CHAPTER 19
Richard and I knock around Hollywood. He is a lot better off than I am. He is steps ahead of me in the biz. He’s got TV. He’s got albums. He’s done movies. Plus there’s the little fact that he’s a genius. I’m just pretty. But Hollywood chews up and spits out genius and prettiness.
As writers, we’re the lowest men on the film-business totem pole. (We hear a joke about a girl, the dumbest-ass bitch in the world, she wants to break into movies. She goes to Hollywood and f*cks the screenwriter.) Producers will always kill you with praise before delivering their favorite line: “Your script is perfect—let me tell you how to change it.” Hollywood producers have f*cked up more movies than they’ve ever gotten made. They ruin scripts that would have been classics. They’re like ass backward Rumpelstiltskins. They spin gold into straw.
Around this time, I get my first agent, Al Winkur. The man with the golden tongue. He can talk his way into hell and back out again. He opens every door for me. Problem is, Al’s checkbook isn’t as golden as his tongue. He tends to write checks that bounce.
My natural element: Onstage, the place where I feel most alive
“You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood,” says the old-school comedian Fred Allen, “put it in a flea’s navel, and still have room left for three caraway seeds and an agent’s heart.”
That isn’t Al Winkur. He has a huge heart. He has the best intentions. He wants me to work. But he is up against Fortress Hollywood, and twenty-five years after they chase Chester Himes out of town, they still have problems with “goddamned niggers on the lot.”
I work almost every night, at either the Store or Ye Little Club, but that doesn’t put food on the table. So I work strip clubs. All the old-fashioned burlesque shows, the ones that put comics on between the strippers, are dying out, but there are a few left, tucked away on side streets off Sunset. If you’re lucky at one of these clubs, the management pays you $50 for a night’s work, a dozen short sets. But I’ll take it.
In November 1973, Richard gets a gig on Lily Tomlin’s TV special that wins him an Emmy. Tomlin first comes to Hollywood for the hit 1960s sketch show Laugh-In. She loves Richard and hires him as a writer and performer for her program, Lily.
It’s the first time Richard works with Lorne Michaels, who takes a producing and writing credit on the program. Working with Tomlin on her special and with Flip Wilson on his show means Richard’s back on national TV, after being absent since his Sullivan days.
Richard is jazzed. It’s really happening for him. But Hollywood has a way of setting you up just to knock you down. I’m always surprised at Richard’s forbearance. Producers treat him like dog shit over and over, and he just goes back for more.
I’m a bystander when Richard gets a Hollywood project that once again breaks his heart. In fact, Blazing Saddles almost kills him. The producer Mel Brooks sells an idea to Warner Bros. about a black cowboy. He wants the script process to be like his old days as a writer for the 1950s Sid Caesar hit Your Show of Shows: a bunch of comics in a room workshopping the screenplay. Mel Brooks knows his comedy. He’s smart enough to know who is the funniest man on the planet. He hires Richard.
I read the treatment that Brooks sells to Warner. It’s called Tex X. There are no laughs in it. It’s not even clever.
“You sure you want to do this, man?” I ask Richard.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I can make it funny. They’re going to hire me to play Black Bart. It’s the lead!”
Richard throws his heart and soul into it. I’ve never seen him more focused. He goes off every day, on time, and works in Brooks’s office. Mel’s got two other writers, Norman Steinberg and Alan Uger, who did work on the TV show The Corner Bar.
But Richard is the king shit in that group. They change the title of the movie to Black Bart, then to Blazing Saddles. Richard writes killer dialog.
Bart: Mornin’, ma’am. And isn’t it a lovely mornin’?
Old woman: Up yours, nigger.
He comes up with the scene where Black Bart takes himself hostage.
Bart [pointing his own gun to his head]: Hold it! Next man makes a move, the nigger gets it!
Olson: Hold it, men. He’s not bluffing.
Doctor: Listen to him, men. He’s just crazy enough to do it!
Bart: Drop it! Or I swear I’ll blow this nigger’s head all over this town! [in a prissy Gone with the Wind accent] Oh, lordy, lord, he’s des’prit! Do what he say, do what he say!
And he writes the most memorable scene in the movie, where the cowboys sit around the fire, cutting farts.
This last one is too much for Warner Bros. It’s the funniest scene in the movie, the one everyone remembers, and Warner Bros. insists that Brooks change it. Mel insists the scene stays as written.
He wins that battle, but loses the war. Warner Bros. won’t let him hire Richard for the lead. This is a character the man created, and the studio refuses to let him play it.
The suits don’t like Richard. He’s got a reputation as unreliable, for being a doper and a drinker. But that’s just their excuse. The real reason they don’t like him is because he makes them uneasy.
Who do they hire instead? Cleavon Little. He’s another actor from Cotton Comes to Harlem. Richard knows him. They work together on a Mod Squad episode, “The Connection.” Cleavon is a good Negro, clean-cut and articulate. Above all, he’s safe.
I’ll give you a dollar if you can name another Cleavon Little picture off the top of your head. His career goes nowhere after Blazing Saddles. He finishes up as a TV actor. He’s fine, he’s okay, but he’s not a genius.
On the other hand, can you picture Blazing Saddles with Richard Pryor as the lead? Ridiculous, right? It’d be the bomb. It’d rank as the funniest comedy of all time. Richard could do something with Black Bart that Cleavon Little could never do. He could make the character dangerous as well as hilarious.
Maybe that’s the real reason why Warner Bros. denies Richard the part. The studio brass are threatened by him. White folks are always threatened by black men who don’t bow and scrape in front of them. Once again, racism trumps capitalism. Warner Bros. misses out on millions of dollars in stockholder profits because the executives are ruled by their prejudices instead of their brains. Serves them right.
Losing the role cuts Richard off at the knees. I see him go through all the stages of grief. He denies the fact that he’s not getting Black Bart, he rages, he bargains, he gets depressed. “F*ck Hollywood” becomes his mantra. Richard chills his friendship with Cleavon Little and bad-mouths Mel Brooks for promising him the part to begin with. He’s devastated and thoroughly disgusted. He wins a Writers Guild of America Award for the Blazing Saddles screenplay, but that’s just like rubbing salt on his wound. It takes him a full two years to get over his disappointment.
Once again, stand-up saves him.
“You better get back onstage,” I tell him.
“F*ck Hollywood,” he says. His automatic answer to everything.
“All right, you don’t have to work in L.A. Go back to Berkeley again, do a show up there,” I say. “Do something, man, don’t just sit around and mope.”
“F*ck you, too,” Richard says. He’s stuffing his face with the gross national product of Bolivia. Cocaine is like the full moon for Richard. It brings out his werewolf.
And a werewolf always attacks those nearest to him first. When the dope and alcohol crank up, I know enough to leave. I see a pentagram glowing on Richard’s forehead, and that’s my cue to bolt.
But he takes my advice. We go up to San Francisco, and he records a show in front of one of Don Cornelius’s Soul Train audiences. He does a riff about a wino confronting Dracula:
Where you from, fool? Transylvania? I know where it is, nigger! You ain’t the smartest motherf*cker in the world, you know. Even though you is the ugliest. Oh, yeah, you an ugly motherf*cker. Why don’t you get your teeth fixed, nigger? That shit hanging all out of your mouth. Why don’t you go to an orthodontist? That’s a dentist, you know.
I know what this riff is all about. It’s Richard talking back to Hollywood. The street-smart folk wisdom of the wino, confronting the white world, confronting film executives. The whole bloodsucking bunch of them. He’s showing how much smarter he is than they are. He’s showing that he’s not afraid of them. Wino on Dracula, black on white, ghetto street on executive suite.
Richard decides to name the album after a phrase we say all the time: “That nigger’s crazy!” When some fool is kung fu dancing on the floor at Maverick’s, we cackle to each other and say, “That nigger’s crazy!” We say it about Redd Foxx, about Flip Wilson and Billy Dee Williams and Marlon Brando, about anybody we damn well please.
Richard takes the phrase and applies it to himself. His album That Nigger’s Crazy blows up huge. It’s everywhere. In South Central, in Inglewood and Compton, we hear it coming out of house stereos as we drive by. People put it on tape and listen in their cars and boom boxes. And it ain’t just black folks. It’s a massive crossover hit.
Richard’s record company, Stax, goes out of business just as That Nigger’s Crazy is released; people can’t even buy it, and the album still blows up huge. Richard just switches labels and brings it out on Reprise. He makes so much money that he can finally afford his coke habit.
He’s a superstar. But he’s not totally happy, because what he really wants is to make it as a movie star. He’s broken out, though, and That Nigger’s Crazy wins him a Grammy for Best Comedy Album.
For all Richard’s success, I never feel a shred of envy or anything like that. Something in my character doesn’t allow me to be jealous of anybody else. It’s Mama’s gift again. I have too much fun being me. And I have fun stepping on the Celebrity Express with Richard.
It’s wild. I have the best of both worlds. I get to go to clubs and concerts and parties with Richard, but I don’t have to feel all the stresses and strains that make him Hoover up lines of coke and suck down fifths of Smirnoff every single waking second.
Plus we always crack each other up. No matter how strung out or high or f*cked up or sick Richard gets, he never loses his sense of humor. I have never encountered anyone like him. He can be raging, screaming at this or that woman, or this or that Hollywood executive, and if I drop a line that tickles him, he turns on a dime. That laugh redeems all.
I go with him to Las Vegas, and they give us a huge suite. It’s like a castle. I go in, and as we head to our bedrooms, I say in a heavy German accent, “Good night, Dr. Frankenstein!” Richard cracks up. Our favorite riff.
Clubs and concerts and parties and casinos—and yachts. This is the period when we find ourselves on a yacht Richard rented, anchored out in Santa Monica Bay. Way off to the east are the lights of Los Angeles. The barking of the seals on the Channel Islands sounds across the water. And there’s a clutch of pretty people on the boat.
One of the pretty people is a very pretty twenty-three-year-old girl who sits on Richard’s lap. In her bikini, her breasts look like two puppies trying to crawl out from behind a pair of eighteen-cent postage stamps. Richard is the cat with nine lives. He was born lucky, with a horseshoe stuck up his ass.
Earlier that evening, Richard opens the yacht’s safe to show us the million dollars in cash that he keeps there. Just a little sailing-around money in his yacht safe.
We sit around on deck and listen to the seals. “What are you thinking, Mr. Mooney?” Richard asks me.
“What are you thinking?” I say back to him.
“I’m thinking this young girl here is going to f*ck me to death,” he says.
I say, “Well, I’m thinking about how I can get that million dollars that’s in the safe, sink this boat with all you on it, and get away—and goddamn if I can swim.”
Richard laughs so hard he dumps the puppy girl off his lap. We just look at each other and howl. We done stepped into some deep, deep shit.
Life is beautiful.