SKIN FLICK

Pryor enlightened his audience on race and interracial relationships using a flamboyant vocabulary that he’d learned growing up in his grandmother’s whorehouse. Illustration by Al Hirschfeld, courtesy of the Margo Feiden Galleries LTD

Winter, 1973. Late afternoon: the entr’acte between dusk and darkness, when the people who conduct their business in the street—numbers runners in gray chesterfields, out-of-work barmaids playing the dozens, adolescents cultivating their cigarette jones and lust, small-time hustlers selling “authentic” gold wristwatches that are platinum bright—look for a place to roost and to drink in the day’s sin. Young black guy, looks like the comedian Richard Pryor, walks into one of his hangouts, Opal’s Silver Spoon Café. A greasy dive with an R. & B. jukebox, it could be in Detroit or in New York, could be anywhere. Opal’s has a proprietor—Opal, a young and wise black woman, who looks like the comedian Lily Tomlin—and a little bell over the door that goes tink-a-link, announcing all the handouts and gimmes who come to sit at Opal’s counter and talk about how needy their respective asses are.

Black guy sits at the counter, and Opal offers him some potato soup—“something nourishing,” she says. Black guy has moist, on-the-verge-of-lying-or-crying eyes and a raggedy Afro. He wears a green fatigue jacket, the kind of jacket brothers brought home from ’Nam, which guys like this guy continue to wear long after they’ve returned home, too shell-shocked or stoned to care much about their haberdashery. Juke—that’s the black guy’s name—is Opal’s baby, flopping about in all them narcotics he’s trying to get off of by taking that methadone, which Juke and Opal pronounce “methadon”—the way two old-timey Southerners would, the way Juke and Opal’s elders might have, if they knew what that shit was, or was for.

Juke and Opal express their feelings for each other, their shared view of the world, in a lyrical language, a colored people’s language, which tries to atomize their anger and their depression. Sometimes their anger is wry: Opal is tired of hearing about Juke’s efforts to get a job, and tells him so. “Hand me that jive about job training,” she says. “You trained, all right. You highly skilled at not working.” But that’s not entirely true. Juke has submitted himself to the rigors of “rehabilitation.” “I was down there for about three weeks, at that place, working,” Juke says. “Had on a suit, tie. Shaving. Acting crazy. Looked just like a fool in the circus.” Pause. “And I’m fed up with it.” Pause. “Now I know how to do a job that don’t know how to be done no more.” Opal’s face fills with sadness. Looking at her face can fill your mind with sadness. She says, “For real?” It’s a rhetorical question that black people have always asked each other or themselves when they’re handed more hopelessness: Is this for real?

Night is beginning to spread all over Juke and Opal’s street; it is the color of a thousand secrets combined. The bell rings, and a delivery man comes in, carting pies. Juke decides that everyone should chill out—he’ll play the jukebox, they’ll all get down. Al Green singing “Let’s Stay Together” makes the pie man and Juke do a little finger-snapping, a little jive. Opal hesitates, says, “Naw,” but then dances anyway, and her shyness is just part of the fabric of the day, as uneventful as the delivery man leaving to finish up his rounds, or Opal and Juke standing alone in this little restaurant, a society unto themselves.

The doorbell’s tiny peal. Two white people—a man and a woman, social workers—enter Opal’s. Youngish, trenchcoated. And the minute the white people enter, something terrible happens, from an aesthetic point of view. They alienate everything. They fracture our suspended disbelief. They interrupt our identification with the protagonists of the TV show we’ve been watching, which becomes TV only when those social workers start hassling our Juke, our Opal, equal halves of the same resilient black body. When we see those white people, we start thinking about things like credits, and remember that this is a television play, after all, written by the brilliant Jane Wagner, and played with astonishing alacrity and compassion by Richard Pryor and Lily Tomlin on “Lily,” Tomlin’s second variety special, which aired on CBS in 1973, and which remains, a little over a quarter of a century later, the most profound meditation on race and class that I have ever seen on a major network.

“We’re doing some community research and we’d like to ask you a few questions,” the white woman social worker declares as soon as she enters Opal’s. Juke and Opal are more than familiar with this line of inquiry, which presumes that people like them are always available for questioning—servants of the liberal cause. “I wonder if you can tell me, have you ever been addicted to drugs?” the woman asks Juke.

Pryor-as-Juke responds instantly. “Yeah, I been addicted,” he says. “I’m addicted right now—don’t write it down, man, be cool, it’s not for the public. I mean, what I go through is private.” He is incapable of making “Fuck you” his first response—or even his first thought. Being black has taught him how to allow white people their innocence. For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don’t like, babies who throw up on you again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they’re babies. Eventually, you direct that anger at yourself—it has nowhere else to go.

Juke tries to turn the questioning around a little, through humor, which is part of his pathos. “I have some questions,” he tells the community researchers, then tries to approximate their straight, white tone: “Who’s Pigmeat Markham’s Mama?” he asks. “Wilt Chamberlain the tallest colored chap you ever saw?”

When the white people have left and Juke is about to leave, wrapped in his thin jacket, he turns to Opal and says, “You sweet. You a sweet woman. . . . I’ll think aboutcha.” His eyes are wide with love and need, and maybe fear or madness. “Be glad when it’s spring,” he says to Opal. Pause. “Flower!”

“Lily” was never shown again on network television, which is not surprising, given that part of its radicalism is based on the fact that it features a white female star who tries to embody a black woman while communicating with a black man about substantive emotional matters, and who never wears anything as theatrically simple as blackface to do it; Tomlin plays Opal in whiteface, as it were. Nevertheless, “Juke and Opal,” which lasts all of nine minutes and twenty-five seconds, and which aired in the same season in which “Hawaii Five-O,” “The Waltons,” and “Ironside” were among television’s top-rated shows, remains historically significant for reasons other than the skin game.

Pryor riffing and digressing in 1964 at Café Wha?: “No one was funnier, dearer, darker, heavier, stronger, more radical,” Lily Tomlin says of the retired comedian. “He was everything. And his humanity was just glorious.” Photographs by Jim Demetropoulos

As Juke, Richard Pryor gave one of his relatively few great performances in a project that he had not written or directed. He made use of the poignancy that marks all of his great comedic and dramatic performances, and of the vulnerability—the pathos cradling his sharp wit—that had seduced people into loving him in the first place. Tomlin kept Pryor on the show over objections from certain of the network’s executives, and it may have been her belief in him as a performer, combined with the high standards she set for herself and others, that spurred on the competitive-minded Pryor. His language in this scene feels improvised, confessional, and so internalized that it’s practically nonverbal: not unlike the best of Pryor’s own writing—the stories he tells when he talks shit into a microphone, doing standup. And as he sits at Opal’s counter we can see him falling in love with Tomlin’s passion for her work, recognizing it as the passion he feels when he peoples the stage with characters who might love him as much as Tomlin-as-Opal seems to now.