White Girls (27 page)
Pryor’s edginess caught the attention of Mel Brooks, who was already an established Hollywood figure, and in 1972 Brooks hired him to work on a script called
Black Bart
, the story of a smooth, Gucci-wearing black sheriff in the eighteen-seventies American West. This was to be Pryor’s real crossover gig, not only as a writer but as an actor, but the leading role eventually went to Cleavon Little. Whatever the reason for not casting Pryor (some people who were involved with the movie told me that no one could deal with his drinking and his drug use), there are several scenes in the film (renamed
Blazing Saddles
) that couldn’t have been written by anyone else. One scene didn’t make it in. It shows a German saloon singer, LilI Von Schtupp, in her darkened dressing room with Bart, whom she is trying to seduce.
Lili: Let me sit next to you. Tell me, schatzi, is it true vat zey say about the way you people are gifted?...Oh, it’s twue, it’s twue, it’s twue, it’s twue.
Bart: Excuse me, you’re sucking my arm.
Pryor’s best performances (in films he didn’t write himself) date from these years. There is his poignant and striking appearance in Sidney J. Furie’s 1972 film
Lady Sings the Blues
. As the Piano Man to Diana Ross’s Billie Holiday, Pryor gives a performance that is as emotional and as surprising as his work in “Juke and Opal.” And then there is his brilliant comic turn as Sharp Eye Washington, the disreputable private detective in Sidney Poitier’s 1974 film,
Uptown Saturday Night
—a character that makes use of Pryor’s ability to convey paranoia with his body: throughout the movie, he looks like a giant exclamation point. And as Zeke Brown, in
Blue Collar
, Paul Schrader’s 1978 film about an automobile plant in Detroit, Pryor gives his greatest sustained—if fraught—film performance. In an interview with the writer Kevin Jackson, Schrader recalls his directorial début:
There were...problems. Part of it was to do with Richard’s style of acting. Being primarily versed in stand-up comedy he had a creative life of between three and four takes. The first one would be good, the second would be real good, the third would be terrific, and the fourth would probably start to fall off...The other thing Richard would do when he felt his performance going flat was to improvise and change the dialogue just like he would have done in front of a live audience, and he would never tell me or anyone what he was going to do.
Generally, though, Pryor had a laissez-faire attitude toward acting. One always feels, when looking at the work that he did in bad movies ranging from
You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It
or
You’ll Lose That Beat
, in 1971, to
Superman III
, released twelve years and twenty-four films later, that Pryor had a kind of contempt for these mediocre projects—and for his part in them. Perhaps no character was as interesting to Richard Pryor as Richard Pryor. He certainly didn’t work hard to make us believe that he was anyone other than himself as he walked through shameful duds like
Adiós Amigo
. On the other hand, his fans paid all the love and all the money in the world to see him be himself: they fed his vanity, and his vanity kept him from being a great actor.
In September, 1977, Lily Tomlin asked Pryor to be part of a benefit at the Hollywood Bowl to oppose Proposition Six, a Californian antigay initiative. Onstage, Pryor started doing a routine about the first time he’d sucked dick. The primarily gay members of the audience hooted at first—but they didn’t respond well to Pryor’s frequent use of the word
faggot
. Pryor’s rhythm was thrown off. “Shit...this is really weird,” he exploded. “This is an evening about human rights. And I am a human being...I just wanted to test you to your mother-fucking soul. I’m doing this shit for nuthin’...When the niggers were burnin’ down Watts, you motherfuckers was doin’ what you wanted to do on Hollywood Boulevard...didn’t give a shit about the riot.” And as he walked offstage: “You Hollywood faggots can kiss my happy, rich black ass.”
Pryor liked to tell the truth, but he couldn’t always face it himself. Although he spent years searching for an idealized form of love, his relationships were explosive and short-lived. From 1969 to 1978, he
had three serious relationships or marriages—two with white women, one with a black woman—and two children. There were also affairs with film stars such as Pam Grier and Margot Kidder, and one with a drag queen. He was repeatedly in trouble for beating up women and hotel clerks. His sometimes maudlin self-involvement when a woman left him rarely involved any kind of development or growth. It merely encouraged the self-pity that informed much of his emotional life.
By the late seventies, Pryor was freebasing so heavily that he left his bedroom only to go to work and even then only if he could smoke some more on the set. He was even more paranoid than he’d always been and showed very little interest in the world. The endless cycle of dependence—from the drinking to the coke to the other drugs he needed to come down from the coke—began to destroy his health. Then, in 1980, he tried to break the cycle by killing himself. He wrote his own account of the episode in
Pryor Convictions
:
After free-basing without interruption for several days in a row, I wasn’t able to discern one day from the next...“I know what I have to do,” I mumbled. “I’ve brought shame to my family...I’ve destroyed my career. I know what I have to do.”...I reached for the cognac bottle on the table in front of me and poured it all over me. Real natural, methodical. As the liquid soiled my body and clothing, I wasn’t scared...I was in a place called There...I picked up my Bic lighter...WHOOSH! I was engulfed in flame...Sprinting down the driveway, I went out the gates and ran down the street...Two cops tried to help me...My hands and face were already swollen. My clothes burnt in tatters. And my smoldering chest smelled like a
burned piece of meat...“Is there?” I asked. “Is there what?” someone asked. “Oh Lord, there is no help for a poor widow’s son, is there?”
Pryor was in critical condition at the Sherman Oaks Community Hospital for six weeks. When Jennifer Lee—a white woman, whom he married a year later—went to visit him, he described himself as a “forty-year-old burned-up nigger.” And, in a sense, Pryor never recovered from his suicide attempt.
Live on the Sunset Strip
, which came out three years later, is less a pulled-together performance than the performance of a man trying to pull himself together. He could no longer tell the truth. He couldn’t even take the truth. And, besides, people didn’t want the truth (a forty-year-old burned-up nigger). They wanted Richard Pryor—“sick,” but not ill.
WHITE HONKY BITCH
Jennifer Lee was born and grew up in Cropseyville, New York, one of three daughters of a wealthy lawyer. In her twenties, she moved to L.A. to become an actress, had affairs with Warren Beatty and Roman Polanski, and appeared in several B movies. She met Pryor in 1977, when she was hired to help redecorate his house. “We sat on an oversized brass bed in Richard’s house,” she wrote in an article for
Spin
magazine. “He was blue—heartsick over a woman who was ‘running game’ on him. He was putting a major dent in a big bottle of vodka.
You could feel the tears and smell the gardenias, even with hip, white-walled nasal passages.” Since that day, she told me, laughing, she has always been “the head bitch.”
As Jennifer talked with me that afternoon, dressed in black leather pants and a black blazer, her white skin made even whiter by her maroon lipstick, I thought of the photographs I had seen of her with Pryor, some of which were reproduced in her 1991 memoir,
Tarnished Angel: Surviving in the Dark Curve of Drugs, Violence, Sex and Fame: A Memoir
. These images were replaced by others: the white actress Shirley Knight berating Al Freeman Jr., in the film version of Amiri Baraka’s powerful play,
Dutchman
, and Diane Arbus’s haunting photograph of a pregnant white woman and her black husband sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park in the sixties. Then I thought of Pryor’s routines on interracial sex. From “Black Man/White Woman”:
Don’t ever marry a white woman in California. A lot of you sisters probably saying “Don’t marry a white woman anyway, nigger.” [
Pause
] Shit...Sisters look at you like you killed yo’ mama when you out with a white woman. You can’t laugh that shit off, either. [
High-pitched, fake-jovial voice
] “Ha-ha, she’s not with me.”
From a routine entitled “Black & White Women”:
There really is a difference between white women and black women. I’ve dated both. Yes, I have...Black women, you be suckin’ on their pussy and they be like, “Wait, nigger, shit. A little more to the left, motherfucker. You gonna suck the motherfucker, get down.” You
can fuck white women and if they don’t come they say, “It’s all right, I’ll just lay here and use a vibrator.”
Pryor was not only an integrationist but an integrationist of white women and black men, one of the most taboo adult relationships. The judgments that surround any interracial couple: White girls who are into black dudes are sluts. White dudes aren’t enough for them; only a big-dicked black guy can satisfy them. Black dudes who are into white girls don’t like their kind. And, well, you know how they treat their women: they abuse them; any white girl who goes out with one is a masochist. The air in America is thick with these misconceptions, and in the seventies it was thicker still. Plays and films like
A Taste of Honey, A Patch of Blue, Deep Are the Roots, All God’s Chillun Got Wings
, and
The Great White Hope
gave a view of the black man as both destroyer and nursemaid to a galaxy of white women who were sure to bring him down. But no real relationships exist in these works. The black male protagonists are more illustration than character. (Though they make excellent theatrical agitprop: what a surplus of symbols dangles from their mythic oversized penises!) In his work, Pryor was one of the first black artists to unknot the narrative of that desire and to expose it. In life he had to live through it as painfully as anyone else.
When Jennifer Lee first slept with Pryor, she told me, she touched his hair and he recoiled: its texture was all the difference in the world between them. That difference is part of the attraction for both members of interracial couples. “Ain’t no such thing as an ugly white
woman,” says a character in Eldridge Cleaver’s 1968 polemic,
Soul on Ice
. In some ways Pryor found it easier to be involved with white women than with black women: he could blame their misunderstandings on race, and he could take advantage of the guilt they felt for what he suffered as a black man.
Yet, while Pryor may have felt both attracted by and ashamed of his difference from Lee, he also pursued her through all his drug blindness and self-absorption because he saw something of himself in her. “What no one gets,” Lee told me, “is that one of the ways Richard became popular was through women falling in love with him—they saw themselves in him, in his not fitting in, the solitude of it all, and his willingness to be vulnerable as women are. And disenfranchised, of course, as women are.” That black men and white women were drawn to each other through their oppression by white men was a concept I had first seen expressed in the feminist Shulamith Firestone’s book
The Dialectic of Sex: A Case for Feminist Revolution
. There is a bond in oppression, certainly, but also a rift because of it—a contempt for the other who marks you as different—which explains why interracial romance is so often informed by violence. Cleaver claimed that he raped white women because that was the only kind of empowerment he could find in his brutal world. At times, Pryor directed a similar rage at Jennifer Lee, and she, at times, returned it.
Life in the eighties: Pryor gets up. Does drugs. Drives over to the Comedy Store to work out a routine. Has an argument with Jennifer after a party. Maybe they fly to Hawaii. Come back in a week or so. Some days, Pryor is relaxed in his vulnerability. Other days, he tries to throw her out of the car. Richard’s Uncle Dickie says about Jennifer,
who is from an Irish family, “Irish are niggers turned inside out.” Richard says about Jennifer, “The tragedy was that Jennifer could keep up with me.” And she did. They married in 1981. They divorced in 1982.
With Lee, Pryor took the same trajectory that he had followed with many women before her. He began with a nearly maudlin reverence for her beauty and ended with paranoia and violence. In
Tarnished Angel
, Lee describes Pryor photographing her as she was being sexually attacked by a drug dealer he hung out with—a lowlife in the tradition of the people he had grown up with. Pryor could be brutally dissociative and sadistic, especially with people he cared about: he did not separate their degradation from his own. He was also pleased when Lee was jealous of the other women he invariably became involved with. And when she left him, she claims, he stalked her.
Pryor got married again in 1986, to Flynn BeLaine, two years after she’d given birth to his son Steven. Lee moved back to New York, where she wrote a challenging review of Pryor’s film
Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling
, for
People:
Well, Richard, you blew it. I went to see
Jo Jo Dancer...
I went looking for the truth, the real skinny. Well, guess what? It wasn’t there...How sad. After all, it was you who was obsessed by the truth, be it onstage or in your private life...You had no sacred cows. That’s why I fell in love with you, why I hung in through the wonder and madness...Listen to your white honky bitch, Richard: Ya gotta walk it like you talk it or you’ll lose that beat.
But later the same year, when Lee interviewed Pryor for
Spin
, they had reached a kind of détente:
Lee: What about the rage, the demons?
