"Didn't you read about the four little girls who were murdered yesterday in a Birmingham church?"
"That was terrible," I said. "Now about this book..."
But he had rolled back, even as he continued to talk, this time to the wall: "How could the white man be so evil as to kill little girls who weren't even demonstrating for their civil rights? You people are the racial cancer destroying America. You stunt the lives of children, break up families, you have the power to wound the innocent just by calling them 'niggers.'"
Because I was a reporter, I began taking notes, but mostly I listened, fascinated. I was in the presence of a soul in rage and pain, hardly the cool 30-year-old hipster who had become the first black comedian to make it in major white nightclubs. His one-liners -- "'Leven months I sat-in at a restaurant, then they integrated and didn't even have what I wanted" -- were already being repeated as social commentary, not to speak of uncomfortable truths in that world before social media. ("We won't go to war in the Congo 'cause we're afraid our soldiers will bring back war brides.") At $5,000 a week, he was then being hailed as the Jackie Robinson of topical comedy.
Late that night, I finally got up to leave and, to my surprise, he asked me to come back the next day so we could start writing the book.
It went badly from the beginning. He was sometimes an hour or more 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 couldn't seem to remember my name. His diatribes against white America were based on strong arguments and solid facts, but they were hardly the human stuff of autobiography. I was fascinated. For me, it was an education, but I soon realized it was fruitless to continue.
So after about two weeks of sporadic sessions, on a day he showed up three hours late, I hit him with a prepared monologue. I told him that I didn't need 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 the color of his skin. I marched out to the elevator. He followed me and got in. On the way down he said, "Your name's Bob Lipsyte, right?"
"Too late," I replied.
He said he was going to have a sandwich at the hotel coffee shop. Would I join him? I figured I might as well get something out of all this.
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."
And it was terrific. For the next few months, usually very early in the morning, after a club date, in a hotel room curtained against the dawn, he would lie in bed and take me into the pit of his St. Louis childhood. We cried and laughed about this skinny welfare case named Richard Claxton Gregory, born on Columbus Day, 1932, who fantasized that school closed in honor of his birthday. When he was hungry enough, he told me, he ate dirt. He started telling jokes to keep the bullies at bay. He talked about his "monster," by which he meant that combination of ego and ambition that drove him to become a high-school and college track star and then a headliner on the honky-tonk "chittlin' circuit" of black nightclubs.
The monster was ready on January 13, 1961, the night the Chicago Playboy Club called him as a last-minute replacement. And it was the same monster that refused to be sent home when the club manager panicked moments before Greg was to go on stage after realizing that the place was packed with white southern conventioneers. Greg thanked the first heckler for calling him "Trigger" -- he said he always admired Roy Rogers' horse -- and he asked the second one to keep using that word because his contract stipulated $50 extra every time it was spoken. He killed that audience. Playboy owner Hugh Hefner was called out of bed for the second show and gave him a long-term contract.
The Monster Needed More
But success on stage wasn't enough for the monster. Between club dates and appearances on TV's top-rated The Tonight Show, where he successfully demanded to be the first black comic to sit on the couch beside, and actually talk to, late-night host Jack Paar, he ended segregation in a Maryland prison by refusing to perform unless black and white prisoners were in the same audience. He also helped free a falsely accused black man from a southern jail and he always made sure there were black waiters in the clubs in which he performed.
As his celebrity grew, any civil rights demonstration for which he was scheduled to show up could count on television news crews following him, which usually lessened the odds of police brutality against the demonstrators. So he began to believe it was his obligation to show up. So he started missing club dates and then began to lose them when bookers realized that the nightclub stage was not his priority.
By this time, we were well into writing the book, whose working title was Callus on My Soul. I thought it sounded too gospel-y, however, for a funny, gritty, remarkably candid personal story. At the time, though, neither of us could think of anything else.
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