CHAPTER 24
As Richard retreats to Northridge to lick his wounds (and lick the coke crumbs off the mirror), I get my own taste of the big screen.
Growing up, people tell me all the time that I look like Sam Cooke. I don’t think I look like anybody but me, but I take it as a compliment to be compared to the greatest soul singer of all time. That resemblance, coupled with my increased visibility on The Richard Pryor Show, leads to my first costarring role in a movie, playing Sam Cooke, with Gary Busey as the lead, in The Buddy Holly Story.
At the start of his rock-and-roll career, Buddy Holly tours with Cooke. He and the Crickets are always being confused for a black act when people hear their records without seeing the band onstage. Buddy Holly sounds pretty white-bread today, but it’s a measure of how much white musicians lift from black music that everyone thinks he is black back then.
Holly and the Crickets are booked at the Apollo, and the crowd gasps when the curtains rise to reveal a white band. “We didn’t expect you, either,” Holly says, before proceeding to win over the all-black audience with his music.
In one of my scenes with Busey, I manage to slip in a time-honored insult joke straight out of the dozens:
Me (as Sam Cooke): Hey, young blood, I hear Solly booked you for the whole tour.
Gary Busey (as Buddy Holly): Yeah, I couldn’t stand seeing you and my poker money leaving town.
Cooke: Come on back here, we’ll play another hand—for that suit you’re wearing. I want to give it to my brother. He’s an undertaker. [laughter]
Holly: Get your money out, Cooke!
But the scene that really kills for me is when Cooke and his bandmate Luthor (played by Matthew Beard, famous for playing Stymie in The Little Rascals) try to check into a blacks-only segregated hotel with white-boy Buddy Holly and the Crickets in tow. The group engages in some high-spirited fronting with the black desk clerk. The scene plays out in a way worthy of a sketch on The Richard Pryor Show.
Hotel desk clerk: Mr. Cooke! Always glad to have you. [He sees Buddy Holly and the Crickets] Mr. Cooke, you know this is a restricted hotel?
Cooke: You mean there is no room for my entourage?
Hotel desk clerk [misunderstanding the word entourage]: Oh, yeah, we’ve got plenty of room out there for your car—you can park anywhere out there.
Luthor: No, no, my good man—entourage. You see, these three young men of the Caucasian persuasion, why, they happen to be Mr. Cooke’s personal valets. They fulfill his every need. So therefore they must have rooms next to his.
Hotel desk clerk: Mr. Cooke, you mean to tell me you have three white valets?
Cooke: That is correct.
Charles Martin Smith (as Crickets drummer Ray Bob Simmons): Mr. Cooke, will you need your bath immediately or after your rubdown?
Cooke: Not now, boy.
Hotel desk clerk: Mr. Cooke, I like your style! You can sign in right here, you and your entourage.
Turnabout is fair play. I know my American history. I recognize this scene to be the exact flip side of Sam Cooke getting turned away from the segregated Holiday Inn in my old home-town of Shreveport, Louisiana. Believe me, I pronounce my last line of the scene—“Not now, boy!”—with a lot of energy.
Working on the big Columbia Pictures production immerses me once again in the boring but enjoyable atmosphere on a film set. In contrast to the pressure cooker that Richard experienced with Blue Collar, it’s a relaxed, stress-free atmosphere. I get along with everyone, especially the Teamsters on the crew, even play a little poker with Gary Busey and the other actors.
While I’m on set, Richard phones me with the news that he has had a heart attack. “Just a small one,” he says. “But you know what, Paul? Even a small heart attack is one hell of a motherf*cker.” I can hear in his voice that Richard is drinking and drugging as much as ever.
Just after The Buddy Holly Story wraps, I step into a ruckus out at Richard’s Northridge estate. In the early morning of New Year’s Day 1978, Yvonne and I are at a party there when I see the pentagram start to glow on Richard’s forehead. He’s drinking and drugging. I know the werewolf is about to come out.
“Let’s go,” I say to Yvonne. “There’s going to be some shit happening here.”
Sure enough, later that night, my phone rings. Bleary-eyed and half asleep, I answer it.
“Mooney?” A voice comes over the telephone. “You got to get up here quick. Richie’s shot up the whole damn place and the cops came.”
It’s a young dancer I know, a friend of Richard’s wife, Deborah. By the time I get there, the damage has already been done. Richard and Deborah have never been the most serene couple, and early that morning, after staying up all New Year’s Eve night partying, they get into it good. Richard chases Deborah and her friends out of the house, and then, to stop them from driving off, he rams their Buick with his Mercedes.
Just for good measure, he goes back into the house and gets his pride and joy Dirty Harry gun, a .357 revolver with Magnum loads, just like the one Clint Eastwood carries in the movie, only Richard’s has a long-target barrel.
Richard has been getting more and more volatile lately, and more and more into guns. He has always kept pistols around the house, and sometimes they figure into unfortunate incidents.
As far back as The Mack, his 1973 pimp movie with the tagline “They’re doing the job the cops can’t!” he just misses getting busted for illegal possession of firearms. His girlfriend at the time finds Richard in bed with an actress from the film, and chases her naked ass out of Richard’s house wielding one of his pistols. So weapons are not a new addition to the Pryor household.
But now he’s got a whole arsenal, mostly handguns, but rifles and shotguns, too. Paranoia, drugs, and firearms—it’s a bad combination. Richard unloads the .357 into Deborah’s Buick, shooting out its tires, its windshield and windows, and putting a couple of thumb-size holes in the door panels. By this time Deborah and her friends have run screaming down the driveway, and soon enough the boys in blue arrive. They book Richard for assault.
A few hours later, Deborah is back at the house. She has her dancer friend call me. She’s afraid the police are going to return and search the house. She wants me to come up to Northridge and hide Richard’s arsenal.
Richard never lays a hand on a woman when I am around. It’s like he is afraid of my judgment. Then again, when I see the werewolf in Richard about to come out, I know enough to get gone. So I’m never present to witness him turn violent. But I see evidence enough that he abuses his wives and girlfriends horribly. I hear the stories, some from Richard’s own mouth.
Richard is like a train on twin tracks—with one rail ripped up and the other smooth. His personal life is a shambles. Deborah divorces him—the end of marriage number three. His professional life cruises along, clickety-clack. He does movies one after another, most of them bombs, like The Wiz and California Suite—but Richard is usually the best thing in them.
White people don’t like anyone messing with their icons. The Wizard of Oz is like comfort food for white people, something familiar from their childhoods. It’s sacred. When Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and Richard show up on-screen doing the black version of The Wizard of Oz, white America turns its back. Nobody f*cks with Dorothy and Toto.
But I know my history. I know that in the first movie version of the book, the silent film version from 1925, a black man named Snowball is going to the Wizard for his freedom. But the flying monkeys must have somehow gotten to Snow-ball before Judy Garland ever eased on down the yellow brick road.
While he’s getting paid millions of dollars to act in bad movies, Richard’s personal life gets jolted again when his grandmother Marie, the woman who raised him, dies from a stroke. Richard is with her in Peoria when she goes. He falls apart. I know how much she means to him. I’ve seen him with his mama when she comes out to visit. She’s a strong woman, and Richard is even more of a child when she’s around.
When he loses her, he turns to the bottle and the spoon, his constant companions. He’s got a new girlfriend, a white actress named Jennifer Lee, who helps him through his depression over Marie’s death. I try to stabilize him by giving him the only advice I know how to give: “You have to get back in front of the microphone,” I say. “Stand-up, man—it’s the only place a black man in America can really be free.”
Just like he does after his Berkeley exile with That Nigger’s Crazy, Richard takes my advice. He goes out on tour. Not only that but he takes a movie crew with him and films one of his concerts. The result is the man at his best: Richard Pryor: Live in Concert.
When his concert film is released in February 1979, Richard gets what he has always wanted. He’s the star of the top-grossing movie in the country. Live in Concert even beats out Superman at the box office. He’s “Super-Nigger” after all. His dream of being a successful movie star happens in a way he never imagines—through his stand-up act—but at least it finally comes through for him. He has achieved his ultimate goal. Anyone else is the world would be happy, relaxed, satisfied.
Not Richard.