THE SHOW
CHAPTER 21
At Ye Little Club in 1975 I see a vision of prettiness and strangeness stand up in front the crowd on open-mic night. She’s scattered with nervousness and all over the place in her act, which features lots of high school humor. All I see are lips and a bone-thin body.
But there’s something there. She’s funny, for one thing. I mean the whole way she approaches the world is funny. The actual bits aren’t quite there yet. But when you got that natural comic attitude, the lines will come sooner or later. I always think comedians are born, not made. It’s something in our DNA.
The thin-as-a-rail woman closes her act with her introduction. “I’m Sandra Bernhard,” she says, waving herself off the stage. I go over to her.
“Girl,” I say, “you’re a cigarette come to life.”
She looks at me. “Thanks, I think,” she says. She’s twenty years old, a manicurist in Beverly Hills.
“The manicurist to the stars,” she says, fluttering her hands in the air.
“I bet,” I say. “You found your way here, so you have to be getting some inside information somewhere.”
She’s not a classic beauty. Then again, a lot of classic beauties aren’t classic beauties. Like Bette Davis. Take a look at her and tell me you’d ever guess she was a movie star.
Ah, yes, “nigger lips.” That’s what they call Sandra all her life. They put her through hell in school. She tells me that people point and stare at her in airports as though she is a freak. As a teenager it makes her cry. She is the ugly duckling. Onstage, in front of a microphone, she becomes a swan.
I always love the underdog. So I start to take Sandra around. I take her to shows at army bases. I take her down to South Central, to Maverick’s Flat and Redd Foxx’s. Black folks go nuts for her. It’s like magic. The first people to really get Sandra Bernhard are the audiences down on Crenshaw.
Richard comes to see her. “Boy, you can really pick them,” he says. As a female, she doesn’t get through to him because she’s one of those rare women he doesn’t want to f*ck. But as a comic, he understands at once. She’s a natural.
It’s lucky for her that Richard likes her, because the next year is his breakout year in Hollywood. He finally gets what he’s wanted all his life. When Silver Streak hits theaters, he’s a movie star. On top of that, his new album, Bicentennial Nigger, sells even better than That Nigger’s Crazy and wins Richard another Grammy.
The Shell oil company had commercials back then with the tag, “And that’s the way it was.” I get a T-shirt made that says, “Bicentennial Nigger: And dat’s the way it wuz.” Richard sees it and goes nuts, using it for the name of his album.
When you get to be a big dog in Hollywood, you see a lot of bones tossed your way. NBC offers Richard a chance to do his own Lily Tomlin–style comedy special, to be aired in the spring of 1977. Producer Rocco Urbisci develops the concept, and we pitch it with a question mark in the title—The Richard Pryor Special?—to set it apart from other shows, but also because we talk about mixing it up, putting a few dramatic skits in with the comedic riffs.
“Mr. Mooney, you do the casting shit,” Richard tells me. He doesn’t want to bother assembling the actors. For the big names, he pulls in a few favors, like getting John Belushi on, but mostly it is up to me. I feel like I am given the keys to the Cadillac.
I hire the most talented people I know. Sandra Bernhard is among them, in her first TV appearance. It’s not much— just a small role of a token woman writer in a room full of black radicals—but it gets Sandra her AFTRA card.
The special itself is a mixed-bag of comedy and drama, just like Richard wanted. He wanders around the NBC Studios in Burbank, trying to scare up ideas for the show. He encounters one hard case after another. The first is LaWanda Page, fresh from playing Fred’s nemesis on Sanford and Son. She does a church-lady riff as “Sister Mabel Williams.”
The Sister Mabel sketch leads into Richard playing his donation-grubbing preacher character, Rev. James L. White, done up with a huge natural, white Crenshaw pumps, and gold-chain chest bling. A chorus of singers behind him sends up a chant of “Money” all through his appearance.
Richard and I come up with the punch line to the riff: When the phones on his religious telethon don’t ring fast enough, Rev. White says it’s because he’s not getting the “crossover” money from white audiences. He announces that all the money received will be donated to the BTAM—the Back to Africa Movement, to send black folks back to their homeland. The switchboards immediately light up.
I get the Pips to come on, the same folks who used to crash at our Sunset Boulevard bungalow when I lived there with Carol. Gladys Knight herself isn’t with them, but we make that the joke and have the backup singers do their same act without the lead. They do all their moves toward an empty microphone. It’s funny and weird and meaningful all at the same time. Richard loves it because he thinks the special should be about bringing folks who are always in the background up to the fore.
My favorite line in the show comes when Richard encounters a thief named Booster Johnson. Richard is in a tuxedo, and Booster is in street clothes and a do-rag, but they find common ground.
“Just trying to stay three steps ahead,” Booster says. “Because you know they’re going to push you two back.”
That’s pure Oak-Town ghetto wisdom, right there, but it transfers well enough to Hollywood, to New York, to the wider world. White, black, red, yellow, or brown, those are words to live by.
All through the production of the special, Richard is chafing against NBC brass on the one side and his own private demons on the other. He is still sucking Smirnoff and snorting cocaine like a madman. It’s funny, the special shows Richard roaming NBC’s studios like they’re his home turf, but in reality we feel like outsiders there.
The episode in the show where the security guard checks Richard’s and Booster’s names in his “black book” isn’t that far from the truth. Heading for the commissary, I get shut out of Studio Two one afternoon without ID, and security won’t let me back in until Richard sends someone to fetch me.
Richard likes to play it cool, as though he doesn’t give a shit whether his special succeeds or fails, but the mask always slips. He’s needy. He’s afraid of disappointment. This all leads to his becoming a bundle of anxiety, which in turn leads to more coke and alcohol.
I know that sooner or later the stripped wires of Rich-ard’s manic energy and nervous stress are going to cross somewhere in his brain, and it will spark a meltdown. I tell him that his main stressor, one that he can’t resolve, is that whenever he does something popular, he’s afraid he’s not keeping it real.
“I see it happen,” I tell him. “The minute you hear white people applauding you, you get all pissed at yourself because you think you ain’t being black enough.”
He knows it’s true, but he can’t see a way out of the bind. The pressure doesn’t let up when Richard’s comedy special is a top-rated success, crossing over to black and white audiences both.
NBC offers Richard his own weekly comedy-variety show. They offer Richard what he calls “bad money”—so much cash that he can’t refuse it: $2 million a year.
“What am I going to do, Mr. Mooney?”
I know him well enough to know he’s not really asking. The answer is already clear. “You’re gonna take the f*cking money and run,” I say.
“Those a*sholes at NBC’ll never let me do my material,” he says. “They’ll mess with it until it’s nothing but shit.”
I don’t argue with him, and as it turns out, Richard is right. We both find it easy to tell the future where TV executives are concerned. They are stupidly predictable.
Getting the NBC series, along with a small art-house movie role, ultimately leads Richard to the crash I have been expecting all along. It’s like witnessing a slow-motion auto accident. Just as Richard takes me along with him as he becomes a star, when he spins out, I’m right there, too.