Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him (3 page)

He was just like any other foul-mouthed comedian. Some of his stuff was funny, most wasn’t. There was absolutely nothing special about him. So he came from Peoria, who the hell cares? At the end of the day he’s just another semi funny, dead drug user. —AM

I’d hate to plan the Pryor exhibit in the new museum. Exactly how does one “honor” this man and still keep the exhibit rated “G”? Elementary schools will make up the majority of attendees. Do you leave out the facts that he was raised in a whorehouse, that he made profanity funny and that he often joked about his illegal drug abuse?
—Anne

To the reader Anne, Luciano replied: “Leave that out? Why? Pryor didn’t glorify hookers, drugs or abuse—he put a spotlight on it. Maybe that’s why many Peorians never liked Pryor: They didn’t like what he made them see.”

“I get this kind of crap every time I write about Pryor,” says Luciano, a transplanted Chicagoan. “People always say, ‘Why don’t you ever write about Fibber McGee?’ I say, ‘Because nobody gives a fuck about Fibber McGee.’ ”

Fibber McGee, children, was a character created by Peoria native Jim Jordan who costarred with his wife and Peoria high school sweetheart Marian Driscoll in the radio sitcom
Fibber McGee and Molly
which aired on NBC from 1935 to 1959. One of the longest-running and most successful radio shows of its time, it depicted the foibles of daily life in the fictional
midwestern town of Wistful Vista
.

Peoria was also home to feminist author Betty Friedan, musician Dan Fogelberg, comedian Sam Kinison, and, most happily for our purposes, Charles Correll, the cocreator of
Amos ’N Andy.

When Correll and his vaudeville partner, Freeman Gosden, were offered the opportunity to create a radio series on WGN in Chicago in 1928, it seemed natural, Correll said, that they should continue to perform in the same black dialect they had developed on vaudeville stages in the South. “We might just as well have done Irish or Jewish dialect,” he said, “but we knew that of Negroes.” Besides, Correll maintained, he and Gosden were laughing
with
blacks, not at them.

Regardless of who may have been laughing at or along with whom, the fifteen-minute broadcasts of
Amos ’N Andy
drew huge audiences at 7:00 p.m.
every week night
for fifteen years from 1928 until 1943 when it switched over to a half-hour weekly format. It was said, with claims of only slight exaggeration, that one could take an after-dinner stroll through almost any American town and not miss a single line of the show as it wafted from the open windows and front porches of an estimated forty million homes.

When
CBS
proposed a
TV version of the show, the network, in a television first, cast African American actors for all the roles. Chief among them were Alvin Childress as Amos, Spencer Williams as Andy, Ernestine Wade as Sapphire, and Tim Moore as
George “Kingfish” Stevens
—veteran vaudeville comics all. However tempting it may have been for
Correll and Gosden
to play the principal roles themselves, their business sense prevailed. The television era, they knew, would not tolerate
white actors in blackface.

Despite drawing huge audiences, the TV incarnation of
Amos ’N Andy
survived only two seasons. CBS programmers later acknowledged their miscalculation in airing the series premiere during the 1951 national convention of the NAACP, a coincidence that prompted the group, in a fervor of reform, to pass a resolution condemning the show’s depiction of African Americans—or “colored people,” as the NAACP preferred—and filed for a court injunction that would have forced CBS to stop the show. (It’s worth noting that the NAACP’s
national office had declined to endorse a similar protest launched by the
Pittsburgh Courier
against the radio show in 1931.)

In a 1975
Ebony
article titled “Black Humor—Full Circle from Slave Quarters to Richard Pryor,” film and broadcast historian Donald Bogle pointed out the irony of an integrationist movement insisting that blacks surrender their own rich heritage as the price of admission into an unwelcoming white culture.

How fitting is it that, after thriving twenty-seven years on radio starring white actors who caricatured black voices, the TV version, featuring the medium’s first all-black cast, fell under a storm of civil rights protests? Doubling down on this irony, the Gosden and Correll–voiced program continued to chug along as a
weekly
radio
sitcom until 1955 and then as a nightly disc-jockey show until 1960.

—————

At the time Richard canceled his 1993 hometown comeback performance at Peoria’s downtown civic center, it was the only venue in the town with the capacity to house such an event. Yet, when Richard was born in 1940, the city of barely 105,000 people boasted more than two-dozen performance theaters that had sprung up during vaudeville’s heyday. For longtime Peorians, the names of those theaters—among them the Duchess, the Majestic, the Deluxe, and the Palace—still conjure up images of bright marquees and glamorous performers.

Although black performers were sometimes seen in these vaudeville theaters, black audiences were not. For their own entertainment, they went instead to taverns, after-hours clubs, and sporting houses.

As the audience for black entertainment grew too large to ignore, a group of enlightened businessmen in the early 1900s established theater circuits exclusively for African American performers. Chief among them was TOBA (Theatre Owners Booking Association—or, if you asked the performers, Tough on Black Asses), founded in 1907 by Memphis-based Italian businessman F. A. Barrasso.

Performers on the TOBA circuit might play as many as ten shows a day while paying their own travel expenses and seeking out their own accommodations, often staying in private homes since Jim Crow laws barred them from most hotels, restaurants, and restrooms. Yet TOBA afforded many the opportunity to play to all-black audiences—although (nice twist here) some theaters roped off small sections for white patrons.

Initially, nearly all TOBA comics appeared in blackface, as they had done since the days of minstrelsy, covering their faces with burnt cork or black greasepaint and using a white flour compound to accentuate the whites of their eyes and teeth. In effect, blacks adopted the same techniques whites used to caricature blacks. It was one of the few areas in which skin color made no difference. Everyone “blacked up” for comic effect. The first time vaudeville comedian Johnny Hudgins worked the Apollo without blacking up, he said backstage that he had felt naked out there.

Harold Cromer, one-half of the famed team Stump and Stumpy, said, “What people today don’t understand is why the artists did all the things they used to do. [Performing in blackface] is what you did if you wanted to eat.”

The times demanded that black entertainers performing before white audiences restrict themselves to acting in skits or in teams. They could crack wise with each other, exchange banter with straight men, or enact a scene, but black performers on the Keith vaudeville circuit—the largest and most reputable circuit of its day—were explicitly instructed not to address anyone in the audience. Any black performer attempting to elicit a personal response would be making an assumption of equality intolerable to most whites at the time. Not until the early 1950s did black comics, led by Dick Gregory, speak directly to white audiences as peers without the buffer of clownish costumes or in the guise of a character. The few TOBA-era comics who adopted the monologue approach pioneered by the likes of Jack Benny, Milton Berle, and Fred Allen soon found themselves shunned by white booking agents and remained largely unknown outside of black clubs and theaters.

The exception to this rule, and a notable one at that, was Charley Case, an African American songwriter and vaudeville comedian of the late 1800s famous for his monologues, which he performed in blackface while passing for white. Some historians credit Case as having single-handedly invented what we now know as stand-up comedy. (His only likely rival to that claim would be Mark Twain, who began a wildly popular sideline career as an after-dinner speaker with an impromptu address at a printers’ banquet in Keokuk, Iowa, on January 17, 1856.)

Because of the restrictions imposed by white theater owners, hundreds of black entertainers—many now recognized as the finest performers of their time—flocked to TOBA, among them Silas Green from New Orleans, Pigmeat Markham, Butterbeans & Susie, Pen & Ink, Moms Mabley, Slappy White, Johnny Hudgins, Miller & Lyles (widely credited as the inspiration for
Amos ’N Andy
), Stump and Stumpy, Dusty Fletcher, and greatest of them all, the Jamaican-born Bert Williams.

Williams was the most popular entertainer of his day and arguably the first African American superstar. Erudite, highly educated, and aspiring to theatrical greatness, Williams quickly learned that he could draw greater laughs if he dropped his refined manners and kept his learning to himself. According to vaudeville historian Trav S. D., Williams found it much easier to lose his inhibitions and play the clown when he donned blackface. W. C. Fields recognized both sides of the dilemma when he declared Williams “the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew.”

Williams built his act around a character he described as “the shiftless darky to the fullest extent, his fun, his philosophy. Show this artless darky a book and he won’t know what it is all about. He can’t read. He cannot write. But ask him a question and he’ll answer it with a philosophy that’s got something.”

Adopting a
style of storytelling that recalled Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus tales, Williams recounted the exploits of one Spruce Bigsby, a street-savvy savant
.
Like Richard’s character Mudbone, Williams’s Bigsby played off the sentimentalized image of the tale-spinning Negro who had migrated from a bygone South only to find himself beguiled by life in the industrial North.

Bert Williams’s most enduring character, however, may be his charlatan minister Elder Eatmore, a direct forebear of Richard’s recurring preacher, as evidenced in this excerpt from Williams’s recording of “Elder Eatmore’s Sermon on Generosity”:

The Lord loveth a cheerful giver. Tonight, my friends, you can omit the cheerful. The truth is the light, and here is the truth: y’all is way back in my salary and something has got to be done here this evening. . . . Because if something ain’t done, your shepherd is gone. That’s all.
THAT IS ALL
. I admit that times is tight because when there used to be a ham coming here and fowl or two there from different members of this flock, I managed to make out fair to middlin’. They all comes to he who waits. But you all done learnt me that self-preservation is the first law of he who gets it. And the Lord helps they who helps their selves.

Everything has got so scientifical nowadays, that they done commenced building such things as smokehouses and hen houses out of pure concrete. And they’ve invented locks for them the same as the combination on the First National Bank. True, true, that makes it harder for all of us. It’s pretty nigh ruint me. And my friends I need, I
need
. . . T’ain’t no use talkin’ about what I need I needs everything, from my hat
down,
and from my overcoat
in.

When Richard created his version of this archetypal preacher, the truth poured out of him. And the truth was he had nothing but contempt for the needs of his flock and couldn’t be bothered to offer up even a pretense of compassion or moral rectitude.

The Walker family brought in their son and they said to me, ‘Can you heal our son?’ Well, I apologize because he’s a big wally-head boy and I wasn’t going to touch the motherfucker, I’m tellin’ you that right now. Little nigger had a head about this big and they wheeled him in his head was bobbing back and forth. I was not about to touch the motherfucker because that shit’s contagious. Give the nigger a big hat or something—leave me alone!

And some of the deacons come down on me for that. But I’d like to say to the crippled peoples that come here, can’t you find another church to go to? Goddamn! You come in here knockin’ shit down, breakin’ up furniture and shit. Learn how to crawl! Shit! And you deaf and dumb motherfuckers who can’t talk, we don’t need you here! All that “ah-whoo ah-hah” shit—kiss my ass!

Silent movies wounded vaudeville. Still, the two managed to cohabit peaceably for a time, sharing bills in the same venues, although the performers could not help but notice how many new theatres were being built without stages, only screens. Then radio came along and killed vaudeville completely.

With the advent of radio, people could hear their favorite stars without even leaving the house. Milton Berle and Jack Benny entertained far more people in a single broadcast than they could have in a lifetime out on the road. Those who made the leap to radio found themselves suddenly flush with cash—and frantic to come up with new material every week or, in some cases, every night. In contrast, a vaudevillian could live off one well-honed routine for an entire career.

Such was the case with Clinton “Dusty” Fletcher who performed a solo skit called “Open the Door, Richard” for more than twenty years. The premise: Fletcher’s character returns to his rooming house late at night without his key. He pounds on the door and calls out to his roommate to let him in. The audience never sees or hears Richard. He may not even be in there. The skit inspired a hugely popular song of the 1940s and for years remained a popular catchphrase.

Jazz saxophonist Jack McVea had seen Fletcher perform the bit hundreds of times in the early 1940s as the opening act for Lionel Hampton’s band. On a rainy afternoon in Portland, Orgeon, McVea, in need of material for his own band, set a simplified version of the skit to music. When McVea recorded the song in October 1946, it went through the roof.

The song’s refrain cropped up in routines by Jack Benny, Phil Harris, Jimmy Durante, numerous Bugs Bunny cartoons, in ads for everything from ale to perfume, and generally made life miserable for anyone named Richard.
*