White Girls (28 page)
Pryor: They don’t rage much anymore.
Lee: Like a tired old monster?
Pryor: Very tired. He hath consumed me.
Lee: Has this lack of rage quieted your need to do stand-up?
Pryor: Something has. I’m glad it happened after I made money.
Pryor had gone sober in 1983 and he soon recognized that, along with alcohol, he needed to relinquish some of the ruthless internal navigations that had given his comedy its power. He performed live less and less. There were flashes of the old brilliance: on
Johnny Carson
, for example, when he responded to false rumors that he had AIDS. And when his public raised its fickle refrain—“He’s sick, he’s washed up”—he often rallied, but in the last eight years of his performing life he became a more conventional presence.
Pryor divorced Flynn in 1991, and in 1994 he placed a call to Jennifer. He was suffering from degenerative multiple sclerosis, he told her, and wouldn’t be able to work much longer. “He said, ‘My life’s a mess. Will you help me out?’” she recalls. “I thought long and hard about it...I wasn’t sure it would last, because Richard loves to manipulate people and see them dance. But, see, he can’t do that anymore, because he finally bottomed. That’s the only reason Richard is allowing his life to be in any kind of order right now.”
Lee came back to Pryor in July of that year. “When I got there, he was in this ridiculous rental for, like, six thousand dollars a month,” she told me. “Five bedrooms, seven bathrooms. Honey, it was classic. You couldn’t write it better.” Lee helped him to find a smaller house in Encino, and she has cared for him since then. He had two caregivers and was bathed and dressed in a collaborative effort that had shades of Fellini. He spent his final days in a custom-made wheelchair while others read to him or gave him physical or speech therapy. Every Friday, he went to the movies. According to Lee, he could speak well when he wanted to, but he didn’t often want to. “Sometimes he’ll say, ‘Leave me the fuck alone, Jenny,’” she told me, laughing. “Just the other day, Richard was sitting, staring out the window, and his caregiver said, ‘Mr. Richard, what are you thinking about?’ He said, ‘I’m thinking about how much money I pay all you motherfuckers.’” He didn’t see his children much, or his other ex-wives, or the people he knew when he still said things like “I dig show business. I do...I wake up every morning and I kiss it. Show business, you fine bitch.”
BLUE MOVIE
“Was that corny?” Lily Tomlin once said to me when I told her I’d heard that certain CBS executives hadn’t wanted her to kiss Pryor good-night at the close of
Lily
, back in 1973. After all, Pryor was then a disreputable black comic with an infamous foul mouth, and Lily Tomlin had just come from
Laugh-In
, where she had attracted
nationwide attention. Tomlin kissed him anyway, and it was, I think, the first time I had ever seen a white woman kiss a black man—I was twelve—and it was almost certainly the first time I had ever seen Richard Pryor.
Tomlin and I were sitting with Jane Wagner, her partner and writer for thirty years, in a Cuban restaurant—one of their favorite places in Los Angeles. Tomlin and Wagner were the only white people there.
“We just loved Richard,” Tomlin told me. “He was the only one who could move you to tears. No one was funnier, dearer, darker, heavier, stronger, more radical. He was everything. And his humanity was just glorious.”
“What a miracle “Juke and Opal” got on,” Wagner said. “The network treated us as if we were total political radicals. I guess we were. And they hated Richard. They were so threatened by him.”
CBS had insisted that Tomlin and Wagner move “Juke and Opal” to the end of the show, so that people wouldn’t switch channels in the middle, bringing down the ratings. “It threw the whole shape of the show off,” Tomlin recalled in a 1974 interview. “It made “Juke and Opal” seem like some sort of Big Message, which is not what I intended...I wasn’t out to make any, uh, heavy statements, any real judgments.”
“Everybody kept saying it wasn’t funny, but we wanted to do little poems. I mean, when you think of doing a drug addict in prime time!” Wagner told me. And what they did is a poem of sorts. It was one of the all too few opportunities that Tomlin had to showcase, on national television, the kind of performance she and Pryor pioneered.
“Lily and Richard were a revolution, because they based what they did on real life, its possibilities,” Lorne Michaels, the producer of
Saturday Night Live
, told me. “You couldn’t do that kind of work now on network television, because no one would understand it...Lily and Richard were the exemplars of a kind of craft. They told us there was a revolution coming in the field of entertainment, and we kept looking to the left, and it didn’t come.”
It is odd to think that Richard Pryor’s period of pronounced popularity and power lasted for only a decade, really—from 1970 to 1980. But comedy is rock and roll, and Pryor had his share of hits. The enormous territory he carved out for himself remains more or less his own. Not that it hasn’t been scavenged by other comedians: Eddie Murphy takes on Pryor’s belligerent side, Martin Lawrence his fearful side, Chris Rock his hysteria, Eddie Griffin his ghoulish goofiness. But none of these comedians approaches Pryor’s fundamental strangeness, vulnerability, or political intensity. Still, their work demonstrates the power of his influence: none of them would exist at all were it not for Richard Pryor. The actor Richard Belzer described him to me as “the ultimate artistic beacon.” “It was like he was the sun and we were planets,” Belzer said. “He was the ultimate. He took socially complex situations and made you think about them, and yet you laughed. He’s so brilliantly funny, it was revelatory. He’s one of those rare people who define a medium.”
According to Lee, Pryor had been approached by a number of artists who saw something of themselves in him. Damon Wayans and Chris Rock wanted to star in a film version of Pryor’s life. The Hughes brothers expressed interest in making a documentary. In
1998, the Kennedy Center gave Pryor its first Mark Twain Prize, and Chevy Chase, Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, and others gathered to pay tribute to him. Pryor’s written acceptance of the award, however, shows a somewhat reluctant acknowledgment of his status as an icon: “It is nice to be regarded on par with a great white man—now that’s funny!” he wrote. “Seriously, though, two things people throughout history have had in common are hatred and humor. I am proud that, like Mark Twain, I have been able to use humor to lessen people’s hatred!”
In some ways, Pryor probably realized that his legendary status has weakened the subversive impact of his work. People are quick to make monuments of anything they live long enough to control. It’s not difficult to see how historians will view him in the future. An edgy comedian. A Mudbone. But will they take into account the rest of his story: that essentially American life, full of contradictions; the life of a comedian who had an excess of both empathy and disdain for his audience, who exhausted himself in his search for love, who was a confusion of female and male, colored and white, and who acted out this internal drama onstage for our entertainment.
SOME FAMOUS PEOPLE
get cancer. That’s a look. Other famous people—my brother, for one—get MS, and that’s a look, too. But the attitude I can’t take is the one that says you better sympathize. Like when a famous acting bitch gets pregnant. Bitch plays her condition up like it’s Mother Superior time. You’ve seen it on
Access Hollywood
, on the TV: Bitch pushes that baby out and Hollywood acts like she ain’t ever laid down with dogs, gotten up with fleas, and bitten their heads off. In the press, she’s pressed, correct, done, ’cause she’s living the right way: Mrs. Morality.
Acting has come to this: engaging less in make-believe than in making a bad carbon copy of reality. All an actress needs to do to get a little juice these days is give up on being an actress and take on the real-life role of wife. Or mother. I never got to that. I always preferred playing myself.
Famous Bitch says in an interview (
simpering voice
): “Well, even though I done sucked off every piece of trade from Hollywood to
wherever to get what I wanted, I’m pure now—I have a child.” I say, is this a woman? She goes on: “Oh, no, I could never do that now”—be it drugs, going down on a girl producer, whatever—ever since she’s given birth to innocence. Breasts leaking, she could feed a nation. I say, is this a woman?
Uh-huh, especially when she’s a so-called actress. For them, the world is a photo op too great to give up once it’s been gotten. There she is, working the phone lines on TV telethons, raising funds for the surviving family members of this or that whatever. Fuck
Medea
. Fuck doing rep. Tell today’s acting bitch where America’s axis of sentiment is turning, and she’ll turn that way as well.
I won’t live long enough to learn how to play that part. I’m sixty-four. And look what I got. A half-assed career. Laughter. Many faggots on my phone: That’s hysterical.
Aren’t the queens fabulous? They don’t want much: an orgasm and a cocktail. And all they want from an always-looking-for-a-job acting bitch like me is that I be fierce, go to premieres, be. And I love it. Love their demands. Helps keep my shit rigorous. Don’t get it twisted, though—a queen will find the holes in a bitch’s fishnets. They just won’t try to kill you for being different.
Sometimes, at the video store, in the rock-and-cock section, I rent what the boys are doing, just to stay in touch. I love those dolls. I take those tapes home and watch assholes puckering. Leather straps. The pizza boy, the pool boy. Drama and attitude and then the cock shot.
I’m in a similar business. I do voice-overs for porn films. I’m an
artist of sorts—a Foley artist for rock-and-cock movies. Split snatch, too. My voice goes both ways—male and female. My mind goes both ways, too. I’ve been at it for nearly twenty years now, ever since Richard failed me for the last time. In a sense, he and I are in the same business: talking dirty. But that was his choice. This is my survival.
I have appeared—if voices appear, and they do—in everything from
Fags in Love, Fags on Vacation
(1992) to
Mystic’s Pizza
(2001). You’ve felt yourself while you’ve felt me doing Polish accents. Or anal discomfort. The old gag and sputter when it comes to oral. I do it all.
No one does it better, either. (I’ve twice won the porn industry’s highest honor, the Hot D’Or, for Best Sound, Oral Division.) No one does it better because no one in the business I’m in believes what we do has anything to do with acting. But it does, because acting is convincing folks to feel something. And you’ve felt yourself while I made the sounds that made you feel something.
Just recently I did a scene where the woman—a skinny white girl who looked like she’d just been shipped in from Estonia—was getting spanked and rimmed by a trannie who may or may not have also (at least in the movie) been her uncle. The director couldn’t get the money shot right. Not the close-up or the cum, but the sound of joy and pain that the girl onscreen needed to make while her uncle ate her ass, her face buried in a pillow, a few sparkles from out of nowhere on the small of her back.
So I searched what I had been once and when I could have made a sound like that, just to add a little reality to the scene. Background.
*
*
*
I went looking for it blindly, like a mole distressed by hunger. I tapped into a little memory of pain and confusion, the high drama of it. I’m in the kitchen with my mother and some of her friends. We are in Peoria, Illinois. The time: the late nineteen forties. I may have been four or five, I can’t remember. I may have been standing in between my mother’s legs. If I am, she has just washed my hair and is greasing it. She had to be doing something. She didn’t just sit down and hold you. This was back in the day when grooming a child was as sincere a form of attention as a black mother could muster, mammy myths to the contrary. I am bearing the weight and sound of her circling hands working and working the grease into my scalp, the warmth, the grease, the murmur of voices rising and falling, fighting the need for sleep. The two or three other women in the kitchen are doing what women do: creating an atmosphere of domesticity that could shift, at any moment, into an atmosphere of violence. Snapping peas and then threatening to break some errant child’s neck. The story they tell—it sounds like a round—is a story they like telling and elaborating on, when they can. It reminds them of when they were young and nothing had run out, least of all time. The story goes: Once, long ago, they knew a girl, very beautiful, who had a great love. He was handsome and had sworn his heart to this young beauty early on. Before they could marry, though, he was drafted into the service. World War II. He made it through, four years, and he came back home afterward, after saving all those Jews. He had a part in his hair. He was with his girl in her mother’s kitchen, a celebratory dinner. His girl had curlers on; she was wearing a pair of pedal pushers. She was sitting on her mother’s blue-and-white-enamel-topped table. To impress his love, the young man showed her a gun,
something called a Luger; he had smuggled it out of Germany. The young man had assumed the safety was on, but it wasn’t.
I remember thinking back then: So this is love: happiness burning on the stove while a section of the dead girl’s flesh smoked, too. I wondered, then, where the fatal wound had been inflicted. Her chest? Her stomach? None of the women ever said. But as they talked, they provided the voice-over and the laugh track to my imagining the dazed and inconsolable lover being led away in handcuffs, the great outpouring of Negress sympathy that met him as his part grew in, behind bars. The girls who had known the accidental murderer and his dead lover grew into women, visiting him in jail, taking him fresh-baked pies with no files in them. They carried those pies and new gossip, tightly wrapped in their white scented handkerchiefs, right up to the grille, all in love.