Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him (22 page)

The situation was especially galling for Keitel, a prominent player in most all of Scorsese’s films to date and the star of the director’s first full-length feature,
Who’s That Knocking at My Door?
Keitel left the production more than once. “Left” as in he went to the airport and got on a plane.

There was one scene, shot on location in a cheaply paneled bar favored by autoworkers, in which Richard went off on a most outrageously brilliant rant. The longer Richard kept going, according to Schrader, the angrier Harvey got, which would have worked fine for the scene, had Keitel not picked up a filled ashtray and flung its contents into the camera’s lens ruining the take. Seconds later, Richard and his bodyguard, Rashon, had Keitel pinned to the floor and were pummeling him with their fists.

Still, a good portion of his lines that made it into the final cut are pure Richard, Schrader attests. “I wasn’t that good of a writer,” he says.

Here is Zeke at home after a hard day watching
The Jeffersons
on TV. His wife, Caroline, is played by Chip Fields.

ZEKE:
Now that shit is pitiful. I don’t know how in the fuck a nigga like that gets some money anyway. This is the dumbest shit—look at this motherfucker. Look like a motherfuckin’ ostrich. Look at that shit . . .

CAROLINE:
If you hate it so much, why don’t you just turn it off?

ZEKE:
Turn it off? Are you kiddin’ baby? Took me three years to pay for that motherfucker. We gonna watch everything they show on it. All the shit they show. Even the snow when the motherfucker go off, I’m gonna sit here and watch that.

Not counting his concert films, this is far and away Richard’s finest performance as an actor and the purest Pryor to be found onscreen, in one of the most overlooked films of the seventies.

—————

Over the three years of their on-again, off-again rocky relationship, Kathy McKee had never judged Richard, had never fought back. She’d seen it all before. She knew the dance steps and she enjoyed the ride. When her sister called in the middle of the night saying Richard was holding her and Freddie Prinze at gunpoint, she showed up and stayed to party.

She came, too, when he asked her to get Pam Grier out of his house.

After we broke up, Pam moved in. He called me up one night—me, again, to come be the intermediary—and asked could I please come get that “yoga-ass bitch” out of his house. “I don’t want to be with her no more and she won’t go home; could you please come get her out of my house?” So I said, “Okay, I’ll come.” Sounds like fun, right? So I went in and I found Pam on the bed doing yoga and meditating. I said, “Pam, Richard asked me to come and speak for him. He really wants you to get the fuck out of his house.” We had words. I told her, “I’m just doing what Richard asked me to. Personally, if somebody didn’t want me in their house, they wouldn’t have to ask me more than one time. They wouldn’t even have to ask. I’d kind of pick up on the hint.” So we had a little argument, but she left.

Later Richard took Kathy out and bought her a piece of jewelry as a thank-you for getting Pam Grier out of his house.

“Most of the women Richard got involved with,” says McKee, “had nothing going on of their own. No career. That’s how it is with a lot of big stars. They have to be the center of attention, they can’t have someone competing with that. Just imagine if Richard and Pam Grier were out together and a fan came up and asked
her
for an autograph. That would be trouble.”

—————

The next time Richard called Kathy he wanted her to meet him for lunch at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel.

“Hey,” he said to her across the table while the waiter poured. “I want to marry you.” (Not “Will you marry me?” but “I want to marry you.”)

“You want to
marry
me? You mean, like, make plans and have a big—?”

No, right now, he told her. He had a plane waiting to fly them to Vegas.

They spent the next three hours talking it over. She went out to the pay phone from time to time to call friends and ask their advice. (“Richard
Pryor
wants to marry you? What the heck? Go ahead. Marry Richard.”) From the moment she said yes, he took charge over everything. He wouldn’t even let her go home to pack. He took her to Giorgio’s on Rodeo Drive to buy the clothes she’d need, then on to the airport.

They checked into a suite at Caesar’s Palace, got dressed, and were making ready to go downstairs to gamble for a while before getting married at one of the walk-in chapels on the Strip. Then the phone rang. It was David Franklin. Richard’s mood got real dark. He asked Kathy to go into the other room and he closed the door to take the call in private.

“He’s in there about twenty minutes on the phone with David Franklin. He comes out very dark. The mood has completely changed from up and happy, and fabulous and drinking champagne, to really dark. David has told him in so many words that he cannot get married without a prenup. I can just hear what David said, ‘Nigger, you are crazy. Don’t you dare marry that woman, she could take you for everything . . .’ talking real fast the way he did.”

Kathy had no objection to a prenup. “Fine. Whatever. We stayed in Vegas a couple of days, gambled, partied, didn’t get married, then back to L.A. to wait for David to show up with the prenup.” Then she had to leave town to do a show and Richard went out on the road. After that, she was hired to cohost
Good Morning L.A.
Everything from around that period—the years between 1978 and ’79 are a little foggy, she says, because she was doing so much stuff and running around with so many people. She and Richard got into a big huge massive fight at the house. “Well, not a fight,” she hastens to say. “I never raise my voice. I’m smarter than that. If somebody gets mad, I just get my little stuff together and walk out the door.”

The marriage never happened. “Actually, when I look back on it now, it was a good thing that it didn’t happen. It would’ve been a mess.”

Richard, apparently, wanted to marry Kathy that day or not at all. He would have done well to heed the advice of Mickey Rooney who always preferred getting married early in the morning. That way, he said, if it didn’t work out, he would not have wasted the whole day.

SURRENDER, RICHARD

NBC hosted a mega press conference at the L.A. Improv to publicize its new fall lineup. Richard arrived, as requested, unsure exactly what he was supposed to do. NBC publicist Kathi Fearn-Banks told him, “ ‘Just get up there and talk to them, let them ask you questions about the series.’ He said, ‘I’m not doing a series. I’m doing some specials.’ [Kathi] said, ‘Well, no, Richard, you’re doing a series.’ ” This was news to him. Perhaps he had confused or conflated the two contracts he’d signed with NBC; perhaps he hadn’t been told what he was signing or simply hadn’t paid attention. It mattered little where the communication had broken down, a pool of seventy-some TV critics from across the country were waiting to meet him. Richard was enough of a pro not to let the misunderstanding mar that day’s session with the press. Rather than describe the series—he had not a clue, after all—he kept the crowd entertained by riffing on what the show would
not
be. There would be no explicit sex, he said, although he had auditioned some people. There would be no violence, although one person, he said, had been killed during taping of the first show. Asked how he was able to work on TV without using profanity, he explained that NBC piled a big stack of money in front of the camera. “When I don’t curse, it gets bigger. When I do, it dwindles.”

At the first opportunity, Richard turned the stage over to the cast of
CPO Sharkey
and then called David Franklin to find out what exactly he’d gotten himself into.

Indeed, he had signed a lucrative contract to deliver a minimum of ten weekly, hour-long comedy-variety shows that fall. Occasional specials once or twice a year he could handle, but writing, staging, rehearsing, and producing an hour’s worth of prime-time material once a week every week was out of the question.

Both sides eventually agreed to four shows instead of the contracted ten. Richard convinced himself that with Mooney and writer-producer Rocco Urbisci covering his flanks, he could will himself through four weeks of the ordeal. The network, for its part, was betting that once the show was under way, a routine was established, and Richard got a taste of basking in the certain glory, he wouldn’t want to stop.

—————

Here’s one thing pimps know—and maybe everyone else does, too, but doesn’t want to say: men don’t pay prostitutes for
sex;
they pay them to go away afterward. As production on
Th
e Richard Pryor Show
got under way, Richard couldn’t deny the parallels. He well knew where that led.

More than once he quit the show, then came back. Meanwhile, the paycheck-to-paycheck cast and crew were left cooling their heels, not knowing for sure if they had a job or not. Some of them chipped in and hired a plane to circle above his house with a banner that said
SURRENDER, RICHARD
. It only pissed him off more. (Rocco thinks executive producer Burt Sugarman hired the plane. Richard thought it had to be Rocco. He called Rocco up and said, “You need this job that bad, motherfucker?”)

At that point in his life and career, Urbisci says, Richard couldn’t allow his muse to be stifled or hemmed in by the restrictions of television’s standards and practices.

No, Mooney counters, it was the drugs.

The show was brilliant. Everybody loved it. Richard simply couldn’t face the prospect of getting up early and going to work every day. And he had no one else to hide behind or blame if it flopped. It was his show; that was his name in the title.

The money was good. The money was outrageous. But this time it felt less like getting paid than being bought.

Richard worried he’d lose connection with his true audience who liked their Pryor raw and profane. Whenever Richard achieved any degree of mainstream popularity, he took that to mean he was not keeping it real. Mooney told him, “The minute you hear white people applauding you, you get all pissed at yourself because you think you ain’t being black enough.”

—————

Richard and Rocco and Mooney agreed it was important for the opening of that first episode to make a clear statement of what he was giving up to do the show. He was giving up his artistry, his integrity. Mooney had the idea to open with a Frankenstein skit where Dr. Frankenstein switches brains between a white guy and Richard. Richard sits up and, speaking in a golly-gee-willikers white voice says, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to
Th
e Richard Pryor Show.
Golly, am I glad to be here.”

Then Rocco got a 2:00 a.m. phone call from Richard.

“ ‘Rocco? It’s Richie.’ ” Urbisci re-creates the conversation with Richard speaking in a late-night whisper. “I could barely hear him. He said, ‘I want to do the opening where I’ve got no dick and no balls.’ I said, ‘You want to do what?’ He said, ‘Can you get me a makeup guy? I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.’ ”

Rocco had hired Rick Baker who’d done makeup on George Lucas’s original
Star Wars
to create the alien costumes for the show’s “
Star Wars
Bar” sketch, which had Richard playing it straight—he was always funniest when he wasn’t playing for laughs—as a bartender dealing with the aggravations of serving a crowd of rowdy aliens. “Hey, watch where you’re going!” he barks at a bug-eyed creature who has just knocked into him while carrying a tray of drinks. “You got the biggest eyes in the place.”

Baker put Richard in a pair of jockey shorts and covered them over with flesh-tone makeup. It was a rush job. The slightest movement would cause the makeup to crumple and spoil the effect so Richard had to stand perfectly still. Director John Moffitt started off with a tight head-and-bare-shoulders shot as Richard delivered his opening lines.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to
The Richard Pryor Show.
My name is Richard Pryor. I’m so happy to have my own show I don’t know what to do. I could jump up and down and sing “Yankee Doodle.” I’m telling ya, it’s gonna be a lot of fun. You know, there’s been a lot of things written about me, people wondering am I gonna have a show, am I not gonna have a show—well I’m having a show! People say, “Well, how can you have a show? You’ll have to compromise. You’ll have to give up
everything.
” Is that a joke or what? Well, look at me. I’m standing here naked. I’ve given up absolutely nothing.

The camera then pulled back to reveal Richard standing naked with no dick and no balls.

“So enjoy the show!”

—————

The day the show was scheduled to air, Rocco got a call saying NBC was going to edit out the naked opening. Rocco called Richard. “Did you know about this?” “I haven’t heard a damn thing about it,” Richard said. That afternoon there was a press conference announcing that Richard had quit the show over artistic differences. “The irony is,” says Urbisci, “that the naked opening was shown that night on every network newscast, including NBC. It got more exposure than if they’d left it alone.” Richard clearly knew what he was doing. Perhaps NBC did, too. Urbisci wonders now if NBC didn’t yank the opening for that very purpose, fully aware of how Richard would react and knowing what the result would be.

The first episode opened cold with the “
Star Wars
Bar” sketch instead.

—————

The tales of Richard’s angst and furious meltdowns belie how utterly brilliant and defiant the show is, especially for its time. Forget pushing the envelope; they tore the envelope to shreds and tossed it like confetti. Director John Moffitt favored cinematic camera moves that were highly unusual for shooting on videotape, and many of the sketches, especially those set in exotic locales, began with leisurely, atmospheric introductions. Even in direction and production values,
Th
e Richard Pryor Show
didn’t look or feel like anything else on TV.

In the first episode, Moffitt’s camera snakes its way through a swampy bayou night before taking us inside a wild hoodoo service where moaning worshippers wait to be healed by the frenetic Cajun faith healer Bojaws, whose refrain is “Let Bojaws handle it!” The sketch was inspired, according to Urbisci, by the flamboyant TV evangelist and faith healer, Ernest Angley—a Liberace in a leisure suit waving a floppy Bible and knocking worshippers to the floor as he casts out demons and disease. The Bojaws sketch also featured the then-unknown Robin Williams—nine months before he first assayed the role of the alien Mork on
Happy Days
—who did a hilarious impersonation of Angley in his own stand-up act.

Viewers tuning in at the half hour of the show’s second episode would be treated to four and a half minutes of African drumming and dance before the scene shifts to a village where Richard is the “Come from Man,” a charlatan who sells tourists tribal artifacts and traces their roots.

As with his special, the transitions between sketches often found Richard walking through the NBC studios, interacting with visitors and staff. In “A Pet Head,” a female staff member knocks on the door of Richard’s dressing room when she hears various bird sounds—a finch, a whooping crane, a chicken—coming from within. She scolds him that “we are not allowed to have pets in our rooms, Mr. Pryor.” After he gets rid of the staffer, a stressed-out Richard removes the cloth cover from a birdcage to reveal the living head of an adult man (Charles Fleischer, later known as Carvelli on
Welcome Back, Kotter
and the voice of Roger Rabbit). The two bicker and scream at each other, accusing each other of neglect and inconsiderate behavior. The head is in a snit because Richard forgot his promise to take the head to Disneyland. “You think I’m going to take you to Disneyland?! Huh? And have you bouncing all around like you did at the dentist?” Richard, near his breaking point, says, “Let me tell you something, man. If the Muslims ever find out I got a white head in my dressing room, I’m in big trouble!” Then, self-loathing: “Only a nigger would keep a pet head.” When Richard accidentally knocks the bottomless cage to the floor, the head freaks out. It can’t bear to be out of its cage.

Our only clue into the attraction at work in this clandestine relationship comes when the head plays harmonica (on a rack, naturally). As the head begins blowing into the harmonica, Richard runs for cover, hiding behind a potted plant. Then he begins to dance, rigidly at first, as though succumbing against his will to the music’s conjured spell.

“A Pet Head” is perhaps the strangest, most subversive thing ever aired on network TV. The sketch stubbornly adheres to its own surreal logic with no explanation. On its surface, it’s as matter-of-factly unsettling as any Kafka nightmare. Make of it what you will.

—————

In the third episode, playwright and actress Kres Mersky (best known for her one-woman shows
Th
e Life and Times of A. Einstein
and
Isadora Duncan: A Unique Recital
) delivered a monologue as a lonely rooming-house dweller who recounts conflicting versions of what may or may not have been a lesbian encounter with a neighbor in a park the night before. Viewers couldn’t be sure.

When production of
The Richard Pryor Show
was first announced, Mersky sent Rocco Urbisci an audition tape that included a number of the dozen or so pieces she performed in her one-woman show
At the Codfish Ball,
which she was then performing on stage at the Hollywood Center Theater. Rocco flipped when he saw her
Rashomon
-like telling of her character’s lesbian encounter. “I loved the tape and showed it to Richard,” says Rocco. “We decided to call the segment ‘New Talent.’ I wanted to frame it in something that maybe could be used as a weekly feature.” The sketch begins and ends with Richard standing over a piano in a glittery glamorous costume and outrageous wig lip-synching Little Richard’s “Good Golly Miss Molly.” In a nod to Orson Welles’s 1937 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s
War of the Worlds
(Welles doing Wells in “the broadcast that panicked America”), the image of Richard as Little Richard flickers in and out, a static-filled snowy screen is replaced by the black-and-white video image of a barefoot, bathrobed woman seated in an upholstered chair in an otherwise scantly furnished apartment. The effect was of a pirate TV station breaking in on NBC’s frequency.

“I’ve fallen in love again,” she says. “She’s a woman here in the rooming house.” Her contradictory versions of their encounter veer from describing a mutually satisfying tryst, to her being the seducer, to having been assaulted by the woman, to it all being a lonely fantasy for a closeness that is unattainable to her. It ends with her saying, “I like being alone. It’s better that way. At least then there’s none of the pretense of closeness, none of the frustration of trying to be close and finding only walls.” The screen goes staticky again and returns to Richard at the conclusion of “Good Golly Miss Molly.”

The most likely reason the sketch didn’t cause more of a stir at the time was that viewers might not have been entirely sure what they had just seen. Had that really been a part of
The Richard Pryor Show
? It sure didn’t look like it. No way would NBC have given the okay for
this.
“When it went on the air back east,” Rocco says, “I got a call from my sister. She was angry and outraged at NBC for screwing up her brother’s show by interrupting Pryor’s parody of Little Richard with some PBS tape of a lady talking crazy. When I told her we did it on purpose, then she laughed.”