Berserk Angel

Richard Pryor is big enough now so that we take him at face value: talking in low, grim tones to Barbara Walters in prime time about growing up in his grandmother's whorehouses, how the prostitutes, one of them his mother, tapped on the windows to lure customers, how he was given his full name, Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor, by pimps, how he went home in tears after learning that he'd impregnated his teenaged girlfriend, only to hear his father blithely admit that he'd been having relations with the girl, too.

And we stare soundlessly as this funny, haunted man rehearses his life's horrors. We dare not question nor probe the etchings on his psyche, because he has become such a star, such a brilliant, erratic persona among the vacuous community of entertainers. We only thank him, as Walters did, and whimper off, reminding ourselves to be more considerate of one who has come so far and through so much.

Except that as soon as we're out of earshot, somebody is apt to shout, "Wait a minute, Jack!" The gales of laughter and the palm slaps will proliferate and the whole place will go up for grabs. Richard Pryor is like that, his life so full of contradiction and jive that there's really no way we can be sure we've not been suckered.

To be sure, this lean, light-skinned cat with the cherubic smile, the insane eyes and the devastating, obscene and outrageous wit is one of the funniest, most entertaining performers anywhere. Pryor's three Grammy-winning albums, his several movie roles, his stage performances--one of which was filmed in its entirety and released this year as a feature--bear testimony to the talent.

But we know that. We also know that the daily newspaper is the best place to read of his latest antic, (continued on page 248)Berserk Angel(continued from page 243) be it a shooting spree on New Year's Eve, a tirade before thousands of gays at the Hollywood Bowl, a jail sentence, a heart attack. Pryor's talent is marked by his personal peril: He is one of the angriest, most unpredictable stars working today.

•

I met him in July 1975 in Macon, Georgia--on location of The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, a film based on my first novel. During the long, restless hours of shooting, Pryor was friendly, occasionally moody but mostly withdrawn and private. At times he'd hold court with members of the cast or crew and run into impromptu routines. Or he'd toy with people such as Leon "Daddy Wags" Wagner or Birmingham Sam Brison, both former pro ballplayers with small roles in the film, and they'd kid him about how awful he was with a bat and ball. It was kidding that Pryor seemed to enjoy.

I was toting around a sound movie camera, and occasionally, he'd pick up the microphone and do a monolog. "You sold your book, now go home!" he cracked. In my copy of Bingo Long, he wrote, "Thanks to you, Bill, for writing this book. It was right. Do more. Love, Richard Pryor."

Earlier this year, when I contacted his office about doing this piece, Pryor personally phoned me and said he'd be glad to talk, though he preferred not to be subjected to a long interview. I told him that was fine and, in almost inaudible tones, he thanked me. He often thanks people.

A few weeks later, after being advised that it would be an opportune time to go out to Hollywood, I checked into a hotel and waited to meet him. I waited for four days and was finally told by his lawyer that seeing him at that time would be impossible. Then Pryor flew off to Maui.

I know that such moves are nothing new with Pryor, especially when he is between projects. But that restiveness is, it seems, the skin over a deep uneasiness that bothers the hell out of him.

Apart from publicly being one of show business' most volatile personalities, Pryor is privately just as fickle. Those who work for him describe their routine as unnerving and chaotic. He is likely to remain incommunicado for days, cancel appointments, renege on personal commitments or simply go off somewhere.

Less than a month after he stood me up in L.A., Pryor called me and talked for almost an hour, again in those soothing, quiet tones, and made no reference to my fruitless trip West. He rang off with the suggestion that I come out to Hollywood sometime so he could show me around.

Most people familiar with the way he operates know enough to proceed day by day. Anything he says about his life one week may be inoperative the next. In late 1977, Ebony found that out after it did a cozy spread on Pryor at home with his new wife, Deboragh McGuire. When the piece appeared in January 1978--complete with Pryor's quotes about the finality of this, his fourth marriage--he had already gone on the New Year's Eve shooting rampage during which he had chased McGuire and two of her girlfriends out of the house and demolished a car with a .357 magnum. Divorce proceedings soon followed.

He repeated much the same prognosis about his life and latest love to me. "I'm a very happy man," he said. "I'm happy to be alive, you know. I have a lady I care about, we're honest with each other and we're finding things out about ourselves."

I remarked that all that sounded vaguely familiar. He seemed hurt by the suggestion, and I reminded him of his statements about his relationship with McGuire. "Well," he responded, "let's just say I'm happy when I'm happy."

Indeed he is, and indeed he isn't. It's difficult to describe this schizophrenic, torn, often unfunny funnyman. A former close friend, a witness to his blinding changes of temperament, probably comes closest: "He is, I think, a black, berserk angel."

Through interviews with friends and associates, and with Pryor himself, one can begin to trace the bitter tracks on his soul. He is a man torn between his resentment of being black--and what it means to be black in this country--and his desire to be big, the biggest, in a white-oriented, white-run industry.

His life vacillates between sweet appeasement of the people he knows he must deal with in order to make it--producers, studio heads, writers, fans--and the opposite, the point at which he begins to feel that he has become the nigger clown for all of them. Then he explodes and feels the need to do some outrageous, antiwhite antic, be it in the form of physical violence--the guns and fistfights--or verbal battery, such as his tirade against homosexuals at the Hollywood Bowl: "When the niggers was burnin' down Watts, you motherfuckers was doing what you wanted to do on Hollywood Boulevard.... Well, you can kiss my happy, rich black ass!"

Such incidents may wreak havoc in his life for a time, but they are an inextricable part of his existence. He has said so himself. "That's what I love about every nigger in the United States. If you push them too far, they'll say, 'Wait a minute! This meetin's over!' From Ambassador Young to Harlem."

Fortunately, Pryor has the ability to transform that anger and resentment into devastatingly effective humor. He senses all the shadings of anxiety, especially racial anxiety, and he thrives on them. When he pokes fun at them in concert, on record or film, it's very funny:

This is the fun part for me: The white people come back after intermission and find out niggers done stole their seats. (Laughter)

(Mimicking white voice) "Uh, weren't we sitting here, uh, dear?... Weren't we? Uh, we were sitting here, weren't we?" (Laughter)

(White woman, nasally) "Yes, we were sitting right there." (Laughter)

(Black voice) "Well, you ain't sitting here now, motherfucker." (Hysterical laughter)

"You ever notice how nice white people get when there's a bunch of niggers around?" he says to the audience. "Why, they talk to everybody--'Hi! How ya doin'? I don't know ya, but here's my wife. Hello!'"

He also uses this humor privately, employing a flash word most people thought was extinct: nigger. Pryor has resurrected the word; he uses it openly, lovingly. He puts it on the title of albums, knowing it is a fuse: for blacks, a signal of years of hatred and struggle; for whites, a demeaning epithet used by rednecks and bigots. For Pryor, the word is currency.

But hold it right there, Jack. You dare not say nigger in his presence, not in any form, not facetiously, not in quotation. Ask anyone who's done it. Call to mind the fire in his eyes when Barbara Walters did it. Richard Pryor will not tolerate an echo.

Those close to him consider him one of the most psychologically dominating persons they've ever known. "He will push you as far as any human being can push," one told me.

Especially when the times get funky, usually in the deep hours inside his home, when the vodka and the drugs take hold. That's when the buttons are pushed, when Pryor's cutting edge bares itself and he can be instantly cruel, (continued on page 292)Berserk Angel(continued from page 248) goading, unmerciful. "He will go for your soul, just personally assassinate you," the same person says.

He may also go for your face. Pryor's past is littered with assault-and-battery charges. He stabbed a soldier in the Army in Germany, punched out a nightclub singer in 1963, slugged a Hollywood motel clerk in 1967 (for which he was fined and put on probation; later, he paid an uncontested $75,000 claim), broke the leg of one of his four wives (resulting in an $1800 medical claim), went for the pistol on New Year's Eve 1977 and has engaged in countless fist-fights and altercations that never made the police blotters.

At such times, there is no way to outdo him, to take the floor or the dagger from him. It is simply best to back off and, if your face is white, to leave. I was warned more than once not to stay at Pryor's place if such a situation arose. "Don't think that who you are or whom you represent means a damn thing. Don't think you can control the situation. Just get out."

That his home contains guns and that he uses them is a matter of record. It may be funny afterward, even grist for a routine--"And the vodka was tellin' me, 'Go ahead, shoot something else!' " But it isn't funny at the time. Those who've encountered him at such times admit to being terrified.

After such sprees--the highs, the violence, the emotional pillaging of friends and lovers--a pervasive remorse inevitably sets in and Pryor is full of regret. "Every time I get in trouble," he says, "it's because I end up drinking too much, or I end up snorting too much, or smoking too much." Then, suitably penitent, he reverts to being lovable, funny, benevolent, inspired Richard. He goes back to work, recaptures his brilliant caricatures, interweaves those bizarre, soul-baring episodes into his routines and wins back the people he has alienated and hurt.

"I took the button off," he assured me during our talk. "I have self-control now, because that's the way I want it."

He sounds sincere, as he always has in the past, and such assurances are enough for most of his circle to return to him, laugh and forgive. They always wait for his angel half to reappear and take note of the scars. And there are always scars: In Pryor's bedroom hangs his first gold album. It has a bullet hole in it.

•

Sixth Street in Peoria, Illinois, is on the south side of town in a neighborhood in which most of the city's blacks still live. They were drawn to Peoria to work in the Hiram Walker distillery, the Caterpillar plant or the grain markets along the Illinois River. The town has always been a decent place for blacks to live, as long as they put in a day's work and are content to go home to their side of town.

In the Fifties, 618 Sixth was the site of Pop's Poolroom, a pretty hot joint run by Thomas and Marie Bryant, the latter a tough old black woman with a head for business and an iron rule over the family. If you had walked into Pop's almost any time of the day or night back then, you would have heard the balls clicking, and you would have found Marie's sons, Buck and Richard, playing eight ball. Racking the balls for pennies was Buck's son Richie, a skinny, nervy runt who looked a lot younger than he was. Most of the poolroom regulars didn't pay much attention to Richie, except when he started cutting up, telling jokes, doing routines and aping things people said and did. He was pretty funny, but then, a lot of people around Pop's were funny. Laughter was cheap--one of the best things going in a town like Peoria.

Every so often, though, a graceful, stern lady would walk into Pop's and dress down the place with her eyes. When that happened, things would go dead-silent. "Where's Richie?" she'd ask.

Grandma Bryant's son Richard E. would grown, "Here he is. Take him."

And the woman would walk out with Richie in hand and head for the Carver Community Center. The woman was Juliette Whittaker, daughter of a lawyer, graduate in drama from the University of Iowa. She was in Pop's because she had productions rehearsing at the center, and little Richie Pryor, pool-hall racker, truant, cutup, son of Leroy "Buck" Pryor, was one of her leading players. And no star of Miss Whittaker's was going to miss a rehearsal.

She had first spotted him hanging around the junior production of Rum-plestiltskin.

"He was about thirteen but looked ten," she says. She offered him the part of a servant and gave him the script.

"He came back with the whole script memorized, every part," she says. "And when the boy playing the king was absent, Richard took his place. Well, he brought so much new business--new lines and expressions--to the part everybody was amazed. And when the boy playing the king returned and saw him, he let him keep the part. So Richard stayed on the throne. And he hasn't come down since."

In the coming years, Pryor became a fixture in the Carver productions, particularly as emcee of talent shows. He did some of his bits, routines he'd developed on the streets and in the pool hall, and the audiences ate them up. Soon the talent acts were fill-ins until Pryor came back onstage.

"At that time, he did comedy in self-defense," Whittaker says. "He was small and to keep kids from beating on him, he cracked them up. I remember a family named Clark always pushed people around, but not Richard. Because he kept them laughing."

Even when he entered Peoria's Golden Gloves a few years later, people claimed his best punch was a one-liner. "He won his first fight in the first round," his father told a newspaper reporter. "And I think he did it by telling a joke, which made the guy double up. And then he punched him out."

A few months later, young Pryor joined a fight outside the ring--with two neighborhood gangs called the Love Licks and the Love Veedles. He and a dozen others were arrested, relieved of knives and rubber hoses and locked up. When he got out, Pryor decided life would be more peaceful in the Army over in Germany.

It took a slow, painful professional hazing before he finally understood his real sense of humor. After his Army discharge in 1960, Pryor went back to Peoria and emcee/comic jobs at Harold's Club and Bris Collin's Corner. From there he swung around the country, working small clubs and strip joints. He was young and unpolished, still learning. In 1963, he turned up in Greenwich Village, haunting the stage doors of clubs such as Café Wha? and The Improvisation. Rudy Vallee spotted him and put him on a summer TV show called On Broadway Tonight. The Ed Sullivan, Merv Griffin and Johnny Carson shows followed, and Pryor was on his way.

By the late Sixties, though, a time when more people than just comics were having personal doubts, Pryor became disenchanted with his act. He was doing routines out of jokebooks, the stuff of Bob Hope, and it bothered him. He always knew he was funniest when he related to life--that his best stuff came from the street, "Jump Street," and the people on it. The stuff he'd made his name on wasn't even in the same neighborhood.

Slowly he began to insert new, riskier material into his act, skits and scenes about niggers, a word he was told wasn't funny. He didn't go over. He was censured by fellow blacks, hassled by audiences, banned from clubs. He found work, but nothing like before, and his income and popularity foundered. He was told that he would never again work in the mainstream of the industry if he kept trying to be Supernigger.

Pryor reacted with schizophrenic performances onstage and a lot of drugs offstage. "Like I owned half of Peru, you know," he said, and proceeded to go through what he termed "a walking nervous breakdown."

It culminated with a sudden exit from the stage of the Aladdin Hotel in 1970 in mid-performance. He simply had had it. Even that story carries a typical Pryor embellishment. When telling a Rolling Stone writer in 1974 about the incident, Pryor said he walked off the wrong wing of the stage and had to squeeze past a panel to get out. In 1977, however, Newsweek writer Maureen Orth wrote that not only did he walk offstage, he also stripped and jumped onto a table in the hotel's casino and yelled, "Blackjack!"

"That's a joke I always told," he says now. "She must have believed it."

Blackjack or no blackjack, Pryor's personal and professional straits couldn't have been worse. And that is precisely when he reverted to the tough racial street humor, the material that made him the comic he is today.

Now, in a seeming attempt to make that humor appear more authentic, Pryor has turned his childhood in Peoria toward the sordid, with whorehouses, oppressive racism and his mother turning tricks for drunken white men. The voice drops, the pain, the deep-seated traumas are called to the surface almost with relish.

Actually, his background is a fairly common one: a sharp kid from a tough neighborhood, with parents and kin who kept track of him, even when he got into trouble, and an understanding mentor who encouraged him to use his talents.

It's as though he were intent on putting the same element of myth and intrigue into his past that he finds for his present. He seems to want to match the aching characters in his sketches with a personal past of prostitutes and racism and dead babies.

"No," he said when I asked him about it, "it never was that bad. I just look back at it more harshly. It depresses me. I wasn't aware of the sophisticated subtleties of racism when I was a kid. I just knew there was no future for me in Peoria. Not for a lot of people."

•

After his ghettoized night-club material in the early Seventies had blackballed him from several clubs--he was arrested for obscenity in Richmond, Virginia--his career was actually rescued by the movies. His portrayal of Piano Man in Lady Sings the Blues nearly stole the movie, and it started a steady schedule of roles in films such as Bingo Long, Car Wash, Silver Streak and many others.

He was hot, and he mixed writing--coscripting Blazing Saddles, Lily Tomlin and Sanford and Son shows--with an album, That Nigger's Crazy. The album turned gold and won him his first Grammy. He had by then become too popular, too good, to be kept down.

It was as if Richard Pryor, with his mischievous smile, his swimming eyes, his "business," could get away with anything. And anything included ready use of nigger, motherfucker and other Jump Street passwords.

But they would have been only window dressing without Pryor's talent for making them a part of his material and synthesizing them with his upbringing, his racial consciousness and his anger. Material people a few years earlier had said would ruin him became his staple: the rough, vulgar, unsparing ragging of the ghetto--cut with a wit and insight that made even cuticle-biting white people laugh.

"You can't gear your show to kiss somebody's ass," he told me. "I make sure my material doesn't let me down. Only I know the magic of my art."

Most people in Hollywood will tell you that Pryor is no trouble on the job. On the set of Bingo Long, I saw him work well with everybody; and of the several movies and television shows he's done, only one was known for any real difficulties.

But that was a doozy. Blue Collar was a severe movie written and directed by Paul Schrader, in which Pryor played the part of an auto worker who sells out his fellow workers to a corrupt union. It was a role with anger and racism built into it, and Pryor carried along all his own excess baggage.

His foil was Harvey Keitel, another less-than-amiable actor, and the two proceeded to tear at each other's throats. According to Schrader, both Keitel and Pryor intermittently felt that they were playing each other's straight men; when the pressure became too great, the two had to be separated. Schrader, who considers the filming the worst professional experience of his life, tried to anticipate Pryor's blowups in a vain effort to keep his irascibility from infecting the whole set.

Then a third star was dragged into the spat. Yaphet Kotto attempted to combat Pryor by being blacker than he was. Kotto and Pryor went at it after Pryor threw a chair at Kotto.

Only Pryor's friend, employee and spiritual mentor, Rashan Kahn, was able to settle Pryor down when things erupted. "Without Rashan," says Schrader, "the film never would have been completed." And Rashan continues to play that role: He lives on Pryor's estate and he is credited with bringing the karma needed to quell most outbursts there.

After Blue Collar was finished, Pryor's remorse set in on schedule. He has apologized to Schrader several times, stating that he didn't realize how childish and scared he was.

"I carry no negative shit about that movie," Pryor told me. "There was a lot of pressure, the script demanded it." Both Pryor and Blue Collar gained fine reviews, and the movie now stands as one of his most dimensional performances.

His success in the Seventies brought in the money to pay off the debts of the Sixties, a sum he once claimed to be $600,000. In 1974, however, he served ten days in prison and was fined $2500 for not filing income taxes from 1967 through 1970. Yet even the tax court let him off in view of his rising career, the obvious fact that he was taking care of business.

In 1976, he dropped a small fortune on a Spanish-style home in Northridge in the San Fernando Valley. The place includes guesthouses, eight acres of fruit trees, a pool, a tennis court, a gym, and a staff to maintain it. The estate makes for an awesome overhead, yet Pryor still cannot resist impulsively pledging, as he did recently, $100,000 to the Jerry Lewis muscular-dystrophy telethon.

He has a reputation for being generous to a fault, a soft touch to friends and family. He gives his kids (four with four women) lavish gifts--a Mercedes 450 SL to his daughter Renee--and has bought homes and cars for his relatives. On another level, after one of his Lily Tomlin shows won him an Emmy, he went back to Peoria and gave it to Juliette Whittaker.

Officials of black charities, who've grumbled about the number of black millionaires who stiff black causes, consider Pryor a reliable supporter, both spiritually and financially. Occasionally, he is comfortable with that image, with what he means to his own and to black people. He even goes so far as to say that if he had only black popularity, that would be enough. "Maybe that's my lot...25,000,000 black people. That's enough for me," he has said.

At least it's an audience he can count on. One hot afternoon in 1977--soon after Pryor's ballyhooed ten-program contract with NBC was cut back to four largely because of disagreements over what material he could use on the air--Pryor was picked up at his hotel in New York City by Rob Cohen, then of Motown Productions, and driven to the set of The Wiz. Cohen, who'd produced Bingo Long, immediately saw that Pryor was subdued, even morose. Once inside the car, however, Pryor started talking, slowly becoming more and more intense, insisting that he'd been betrayed by many people, that television wasn't ready for truth of any kind.

Cohen drove and said little, letting the steam escape. He decided not to take Pryor directly to the brass of The Wiz, the same fraternity Pryor was presently reaming. Instead, he took him to see The Wiz's 300 black dancers rehearsing in the giant ballroom of the St. George Hotel.

The two of them walked into a panoply of arms and legs, hundreds of them flailing and pirouetting in preparation for the movie's biggest numbers. Then a few dancers spotted Pryor. He said nothing, but they stopped what they were doing. One of them began to applaud. Others took notice and stopped what they were doing, and also began clapping. More and more joined in. Then, in a scene out of a Thirties MGM spectacular, the applause rippled through the hall until the comedian was overwhelmed by it. For producer Cohen, it was one of the most moving, spontaneous gestures he'd ever witnessed.

Pryor stood and nodded, smiled, forgot what was on his mind and gazed at the crowd. When the applause subsided, he went into character, screaming, "We are gathered here today..."and the place broke up.

He had made them laugh many times before. Now he was grateful that they had returned the favor.

•

Not even the most reckless of Hollywood prognosticators will venture guesses about Richard Pryor's future. They can list projects--a movie called Family Dream, which he wrote and starred in with Cicely Tyson, and a long-range, multimillion-dollar contract with Universal. Pryor himself will talk about the fact that he controls most of the things he's now involved in.

His latest, most intimate female companion has been Jennifer Lee, an actress. "She's first," he told me last summer.

But a most significant influence in his life is David Franklin, a black, Atlanta-based attorney considered one of the top lawyers in show business today. Pryor personally credits Franklin with saving his financial life and points to their meeting as a pivotal point in his life. "I'm a different person," he says.

He exudes resilience. "I'd be funny no matter where I was or what I did. If the bubble bursts, I'm still alive and I'll start all over again. I wouldn't have it any other way. It made me what I am, whatever I am. I'll be that way till I die. When they bury me, they better dig the hole deep, because I may get out of that, too."

Professionally, he can do almost anything. He is an expert at improvisation, a master mimic, the possessor of an aural memory that enables him to impersonate anybody. His humor isn't restricted to racial routines--he can be as funny and silly mimicking his pets or his kids as he can his rough-edged street characters.

In Pryor's very successful Live in Concert film, there's a scene in which he tearfully tells the vicious German shepherd next door that his two pet monkeys have died.

Pryor: I was in the back yard and I was crying...the dog jumped the fence and I felt something moving in my hand and I started pettin' him. And he looked up at me.

Dog: Wuzza matter, Rich?

Pryor (weeping): My monkeys died.

Dog: Say what? Yer monkeys died? Ain't that a bitch. You mean the two monkeys used to be in the trees, they died?

Pryor: Yeah, they died.

Dog: Shit. I'se gonna eat them, too. (Pause) Now, don't linger on that shit too long, you know, it fuck widja.

Pryor: I'll try.

Dog: Yeah, you take care.

Pryor (to audience): And he went back and jumped over the fence. But just before he jumped, he looked back at me and said, "Now, you know I'm gonna be chasin' you again tomorrow."

It's humor even Whitey can play, no matter how Pryor laces it. Pets and kids have always been a part of his life, as has his late grandmother, and bits about them show him to be as gentle and touching as his racism is coarse.

And yet his anger continues to surface. On The Tonight Show last May, Pryor said to the audience: "If you want to do anything, if you're black and still here in America, get a gun and go to South Africa and kill some white people." Incredibly, not only was it not censored by NBC but the statement raised nary a response from viewers.

Maybe they thought he was joking. That's the problem with Pryor: We never know when the laughter will stop and he will turn and hiss, "What you laughin' at, fool?"

He may complain, as he did to Barbara Walters, that racism prevents him from being the biggest comedian in the business. But the obvious reply is that were it not for racism, he wouldn't be a big comedian today.

He intimately knows people's fears, particularly white fear of black faces, their uneasiness and sense of inferiority, and he exploits that with maniacal glee. He hasn't a dumb bone in his body. But beneath the surface, in the folds of that troubled, complex psyche, is an erratic malice, a menacing force that sooner or later cannot help but hurt somebody.

Being around Pryor, say those who have experienced it, is like sleeping in the company of a viper, of a presence that will slither lovingly next to your skin as you breathe, gently caressing your eyelids, hurting you not at all--then suddenly strike and cut you as nobody and nothing has before.

Some close to him fear that one day he will push things too far--that probably in the wee hours of morning in the smog of the drugs and the booze, a scene will go out of control and he will push someone to go after him. It won't be a case of the whimpering, suicidal Freddy Prinze, or the O.D. blues of Joplin, Hendrix or Bruce. Rather, a trigger Pryor will force someone else to pull.

Or that may all be baloney. Richard Pryor turns 40 in 1980. "I'm just happy to be alive," he told me. "It's a lot easier for me to purge myself now, to clean out the old evils."

I'd like to believe him, as difficult as that might be. He's the one who once said about blacks in general, but really about none other than Richard Pryor: "Oh, boy, I know where that nigger came from. He's not fooling me with those niceties he may have now...you know that any time you push that right button, he'll jump right to his stuff."

"A witness to his blinding changes of temperament said, 'He is, I think, a black, berserk angel.'''

In Pryor's bedroom hangs his first gold album. It has a bullet hole in it."