Following my hero, Gay Talese, I began writing nonsports pieces for magazines, somehow specializing in cop stories. This was in 1963, a year after the Mets’ first spring training and a year before Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title. I wasn’t committed to sportswriting yet, and I didn’t want to be pigeonholed for life. I hadn’t yet figured out that sports led me to everything and everything led me back to sports.
My favorite piece, for the Times Sunday magazine, was about two narcotics detectives who disguised themselves as bums, old ladies, hippies, to bust heroin dealers. Hanging with the cops was exhilarating. Now, these were authentic men! They had guns! We swaggered through the streets, daring the bad guys to make their moves!
The magazine article attracted book offers. The cops told me to go ahead and make myself a deal but leave them the movie rights because there was a huge case they were wrapping up that would make us all rich and famous. I signed a contract for a nonfiction book about the central characters in one of their big drug cases. It was less about them than about NarcoWorld, including the dealers and the buyers, but they were key characters. I got my first advance, $1,500, one-third of it up front. I felt like a real writer.
I kept hanging with them, but as time went on I began liking the older, alpha cop, Eddie Egan, less and less. He was a self-absorbed jock who had had pro baseball dreams. He was hard and violent. I thought his partner, Sonny Grosso, had a soul, but I wasn’t sure Eddie had one. One day Eddie and I went up to Harlem on a case (people thought I was a cop by this time, or maybe an assistant DA), and he kicked in an apartment door and started slapping a young white woman who cowered on her bed clutching a mixed-race baby. He stopped when he remembered I was there. Later, he said to me, “I hate it when white women fuck niggers.”
I sensed that as I dug deeper into the story, there would be more incidents like that one. There was no way I could write about these guys as heroes and no way I could write the truth so long as they had some say over the final product. I hadn’t promised them veto power, but I had promised them a look at the manuscript. I wanted to write this book, a nonsports book, but I returned the advance. I was glad I had a day job.
A few weeks later, the book editor called back. He was looking for a writer to collaborate with Dick Gregory on his autobiography. Gregory was already under contract but hadn’t clicked with any of the writers who had been sent to meet with him. I wasn’t that interested in ghosting a book, but I was interested in meeting Gregory, the first black comedian to make it in the major white clubs. He was earning $5,000 a week! While much of his act was standard stand-up about dumb cousins and vicious mothers-in-law, his racial rim shots (“’Leven months I sat in at a restaurant, then they integrated and didn’t even have what I wanted”) were repeated everywhere as social commentary if not uncomfortable truths (“We won’t go to war in the Congo ’cause we’re afraid our soldiers will bring back war brides”). At thirty, he was hailed as the Jackie Robinson of topical comedy, a Will Rogers for the Atomic Age.
So on the evening of September 16, 1963, I walked into a New York City hotel suite, where I was politely told by Gregory’s wife, Lillian, that he was in the bedroom and could not be disturbed.
I knocked and without waiting for an answer barged in. I introduced myself to a pudgy man in underwear curled into a fetal position on his bed. I sat down and asked him why he was crying.
He slowly rolled over and looked up. “Don’t you read the papers?”
“Sure,” I said. “I work for one.”
“Didn’t you read about the four little girls who were murdered yesterday in a Birmingham church?”
“It was terrible,” I said. “Now, about this book thing . . .”
But he had rolled onto his back and was talking to the ceiling. “How can the white man be so evil to kill four little girls who weren’t even demonstrating for their civil rights?”
He talked for hours, deep into the night, about the racial cancer destroying the nation and how most of the blame was on people who looked like me. You people stunt the lives of children and break up families, he said, you have the power to wound the innocent simply by calling them “nigger.” I took some notes because that’s what I did, but I mostly wondered what I was doing there. This man was not the cool, slangy hipster I had seen on nightclub stages, the Chris Rock–Dave Chappelle–Bill Cosby of his time whose humorous, rats-to-riches autobiography I was supposed to write.
The man on the bed, alternately blubbering and ranting about the Birmingham bombing, was not funny or particularly insightful, I thought at first, just angry. I resented his making me the stand-in for all hateful white men. But something kept me there, and the more I listened the more I was engaged. As disturbing as it was, it began to make sense. I wondered if we could find a common ground. I began to wonder how I would feel right now if I were black. I’d never had a black friend. The only black person I knew was my parents’ cleaning lady. Gregory was taking me somewhere I had never been. I was open, and he must have sensed it. When I finally got up to leave, he asked me to come back the next day so we could start writing the book.
It went badly. Greg was sometimes an hour or two late for an interview session, and when I complained, he’d say, “I can tell you been waitin’, baby, you sound colored.” He always called me “baby.” He didn’t remember my name.
I began to envy the collaborators he had rejected. Once Greg and I started tape-recording, it got even worse, endless, unusable diatribes against white America. He had strong arguments and solid facts, but this was deadly speechifying, hardly the human stuff of autobiography.
I took it for about two weeks of sporadic sessions before or after his nightclub appearances and my Times assignments. One day, I waited three hours for him with a prepared monologue. I told him that I didn’t need this jive job badly enough to put up with an irresponsible, selfish fool trying to hang me up in reverse prejudice. In fact, I declared pompously, the only thing I didn’t have against him was his color.
I stood up, said good-bye, and marched out of his hotel room to the elevator. He followed me and got in. On the way down he said, “Bob Lipsyte, right?”
“Too late,” I said.
He said he was going to have a sandwich at the hotel coffee shop. Would I join him?
While we ate, he kept repeating my name. When we finished, he said, “Let’s go back up. I think we’re ready to write a book. A real book, one they’re not expecting.”
We went back up. The book that emerged was basically my editing of taped hours of emotional storytelling that my wife-to-be, Marjorie, transcribed when she got home from her Times job in the music department. She typed and cried, later laughed, along with Greg crying and laughing as he lay on his hotel bed like a patient in therapy. His stories were raw and unsentimental. The most poignant scenes for Margie and me were of little Richard sitting with his mom, who was dressed and rouged, waiting for Greg’s dad, Big Pres, to make a rare cameo in their lives. It always ended with Big Pres beating both of them for asking him to stay.
It was a thrilling, intense education in race, politics, comedy. Being with Greg in those tumultuous years of 1963 and 1964 informed the rest of my career, most immediately my coverage of Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali. We never stopped talking, mostly about civil rights and Vietnam as Americans went south in voter registration drives and to Asia to fight an illegitimate war triggered by the phony Gulf of Tonkin incident. Medgar Evers and President Kennedy were murdered, and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., received the Nobel Peace Prize. Black ghettos blew up into violence during “the long, hot summer” of 1964. By the end of that year, the conservative white Berkeley campus had erupted into riots during the Free Speech movement that eventually led to the university lifting a ban on student activism.
We also talked sports. Greg had gone to Southern Illinois University on a track scholarship. One of the first stories he told me about himself once we were past the diatribes was how he had become an activist. I didn’t believe it.
In 1951, his junior year in high school, Greg told me, he had set a St. Louis schoolboy track record for the mile. When it didn’t appear in the annual city yearbook the following September, he complained to his coach, who explained that only records set by white boys were listed. Greg was outraged, and he ditched school the next day to go to City Hall to protest to the mayor. It also happened to be the day that thousands of other African-American schoolkids were marching on City Hall to protest overcrowded conditions in their segregated schools. Greg was quickly recognized as a sports star. It was assumed he was there to protest with them, and he was appointed a marshal and asked to run up and down the line of march, maintaining order and morale. He was interviewed by newspapers and local TV. By the time they got to City Hall, Greg was talking about overcrowded conditions. When he got home, his mother was in tears. Someone on TV had called him a Communist. He told me it was the beginning of his political awakening.
It sounded like one of those celebrity creation myths. But when I checked out the story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I was surprised. Dates, quotes, everything matched what Greg had told me. I began thinking about my own racism. Why had I thought his story was piped? And I began to trust him. Even in his hyperbole there would always be a core of truth.
Once we got cooking, we taped mostly early in the morning in New York or Chicago or San Francisco after Greg had appeared at a club. It would be a long and wonderful night that began with Greg ambling onstage, climbing on his stool, lighting a cigarette, and asking the nearest white waiter for a Scotch and soda. When the drink arrived, Greg would shake his head and say, “Damn, Governor Barnett should see this.” The audience would laugh and then applaud the subtle compliment he had paid them and their city, so far advanced beyond segregationist Ross Barnett’s Mississippi. I thought many of them felt that the money they were spending in the club was somehow a contribution to “the cause.” And in some ways it was; the audience never knew that Greg stipulated in his contracts that the nightclub had to hire some black waiters, at least during his engagement.
We’d go out to eat after the gig, at least half-a-dozen people, to whatever joint was still open, and Greg would order for everyone, much too much food. He would taste everything, almost delicately, savoring bites, obviously feeling comforted by the abundance. He had been hungry as a kid, and he remembered eating the silky sand that blew through St. Louis in the summertime.
Just before Christmas 1963, after a late show at Mister Kelly’s in Chicago, I got the idea for the name for our book, although I didn’t know it right away. (The approved working title at the time was “Callous on My Soul,” which I hated.) We were eating at Mammy’s Pancake House, an all-night luncheonette on Rush Street, where Greg had ordered three kinds of pancakes—chocolate, Dutch apple, and sausage—roasted barbecue, scrambled eggs, and a breakfast steak when he suddenly said, “Someday I’m going to open up my own restaurant, call it ‘Nigger,’ just one table, five waiters, and an orchestra, the royal treatment to anybody who has the guts to come in. And every white man in the South will be giving me free publicity.”
And then we went back to his hotel room to tape. In those eerie hours before dawn, he would lie on his bed and reach back to Richard Claxton Gregory, one of six kids, a welfare case born on Columbus Day 1932, who fantasized that school closed every year in honor of his birthday.
He often talked about his “monster,” his term for the ego, ambition, drive, and survival skills that had outwitted bigger boys with humor, kept him running track until he was out of the ghetto, pushed him to polish his comedy act at parties and black honky-tonks until January 13, 1961, when the Chicago Playboy Club called him to replace the popular double-talk comic Professor Irwin Corey, who was sick. When Greg arrived, the manager was blocking the stage door. He was panicked at the number of southern conventioneers in the house. Maybe another night. But the monster refused to be canceled. The manager sighed and opened the door.
Greg had a plan. He started by making fun of himself.
“They asked me to buy a lifetime membership in the NAACP, but I told them I buy a week at a time. Hell of a thing to buy a lifetime membership, then wake up one morning and find out the country’s been integrated.”
Now he had them, and he could say anything he wanted as long as he stayed away from sex.
“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 then these three cousins come in, you know the ones I mean, Klu, Kluck, and Klan, and they say, ‘Boy, we’re giving you fair warning. Anything you do to that chicken, we’re going to do to you.’ So I put down my knife and fork, and I picked up that chicken and I kissed it.”
Sometime early in that first Playboy show a heckler in the back yelled, “Nigger!” Greg said, “Say that again, please. My contract calls for fifty dollars every time that word is used.”
That fifty-minute show lasted almost two hours because the crowd wouldn’t let him leave the stage. When he finally did, he got a standing ovation. Hugh Hefner showed up for the second show that night, and when it was over he signed Greg to a three-year deal.
The monster that had led him through the stage door would never concede defeat or admit it had been tricked. It also worked in smaller, more subtle ways.
The assistant pastor of a black church in Harlem, a theatrical white man who called himself “a public relations man for God,” had invited Greg to speak one Sunday morning at a service for young prison inmates. Greg accepted immediately. But when he and I arrived at the large, ornate church, it was filled with hundreds of well-fed, well-dressed parishioners. He’d been tricked into showing up for the fat cats.
Greg asked, “Where are the prisoners?”
The assistant pastor smiled. “Their services are conducted much, much too early for an entertainer with your hours.”
Greg stalked out of the church. “You can tell them the incense made me sick.”
The assistant pastor, sweat bubbling on his pale, fat face, blocked Greg at the bottom of the steps. He sank to his knees.
“They saw you, the pastor is such a tyrant, I’ll be in such trouble,” he babbled, wringing his hands. “I plead with you in the name of God.”
I felt embarrassed for the minister and began looking for a cab. I assumed that Greg, furious at being conned, would let the fat fool grovel, then stomp away.
“Get up,” I heard Greg say in a flat, hard voice. “I’ll go in.”
We sat in a back pew and watched an elaborate service conducted by ministers in flowing robes. Greg was very still, a smile tugging the corners of his mouth. I wondered what he was plotting. When his time came, he strolled down the aisle to the pulpit, stiff-legged, almost swaggering. A gunfighter’s walk.
He looked down at the congregation and told them how the middle-class Negro churchgoer was a hypocrite for avoiding the civil rights struggle.
“You sing the hymn ‘Were you there when they crucified the Lord?’ Well, a crucifixion is going on right now in America. Were you there? That’s what your grandchildren are going to ask. What are you going to tell them? That you were just standing around?”
After twenty minutes, he stopped abruptly and walked out of the church. He was grinning when I caught up with him on the street. “Man, if I had been mentally prepared I would have knocked those people into the aisles, no preacher in America could have followed me.” He began to laugh and slap his leg. That was the monster in action.
Once we decided on the title, Nigger, he held his ground against the publishing house. I loved his dedication: “Dear Momma—Wherever you are, if you ever hear the word ‘nigger’ again, remember they are advertising my book.”
The book has been in print for more than forty-five years, and although the reviews were mostly good to great, the title didn’t help sales. Most blacks and fair-minded whites hated the title and found it hard to ask for the book by name. The whites who liked the title weren’t about to buy a black man’s book. In retrospect, I think it was a mistake, destructive defiance on both our parts. These days, it’s even harder to mention the title. I find myself talking about a book that I am very proud to have helped write as “Dick Gregory’s autobiography.”
By the time Nigger came out in 1964, Greg’s entertainment career was in a downward spiral. The nightclub stage wasn’t big enough for him anymore. He was integrating jails, schools, restaurants. Club owners and TV producers were unwilling to book a performer who might show up late or not at all because he had decided at the last minute that flying south to a civil rights demonstration was more important than making white liberals laugh. Civil rights leaders have said that Greg’s appearances at demonstrations—which invariably brought a Huntley-Brinkley NBC news crew—not only advanced the cause but persuaded most hard-core segregationists to leave their guns at home.
Playboy called him the Scarlet Pimpernel of the civil rights movement, and the writer Thomas Morgan called him the Lone Ranger, but too many commentators suggested that he was merely demonstrating for publicity, he wasn’t sincere. When he ran for mayor of Chicago, journalists wondered if he were a serious candidate. They weren’t interested if he was merely trying to get attention for issues such as welfare, housing, jobs, hunger, health care, and police brutality.
I enjoyed campaigning with him, especially when a street hustler would sidle up and ask what he could do to help. Greg would laugh and say, “Really be something else if the rumor got out that Mayor Daley’s precinct captains were paying $20 a vote this year, then, when they come around with the usual $2, folks be so mad they run him out of town.”
In 1968, Greg ran for president. I voted for him, of course, and when my friends upbraided me as if it were my fault that Richard Nixon had beat Hubert Humphrey, I’d quote Greg: “Look, brother, you got two girls and one is a full-time prostitute and the other is a weekend prostitute. If you choose the lesser of two evils and marry the weekend prostitute, you’re only fooling yourself if you don’t think you’re marrying a whore.”
I don’t believe that now, and I wonder if I believed it then or was merely so delighted to be able to vote for a person who had eaten in my house. The lesser of two evils is still evil, that’s true, but isn’t less evil better than more evil?
The year after Greg didn’t win the presidency, a book I hadn’t written about the narcotics detectives Egan and Grosso came out. It was called The French Connection. The Academy Award–winning movie followed three years later, in 1971, the year I left the Times and about the time Greg left the nightclub stand-up circuit. We didn’t see much of each other for the next few years. We kept up through late-night phone calls. He faded from media view except when he made an outrageous claim, suggesting in 1981 that the seventeen black children murdered in Atlanta had been part of “fiendish” government medical experiments. His antiabortion stand infuriated Margie and troubled me.
He began fasting in civil rights demonstrations and lost more than 60 pounds. It became the flip side of his obsession with food. He started running again, in marathons. He hawked a diet powder on the New Age circuit. He helped the boxer Riddick Bowe trim his weight on a kelp diet and win the heavyweight championship.
We had a wonderful reunion in 1990 when he came on my WNET public affairs TV show, The Eleventh Hour. It was vintage Greg. He talked about rich women who get prescription drugs when their husbands cheat on them and poor women who go out and get crack. “Both of them are drugged out so they don’t have to deal with their problems from an ethical standpoint, from a spiritual standpoint.”
He talked about black folks needing to change their priorities. “Michael Jackson comes to town, I buy my child a forty-dollar ticket and give him twenty dollars to buy a silly glove. I never gave that child twenty dollars to join the NAACP.”
It was a reaffirmation of my old admiration for him. Greg has said that there have been only three comic geniuses in America: Mark Twain, Lenny Bruce, and Richard Pryor. Pryor credited Greg with opening the door for him. I wonder if Greg would have gotten into that league had he stayed primarily in stand-up comedy, especially after late-night TV shows opened up for black comics. But Greg followed his monster. Civil rights activism made him a hero but a dangerous commodity. His forays into the New Age nutritional circuit, which I never fully understood, seemed more calling than commercial opportunism, but they diminished his mainstream reputation as a social commentator.
In the spring of 2009, when I saw an ad for a rare appearance at Manhattan’s comedy club Caroline’s, I was torn. I desperately wanted to see him, but I was afraid of being disappointed, of having my memory smudged. I decided to show up unannounced. I’d catch him afterward. Maybe.
It was a ten o’clock weeknight show, and the crowd was predominantly middle-aged, mostly white, lots of jeans, sweatshirts, and running shoes. Tourists. They were old enough to agree with the MC who called him “the legendary comedian.” My nervousness that he wouldn’t be funny, that he would be out of touch, evaporated quickly.
“I’m suing Bernie Madoff. That’s right. A civil rights suit. He didn’t rip off any black people.”
He was onstage for an hour and a half, sitting down, punctuating his rap with broad winks, pauses, head and eye rolls. I recognized a lot of the 1964 riffs that people talked about.
“If Jesus had been electrocuted, we’d be wearing little chairs around our necks—how do you make the sign of the chair?”
And my favorite of the night: “Biggest loss of the Obama presidency is for black entertainers and athletes. Sports and entertainment used to be the only tickets out. We’re not better athletes and dancers, just twenty-two million parents making their kids practice.”
Afterward, happy and proud, I decided not to try to fight through the crowd outside his dressing room. I wanted to keep the high, think about the past flowing into the present, how our subjects choose us, and how lucky we are when they choose wisely. Greg had taken me through a door into another world and changed me.
I remembered how thrilling and exhausting it was hanging with Greg in the sixties, always on the run to a cab to a train to a plane, ending up in an unscheduled city a stop ahead of our clothes, marching in a demonstration, sitting in on a Supreme Court hearing (where a black janitor let us in a side door and slipped Greg some papers), whispering in a restaurant bathroom with the water running to foil listening devices. Years later when I got my FBI file through the Freedom of Information Act, I wondered if some of the redacted pages were about Greg. Joe Louis, Jim Brown, civil rights leaders, writers, politicians, gangsters, blues singers paraded through his dressing room. He took me on visits to Malcolm X and Harry Belafonte.
Once I took him along to visit Muhammad Ali, who covered the phone and asked Greg what advice he should give to some Muslim ministers calling from Africa.
“Tell them to look to the east and pray,” said Greg.
Ali uncovered the phone and said, “Look to the east and pray to . . .”
“No,” snapped Greg. “They know who to pray to.”