Black is the New White Page 8

  Richard fits in at the Candy Store, too. At that point, he isn’t real famous. But he has a buzz around him. He is one more Hollywood hotshot among the stars at the Candy Store. They accept that he should be there, walking among them. He doesn’t have to dance for his supper the way I do.

  He is just coming off one of his appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. That’s about as big as a comic can get as far as national recognition goes. From there it’s albums, it’s headlining in comedy clubs, it’s Vegas. That’s the dream path of comedy back then.

  Sullivan is a stiff, no-talent guy who used to be a gossip columnist. He invites Richard on his show to do his safe, bland, Cosby-style routines. The physical gag about the bowling pin, stuff like that. Sullivan likes him so much that he has him on a half dozen times.

  They like Richard in New York. He goes on The Tonight Show, when it’s still broadcast out of the city, before it moves to Burbank, California. Merv Griffith has him on, too.

  All this recognition in New York works its magic in Hollywood, where people are like sheep. They have to be told it’s okay to like somebody. Once they’re told, they fall into line meekly. Baa-baaa.

  So when Richard comes to the Candy Store with me, people know him. The two of us, him in the lead, me following behind. I get a glimpse of Hollywood power. The crowd parts. Everyone is looking at us. It’s heady and intoxicating, but I have an impulse to reject it, too.

  We pass by Steve McQueen. He lets Richard go by, but then stops me. “Hey, that looks just like Richie Pryor.”

  That’s what people call him back then. Richie Pryor, or even Dick Pryor.

  “You look just like Steve McQueen,” I say, and follow Richard to a booth.

  In 1970, one of the biggest stars on TV is a black man. The Flip Wilson Show is top-rated. Flip performs in the round, with the audience seated on all sides. When I ask him why, he says, “That way they can’t corner me.”

  Richard and I see Flip all the time at the Candy Store. He hires Richard to write for him and appear in sketches on the program. George Carlin works as a writer on Flip’s show, too.

  Flip does characters, the kind of stuff that Richard can see himself doing, only it’s got a softer edge. Like Reverend Leroy, preacher at the Church of What’s Happening Now. His most popular character is a drag act, Geraldine, with her line, “The devil made me do it.”

  It gives us hope that the devil can make us do it, too. If he can make it, we can make it. Flip comes to the Candy Store and people fawn over him, the big star. Then he and Richard go out and score blow. Richard works on Flip’s show and Flip’s snow at the same time.

  Flip has an eighteen-year-old white girl, Amy, who acts as a drug mule. She goes out and buys dope for him. Richard poaches her. He steals Flip’s drug courier from him. Amy starts muling for Richard. Flip flips. He never forgives Richard.

  Billy Dee Williams comes into the Candy Store, too. He looks me up and down and says, “If I had your looks, I’d be a real movie star.” He wants to meet Richard, but he doesn’t want to be seen with him. He’s under the Motown protection plan, and Richard has a wild reputation. Billy Dee’s a real prima donna. He won’t go out with us. He thinks we’re too wild, that we might get him in trouble with his Motown handlers.

  Richard loves the whole scene. I mean, he really loves the glamourous life of Hollywood. More than the money, I think, more than the pussy even, more than everything but the drugs, Richard Pryor loves him some Hollywood star power. He could give a lot of it up and just be satisfied alone in a room with a base pipe, but he’d miss that Hollywood connection too much.

  Yet giving it up is what he’s always filling my ear about back then. In the middle of the Candy Store, which in Richard Pryor’s eyes is like a slice of heaven, he’s talking about giving it up. How he hates it. Sullivan and Griffin and The Tonight Show. The Las Vegas clubs and the top billing.

  “It ain’t me, Paul,” he says. “I can’t even say the mother-fucking word bullshit! I can’t say ass!”

  I want to respond, “Look, I see the way your face lights up when Steve McQueen recognizes you.” But I don’t. I know that these people, the ones we are sitting among at the Candy Store, are the same ones who think they can tell Richard Pryor what to say, how to behave, who to be. To tell him he can’t say “ass” or “bullshit.”

  He is a man all torn apart. Hollywood is telling him, You can have everything you want, but we have to put you through our deflavorizer first.

  What Richard wants is what I want, what everyone in the world wants. To be accepted, to be loved for who we are, not for some playacting phony version of ourselves.

  That’s what he and I set out to do over the next few years: conquer Hollywood on our own terms. Our first step is to turn our backs on it entirely and make our Motown drive north in a blue Buick convertible, heading for the wilds of Berkeley.

  CHAPTER 14

  The stretch in Berkeley is Richard’s time in the wilderness. He’s like Jesus, going out into the desert and meeting the devil. For Richard, the devil takes the form of a white powder from Bolivia. And unlike Jesus, Richard doesn’t conquer his devil. He makes friends with it.

  Richard cannot stay in Berkeley if it’s a dry town. Luckily for him, the Bay Area is a big port of entry, with freighters docking every day, many of them with kilos of cocaine hidden in their holds. He finds it just as easy to score in Berkeley as he did in L.A. In that sense, at least, all is right with Richard’s world.

  He holes up in a shitty little studio apartment on the west side, near the marina. The interstate pounds by within shouting distance. He loves it. It’s like he’s denying himself for the sake of his art. His job, as he sees it, is to find a way out of the box that white people want to keep him in.

  The fundamental truth about Richard during his year in the Berkeley wilderness is that he’s sick to death of white folks, white jive, white culture. He feels like it’s killing him. He has to get out from under it just to survive as a man. It’s his “fuck it all” period.

  I bring him by to meet Mama. He loves the fact that she steadfastly remains at 18th Street, in the middle of the Oakland ghetto. Mama likes Richard. She fixes him my favorite dish, neck bones and butter beans.

  “Those are the best neck bones I ever ate,” he says.

  Mama thinks he’s fooling with her, but he’s not. That meal isn’t the first beef neck bones Richard eats in his life. His grandfather, just like Daddy Preston, is a hunter. He and I are raised by our grandparents in similar households, but in totally different circumstances.

  As a child, Richard has a much harder time of it. He’s not in a warm, protected environment of family, like I am. He gets molested when he’s five years old. He’s got all the brothel bullshit to put up with.

  But he chows down on possum, rabbit, whistle pig, fat-back, garden greens, and chitterlings like the best of us. Black folks develop a taste for food like this in slave times. The massa always takes the choice cuts for himself. We are left with the snouts, ears, neck bones, feet, rectums, and intestines. But we make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The discarded cuts turn out to be the best eating.

  Richard recognizes Mama and Daddy instantly. From his childhood, they are familiar figures to him. He grows up along the Chicago River, a tributary on one end of the Mississippi River, just like I grow up along the Red River, a tributary on the other end. It’s like we are twins from different families.

  The main difference is Richard needs more love than I do. He needs assurance. He’s vulnerable. I get so much love from Mama growing up that I am set for life. So I don’t need to look for approval so much. I am self-contained. Richard isn’t, and that’s the source of a lot of trouble and a lot of good at the same time.

  I hold on to who I am. When you know who you are, it’s harder for people to fuck with you. Hollywood is dangerous because the great hobby they have in that town is fucking with other people. Building you up, knocking you down, until finally you are destroyed. They all want t
o create you and mold you.

  Richard and I talk about Frankenstein all the time. We are always riffing on the old movie, because we know that Hollywood has the Frankenstein syndrome. Just like Dr. Frankenstein, producers want to stitch together body parts and build their own stars, their own monsters. If you don’t watch out in this town, you wind up with someone else’s dick attached to your crotch.

  But just like in the Frankenstein story, the monster always hates the doctor. In the black-and-white original Frankenstein movie, the one with Boris Karloff as the monster, the doctor has all the dialogue: “Now I know what it feels like to be God! … The brain of a dead man waiting to live again in a body I made with my own hands!”

  Dr. Frankenstein talks throughout the whole movie. The monster says only one thing: “Aaaah!” But less is more.

  I always thought of Frankenstein’s monster as a black man. All the white people are always chasing him. “Get him! Get him!” That crowd of cracker-ass villagers with torches is a lynch mob. The monster runs exactly like the caricature of a black man running from a mob, wild-eyed, grunting like an animal.

  “Aaaah!”

  The villagers are terrified of him, just like crackers are terrified of the black man (“What’s that? Who’s out there? Niggerstein! Is it him?”) And when they catch him, he whups villager ass, just like a black man. He throws motherfuckers all over the place.

  “Aaaah!”

  The thing is, in the movie, all you remember is the monster. Who remembers the doctor? Karloff becomes a big star. But Colin Clive? He stays a nobody.

  Hollywood is the Frankenstein story blown up into a whole industry—the movie business.

  On the drive up to Berkeley, in between hollering out those Motown songs, Richard tells me that the people around him sometimes appear to him as devils.

  “I’m in a meeting down in motherfucking Hollywood, Mr. Mooney, and I ain’t kidding, all I see is horns and tails! Really! All these folks around me got cloven feet and forked tongues!”

  So while he’s in Berkeley, Richard is a Frankenstein’s monster who becomes a hermit. Richard goes into that rat hole of an apartment and doesn’t come out for a few weeks. He does some surgery on his own ass, cutting off the body parts that Dr. Hollywood grafted onto him.

  He’s got two things to sustain him—Marvin Gaye and Malcolm X. All he does is listen to music and read Malcolm all day long. That’s the winter of “What’s Going On,” Marvin’s masterpiece. Richard has it on his turntable and puts it on repeat. “Mother, mother, there’s too many of you crying.”

  The song is something new out of Motown. It talks about the here and now. I know Marvin really does have a brother in Vietnam. Plus he’s sick over the death of Tammi Terrell, the sweet little Philly soul singer who used to hang out at our bungalow on Sunset, gone at age twenty-four. If she’d lived, she’d have been bigger than Whitney, a super-star.

  So out of all this pain comes a work of genius. I hear “What’s Going On” everywhere, coming out of car radios and stereo speakers. Number one on the R&B charts, of course, but when I look at the pop charts, it’s stuck at number two behind this pop number by Three Dog Night called “Joy to the World.”

  I think, yeah, that figures. “Joy to the World” is catchier than hell, but it ignores what’s going on around me on the streets. “Joy to the World” is like everything that Richard is trying to get away from by hiding out in Berkeley. Mindless white-world pop froth. “What’s Going On” is everything he’s moving toward; genius and keeping it real. But the wider Billboard pop-chart world ain’t ready to embrace it.

  It’s maddening. Vegas gatekeepers don’t want to hear bullshit and ass spoken out loud from their stages, much less nigger and motherfucker. This is what they want: “Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea/Joy to you and me.”

  Like I said, catchy song. But it just ain’t where our heads are at right at the moment.

  I’m staying at Mama’s on 18th Street. I go up to Berkeley to check in with Richard every once in a while, make sure he’s all right, hasn’t lit himself on fire with a base pipe. For a few weeks I’m the only human being he sees outside of food-delivery boys.

  “I got to go back to L.A.,” I say. Richard is so over L.A. at that moment, he looks at me like I’m saying I have to go visit the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, brush up on my evil.

  “You all right?” I ask.

  He bristles. “Yeah, man, sure, I’m all right. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Just asking,” I say, and I leave Richard in the wilderness and drive down to L.A. I figure my goal now is just to get known. That’s how you do it in Hollywood—you get known first and succeed later.

  CHAPTER 15

  All the while Richard is up north taking his mental-health break from the business, I am going back and forth between Oakland and L.A. Yvonne and I have a house in Hancock Park, an old Los Angeles neighborhood where all the rich people live, only she and I are the exceptions. She’s dancing at a strip club for bread, waitressing at the Candy Store, picking up any old job to make the rent. I’m dancing as fast as I can, doing anything for a paycheck.

  Everyone falls in love with Yvonne. It’s embarrassing. Men see her and trip head over heels for her. It doesn’t matter that I’m standing right there, her husband. They still lose their minds.

  The first time it happens is with Peter Boyle, my Second City improv partner.

  “Hey, honey, what do you do?” Boyle says, practically drooling. “Are you in the movies? You want to be in the movies?”

  A time-honored Hollywood opening line. I gently tell Peter that Yvonne is my wife. “I know that!” he snaps at me. “What’s you point?” Being funny.

  Warren Beatty sees Yvonne at the Candy Store and chats her up. George Peppard, Elizabeth Ashley’s husband, flips over her, sending her roses again and again. He tracks her down at the club where she works. John Barrymore, Jr., Drew’s father, follows Yvonne around like a puppy dog. It’s like I have to walk around with a stick, just to beat them away.

  My cousin Alice, too. She is so pretty it gets her into trouble. Garry Marshall, the director, seems smitten by her. Mickey Rooney bothers her constantly at the Candy Store. “If you won’t go out on a date with me, will you at least marry me?” he asks. Alice isn’t sure if he’s joking, but she’s not about to be wife number 1,803 for Mickey Rooney.

  “I like to get married early in the morning,” Rooney says. “That way, if it doesn’t work out, I haven’t wasted the whole day.”

  Alice, Yvonne, Carol, Carol B., Diane DeMarko—we are all doing anything and everything we can to earn money. My agent gets me an audition for a Steve McQueen movie, The Reivers, which is based on a William Faulkner novel. Reiver is a Southern word I haven’t heard since Shreveport. It means what we today would call a player.

  They like me in the audition, and I think I’m going to get the role of Ned, a sidekick. I’m young and naive. I don’t realize yet that the real business of Hollywood isn’t making movies. It’s breaking hearts.

  They give the part of Ned to a TV actor named Rupert Crosse. He gets nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor. He loses to Gig Young in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? I’m so disappointed over not getting the part of Ned, I wish somebody’d shoot me. I know if I acted in that movie, I’d get nominated, too. But the difference between me and Rupert is I’d win the motherfucking Oscar.

  I go on the ABC afternoon show The Dating Game, because even though I am married, the producers pay scale. It’s okay, because everyone is doing it. Half the people on the show are married or living together. It should be called The Adultery Game. When I go on, Yvonne is already pregnant with Shane.

  The program’s gimmick has a girl asking questions of three guys, who are hidden behind a screen. After she listens to their answers and decides what she thinks of them, she picks the one she wants to date. Tom Selleck goes on The Dating Game twice and doesn’t get picked either time. Later on, people like Oprah Winfrey an
d Michael Richards do the show before they are stars. A white-bread DJ named Jim Lange is the host, but the real genius behind The Dating Game is Chuck Barris, the same producer who comes up with the ideas for The Gong Show and The Newlywed Game.

  After I appear on the program (I get picked, but the bach-elorette and I decide to take the prize money in cash instead of going on a date), I tell Alice she should go on, too. Alice does, has a good time, and gets paid. She’s choosing between three black men. Suddenly, when the show airs, Chuck Barris gets a call from an outraged viewer. It’s Howard Hughes.

  “Why in the hell do you have a white girl on with a bunch of niggers?” Howard screams into the phone.

  Barris gently tells Hughes that Alice is black. “She’s Creole,” Barris says. The world’s richest man then meekly does his best Gilda Radner–as–Emily Litella impression: “Never mind.”

  Howard Hughes shouldn’t feel too badly. He’s not the first person to get tripped up by Alice, my beautiful cousin who can pass. It can happen to any racist cracker asshole.

  The best gig we all get is like a grown-up version of Dance Party. Hugh Hefner syndicates a show he calls Playboy After Dark, which is him showing off his lifestyle. He sits around the Playboy Mansion in his satin smoking jacket, smoking a pipe.

  Hef has a celebrity on, they talk, the celebrity performs, Bunnies walk on and walk off. It’s like a talk show with tits, and they need a lot of pretty people to make the Mansion look less like a mausoleum. I’m a regular, and I bring Alice on with me every once in a while.The best part of Playboy After Dark is meeting all the talent, people like Linda Ronstadt, Billy Eckstein, Ike and Tina, and Sonny and Cher. There is nowhere else you can find odd-couple pairings like Ronstadt and Billy “Mr. B” Eckstein doing a duet of Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child.”

  Meeting talent and dancing. That’s what I am there for. I’m stylin’ once again. For one set of the show I wear a green knit tunic and a black patent-leather belt. I look like one of Robin Hood’s merry men. I bust some moves in front of the biggest acts of the day.