But is Dick Gregory STILL vegetarian?

[Guest guest]

Consider The Alternative

By Peter Carlson

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, October 9, 2000; Page C01

 

" Come on up to my office, " Dick Gregory says, then he climbs the steps into

the lobby of the Capital Hilton.

 

He picks out a little cocktail table and lays down the two heavy bags he's

toting. One is stuffed with his reading matter for the day--several pounds

of newspapers from around the world--and the other is filled with his daily

diet, dozens of bottles of juices and potions and herbs.

The veteran comedian/activist/nutrition theorist walks to the hotel bar and

greets the barmaid with a cheery hello. She's got her back to him and as

she turns around, she's saying, " The bar is closed. " Then she recognizes

him and smiles. " Oh, hello, Mr. Gregory, what would you like? "

Gregory, a man who doesn't drink alcohol, or even soda pop, and eats almost

nothing, orders a bottle of spring water--no ice, please--then returns to

the table.

He's comfortable here. He has two homes--one in Plymouth, Mass., where his

wife, Lillian, lives, and an apartment in Northwest Washington--but he

really lives in hotels. He's traveling most of the time, to speaking gigs

or rallies or demonstrations, but when he's in Washington, you can find him

in the Hilton lobby, reading, talking, getting ready to hit the road again.

He sits down. He smiles. His hair and beard are gray now but he looks

good--thin but not gaunt, and full of pep. He's fresh from his daily

eight-mile walk through Rock Creek Park, which takes him about an hour and

a half--not bad for a 67-year-old man who was diagnosed last year with

lymphoma, a particularly nasty form of cancer.

Gregory says the cancer doesn't scare him, but it was a wake-up call for

his friends. They decided it was time to organize a gala tribute to him.

It'll take place tonight at the Kennedy Center. Bill Cosby will be there.

So will Stevie Wonder and Sinbad and Cicely Tyson and Isaac Hayes and Ossie

Davis and Ruby Dee and a lot of Gregory's old friends from the civil rights

movement. Plus his wife and their 10 kids and six grandchildren.

" I'm just thrilled, " Gregory says. These days, he sees his old friends

mostly at funerals, which gets kind of gloomy. " But this is gonna be a

joyous occasion. "

Still, he's a comedian--and he's Dick Gregory--so he can't resist adding a

bit of dark humor. " The reason some people are coming is that they think

I'm dying, " he says, grinning. " They wouldn't buy tickets if they knew I

was walking eight miles a day. "

 

Active Activist

 

Right from the get-go, Dick Gregory moved fast.

He grew up in St. Louis during the Depression, son of a single mother who

worked cleaning white folks' houses, and he ran so fast that he won a track

scholarship to Southern Illinois University. His wit was quick, too, and in

the late '50s, after a stint in the Army, he became a comedian, getting

uneasy laughs by mocking racism:

" Last time I was down South, I walked into this restaurant. This white

waitress came up to me and said, 'We don't serve colored people here.' I

said, 'that's all right, I don't eat colored people--no way! Bring me a

fried chicken. "

It was a new kind of black comedy. " He taught us how to laugh at the enemy

and not at ourselves, " says actor Ossie Davis.

Gregory was edgy and he was hot. By the early '60s, he was making $5,000 a

night playing nightclubs. But the civil rights movement was blazing across

the South and Gregory figured that was more important than comedy. So he'd

cancel gigs to go march in Mississippi and Alabama and he seemed to spend

more time in jail cells than in nightclubs.

The movement changed his life. He stopped smoking and drinking. He stopped

eating meat. He fasted for months to protest the Vietnam War.

In 1968, he ran as a write-in candidate for president and got in trouble

with the U.S. Treasury Department for issuing a campaign leaflet in the

size and shape of a dollar bill, with his own face replacing George

Washington's. The feds said it was illegal to put out facsimiles of U.S.

currency. Gregory replied, quite convincingly, that dollar bills bearing a

black man's picture could never pass for money in the United States.

When the '60s ended, a lot of activists returned to regular life but

Gregory just kept on going. He fasted against nuclear power. He ran across

the country to protest world hunger. He traveled to Iran in 1979, when

Americans were taken hostage, and he fasted there, too.

In the '80s, he touted his own diet and health potions-- " Formula Four X "

and " Slenderella " --and earned publicity by escorting a group of obese

people to Congress to lobby for the creation of a National Institute of

Obesity and Weight Management. And he kept demonstrating, kept getting

busted. Sometimes, he took his kids along.

" When I was 8 years old, I was locked up with him in Louisiana, " says his

son, Christian Gregory, now 30, a chiropractor in Washington. " By the age

of 10, I had a rap sheet. "

In the new millennium, he's still at it, flying to Kentucky to demand the

hiring of black school principals, and protesting police brutality in New

York and Detroit and Prince George's County.

" You've heard of a runner's high? Well, he gets an activist's high, "

Christian Gregory says. " The moment the phone rings and somebody says

they're about to boycott or demonstrate, they don't even have to ask, he's

on his way. "

 

Theories and Practice

 

Sitting in the Hilton lobby, Gregory reaches into his knapsack. He extracts

a few copies of his new book, a memoir titled " Callus on My Soul, " then

starts unloading a slew of tiny bottles, many of them topped with eyedroppers.

" This is cayenne pepper, very hot, " he says, putting down one bottle. " This

is my liver cleanser, " he says, putting down another. " This is maple syrup.

.. . . This is mushrooms. . . . This is lymph cleanser. . . . This is green

tea. . . . This is olive leaf. . . . This is apricot pits--laetrile. You

can't buy it in the United States. I have to go to Mexico to get that.

Where there's cancer cells, it'll just choke it. "

Maybe, maybe not. The Food and Drug Administration probably wouldn't agree,

but Gregory doesn't care. He's determined to fight his cancer with

alternative medicines. So far, it's working, he says. " My cancer is 80

percent controlled. My inner system is built up from the herbs and the

walking I do every day. "

He believes in health food, but not so much that he can't joke about it.

" I'm at this vegetarian conference, " he says, " and I said, 'Hitler was a

vegetarian and Martin Luther King would eat the heart out of a cow. When

Martin Luther King showed up, chickens would fly as high as eagles to get

away from him. But who would you rather live with, King or Hitler?' " He

smiles. " So food isn't everything. "

By now, he's off on one of his free-flowing monologues, hopping from topic

to topic. He has a lot of theories, many of them elaborate conspiracy

theories. King was killed by the government, he says. So was Robert

Kennedy. And John Kennedy. And John Kennedy Jr., who was murdered, Gregory

says, because he was using his magazine to investigate the deaths of his

father and uncle.

" I think they took him out, " he says.

Who took him out?

" Whoever the people are who control the system, " he says. " The same people

who took out John Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. "

But not the same people who took out Princess Diana. No, she was killed by

the British royal family, which feared that she would marry her boyfriend,

Dodi Al Fayed, who was Egyptian, which means he was part black, which

freaked out the royals.

" If you think the British royal family is gonna allow a king of England who

has a half-brother who has African blood, " he says, " you're out of your mind! "

Gregory promotes these theories--and others--on the radio almost daily,

calling friendly deejays in Chicago, Los Angeles, Fort Lauderdale as well

as station WOL-AM in Lanham. He has gained a following and now some of his

fans have advanced their own conspiracy theory--that Gregory's cancer was

caused by the FBI irradiating him back in the '60s because of his attacks

on FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

Gregory doesn't endorse that theory, but he doesn't deny it, either.

" I don't know, " he says. " But I'm suspicious. "

Opposition Attracts

 

Ossie Davis has a theory about his friend's conspiracy theories.

" Dick's theories are, I suppose, sublimations of the fears that he's faced

that he couldn't admit to himself, " Davis says. " Dick is brave, but brave

people are not without fear. Dick overcame his fears perhaps by driving

them deep down inside. Of course, this is 10-cent psychologizing, but maybe

his theories are sublimated reactions to the fears he has been exposed to. "

Davis, who has known Gregory for nearly 40 years, also has a theory about

his friend's seemingly obsessive need to protest. " Some people are

energized by being in opposition, by having an enemy, " he says. " I think

Dick is one of those people. They see things that need to be done and they

can't live with themselves if they don't go do it. "

Of course, that way of life was not easy for Gregory's wife and children.

" He told his 10 children that the movement came before the family, " says

Christian Gregory. " It was a hard pill to swallow. "

In 1973, when he was still making big bucks doing comedy, Gregory bought a

400-acre farm near Plymouth, Mass. It was a refuge for Lillian and the

kids--and for him on those few occasions when he was there. But in 1991, he

could no longer make the mortgage payments and the farm was repossessed.

Gregory called from Washington, where he was making a speech, to apologize

to Lillian.

" We will be fine, " she told him, and she moved to an apartment nearby.

After 41 years of marriage, they are still together--although seldom in the

same place.

" We talk probably four or five or six times a day, " she says. " That's the

way it's been for most of our marriage. It wouldn't work for most people,

but it works for us. . . . I support him 100 percent. "

She's thrilled about the Kennedy Center tribute-- " It probably should have

happened a long time ago " --but she will not make a speech. " I don't do any

public speaking at all, " she says.

Tickets for the tribute cost $100 and the proceeds will go to Gregory. His

friends hope that a nice nest egg will permit him to turn down the college

speaking gigs that constitute his main source of income, and maybe rest a bit.

" I'd like to see him slow down and take a little time to reflect, " says

Christian Gregory. But he's not optimistic that his father will do that

anytime soon. " If he had a million dollars, he'd do more, because he could

afford to do more. "

Davis figures that only the Grim Reaper can slow his old friend down.

" Eventually, death will catch him, but it will have to catch him in

motion, " he says. " I'm going to this [tribute] to say, 'We love you. Will

you hold still long enough to let us kiss you, you big galoot?' "

 

Birthday Plans

 

In the Hilton lobby, Gregory orders an herbal tea and when it arrives, he

loads it up with dollops from the various herbal potions from his backpack.

Soon, the air reeks with a pungent medicinal smell. He sips his concoction

and says he's planning to start a new fast on Oct. 12, his 68th birthday.

" I'm not going to eat any solid food and I'm going celibate until we get a

grip on police brutality, " he says.

He promises not to eat or have sex until Congress passes a law requiring

every cop and FBI and CIA agent to have a license for his gun. That way, he

says, if the cop is brutal, his gun license can be revoked. " For the first

time, they'll have something to lose, " he says.

He figures his fast will inspire others to fast, which will make America's

turkey farmers worry about selling their birds come Thanksgiving. " They'll

get on the phone and talk to the politicians, " he says.

If that doesn't work, he'll just keep fasting. " When I get down to 92

pounds, the world press will get involved because they'll think I'm gonna die. "

The subject of police brutality brings a flash of anger to his eyes for the

first time all day. " Living in this country is just like living in Nazi

Germany if you're black, " he says bitterly.

But he doesn't stay mad long. A moment later, he's joking again, off on a

comic riff about American Indians and the Washington Redskins.

" I wish the Indians would take some of that casino money and buy the

Redskins, " he says, grinning mischievously, " and rename the team the

NiggerHonkies. Then we'd see how people like that. "

© 2000 The Washington Post Company