by ISHMAEL REED
I had some enjoyable encounters with Stanley Crouch. He was smart and witty. His humor dark and droll. But there was something wrong with Stanley in the head. Something that his groupies in their eulogies ignore. These were white groupies whose relationship to Stanley was like that between Jim and Huckleberry Finn. Stanley seemed to be constantly searching for someone who would do him great physical harm. As long as Stanley bullied Black people, his Neo-Con supporters in admiration called him “pugnacious,” but when he slapped Dale Peck, a white book reviewer, a backlash set in. His supporters also ignore the fact that Stanley was a poor gladiator, the quality that his white fans seemed too admire above all. He got punched out from time to time. Badly. Quincy Troupe, with whom he feuded, knocked him out. The writer for Mother Jones talked about his relationship with Amiri Baraka. What he left out was Crouch, a heavyweight at the time, threatened Amiri Baraka, a lightweight, in The Village Voice. He had signed up to be the enforcer of those Black writers whom the establishment considered, “Troublemakers.” I remember him threatening me. After the incident, we were still in contact. But I never will forget the incident and I’m still angry about it.
I met Stanley in the early seventies. I stopped off to see him in Los Angeles after he contacted me about my books. Ivan Dixon, the late actor, and I were on the way to see Quincy Jones about his possible co-producing my western, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, the “antecedent” of “Blazing Saddles,” as a result of Richard Pryor introducing the book to the studio that produced it. Stanley wanted to tag along. He wanted to call Jones an “Uncle Tom.” I refused his request.
At first, Stanley wrote some articles that lauded my literary output. Even stuck his neck out by writing in The Village Voice that “Blazing Saddles” was a rip off of my surrealistic western, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, a connection that is still being made. Andrew Bergman, one of the scriptwriters for the film, wrote a letter to The Voice denying such a connection. What Bergman failed to mention was that Richard Pryor was his co-writer. Pryor read my novel in Berkeley and wrote a letter to the late actor D’Urville Martin, in which he said he was considering making a film based on the book. Alison Mills, an actress and filmmaker, whose novel, Francisco, was published by Steve Cannon and me, mentioned in the book that a friend of hers, who worked at the studio that produced “Blazing Saddles,” told her that they were reading my book.
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