Michael Seth Starr - Black and Blue: The Redd Foxx Story

preface

introduction

W riting a biography is always a tricky proposition, even more so when the subject is a pop-culture icon like Redd Foxx. An authors challenge lies in trying to separate the real person from his or her ubiquitous alter-ego, in this case the bow-legged, chest-clutching Sanford and Son junkman Fred Sanford (Im comin to join ya honey!).

Fred Sanford exists in that timeless television netherworld inhabited by the ghosts of Lucy Ricardo, Ralph Kramden, Maxwell Small, Archie Bunker, Cosmo Kramer, and all the other indelible, frozen-in-time characters weve welcomed into our homes and hearts over the years. Television is an intimate medium. We know these people, or at least we like to think we do. Thanks to endless reruns, DVD boxed sets, and the Internet, we have access to these characters at the touch of a button or the tap of a keystroke24/7 immediacy in this digital age. So we know what Fred Sanford will say, when hell say it, when hell fake (yet) another heart attack or spar with Aunt Esther or lambaste that big dummy son of his. It never gets old.

Thats the easy part. The challenge for this (hopefully) unobtrusive narrator of Redd Foxxs life story is in giving you, the reader, a sense of the man behind Fred Sanford. Redd Foxx, after all, didnt just materialize on television from whole cloth. He was an overnight sensation at the age of forty-nine, a street-smart, natural-born comic who, through sheer talent, guile, and brimming self-confidence, overcame a life of poverty in the slums of Saint Louis to impact three entertainment genres: stand-up comedy, recorded nightclub comedy, and television.

Jon Sanford was born in 1922, and by the age of twenty-five, having changed his name to Redd Foxx, was already a veteran nightclub comic seasoned on the streets of Saint Louis, Chicago, and Harlem. There he lived a hardscrabble existence with his (literal) partner-in-crime, Malcolm Little, who was later to morph into the Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X. After years of toiling on the segregated blacks-only string of nightclubs dubbed the Chitlin Circuitpart of that time with his comedy partner, Slappy White Redd Foxx recorded Laff of the Party, the album that would become an underground classic, in a dingy Los Angeles nightclub for the princely sum of twenty-five dollars.

Released in 1956, Laff of the Party was the first of Redd's famous (or infamous, depending on who you asked) party records. It was racy for its time, but not profaneRedd Foxx never swore onstage, at least not in those early days. The devil was in the details. Laff of the Party was, though, replete with Redds double entendre, almost folksy storytelling, which he overlaid with sexually suggestive wordplay. The album set the table for the fifty-plus Redd Foxx party records released in subsequent years that would revolutionize (some say invent) the genre. Redds party records sold anywhere from twenty to fifty million copiesunder the counter, of course, and usually wrapped in the brown paper bag that was expected to somehow mute Redd Foxxs blue material just waiting to be slapped onto turntables across the country (and, yes, even discreetly in white suburbia).

But while he was selling millions of party records, Redd Foxx was still shielded from wider exposure to a mainstream (white) audience, both by the color of his skin and by his refusal to compromise and tone his act down a bit, a decision that kept him off television and scared away potential bookers. (Redd claimed to have auditioned for The Steve Allen Show and The Ed Sullivan Show in the late 50s with clean material, which got him absolutely nowhere.) He eventually climbed his way up the show-business ladder, breaking through in Las Vegas and New York, opening a fondly remembered (but poorly run) comedy club in Los Angeles and taking baby steps on the big screen with Cotton Comes to Harlem, leading to that first Sanford and Son episode that hit the airwaves in January 1972and changed his life, and ours, forever.

The following pages will hopefully serve to guide you through the sixty-eight years of Redd Foxxs remarkable life, from birth to death and all the good, the bad, and the ugly in-between. Say what you want about The Man, but he was never boring.

You won't find any psychoanalysis of Redd Foxx in Black and Blue, nor is this book written in his voicetwo approaches I find both pretentious and presumptuous. I didnt know Redd Foxx, and I never had the chance to interview him. And even if I had had the opportunity for just one conversation with him, how could I ever really know what was in his heart and in his mind?

Thats where Redds close friends and associates enter the picture to help splice together the narrative of his life, one frame at a time. Unfortunately, many of Redds oldest friendsSteve Trimble, LaWanda Page, Slappy White, Bardu Aliare gone now. But each, in his or her own way, left behind their memories of Redd for posterity.

In writing this book, though, I was fortunate enough to interview many people who knew Redd Foxx in different phases of his life and career. Some knew him more intimately than others. But no matter how deep their connection was to this remarkable entertainer, I was struck, almost to a man and woman, by the depth of their emotions in their reminiscences and, in some cases, in their recalling long-forgotten memories and incidents they hadnt thought of since his death. Most of these people were highly emotionalthere was a lot of laughter, a few tears and, for some, a note of awe in emphasizing Redds powerful presence, even twenty years after his passing.

Dee Crawford and Anthony Major, both of whom ran Redds production company in different decadesDee in the 1970s and Anthony from the mid-1980s until Redds deathspent hours reminiscing about The Chief, as he was called by those in his inner circle. They both had a birds-eye view into the Redd Foxx Traveling Circus that defined his life. And, as they quickly learned, running The Chiefs companyRedd Foxx Productions and its many subsidiariesmeant more than paying the bills and negotiating contracts. It was an all-consuming, seven-days-a-week job in which they lived Redds life with him, both professionally and personally, while dealing with the hangers-on and wannabes who seemed to come out of the woodwork looking for a handout. It could be completely chaotic, and it usually was. With Redd Foxx, there was no in-between.