Last Girl Before Freeway

by Leslie Bennetts

  And yet even as she conformed to the cultural straitjackets circumscribing women’s behavior, Rivers played a significant role in destroying them. During her lifetime, the modern American women’s movement built a freeway to the future that liberated millions of women and girls from the limitations of the past. Although Rivers never set out to become part of a social justice crusade, she was by nature the quintessential iconoclast, compulsively rebellious and utterly fearless in her willingness to thumb her nose at such restrictions. Like a large boulder dropped into a still pond, her defiance had a ripple effect that spread out in ever-wider circles, rocking every boat it encountered.

  Rude and transgressive, Rivers’s humor freed the women who followed her, liberating them to tell the truth about their experiences and their bodies and their feelings, to say whatever they wanted and reject other people’s ideas about what a woman can’t do, onstage or onscreen or anywhere else. Her boldness helped pave the way for the legions of aspiring comediennes who now throng stages all over the country, no longer deterred by the naysayers who tell them they’re not pretty enough or fuckable enough—let alone that women aren’t funny.

  But Rivers was more than a role model for women in the entertainment industry. With stunning candor, she shared her own financial, professional, romantic, marital, and emotional struggles in self-help books and on motivational speaking tours. Unlikely as it seemed, the famous diva who lived in an apartment so lavish it was routinely compared to Versailles had also managed to make herself into everywoman’s sympathetic best friend, an intimate confidante and sensible adviser whose strength and determination provided encouragement for ordinary people overwhelmed with their own challenges. As she put it in the subtitle of one of her books, “I’ve survived everything…and you can too!”

  Both she and Elizabeth Taylor grew up at a time when the story of a woman’s life was defined by the man she married. Taylor won renown as the most beautiful woman in the world, but her career was in decline by the time she hit middle age. Today she is primarily remembered for being beautiful—and for marrying eight times. Between them, Taylor and Rivers had a total of ten marriages, but neither of them ever found that a man was the answer.

  As for beauty, Rivers would have traded all her achievements to become one of the swans she envied, but instead she used her midlife catastrophes to create the startling new accomplishments that made her a cultural powerhouse in old age.

  For her, the real answer was success. She never saw herself as a feminist groundbreaker; all she ever wanted was to make people laugh so she could feel loved in return. No matter how many triumphs she accumulated, she still felt unappreciated—but when she died, in 2014, the outpouring of emotion was so overwhelming that no one could fail to realize she had won the love of millions.

  Headlines around the world recognized her as a history-making pioneer who left a legacy of expanded opportunity for all those who followed. An inspiration for anyone struggling to overcome heartbreak and tragedy, she had long since become a living embodiment of courage, ingenuity, and resilience for every woman who faces unexpected hardships—or who yearns for something more substantial than a life story defined by how she looks and whom she marries.

  Fierce and indomitable, the ugly duckling was the one who helped to change the world.

  Chapter One

  Nobody Ever Wanted It More:

  “But She Has No Talent!”

  In school, she didn’t have friends. At lunch, she couldn’t find anyone who wanted to sit with her. During recess, nobody chose her for their team in any sport.

  Such slights made her feel bad, but from her earliest childhood, Joan Alexandra Molinsky was consoled by the incandescent memory of the unforgettable moment when she discovered the solution to all of life’s disappointments.

  The epiphany arrived like a bolt from the heavens when she won the role of a kitty in the preschool play. Performing in front of an audience, she was struck by “the ecstatic sense…that I could say, ‘I want to be somebody wonderful and walk out onstage and be the princess,’ and the world would say, ‘Yes, you are the princess!’”

  When everyone applauded, she was suffused with a joy she had never known—a miraculous high she spent the rest of her life trying to recapture. People accepted her! They enjoyed her! They thought she was beautiful!

  That night she wore her kitty cat hat with the bunny fur and pink felt ears to bed, where she sat in her best pajamas and waited expectantly for her parents to bring their dinner guests upstairs, certain that the grown-ups would again make a fuss over her and say, “Aren’t you darling!”

  She didn’t stay darling for long. As a very small child she was an angelic blonde, but the golden ringlets soon drooped and darkened to a dull mouse brown, her nose grew, and the tiny princess got so pudgy she would never stop despising herself for having been overweight as a child.

  But she had found the magic escape from her self-loathing, from feeling inadequate and unwanted. She had learned how to make people love her, even if only for a few precious moments—and she was hooked forever.

  From then on, the pretty kitty story represented the emotional truth at the core of her very existence—the Rosebud moment that defined the rest of her life. But in other regards, Joan Rivers’s public story of origin—like so many other aspects of her carefully constructed identity—was a shrewdly designed facade that obscured a considerably less photogenic reality.

  When she started to appear on television, she always said she came from Larchmont, a New York suburb that was noted for its “impeccable gentility,” as she put it with airy nonchalance, as if she was born to the little black dress and WASPy strand of pearls she wore like a uniform for her early TV performances.

  But even in a black dress and pearls, Rivers couldn’t resist the temptation of juicing up her impact with some showbiz pizzazz, so she always added a tacky feather boa. In the photographs of her first ever appearance on The Tonight Show, the bedraggled boa is crumpled in a forlorn heap, like a limp, mangy bird that happened to die on her lap while she was bantering with Johnny Carson.

  Her life story offered an equally curious amalgam of disparate elements. Far from the leafy green suburbs, Joan was born in 1933 in Brooklyn, where she spent her childhood. She and her older sister, Barbara, were raised in Crown Heights, at the intersection of Eastern Parkway and New York Avenue, on a block of houses known as Doctor’s Row. Their father, Meyer Molinsky, was indeed a doctor. But he grew up poor in a family of struggling Russian immigrants, and he never figured out how to be a successful businessman—a failure that had harrowing consequences for his family.

  Trying to establish a practice during the Depression, he seemed perpetually unable to manage the financial demands of running an office, so he would skip out on the rent by disappearing in the middle of the night after emptying everything he owned into a truck at 3 a.m. A soft touch who cared more about having people love him than about paying the bills, he charged a dollar a visit and accepted a cake or gefilte fish if his patients said they couldn’t pay, even if they were driving a new car and he wasn’t.

  “If somebody was sick, he would just take care of them. Money didn’t mean anything,” said Larry Ferber, a longtime friend of Joan’s and the former executive producer of her daytime television talk program, The Joan Rivers Show.

  Unfortunately, money was what meant the most to Meyer’s socially ambitious wife. Beatrice Grushman came from a family of well-to-do merchants in Odessa, and she raised her daughters on enthralling stories of her own enchanted Russian childhood, of lavish parties with peacocks strolling on lush emerald lawns and liveried waiters twirling trays of gold flatware and pears filled with caviar. But all their riches were left behind when their lives were overwhelmed by Russia’s prerevolutionary turmoil. After sewing jewels into the sable lining of her coat, Beatrice’s mother fled with her children to America.

  As a young woman in New York, Beatrice worked at a sewing machine in a blouse factory, stuffed her shoes
with newspaper when the soles wore out, and lived in a cold-water flat, where she slept on two chairs pushed together while her bed was rented to boarders. Humiliated by her family’s straitened circumstances and haunted by their loss of privilege, she developed a lifelong obsession with the trappings of wealth. She spent the rest of her life trying to create the appearance of class, which to her mind was signified by materialistic excess and exaggerated formality.

  “Both my parents were almost pathologically terrified of poverty,” Joan wrote in her first memoir, Enter Talking, which was published in 1986. But instead of bonding over shared trauma, her parents dealt with their fears in disastrously conflicting ways. While the debt-ridden Meyer agonized over every penny they spent, Beatrice filled their home with damask and brocade, dressed her daughters in silk pajamas from Paris, and squandered $2,000 the family didn’t have on a mink coat that sent her husband into paroxysms of helpless rage.

  “Elegance was her religion,” Joan said. “My mother wanted MD to stand for ‘Make Dollars.’”

  Although there were never enough dollars to satisfy her, Beatrice refused to curtail her extravagance. No matter how many screaming fights the Molinskys had over money, no matter how many times Beatrice stormed out of the house in disgust and then slunk back home because she couldn’t support herself, her compulsive spending forced her husband to live perpetually beyond his means.

  The consequences were painful for everyone. To the outside world, the Molinskys were the very embodiment of midcentury success—a nuclear family with a doctor father, a beautifully dressed mother who gave impressive dinner parties, and two healthy children. But behind closed doors, the atmosphere was poisonous. Beatrice’s ferocious quest for status caused unbearable financial pressure that doomed the entire family to live in a state of unrelenting stress. The result was an excruciating tension between the refined image they strove so hard to convey and the terrifying economic insecurity that always threatened to overwhelm them.

  Furious at Meyer’s failure to provide a more opulent lifestyle, the haughty Beatrice subjected his every move to withering scorn. When he said or did something she considered common, she was contemptuous: “Well, you come from kikes!”

  When she told him disdainfully to put his napkin on his knee, he would say, “Go to hell!”—and put the napkin on his knee.

  When Beatrice couldn’t pay the bills, she made secret trips to the pawnshop to sacrifice her wedding ring and gold bracelet yet again. She was so desperate to maintain her fabricated self-image that she never even told her husband the truth about her own background.

  “Incredible as sounds, my father during their entire forty-eight years of marriage did not know she had ever been poor and always believed that Beatrice had been rich in Russia and rich in America,” Joan wrote.

  An emotionally absent workaholic obsessed with his practice, Meyer paid little attention to his family. He was the breadwinner, but Joan identified with her frustrated mother, and her anguish at Beatrice’s powerlessness would shape the course of her life.

  “I knew then that I was not going to let that happen to me,” Joan said. “I was going to be what was called in those days a career girl, and would never, never let myself be dependent on anybody—and I never have.”

  Joan got another lesson in the power of money when she went away to summer camp at twelve. She was so certain she would be given the lead role in the camp play that when someone else was cast as Snow White, Joan went ballistic. “My reaction was overpowering rage, with no sane way to release it,” she recalled.

  Convinced that Phyllis Bernstein got the role because her father donated a new curtain for the camp stage, Joan organized her fellow campers in protest, demanding auditions and fomenting a strike. Even though the camp was owned by a friend of her mother’s, Joan was expelled and sent home.

  The mortifying debacle served as a bitter lesson: “If you had money, you could be Snow White!” But it was also an inescapable reminder of her own deficiencies. How could she have mustered enough social power to goad an entire camp into an uproar, and yet still lack the interpersonal skills to win friends and make people like her?

  Quite by accident, Joan had discovered one way to make people like her when her father took her on a fishing trip with several other doctors. To her surprise, she found she could make the group of adult men laugh by telling a story in a funny way. The experience was a revelation: “This is power!” she thought. In Joan Rivers: Exit Laughing, a Comedy Hall of Fame documentary that aired on PBS, she explained, “Laughter gave me power.”

  But for the most part, Joan was a social dud, and the problem got worse as her peers expanded their get-togethers to include boys as well as girls. The first time Joan found herself in a group playing spin the bottle, the boy who got stuck with her in a darkened room immediately said, “Let’s forget this.” When the next boy ended up alone with her, he grabbed her nose and twisted it instead of kissing her—“which makes you realize you are not attractive,” Joan said wryly.

  She was tormented by the sense of having been “cheated by fate,” which had, in her opinion, promised her a life of kitty hats and princesshood. But if Joan craved the adulation of a crowd, her mother had other goals in mind.

  Despite the family’s chronic inability to keep up with its financial obligations, Beatrice decided, as her daughters moved through adolescence and their Brooklyn neighborhood deteriorated, that it was time to improve their standing in the world. In the classic migration of urban strivers determined to create a new identity that reflected comfort and privilege, the Molinskys bought an impressive house in a suburb that seemed like the epitome of the American dream.

  Originally known as a summer resort for wealthy New Yorkers, Larchmont had, by the late 1950s, become a desirable haven filled with stately Victorian, colonial, and Tudor homes on the scenic streets bordering Long Island Sound, whose tranquil waters made the Larchmont Yacht Club an important gathering place for the sailing world.

  Most of the beach clubs, like the surrounding country clubs with their manicured golf courses, were inhospitable to Jews, but the Molinskys didn’t come to Larchmont for the boats or the greens. When they bought their dignified Georgian house, Beatrice told her daughters it was their “picture frame”—a trophy acquisition designed to serve as “a home to impress the boys who came there,” as Joan later put it. Beatrice was determined to launch her daughters into advantageous marriages, and Larchmont was an appropriate setting to attract the kind of husbands she envisioned.

  Joan had a very different vision: she just wanted to escape suburbia and get famous. Even as a teenager, she was savvy enough to realize she would have to buy her own ticket out of town, so she went to work selling jewelry at Wanamaker’s department store. When she’d saved up enough money, she took her mother out to dinner at a nice restaurant. “We had never before sat down relaxed and ordered anything we wanted,” reported Joan, who was thrilled to be able to leave “a major tip” that made her feel she was “very hot stuff”—and very unlike her father, whose anxious penny-pinching ruined every family outing.

  The experience crystallized the lesson that would drive her for the rest of her life. “I thought, ‘Money is power. Money is wonderful.’ I have not changed my opinion,” she wrote forty years later.

  Despite its manifest influence, money was ultimately a means to the desired end. For Joan, the ultimate point was what she referred to, always in capital letters, as “THE DREAM.” Although the reasons were apparent to no one but herself, she possessed “a permeating confidence that I had been born a great dramatic actress and my classmates would be sorry they had not appreciated me. I once wrote in my diary, ‘One day when I’m famous, I’ll laugh in their faces when the boys ask me to dance and please God don’t let that be too far off.’”

  As far as Joan was concerned, she was J. Sondra Meredith, a brilliant thespian who was destined by fate to become one of the great actresses of her time. She practiced her own private melodramas in fron
t of the bathroom mirror, imagining herself as a brave American who pretended to be a little French girl so she could smuggle documents past the Nazis on a death-defying mission. But as Joan later observed, lots of girls dream about becoming stars, and most don’t devote their lives to the single-minded pursuit of applause—so why did she?

  “The answer is the difference between a dream and an obsession,” Joan wrote in Enter Talking. “Performing became a psychological need at age fourteen, when I first experienced the full, intoxicating rush that happens onstage and all my fantasies were confirmed.”

  This time around, nobody handed her the chance, as some benevolent fate had done so many years earlier when she was given the role of the pretty kitty. As a homely but determined teenager, she had to create the opportunity for herself, which she did by taking on the responsibility of organizing the class plays, reviving the discontinued school tradition of an annual variety show, and making sure she was a featured performer.

  She made the most of her turn in the spotlight: “Suddenly this chubby girl who had never been worth much attention was mesmerizing and manipulating the entire school and faculty and all the parents. For a moment I was the supreme princess, somebody dazzling, somebody else.” That night she wrote in her diary, “Golly, I feel wonderful!”

  Those precious moments confirmed everything she had first intuited in prekindergarten—that the most enveloping kind of love could be found onstage and experienced through the applause of a crowd. But in the coming years, such highs would be few and far between as Joan struggled to navigate the widening gap between her ecstatic fantasies and her parents’ real-world expectations.

  When she finished high school, Joan wanted to go “right into drama school at the Pasadena Playhouse next door to Hollywood.” Her mother’s reaction was unequivocal: “Absolutely not.” Joan was expected to go to an eastern university, so she followed her older sister to Connecticut College for Women, a private liberal arts college in New London.