Read Talk Stories for Free Online Page B

oven. “I think it’s a dynamite look,” she said.
    â€œBut aren’t these colors for black women?” we asked.
    â€œWell, yes,” she said. “But—”
    Before she could finish, a very light-complexioned Negro man who was standing nearby jumped in and said, “No, they aren’t.”
    The man introduced himself as Ron Marablé, beauty consultant for Revlon. Then he told us, “They’re not black cosmetics.
People are no longer into that. There is no longer such a thing as black cosmetics. We don’t believe there is a different makeup for different people. There are many different skin tones in the world, and black is just one of them. I know. I went to art school for eight years, and then I went to Europe. I did Sophia Loren in Rome. I studied with her makeup artist for a year. I have done Melba Moore, Freda Payne, Nina Simone, Virna Lisi, Nancy Wilson, and—oh, Coretta King. Don’t forget that. She was my favorite—Coretta King. I used to be the beauty editor for Ebony. I used to do before-and-after—I would take a woman and make her over. I would take an ugly woman and make her pretty. But this is a makeup for any woman. Any woman can wear it. We have a range of colors here. Bronze, copper, rust—all the warm earth colors. They’re going over well. On the first day, we sold three thousand dollars. Today, we did twenty-five hundred. And tomorrow we hope to do over three thousand.”
    â€” October 27 , 1975

Time with Pryor
    Â 
    Â 
    Two things we know about Richard Pryor for sure: he is the funniest man in America, and, after Muhammad Ali, he is the baddest person anywhere. “Bad” here does not mean rotten or no good. It means being so extraordinarily good at doing something that for someone to call you the greatest, or anything like that, does not quite measure up to describing how incredible you are. Only the word “bad” will do. For instance, not long ago we saw Pryor performing at the Felt Forum, in Madison Square Garden, and he said things that are usually considered uncomplimentary about blacks, whites, and women, and the audience, which was made up of blacks, whites, and women, laughed and laughed.
    He was in town the other day, and around dinnertime we stopped by his suite at the Regency Hotel for a chat with him. Before we had a chance to say hello, he stuck a finger out and showed us a ring he was wearing and said, “Look at this ring. It’s nice. Ain’t pimpy at all.” We looked. It was a slim, plain
gold band decorated with three delicately set diamonds. Then we looked at him. We had never before seen him close up, and noticed that he is quite handsome. He is tall, slim (he was dieting, he said), with a boyish face that is especially nice when he smiles. He was wearing tapered gray trousers, a mottled black-and-white sweater, and brown mules. In his rooms with him were a woman he introduced as his girl friend, his manager, his valet, and his jeweller.
    We spent three hours with him, and during that time this is what happened: he bought a gold necklace with a heart-shaped, diamond-studded pendant for the woman he had introduced as his girl friend; he bought a gold ring for his manager and a gold ring for his valet; he wrote a check for sixteen hundred dollars to his jeweller; he ordered a dinner of sweet-and-sour fish from Greener Pastures, a health-food restaurant not far from the hotel; he picked up his spinach with his bare hands and said with a British accent, “I like my spinach squeeze-dried, don’t you?”; when the telephone rang, he spoke into his mules; during dinner, he watched The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and mimicked Walter Cronkite many times; after dinner, he disappeared for a while with a copy of U.S. News & World Report. When he was not mimicking Walter Cronkite, these are some of the things he said: “I am now a vegetarian. I was standing at the