Black is the New White Page 14

  I don’t “nigger, please” him when he says shit like that. It scares me.

  But despite all the tension on the set, we produce some of the best television ever broadcast. The Maya Angelou bit comes off beautifully, unbelievably good. Nothing like it has ever been shown before or since.

  I get to act in a Chaplin-style pantomime bit with Richard—no dialogue, just music on the soundtrack. He plays Mr. Fix-It, and I am his customer, with a broken-down car. In a series of sight gags, Richard totally demolishes the car. At the end, miracle of miracles, he manages to start the wreck’s engine. Overjoyed, he leaps out to shake my hand. My arm falls off.

  It’s the purest form of comedy, a sketch that would play in Thailand just as well as in Oakland. You don’t need words. I treasure it as one of the highest achievements of my life, to share a stage with my best friend Richard, just me and him, making people laugh.

  Other sketches are less stripped-down. A parody of the bar scene in Star Wars has Richard as a bartender keeping a rowdy crowd of aliens in check. It reminds me of him trying to keep the ensemble of actors and writers on track, trying to keep it real. Richard loves Star Wars. He’s obsessed with it. He tells me because the characters are from a galaxy “far, far away,” then they can’t be prejudiced.

  Richard does a samurai skit that shows off his obsession with all things Asian. He and Robin Williams slip a cocaine-snorting reference into an Egyptian tomb-of-the-pharaohs sketch. Racial politics keep creeping into the content of the show. There’s a lot of Afrocentric material, because Richard is getting more and more interested in Africa. African dances, glorification of the black female, a voodoo skit where Richard attempts to heal Robin’s crippled arm.

  In another bit, more than three decades before Obama, Richard acts as the “Fortieth President of the United States” at a press conference. He starts the sketch solemn enough, but becomes increasingly raucous, calling only on black reporters while telling the white journalist from Mississippi to sit down. He appoints our old Oakland friend Huey P. Newton as the head of the FBI.

  I do the audience warm-up for the show, because Richard doesn’t trust anyone else. Not only do I perform multiple functions on the show, I go home with Richard and buck him up during his dangerous moods. I have the professional and the personal at the same time.

  By the fourth show, Richard has had it. He’s ready to bail. It’s clear from the ratings that NBC won’t be interested in going forward. We’re scheduled up against the two top-rated shows on TV back then, Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley. We barely dent their numbers. No one has succeeded in mounting a new TV variety show for years, and we don’t break that trend.

  In public, Richard talks about his inability to work under the rules of network censorship. It’s a good story, and everyone in the media buys into it. But from the inside, I know the truth. Richard can’t stand the demands of a weekly TV show. It’s the pressure, the drugs, the obligations. He can’t handle it. So he uses the “censorship” excuse to slide out of it. The explanation has just enough truth to it that it’s widely accepted, even today.

  Richard and I charged Fortress Hollywood and got shut down. The show crashed. We got flattened.

  I have a big hand in the failed show, from casting to writing. So why am I happy? I swear that my life could end right there, laughing with my best friend on national TV, and I would be cool with it. I don’t let any of the stresses of the show weigh on me the way Richard does. He goes into a deep funk. He’s the biggest star in Hollywood, but in his own mind, he’s a failure.

  CHAPTER 24

  As Richard retreats to Northridge to lick his wounds (and lick the coke crumbs off the mirror), I get my own taste of the big screen.

  Growing up, people tell me all the time that I look like Sam Cooke. I don’t think I look like anybody but me, but I take it as a compliment to be compared to the greatest soul singer of all time. That resemblance, coupled with my increased visibility on The Richard Pryor Show, leads to my first costarring role in a movie, playing Sam Cooke, with Gary Busey as the lead, in The Buddy Holly Story.

  At the start of his rock-and-roll career, Buddy Holly tours with Cooke. He and the Crickets are always being confused for a black act when people hear their records without seeing the band onstage. Buddy Holly sounds pretty white-bread today, but it’s a measure of how much white musicians lift from black music that everyone thinks he is black back then.

  Holly and the Crickets are booked at the Apollo, and the crowd gasps when the curtains rise to reveal a white band. “We didn’t expect you, either,” Holly says, before proceeding to win over the all-black audience with his music.

  In one of my scenes with Busey, I manage to slip in a time-honored insult joke straight out of the dozens:

  Me (as Sam Cooke): Hey, young blood, I hear Solly booked you for the whole tour.

  Gary Busey (as Buddy Holly): Yeah, I couldn’t stand seeing you and my poker money leaving town.

  Cooke: Come on back here, we’ll play another hand—for that suit you’re wearing. I want to give it to my brother. He’s an undertaker. [laughter]

  Holly: Get your money out, Cooke!

  But the scene that really kills for me is when Cooke and his bandmate Luthor (played by Matthew Beard, famous for playing Stymie in The Little Rascals) try to check into a blacks-only segregated hotel with white-boy Buddy Holly and the Crickets in tow. The group engages in some high-spirited fronting with the black desk clerk. The scene plays out in a way worthy of a sketch on The Richard Pryor Show.

  Hotel desk clerk: Mr. Cooke! Always glad to have you. [He sees Buddy Holly and the Crickets] Mr. Cooke, you know this is a restricted hotel?

  Cooke: You mean there is no room for my entourage?

  Hotel desk clerk [misunderstanding the word entourage]: Oh, yeah, we’ve got plenty of room out there for your car—you can park anywhere out there.

  Luthor: No, no, my good man—entourage. You see, these three young men of the Caucasian persuasion, why, they happen to be Mr. Cooke’s personal valets. They fulfill his every need. So therefore they must have rooms next to his.

  Hotel desk clerk: Mr. Cooke, you mean to tell me you have three white valets?

  Cooke: That is correct.

  Charles Martin Smith (as Crickets drummer Ray Bob Simmons): Mr. Cooke, will you need your bath immediately or after your rubdown?

  Cooke: Not now, boy.

  Hotel desk clerk: Mr. Cooke, I like your style! You can sign in right here, you and your entourage.

  Turnabout is fair play. I know my American history. I recognize this scene to be the exact flip side of Sam Cooke getting turned away from the segregated Holiday Inn in my old home-town of Shreveport, Louisiana. Believe me, I pronounce my last line of the scene—“Not now, boy!”—with a lot of energy.

  Working on the big Columbia Pictures production immerses me once again in the boring but enjoyable atmosphere on a film set. In contrast to the pressure cooker that Richard experienced with Blue Collar, it’s a relaxed, stress-free atmosphere. I get along with everyone, especially the Teamsters on the crew, even play a little poker with Gary Busey and the other actors.

  While I’m on set, Richard phones me with the news that he has had a heart attack. “Just a small one,” he says. “But you know what, Paul? Even a small heart attack is one hell of a motherfucker.” I can hear in his voice that Richard is drinking and drugging as much as ever.

  Just after The Buddy Holly Story wraps, I step into a ruckus out at Richard’s Northridge estate. In the early morning of New Year’s Day 1978, Yvonne and I are at a party there when I see the pentagram start to glow on Richard’s forehead. He’s drinking and drugging. I know the werewolf is about to come out.

  “Let’s go,” I say to Yvonne. “There’s going to be some shit happening here.”

  Sure enough, later that night, my phone rings. Bleary-eyed and half asleep, I answer it.

  “Mooney?” A voice comes over the telephone. “You got to get up here quick. Richie’s
shot up the whole damn place and the cops came.”

  It’s a young dancer I know, a friend of Richard’s wife, Deborah. By the time I get there, the damage has already been done. Richard and Deborah have never been the most serene couple, and early that morning, after staying up all New Year’s Eve night partying, they get into it good. Richard chases Deborah and her friends out of the house, and then, to stop them from driving off, he rams their Buick with his Mercedes.

  Just for good measure, he goes back into the house and gets his pride and joy Dirty Harry gun, a .357 revolver with Magnum loads, just like the one Clint Eastwood carries in the movie, only Richard’s has a long-target barrel.

  Richard has been getting more and more volatile lately, and more and more into guns. He has always kept pistols around the house, and sometimes they figure into unfortunate incidents.

  As far back as The Mack, his 1973 pimp movie with the tagline “They’re doing the job the cops can’t!” he just misses getting busted for illegal possession of firearms. His girlfriend at the time finds Richard in bed with an actress from the film, and chases her naked ass out of Richard’s house wielding one of his pistols. So weapons are not a new addition to the Pryor household.

  But now he’s got a whole arsenal, mostly handguns, but rifles and shotguns, too. Paranoia, drugs, and firearms—it’s a bad combination. Richard unloads the .357 into Deborah’s Buick, shooting out its tires, its windshield and windows, and putting a couple of thumb-size holes in the door panels. By this time Deborah and her friends have run screaming down the driveway, and soon enough the boys in blue arrive. They book Richard for assault.

  A few hours later, Deborah is back at the house. She has her dancer friend call me. She’s afraid the police are going to return and search the house. She wants me to come up to Northridge and hide Richard’s arsenal.

  Richard never lays a hand on a woman when I am around. It’s like he is afraid of my judgment. Then again, when I see the werewolf in Richard about to come out, I know enough to get gone. So I’m never present to witness him turn violent. But I see evidence enough that he abuses his wives and girlfriends horribly. I hear the stories, some from Richard’s own mouth.

  Richard is like a train on twin tracks—with one rail ripped up and the other smooth. His personal life is a shambles. Deborah divorces him—the end of marriage number three. His professional life cruises along, clickety-clack. He does movies one after another, most of them bombs, like The Wiz and California Suite—but Richard is usually the best thing in them.

  White people don’t like anyone messing with their icons. The Wizard of Oz is like comfort food for white people, something familiar from their childhoods. It’s sacred. When Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and Richard show up on-screen doing the black version of The Wizard of Oz, white America turns its back. Nobody fucks with Dorothy and Toto.

  But I know my history. I know that in the first movie version of the book, the silent film version from 1925, a black man named Snowball is going to the Wizard for his freedom. But the flying monkeys must have somehow gotten to Snowball before Judy Garland ever eased on down the yellow brick road.

  While he’s getting paid millions of dollars to act in bad movies, Richard’s personal life gets jolted again when his grandmother Marie, the woman who raised him, dies from a stroke. Richard is with her in Peoria when she goes. He falls apart. I know how much she means to him. I’ve seen him with his mama when she comes out to visit. She’s a strong woman, and Richard is even more of a child when she’s around.

  When he loses her, he turns to the bottle and the spoon, his constant companions. He’s got a new girlfriend, a white actress named Jennifer Lee, who helps him through his depression over Marie’s death. I try to stabilize him by giving him the only advice I know how to give: “You have to get back in front of the microphone,” I say. “Stand-up, man—it’s the only place a black man in America can really be free.”

  Just like he does after his Berkeley exile with That Nigger’s Crazy, Richard takes my advice. He goes out on tour. Not only that but he takes a movie crew with him and films one of his concerts. The result is the man at his best: Richard Pryor: Live in Concert.

  When his concert film is released in February 1979, Richard gets what he has always wanted. He’s the star of the top-grossing movie in the country. Live in Concert even beats out Superman at the box office. He’s “Super-Nigger” after all. His dream of being a successful movie star happens in a way he never imagines—through his stand-up act—but at least it finally comes through for him. He has achieved his ultimate goal. Anyone else is the world would be happy, relaxed, satisfied.

  Not Richard.

  CHAPTER 25

  All through the 1970s at the Comedy Store, I’m tight with Mitzi Shore. I genuinely like the woman. And Mitzi loves me right back. She tells young comics who are just coming up, “You want to learn about comedy, watch Paul.” She gives me lots of sets. Whenever I want to work the Store, it’s there for me. I’m one of Mitzi’s regulars.

  But she and I have one area of serious disagreement. “Mitzi,” I tell her, “slavery is dead. You got to start paying the comics.”

  I don’t even say, “You have to start paying me.” I don’t put it that way, even though I am still hardscrabbling and I could use the money. I put it in terms she can relate to—namely, looking out for her own best interests. If you don’t support these young comics, I tell her, you will have a rebellion on your hands.

  Mitzi is stubborn about it. No way, she says. She’s got this idea in her head that we are all some big comedy commune, and the Store provides a service: a place for comics to work out their routines. I think somewhere in her mind Mitzi believes the comics should be paying her for the privilege of time in front of a microphone.

  On most nights, Mitzi perches like a hawk on the cashier’s chair at the entrance of the Store, a tiny, thin, pale woman with straggly black hair. She dispenses her trademark gifts of cigarettes and bubble gum. She’s effusive with support and encouragement. She loves mothering the comics. Half of them do dead-on impressions of Mitzi’s nasal voice.

  She gives love, but that’s it. She refuses to toss even a small coin into the begging bowls of the performers who are filling her club with paying customers.

  Make that “clubs,” plural. Mitzi has built the Store into an empire. She’s got a Comedy Store West, located near UCLA in Westwood, and one in San Diego. I’m seeing all this prosperity and success, and I’m thinking, this ain’t right. How much money are we making for this woman, working for free?

  It’s a thing we comics talk about among ourselves, trying to total up the money coming in and the money going out. The door charge back then is $4.50. And the Store is packing them in—fifty to a hundred in the Original Room, a couple hundred in the Main Room. That’s a thousand-plus per night just on door fees, never mind the drink tabs.

  What would it take to pay the comics? There are maybe a hundred or a hundred fifty regulars who work the Store at least once a month. Twelve sets a night in the Original Room. If they rotate to all the rooms, there can be three or four dozen comedians working every night. Say Mitzi paid a bare-bones minimum of $5 for a set. She’s still clearing a thousand dollars every night on the cover charges alone.

  “Mitzi, give them something,” I tell her over and over. “Give them five dollars a set.”

  She folds her arms across her chest and digs in her heels. No way.

  I argue with her. I know how messy the beef will get if it goes public. “Let’s settle this whole thing among ourselves, in the house,” I say. “Nobody goes to the press, no big blowups. If this shit ever gets out on the street, we’ll never get over it.”

  “No, Paul,” Mitzi says. “That’s not the way it works.” That is her main line that she repeats again and again. That’s not the way it works.

  “Well, it ain’t working this way, either. You are going to have a comic riot on your hands. There will be comedians splattered all over Sunset Strip. Their bloo
d will be on your hands.”

  Mitzi reminds me of a rich woman who is getting alimony from her ex. She doesn’t need it, but she’s like a she-bear going after it. Her only reason for doing it is because she can.

  In those days, comics call up the Store every evening to find out if they are scheduled that night. It’s hard on the nerves. The performers are like court jesters, waiting on the favors of a queen.

  I talk to the comics. Back then, people like Gary Shandling, Robin Williams, Michael Keaton, David Letterman, Johnny Dark, Elayne Boosler, and Jay Leno are Store regulars. I know that things are coming to a head, so I go back to Mitzi about it. I keep the tone light, but I hock her constantly. At first, she doesn’t budge. When she does, she just makes things worse.

  In 1977, Mitzi opens the big Main Room with professional Vegas-style comics, her ex-husband Sammy’s people, Jackie Mason, Shelley Berman, and Mort Sahl, those types. Mitzi wants the Main Room to be a nightclub, like a casino lounge, so she pays them. But the Vegas comics would much rather work Vegas. So in fall 1978, Mitzi books the Main Room with the most popular of her regulars. Letterman and Leno both pack them in, filling the three-hundred-seat space.

  Mitzi doesn’t pay them a dime. She’s not used to paying the young crop of comics who she has nurtured and work-shopped. Just because they’re booked in the Main Room, she doesn’t see why she should change her ways.

  That’s it, I figure. That’s where we draw the line. I reach out to the other comics. I go to everybody. “Shelley Berman works the Main Room,” I say, “and he draws half crowds, but he gets all the money from the door. Then Dave or Jay come in and pack the place, and they get nothing? What kind of shit is that?”