The Molinskys’ reaction was equally scathing. Joan’s father told her that Seaweed was “the worst piece of garbage I ever saw, and these people are garbage. You’re crazy.” Joan’s mother said she was wasting her life on acting and should give up and go to law school like her sister. Both were baffled by Joan’s obstinacy. As far as they could tell, no one on the planet thought Joan had what it took to make it—except Joan.
“What makes you think you can be a success?” her mother asked in desperation. “How do you know you have talent? Has anyone ever said you have talent? It’s absolutely, utterly ridiculous. You’re talented in so many other ways; why throw your life away in the one area you have nothing?”
In her memoir, Rivers related such painful experiences in great detail, but it seems she took as many liberties with the truth as she had in describing her ostensible academic honors. When the author James Spada published Streisand: Her Life in 1995, he reported that Rivers fabricated virtually everything about her alleged appearance with Streisand—including the name of the play, which was actually Driftwood, and the lesbian romp Rivers claimed to have had with the future megastar.
“‘There was no lesbianism in my play,’ says Driftwood playwright Maurice Tei Dunn. ‘I can’t imagine where Joan got that. In those days, it would have been suicide in the theater. Barbara and Joan never had a single exchange together. They were never onstage at the same time. That picture of them together in Joan’s book was posed during rehearsals.’”
What Joan didn’t exaggerate was the unanimous dismay that greeted her own performance. When it came to her viability as a potential talent, all available evidence suggested that her parents’ concerns were warranted—and yet Joan remained implacable.
Busy going nowhere as a dramatic actress, she was also trying to get onstage as a comic, but when she managed to land a gig, the reception was even worse. She was thrilled when Lou Alexander introduced her to an agent named Harry Brent, who booked her as an emcee at a place called the Show Bar in Boston. Brent informed her that her stage name was Pepper January, and she’d be known for “comedy with spice.”
The Show Bar turned out to be a seedy strip club where Pepper’s castmates were named Dyna-Mite and Aurora Borealis, the Shooting Star. Trying to maintain some semblance of dignity, Joan told the strippers that she had gone to Connecticut College. “Oh—me too,” said one of the strippers, who astonished Joan by naming the dormitories where she had lived.
When Joan went onstage, another shock awaited her. Looking down at the audience, she saw, “almost at my feet,” a Yale student she had dated—“the blond son of the owner of Peck & Peck,” dressed in a Brooks Brothers gray flannel suit and rep tie. “I do not know which of us was more astounded and upset,” Joan said.
The audience wasn’t any happier. As she launched into her routine, men started screaming, “Get the fuck off! Bring on the girls!” Joan’s set was so bad she was fired before the second show of the night, which meant she didn’t get paid.
Back in her cheap hotel, which smelled of urine and peanuts, she couldn’t stop crying. “I was seeing myself as my parents saw me, facing the truth that theater had not worked and comedy was not working,” she said. She took a long shower in a tub so filthy she kept her socks on. “Standing in that dirt-blackened tub, I no longer knew whether the thing inside me struggling to come out was talent or only an obsession. But even at that moment I could still feel it there, enormous inside me, still constantly pushing. It wanted to get out and I wanted it out—and could not find a way to release it. I was giving birth to a baby and someone had tied my knees.”
When she got home to Larchmont and acknowledged her failure to her parents, they told her that “this foolishness has got to stop.” Her mother said, “You’re making your father and me ill.” Joan didn’t stop, and she kept trying valiantly to fit in, even at strip clubs. “I used to buy pasties and put them on over my dress,” she said.
But then Harry Brent managed to book her into a strip joint in Springfield, Massachusetts. When she came off the stage, the boss said, “Get your stuff and get the fuck out of here.”
At this point Brent gave up and told her he wouldn’t handle her anymore. He was, however, keeping the rights to “Pepper January, comedy with spice”—because “great names and logos don’t come easy,” he said.
“When you are not even Pepper January, then you are truly nothing,” Joan observed. No one seemed to think she was going to make it. Nobody except her boyfriend, an Italian wannabe actor named Nick Clemente whose father was connected to the mob, ever encouraged her at all. And yet no matter how many times she failed, she simply refused to give up.
But it was a long time before Joan’s perseverance began to pay off. As she learned more about comedy, she also realized how bad she was at it. “I knew my act was terrible,” she admitted. She admired the sophisticated comedy of hip talents like Mike Nichols and Elaine May, but it didn’t occur to her that she might draw from her own everyday humor to create jokes or sketches that were more original than the tired old gags endlessly recycled by generations of hacks.
In the spring of 1959, she finally met a kindred spirit, an aspiring comedy writer named Treva Silverman—“a dream sister who had graduated from Bennington College, done her thesis on James Joyce’s Ulysses, and known since day one that she belonged in show business,” Joan said. “We were two salmon swimming upstream together.”
Through her new soul mate, Joan got to know a group of comedy-obsessed twentysomethings who, like Treva, wanted to be writers rather than performers. They were all students of comedy, their role models were the legendary wits of the Algonquin Round Table, and their goal was to make it to Upstairs at the Downstairs, Julius Monk’s satirical revue at the old Wanamaker mansion on West Fifty-Sixth Street—a far cry from a gig in the Catskills.
Hanging out with such smart young things, Joan was exposed to a very different world than anything she had known, and a different sort of people. Up until then, she spent much of her time with her incongruously inappropriate boyfriend. A great comfort, Nick gave her unfailing emotional support even when no one else did, but he was a former Marine who lived with his parents in Brooklyn, where his father was a housepainter who also worked for the Mafia, according to Enter Talking. Joan knew he wouldn’t fit in with Treva’s cabaret crowd any better than he would with her own very Jewish, very status-conscious parents, so she kept each part of her world quite separate.
Treva’s friends also introduced Joan to a different approach toward her work. They were obsessed with the craft of writing, and Joan began to focus on developing her material and shaping it to her own individual persona instead of conforming to a generic mold. In addition to making fun of herself, she ridiculed society’s expectations of women—a topic that became a staple of her work in jokes about traditional female roles: “I hate housework. You make the beds, you do the dishes, and six months later, you have to start all over again.”
A quarter of a century after meeting Treva and her friends, Joan wrote about what an important influence they had on her own development as a comic. “Treva even gave me one line I still use: ‘If God wanted me to cook, my hands would be aluminum,’” Joan reported in Enter Talking.
As she began to drop old routines from her act and replace them with new material, she also assumed a new identity. When a theatrical agent named Tony Rivers said he couldn’t send her out as Joan Molinsky and she had to change her name, she came up with a new one on the spot. “Okay, I’ll be Joan Rivers,” she said.
And slowly, a new persona began to emerge. “In the course of all that bombing in cheesed-out clubs, I gradually saw my mistakes and tried not to repeat them—it is the bad that teaches you, makes you think; good takes care of itself and only gets better,” she said. “However, no matter how many times I bombed and cried, I could not wait to get to the next job. Hope always lived in the next show.”
But when she bombed in front of all her parents’ friends, the Molinskys
finally reached their breaking point, and the public humiliation Joan inflicted on them touched off a shattering explosion that left her homeless.
The Molinskys were members of the Riviera Shore Club in New Rochelle—“not the best beach club, but one my parents could afford,” said Joan, who described its decor as “high Bronx.” Even there, the Molinskys felt compelled to elevate their status by pretending they had a cabana when they had only a locker.
Joan was nonetheless gratified when her father suggested her as the professional entertainer for one of the club’s regular Saturday night dinner shows. The manager agreed, mainly because a recent appearance by the comedienne Totie Fields had depleted his budget and he needed to find free entertainment.
But when Joan took the stage, the crowd quickly progressed from muttering “Oh, it’s Joan Molinsky—you know, Dr. Molinsky’s daughter. No, not Barbara—Joan!” to “How long do you think she’s going to go on?” and “Shouldn’t we leave now and avoid the traffic?” Drenched in flop sweat, Joan finally fled the stage and ran to hide behind the kitchen door, shaking—only to be confronted with her parents.
The manager saw the Molinskys “dying of embarrassment and led them out through my escape route,” Joan reported. “Coming through the kitchen was my father, confused and shocked, looking as though somebody had sat on him. With one outstretched hand, he was trying to steady my mother, dressed in very high-heeled satin shoes, a lace Bergdorf Goodman dress, wearing the good pearls and clutching a little Judith Leiber bag…On her face was the look that must have been on somebody’s face at the first sight of Hiroshima.”
After trying to sneak out without having to face anyone, the whole family was further humiliated when they were forced to wait for their car in front of the club, along with everyone else. “Mostly they just looked away and said nothing,” Joan recalled, although a few women came over to her mother and said sorrowfully, “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
At home, Joan went up to her room, but the window was open and she could hear her parents talking on the terrace below. “She has no talent. What can we do?” her mother said. “She is throwing her life away.”
Her father was equally desolate: “The people expected more, even from an amateur.”
Joan finally exploded. “I went crazy. I ran down the stairs and out the back door…[and] screamed at them, ‘I don’t care what you say! You don’t know! I do have talent! You’re wrong!’”
Her mother told her she had to give up. Her father told her she was associating with “a bunch of derelicts and fairies.” Joan yelled, “It’s my life! It’s my choice how I live it!”
When her father said she could go to hell, she told him he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about—whereupon her mother told her she wasn’t allowed to swear at her parents and her father said she was turning into a tramp, just like her friends.
Then her mother played the fatal trump card: “Joan, if you’re going to live in our house, you’re going to live by our rules.”
Joan took the bait. “In that case, I won’t live in the house! You can’t tell me what to do. I’m too old. I’ve been married and divorced.”
Her father shouted, “You want to leave? Leave! Who wants you? It’s our house—just get out!”
“You got it,” Joan screamed, and ran off in her pedal pushers.
She got into her car and waited, but nobody came to retrieve her. After waiting for a very long time, she drove down the driveway at a snail’s pace, but her parents still didn’t come after her. She drove around Larchmont aimlessly, but couldn’t figure out where to go. Eventually she drove into the city and found herself in front of the YWCA at 1 a.m. At last, she did what she always did when she ran out of other options: she called Nick Clemente, waking up his parents. As usual, he rushed into Manhattan to rescue her.
Also as usual, her white knight lacked the wherewithal to give her anything more than reassurance, so she slept in her car until Nick pawned a friend’s sister’s typewriter to get enough money to pay for a room at the YWCA for a week. After the week was up, the two checked themselves into a succession of hotels under various fake names, ordering roast beef dinners from room service and then sneaking out without paying the bill. When they ran out of hotels, Joan worked at office temp jobs to scrounge up enough money for a room in a women’s residential hotel.
As the weeks went by, she lived on Orange Julius and date-and-nut-bread sandwiches at Chock Full o’Nuts, making calls to advance her nonexistent performing career from a phone booth in Grand Central Terminal. Haunted by the constant barrage of evidence “that I was a moron whose instincts had been wrong since I was three years old,” she still refused to face the possibility that she might never realize THE DREAM.
“I could not endure the reality that I might end up Joan Molinsky, an unattractive, nondescript little Jewish girl, run-of-the-mill, who might just as well have stayed in Brooklyn and married the druggist and had a normal life,” she said. “I had come from normal life, from real life, and nobody there had been happy. I knew I had to be special, had to have a life different from anything I had ever known, and if I ended up ordinary Joan Molinsky, I would always be unhappy and make my husband and children unhappy.”
Although Nick Clemente was endlessly supportive, he—unlike Joan—didn’t seem to mind being broke. One night they were debating whether they could afford a hot dog at Howard Johnson’s when Nick made the mistake of saying that money didn’t mean anything. This made Joan furious, but when she pointed out that they were cold and hungry and tired and unemployed and couldn’t buy dinner, Nick did not rise to the occasion by saying that maybe he could get a job.
Since Joan needed to make her rounds as an aspiring actor during the day, she goaded him by announcing that she would get a night job and become a hooker. Nick replied that she might be able to get five dollars for a trick, “but only under the boardwalk at Coney Island at night.”
Not surprisingly, the fight ended up with Nick storming out to seek moral support and alcoholic solace from his friends Sal and Guido, who eventually convinced him that if he really loved Joan, he should call her family. So he telephoned Barbara in Larchmont and told her that Joan had decided to become a prostitute, which prompted Mrs. Molinsky to pick up an extension and scream at Nick that it was all his fault, whereupon he screamed back that it was, in fact, her fault. Sal decided the Molinskys were abusing his friend, so he grabbed the phone, yelled “Listen, you fuckers!,” and hung up.
At this point Nick called Joan and said, “I think maybe I made a mistake.”
When he told her what he’d done, she said she was going to jump out the window of the women’s residence. Nick promptly hung up and told Guido, “I gotta go—she’s gonna jump!”
Guido said he knew “a big black guy who had a car,” which launched an against-the-clock car race worthy of a French farce. Ten people set out at breakneck speed in three different cars, all heading for the same destination from different directions, with each of them frantically running every red light in their effort to reach Joan in time to prevent her suicide. In one car were Nick, Sal, Guido, and the big black guy; the second car held Joan’s mother and father and sister; and the third, a chauffeur-driven limousine, contained Joan’s Aunt Alice and Aunt Fanny, two dowagers in pearls who had been summoned to the rescue by Joan’s hysterical mother.
When all of them converged at the women’s residence, Joan’s mother shouted at Nick that he was a bum, and the big black guy yelled back at her to defend Nick until Joan’s mother demanded to know who he was—whereupon the big black guy grabbed Nick’s arm and retorted, “I’m his brother!”
Meanwhile, Dr. Molinsky ignored the hotel clerk’s agitated protests that no men were allowed upstairs, charged up to Joan’s room, and started trying to wrestle her back down the stairs as Joan clung to the railing in her bathrobe, screaming and crying hysterically.
Dr. Molinsky finally halted Joan’s resistance by announcing that she had two choices: come home
to Larchmont at once or he would commit her to Bellevue that very night.
“All along my father was convinced I would end up a whore and now it had happened,” Joan wrote years later. “Why would the Italian lover lie? And the only reason his daughter would turn to prostitution would be insanity. I knew he meant it—and that he could do it. I had lost.”
When they got back to the lobby, Joan’s mother was shrieking “What have you done to my daughter?” at Sal and Guido, who were drunk, while Aunt Fanny poked at them with her cane. When Mrs. Molinsky went back to yelling at Nick that it was all his fault, Sal shouted, “Don’t yell at my buddy!,” and the black guy said ominously, “Don’t worry, I’ll call some friends!”
“Three Jewish ladies, none over five feet tall, in mink coats and Delman shoes, were screaming and swinging Hermès pocketbooks at three rough Italian boys,” reported Joan. Weeping with rage, she ran to Nick and sobbed, “How could you do this?”
But when he lifted his arm to comfort her, Aunt Fanny cried out, “My God, he hit her!”
Aunt Alice finally imposed a truce by announcing that Joan would spend the night with her while the Molinskys would go home. Joan asked Nick to come with her so they could talk, but Guido said, “You’re not going. She’s not Italian.” As Nick struggled to leave, Guido grabbed him by his coat and held on until Nick broke free and ran off, coatless, with Joan. Nick had sold out the Italians to a Jew, and Guido never spoke to him again.
Ever the dutiful boyfriend, Nick went to Aunt Alice’s apartment on Park Avenue, where he and Joan “sat on her Chippendale sofa under her Vlaminck, surrounded by her wonderful English antiques,” while Aunt Alice negotiated a deal: Joan would go home and behave herself, Dr. Molinsky would not have her committed to Bellevue, and her parents would accept her goal of becoming a performer.
So life went on, and what happened that night was never mentioned again—but on the rare occasions when Joan’s parents encountered Nick Clemente, Mrs. Molinsky always asked him, “How’s your brother?”
Last Girl Before Freeway Page 4