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Ebony Magazine : June 1974 : Article by Louie Robinson
Redd Foxx, his grey-wreathed face looking strained, and sounding somewhat short of breath , glanced restlessly around his walnut-panelled office on the NBC Television Studios lot in Burbank, Calif. Motioning toward the aqua gravel in a still unfinished tropical fish aquarium, he asked his pecan-colored secretary Geri Nicholas: "Can't they put some other color in there? I want to get rid of all these reds, whites and blues?"
The red-white-and-blue decor had been that of previous inhabitant, Sammy Davis Jr., before he vacated the premises upon the cancellation of his Follies.
The first year I was here, I didn't even have a dressing room," Foxx confided to visitors. Now, as star of the network's No. 1 prime time show, Sanford and Son, he found his lavish new quarters a somewhat hollow acquisition. His legs ached, his neck hurt, his nerves were shot, he couldn't sleep and when he complained, nobody seemed to listening.
The work schedule was too demanding, Foxx felt, the rehearsal hall windowless, the production personnel insensitive to black people in some cases, and stardom -- as he presently found it -- too restrictive.
"They saw other people work under these conditions. Sure. But they are not coming from a 36-year-long nightclub scene," Foxx lamented. "Now I've spend two years here. That's 38 years of my life devoted to show business, and I'm not to be locked up in a room. I came from a job where I had freedom. I worked 90 minutes a night, and I was through until the next night. Now I have to convert and try to learn to sleep at night when I've been up at night all my life. I'll be sitting at home in the evening, and 11 o'clock comes, I get nervous. I want me a drink of Scotch, because all my life, around eleven, I had already had a couple."
Oddly enough, Foxx's catalogue of complaints did not cover the subject of money, except to the extent of making it, under today's tax laws, was not the same as having it. Earning $25,000 a week as an irascible old junk dealer on TV, Foxx is in the income bracket where as much as 72 cent of every dollar he earns goes to the Internal Revenue Service. "You make all this money, but you don't get it so you can spend it. When I was working in theaters and places in the old days, if a man said he was going to pay you a $175 a week, on payday he put $175 in your hand, I would wrap it up around a head of cabbage and go out and flash it."
Today, Foxx is flashier than ever with three fancy autos, a house in Las Vegas and another in North Hollywood, swimming pools, servants and a face now familiar to 40 million people. But as he sat talking, he was experiencing more pain than pleasure. A week later, he was absent from the set of Sanford and Son.
Thus began the case of the elusive Foxx.
"Redd called in ill," answered an NBC spokesman in reply to inquires. "We hope to have him back next week." His optimism was unrewarded.
When Foxx did not return the second week, the illness story became suspect. Some observers began to tie his absence to an earlier incident in which Redd walked out of a dinner honoring Norman Lear, one of the creators of the string of successful shows that includes not only Sanford and Son but CBS's high flying All in the Family, Maude, and the new addition, Good Times, starring Esther Rolle, Maude's exmaid. There was also a rift on the set between Foxx and the show's other creator, Bud Yorkin. "When Redd is here, Yorkin is not here," confided one staff member.
A telephone call to the Foxx home a the end of the second week reached a comedian who was anything but funny. "My doctor says I've got to get away for a while for a rest," Foxx said in a tense, hoarse voice. "These people are bugging me, I take my wife out to dinner and ears are following me." The next day a news announcement was made, saying Foxx left the country.
Indeed he had. He had flown to Acapulco where, as he put it later, he "ran into more people than there were here. Everybody in in the world was there. I came back and went to Las Vegas, shut my gate and let the dogs out."
While Foxx rested in Vegas, the rumor mills ground in L.A. Each week a network vice president was reportedly betting his job that Foxx would be back for the next show. (He lost the bet but kept his job.) Meanwhile, writers were frantically revising scripts, writing Redd out of the action on the pretense that the character had gone to St. Louis for a relatives funeral. Actor Whitman Mayo, who had a feature role as Fred Sanford's friend, Grady, moved into the junkyard with Demond Wilson, the son in Sanford and Son. When Redd returned to Los Angeles and checked into a hospital for medical tests, missing yet another week of work, a story was released to the press saying then series "seems to be alive and doing very well despite his absence." The story written by Los Angeles Times reporter Dick Adler, said that not only had the show regained its second-place spot in the ratings, "which it had been losing lately to the Waltons," but that NBC had received "an extra-large volume of telephone calls," mostly favorable, regarding the substitution of Mayo for Foxx. This prompted the show's producer, Aaron Ruben, to remark when asked how the series without Foxx next year might be regarded: "It certainly must open up a lot of possibilities in our minds."
At NBC, where the problem of the missing Foxx had been undertaken on the uppermost executive level, Program Manager Dennis Johnson said that the season's remaining three shows would be done without Redd, and that as for the shows being renewed for the 1974-75 season: "That's still up in the air. There's no definite conclusion that we're not doing Sanford and Son next year."
Things got hairier a couple of days later when word reached NBC that Foxx had taped a guest spot on the Merv Griffith Show in which he openly indicated he might not have been so indisposed as to be unavailable for work. This prompted new rumblings at NBC, which until then had stood above the dispute, since Foxx was under contract to Yorkin and Lear's Tandem productions, which in turn was contracted to produce 24 Sanford shows seasonally to the network.
"Until today," declared a network spokesman upon news of the Foxx TV statement regarding his absence from the show, "nobody could say Redd was not really sick. All that has now changed. The network believed the conflict to be between Yorkin, Lear and Redd. But Redd has indicated that the network has been doing something to him. That changed the flavor of everything."
Behind closed doors, an executive declared: "We've had enough of being on the defensive. It's time we got rid of it."
On the set, new star Whitman Mayo showed grace under pressure. "Nobody could ever replace Redd," he told questioners, "but I'm doing the beset I can under these circumstances."
The networks attitude seemed to have softened a few days later when public information vice president Hank Rieger revealed: "We would love to have Redd back as the lead in each of the remaining three shows. We hope he'll be back." He was quick to add however, that "the ratings, even without Redd, have held up remarkably well."
Foxx did not make it back, and as soon as the show closed out the season minus its star, the battle was rejoined by Redd from his home in the Touluca Lake area of North Hollywood. His litany included charges that few scripts were written by black writers (although the show had a black story editor, Illunga Adell, for a while) and that even those were often changed to inject white versions of black humor; that the shows could have benefited from the work of black directors; that black actresses were being asked to sound like "Pearl Bailey or Ernestine Wade," and that the casting office had never even heard of Academy Award nominee Juanita Moore, and that pre-determined five-minute breaks for visits to the restroom were insulting. Of the latter he snorted: "You just can't judge, 'Well in 45 minutes I'm going to the toilet for five minutes.' You go to the toilet when you have to go to the toilet."
Most of all, he hated the confinement of what was for him a seven day work week imposed by starting script readings on Wednesday, run-throughs on Fridays, final script memorization on Saturdays and Sundays (the show is taped live without cue cards), blocking out action on Mondays, and shooting on Tuesdays. On Wednesday, it started all over.
Explaining that he and his wife, Jean, to whom he has been married for 24 years, had "never argued until I got this show," Redd added: "I come home sometimes and I just raise hell to anybody, because I'll be so strained mentally."
In the third year of a five-year contract, Foxx revealed that he had turned down a $50,000 bonus to finish the last five shows because "If I have to work under those conditions, the money ain't worth being dead for."
Firing back from the other side, the show's producer, Aaron Ruben, pointed out: "This is the same windowless hall everybody rehearses in at NBC, whether its Bob Hope or whoever. The reason is to cut down on distractions." Aaron also said that both Redd and Demond Wilson had been informed that any material they felt to be offensive to black viewers would be stricken from scripts without question. He added further that Redd was given time off and quicker intervals between show tapings even though it made the production season longer and costlier to the producers and that: "Everything was done to make him as comfortable as possible. His statement about the dressing room is inaccurate; NBC built one especially for him with a shower and plenty of office space." (Before Foxx was moved into the old Sammy Davis Jr. quarters, an office had been built for him. As Foxx described it: "That little bitty dressing room I had, there wasn't enough room in there for six people.")
Filtering through all the conflict was an obvious point: the professional and private lifestyles of nightclub comedian Redd Foxx (born John Elroy Sanford) and those of television star Redd Foxx were in direct conflict. The man who had played in street corner washtub bands as a kid, slept on New York rooftops, shot pool with a skinny pal who later became Malcom X, hitchhiked on the back of trucks, been skipped out on by promoters holding his paycheck (one, lacking cash, paid him with a sick dog which Foxx has to this day), sold 40 million copies of "dirty" records and uttered some of the bluest nightclub lines ever heard, was to the manner born. He had reached a peak of success where he earned as much as $12,500 a week working 90 minutes a night, six nights a week in Las Vegas. Explains Redd: "I got off at 2a.m. and didn't have a thing to do until 11 the next night. After that kind of freedom for 36 years, I can't adjust to working seven days a week and being holed up in a rehearsal room with no windows. I haven't seen the birds in three years. When I get off, they've all gone to bed."
It is also probable that Foxx could do a 90-minute television special of stand-up gags on 10 minutes notice, but at the age of 51, he finds learning 40 or 50 pages of Sanford script each week a disagreeable task. "I had never been no actor," he says.
According to Los Angeles physician Dr. Lindberg Gallimore, all the changed Foxx has gone through indeed made him ill. The doctor says Foxx has suffered nervous exhaustion -- exemplified by lack of energy, fatigue and restlessness, some form of claustrophobia and calcification between the fifth and sixth vertebra that irritates the nerve. "This is why he has a problem turning to the left because of the pressure," Dr. Gallimore said of Foxx's neck stiffness. Foxx drinks half a gallon of milk daily to relieve the calcium problem. Dr. Gallimore also says that "mild sedation and rest is what he needs, plus decrease of the stress situation under which he works. The amazing thing is that this man has tolerated this kind of stress as long as he has. He also has tenderness of the skull, which is one of the first signs of reaction to stress."
An effort was soon made to ease some of the stress. After Foxx flew off to New York to confer with NBC president Herb Schlosser, his manager, Bardu Ali, said the disagreement had been resolved. And back in Los Angeles, two new producers had taken the reins of Sanford and Son. Gearing up for the new season were Sol Turteltaub and Bennie Orenstein. "We have acquired a rehearsal hall with a window," said Turteltaub, and he announced that the new work week would run from Monday to Friday, as Redd had wished. "We have no problems with Redd," said Turteltaub. "We haven't even met him. My partner and I are in comedy and Redd is one of the greatest comedians. We're looking forward to working with him and turning out some good comedy."
For his part, Foxx was already turning out some good comedy elsewhere. During the season break, he had taken off for shows at New York's Apollo Theater, the Fontainbleau Hotel in Miami Beach, and other concert spots around the country. In New York, much of the crowd had to settle for standing room while others were simply turned away. For those lucky enough to get inside, there was the same old blue Foxx, capping his performance by streaking across stage in panty hose through psychedelic lights.
After that, he was back in Los Angeles streaking for something else. Beginning summer tapings for next fall's shows, Foxx announced that he was seeking 25 per cent of Sanford and Son's potential long-term profits. Said Foxx with a sly grin: "Twenty-five percent of $40 million is a lotta bucks."
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