Eddie Murphy became one of Hollywood’s biggest stars at such a young age, and there was no obvious handbook waiting for him. He had other successful Black entertainers to look toward, but the advice he received was not always practical. James Brown, for instance, apparently believed the then up-and-coming young comedian’s best path to a long career involved cleaner language and a shovel. Thankfully, the legendary Saturday Night Live veteran did not take his advice.
Murphy recalled the wonderfully strange conversation in Apple TV’s Number One on the Call Sheet: Black Leading Men in Hollywood. The two-part documentary gathers prominent Black actors to discuss their breakthroughs, struggles and the people who helped them navigate the industry. His story begins with Brown warning that his famously profane stand-up act could shorten his time in show business. Per the Mr. Robinson's Neighborhood sketch performer:
James Brown told me to; he asked me to — he told me I should stop cursing. He said, ‘You want to be in this business a long time? You can stop that cursing.’
That was not completely unreasonable advice. Murphy’s early comedy was loud, confrontational and very adult, with Delirious and Raw becoming defining pieces of his professional ascension. Still, abandoning that voice would have meant sanding away one of the qualities that made him impossible to ignore. The Bowfinger actor kept cursing, and his career eventually stretched across stand-up, the best action comedies, animation, family movies and dramatic performances.
Brown’s financial guidance was considerably harder to defend. The singer asked whether Murphy believed he had $1 million, rejected the answer and then proposed a banking strategy better suited to a pirate than a movie star. The Nutty Professor star continued:
He said, 'Do you think you got a million dollars?'I said, 'Yeah, I do.' He said, 'You ain't got a million dollars.’ He said, If you do got a million dollars, you take it, and you bury it in the woods.’ I said, ‘Why bury my money in the woods?’ He said, ‘Because the government will take it from you. So bury it!’ I was like, 'But can't the government take your land?' He said, 'But they won't know where the money is.' That's a true story. So that's the kind of advice I used to get. We didn’t have a lot of elders. [Laughs]
The best part may be Murphy immediately spotting the flaw in Brown’s wilderness savings plan. Even as a young performer talking to one of his musical heroes, he understood that owning the land did not make a buried fortune magically untouchable. It mostly made the money damp and likely very difficult to insure.
The Coming to America star tells the story with affection rather than ridicule. Brown was trying to protect a younger Black entertainer from two dangers he understood: audiences turning on an act and powerful institutions taking the money that act earned. His solutions were eccentric, but the anxiety beneath them comes from a very real place. Plus, anyone with a grandparent who lived through the great depression probably got very similar advice. I know I did.
Nevertheless, advice also says something about the limited mentorship available to Murphy’s generation. Number One on the Call Sheet is built around Black performers sharing the knowledge they had to gather in an industry that rarely offered them an easy path. Brown could pass along what experience had taught him, even when those lessons included avoiding profanity and treating the forest like a safety-deposit box.
Luckily for us all, the still widely loved Murphy ignored most of the "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine" singer's guidance. He did not clean up his act before becoming a comedy phenomenon, and one can only hope his early movie earnings were never left beneath an unidentified tree.
You can check out both parts of Number One on the Call Sheet with an Apple TV subscription.
