Becoming Richard Pryor (5 page)

W
hen the Pryor clan first arrived in Peoria, the rest of Marie’s family found jobs outside the world of brothels. Marie’s husband,
Thomas, worked as a butcher; Buck, Richard’s father, as a chauffeur; his aunt Maxine, as an entertainer; his uncle Dickie, as an elevator operator. But by the early 1940s, when Marie opened a second brothel on North Washington Street, the red-light district’s main thoroughfare, everyone appears to have been integrated into the “family business” and fallen into their respective roles. They lived and worked in what Richard Pryor later called “the backside of life.”

Settling into a role that fit her well, Marie was the family’s madam in chief. She was a boulder of a woman—six feet tall, over two hundred pounds of immovable flesh—and she was in charge of establishing the law of the house. Thomas, or “Pops,” tended to work on the sidelines: when the Pryors had a legitimate business on the side, like a tavern or a pool hall, Pops would be found there. Buck was the muscle of the operation, having won a Golden Gloves boxing tournament in Chicago when he was eighteen. Dickie and Maxine were more sociable types and could be counted on to do the work of recruiting the girls and the johns. All Marie’s children were large people—Maxine was close to six feet tall; Buck, six foot two; Dickie, six foot four—and cumulatively, they had the sort of heft that could make any trouble go away.

As a madam, Marie had a motto, “Don’t mess with my money,” by which she meant that you shouldn’t mess with the money in her hand, the prostitutes whose bodies she owned, and the johns whose cash she was seeking. The color of money was more important than black or white: while black customers predominated on Marie’s block of North Washington, whites were not to be harassed. To enforce the law of the house, Marie had her straight razor. Prostitutes would meet the razor if they tried to cheat her of her customary 50 percent share of the take; johns would be sliced on the face if they tried to leave without paying. (One childhood friend of Richard Pryor’s recalled “a lot of men” walking around Peoria “with nasty scars around their face.”) In later years, Marie upgraded to a pistol, which she carried strapped to her leg. Most of the time, she didn’t need to draw her weapon or even use her fists. She simply said, referring to her size-twelve
shoes, “I’ll put my twelves up in your ass,” and the trouble went away.

“I was raised to hate cops,” Richard Pryor once told a journalist. “We ran a whorehouse, and I was raised to not trust police.” But through the 1940s, Marie, like other madams in Peoria, appears to have reached an accommodation with the authorities, who gave her free rein to run her business as she saw fit. Richard remembered that, during election season, “all the political people would come to the whorehouse to try to win votes, to tell all the whores that there wouldn’t be no busts and shit like that.” Woe betide the rookie cop who decided to take down Marie. According to family legend, Marie’s brothel was once raided by a group of young policemen who were unaware that the house was off-limits. “As fast as they would come in,” remembered family friend Cecil Grubbs, “she would throw them out the door. She said, ‘You tell your chief, you don’t go bothering me.’ And before they could get back to the station, she’d been there, talking to the chief, and her place wasn’t bothered anymore.”

Marie’s toughness and working relationship with the cops might have been savored, from a distance, as the stuff of family lore, but the scene was considerably uglier up close. One of Richard’s neighbors recalled being devastated, as a young girl, by what she saw on the sidewalk of North Washington Street, right in front of Marie’s brothel. Marie was whaling with her fists on the body of a black woman, most likely one of her prostitutes. Buck the boxer was standing on the sidelines. The woman would struggle to get up; Marie would knock her back down, hard enough to draw blood. As this one-sided melee unfolded, a police car rolled down the street and continued on its way; Marie kept whaling. Looking on, the young girl cried uncontrollably.

Even in Peoria, where the red-light district was integrated into the political and social life of the city, it was no place for the tender emotions of a child.

T
he historical record sheds only a bit of light on the background of Richard Pryor’s mother, Gertrude Thomas. Unlike the paternal
side of Pryor’s family, the maternal side kept clear of the law and left few traces. Born in 1919, Gertrude spent her first years on a farm in the small eastern Illinois township of Pilot, where her father, Robert, worked land that he did not own. As the Great Depression deepened, Gertrude’s family was part of the migration off of farms and toward cities, leaving Pilot for Springfield, Illinois. Her father started working, like her future husband, as a chauffeur. Though her family was part of the working poor, Gertrude was likely exposed in Springfield to a more glamorous lifestyle. Her father’s employer lived in the tony neighborhood of Leland Grove and was the business manager and personnel director of Illinois’s State Division of Highways, administering one of the larger money pots in Illinois government. A more attainable sort of glamour was on display at Rosalie’s, a two-story brothel with a black madam and black prostitutes, a few blocks away from Gertrude’s home. En route to her high school, Gertrude would have passed Rosalie’s and noted the spectacle: the deep red paint of the house, the neon sign with a red rose, the girls dressed in the latest fashions.

Around 1939, the Thomas family relocated to Peoria: Gertrude’s father found work there as a driver. The twenty-year-old Gertrude struck out on her own and took a room in a fateful location downtown: across the street from the apartment building where two of Marie’s children, Maxine and Dickie, were staying. She was launching herself in the world, and it’s likely that they introduced her to Marie as a girl who could work in her brothel. Gertrude was light-skinned, small if solid, and moon-faced, with sad, expressive eyes. An added bonus, from Marie’s point of view, may have been that she was fresh from Springfield: Peoria madams preferred to take their girls from out of town. In Marie’s brothel, Gertrude reportedly took on the professional name of Hildegarde, a nod to the elegant supper club singer of the period.

And what did Gertrude see in front of her when she met her future husband, Buck? The twenty-four-year-old son of the madam who was bringing her into the business; a tall man with the muscled body
of a former boxer, now settling a bit; heavy-lidded eyes that rested all their weight on whatever they focused on; a well-trimmed mustache over a mouth that, at least in photos, gave out a thin smile. The various features added up to a man, good with his hands, who enjoyed his vices, did not deny them for himself, and radiated a hustler’s tough confidence. His softer side was expressed through his love of music: he adored the Ink Spots’ 1939 ballad “If I Didn’t Care,” and loved to sing it. Perhaps Buck wooed Gertrude as he wooed another woman who would carry his child, a year after Richard was born, by singing onstage at a local tavern.

The two began sleeping together, and when Gertrude became pregnant and wanted to keep the baby, Buck let her. He did not have much choice: Marie took Gertrude’s side in the matter.

Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor was born December 1, 1940, in Peoria’s St. Francis Hospital. There was no birth announcement in the local newspapers because Pryor’s parents were unmarried and the papers did not trumpet births that could not be attached to a “Mr.” and “Mrs.”

The circumstances surrounding Richard’s arrival in the world remained a mystery to him later in life. “I wish I would’ve asked my mother more about how I came to be, but didn’t,” he admitted in his memoir. “Why didn’t you, Richard?” It’s easy to understand the older Richard’s frustration: he had only a fleeting relationship with his mother, Gertrude, and it was concentrated in the first five years of his life, when his memories were few and hazy. Raised by a grandmother who “made it her job to scare the shit out of people,” he could not help but wonder what it might have been like to grow up around someone whose oversize shoes were not always threatening to kick your ass.

“At least Gertrude didn’t flush me down the toilet as some did,” Pryor reflected in a hard-bitten aside. “When I was a kid, I found a baby in a shoe box—dead. An accident to some, I was luckier than others, and that was the way it was.” As he was growing up, his father never let him forget that he was fortunate simply to have been taken
in by the family. “I chose you, so be cool,” Buck repeatedly advised the young Richard. “You could be in an orphanage.” Buck’s other children—four more, by four different women—may not have been sent to orphanages, but neither were they raised within the family.

A
year after the baby arrived, the onset of World War II gave a great jolt to the family business. Caterpillar jumped into high gear, manufacturing tank transmissions, howitzer carriages, and bomb fuses; its tractors leveled the landscape of South Pacific islands for airstrips and cleared the rubble from London during the Blitz. Cash was everywhere on the table in Peoria. Factory hands had steady work again, and soldiers streamed in on weekend passes, looking to spend their wages on a good time. After the opening of nearby Camp Ellis in April 1943, that stream into Peoria became a deluge. There were so many soldiers sleeping off their hangovers on the courthouse lawn in the center of downtown that Peoria County opened up its jails and let the soldiers crash on beds brought from the camp.

Politically, the war sharpened Peoria’s divides, emboldening the city’s “reform” elements while handing windfall profits to the operators of its red-light districts. Regional military officials noticed that soldiers were picking up venereal diseases on their lost Peoria weekends, and in early 1942, they threatened that the city would be denied defense contracts and declared “out of bounds” for soldiers and defense workers if its brothels were not padlocked. Peoria’s Junior Chamber of Commerce organized a mass meeting on the theme of “Why Peoria’s Vice District Must Go!” Venereal disease, chaplains declaimed, was a form of wartime sabotage on a par with Nazis wrecking machinery in defense plants. In response, the foxlike Mayor Woodruff practiced a strategy of public acquiescence and private obstruction. When the reform-minded city council passed ordinances closing brothels, Woodruff assented but kept the city’s health department and police from pursuing the work with any vigor. And even when judges clamped down on prostitution, levying a two-hundred-dollar instead of a five-dollar fine on brothel keepers, the local
madams found a way to keep the profits rolling in. They jacked up their prices three- or fourfold, and the unlucky soldiers, who sometimes had not been to a city in two or three months, paid the new tariff. According to Richard Pryor, his grandmother had her own strategy for skimming a little extra from servicemen in her brothel: she’d ply them with liquor and turn up the heat in the winter months, then have a young boy like Richard search their combat boots for money while they were sound asleep.

The war years were boom times for Marie and her family. A good number of Camp Ellis men were black, and so found their way to the block on North Washington Street where Marie ran her brothel. Soon she expanded her operation to include another brothel two doors down and a tavern on Adams Street just an alley away: men who came to the tavern looking for action could easily be funneled to one of her houses. She copped the tavern’s resonant name, the Famous Door, from a pair of well-known clubs in New Orleans and New York. The place might have been simple—a handful of tables, drinks but no food, a small bandstand—but it had aspirations. The family was joining together and going “legit,” carried there by the money sluicing around wartime Peoria. A photograph of the Famous Door, taken around 1945, is a family portrait—and perhaps the only surviving picture that places Richard’s mother, Gertrude, with his grandmother, father, uncle, and aunt. Framed in the center of the ensemble, Marie has the happiest face in the picture, one lit up with a den mother’s pride.

Then Buck received his draft notice, and the war was more than just an economic godsend. Buck married Gertrude on December 24, 1943, in Peoria, seven days before he was inducted into the U.S. Army in Chicago; the Pryor family now claimed the three-year-old Richard officially. Buck and Gertrude were probably motivated, like so many wartime couples, by practical concerns as much as any desire to cement a romance. As a war bride, Gertrude would receive a fifty-dollar monthly allotment for herself and a twenty-dollar monthly allotment for their son; and if Buck were killed in the war, she would be the beneficiary of the army’s ten-thousand-dollar life insurance
policy. Death in battle was a palpable threat: on their wedding day, the Peoria newspapers announced that Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had been selected to head up a second Western Front, a huge human mobilization that would be launched six months later, with the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

The Pryor family at the Famous Door. Bottom row from left: Gertrude Thomas Pryor, Dee Pryor. Top row from left: unidentified woman, unidentified man, Marie Carter Bryant, Dickie Pryor, LeRoy “Buck” Pryor.