Comic Dick Gregory's gags-to-riches career is probably the fastest rising and most spectacular in night-club history. At the time he was first booked for a three-week gig at Chicago's Playboy Club in January of 1960, at $250 a week (his initial appearance in a non-Negro night club), Dick's club engagements were so infrequent that he was forced to wash cars during the day to support his family; he was seriously considering scrapping his showbiz career altogether (cracked Dick in his act: "Things are so bad, if it weren't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all"). But soon after his welcome to the Club, Dick began to click with his unique style—mainly because in talking about segregation, freedom riders and sit-ins he truthfully probed to the heart of darkness at a time when the nation's conscience on matters racial responded to the spur of laughter. Dick's engagement at the Playboy Club was extended for an additional six weeks, and when the S.R.O. quip-cracking stint was done, he had been featured in stories in every Chicago newspaper, received a full-column salute in the Show Business section of Time, scored twice on the Jack Paar show, been besieged by big-money bids from top clubs throughout the U.S., and hailed by critics as "the Negro Mort Sahl," the first colored comic ever to make it big in night-clubdom. ("In Africa," he observed wryly, "Mort Sahl is the white Dick Gregory.") In a business where memory and friendship exist all too rarely outside of song lyrics, Gregory has returned to the Playboy Club again, and still again, to fulfill a contract written for a few hundred a week, when he was receiving $5000 at other clubs; and when PM East devoted an hour to a TV profile of Playboy in New York recently, he jetted in from the West Coast to do an eight-minute spot on the programfor scale, returning immediately to San Francisco for his show at the hungry i that night. Having already entered the best-seller lists as an LP monologist (Dick Gregory in Living Black and White, Dick Gregory East and West) Dick debuts next month as an equally lethal literateur: E.P. Dutton will publish From the Back of the Bus, a book featuring caustic comment by Gregory, pictures by Playboy photog Jerry Yulsman, and an introduction by Playboy Editor-Publisher Hugh M. Hefner. Herewith, for our readers, a special prepublication package of the latest word in pointed Gregorian chanting.
