Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him (26 page)

He stops short of outright admitting that he’d deliberately set himself on fire, although he danced around other explanations, dropping coy rhetorical hints that it may not have been entirely accidental.

“Have you ever heard of a motherfucker burning up freebasing other than me? If nobody else burned up freebasing, why do you think it happened to me? I did not burn up freebasing. I burned up because I
quit
freebasing.”

Now here’s how I really burned up. My friends really know how it happened, okay? Usually before I go to bed, I have a little milk and cookies. One night I had that low-fat milk and that pasteurized shit, and I dipped my cookie in it and the shit blew up.

That was a joke. A gag writer brought it to him and Richard Pryor paid for it.

Live on the Sunset Strip
was released on March 12, 1982, one week to the day after John Belushi was found in his bungalow at the Chateau Marmont dead of an overdose—too soon to assign any intentional meaning to the shot of the iconic West Hollywood hotel that appears in the film’s opening sequence.

IS COMEDY STAND-UP POETRY?

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

—Kurt Vonnegut

Self-proclaimed comediologist and professor of English at New Mexico Highlands University, Eddie Tafoya makes a case that
Live on the Sunset Strip
is a modern American answer to Dante’s
Inferno.
“Just as Dante did for the world at the beginning of the Renaissance, Pryor provides for twentieth-century America a literary and spiritual assessment of the times. “In his immensely entertaining
Th
e Legacy of the Wisecrack: Stand-Up Comedy as the Great American Literary Form,
Tafoya breaks Richard’s filmed performance down into twenty-eight separate bits, which he then roughly equates to the
Inferno
’s thirty-four cantos, and arrives at the conclusion that Richard is perhaps “the only person of the last century able to venture into the depths of this particular Hell.”

Live on the Sunset Strip
“belongs to the world of classical literature,” Tafoya writes.

When taken as a single unit, the twenty-eight bits included in the performance tell a story with a classic mythological structure, one that begins with a rebirth and ends with a dual baptism by fire and water, a story that follows closely the initiation-separation-return hero cycle Joseph Campbell describes in his seminal book
The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

As with Dante, the venture into the Dark Wood is initiated by the loss of female love. Just as Beatrice’s love is lost with her death and then returns with the message from Virgil, Mama Bryant’s love is lost and then resurrected in the person of Jennifer.

Tafoya offers no evidence that Richard had any particular knowledge of or interest in Dante’s fourteenth-century epic. For this, we hold him blameless. The all-embracing scholar Guy Davenport published an essay that laid out in meticulous detail how Eudora Welty had transmuted the symbolism and imagery of the Greek myth of Persephone, queen of the underworld, in her novel
Delta Wedding.
When they later had occasion to meet, Welty chided Davenport in her playful way that it was news to her that
Delta Wedding
had anything to do with Persephone. That made no difference at all, Davenport insisted. The story, he said, had known it for her. Stories can do that. Just as Richard’s characters were wiser and more clear-eyed in their understanding of the world than he ever managed to be in navigating in his own life. But when he was all alone in command of a bare stage with no obstacles, he could go with them anywhere and not stumble.

—————

Is stand-up comedy literature? It is if you accept Ezra Pound’s contention that literature is “news that stays news.” The oldest, mustiest, and most venerated literature we have managed to flourish for centuries as popular entertainment, delivered by performers equipped with nothing but breath, gesture, facial expression, and memory.

Is it poetry? Our answer comes, fittingly enough, from Pound’s lifelong friend and sometime tormentor, the physician and poet William Carlos Williams, who, when he wasn’t treating jaundiced factory workers or delivering babies, wrote stanzas such as this, often on the backs of prescription pads while pulled over in his car on the side of a road in Rutherford, New Jersey. “It is difficult to get news from poetry,” he wrote, “yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

“I GUESS THAT’S A SMILE. I HOPE THAT’S HIS FACE”

“Richard’s black and doesn’t have the same career opportunities,” said Paul Schrader. “This is a racist society: people aren’t offering him the Oliver Sacks role that Robin Williams got in
Awakenings.
” The only role he ever got that had not been specifically written for a black actor was Corporal Eddie Keller, a returning Vietnam vet in an adaptation of James Kirkwood’s novel
Some Kind of Hero.

Eddie is released from a POW camp and comes home to find that his wife has borne him a daughter and fallen in love with another man. His mother has suffered a stroke and is now in a nursing home costing twelve hundred dollars a month, but his wife and her boyfriend lost all his savings in a business venture and the army is withholding his back pay because, in exchange for medical help for a dying buddy, he had signed a statement presented by his captors admitting that the United States was conducting the war illegally.

Once Paramount had signed Richard Pryor, they decided the movie ought to be a comedy. Some moments in the film are genuinely funny, but the jokes are jarringly off-key in what began as the earnest story of a man overwhelmed by absurdity as he tries to reassess his life. (Example: Eddie uses a water pistol to rob a bank, but the ruse gives way when—wait for it—the pistol starts to leak. Why on earth would he—a corporal in the 101st Airborne—fill the thing with water in the first place?)

—————

The brutal opening scenes, set in a POW camp, are by far the best part of the film. For those first twenty minutes, Richard gives one of the best dramatic performances of his career. After that promising start,
Some Kind of Hero
goes wobbly. The movie works as well as it does only because Richard plays it straight. Vincent Canby, reviewing in the
New York Times,
wrote, “The performance, if not the script, is a series of revelations of the singular Pryor talent as the actor inhabits a particular character,” and he declares it Richard’s “most complete, most honest characterization to date in a fiction film.”

Costar Margot Kidder detected a recurring pitfall in that “most directors didn’t direct him, they just let him go, thinking suddenly he could turn in a brilliant performance just by—I don’t know what they thought. They were a little intimidated by him.” Kidder admits that she “fell in love with him in two seconds flat.”

Shooting a love scene, they nervously got in bed together.

Then he looked up, and it was very genuine, and he went, “(
Gasps
) Richard Pryor’s in bed with Lois Lane!’ He was really adorable. He was a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful man. Much underrated as a human being. I mean, he was really generous and kind and thoughtful, and I think the best actor I’d worked with, in the sense of when you were in a scene with him, it was like doing a dance. He didn’t miss an eyelash-flicker. He was so in the present. And I remember saying to him, “God, you’re really a good actor. Why does everybody insist you be funny all the time?”

A few months later Richard asked for and received the unheard of sum of four million dollars for his role in
Superman III
—a million more than Christopher Reeve got for reprising the title role. The Superman franchise seemed exhausted and director Richard Lester was counting on Richard to carry the film, which he did. Again, once they had Richard, they weren’t sure what to do with him. The filmmakers never decided for certain whether they wanted it to be a Richard Pryor movie or a Superman movie with Richard Pryor in it. There are a few moments of inspired comedy, clearly put in for no other reason than to capitalize on Richard doing what he did best, as they had nothing to do with the story. The movie essentially had to stop and wait while they let Richard do his thing.

—————

It did not escape Richard’s notice that the more he screwed up, the worse his movies were, the more money the studios threw at him. Billy Wilder made the droll observation in 1982 that studio executives looking for a hit movie “approach it very scientifically—computer projections, marketing research, audience profiles—and they always come up with the same answer: Get Richard Pryor.”

Following the box-office bonanza of
Live on the Sunset Strip,
Columbia Pictures offered a five-year, forty-millon-dollar deal giving Richard full creative control over four films to be produced by his own Indigo Productions, presided over by his friend and former NFL star Jim Brown. Rather than make Indigo an exclusive showcase for Richard Pryor films, Brown wanted to diversify, using as his template Desilu Productions, a co-venture between husband and wife Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. Desilu quickly moved beyond their own
I Love Lucy
series to produce a diverse slate of shows that came to include
Star Trek
,
My Three Sons
,
Mission Impossible
,
The Andy Griffith Show
,
I Spy,
and
Hogan’s Heroes.
That’s what Jim Brown wanted, for Indigo to be an umbrella for African American writers, actors, producers, and directors to realize their dreams. They had forty million dollars to spend on whatever they wanted to do. At the press conference announcing the company’s launch, Richard said no one was excluded. They wanted to make quality films. They were open to anything. The only film Indigo made before Richard unceremoniously relieved Brown of his duties was
Richard Pryor: Here and Now.

“Richard wasn’t a filmmaker,” Penelope Spheeris says, thinking back to their work together on
Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales.
“Richard was a comedian and a brilliant one. And a good actor. But I don’t think filmmaking was a priority for him. And it’s hard to have anything else as your first priority when you have cocaine and Courvoisier in battle for number one.”

—————

Although
Live on the Sunset Strip
had been a shaky, uncertain effort—three of four filmed performances spliced and patched together, actually—it ultimately delivered twenty riveting minutes of pure devastation.
Richard Pryor: Here and Now,
filmed at the Saenger Theatre in New Orleans in 1983, finds him off his stride and out of his depth, low on energy and retreating at times to old material. He never really takes off or gives the impression that he could. The junkie routine that ends the film affirms that this is indeed a man once possessed by genius.

A young woman leaving the cinema at Briarwood Mall in Ann Arbor on the film’s opening weekend spoke for many when she said, “He was funnier when he was on drugs.”

—————

It’s worth remembering that, for all he gave up, Richard did, in fact, make some good movies. He played Billie Holiday’s strung-out piano player, an auto assembly-line worker who robs his union and sells out his friends, champion race-car driver Wendell Scott, a petty thief who seizes an opportunity for adventure, a shipyard welder who teams up with an FBI agent to avenge his wife’s murder, a pimp’s enforcer, and a Vietnam vet who comes home to find what’s left of his life in shambles. Then he played an unemployed actor falsely—and utterly implausibly—convicted of a bank robbery in a comedy that started out promisingly enough, then promptly ran off the rails. That movie, though, made him a bona fide movie star. His lifelong dream. That done, he settled into making Richard Pryor movies, and thereafter, Richard Pryor was the only character he played.

Not that he never again had the opportunity to play meatier roles. Superstar producer Robert Evans—a failed actor who, without ever having produced a movie, was named Paramount Pictures’ head of production at age thirty-five and oversaw films such as
The Godfather, Chinatown, The Odd Couple, Love Story, Rosemary’s Baby,
and
Marathon Man,
to name a few—relentlessly courted Richard for the role of Sandman Williams in what Evans believed would be the jewel in his crown, Francis Ford Coppola’s
The Cotton Club.
Based on a Jim Haskins book of the same name,
The Cotton Club
re-created the verve, elegance, and violence of the white gangsters and black entertainers who populated Harlem’s most famous nightspot of the 1930s. “Gangsters, music, and pussy,” Evans reasoned. “How could I lose?”

Evans invited Richard to dinner to discuss the part, but all through the meal, Richard broke down in tears talking about Jennifer. The next day, Evans sent a limo for her and spent five hours trying to charm her into having dinner with Richard. She agreed finally to a double date that included Evans and his ex-wife Ali McGraw. Every day of the week leading up to the dinner, Richard called Evans to ask his advice on what he should wear, what he should say. At the last minute, Richard canceled the date, telling Evans he just wasn’t ready. Still, he was so grateful for all Evans had done that he agreed to
The Cotton Club.

Evans was elated. “In 1982,” he writes in his memoir, “there wasn’t a hotter box-office star than Richard Pryor.”
*

Then he got a call from one of Richard’s lawyers saying that his client wanted four million dollars—far more, he knew, than Evans could afford. “I was advised it would be a disaster and the best thing to do would be to get out of it,” Richard later explained. “And the best way to get out of something is to ask for money, and that’s what I did.”

Instead, the role of Sandman Williams launched the film career of Gregory Hines. Richard’s next movie was
Brewster’s Millions
—a “wicked waste,” Vincent Canby called it in his
New York Times
review: “Watching Richard Pryor as he forces himself to cavort with simulated abandon in
Brewster’s Millions
is like watching the extremely busy shadow of someone who has disappeared. The contours of the shadow are familiar but the substance is elsewhere.
Brewster’s Millions
is another in the series of earnest attempts to tame—to make genteel—one of the most original, most provocative, most unpredictably comic personalities to come onto the American scene in the last 20 years.”

It was, Richard said, the first movie he ever did completely sober, and he could never bring himself to watch it.

—————

Richard preemptively dismissed his films and his roles in them before anyone else could: “Tell the fans I’m sorry,” he would say. “I got greedy. I did it for the money.”

In 1976, he apologized for
Silver Streak,
his first teaming with Gene Wilder. “It was a career move, and I’m sorry I did it. But I’ll be glad when the movie is out and over with.” After
Stir Crazy
broke the hundred-million-dollar mark, making it the highest-grossing comedy to date, Richard told a nightclub crowd that he and costar Gene Wilder “appreciate that y’all went to see it, we really do—but I saw the motherfucker and I don’t get it.”

He did it to his own
Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling
, a film depicting the events of his own life that he directed, starred in, and cowrote with two of his best friends
.
He wasn’t saying he did it for the money but that his sincere effort had failed. “I don’t know what happened,” he told Thom Mount in the March 1986 cover story for Andy Warhol’s
Interview
a month before
Jo Jo
’s release. “I like the script and I’d do it again today. To see what I did with it makes me somewhat sad. I asked myself a thousand times, ‘How could I have fucked up?’ ”

—————

The project started with promise. In 1985, Rocco Urbisci was going through a difficult time. He had separated from his wife and was living apart from his two children in an apartment on the beach near the Ventura County line, miles away from everything else. He needed time to figure things out. Then the phone rang.

“Rocco, it’s Richie. What are you doing?”

“You want to know the truth? I’m taking a dump.”

Richard didn’t miss a beat. “Well, after you wipe your ass, come meet me at Columbia Studios.”

Richard had decided to do a movie based on his own life and he wanted Rocco to help write it.

“Why me?” Rocco still asks. Richard Pryor could’ve hired the best—David Mamet, William Goldman, Paul Schrader, Robert Towne . . . anybody. He wanted Rocco Urbisci. He needed him to be there. Rocco had earned his trust. Richard could tell him anything, and did. Horrific stuff about his life. Some of it Rocco still refuses to divulge and says he never will. It refused to be written as the comedy the studio was hoping for. It ended up being more like an inventory of events in his life. It was therapy, he said, “more like basket-weaving.”

The studio, predictably, wanted more of Richard’s stand-up material. That was the Richard everyone loved. Richard and Rocco didn’t know how they could shoehorn that into what they had written, so they brought Paul Mooney on board. He knew where the stand-up bits would fit, but it changed the tenor of the whole thing. The sequences are jarring, like a montage copied and pasted from one of those rise-to-the-top celebrity biopics where the star is seen triumphing on a variety of stages while calendar pages flip past, and newspaper headlines spin.