Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I understand there are a good many Southerners in the room tonight. I know the South very well. I spent twenty years there one night. . . .
It’s dangerous for me to go back. You see, when I drink, I think I’m Polish. One night I got so drunk I moved out of my own neighborhood. . . .
Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant, and this white waitress came up to me and said: “We don’t serve colored people here.”
I said: “That’s all right, I don’t eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.”
About that time these three cousins come in, you know the ones I mean, Klu, Kluck, and Klan, and they say: “Boy, we’re givin’ you fair warnin’. Anything you do to that chicken, we’re gonna do to you.” About then the waitress brought me my chicken. “Remember, boy, anything you do to that chicken, we’re gonna do to you.” So I put down my knife and fork, and I picked up that chicken, and I kissed it.
I went all the way back to childhood that night in the Playboy Club, to the smile Momma always had on her face, to the clever way a black boy learns never to let the bitterness inside him show. The audience fought me with dirty, little, insulting statements, but I was faster, and I was funny, and when that room broke it was like the storm was over. They stopped heckling and they listened. What was supposed to be a fifty-minute show lasted for about an hour and forty minutes. Every time I tried to get off the stage, they called me back. When I finally said good night, those Southerners stood up and clapped, and when I started toward the door they took money out of their pockets and gave it to me. And one of those Southerners looked at me and said: “You know, if you have the right managers, you’ll die a billionaire.” It was the greatest compliment I had ever gotten.
Hugh Hefner, the owner of the Playboy Club, caught the second show I gave that night. He signed me to a three-year contract, starting with $250 a week for six weeks in 1961. It was a hell of a thing for people to ask if I was working. I could stick out my chest and say: Yeah, baby, I’m over at the Playboy.
After Hefner hired me, all kinds of things started to happen. I started to get press notices, the newspapers sent people by to review my act, the columnists started quoting my jokes. I’d buy every paper every night, and if I saw my name in one I’d run over to another newsstand to make sure all the copies of that newspaper had my name in it. Time magazine ran my picture and a rave review. There were calls from agents and managers and night clubs and record companies. The phone never stopped ringing.
I got a lot of help that year. Tim Boxer, the newspaperman I met at The Fickle Pickle, was working hard as my press agent. Associated Booking was getting me jobs. Alex Drier, a big Chicago television personality, invited me by his house to talk about proper management. Alex lived on the Gold Coast of Chicago, and the night I drove out there the police stopped me three times along the way. They figured that any Negro there after dark could only be there to steal. I should have worn a chauffeur’s uniform. But it was worth it. When I finally got to his house, Alex was warm and friendly and encouraging and as helpful as usual. He introduced me to Ralph Mann and Marv Josephson, who became my managers. I got lawyers, Dick Shelton and Bernie Kleinman, to handle my account. When you’ve been busted as long as I had been busted, and suddenly people are waving contracts and money under your nose, you need good, honest, smart businessmen around you. You can’t go downtown to wheel and deal for yourself because you aren’t used to thinking like a big entertainer with a future; you’re still thinking like a guy who is busted.
Then I got a call to come to New York for the “Jack Paar Show.” The day I went was a hell of a day. First time I was ever in a jet, first time I ever stayed in a big white hotel. I met Joe Glaser, the head of Associated Booking, a man worth millions. He told me if there was anything I wanted in the hotel, just pick up the phone and call downstairs. His office would take care of the bill. By the time I got on the “Paar Show,” so much had happened to me that I wasn’t as nervous as I should have been. But it was a hell of a thing to be on national television, on the biggest show in the country, and be allowed to make honest racial jokes right in everybody’s living room. Being on the “Jack Paar Show” made me in America.
When I got back from New York, I called Lil from the airport. “Hey, baby, anything done happen in my life?”
“Well, Greg, David Susskind called, he wants you on his show, the Paar people called, they want you back again, and are you ready for the big one?”
“Yeah, baby, lay it on me.”
“They just came and repossessed your television set.”
“Good. Honey, don’t you worry about it.”
On the way back home, I stopped at my lawyers’ and asked them to get me the biggest color television set on the market.
“How big, Dick?”
“Tell them to go by my apartment and measure the doors. I want the set so big, they got to take all the doors down to get it in the house.”
And I told my lawyers to pay off the people who took the other set. Tell them to keep it. They pulled a trick on some poor people. But the trick was on them. They had given me time to pacify my family.
I didn’t have to pacify them any more. There were more television shows, and big night-club contracts, and concert offers, and articles about me in national magazines. I bought Lil a Thunderbird for her birthday that year. I got a kick out of the Thunderbird. Lil didn’t know how to drive, and that Thunderbird just sat out there in front of that furnished apartment on Wentworth Avenue. That was getting back at the system.
And then the big one. That August, Lynne Lucille, our second daughter, was born. In a private hospital.
I was growing by the minute, meeting fascinating people, like Hefner and Paar and Bob Hope. I was flying first-class to California and New York. One day, one of the biggest record companies called. They wanted me to cut a comedy record for them. I was thrilled. I’m sure I would have done it for them, but the man who came by to talk to me took me to the wrong restaurant—a fancy place called London House that scared me to death. The man ordered lobster tails, so I ordered lobster tails. When the waiter brought the lobster tails, I realized that I didn’t have the slightest idea how to eat them. So I watched the man from the record company. He squirted some lemon on his lobster, so I squirted some lemon on my lobster. But by the time I finished squirting, he had already taken his first swing at the tail, and cut it open. I had missed his move, and I didn’t know what to do. So I told him I had an upset stomach, and I walked out of the restaurant.
But a little while later, Colpix Records offered me a $25,000 advance for two albums. I took it. That really tied up a loose end for me, that $25,000 check. I wished I still had my telegram. I hadn’t really told a lie after all.
There were some other loose ends that got tied up that year. In May, I went back to Southern Illinois University with Dizzy Gillespie, for a concert. Doc Lingle was there, and the dean, and the president. I was a hero again.
And that summer, in San Francisco, I met Big Pres.
We didn’t talk very long. There wasn’t very much to say. He was married again, he had other children. He was working hard and living right. I still felt a lot of resentment toward him. And I was surprised to find he was only about my height, five-foot-ten. I had always thought of him as a giant.
I felt a little sorry for him, too, and I promised him that he was still the grandfather to my children, and that they would visit him. They would give him the respect they would have to give to any grandfather. I didn’t see him again that year, but I kept my promise about the children.
That fall, I went to Buffalo for an engagement, and after a show a guy came up and said there was a lady who wanted to see me. For some reason I knew immediately who it was. I knew she had been living in Buffalo for some years, and I was so nervous that I went back to my dressing room to smoke and go to the bathroom before I went to her table. And when I sat down and looked at her, I found out that when a man waits for something and begs for something and prays for something for twenty-two years, from the time he’s seven years old until he’s twenty-nine, that thing just doesn’t qualify any more. No, I didn’t want Helene Tucker any more. I was after a Helena, and I had her at home and her name was Lillian.
That was a big year, 1961. Made it to the top, and found my Daddy and found Helene Tucker, and wiped out that $25,000 lie. I came off the road in November, back to Chicago, thinking how I was going to wrap up this beautiful year in a final beautiful package. I had me a brilliant idea, and I schemed out one hell of a plot.
A friend of mine, an interior decorator, was in on the trick. We went and found an apartment in the Hyde Park section, an integrated building near the University. I told him to take that apartment and spare no expense. I want to move in on Christmas morning, and the only thing I want to take with me from the furnished apartment on Wentworth is the color television set, so I could watch them tear the doors down again. I want this place to be perfect. I want to walk in here on Christmas morning and start living in it, I want to open up that new refrigerator and cook ham and eggs.
He did a hell of a job, went and bought furniture and carpeting and drapes, and when I went back I nearly flipped. I couldn’t believe we were going to live in anything so beautiful. Now I brought my lawyer in on the trick. Three days before Christmas, I had him call Lil. He was supposed to tell her I was having trouble with my income tax. The Internal Revenue had taken every penny I had made for the entire year. We were broke again. I lay there in bed that morning, listening to Lil talk to him over the phone. I lay there waiting for her to come in and give me the bad news. And I waited. Finally, I couldn’t stay in bed, any more.
“Anybody call me while I was sleeping, Lil?”
“No, Greg.”
“But I heard the phone ring.”
“Oh, it was just the lawyer.”
“What about?”
“He didn’t tell me.”
I called him back, and asked why he hadn’t given Lil the message. He said he had.
When you have that Helena you’re just not going to hear any bad news from her lips. Nothing sounds bad to her when you’re around.
“Lil?”
“Yeah, Greg?”
“We’re going to have to sell the toys we bought the kids, and we’re going to have to give your car back.”
“That’s okay, Greg.”
“Baby, I’m sorry but it’s going to be the worst Christmas we ever had.”
“Don’t worry about anything, Greg, we’ll be all right.”
I had planned to stage a big eviction scene, but just looking at all that peace and trust in her face, I canceled that plan out.
There were still a lot of things that had to go into the new apartment that nobody but Lil could buy. So two days before Christmas, I told her that a friend of mine had called to ask if we could help out a young couple who had just moved to Chicago. The couple had some money, but no credit in town. Since the stores probably didn’t know yet that Dick Gregory was busted, we could open a charge account in our name for them, and we could help them buy their furnishings. Lillian said she’d be glad to help them.
We spent all that day shopping with this couple Lil didn’t know. Lil helped that woman pick out dishes and silverware and sheets and bedspreads and towels as carefully as if she were picking them out for herself. And somehow, Lil never caught on to the clever way that other woman made sure Lil liked something before she charged it. When we left the store, we had about ten cabs full of stuff, plus my car and my friend’s car. I sent Lil home in another cab, and we took the stuff to the new apartment.
We had no tree Christmas Eve, no toys for the kids, no gifts for each other. I told Lil I couldn’t take her to the club with me that night because I couldn’t afford to run my tab up. But after the show, I picked her up and carried her to a party in the Hyde Park section given by a big Chicago columnist, Tony Weitzel, and his wife, Carmen. He was in on the trick. Lil was fascinated by Tony’s apartment.
“If you really want to see something, Lil,” said Tony, “let me show you what one of these apartments looks like brand new.” He took a bunch of us up to the ninth floor.
Lil walked in that door, and it was beautiful to see the way her face lit up. “Oh, it’s lovely, it’s so fine. Those people will be so happy in here.”
She walked around and looked at the apartment, and her face was so full of happiness I almost cried. She was being happy for somebody else.
Then she noticed some of the things she had bought in the store two days before, and she grabbed my arm. “Greg, oh, Greg . . .”
And her eyes got wide, and her mouth fell open, and she saw one of Michele’s toys underneath the Christmas tree in the middle of the living-room floor. Lillian screamed, and she fainted.
That was Christmas, 1961, so different from all the Christmases I’d ever had. It was as if I had rolled it all together in one big ball, and bounced it, and while it was up in the air, said:
It’s get-even time, Santa.