Black is the New White Read online

  I hate how they treat the beasts to get them to do their tricks. It’s Dick Cheney–style torture. It’s inhumane. To this day, I can never see a circus as entertainment. I know too much.

  The handlers can never control the chimps, though, not Peggy and her nasty gang of thugs. Fuck you, I can imagine the chimps saying, I ain’t gonna do nothing you tell me, I’m free, white, and twenty-one. (Now isn’t that a real classic American saying?)

  The chimps never do the same action twice. They are totally unpredictable. The wind changes direction and suddenly they are going crazy. Like Travis the Chimp, who does commercials and The Maury Povich Show and then chews a woman’s face off in Connecticut.

  The circus band that accompanies all of the acts consists of a dozen drunks with a collection of travel-battered horns and drums. At unexpected points during the show, they abruptly launch into “God Bless America.” It happens again and again, but I never know when to expect it. I learn to bribe them so they don’t interrupt my act.

  All I really have to do as ringmaster is what I am born to do: stand up in front of a crowd and look pretty. I play to the “blues,” which is circus-speak for the bleachers. I make corny jokes (“Any palomino is a pal of mine-o”) and do routines during the act changes. I lift some of my old Bedbug material, modifying it to suit the occasion.

  “These animals are smart, aren’t they? What if they take over the earth? Then we’d have animal army soldiers knocking down our doors, keeping all the humans in line. Lassie would have to hide Timmy in the basement and bring him table scraps!”

  Gatti-Charles makes the circus of Hollywood, when I get back to it, seem almost sane. I’m back in auditionland again. I get so I can judge just by walking into an audition if the producers are going to be color-blind. Not many of them are. If they aren’t, I turn around and walk right back out.

  Through Carol I meet a girl who I can tell is interested in me. Yvonne is very pretty and almost as tall as I am. The problem is that she’s sixteen, just turning seventeen. I decide I have to wait. I go back and forth to Oakland few times, run off and join the circus again, do improv and work salesman jobs. All the while I am expecting Carol to inform me that Yvonne has found someone else and gotten married.

  Only it never happens.

  The year she turns eighteen, Yvonne and I are married. I know I can’t stay in the bungalow crash palace anymore. I am a married man now, and I have to provide for my beautiful woman. I find a love nest for us on Hancock Place and swear that I am turning my back on Hollywood forever.

  That lasts for all of a month. Our honeymoon an idyll. All too soon, we are back in the swirl. Yvonne, Carol, and I host a party at the place on Sunset, the one where a twisted imp I just met asks if I want to have an orgy.

  CHAPTER 12

  When I first meet Richard, before we ever go to Berkeley together, he’s still hanging with his then-wife, Shelley Bonus. Shelley is his second wife out of six or seven or seventeen or a hundred (Richard is a marrying fool).

  I like Shelley because she’s a dancer, a crazy hippie girl with a huge head of curly hair. Big eyes, bigger breasts—a Jewish Cher. I always call her the White Lady, though she hates it when I do. It makes Richard cackle. Maybe he laughs because she hates it.

  They hooked up on the set of a movie called Wild in the Streets. It’s Richard’s first movie. Shelley Winters, one of the most cock-hungry actresses in Hollywood, gives him a job. Richard is happy to pay the price of admission to Winters. They get wild in the sheets.

  It’s the first time I encounter Richard’s Hollywood jones. He wants to be a movie star more than anything. He grows up idolizing John Wayne. Give Richard the choice between being a stand-up star and a movie star, and he goes for the Hollywood bullshit every time.

  The other Shelley, Shelley Bonus, is a hippie chick extra in Wild in the Streets, and Richard has a small part. He gets them to hire me to do all his stunts.

  During the shoot, Richard and I encounter set decorators on the crew who are spraying a liquid substance on the streets to make them look like it has just rained.

  “What’s that stuff?” Richard asks.

  “It’s called ‘nigger-size,’” the union guys tell him, not even bothering to notice if we’re offended.

  “Nigger-size?” I ask, incredulous.

  “Yeah, it’s what we nigger-size the streets with,” the crew explains. Richard and I look at each other and shake our heads. It’s 1968 in Los Angeles, but it may as well be 1920 in the Deep South.

  Richard’s wife, Shelley, is Hollywood, even if she comes from New York. Her daddy is Danny Kaye’s manager. Daddy gives his daughter a typical L.A. gift—a $40,000 Maserati. This drives Richard crazy. He hates the car because he didn’t buy it. I wind up hiding it in the driveway of my house in the Exposition Hills.

  Richard and Shelley have a child, Rain. Richard is big on fathering children but not too keen on behaving like a father. He and Shelley alternate between knockdown, drag-out fights and flower-child dreamy-ass shit. I see them out in the yard of their house in Beverly Hills, and the two of them are literally hugging trees and kissing rocks.

  “You see this rock?” Richard says to me. “Its name is Forgotten. We named it. We named a motherfucking rock, man.”

  For a little while it’s Yvonne and me and Shelley and Richard. We go around on double dates, like white people. Richard is a drinker and Yvonne and I don’t put anything like that into our bodies. We are the odd couples.

  Dressed to the nines: Yvonne and me ready for a night out

  Right after they have Rain, we have our first child, a boy, who we call Shane. Rain and Shane. They’re born six months apart. Yvonne has her baby shower at Richard’s. Later on we have a girl and name her Spring. Every summer I bring Daryl and Duane to live with us, and have Lisa down from Oakland, too. Yvonne is a great stepmom to them all. They adore her.

  In his stand-up during this time, Richard doesn’t talk as much about black and white as he does about men and women. Or pricks and pussies. Or bitches and sons-of-bitches.

  I got a wife, and it’s really funny to have a wife, man, because we were in love like a bitch until we got married. It’s true. We used to have fun things to do together. I used to bring her a rock, and she’d go, “Oh! A rock! A rock, for me?” Now it’s more like, how big is that rock that she hit me with?

  For a little while Yvonne and I live in the guesthouse Shelley and Richard fix up behind their house. We sit there and listen to the two of them fight in the big house. They rattle the walls.

  Most artists aren’t good with day-to-day business. The more talented the artist, the higher the level of insanity, like Van Gogh. Richard doesn’t cash his paychecks. He leaves money around the house. When he gets tired of driving a car, he parks it on the street and just leaves it. Shelley does the same thing. Practicality ain’t a strong suit for either one of them.

  Richard burns to be a movie star. “Mr. Mooney, I want to be an actor,” he says to me, over and over again. He’s always doubting himself. He’s like a little kid, needing to be reassured. “What do you think, Paul? Do you think I can be an actor?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I say. “You’re the best actor.”

  “I am?” Richard says.

  “You got everybody convinced you’re not crazy,” I say, laughing. “That’s the best acting job I’ve ever seen.”

  Richard decides that if Hollywood won’t make a film with him as the star, he will do it himself. Richard’s film Bon Appétit is a project conceived and executed in a drug haze. The plot centers on a black man accused of raping a white woman. Richard doesn’t plan out the movie. He just buys an expensive 16mm movie camera and simply starts filming. The script is handwritten in a spiral notebook with torn pages, but no one pays any attention to it.

  At different times, Bon Appétit is called Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales and The Trial. Richard is helpless to finish it. The story changes so often that no one can follow the action. He hires a twenty-three-year-old UCL
A film student named Penelope Spheeris to make sense of the reels and reels of footage he has shot.

  Spheeris tries. She actually moves into the house with Richard, Shelley, and baby Rain in order to work on editing the raw material. But it’s an impossible task. Bon Appétit never does get released. Penelope Spheeris goes on to be a big film director, making Wayne’s World.

  Another big idea, lost in the haze. With all the cocaine he’s doing, Richard’s mind jumps from subject to subject like one of those Mexican beans with worms inside them.

  Whenever I read reviews about what a comic genius Richard is, I have the same response: I know him too well. Yeah, Richard Pryor is the funniest man America has ever seen. (Mark Twain is runner-up. Richard is Dark Twain.) But I know he is a junkie first, and a genius second. That’s cold, but it’s the hard, sad truth. It’s the reality of Richard’s life, but not many of his idolizers want to hear that shit. It’s the fundamental, up-front thing you have to say about him. You talk about genius afterward.

  When you’re as tight with someone as I am with Richard, you can’t avoid his faults. You can’t gloss over them. Critics and commentators who look from a distance at Richard the movie star–comedian-celebrity can do that. I’ll never have a closer friend than Richard. I don’t love him because he’s a comic genius, and I don’t hate him because he is a degenerate drug user. I love him because he’s Richard.

  Best friends: Richard and Yvonne

  Around this time I meet another Carol—Carol Brooker, a beautiful girl from Chicago. Carol B. shows up in Los Angeles with a huge natural. It stops traffic. No one has ever seen a huge Afro like that. Her hair must be three feet wide. She has to go through doors sideways.

  Carol B. becomes our style maven. She’s like Mr. Blackwell, telling us what’s in and out. She sits down in front of the makeup mirror and doesn’t get up for three hours. But when she does, she looks wonderful.

  We all stay in a big duplex at Highland and Wilshire. When the rent collectors come around, we pretend we live in the apartment next door. They knock on one door of the duplex, we answer the other. “Oh, those people? They’re in Europe.”

  We don’t have any money, but we do have style. Carol B. makes sure of that. The first time I get a pair of platform shoes, I head over to see Richard. He can’t figure out what’s different.

  “You are always smaller than me, motherfucker,” he says. “What the fuck did you do, grow?”

  I lift up my bells and show Richard my snakeskin platforms. He goes nuts. “Oh, man, we are going to go get mine tomorrow.”

  Pretty soon, everybody is wearing them. We always call them “Crenshaw pumps.” I see Jim Brown in a pair of platforms, a big 275-pound man teetering along in heels. Every-body’s walking around like they’re just in from planet Jupiter. The world slides off the deep end. People don’t dress, they costume. Richard grows a natural, the kind of big, Wookie-ass ’do that everybody back then calls a “freedom cap.” I develop a theory that the wilder the times, the more whack the outfits. The bigger the social upheaval—and the 1960s is the biggest—the crazier the clothes. The style fits the scene.

  CHAPTER 13

  The late 1960s are confused. Nobody knows how to act. The old white folks in showbiz suddenly see blue jeans and black people where before there were only tuxedos and black waiters. They don’t know what to make of it all.

  In 1969, Jim Brown and Raquel Welch perform Holly-wood’s first acknowledged interracial love scene in a movie called 100 Rifles. James Earl Ray retracts his bogus guilty plea in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., but the government conspiracy to kill America’s greatest prophet is covered up. John Lennon and Yoko Ono do their “bed-in” for peace in Montreal, and everyone is singing their antiwar anthem, “Give Peace a Chance.”

  The old-style Hollywood club at that time is Villa Capri, really just an Italian restaurant that Frank Sinatra makes famous. Musty, traditional places such as Chasen’s still reserve booths for people like Ron and Nancy. Some joints are still “jacket-and-tie only.” But movie-studio Hollywood is on its last legs.

  Black power, psychedelia, and the Sunset Strip scene blow that antiquated shit straight out of the water. Most of the new clubs are democratic, like Luau, the Troubadour, or the Cheetah out in Santa Monica. Anyone can go there, dressed any old which way.

  But a few private clubs spring up, ones that mix the old style of exclusivity with the new style of anything goes. One of them is the Daisy, with a snooty, beautiful hostess that Richard is always trying to fuck. She won’t have anything to do with him.

  But the club we wind up going to, and the one that puts me in the middle of the Hollywood swirl, is called the Candy Store. A Frenchman named Jean Chicot runs it. It is a real private club in the sense that you have to be a member to get in. Why am I not surprised when I learn that only white folks are members?

  We don’t set out trying to do it, but we wind up integrating the Candy Store.

  Los Angeles is the bourgeois town of all bourgeois towns, a vile, racist city from the very start. It’s always been way more conservative than people think. Hollywood folks like to believe they are wrapped in their liberal beliefs, but it’s all just a ruse. They got the complexion for the protection. Hollywood only brings up race when it works for them.

  Down in Orange County, they are right-wing and racist and proud of it. I actually prefer that to the bullshit pretense of being open-minded in Hollywood. In Orange County, at least I know where I stand—on a stool with a noose around my neck. Up north in movieland, I am always getting side-swiped by prejudice, because everyone assumes their racial shit is all settled, when it most definitely is not.

  The Candy Store gives the white, uptight Hollywood establishment a controlled environment to taste the hippie shit and the racial shit that is happening down on the Strip. It features only female DJs playing Motown, the Doors, the Byrds, Arthur Lee and Love. The Candy Store is Peter Lawford’s club, and Sinatra comes in with Mia Farrow.

  My friend Diane DeMarko works the door, so we have no problem getting in. But it’s a white bastion. The staff is all white. Chicot probably doesn’t think about it much, but he has only white waitresses and staffers.

  One evening Yvonne and I are in the Candy Store early, visiting with Diane. Chicot is freaking out because one of his waitresses doesn’t show up.

  Diane says, “Yvonne is a waitress.” Chicot looks over to see this stunning black woman sitting with me.

  He gives Yvonne a uniform and she works the whole night. At the end of it, Chicot is so thankful I think he is going to kiss her.

  “You saved us tonight,” he says, and he gives Yvonne a job.

  After that, the Candy Store becomes our playpen. I’m there every night on the dance floor, a tall, handsome black guy with movie-star looks. Chicot finally realizes that I hip up the place. I’m an asset, where before he saw me only as a nuisance.

  It’s my first big, concentrated dose of Hollywood celebrity. One of those whiplash places, where people are always jerking their heads around, rubber-necking. Is that …?

  Yes, it is. It’s Racquel Welch, Barbra Streisand, Shelley Winters, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Jane Fonda, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Ringo Starr. The big TV stars of the day, My Favorite Martian’s Bill Bixby, Ben Casey’s Vince Edwards, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’s Robert Vaughn.

  I don’t get starstruck. Mama’s ironclad rule that nobody is better than me prevents that. Except for once, in the Candy Store, the first time I sit at the same table as Elizabeth Taylor.

  I am tongue-tied. She is such an icon in my life. Sitting there in person, at a banquette in this little private club in Beverly Hills, she exudes such class. She doesn’t show skin. Yet she is the sexiest person alive. In terms of sex appeal, Liz Taylor can school the young tramps who dress like hookers today.

  The Candy Store is like that. Close Encounters with the Rich and Famous. I tell Ava Gardner that she should write a book about Frank Sinatra. She looks up at me with
those wonderful eyes of hers and coos, “I don’t kiss and tell. What’s between Frank Sinatra and me is between Frank Sinatra and me.” Not nasty, but firm.

  Mia Farrow is complaining that they won’t let her out of her Peyton Place TV contract to let her go do a movie in New York— Rosemary’s Baby. This is back before her radical transformation, when she still has beautiful long hair down to her ass.

  “Just leak it that you are going out with me,” I say to her. “They’ll let you out of your contract right away.”

  Sinatra isn’t with her that night. She does go to New York to have her demon baby, and the film producers make her cut her hair. She looks like a little boy. Frank’s furious. Things aren’t the same with them after that.

  At the Candy Store, I fit in. I get the first real hint of how I strike people, that combination of fascination and terror that I encounter again and again in my life. Ann-Margret flits through the club and recognizes me from Dance Party.

  “You made it!” she says. Everywhere she goes, that woman is like a blast of freshness and energy.

  I don’t feel like I’ve made it. The Candy Store is like a golden womb, private, intimate, where everyone knows everybody else. I love it when I’m there. But I never forget that outside the doors of that little club it’s Hollywoodland, where I can’t get my foot in the door.

  I’m still living on the edge. I don’t have a dime. Professionally, I’m not even showing up yet on Hollywood’s radar screen. But I love to dance, and that’s what I’m doing every night at the Candy Store among all the pretty people.

  Maybe I’m window dressing. I don’t care. I’m seeing and being seen, becoming known. That’s vital in Hollywood. People need to see you around, check you out, before you’ll be accepted as a member of the club. They don’t like strangers in that town. What town does?