Black is the New White Read online

  For a few people, it works out. All the New York comics get TV shows. Jimmie Walker does Good Times, with everybody in the country saying his signature line, “Dy-nomite!”

  Freddie Prinze, who is going out with Lenny Bruce’s daughter, Kitty, nails the lead role on Chico and the Man. Gabe Kaplan goes on Welcome Back, Kotter. Steve Landesberg (who comes up with one of my favorite lines, “Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense”), gets a part on Barney Miller.

  All the time I’m thinking, My turn next! If I were a Borscht Belt comic, I’d be asking, “What am I, chopped liver?” I don’t sit around waiting. I am always working either at Ye Little Club or the Store. But the phone never rings with my big TV break.

  I know that producers who pass me by are leaving millions of dollars on the table. They say the profit motive is sacred, but it’s not true. Racism trumps capitalism. Hollywood prefers to pass up a program that I know I can make a hit, rather than work with a proud black man like me. I make them too nervous. I freak them out. It reminds me of my guerrilla newspaper in high school, or my alternative talent show. You don’t want to work with me? Fine. I’ll do it myself.

  I’m surprised by the ignorance of the people around me at the Store, including all the young white comedians I’m hanging with. It’s like for them, the world began yesterday, and it starts and stops in the white neighborhoods of Brooklyn.

  I’m reading a lot of African history, black history, all kinds of history, so I start working it into my act.

  Don’t let Chinese people fool you—they didn’t invent rice. Rice didn’t come from China, it came from Africa, like a lot of shit, we invented a lot of shit, okay? The piano. The English found the piano in the middle of the jungle and brought it back to England. They put white keys on it, fucked it up, ruined it. So Uncle Ben’s black ass belongs on the rice box, because we introduced rice to Chinese people. We scared ’em—we threw the rice at ’em. They said, “Don’t touch it, pick it up with sticks!” The rest is history.

  I sort of mildly wonder if it’s this kind of material that’s closing doors in my face in Hollywood. It ain’t that I think of changing or making it more pale to suit the tastes of the Hollywood suits. I’m just curious, that’s all. My act doesn’t strike me or Richard as radical. Neither of us can understand how anyone can really be offended by it. It’s the truth.

  “Nixon in China, now that shit is offensive,” Richard says. “What you do, Mr. Mooney, that’s just keeping it real. You ain’t offensive. You’re colorful.”

  Richard has a love-hate thing with Hollywood. I just settle on hating it. But he can’t give up his fantasy of becoming a movie star.

  The month after the Comedy Store opens, Johnny Carson moves The Tonight Show from New York City to Los Angeles—actually, to Burbank. Johnny will have Richard on, because he’s too popular to ignore, but his producer Fred De Cordova blocks my shit. Freddie doesn’t want to know me. He hires everyone else in the world, not me. I think he’d have a fucking statue on the show before he’d call me.

  I watch comic after young comic, the same ones I started with at the Comedy Store, I see them all flap away on wings of money, flying off to TVland. Not me.

  Richard and I realize something. If we are going to crack television, we are going to have to do it ourselves.

  CHAPTER 18

  Along with the Store opening and Johnny Carson moving his show to California, another thing happens at the beginning of 1972. Redd Foxx gets his own sitcom.

  Ever since Richard appears at his club, Redd is our main man. Richard rents one of Redd’s houses. We see his act at least once a week. He’s a lot like his character Fred G. Sanford. He doesn’t suffer fools. For a long time, he’s too pissed off at the American government to pay income taxes.

  Norman Lear, the producer of the Archie Bunker hit All in the Family, sees Redd in the movie Cotton Comes to Harlem, an action comedy based on a crime novel by the great Chester Himes. Himes is one of my all-time favorite writers. He leads a hard-knock life, including a stretch in an Ohio prison, but he always says he never encounters the real depth of racism and gets “saturated with hate” until he comes to Los Angeles.

  In the 1940s, Warner Bros. briefly hires Himes as a screen-writer, but then studio head Jack Warner hears about it; “I don’t want no goddamned niggers on this lot.” Himes turns his back on America and lives in Europe for the rest of his life.

  In the late 1960s, Hollywood still has a segregated frame of mind. Cotton Comes to Harlem is one of the few films that the studios allow a black man to make—the actor Ossie Davis is the director—and it’s a hit.

  Redd plays a character named Uncle Bud in Cotton, and steals every scene he’s in. Based on that performance, Norman Lear proposes to Redd that he take the lead role in a new TV show Lear and his producing partner Bud Yorkin are developing about a junkman and his son in Watts.

  Like All in the Family, the sitcom is based on a hit British TV show. Sanford and Son is a remake of a popular BBC program called Steptoe and Son.

  Redd knows he wants black writers on staff, because Sanford and Son is going to be a black show—the first American television sitcom with a primarily black cast since Amos ’n’ Andy gets cancelled. Naturally, Redd suggests to Richard and me that we write for his new show. Miracle of miracles, the producers hire us.

  It doesn’t come that easy. Richard and I have to jump through all sorts of Hollywood hoops to get taken on as writers. It ain’t Lear or Yorkin, they’re all for us. It’s the system.

  You’d think that with the star of the show behind you, it’d be a slam dunk. You’d think that a monster hit like All in the Family gives the producers a little juice, that they can hire whoever they want.

  But racism trumps capitalism. The NBC brass hem and haw like mules. They want their own people as writers. Their own white people. The kind with the complexion for the protection.

  “We’re having trouble finding black comedy writers,” the NBC people would say in meetings, right to our black faces.

  Baffled and apparently invisible to them, I reply, “I guess if I’m running this show, I would have trouble finding white ones.”

  Richard and I are tossed a couple of bones. We get our Writers Guild cards for doing two Sanford episodes in the second season, “The Dowry” and “Sanford and Son and Sister Makes Three.” Redd fights and brings me back for one more episode in season three, “Fred Sanford, Legal Eagle.”

  The kind of material I write is maybe the reason I’m on the Hollywood blacklist. This is from the “Legal Eagle” episode, where Demond Wilson as Lamont Sanford is all pissed off for getting a traffic ticket he didn’t deserve.

  Fred Sanford to Lamont: If you had the green light, you can’t get a ticket.

  Lamont: You can if the light is green and you’re black and the cop is white.

  Fred: You got to fight it.

  Lamont: Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t fight a traffic ticket.

  Fred: I’m not ridiculous, you are. You get a ticket from a white cop in a blue uniform in a black neighborhood. It makes you so mad that you’re seeing red. But you ain’t going to fight it because you’re too yellow. Now what are you? A man or a box of crayons?

  Redd as Fred loves it. But it’s the kind of material that cuts close to the bone. And it gets me no favors with the NBC brass.

  They always say it’s too “angry” when they want to block you. But I’m not angry. I’m the happiest man I know. I just dedicate myself to keeping it real. So I never get invited back to write for Sanford and Son.

  The “Legal Eagle” episode is still being censored today. My writing still pushes buttons. This is the scene in the original version where Fred confronts the white cop who writes Lamont the traffic ticket.

  Fred: Hey, look here, why don’t you arrest some white drivers?

  White cop: I do.

  Fred [gesturing around to all the black people in the docket]: Well, where are they? Look at all these niggers in here! />
  The studio audience goes nuts. They absolutely go crazy with laughter and clapping and hollering. They are all from Los Angeles, and they know the “driving while black” policies of the LAPD all too well. Redd has to wait for the laughter and applause to die down before he unleashes my tail-end zinger.

  Fred: There’s enough niggers in here to make a Tarzan movie!

  On the DVD they’re selling of Sanford and Son nowadays, there’s none of that shit. They cut the whole scene. They wreck the flow of the show. The action suddenly jumps like a train off the tracks. If you don’t know the original, you can’t figure out what’s up.

  Eventually, Redd gets fed up with the Hollywood bullshit, too. Sanford and Son is a hit show, top ten every season it’s on, peaking at number two behind Archie Bunker. Plus it’s aired in the so-called death slot of Friday evening, when no show ever succeeds, and it still kills. But it strikes Redd that he’s not getting the props someone in his position should.

  “I get tired of their bullshit,” Redd tells me and Richard. “Man, I’m too black for Hollywood.”

  It’s the first time I hear the phrase. But Richard and I recognize what he’s talking about. Los Angeles is a racist place. I think about Lead Belly: “Yeah, it’s a bourgeois town.”

  Redd demands that NBC hire more black writers. The network drags its feet and does nothing. Redd tells them again and again that the white writers they hire don’t understand the black experience. NBC ignores him.

  So Redd quits. Here’s NBC blowing a top-ten show, killing the goose that is laying golden eggs. They’d rather do that, losing out on millions of dollars for their stockholders, than let a black man tell them what to do.

  Racism trumps capitalism.

  Right around this time, Richard also gets disgusted with the whole film-studio establishment. His dream of being a movie star isn’t panning out. He decides to take his act on the road. After trying out his material at the Store, he opens at the Apollo and plays the whole country for black folks in Chicago, Detroit, and Kansas City.

  It’s like stand-up is his safety net. He can always make $50,000, $100,000, or even $300,000 a year onstage, enough to support his alimonies and his habits. There’s a whole audience out there that the white entertainment industry is ignoring. And those are the people Richard seeks out.

  When Richard does finally get a break from butting his head up against the wall of Fortress Hollywood, naturally it’s courtesy of a black entrepreneur. Berry Gordy doesn’t let the movie Lady Sings the Blues die after all. Paramount pulling out its $2 million can’t stop him. He puts his own $2 million into the movie and lets the cameras roll.

  It could have been a recipe for a disaster: a rookie movie producer puts his favorite diva in a starring role. Instead, Berry Gordy shows Hollywood how it’s done. He makes a good movie. Gordy’s first production knocks down a bunch of Oscar nominations. I watch that shit today, Lady still holds up. Diana Ross wins a Golden Globe for her first film performance, but loses out on the Oscar to Liza Minnelli in Cabaret.

  Richard knocks me out with what he does with the tragic, nameless character of the “Piano Man.” What’s on the page in the script is light-years away from what’s onscreen. Richard riffs and improvises like a crazy man. The scene where Billie hears of the death of her mother is only a couple of bland lines in the script. Richard’s reaction is all him.

  He’s so good that, watching him, I forget he’s my best friend. I even forget he’s Richard. I’m sucked into believing the character like everyone else does. But I also see the real Richard in it loud and clear all the way through. In the “that’s me at the door” party scene, I recognize good-times Richard. Night after night, party after party, I watch him get down exactly like that.

  The Piano Man character is sort of loosely based on Billie Holiday’s real accompanist, Bobby Tucker. “Mr. B” is legendary, and works with everybody from the other “Mr. B,” Billy Eckstein, to Johnny Hartman. He is forgotten now. When he dies in 2007, he doesn’t even warrant an obit. Just another black genius gone.

  Richard makes Piano Man totally his own. He’s convinced that the role will be his big break. He’s going to be a star. Producers are going to come knocking on his door. We both think he’s going to get nominated for an Academy Award.

  It doesn’t happen. Producers only offer him jack-shit film roles to follow up Lady. This is the business Richard wants to succeed in more than any other, and he keeps hitting brick walls.

  He does earn himself a few perks. The Daisy is a private club just like the Candy Store, but more racist. The hostess at the place always treats us like we have leprosy. She lets us in, but looks stony-faced and unfriendly. We call her the Dry-Ice Queen, because she is colder than ice.

  Then she hears Richard has a role in Lady Sings the Blues. She gets all gushy over us. “Oh, you’re the black Paul Newman,” she coos to me, while rubbing herself against Richard’s body like a cat after milk.

  I remember Marilyn Monroe’s bitter comment about Hollywood: “It’s a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifteen cents for your soul.” Richard wasn’t getting what he wanted from producers during this period, but he got a lot of love from women, which was almost as important to him.

  CHAPTER 19

  Richard and I knock around Hollywood. He is a lot better off than I am. He is steps ahead of me in the biz. He’s got TV. He’s got albums. He’s done movies. Plus there’s the little fact that he’s a genius. I’m just pretty. But Hollywood chews up and spits out genius and prettiness.

  As writers, we’re the lowest men on the film-business totem pole. (We hear a joke about a girl, the dumbest-ass bitch in the world, she wants to break into movies. She goes to Hollywood and fucks the screenwriter.) Producers will always kill you with praise before delivering their favorite line: “Your script is perfect—let me tell you how to change it.” Hollywood producers have fucked up more movies than they’ve ever gotten made. They ruin scripts that would have been classics. They’re like ass backward Rumpelstiltskins. They spin gold into straw.

  Around this time, I get my first agent, Al Winkur. The man with the golden tongue. He can talk his way into hell and back out again. He opens every door for me. Problem is, Al’s checkbook isn’t as golden as his tongue. He tends to write checks that bounce.

  My natural element: Onstage, the place where I feel most alive

  “You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood,” says the old-school comedian Fred Allen, “put it in a flea’s navel, and still have room left for three caraway seeds and an agent’s heart.”

  That isn’t Al Winkur. He has a huge heart. He has the best intentions. He wants me to work. But he is up against Fortress Hollywood, and twenty-five years after they chase Chester Himes out of town, they still have problems with “goddamned niggers on the lot.”

  I work almost every night, at either the Store or Ye Little Club, but that doesn’t put food on the table. So I work strip clubs. All the old-fashioned burlesque shows, the ones that put comics on between the strippers, are dying out, but there are a few left, tucked away on side streets off Sunset. If you’re lucky at one of these clubs, the management pays you $50 for a night’s work, a dozen short sets. But I’ll take it.

  In November 1973, Richard gets a gig on Lily Tomlin’s TV special that wins him an Emmy. Tomlin first comes to Hollywood for the hit 1960s sketch show Laugh-In. She loves Richard and hires him as a writer and performer for her program, Lily.

  It’s the first time Richard works with Lorne Michaels, who takes a producing and writing credit on the program. Working with Tomlin on her special and with Flip Wilson on his show means Richard’s back on national TV, after being absent since his Sullivan days.

  Richard is jazzed. It’s really happening for him. But Hollywood has a way of setting you up just to knock you down. I’m always surprised at Richard’s forbearance. Producers treat him like dog shit over and over, and he just goes back for more.

  I’m a bystande
r when Richard gets a Hollywood project that once again breaks his heart. In fact, Blazing Saddles almost kills him. The producer Mel Brooks sells an idea to Warner Bros. about a black cowboy. He wants the script process to be like his old days as a writer for the 1950s Sid Caesar hit Your Show of Shows: a bunch of comics in a room workshopping the screenplay. Mel Brooks knows his comedy. He’s smart enough to know who is the funniest man on the planet. He hires Richard.

  I read the treatment that Brooks sells to Warner. It’s called Tex X. There are no laughs in it. It’s not even clever.

  “You sure you want to do this, man?” I ask Richard.

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “I can make it funny. They’re going to hire me to play Black Bart. It’s the lead!”

  Richard throws his heart and soul into it. I’ve never seen him more focused. He goes off every day, on time, and works in Brooks’s office. Mel’s got two other writers, Norman Steinberg and Alan Uger, who did work on the TV show The Corner Bar.

  But Richard is the king shit in that group. They change the title of the movie to Black Bart, then to Blazing Saddles. Richard writes killer dialog.

  Bart: Mornin’, ma’am. And isn’t it a lovely mornin’?

  Old woman: Up yours, nigger.

  He comes up with the scene where Black Bart takes himself hostage.

  Bart [pointing his own gun to his head]: Hold it! Next man makes a move, the nigger gets it!

  Olson: Hold it, men. He’s not bluffing.

  Doctor: Listen to him, men. He’s just crazy enough to do it!

  Bart: Drop it! Or I swear I’ll blow this nigger’s head all over this town! [in a prissy Gone with the Wind accent] Oh, lordy, lord, he’s des’prit! Do what he say, do what he say!

  And he writes the most memorable scene in the movie, where the cowboys sit around the fire, cutting farts.