Becoming Richard Pryor (27 page)

He told her that he had felt, in Vegas, like he was choking to death each time he walked through the kitchen “like a good little
boy” to get to the stage. One day he decided he’d had enough. He told the Aladdin management that this would be his final performance, and beat back their protestations. Then he went onstage and delivered a performance so angry and profane that it was sure to offend, and it did: he was pulled offstage mid-act, and the Aladdin’s staff rushed up to him. Richard braced himself and, lifting his chin, told them that he couldn’t be a man and work for them anymore. They looked into his eyes, and whatever they saw disarmed them. They backed off.

Richard felt the hand of God in his life, raising him up and protecting him. After he went back through the kitchen and stepped outside, the world seemed transformed. For a precious moment, a calm settled over him. His eyes scanned the desert horizon. The trees, perhaps stirred by the wind, were bowing to him.

T
he magic moment didn’t last long. In November, a scheduled appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
sent Richard into a nervous “flittamajitter,” and he didn’t show up—the showbiz equivalent of standing up the Queen of England. Sullivan treated Richard like a
monstre sacré
whose bad behavior was to be expected: an extra clause was simply stitched into his next contract, specifying that Sandy Gallin was required to be in New York City for every engagement and that Gallin was personally responsible for his client’s appearance at rehearsal and taping. Richard remained in the show’s good graces.

Whatever sympathy and forgiveness Richard experienced in his professional life, elsewhere it was harder to come by. In mid-November he was ordered by the court to pay Maxine’s legal fees and a regular child support payment of three hundred dollars a month. A month later, on the first day of his trial on the Sunset Towers assault charge, he treated the court as he had treated Ed Sullivan, with a no-show, and the judge issued a bench warrant for his immediate arrest.

In Peoria, Richard’s family was itself facing a sea of troubles. On
the same day that Richard was ordered to pay child support, police raided his father’s brothel at 409 West Aiken and charged him with being a keeper of a house of prostitution. Tough to the core, Buck took the harder legal route: rather than pay a fine, he demanded a trial by jury. Meanwhile, Richard’s stepmother Ann was now so ill that, even though the Illinois Supreme Court had rejected her appeal of the previous year, the court order was apparently never carried out. She took her rest at home.

On the very last day of 1967, Ann received last rites, then expired. For twenty years she had been a prostitute and a madam, but she was also a member, in good standing, of Peoria’s Catholic community, and the local priests reserved St. Patrick’s Church for her service. Peoria’s most prominent black mortician readied the body.

When Buck called Richard with the news, his son expressed his condolences but balked at attending the funeral. “Dad, I ain’t going,” he said. He wasn’t in a frame of mind to handle the weight of the family he’d tried so hard to escape.

“That’s all right, son. You don’t have to come,” Buck said, baiting him. “But the next time you be on
Ed Sullivan
, it’ll be a duo.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’ll be you telling jokes and me kicking your ass.”

Richard quickly booked two plane tickets to Peoria. One was for himself, the other for the woman who accompanied him out of the destructive chaos that was 1967 and into the productive chaos that was 1968.

Peoria and Los Angeles, 1968

W
hen Richard arrived for Ann’s funeral with a young white woman named Shelley Bonis at his side, he brought convincing evidence of how far he’d traveled in the six years since he’d left Peoria—and how far American culture had traveled with him.

The two had met a few months before in a bar, both togged in the costumes of the times. Shelley had pulled off a stunning go-go look: honey hair spilling to her shoulders, miniskirt levitating above her tall white-leather boots. Richard looked like some combination of hippie, pimp, and journalist. He carried a notepad and pen, and wore bell bottoms with a wide belt, from which dangled a “huge, Mad Hatter–style watch,” as Shelley recalled. His pickup line was to ask for the time.

Shelley walked away, moseyed to the dance floor, and started doing what she had done, professionally, for the cameras of
Hollywood a Go-Go
: danced by herself. Richard followed the tease by approaching her with the notepad and pen.

“So what’re you writing on that little notepad of yours?” Shelley asked. “You’re not trying to steal my dance moves, are you?”

“Dance moves! I’m working on my act, girl.”

“What kind of act?”

“My comedy act. I’m a comedian.”

Something squared in Shelley’s head—she was under contract with Columbia Pictures and plugged into the industry—and she said, “You’re the guy who walked off the stage in Vegas. I dig that.”

Richard was intrigued, and riled, by whites playing black. “You
‘dig’ that? Now where you comin’ from, girl, talking the talk. You don’t look like no nigger I know. You’re not some kind of freaky bitch, are you?”

Shelley punched back that she was simply “hip to change”: “The Man ain’t the Man no more—dig?”

“Don’t get all political on me, bitch,” Richard said. “I know who the fuck I am. I’m a nigger. And I know who the fuck you’re not: a nigger.”

“You don’t know a thing about me, funny man. Not a thing.”

Richard didn’t know, for instance, that Shelley was the daughter of Danny Kaye’s manager, a child of liberal Hollywood. Or that she was the sort of Brooklyn-born Jewish girl who loved black culture more than her own—that she felt herself a “sister” in her very soul. Or that she had already fallen for him with his first ridiculous question about the time, and was ready to take a deeper plunge.

Just days after they met, Shelley moved into the small cottage, at the tail end of Wonderland Avenue in Laurel Canyon, where Richard had settled after the Sunset Towers fiasco. The cottage was only a three-mile ride up from the Sunset Strip, but it was a world away from that neon carnival. The Canyon was rusticated—home to screech owls, coyotes, and a pack of folk-rock troubadours hoping, in the famous words of one of their own, to “get ourselves back to the garden.”

It was steadily becoming home, too, to the “heads and “freaks” of LA’s counterculture (
head
and
freak
being terms much preferred, within the community, to the epithet
hippie
). Music engineer Robert Marchese, who later produced Richard’s first album, lived nearby in what he called a “classic psychedelic pad.” Each room was painted scrupulously, or fanatically, with a different color scheme: Marchese’s bedroom was split between orange and magenta down to the mismatched screws—one orange, one magenta—on the light switch. A few months after Shelley joined Richard, musician Frank Zappa came to the Canyon and settled into a dim, cavernous house known as the “Log Cabin,” which quickly became, according to the Canyon’s chief chronicler, a “rock-and-roll salon and Dionysian playground,”
drawing a steady stream of freaks from the San Fernando Valley to Hollywood. Its goings-on became part of a richly embroidered legend of rock ’n’ roll decadence: “Talents as imposing as Mick Jagger and as whimsical as Alice Cooper were stabled, jam-sessioned, fed, and fellated while the undisputed master of the house . . . reigned as the ‘freak daddy’ of the whole show.”

Richard was neither freak nor freak daddy, but he and Shelley inhaled the Canyon’s heady romantic spirit. Shelley lit incense, wore love beads, pattered around barefoot, and, in Richard’s words, “made me feel free.” They made a sport of the rocks lying around the cottage—giving them as presents to one another, kissing them, imagining them in conversation—and then laughed at the deliriousness of it all.

Then the world outside their cottage came calling—threatening, in the person of Buck, an ass-kicking for good measure—and the lovers packed themselves off for Ann’s funeral in the dead-of-winter Midwest.

O
n the day of the funeral, the temperature fell to fourteen below. Two hundred friends and relatives filled St. Patrick’s Church; a soloist’s voice rose above the hum of the organ. Ann was laid out in a fur-lined coat, her usually straightened hair braided in cornrows.

Buck was neither a religious man nor one to stand on ceremony. Inside the limousine as it traveled to St. Joseph’s Cemetery, Richard held his father and tried to give him strength: “Pop, don’t cry, please.” Buck cut the tender moment short: “Okay, son. But if it get any colder, they’re going to have to bury the bitch by themselves.”

At the cemetery, the pallbearers hoisted Ann’s casket to the grave site. They wore gray gloves, and after lowering the casket into the grave, they removed their gloves and dropped them into it. The preacher began delivering a eulogy over the casket, only to be interrupted by a shivering Buck. “The dirt. The dirt. Throw the dirt,” he muttered through clenched teeth. “It’s cold, preacher. The dirt.” Even at his wife’s funeral, Buck would be Buck—“brutally honest,” as his son later observed.

After the service, the whole family repaired for a reception at the large house that Richard had bought for his father a few years earlier, at 1319 Millman. A photograph from the reception suggests how Ann’s death rippled differently across the family. Buck and June, Ann’s daughter from earlier in her life, sit in front, their faces drawn and tight-lipped in grief. Behind them, Shelley and Richard’s aunt Maxine beam at each other as if sharing a private joke. Richard’s teenage cousin Denise smiles with a look of nervous excitement. Richard wears a powder-blue turtleneck and white windbreaker, and connects to the camera with confident eyes and an easy grin, ready even in hard times for his close-up.

A family reshuffling itself after Ann’s death. Front row: LeRoy “Buck” Pryor and Ann’s daughter June. Back row: Barbara McGee, Denise Pryor, Maxine Pryor, Shelley Bonis, Richard Pryor. (Courtesy of Barbara McGee)

With Ann buried, there were some new introductions to be made. Buck had fathered three children with three different women while married to Ann, and as long as she was alive, he had been able only to
watch those children from afar—by standing across from a schoolyard while one of them played, or from the inside of his station wagon. Now they could be brought into the fold.

Buck’s daughter Sharon came timidly to the door at 1319 Millman. She knew that Buck was her father, but aside from an overpowering hug at Ann’s viewing—“he squeezed me like he was going to squash me to death”—she had never had any physical contact with him in her thirteen years. A small white poodle yapped at her ankles. She saw Buck sitting with the family at a table near the entrance to the house.

“Let my baby in,” he said. “Look at my baby!” Buck, who needed comforting, comforted her. “Come on over here—that dog ain’t going to bother you.” She skittered over, and he led her around the house, introducing her with great pleasure to the extended family. Marie was ministering to a kettle of neckbones in the kitchen; Richard and Shelley were nesting together like lovebirds in the living room. Then Buck sat down again and put Sharon on his lap, where she stayed.

When Sharon was leaving, Buck insisted to her mother, “Please don’t let this be the last time I see her.” Sharon was in sixth grade and, in the eyes of her school and her mother, who had ten other children to handle, she was a problem child, always tilting against figures of authority. The freshly bereaved Buck soon took her under his wing. “Baby, everything’s going to be all right,” he reassured her when they spent time together in the next few months. “Ain’t nobody gonna mess with my little girl again.”

O
n January 13, Richard and Shelley were married in a quick impromptu ceremony at a small chapel in Las Vegas. They consecrated, in the city of Richard’s recent embarrassment, a relationship that sometimes played out as a political allegory of late-1960s America. Shelley was the white romantic, Richard the black cynic. It was Shelley who had avidly read Malcolm X, Angela Davis, and the Black Panthers, and who believed that a new day was dawning and that the love she felt for Richard was proof of it. Richard, meanwhile, had
been hardened by his family and his struggles with school, the army, and show business—every institution he’d come into contact with. He tended to shield himself from disappointment by expecting the worst—of people and of his country.

Still, a piece of Richard longed to believe, as Shelley believed, in what was pure between them and how it might spill beyond their cottage in Laurel Canyon—and here, again, the two lovers were emblematic of larger hopes and tensions. Around the country, the Black Power movement and the largely white counterculture were engaged in a delicate, circling dance, as each group wondered what they might give to, or gain from, the other. In Los Angeles in 1967, white hippies had sought to bring together “the city’s two hip communities” by organizing two “love-ins” at parks in Watts, with tellingly mixed results. The first love-in drew a crowd of seven thousand whites and blacks, who danced together to a mix of blues and rock groups; the alternative paper
Open City
raved that the hippies “short-circuited the ghetto’s mental hate syndrome with smiles, freaky renaissance clothes . . . and an open attitude which became contagious.” The second love-in, more poorly attended, was disrupted by a stone thrown at a white photographer and a “get whitey” speech from the stage—and the hippies, discouraged, left Watts for good.