Black is the New White Read online

  Rock groups such as Canned Heat and Joe Cocker and the Grease Band jam for us in Hefner’s “Romper Room.” It’s like we’re in a small, private nightclub. There’s a lot funkier music going down at the time, but Hefner’s tastes run to the middle of the road, even though he styles himself a hipster.

  Hef is a smooth, hepcat presence throughout the taping, with his girlfriend Barbi Benton surgically grafted to his side. Behind her back, everyone calls her “Boobie Benton.” With her bubbly attitude, brunette bangs, and glistening lips, she’s white-girl sexy. Playboy sexy. Girl-next-door sexy. She loves me. Off camera, she seeks me out. She likes me because I tease her and make her laugh. She’s the boss man’s lady, but I don’t care. I catch Hefner watching us, a gleam in his eye, and I think, That cat would like to watch us do more than just flirt.

  Hefner’s taste in comics runs to the middle of the road, too. He has on Jerry Lewis, Sid Caesar, and F Troop’s Larry Storch. The great Mort Sahl does an incomprehensible blackboard bit about politics. Hefner also favors the comic Dick Shawn, who is famous from the ensemble comedy movie It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World. Shawn’s act is pretty bland, but it’s got some freaky touches. In his stage act, he doesn’t come in from the wings, he emerges from a pile of bricks.

  The most memorable thing about Dick Shawn’s career is how he left it, dying of a heart attack onstage in San Diego. A real comedian’s death. The audience thinks it’s part of the act. They don’t leave, even after the paramedics take the body away. Sometimes I die onstage with my act, too, but never to that degree.

  Once again, on Playboy After Dark, I’m wallpaper. Dancing and hanging out. But I do get to hang out at the Playboy Mansion whenever I want. I swim in the grotto. Play pool with Jimmy Caan. Hef runs the place like a club. You can sit down day or night at the dining room table, and a waiter gives you a menu from which you can order.

  One time, by mistake, I open the wrong door off a hallway near the dining room. It’s a closet filled with Tampax and Kotex and every kind of feminine hygiene product imaginable. The Mansion isn’t a house, it’s a harem. The women walking around are all brick-shithouse knockouts.

  Some of the same group of celebrities that I know from the Candy Store show up at the Mansion. These people are always seeing me around, so they get the idea that I’m in the mix. Even if I’m on Playboy After Dark just as a kind of male eye candy, I figure that it’s good to get known. Meanwhile, I’m trying to make a name for myself as a comedian. Being part of an improv group like the Yankee Doodle Bedbugs or Second City is one thing. Getting up onstage and flying solo as a stand-up act is another. Improv is great for timing and thinking on your feet. But you’re still protected by the other members of the troupe. If you flop, they can step up and cover for you.

  I’m born as a stand-up comic in 1970 on the stage of Ye Little Club, Joan Rivers’s joint in Beverly Hills. Joan opens the place so she and her comedian friends have a place to try out material. It’s small, casual, intimate, a jazz club for jazz people.

  The great big-band vocalist Anita O’Day headlines at Ye Little Club. The house singer is my old friend Ann Dee from Ann’s 440 Club in San Francisco, where I first see Lenny Bruce. Almost in spite of herself, Joan breaks some big acts. Trini Lopez starts out at Ye Little Club, as does the folk singer Barry McGuire, the “Eve of Destruction” guy.

  Getting born ain’t a pretty spectacle. It’s bloody and messy and there’s a lot of screaming and bawling. That’s the way it is for me on the stage of Ye Little Club. What’s great is that Joan Rivers understands. She has me back again and again. I’m trying out my routines, seeing what works and what doesn’t.

  My comedy is a nuclear bomb inside my mind. It’s a weapon that’s never been tested. It just blows up and flattens everybody. I start out talking about the funniest shit I know, which is race.

  Thank God, Paul Revere was white, because if he was black, they’d have shot his ass. “He done stole that horse, let’s kill him! Kill him!” And who do they say sewed the flag, what’s her name? Betsy Ross? Now, come on—they had slaves back then. Betsy Ross was asleep at six. You know some big black mama was up all night sewing that flag! “Honey, oh, Lawd, have mercy, I’m just up so late sewing this flag, I’m seeing stars!” And she’s thinking about the stripes on her back, from the whip. So there we get it, the stars and stripes. But as soon as the white men got there, the white lady Betsy Ross jumped up, “See what I did?”

  Right away, I notice something. The black people in the audience react to me way differently than the white people. Like in this routine. White people like the killing of the black horse-thief. They like the coon talk of the slave woman.

  But the white folks get tight-faced and nervous when I start making fun of the white lady Betsy Ross. I know they like history. White people like going back in time, which is always a problem for me. I can go back only so far. Any farther and my black ass is in chains.

  At Ye Little Club, I always drop some history into my act. It’s knowledge. There’s always a message in my comedy. But it’s like a time bomb. The audiences might not get it right away. But they get it later that night, the next day, a week later. Then they understand.

  I start to study white audiences. I see their reactions. I get my first walkouts. A lot of white people remind me of scared rabbits. When the wolf comes out, they run. They twitch their little pink noses and haul ass out of there.

  When I imitate middle-class white speech, I see a flicker of unease cross the faces of the white people in the audience. Then, when I go into ghetto riff, the smiles return. They’re fine as long as I am making fun of the same kind of people they make fun of, chinks and spics and niggers. But as soon as I start talking about them, I can clear a room.

  My favorite is Lassie. Is that dog smart? Goddamn that dog is smart. They talk to Lassie like Lassie is a person. “Lassie, hey, Lassie, how’s your mom? I love you! Call me in an hour!” I saw one episode, Grandpa has a heart attack? Lassie drove him to the hospital. And made a left turn. I said, Goddamn, Lassie, this is a smart dog. Lassie got other dogs killed. Little ghetto boy, hits his dog with a hammer, trying to get his dog to do what Lassie does. “Goddamn, you better talk to me like Lassie! You don’t, I’m going to give you to the Vietnamese family!”

  When I’m up onstage, I’m watching the audience like a hawk. I’m analyzing little tics, tells, and reactions they don’t even know they are having. I study them. I have jungle eyes, I don’t miss a thing.

  I start to get so I can orchestrate my act. Some nights I feel like I’m Quincy Jones, like I’m playing the white audience like an instrument. That line’ll make ’em nervous, but this line’ll bring ’em back. I tease it to the edge.

  It’s funny, isn’t it? Most of the white folks at Ye Little Club laugh about everyone else, but when I talk about them, they suddenly lose their sense of humor. They freeze up like an engine out of oil. If I do it enough, if I push it too far for them, they get up and leave.

  So I think, Fuck them. I do it more than enough and I push it too far. Some nights I’m not happy until I provoke a walkout.

  That’s when I first find my true audience. Black people, who are always with me, and brave white people. The non-rabbits of the bunch. The ones who can laugh at themselves.

  What I like about Ye Little Club is nobody ever tells me to tone it down. I have to give props to Marshal Edgel, who runs the place, and to Joan Rivers for that. Joan has comedy in her bones. She knows never to fuck with anyone else’s act. Ye Little Club is a free-fire zone. It’s like this little oasis of free speech in the middle of the 1970 culture wars. It’s not celebrity heavy like the Candy Store. Only the hip people know about it. The wife of the chief of police of Beverly Hills used to be a regular. She was one of my first fans. She used to howl at my routines.

  But in those days, no one pays club comics anything. There are a lot of places where comics can go to do stand-up. The Etc. Club, Paradise Gardens, the Gypsy Club, the Bla-Bla Café in Studio City, the Imp
rov on Melrose. But all over, it’s the same. You play for no pay. Owners are doing you a favor. The attitude is “Get on television, then come back and we’ll talk about paying you.”

  I’m not on TV yet, except for an uncredited walk-on in one of Richard’s projects, a made-for-TV thing called Carter’s Army. A cracker redneck sergeant commands a platoon of black soldiers. Richard is great as a medic who is scared of his own shadow. I’m one of the soldiers. The gig pays me scale for a few days, and that’s worth it for me.

  Through James Watson, an actor-comic I grew up with, I get involved in an antiwar improv group that Jane Fonda puts together. It’s like a traveling carnival show with politics, organized by a peace activist named Fred Gardner. A folksinger named Len Chandler performs, plus a lesbian singer and actress named Holly Near. We put up a stage near military bases, like the one in South Bay at San Pedro, and play to the troops. There’s a lot of antiwar sentiment among the soldiers, so we’re a hit. We call ourselves FTA—Fuck the Army.

  My life is crazy. I’m working at make-the-rent jobs during the day, gigging at Ye Little Club at night, and then every weekend going out and fucking with the army alongside Jane Fonda. It’s funny to work with Jane Fonda, doing antiwar theater during the day, and then see her old man come into the Candy Store at night with his Hollywood pals. The actor Donald Sutherland joins the FTA troupe. He’s a big name now because he’s coming off his breakout role in the Robert Altman hit movie M*A*S*H.

  Fuck the Army: Me onstage in the antiwar improv troupe FTA

  If anyone among the brass asks us, we say that FTA means “Free the Army.” But everyone in the ranks knows the truth. I know it myself from my hitch in West Germany. Whenever you are an enlisted man, the abbreviation FTA is always on your lips—if you are not actually coming right out and saying the words. The officers may not know what it means, but the grunts surely do.

  You have to understand that it isn’t the hippies against the soldiers back then. Thousands of people who are in the military are antiwar. They know better than anyone else that Vietnam is fucked up. There is an antiwar petition, and a thousand sailors on the aircraft carrier Coral Sea sign it.

  The military freaks out. The brass are terrified about insurrection in the ranks. In the Vietnam war zone, there’s a new word—fragging. It’s when an enlisted guy tosses a grenade into the tent of a gung-ho officer who is determined to get everyone in his outfit killed. Instead, the officer is the one blown sky-high.

  This shit is heavy. This shit is too much. It’s the Pentagon’s worst nightmare. They want their soldiers dumb and docile, ready to go into battle like sheep to slaughter. They don’t want them thinking about it.

  And they definitely don’t want anyone telling jokes about it. In 1971, we hatch a plan to take the FTA show on the road. We want to go to Vietnam to entertain and enlighten the troops there, but of course the Pentagon prohibits that.

  So we chart a two-week tour of the Asian Rim, Hawaii, Okinawa, and the Philippines, winding up in Japan. It’s supposed to be me, Peter Boyle, Donald Sutherland, Jane Fonda, and two or three folk singers. Folk singers all around, to the left and right, but mostly to the left. I feel like I am back in Joe and Eddie territory.

  Peter Boyle drops out at the last minute. We want to get Faye Dunaway. She’s a big star because of Bonnie and Clyde and I am absolutely nuts about her. I’m in love with Faye Dunaway. She’s right behind Elizabeth Taylor in sexiness.

  When Jane Fonda says we have to go to Faye’s house and ask her to come on our tour, I freak. “What do I say to her?” I ask Jane. “What can I possibly say to Faye Dunaway?”

  “Don’t you know?” Jane says. “You say to her the same things you say to me. You say, ‘Hi, Faye, I’m Paul.’”

  Fonda can see I’m freaking when we walk up to Dunaway’s front door. “It’ll be okay, Paul,” she whispers to me. “Just pretend Faye is nobody. Pretend she’s white trash.”

  Faye Dunaway answers her door and invites us in and says hi all around. “Hi, Faye, I’m Paul,” I say. But then she smiles at me and I fall apart. “Jane Fonda tells me you’re white trash,” I blurt out.

  Faye politely declines to go to Asia with us to fuck the military.

  We go without her. The whole tour is modeled on Bob Hope’s USO shows. He’s the USO, we’re the UFO—the United Freedom Organization. Nixon’s buddy Bob Hope supports the war and entertains the troops. We figure the best way to support the troops is to be against the war that is killing dozens of them every week.

  The military hates us. It tries to sabotage our appearances by putting out fake “corrections” listing the wrong time and place. At the back of every audience there are stone-faced military intelligence spooks looking to intimidate the anti-war GIs.

  Fonda describes the show as “antiwar vaudeville.” We do a lot of fragging-style humor, like a skit where I play a sergeant to Donald Sutherland’s officer.

  Sutherland: Sergeant, I want to get a watchdog.

  Me: But, sir, you’re surrounded by thousands of troops. Why would you need a watchdog?

  Sutherland: Sergeant, I need a watchdog because I’m surrounded by thousands of troops!

  On the DC-3 airplane that takes the troupe around Asia, I get up close and personal with Fonda. She has just come off playing a hooker with Donald Sutherland in the movie Klute, the role that will win her an Oscar. She’s living in Malibu, married to Brigitte Bardot’s old husband, the French actor and filmmaker Roger Vadim. A real Hollywood girl.

  Jane Fonda as Bree Daniels in Klute: “For an hour, I’m the best actress in the world, and the best fuck in the world.” And later, when Donald Sutherland turns her down for sex. “Men would pay two hundred dollars for me, and here you are turning down a freebie. You could get a perfectly good dishwasher for that.”

  Fonda really is lovely in person, fresh-faced and pretty. But I don’t buy into her sex-bomb reputation from the movie Barbarella. Maybe it’s the fact that on the tour she still wears her hair in a Bree Daniels Klute-style mullet, which sort of cuts down on her sexiness for me.

  The troupe appears outside military bases and we wind up playing to sixty thousand soldiers. They’re some of the best audiences I ever have. Those boys are into it. Japan especially is a mob scene. Fonda is a big star there because of Barbarella. A sobering moment comes when we tour the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. It reminds me what this is all about.

  “Foxtrot—Tango—Alpha: FTA Fuck the Army.” That’s the song with which we open the show. We have a film crew along on the DC-3, and a director named Francine Parker shoots the whole tour. The idea is to make a film of the show that will get FTA much wider exposure than any two-week tour can ever get.

  It doesn’t work out that way. Fran Parker does cut her film footage together to make a great documentary. It captures not only the act but the bitch sessions we hold for the soldiers, including one I lead for a group of my homeboys from Oakland.

  So F.T.A., the documentary, is ready to hit theaters in 1972. It has a distributor, Hollywood mogul Sam Arkoff’s American International Pictures. Arkoff normally handles B movies such as I Was a Teenage Werewolf, The Wasp Woman, and A Bucket of Blood.

  But Arkoff is also trying to suck profits out of the social upheavals of the 1960s, like when he puts out the crazed “don’t trust anyone over thirty” youth-revolution movie, Wild in the Streets, in which Richard has a role.

  I’m excited for F.T.A., my first Hollywood screen appearance. It doesn’t matter to me that it is a documentary. I am going to be in theaters. On the silver screen, as they say, although to my eyes, screens in movie theaters have always appeared white—in more ways than one.

  But in July, without telling anyone in the troupe, Jane Fonda goes to Hanoi. The photograph of her sitting in the seat of a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun hits the newspapers all over the world. The backlash is brutal.

  Richard Nixon has one of his underlings call up Sam Arkoff. You want to put this commie pinko girl in American theate
rs? Maybe you’re some kind of commie pinko yourself? Arkoff, the cowardly film mogul (is there any other kind?), caves. F.T.A. is pulled from distribution after a single week.

  No one sees my film debut for almost thirty-seven years, when a print of the documentary is discovered. In 2009, F.T.A. is broadcast on the Sundance Channel and put out on DVD. As Jane Fonda says, “I wasn’t blacklisted—I was gray-listed.”

  I don’t lose sleep over it. I’m too busy losing sleep over another development in my life. I’m up all night keeping Richard Pryor company while he’s partying.

  He has emerged from his sojourn in the Berkeley wilderness. He’s back in Los Angeles, and the two of us begin our dual assault on Fortress Hollywood.

  Our first beachhead is a Sunset Strip club that opens in spring 1972, in the same building where Ciro’s nightclub used to be, a place that will become my second home, my launching pad, and my battleground.

  THE STORE

  CHAPTER 16

  After being holed up in his little efficiency apartment in Berkeley for a while, listening to Marvin Gaye and reading Malcolm X, Richard ventures out—to find dope connections, among other things. He goes around to clubs like the Purple Onion. He comes back and riffs into a tape recorder about talk he hears on the street.

  Before, in Hollywood, I never see Richard read a book, but when I visit him, he’s got his nose in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, or, more and more, By Any Means Necessary, Malcolm’s collection of speeches. He’s got The End of White World Supremacy: Four Speeches by Malcolm X on his shelf, too.

  “I like reading him because he shows me that I’m not out of my mind,” he tells me. “It’s the rest of the world that’s nuts, not us.”