Chapter 1Peoria

Foreword

On December 10, 1978, at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach, Richard Pryor performed the night he had shot up his wife's car with a Magnum, and got the biggest laugh of the evening.

Eighteen months later he ran down Parthenia Street in Northridge on fire.

Eighteen months after that he walked out at the Circle Star Theater in San Carlos and performed the rum, the lighter and the burn ward, and turned it into a bit, and it took a Grammy.

That sequence is the argument of this book.

Richard Pryor's freedom was not liberation. It was a survival technique with no off switch.

A boy raised in his grandmother's brothel in Peoria learned to make a room laugh before it turned on him, and spent forty years converting that reflex into an art form — confession as performance, the self spent as material — until there was nothing left with which to protect himself in private.

The fire is Chapter 16 of 22, and it is placed there on purpose.

Every other account of this life ends somewhere near it or treats it as the climax. This book will not, because it was not an ending. It was the technique arriving at its logical end point: the ultimate confession, performed with his body, in a suburban road, with police walking beside him because they could not touch him.

And then, eighteen months later, performed again as material.

Six chapters follow it, because the cost only becomes legible in 1986, when multiple sclerosis begins taking the instrument away and nineteen years remain.

Seven chapters pass before the record that first sounds like him.

That is deliberate too. The argument needs the reader to see what the voice was for, and to watch it being suppressed first. In New York in 1963 he learned Bill Cosby's act deliberately — clean, universal, unthreatening, bookable on Sullivan and Merv Griffin — and it worked, and by 1967 he had everything he had come for and it was somebody else's.

Then, at the Aladdin in Las Vegas in September 1967, he looked at the room, said something to the effect of asking what he was doing there, and walked off, torching four years of bookings.

The famous line survives only in retelling and it is not given quotation marks in this book.

Two years in Berkeley followed, broke and out of the business, around Ishmael Reed and Cecil Brown and in proximity to the Panthers. Chapter 7 says what is documented and what is participants remembering themselves into the room, and it makes the argument that matters: he did not find a new voice there. He stopped suppressing the old one.

There are four corrections in this book that the standard tellings get wrong, and they are chronological rather than interpretive.

Stir Crazy was shot from March to May 1980, months before the fire, and opened in December 1980, long after he was discharged. The popular version has the biggest hit of his career opening while he lies in a burn ward, and it did not.

His monologues for Wattstax were shot after the concert, in a bar, which is why he hosts an event he did not play.

The Toy and Superman III were both finished before the 1983 Columbia deal was signed, and Brewster's Millions sits outside it altogether. What Indigo Productions actually delivered to Columbia in five years, against roughly forty million dollars, was one film.

And the most famous thing about The Richard Pryor Show — the opening in which he appears naked and neutered — was cut by NBC before broadcast. No viewer saw it.

Chapter 14 stops the narrative and looks back, and it is the hardest chapter here.

Seven marriages to five women. Seven acknowledged children. And a pattern of violence, documented from his own memoir, from Jennifer Lee's book, from Rain Pryor's, and from what the court record has yielded to published research, assembled as a pattern rather than scattered across the chapters as incidents.

It ends on New Year's Day 1978 with a Magnum and his wife's car. They had been married since September and were separated inside the month.

Neither excuse nor sermon. The material is laid out and the reader does the rest.

Several people in this story are alive and in dispute with one another, and this book handles that in one way throughout: every contested claim is attributed by name in the narration and never absorbed into the biographer's voice. Where an allegation is reported, it is reported once, flat, with whatever response exists on the record — and where no published response exists, the book says that rather than assuming one.

The last chapter is about tape.

To escape Laff Records, Pryor signed a settlement that licensed the label everything it had recorded of him between 1969 and 1973. Laff worked that material until 1983, across twenty releases, retitled and repackaged.

The case is made by one fact. In 1982 a Laff album assembled from decade-old tape won the Grammy for Best Comedy Album while Richard Pryor was publicly telling voters to choose anybody else.

Forty-plus hours of unedited material were recovered in 2002. A fraction was released in 2005. The rest has never been heard.

He was born in Peoria on December 1, 1940, and died on December 10, 2005 — twenty-seven years to the day after Long Beach.

Chapter 1 · Peoria

Peoria sits on the Illinois River, and for most of the last century it carried a reputation that contradicted itself. Part of it gave the country a proverb. The rest of it gave Richard Pryor a childhood.

The proverb is the famous one. Will it play in Peoria — the question asked of an act, a product, a slogan, a candidate, on the working theory that whatever the middle of the country would take, the country would take. The phrase made the town a synonym for the average American, and the average American it described was sensible, solvent and unshockable in no particular direction. It is still the first thing most people outside Illinois can tell you about the place. It is worth setting down at the start only because of how badly it fits what else was there.

What else was there is North Washington Street. Peoria was a wide-open river town and everybody knew it. Wide open is a term of art rather than a moral verdict. It does not mean that vice existed there, since vice existed everywhere; it means that vice was permitted to operate where it could be found, by people who did not particularly expect to be interrupted, out of premises that had doors and rents and staff and hours. A river city moves goods, and moving goods means moving men, and the trades that attach themselves to men in transit attach themselves hardest at the point where the boats stop and the money comes out of a pocket. Peoria was such a point. The district on North Washington Street was where that arrangement lived.

Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor was born into it on December 1, 1940.

The name is worth pausing on, because it is the first thing the record hands us and it is grander than the circumstances. It is the sort of name a family gives a child it has plans for, or a name assembled out of other people's names, and the record reached for this book does not say which, or who chose it, or whether anyone in the house ever used the whole of it. He would spend his professional life being announced, and he went out under two of those words. The rest sat in the paperwork.

The houses were run by his grandmother, Marie Carter. His mother, Gertrude Thomas, worked in them. His father, LeRoy Pryor, known all his life as Buck, was a boxer, a hustler and a pimp. Those sentences are close to the whole of what can be stated flatly about the household he arrived in, and every one of them is a job description rather than a person. That is the first difficulty this book has, and it is worth naming on the opening page rather than concealing it under atmosphere: the trades are documented, the interiors are not.

Any life of Pryor has to decide early how much weight to hang on that address, and most of them have hung too much. The brothel is an irresistible explanation. It arrives pre-loaded with everything a reader wants a comedian's origin to contain — squalor, secrecy, sex conducted as commerce in front of a watching child — and it can be made to account for the man in a paragraph, which is exactly the reason to distrust it. Two quick mass-market lives appeared in the years after the fire, Fred Robbins's in 1982 and Jeff Rovin's in 1984, and their value now is as a record of what the public was being told about him in those years rather than as sources for what happened in the Peoria of his childhood. The tone the material invites is Gothic, and Gothic is the wrong register, because it converts an economy into a haunting and a family into a set of grotesques.

The correction is recent. The standard life is Scott Saul's Becoming Richard Pryor, published in 2014, and it is the only one built on original archival research — Peoria municipal, school and court records, service material from the Army years, and interviews conducted long after the earlier books had settled the legend. What that work established, and what this chapter takes from it, is that Peoria was a real place with a real economy rather than a Gothic backdrop. The houses were not a crypt. They were a business, with the operating problems of a business, in a town whose officials had made their peace with it.

It is worth being exact about what such a documentary record can do, because the exactness is the argument. Municipal papers, school files and court dockets are very good at certain things and useless at others. They establish that a household existed at an address, that a property changed hands, that a boy was enrolled and then was not, that a man was charged. They fix the frame. They do not report a room. No court docket has ever recorded what a child understood while the adults around him were talking over his head, and no school register has ever noted why a boy came in tired. The documents are how we know the Peoria of this chapter is real. They are not how we will ever know what it felt like, and the gap between what they fix and what they cannot reach is where most biography goes wrong.

There is a further limit to declare. The papers underlying the archival account sit where such papers sit — the county's own files, the local-history holdings of the public library — and this book has not been through them. A companion digital archive of the Peoria documents is commonly cited alongside the standard life; it did not resolve when this book went looking for it. What follows therefore rests on published research rather than on the original files, and where that matters the text will say so rather than borrowing the authority of documents nobody here has handled.

Take the district itself. A place of that kind does not survive by stealth. Stealth is expensive and unreliable; a house that has to hide cannot advertise, cannot bank, cannot summon anyone when a customer turns violent, and cannot last. An open district survives instead on an understanding — that it will stay in one part of town, that it will not embarrass anyone, and that certain people will be kept comfortable. What the terms of that understanding were in Peoria, who set them, and what they cost the people who paid them are questions the county's own paper could answer and this chapter cannot. They exist in the record somewhere. They are not in this book, and it is better to say so than to improvise the arrangement out of what such arrangements usually looked like.

There is a consequence of openness that the Gothic version misses entirely. A hidden household is anonymous; a known one is not. If everybody in Peoria knew what stood on North Washington Street, then everybody in Peoria knew what the boy's family did, and he would have known that they knew, from about the age at which a child learns anything at all about how he is seen. That is a different childhood from the one the word secret implies. It is not a childhood of concealment; it is a childhood of having been placed — of walking into rooms where his position had already been assigned before he got there. Nothing in the record fixes when he understood this, and the book will not pretend otherwise. The structure of the town makes it very hard to believe he did not.

The same discipline applies to the houses themselves. The plural is in the record. The number is not, at least not here, and neither is the layout, the furniture, the count of women working at any given time, or which of the properties the family lived in as against which they worked. What those rooms looked like from the inside is not recoverable from anything this book has read, and the temptation to furnish them anyway — to put a piano in a corner and a stair rail under a small hand — is the first thing a biographer of Pryor has to refuse. The mood of this chapter is a child in a business, at the level of the furniture. The furniture itself has to stay unspecified, or it is being invented for effect.

The questions a reader most wants answered about that childhood are precisely the ones the paper does not reach. Who fed him. Who put him to bed, and where, and how close to the working part of the premises. Whether he was kept out of the front rooms or moved through them unremarked. Whether the women were kind to him, indifferent to him, or too tired at the end of a night to be either. Whether he was a novelty in the house or a nuisance. None of that is established, and the honest form of the sentence is that we do not know. What we know is the shape of the establishment and who ran it, which is not nothing — it is a great deal more than the earlier books had — but it is a floor plan without a household in it.

What can be said about Marie Carter is that she ran it. That verb carries more than it looks like it carries. Running houses meant holding or renting the premises, finding and keeping the women, setting the terms on which they worked, managing the money in a cash trade with no recourse to law, absorbing the risk of violence from customers and the risk of interference from the city, and doing all of it as a Black woman in an Illinois river town in the middle of the last century, in an economy that offered her almost nothing else at that scale. She was, in the plainest sense, a proprietor. She was also the head of the household in which her grandson was raised. Both facts are load-bearing and neither cancels the other. Her surname is neither his father's nor his mother's, which by itself explains nothing about the family's shape and is noted only because it is the kind of small discrepancy a document can settle and an anecdote cannot.

Gertrude Thomas worked in the houses. The sentence is short because the record is, and because the alternative to a short sentence here is a long one full of things nobody established. Her name survives in her son's: Thomas sits fourth in the string of names he was given, ahead of Pryor. What she wanted, whether she came to the work by choice or by pressure or by simple lack of any other paying option, what she made of the child, and what the child made of her, are not settled by anything reachable here. She is the figure in this chapter most at risk of being written by other people — by her son, who had every professional reason to shape her for effect, and by biographers who needed her to mean something. The honest position is that a woman who worked in that trade in that town in that decade had a life of her own, that the record of it is thin, and that thinness is not the same as absence.

LeRoy Pryor's trades were boxing, hustling and pimping, and in a town like that they were barely distinguishable from one another. Each of them turns on the same set of skills: reading a stranger fast, judging what he wants and what he will pay, controlling the terms of an encounter, and being physically willing when control fails. A boxer sells a crowd a fight. A hustler sells a mark a story. A pimp sells a customer a woman and sells a woman a version of her own position. Buck Pryor was competent at all of it, which is to say that he made his living managing what other people did with their bodies, including the body of his son's mother. It is possible to state that without condemning him in the abstract and without softening him into a period type, and this book will have to keep doing so, because what he did with his hands is still ahead of us.

Set the adults of that household side by side and a common feature emerges that matters more, for this book's purposes, than any of their individual biographies. All of them made their money by reading rooms. The proprietor read the customer at the door and decided whether he came in. The woman read him across the parlor and decided how it was going to go. The man in the street read the mark and decided what could be taken. In that house, the capacity to work out very quickly what a stranger wanted, what mood he was in, and what he was likely to do next was not a personality trait. It was the trade. It was how the rent got paid.

A child raised inside that arrangement acquires the skill the way a farmer's child acquires weather. Nobody sits him down. He absorbs it at the height he happens to be, which is the height of the chair legs and the table edge and the hem of a coat, and he learns it before he has any framework for what he is learning. The adults are not performing for him; he is beneath their attention most of the time, which is precisely why what he sees is unguarded. He watches an economy conducted at close range by people who cannot afford to misjudge anyone, and he is not told that this is unusual, because in that house it is not.

This is the argument the rest of the book will make, so it should be laid out cleanly now rather than sprung later. The freedom that everyone came to celebrate in Richard Pryor — the apparent absence of any filter between what he thought and what he said into a microphone, the willingness to hand an audience the worst of himself — was not a philosophy he arrived at, and it was not, at bottom, courage. It was a technique. It was learned early, in a room where the ability to see how a stranger was going to behave before he behaved was the difference between a bad night and a safe one, and where the child was the only person present with nothing to trade. He spent the next four decades converting that reflex into an art form, and the conversion worked so well that the reflex became invisible, including to him. What the technique cost is the subject of this book's later chapters. Where he got it is here.

None of which licenses the biographer to explain the man by the address. Plenty of children were raised in and around that district and became nothing in particular, which is the standard objection to any deterministic reading of a childhood, and it holds. The brothel does not produce the comedian. What it produces is a set of conditions — an unusual quantity of adult behavior observed at close quarters and without adult supervision, an early and unsentimental education in what people pay for and why, a household whose income depended on nobody misreading anybody, and a small boy inside it whose safety depended on the same thing. That is not an explanation. It is the material an explanation will have to account for.

One further matter has to be settled before the story starts moving, and it concerns the sources for everything that follows. Pryor published a memoir late, Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences, written with Todd Gold and issued in 1995. It is indispensable and it is unreliable, and it is both for the same reason: it is a comedian's account of his own life, shaped for effect by a man who had spent a career learning what a story needs in order to land. It contradicts itself in places and contradicts the documentary record in others. It will be used constantly in this book and it will be attributed every time, because there is a real difference between what happened and what he said happened, and that difference is one of the more interesting things about him. Where his is the only voice, the book says so. Where the paper disagrees with him, the book prints both.

The earlier biographies carry their own weather. The first serious one, by John A. Williams and Dennis A. Williams, came out in 1991, while he was alive and the fire was still the most recent large fact about him; it is valuable precisely because it was written before hindsight tidied the shape of the life. Furious Cool, by David Henry and Joe Henry, published in 2013, is not a research biography at all but a critical appreciation by two writers who love the work and who say so on the page. Each of these books is worth reading and each of them wants something. The archival account is the corrective, and even it is invested in a particular arc — the artist finding his voice — and is gentler with the violence than the record supports. There is no neutral life of this man. There is only a set of interested ones, read against each other and against the documents.

So the chapter ends where it has to end, with a birth date and a street and a short list of trades, and with an admission that the inside of the house is closed to us. He was born in Peoria on December 1, 1940, in a district anyone in the town could have directed a stranger to. His grandmother ran the houses; his mother worked in them; his father fought, hustled and lived off women. The town's other reputation, the one about playing in Peoria, was true at the same time and in the same place, which is the sort of contradiction a river city can hold without effort. Both Peorias were real, and the respectable one was not a lie told about the disreputable one — they were neighbors, and a district that operates in the open is a district the respectable town has agreed to keep.

He was raised in the Peoria that never got into the proverb, at the level of the furniture, watching adults conduct a business in which the whole art was to know what the person in front of you was about to do. He would spend his working life doing that in front of strangers, for money, with a microphone. The rest of this book is an attempt to work out what it cost him.