Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

Overview

A major biography—intimate, gripping, revelatory—of an artist who revolutionized American comedy.

Richard Pryor may have been the most unlikely star in Hollywood history. Raised in his family’s brothels, he grew up an outsider to privilege. He took to the stage, originally, to escape the hard-bitten realities of his childhood, but later came to a reverberating discovery: that by plunging into the depths of his experience, he could make stand-up comedy as exhilarating and harrowing as the life he’d known. He brought that trembling vitality to Hollywood, where his movie career—Blazing Saddles, the buddy comedies with Gene Wilder, Blue Collar—flowed directly out of his spirit of creative improvisation. The major studios considered him dangerous. Audiences felt plugged directly into the socket of life.

Becoming Richard Pryor brings the man and his comic genius into focus as never before. Drawing upon a mountain of original research—interviews with family and friends, court transcripts, unpublished journals, screenplay drafts—Scott Saul traces Pryor’s rough journey to the heights of fame: from his heartbreaking childhood, his trials in the Army, and his apprentice days in Greenwich Village to his soul-searching interlude in Berkeley and his ascent in the “New Hollywood” of the 1970s.

Becoming Richard Pryor illuminates an entertainer who, by bringing together the spirits of the black freedom movement and the counterculture, forever altered the DNA of American comedy. It reveals that, while Pryor made himself a legend with his own account of his life onstage, the full truth of that life is more bracing still.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062123305
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	12/09/2014
Pages:	608
Sales rank:	963,279
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Scott Saul is a professor of English at the University of California–Berkeley. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times, and The Nation, among other publications. He is the author of Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Table of Contents

Author's Note xi

Prologue 1

Part 1 Up From Peoria

Chapter 1 Dangerous Elements 7

Chapter 2 The Backside of Life 20

Chapter 3 The Law of the Lash 37

Chapter 4 Glow, Glow Worm, Glow 59

Chapter 5 The Boot 75

Chapter 6 The Measure of a Man 92

Part 2 Man Of A Thousand Rubber Faces

Chapter 7 In Search of Openness 111

Chapter 8 Mr. Congeniality 128

Chapter 9 An Irregular Regular 147

Chapter 10 The Person in Question 166

Part 3 In The House Of Pain

Chapter 11 The King Is Dead 187

Chapter 12 Black Sun Rising 209

Chapter 13 Irreconcilable Differences 225

Chapter 14 I'm a Serious Mother 245

Part 4 King Of The scene Stealers

Chapter 15 The More I Talk, the Less I Die 273

Chapter 16 Black Goes First 299

Chapter 17 Be Glad When It's Spring, Flower 318

Chapter 18 Number One with a Bullet 336

Part 5 The Funniest Man On The Planet

Chapter 19 Every Nigger Is a Star 361

Chapter 20 Hustling 384

Chapter 21 A Man of Parts 404

Chapter 22 Giving Up Absolutely Nothing 427

Chapter 23 Can I Speak to God Right Away? 448

Epilogue 471

Acknowledgments 489

Notes 493

Index 565

Editorial Reviews

11/17/2014
Drawing on interviews with family and friends, unpublished journals and court records, Saul (Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t) jauntily chronicles the year-by-year, and almost day-by-day, evolution of the young man from Peoria who developed into the man that Jerry Seinfeld called “the Picasso of our profession.” Saul examines the forces that propelled Pryor to the top of his game in the late 1970s, tracing the comedian’s early years being raised in a brothel and his introduction to improvisational acting by teacher Juliette Whittaker to his days in New York’s Greenwich Village and Manny Roth’s Café Wha? honing his skills. In his heady days in L.A. he played baseball with Aaron Spelling and Bobby Darin. Saul then documents Pryor’s retreat to Berkeley in 1969, where he found himself part of the city’s counterculture movement. Glaringly honest, Saul shines a light on Pryor’s descent into drugs, his brutal treatment of his wives, and his fretful insecurities about his own abilities. In the end, Pryor emerges as a revolutionary stand-up comic who perfected the art of dramatizing his own imperfections, and the world’s; a trenchant social critic, often called “Dark Twain”; and a crossover artist whose work in film often failed to achieve the incendiary raw power of his live comic shows. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

Absorbing, incisive....With skill and insight, Saul shows how both the best and the worst of Pryor could merge into a great body of work unmatched by anyone who was ever paid to make people laugh.” — USA Today

“The most detailed and rigorously researched work on the comic’s life and performances....Pryor was both the quintessential hipster and the vulnerable, damaged witness of his age...Becoming Richard Pryor captures these dimensions of the persona and the man behind it very well.” — Washington Post

“Sharply observed....lays out the case that Pryor was not only a comic genius but ‘a bellwether of the great changes of postwar American life, some of which he helped incite.’...Riveting.” — TIME magazine

“A gripping read....The only book you need on its subject.” — Sunday Times (London)

“A pop-culture masterpiece of exhaustive reporting, psychological insight and elegant writing.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Insightful and expansive, Scott Saul’s remarkable biography of the now legendary comic chronicles how a sensitive brilliant man with a hardscrabble past mined his personal life for American entertainment, revolutionizing stand-up along the way.” — Playboy, "This Winter's Best Books"

“Masterful.” — Newsweek

“A fascinating, exhilarating read. Saul dives deeper and comes up with more treasure than previous biographers; he deftly traces the stamp that Pryor left on American culture at one of its more impressionable moments…I didn’t want to put the book down and couldn’t wait to get back to it.” — Michael Chabon, bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and Telegraph Avenue

“Becoming Richard Pryor is a compulsively readable book that sets a new gold standard for American biography. Scott Scaul’s research is extraordinary; his writing his taut, elegant, and insightful; and he captures both the hilarity and pain that made Richard Pryor such a towering figure.” — Debby Applegate, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography and author of the forthcoming Madam: The Notorius Life and Times of Polly Adler

“The Richard Pryor biography we’ve been waiting for.” — Deadspin

“With Becoming Richard Pryor, Scott Saul gives us the fullest picture yet of a great and puzzling American figure. What starts as a procedural on the making of an artist becomes a story of a man desperate to be free.” — RJ Smith, author of The One: The Life and Music of James Brown

“Pryor has had the good fortune to fall into the hands of a writer with the smarts to understand both his greatness and his madness. Becoming Richard Pryor is a first-rate biography.” — Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders and Raging Bulls

“Becoming Richard Pryor takes you on a wild, tumultuous ride. Scott Saul’s superb storytelling is a perfect match for his subject—he keeps you mesmerized, laughing, crying, stunned, hungry, and above all, surprised.” — Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

“Becoming Richard Pryor is a book that breaks new ground...Saul details the amazing way that Richard found his way out of the life for which he seemed destined and into the world of the performing arts.” — New York Times Book Review

“This is a well-executed study that gives Pryor due credit as pioneer, intellectual and artist. Better written and more thoughtful than David and Joe Henry’s Furious Cool. The latter remains worth reading, but this book is the place to start.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Magisterial....Brilliantly reveals the glorious highs and lows of Pryor’s life....Becoming Richard Pryor reveals itself to be not simply a biography, but the compassionate map of a terra incognita.” — Independent

“Drawing on interviews with family and friends, unpublished journals and court records, Saul jauntily chronicles the year-by-year, and almost day-by-day, evolution of Richard Pryor. Glaringly honest, Saul shines a light on a revolutionary stand-up comic who perfected the art of dramatizing his own imperfections, and the world’s.” — Publishers Weekly

“Drawing on interviews with family and friends, unpublished journals and court records, Saul jauntily chronicles the year-by-year, and almost day-by-day, evolution of Richard Pryor. Glaringly honest, Saul shines a light on a revolutionary stand-up comic who perfected the art of dramatizing his own imperfections, and the world’s.” — Booklist (starred review)

From the Publisher

A fascinating, exhilarating read. Saul dives deeper and comes up with more treasure than previous biographers; he deftly traces the stamp that Pryor left on American culture at one of its more impressionable moments…I didn’t want to put the book down and couldn’t wait to get back to it.

Michael Chabon

Insightful and expansive, Scott Saul’s remarkable biography of the now legendary comic chronicles how a sensitive brilliant man with a hardscrabble past mined his personal life for American entertainment, revolutionizing stand-up along the way.

"This Winter's Best Books" Playboy

Sharply observed....lays out the case that Pryor was not only a comic genius but ‘a bellwether of the great changes of postwar American life, some of which he helped incite.’...Riveting.

TIME Magazine

Masterful.

Newsweek

The most detailed and rigorously researched work on the comic’s life and performances....Pryor was both the quintessential hipster and the vulnerable, damaged witness of his age...Becoming Richard Pryor captures these dimensions of the persona and the man behind it very well.

Washington Post

Becoming Richard Pryor is a book that breaks new ground...Saul details the amazing way that Richard found his way out of the life for which he seemed destined and into the world of the performing arts.

New York Times Book Review

01/01/2015
There are many things to praise about this title, not least of which that it is an exhaustive historical account of the legendary entertainer Pryor's life (1940–2005) and career up to the late 1970s. Saul (Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't) marshals more archival resources and personal interviews than any previous biographer of the comedian, providing a comprehensive chronology of his early years. The exacting detail is often painful reading. Pryor grew up in a brothel (a contested biographical detail until now), and even while striving toward themes of liberation in his work, he abused lovers and substances prodigiously. Yet the author demonstrates how Pryor's background and turmoil, as well as larger social and political forces of the 1960s and 1970s, fueled his creativity and willingness to take artistic risks. For now this book serves as the final word on how its subject rose to occupy a singular spot in the American comedy and cinema landscape. VERDICT This essential book for Pryor enthusiasts will be equally valuable to scholars of modern American history and popular culture.—Chris Martin, North Dakota State Univ. Libs., Fargo

Library Journal

2014-10-20
Smart blend of social history and biography centering on one of the funniest—and most tragic—people of our time.By Saul's (English/Univ. of California; Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties, 2003) account, Richard Pryor (1940-2005) wrestled out the demons of physical abuse, racism and addiction on a stage that at first wasn't quite sure what to do with him. That effort produced some strange results. One of the more interesting detours in this already digressive narrative follows the course of the autobiographical film This Can't Be Happening to Me, a look at Pryor's childhood in a brothel; the film started as a broad comedy, then became serious, then took on the coloring of a "tripped-out imagination that made [the film] cousin to a midnight movie like El Topo." As Saul observes, it helped that Pryor and the family that so often figured in his comedy were "powerfully dramatic people," thus it was natural that Pryor should so readily bend genres to insert seriousness in funny situations and comedy into grave discussions. Saul's psychobiographical essays are illuminating, as when he writes of a young Pryor discovering that white girls were more receptive to him than were white boys. Race is a driving theme throughout, and Saul closes on a note that is both hopeful and resigned. Asked whether he viewed the world in terms of black and white, Pryor said, "I see people…as the nucleus of a great idea that hasn't come to be yet." Saul is sometimes guilty of forced analogies, as when he finds an echo of the resignation of Richard Nixon, whom a Republican senator compared to "a piano player in a whorehouse who claims not to know what's going on upstairs," in Pryor's own time in the house of bawd. Still, this is a well-executed study that gives Pryor due credit as pioneer, intellectual and artist. Better written and more thoughtful than David and Joe Henry's Furious Cool (2013). The latter remains worth reading, but this book is the place to start.

Kirkus Reviews

The Richard Pryor biography we’ve been waiting for.

Deadspin

A pop-culture masterpiece of exhaustive reporting, psychological insight and elegant writing.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

Becoming Richard Pryor is a compulsively readable book that sets a new gold standard for American biography. Scott Scaul’s research is extraordinary; his writing his taut, elegant, and insightful; and he captures both the hilarity and pain that made Richard Pryor such a towering figure.

Debby Applegate

A gripping read....The only book you need on its subject.

Sunday Times (London)

Absorbing, incisive....With skill and insight, Saul shows how both the best and the worst of Pryor could merge into a great body of work unmatched by anyone who was ever paid to make people laugh.

USA Today

Masterful.

Newsweek

The most detailed and rigorously researched work on the comic’s life and performances....Pryor was both the quintessential hipster and the vulnerable, damaged witness of his age...Becoming Richard Pryor captures these dimensions of the persona and the man behind it very well.

Washington Post

Absorbing, incisive....With skill and insight, Saul shows how both the best and the worst of Pryor could merge into a great body of work unmatched by anyone who was ever paid to make people laugh.

USA Today

With Becoming Richard Pryor, Scott Saul gives us the fullest picture yet of a great and puzzling American figure. What starts as a procedural on the making of an artist becomes a story of a man desperate to be free.

RJ Smith

Magisterial....Brilliantly reveals the glorious highs and lows of Pryor’s life....Becoming Richard Pryor reveals itself to be not simply a biography, but the compassionate map of a terra incognita.

Independent Whig.

Pryor has had the good fortune to fall into the hands of a writer with the smarts to understand both his greatness and his madness. Becoming Richard Pryor is a first-rate biography.

Peter Biskind

Becoming Richard Pryor takes you on a wild, tumultuous ride. Scott Saul’s superb storytelling is a perfect match for his subject—he keeps you mesmerized, laughing, crying, stunned, hungry, and above all, surprised.

Robin D. G. Kelley

Drawing on interviews with family and friends, unpublished journals and court records, Saul jauntily chronicles the year-by-year, and almost day-by-day, evolution of Richard Pryor. Glaringly honest, Saul shines a light on a revolutionary stand-up comic who perfected the art of dramatizing his own imperfections, and the world’s.

Booklist (starred review)

Magisterial....Brilliantly reveals the glorious highs and lows of Pryor’s life....Becoming Richard Pryor reveals itself to be not simply a biography, but the compassionate map of a terra incognita.

Independent

Sharply observed....lays out the case that Pryor was not only a comic genius but ‘a bellwether of the great changes of postwar American life, some of which he helped incite.’...Riveting.

TIME magazine