CHAPTER 13
The late 1960s are confused. Nobody knows how to act. The old white folks in showbiz suddenly see blue jeans and black people where before there were only tuxedos and black waiters. They don’t know what to make of it all.
In 1969, Jim Brown and Raquel Welch perform Holly-wood’s first acknowledged interracial love scene in a movie called 100 Rifles. James Earl Ray retracts his bogus guilty plea in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., but the government conspiracy to kill America’s greatest prophet is covered up. John Lennon and Yoko Ono do their “bed-in” for peace in Montreal, and everyone is singing their antiwar anthem, “Give Peace a Chance.”
The old-style Hollywood club at that time is Villa Capri, really just an Italian restaurant that Frank Sinatra makes famous. Musty, traditional places such as Chasen’s still reserve booths for people like Ron and Nancy. Some joints are still “jacket-and-tie only.” But movie-studio Hollywood is on its last legs.
Black power, psychedelia, and the Sunset Strip scene blow that antiquated shit straight out of the water. Most of the new clubs are democratic, like Luau, the Troubadour, or the Cheetah out in Santa Monica. Anyone can go there, dressed any old which way.
But a few private clubs spring up, ones that mix the old style of exclusivity with the new style of anything goes. One of them is the Daisy, with a snooty, beautiful hostess that Richard is always trying to f*ck. She won’t have anything to do with him.
But the club we wind up going to, and the one that puts me in the middle of the Hollywood swirl, is called the Candy Store. A Frenchman named Jean Chicot runs it. It is a real private club in the sense that you have to be a member to get in. Why am I not surprised when I learn that only white folks are members?
We don’t set out trying to do it, but we wind up integrating the Candy Store.
Los Angeles is the bourgeois town of all bourgeois towns, a vile, racist city from the very start. It’s always been way more conservative than people think. Hollywood folks like to believe they are wrapped in their liberal beliefs, but it’s all just a ruse. They got the complexion for the protection. Hollywood only brings up race when it works for them.
Down in Orange County, they are right-wing and racist and proud of it. I actually prefer that to the bullshit pretense of being open-minded in Hollywood. In Orange County, at least I know where I stand—on a stool with a noose around my neck. Up north in movieland, I am always getting side-swiped by prejudice, because everyone assumes their racial shit is all settled, when it most definitely is not.
The Candy Store gives the white, uptight Hollywood establishment a controlled environment to taste the hippie shit and the racial shit that is happening down on the Strip. It features only female DJs playing Motown, the Doors, the Byrds, Arthur Lee and Love. The Candy Store is Peter Lawford’s club, and Sinatra comes in with Mia Farrow.
My friend Diane DeMarko works the door, so we have no problem getting in. But it’s a white bastion. The staff is all white. Chicot probably doesn’t think about it much, but he has only white waitresses and staffers.
One evening Yvonne and I are in the Candy Store early, visiting with Diane. Chicot is freaking out because one of his waitresses doesn’t show up.
Diane says, “Yvonne is a waitress.” Chicot looks over to see this stunning black woman sitting with me.
He gives Yvonne a uniform and she works the whole night. At the end of it, Chicot is so thankful I think he is going to kiss her.
“You saved us tonight,” he says, and he gives Yvonne a job.
After that, the Candy Store becomes our playpen. I’m there every night on the dance floor, a tall, handsome black guy with movie-star looks. Chicot finally realizes that I hip up the place. I’m an asset, where before he saw me only as a nuisance.
It’s my first big, concentrated dose of Hollywood celebrity. One of those whiplash places, where people are always jerking their heads around, rubber-necking. Is that …?
Yes, it is. It’s Racquel Welch, Barbra Streisand, Shelley Winters, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Jane Fonda, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Ringo Starr. The big TV stars of the day, My Favorite Martian’s Bill Bixby, Ben Casey’s Vince Edwards, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’s Robert Vaughn.
I don’t get starstruck. Mama’s ironclad rule that nobody is better than me prevents that. Except for once, in the Candy Store, the first time I sit at the same table as Elizabeth Taylor.
I am tongue-tied. She is such an icon in my life. Sitting there in person, at a banquette in this little private club in Beverly Hills, she exudes such class. She doesn’t show skin. Yet she is the sexiest person alive. In terms of sex appeal, Liz Taylor can school the young tramps who dress like hookers today.
The Candy Store is like that. Close Encounters with the Rich and Famous. I tell Ava Gardner that she should write a book about Frank Sinatra. She looks up at me with those wonderful eyes of hers and coos, “I don’t kiss and tell. What’s between Frank Sinatra and me is between Frank Sinatra and me.” Not nasty, but firm.
Mia Farrow is complaining that they won’t let her out of her Peyton Place TV contract to let her go do a movie in New York— Rosemary’s Baby. This is back before her radical transformation, when she still has beautiful long hair down to her ass.
“Just leak it that you are going out with me,” I say to her. “They’ll let you out of your contract right away.”
Sinatra isn’t with her that night. She does go to New York to have her demon baby, and the film producers make her cut her hair. She looks like a little boy. Frank’s furious. Things aren’t the same with them after that.
At the Candy Store, I fit in. I get the first real hint of how I strike people, that combination of fascination and terror that I encounter again and again in my life. Ann-Margret flits through the club and recognizes me from Dance Party.
“You made it!” she says. Everywhere she goes, that woman is like a blast of freshness and energy.
I don’t feel like I’ve made it. The Candy Store is like a golden womb, private, intimate, where everyone knows everybody else. I love it when I’m there. But I never forget that outside the doors of that little club it’s Hollywoodland, where I can’t get my foot in the door.
I’m still living on the edge. I don’t have a dime. Professionally, I’m not even showing up yet on Hollywood’s radar screen. But I love to dance, and that’s what I’m doing every night at the Candy Store among all the pretty people.
Maybe I’m window dressing. I don’t care. I’m seeing and being seen, becoming known. That’s vital in Hollywood. People need to see you around, check you out, before you’ll be accepted as a member of the club. They don’t like strangers in that town. What town does?
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 p-ssy 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-f*cking 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.