’ dime, they have to spread their legs later so they can come to this show, and when I’m on stage they have to take up
my
time.”

Sometimes a guy in the crowd would get upset at his abuse of the woman: “Hey! Take it easy, man!”

The woman would chime in with “I just wanted to know where you were. You don’t have to be an asshole.”

The audience would agree and applaud for her.

Clifton pushed further. “Excuse me, fuckin’ lady, if you think you’re tough enough to knock me off this stage, bring your ass up here and do it.”

The “customer” would strut angrily onto the stage. As she did, the fire exit door next to the stage was opened from the outside. Andy had taught the waitresses how to take him by an arm and flip him so he flew through the door and out of the club. The move was the beginning of his wrestler character a few years later. Then the door would slam shut.

The audience, not really sure whether what they had witnessed was real or an act, would applaud wildly in either case. At first, I too thought Tony Clifton was funny, and his Elvis too. But Andy just went on too long. It is said that jokes have three beats—badda, bing, punch line. Andy’s humor was five beats. It just kept going and going. I watched him and thought, “Are we there yet?” I was not surprised that Kaufman said he went to a Pryor concert and never laughed once. That’s because Richard had actual jokes.

He stayed in character off stage too. When people saw Andy at the bar after his act, they would say, “Hey Andy, that was great.” He would blow them off because he was still Tony Clifton, and Tony Clifton was a prick. If he had played Foreign Man onstage and another comic said, “Andy, I liked that bit,” he would talk like Foreign Man and ask, “Who this Andy?” He was the same with everyone, including the hordes of women who flocked around him.

Boosler, who dated him for years before everyone moved to LA, thought he was great. There are others who also thought he was brilliant. To them I said, “Next time, you need to bring enough drugs for everybody.”

For Richard, Freddie, Andy, and all of us who had come to the West Coast, our first stop was at the Store. Formerly the legendary Ciro’s nightclub, in 1972 the place was reopened as the Comedy Store, featuring a ninety-nine-seat theater, by comic Sammy Shore, who had opened for Elvis Presley the previous few years in Vegas. For Sammy the club was a playground for him and his comic pals, from Buddy Hackett and Redd Foxx to Rudy DeLuca and Flip Wilson. The next year, when Sammy had to return to Vegas for an extended solo gig, he left the club in the hands of his wife, Mitzi. By the time he returned a month later she had not only transformed the Store; she had begun to transform comedy itself.