In that environment, Barbara excelled as usual: she got high marks, was invited to dine at the Colony Club, and dated Yalies who had gone to Andover and Exeter. Joan tried to emulate her social success, but the results were very different. Ever enterprising, she wrote letters to boys all over the eastern seaboard, but even when she landed a date, it was an unpleasant experience for all concerned.
When she trotted down the dormitory stairs to meet one blind date, “the guy frowned, turned to his friend, and said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ A moment like that—and there were many—rakes every open wound and makes you feel like nothing,” Joan recalled years afterward.
Instead of inspiring lust or longing in members of the opposite sex, Joan was made to feel that her looks provoked only revulsion. After going to the beach with another boy, she took off the little robe she was wearing so they could go swimming. Her date said, “Oh, my God.”
“The anguish was not just the disappointment in those boys’ faces, it was also my embarrassment—really shame—at not being like the other girls who got the invitations, got the votes of approval,” Joan said.
To make matters worse, her parents would come to visit her at college, driving up in a Cadillac she knew her father had received from a patient who repossessed cars, with her mother wearing the mink coat that her father had screamed about and a diamond bracelet, bought on time at Macy’s, that had also precipitated angry scenes. Joan didn’t have enough money to travel to Yale for her next blind date, but she was forced to smile and nod as her parents took her dorm mates out to dinner and pretended to be as affluent as they looked.
“I hated myself for playing along and joining their hypocrisy,” Joan recalled later. “Maybe that is why in my comedy I try to puncture the hypocrisy all around us, why it is almost a crusade with me to strip life down to what is really true.”
Although she still felt like a social outcast, she finally carved out a small niche for herself by directing a school play and finding a best friend. After two years at Connecticut College, she transferred to Barnard, where she discovered a more congenial tribe of artsy girls and theater nerds in an environment where “idiosyncrasies did not make you strange, they made you chic. Every girl was very, very bright and very, very neurotic. It was wonderful.”
As much as Rivers appreciated her college experience, she was not content to make her way in life as a plain old Barnard alumna following her graduation in 1954. After she became a public figure, she always let interviewers know she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, which is widely considered to be the nation’s most prestigious collegiate honor society—and an automatic signifier of intellectual distinction. When coverage of Rivers didn’t specify that she was Phi Beta Kappa, it usually mentioned that she graduated with honors. If you google “Joan Rivers Phi Beta Kappa Barnard,” more than thirteen thousand entries pop up.
Like many other aspects of the Molinsky family history, this particular “fact” turns out to be untrue. “Joan did not graduate Phi Beta Kappa—and no honors either,” said Debora Spar, Barnard’s current president, after checking the college’s academic records. Much as Rivers resented her parents’ efforts to embellish their status, she did the same thing with her own academic record.
One might suspect that Joan falsely claimed to be Phi Beta Kappa in order to compete with her accomplished older sister, but that assumption would also prove to be incorrect. When her sister—then known as Barbara Cushman Waxler—died in 2013, her obituaries specified that she too had earned such academic honors. “Barbara received her BA in economics from Connecticut College for Women, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa,” reported Main Line Media News, as did Philly.com.
But Joan wasn’t the only Molinsky to burnish her image with a more impressive intellectual pedigree. After checking its records, Connecticut College discovered that Barbara Molinsky, who graduated in 1951, wasn’t Phi Beta Kappa either, according to Deborah MacDonnell, a spokesperson for the college (which shortened its name in 1969, when it began admitting men). Both Molinsky girls spent their entire lives claiming to be Phi Beta Kappa, but neither actually earned that distinction.
Joan’s real interests were elsewhere, and finishing college finally liberated her to pursue the goal she had cherished for so long. As a newly minted graduate, she applied to become an apprentice at the Westport Country Playhouse in a program run by the Theatre Guild. Joan saw Westport as “the Tiffany of summer stock companies,” and she was overjoyed when she was accepted.
But to her own astonishment, instead of sashaying triumphantly into Westport as J. Sondra Meredith, she took to her bed and lay there in a fetal position for days, unable to face the challenge she had longed for all her life. When her chance finally came, she couldn’t bear the possibility that she might try to live out her dream and fail. After days of making increasingly ridiculous excuses, she finally gave up and told her mother, “I can’t.”
“In the end, it was an almost conscious choice to preserve my childhood fantasy and keep my secret self-image out of danger,” she observed later.
And so, having sabotaged the theatrical career she had hungered for, she took a course in typing and shorthand and found a job in the executive training program at Lord & Taylor. She did so well that she was hired away by Bond Clothing Stores to be a fashion coordinator.
Founded in Cleveland, Bond was the largest retail chain of men’s clothing stores in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. Best known for selling two-pant suits, Bond expanded to include women’s clothing during the 1950s, when the chain operated nearly a hundred outlets around the country. In New York City, the flagship store was Bond Fifth Avenue at Thirty-Fifth Street and Fifth Avenue, but it was the Times Square store that was dubbed “the cathedral of clothing.” For Joan, Bond would provide a fateful turning point that helped to determine the course of her life.
As she progressed in her working girl career at the store, her love life was also looking up. She fell madly in love with a friend of her cousin’s named David Fitelson, on whom she’d had a crush since girlhood. When he decided that he liked her too, she was astonished, and even more incredulous when he announced that she was his girlfriend.
To Joan, everything about David was dazzling. He was studying history at Columbia University and planning to be a poet. His father was an attorney with the Theatre Guild, and the family personified the kind of cultural cachet Joan admired and envied. A Chagall and a Matisse hung in the living room of the Fitelson house in Greenwich Village. The garden boasted a Henry Moore sculpture. A silver cigarette case from Mary Martin gleamed on the table.
The Fitelson family’s sophistication notwithstanding, Joan’s parents were unimpressed with the prospect of David as a mate for their daughter. To them, he was a spoiled, disreputable bohemian who wouldn’t be able to support a wife in the style to which they expected her to become accustomed. Joan was supposed to marry a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant—not some wild-eyed, impractical urban Heathcliff who loved her with the kind of dramatic fervor that epitomized grand passion in her eyes. Joan and David fought with operatic intensity and great regularity, and after every explosion he would write an elegy, which Joan thought was very romantic.
Far less romantic, even to a besotted Joan, was the fact that he was always broke. He would drive to Larchmont in the middle of the night with no money to buy gas, expecting her to pay. He was the love of her life, but their fights were so terrible that on one particularly memorable occasion she screamed, “You’re a lazy rich man’s son waiting for the inheritance!”—and then jumped out of a moving car. And yet their mutual attraction exerted such an overwhelming pull that they couldn’t seem to leave each other alone. He vowed he would never let her go.
So when David finally went into the Army, Joan figured she had the six weeks of his basic training to get herself married to someone else. As if sent to her by central casting, James Sanger materialized to fit the bill. The son of the merchandise manager at Bond, “he was the royal princ
e and we were the buzz of the store,” she said proudly.
Joan decided that Jimmy was just what her parents wanted for her: a Columbia graduate and a businessman, already well-to-do and destined for success. Instead of constant emotional chaos and a future of impoverished disillusionment with David, a life with Jimmy seemed to promise a nice apartment, a maid, a country club, and a mink coat—everything that she had been raised to want, and that, in truth, a significant part of her actually did want.
Joan told Jimmy that they should get married immediately. She was twenty-two years old, and so sure she was making a mistake that she had to take a tranquilizer before the wedding—“but I knew what was expected of me and was going to do it,” she said.
Her acquiescence did not signal her acceptance. “I was furious about having to get married,” she admitted long afterward. “I was Phi Beta Kappa, and all they wanted me to do was get married!”
Her anger at such social expectations was compounded by her parents’ implicit disparagement of her other prospects. “Her mother thought Joan would never marry, so she said, ‘Listen, nobody else is coming along, so you’d better grab this guy,’” reported Blaine Trump, who became a close friend many decades later. “Joan said it was a disaster.”
Like her parents before her, Joan found herself mismatched in a marriage as ill-conceived as it was hasty. It became clear almost immediately that neither partner understood what they were getting into when they said “I do.” Jimmy—who obviously had no idea what Joan was really like—turned out to be “furious that he had an ambitious wife.” He kept telling her, “I want to be the boss,” and they fought constantly.
Six months after the wedding, Joan left for good. In those days, even when both parties wanted to escape a marriage, the options for doing so were tightly constrained; until the movement to reform divorce laws gained traction in the 1970s, no-fault divorce didn’t exist, so one partner had to prove that the other was to blame in order to terminate a marriage.
So they got the marriage annulled on the grounds that Jimmy didn’t want children but had neglected to tell Joan. Ending a marriage was scandalous no matter how it was done, and Joan’s parents were understandably appalled; in 1955, nice Jewish girls who wore white gloves and aspired to mink coats and country-club memberships didn’t jump into and out of a perfectly respectable marriage, let alone all in the same year.
The Molinskys would have been even more upset had they realized what the whole debacle really meant. As far as Joan was concerned, her doomed attempt at establishing a conventional grown-up life “closed the door, not just on Jimmy Sanger, but on ever being Mrs. Westchester and Mrs. Doctor’s Wife and Mrs. Normal Citizen in society.” She had tried; she had done what her parents wanted her to do. And she had failed.
From now on, she was going to pursue her own dreams, not theirs. Fortunately for the entire family, neither Joan nor her parents had any idea of what a long, difficult, painful, embarrassing journey this would turn out to be—or of the widening gulf that would separate them as the rebellious child battled her way into a hostile future.
In order to do so, she had to find a new support network, and so she began what would become a lifelong process of creating her own surrogate family with friends who understood her goals and sympathized with her hardships.
The son of a burlesque comedian in the Catskills, Lou Alexander grew up in the Borscht Belt branch of show business, and all he wanted was to follow in his father’s footsteps. In the late 1950s, after getting out of the service, he started trying to make it as a stand-up comic in his own right. One day his wife, a model named Beth Hamilton, told him that someone she worked with at Bond had asked to meet him. The young woman’s name was Joan, and while she had a job in a clothing store, what she really wanted to learn about was comedy.
“At the store, the models would walk around and they would do a whole thing about what you’re wearing, like ‘This is an off-the-shoulder pinstripe’ or whatever,” explained Alexander, who was two years older than Rivers. “Joan did the narration of the clothing, but she said to Beth, ‘I’m not going to do this. I want to be a comedian.’ Beth said, ‘I’m married to a comedian,’ and Joan said, ‘I want to meet your husband.’ I was working at a club called the Golden Slipper in Mineola, Long Island, and Joan came out with her boyfriend to see me.”
Although Alexander knew the bare facts of Joan’s history, she wasn’t forthcoming about her marital misadventure. “She was divorced from her first husband, but she never talked about that,” he said. “I knew she wasn’t doing very well, because she had on a brassiere that was held up with a safety pin.”
But she knew what she wanted. “She said, ‘Can you give me some pointers on how I can get into the business?’ I said, ‘Whatever you see me doing tonight, take it and use it as a girl thing instead of a guy thing.’ So she wrote down all kinds of notes. Then she said, ‘How do I get started?’ I said, ‘Go to Greenwich Village and work for nothing. Tell them you want to break in. If they like your act, they throw change—quarters, dimes, nickels—and that’s your money.”
Alexander promised to come and watch Joan perform when she got onstage, which he did. “I went down to Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village and saw her,” he reported.
Founded in 1959 as a club on Macdougal Street, Cafe Wha? was a popular venue for aspiring musicians and comedians, many of whom went on to have legendary careers, including Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, the Velvet Underground, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, and Bruce Springsteen.
When Alexander first saw Joan onstage, her lack of experience was so apparent that his initial notes focused on the basics of communicating with an audience. “The material wasn’t that good, and she talked too fast,” he explained. “She was speaking so fast I said, ‘It’s very hard to understand what you’re saying. As soon as you get to the punch line, say to yourself, “One, two, three…”—and then say the punch line.’”
The next time he watched her perform, he was in for a surprise. “She’s doing her act, and she says out loud, ‘One, two, three!’ She’s supposed to say it to herself!”
Alexander has told this story before, but it was reported as if the joke were on Joan, the clueless novice who was so green she didn’t realize she wasn’t supposed to say the numbers of her little countdown out loud. And yet this interpretation seems absurd: Joan was a woman who would go to any lengths to make someone laugh. In this case, it seems clear that her intended target was Lou Alexander, whom she was so eager to impress that she was willing to sacrifice the entire room to crack up her mentor with a private joke that only he would get.
It worked. “How could I not laugh at that?” Alexander said. “I fell on the floor.”
The joke was not only calculated but totally unexpected, its impact compounded by the irresistible frisson of marking its intended audience as part of a select group of knowing insiders—a group that, in this case, numbered only two. No one else knew why the joke was funny, or even that it was a joke—but to Lou and Joan, it was hilarious.
The experience convinced him that Joan had the one irreplaceable attribute of any comedian. “You can’t teach somebody to be funny,” he said. “There’s gotta be something there to start with. Joan was a little bit outrageous, a little bit out there.”
Driven by a compulsive need to transgress, she seemed willing to sacrifice almost anything to make people laugh, from propriety and good taste to her dignity and her femininity. The reward certainly wasn’t riches; when Joan got started, a working comic like Lou Alexander was lucky if he earned enough to pay for food and shelter. “I was making sixty dollars for four shows in two days at the Golden Slipper,” he reported. “Joan said, ‘Can I make that kind of money?’”
“Everything’s relative,” Alexander replied dryly.
Despite her family’s emphasis on material wealth, Joan was not discouraged by such hardships. Trying to placate her parents by making some money, she juggled office temp jobs with an e
ndless round of largely fruitless efforts to land an acting gig. She was fired from so many jobs that she resorted to a fervent prayer: “Please, God, if you’re going to make me a failure, fine—but don’t make me a failure at something I don’t want to do.”
She was no more successful on the rare occasions when she landed a role in some kind of stage show. After assuring the director that she had lots of relatives who would come see her in a play, which seemed to be the primary qualification for being cast, Joan was thrilled to be included in an Off-Broadway production called Seaweed. She was told that the job didn’t pay any money but could be useful as a showcase. When it turned out that the only available part was Man in Black, Joan suggested that the role be changed to Woman in Black.
And so the character became a lesbian, and Joan found herself impersonating a young woman in love with another female character, who was played by “a skinny high school girl with a large nose and a pin that said ‘Go Erasmus!’” The Brooklyn girl with the big nose was named Barbara Streisand, but she would later change her name to Barbra and become one of the biggest stars in the world.
Seaweed didn’t turn out to be Streisand’s big break—or Joan’s. “The actual performance is a blur—the mind protects itself,” Joan wrote in Enter Talking. “I do remember I had a big love scene where I told Barbra I loved her very much and she rejected me and I had a knife in my hand and tried to kill her and then myself. I also remember a horrendous lot of coughing, like a tubercular ward, and knowing this whole thing was insane and wanting to turn and wink at the audience, sitting there in overcoats.”
The only review appeared the next day in Show Business, which called Seaweed sophomoric and ridiculous and added that the performances couldn’t be evaluated because the material was so bad.
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