by Marlo Thomas
—M.T.
Marlo: I’ve got to tell you, your book Enter Talking was the most honest and unsettling account of becoming a comedian I have ever read. What amazed me was that, with all the failure you went through, you knew you were as good as you later proved to be. How did you know?
Joan: I didn’t know. I was one of the lucky ones who had no choice. And I don’t mean that melodramatically. But at this age you can look back and get it. I knew I wanted to be in the business and I knew that’s where I was going.
Marlo: But you were failing everywhere—even your parents begged you to stop.
Joan: Yeah, I know, it’s not rational. It was like drugs, and in my case, it’s my drug of choice.
Marlo: When did you know you were funny?
Joan: I didn’t know I was funny. I just knew I had to perform.
Marlo: Were your parents funny?
Joan: My whole family was funny. My father was very witty. He was a doctor, but he would tell great stories about his patients. I think it’s all truly DNA. You don’t just say, “Oh, gee, I’m going to become funny.” You just see the world . . . differently.
Marlo: How about your mother?
Joan: She was the only one in my family who wasn’t funny. She would always say—and it was so sweet—“I’m an appreciator.”
Marlo: Did being an appreciator make her encourage you?
Joan: In comedy? Oh, God no! None of them did. They didn’t want me in the business. They didn’t want me to be an actress, and couldn’t even say the word “comedian.” To them it was the lowest rung on the show-biz ladder. Even when I was already hosting The Tonight Show, my mother would still say, “Joan is basically a writer.”
Marlo: You often talk about comedy in such a violent way: Comedy is a medium for revenge, humor is a gun.
Joan: That’s because comedy comes out of anger. Comedy comes out of “I’ll show you.” Comedy comes out of “You’ll be sorry.” The minute somebody is having a wonderful, soft life, they’re not so funny anymore.
Marlo: You’re still funny.
Joan: My life has always been rough.
Marlo: Even now?
Joan: Oh, absolutely. Always. Now I’m fighting the age barrier. They tell me, “You’re great, but you’re not the demographic.” I think one of the reasons I did Celebrity Apprentice was to say, “I can still take you with one hand behind my back.” And I was so glad to have won because of that. Literally to say, “Enough, stop writing people off!”
Marlo: You like to make fun of older women being with younger men.
Joan: Yeah, I do a lot of cougar jokes. I mean, what’s with these older women? I don’t want to wake up in the morning, look over and say, “Is this my date or did I give birth last night?” That’s not what I’m looking for.
Marlo: You’ve referred to yourself as a lion tamer when you’re on stage. More violence.
Joan: Absolutely. I think any actor or performer has to be in command. You have to be the strongest and they have to pay attention. You don’t want an audience talking during you.
Marlo: I have this vision of you with a chair and a whip.
Joan: Just about. You have to say, “I’m here and we’re all going to have a good time, but you will be quiet and listen to me.”
Marlo: And why should we listen to you?
Joan: Because I’m the funniest, and because you paid your money to see me.
Marlo: Why do you say, “Never trust an audience”?
Joan: Because you can’t. Bill Cosby told me this a long time ago. He said the audience decides collectively if they like you or don’t like you, every time you walk on the stage. You must never think, Oh they adore me, so they’ll adore me tonight. No, no, no, no. Bill said—and it’s so smart—“If they don’t know you, they give you three minutes. If they do know you, they give you five.”
Marlo: How do you handle a heckler?
Joan: I saw Sinatra do something once, so I just copied him. Someone was heckling him—and yelling and talking during him—so he just walked over, gave the guy the microphone and said, “You think they’d rather hear you? Here—go do it. I’ll be back.” And he walked off stage.
Marlo: That’s brilliant. You’re known for saying very funny but insulting Don Rickles kinds of things . . .
Joan: But it’s never directed at the audience. I have great respect for my audience. Nobody got all dressed up to have a bad time. They came to have fun. So I would never hurt them or intimidate them in any way. I go after the big guns.
Marlo: Like Elizabeth Taylor. What did this woman ever do to you?
Joan: I truly feel that a comedian is the one who says that the emperor is not wearing clothes. I succeed by saying what everybody else is thinking. I was the first to say that Elizabeth Taylor is . . . huge! Remember that picture of her getting out of a limousine with David Geffen and she couldn’t fit through the door? That was my first Elizabeth Taylor joke. Then I just kept going: “She has more chins than a Chinese phone book.” “I sit in McDonald’s just to watch her eat and see the ‘How Many Served’ numbers change.”
Marlo: And you never let up.
Joan: Oh, I let up. When she got in a wheelchair, I said, “Okay, let it go.”
Marlo: I’m so impressed with your drive. You’ve never lost that, have you?
Joan: No, no, no, no, you don’t. You can’t.
Marlo: As harrowing as your survival stories are, they’re also very touching. Like when you first appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, you were so frightened and felt so unsupported, that you wrote “Break a leg” on one knee and “Good luck” on the other. They were covered by your dress, so you could touch them while you were on the air. That was so moving to me.
Joan: Yeah, well, you’ve got to bolster yourself. I had been brought up so many times for The Tonight Show and was always turned down. And, you know, the humiliation of getting up in front of a secretary . . .
Marlo: You auditioned for a secretary?
Joan: . . . who’s eating a sandwich. And she rejects you! I wasn’t brought on the show to anybody’s expectations. I was just thrown on in the last ten minutes, the worst spot. And three weeks before, my agent had told me, “You’re too old. If you were gonna make it, you’d have made it by now.”
Marlo: That’s nice—and that’s your agent. So how did he get you on the show?
Joan: He didn’t. I went on because Bill Cosby had been on the show with a comedian who was so bad, he said to the bookers, “You might as well use Joan Rivers. She can’t be worse than that guy.” And that’s why they finally put me on.
Marlo: What a recommendation.
Joan: No one had faith in me. They didn’t even think I was good enough to do stand-up, so they brought me out as “a girl writer.”
Marlo: And it went great, right?
Joan: Yeah, I was funny out there—and Carson, right on the air, said, “You’re going to be a star.” But it wasn’t until the next day, when every critic came out and said something wonderful, that the phones went off the hook. It was like an overnight sensation, really. Amazing.
Marlo: So you were on your way.
Joan: Not yet, because I knew one thing—and no one told me this, I just knew it was true: that it wasn’t the first shot, it wasn’t the second shot, it was the third shot that establishes you and proves you weren’t a fluke.
Marlo: So how far apart were your three shows?
Joan: About six weeks—and, every night, I went to a club in the Village with my Wollensak tape recorder and continued to do exactly what I had been doing—working on the shots, working on the shots. That’s all I did—I wanted to show them. Anyone can be funny once. We’ve all got seven good stories in us. But can you come up with 160 good stories?
Marlo: I love that you taped it. It’s the craft.
Joan: Yeah, I still do that. Nothing has changed. I work in a place on Forty-second Street in New York every Wednesday night. I go in, ad-lib, and tape the whole thing.
Marlo: No kidding.
Joan: Nothing has changed—just the machine is smaller.
Marlo: Are you creating material to use on television?
Joan: To use on television, to use on a roast, to keep me relevant. Right now, I’m going over last night’s transcript so I can pull stuff together for Vegas next week.
Marlo: What joke is in front of you right now?
Joan: My “Helen Keller Was My House Guest” routine.
Marlo: Tell it to me.
Joan: Oh, please.
Marlo: Come on, tell me!
Joan: It’s still so new. Okay—here’s one joke: Barbara Walters wrote in her book The Art of Conversation that if you’re a house guest you have to have one good story at every meal.
Marlo: Okay . . .
Joan: So Helen Keller has one story: “I put my hand under the water and I went wa-wa.” Which is good for Friday night—but come Sunday morning, it’s like, “Okay, we heard it, Helen.” You can’t even tell her to shut up.
Marlo: You’re vicious! Let’s talk about marriage. I didn’t realize that you were married before Edgar. How long did that last?
Joan: About seven months. As I’ve said, “Our marriage license turned out to be a learner’s permit.” It was all about I don’t think I have the courage to go on and do what I want to do. I knew it was bad for me. While I was married to him, I wouldn’t go to the theatre. I just couldn’t bear to go and see live performing because I wanted it so much.
Marlo: How sad.
Joan: When it was finally over, it was truly like getting out of jail. Years later he called me up and wanted to meet me, and I took a vote. My entire body voted.
Marlo: And what was the verdict?
Joan: A hundred percent no way. “Come on, toes! Everyone’s gotta vote here!”
Marlo: “Come on, toes”—that’s funny. It’s what you said—“Personal truth is the foundation of comedy.”
Joan: Oh, it has to be. Comedy has got to come right from the gut. And that makes all the difference in the world.
Marlo: And what are you saying about age in your act now that’s right from the gut?
Joan: How horrible it is. How I hate old people—especially old people who buy in bulk. “What are you doing with eighteen jars of mayonnaise at Costco? You’re not even going to make it through the checkout line!”
Marlo: You’re so funny.
Joan: As long as you talk about what you really experience, audiences know you’re telling the truth.
Marlo: And how did you deal with that when you were coming back from losing Edgar?
Joan: Oh, I talked about it immediately—I had to. You can’t come on stage with this elephant in the room and not mention that your husband has committed suicide.
Marlo: How did you?
Joan: I would come out and say, “I’ve had some year. You think you’ve had a year, don’t start with me because I’ve had a worse year than you, okay? My husband committed suicide.” My joke was “And it was my fault. While we were making love, I took the bag off my head.”
Marlo: Oh, God . . .
Joan: But it gave them relief, you know what I’m saying? We all knew it. I knew they knew it. And we were able to go on from there. I work everything out on stage.
Marlo: Did your daughter, Melissa, ever get mad at you for making jokes about her in your act when she was younger?
Joan: She was never the butt of my jokes. Same with Edgar. I made myself the butt of their jokes.
Marlo: Like?
Joan: Like, “On my wedding night I came out of the bathroom and Edgar said, ‘Let me help you with the buttons,’ and I said, ‘I’m naked.’ ” It always came back on me.
Marlo: Your whole career—your life—is about being a survivor.
Joan: It’s mountain after mountain, Marlo. And the mountain at this moment is the age thing, and staying relevant.
Marlo: Do you think you’ll do a book on aging now?
Joan: I don’t know—I still don’t feel old. But people say to me, “You should really think about selling your apartment.” I say, “Are you crazy?” And then I think, What would I tell a seventy-six-year-old woman? I would say, “Sell your apartment.”
Marlo: Will you?
Joan: Probably, because my life has changed.
Marlo: And will that new life sit well with Joan Rivers, lion tamer?
Joan: It will be fine. Cindy Adams, Barbara Walters and I have talked about this. We want to live at the Pierre Hotel, have three apartments on the same floor—and share one nurse. It’s our dream.
Marlo: What a dream.
Joan: And we’ll have one person to walk all of our dogs. We’ll have a very good time.
Chapter 30
Obsession
The saying goes, “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.” I think that’s what makes comedy such an obsession. And you have to be an obsessive to work in it. Fixing, honing, scratching out. You know it when you hear it. And until you can hear it, you can’t stop.
I remember when we were shooting the pilot of That Girl, I was going over lines in the script, working through each scene to be sure we’d covered everything. Our director, Jerry Paris, looked at me, amused.
“What is it with you?” he said. “Every scene is opening night?”
“Yes,” I said, incredulous. “Isn’t it with you?”
But it was with Bill Persky, who was a co-creator of the series, along with his writing partner, Sam Denoff. As the Executive Producer I worked closely with both of them, but I had an immediate bond with Billy. He liked women, and was one of the first men I’d ever worked with who had no problem having a woman as a boss (even one in her twenties). There weren’t a lot of guys who did. Lucille Ball was our landlord at Desilu Studios, where we rented our soundstage. She had real power—she owned the studio. Tony told me years later that, whenever someone was looking for me, the joke was “She’s having a meeting in the men’s room with Lucy.” That was the climate in the late Sixties, which made Billy unusual. He really seemed to understand the feelings of a young woman. He had grown up with a sister and had three daughters. So he got it.
I depended on Billy a great deal during the first year of the show, and we quickly became friends. One day he developed serious muscle spasms in his neck—obsessiveness can do that to you—and was confined to his bed by his doctors. I was worried about him, and worried about how the show would proceed without him.
At the table with Billy Persky—on the same side, in more ways than one.
Billy loves to tell the story of my coming to his house to discuss some trouble we were having with the script we were about to shoot. There he was in traction, lying absolutely flat on his back with a nine-pound weight pulling on his head. He couldn’t see anything but the ceiling, so he had to wear a special pair of glasses that were actually mirrored cubes, cut diagonally so that he could see down even though he was looking up—kind of like a periscope. But since he couldn’t move his head, he could only see me when I was directly in front of him.
Undaunted, I paced back and forth at the foot of his bed, passionately laying out the script’s problems, oblivious to the fact that he was flat on his back—and oblivious to the mirror’s limited range of vision. Billy could barely move, but he desperately tried to follow me with his eyes as I darted back and forth in his mirrored glasses. At one point he moved his head to try to catch my fleeting image, and winced in pain. I felt terrible, so I sat on his bed to comfort him—which caused the mattress to depress and him along with it, as the weight stayed stationary, almost pulling his head off. Then we burst into uncontrollable giggling at the absurdity of the situation. We were obviously made for each other.
A few months later, I was in the makeup room at the studio, about to begin the day’s work. I took a brush to my hair and, after a few strokes, I froze in pain. I couldn’t get my arm to come down. I had my own muscle spasm, and ended up in a similar hospital bed and neck brace.
My father came to visit me. He
walked into the room, stood at the foot of the bed and said, “If you live, you’ll be a big star.” Then he lectured me on pacing myself.
Now he tells me.
FOR THE SECOND YEAR of That Girl, we had the great fortune of getting Danny Arnold to produce the show. Danny had produced the first year of Bewitched, and would later create a hit show of his own, Barney Miller. He was superb at everything—writing, directing, editing, producing—and was the ultimate obsessive. I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. I would leave the studio at 9:30 P.M. after a day of shooting—having first arrived that morning at 5 A.M.—and I would see the lights on in the editing room and know Danny was still there. A man like that makes an obsessive like me sleep like a baby. Someone was minding the store.
Danny did so many great things for me. One of them was to bring in a female story editor, Ruth Brooks Flippen. Until Ruth joined our all-male staff, I had felt like a lonely voice in the wilderness, constantly explaining, But a girl wouldn’t say that to her father . . . or her boyfriend . . . or her best friend . . . I had always known that, for a woman, there was safety in numbers. It’s never wise to be the only female at the table. Experience had taught me: One is a pest, two is a team, three is a coalition. Now I had Ruth. We were only two but, together, we were like the Red Army.
I remember one late night we were leaving the office of one of our writers, who had been moaning about how hard we were being on him.
“Why do some men always make you feel like you’ve beaten them up just because you don’t agree with their opinion?” I asked.
“I know what you mean,” Ruth said. “All I’ve ever really wanted was a good cry, but my husband always beats me to it.”
I loved her—she always nailed it.
And I was learning that, even for a woman with power, the path was dotted with land mines—she’s so ambitious, she’s so aggressive, she’s ruthless. “Funny thing,” I used to say, “a man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruthless . . . all a woman has to do is put you on hold.”
After the series ended, I went to New York to study acting with Lee Strasberg, and learned a whole new way to work. It became my true obsession—I felt like I had found a home. Strasberg wanted all you had to give. He welcomed it.