Last Girl Before Freeway

by Leslie Bennetts

  The crisis left Joan feeling defeated; she saw her father as having won, and his threat to have her committed to Bellevue as a powerful weapon that transformed him from a parent into a policeman. From then on, she tried to avoid him as much as possible.

  And yet the truth was that Joan won what really mattered to her, which was the security of living in her parents’ home while retaining the freedom to keep on trying to make it in show business. Constant rejection and her parents’ wrath hadn’t dissuaded her, nor had poverty and homelessness. While her talent had not yet struck anyone as exceptional, her fanatical, incomprehensible, inextinguishable ambition certainly did.

  For the first half of her life, Rivers avoided therapy because she was afraid it might help to resolve her issues—“and there goes the act!” But she didn’t need a psychiatrist to understand what motivated her. In 1983, when People magazine asked where she got her drive, she replied, “From being the second child and a fat child. My sister was prettier, smarter, and better than I was in every way.”

  Over the course of a long career, Lou Alexander met most of the iconic names in comedy as well as countless wannabes. After performing as a stand-up comedian for twenty-two years, he became an agent and later worked with Budd Friedman, the founder and original proprietor of The Improv, a Manhattan comedy club that later became a franchise with other clubs around the country. Alexander knows the world of comedy intimately—and yet even by those standards, Joan is unique.

  “I’ve seen many, many people when they got started in this business, and I’ve seen a lot of people break in. But I’ve never seen anybody, man or woman, who wanted it more or loved it more than Joan Rivers,” he said. “I never saw anybody who was that diligent. She could have a high temperature and she’d go onstage. There is nothing that would stop her. She was willing to give up anything to make it.”

  Chapter Two

  Dying Is Easy. Comedy Is Hard.

  For the rest of her life, Rivers’s recollections of her early years in the business remained vivid and harrowing. “All of us in comedy have had our Show Bars, our hideous low points that almost destroy us—except that we come back to have more of them—walking out on stages hundreds and hundreds of times when lights are broken, when microphones do not work, when audiences are hostile, when our material stinks,” Rivers wrote in Enter Talking. “That is what makes you tough. But the process gives terrible war wounds that are forever open, leaving you a victim for the rest of your life.”

  “If you have reached the top in comedy, you are, in your own way, a killer—but every killer is bandaged. And the anger is never out of you,” she added. “Why was Totie Fields so angry? Why did her contract require twelve coffee cups, exactly twelve, in her dressing room? Because twenty-five years ago she could not get even one cup. After years of being pampered, I am still angry. I am angry because of the Show Bar.”

  When Rivers wrote those words in the mid-1980s, at what then appeared to be the height of her career, she went on to list a host of other indignities that still rankled from countless other sleazy venues, for “the nights I had to get dressed in filthy toilets, for all the disgusting dressing rooms where there was no toilet paper in the john, where the soap had hair embedded in it, where cockroaches ran across the dressing table, where my paycheck had $1.25 deducted from it for two cups of coffee.”

  But slowly and incrementally, progressing in tiny steps that often appeared undetectable as forward motion, the seemingly hopeless succession of terrible experiences began to pay off. “What makes a comedian finally jell? I know the answer to that now,” Rivers said decades later, enlightened by the wisdom of hindsight. “The act evolves out of yourself—but not intellectually. It gathers emotionally inside you, in a strange way a by-product of struggle, of a willingness to do anything, try anything, expose yourself to anything…This is paying your dues, appearing again and again and again on every sort of stage, in front of every kind of audience, until you gradually, gradually acquire technique and a stage identity, which is not you, but has your passion, your hurts, your angers, your particular humor. This is a birth process and it can be very painful.”

  Through all the soul-crushing rebuffs, what keeps any comic going is the irresistible promise of the reward that shimmers perpetually on the horizon like an enticing oasis offering sweet relief from all of life’s hardships—if only one could get there.

  In Why We Laugh: Funny Women, a documentary that featured interviews with more than a dozen female comedians, Rivers was moved to tears by her own description of what it feels like for a comic to elicit the desired response from an audience.

  “There is nothing like walking on a stage and turning to the audience and saying, ‘This is what happened to me today, and it was wrong!’—and they say, ‘Yes, it was wrong!’ It’s having a million mothers out there that say, ‘You’re the best! You’re the funniest!’” Rivers said, starting to cry at the very thought. “It’s a very tough existence for all of us in real life, and we have an hour and a half when we’re going to forget what’s tough. Comedy is such a warm blanket to put around everyone.”

  The comic Judy Gold was more succinct in describing what it feels like to win the laughter of an audience: “I guess it’s like a crack high,” she said. “When I got the first laugh, and then got another, it was like God had spoken to me.”

  But it takes years of practice to master the craft of extracting that reward from a volatile and demanding process. Every audience is different, and comedians must learn how to manipulate everyone watching them with the kind of assurance that puts listeners at their ease. Only hard-won experience can give a performer the necessary skills and confidence—not to mention the judgment to tailor the comedic content to a specific audience.

  Although comics have always stolen material from one another, it’s the individuals who create a distinctive style with original material that make the biggest impact. For Rivers, another crucial step toward success was learning to draw from her personal experience in developing her own characteristic brand of humor—and finding an effective stage persona to deliver it.

  This took her a while to figure out. When she auditioned for the agent Irvin Arthur, he said, “That was terrific. The only trouble is, you just did his act.”

  Arthur gestured toward the friend sitting next to him, who turned out to be a comedy star named Dick Gautier. Rivers and Gautier had never met, but Rivers had copied down his routines from The Ed Sullivan Show and performed them so often she’d forgotten where she got them. Gautier asked her politely to stop doing his act, whereupon Arthur suggested she try writing her own.

  After she had accumulated enough fresh material, she shaped it into a new act called “The Diary of Joan Rivers” and started begging anyone she knew to get her a booking. At last she wangled a gig at the Cherry Grove Hotel on Fire Island, an experience that produced a major epiphany.

  “I finally found the audience that would keep me in show business until I could, so to speak, go it alone,” Rivers said. “Basically, it was people who were smart, realistic, literate, up-to-date, with a taste for the camp and the outrageous—and the best of these, I learned at Cherry Grove, were the gays. There has been nothing nicer than five hundred gay faces looking up at me onstage.”

  Others would discern a deeper connection. “Gay people hated themselves the way Joan hated herself,” said Sue Cameron, a former Hollywood Reporter columnist who describes herself as bisexual. “She identified with their pain, and they knew it; they were immediately in sync. They use humor to get out of their pain, and so does Joan. They make all these jokes, but inside they feel abandoned, like second-class citizens.”

  Some audiences were less appreciative. Rivers always felt she deserved more opportunities than she received, but many observers simply disliked what she was offering. At times they were won over by what she described as “a tremendous eagerness to please combined with hopefulness—the quality which makes puppies charming.”

  But others were put
off, both by her style and by her substance. When Off Broadway Reviews assessed her performance at an engagement in a Greenwich Village club called Phase 2, the verdict was withering. “There are two main things amiss with Miss Rivers’s approach: her material is tired and her delivery is frenetic…Her frantic and strained efforts are only nerve-racking and do not disguise, but rather point up, the material’s essential aridity.”

  The gig at Phase 2 did succeed in bringing Rivers to the attention of Jack Paar’s talent coordinator, and Rivers was ecstatic when he finally booked her for the television show, which was her parents’ favorite. As was increasingly the case, she drew her material from the ongoing Molinsky family psychodramas.

  “I told Jack Paar my mother desperately wanted me to get married, so she painted the entire kitchen pink, because she had heard pink made you look young and terrific. She even bought a pink stove and a pink refrigerator—which was true—but nothing happened for my sister and me. However, three maids ran off with A&P delivery boys,” Rivers said.

  She also told Paar she was dating a guy whose father was in the Mafia, and she loved going out with him because Italian men are so masculine. “You’ve never seen a gay Italian, because any time they turn gay, they make them into nuns. That’s why so many nuns have mustaches,” she said.

  Jack Paar stared at her, aghast. “Do you realize Italian people are watching this show?” he asked.

  After the show, the talent coordinator told her it was a good performance and they would have her back. But Paar said, “Never again. I don’t believe one word she says. She’s a liar.”

  Stunned, the talent coordinator told him, “Jack, they’re jokes.”

  Paar replied, “We don’t do jokes.”

  Rivers was devastated, but for once her parents were supportive. Her father wrote Paar a letter, earnestly telling him that Joan was a doctor’s daughter and had gone to the finest schools and was not a liar. “He and my mother really believed that Jack Paar was their friend and once he understood that I had been telling the truth, everything would be repaired. It was so sweet,” Rivers said. “They never received an answer and they never watched Jack Paar again.”

  As it turned out, Rivers had to leave the country to acquire some sustained experience onstage. At the end of 1960, she was included in a USO show called Broadway USA, which toured Army bases in Korea, Japan, and the Pacific Islands. “It was the first time I had ever had friendly, forgiving audiences night after night,” she said. Her performing skills improved with constant practice, and by the time she arrived back in New York, she felt like a professional for the first time.

  And then one night, when Hugh Downs was guest hosting The Jack Paar Show, the talent coordinator called her back and gave her another chance to perform on television. Unfortunately, Downs was as baffled by her sense of humor as Paar had been, and the appearance went so badly that Aunt Fanny phoned Joan’s mother afterward and demanded, “When is that girl going to stop? Bea, when is she going to stop?”

  “Nobody cared that I was terrific on Guam,” said Rivers, who received a further blow when her sister confessed to having taken all the money Joan had sent home from overseas. Instead of depositing it in Joan’s account, as she had promised to do, Barbara had used Joan’s earnings to get her teeth capped. “I was a beggar again,” said Rivers, who went back to office temp jobs once more.

  But the following year, Rivers finally got an important break. An agent at William Morris arranged for her to audition for Second City, an improvisational comedy troupe in Chicago that began in the 1950s with such young actors as Mike Nichols and Elaine May. Its later alumni included comedic icons who ranged from John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, and Gilda Radner to Stephen Colbert. But when Rivers auditioned, she was familiar with neither improvisational techniques nor the company’s work.

  Foolishly, she brought her mother to her appointment, figuring it would take twenty minutes and they could go to brunch at Schrafft’s afterward—only to be forced to wait for five mortifying hours while a succession of prettier girls were allowed to audition ahead of Joan. When she was finally given her chance, Rivers was startled to find that instead of being handed a script, she was told to improvise something—perhaps a description of what was actually going on in the room.

  Hungry, tired, and humiliated at being treated with such disdain in front of her mother, she lost it. “My head swam with fury,” she wrote in Enter Talking. “I had no chance to get this job, had nothing to lose, and years of accumulated hurt exploded out of me and my voice trembled with rage. ‘In this room there is a cheap ugly little man sitting behind the telephone without the manners to get off and watch somebody who has been waiting five hours. And the other man, so superior, is saying, “We don’t have scripts.” Well, I am sorry! I didn’t know you didn’t use scripts. I guess I was too busy doing my rounds, trying to make a living as an actress, to know what you are doing in Chicago.’”

  She went on and on, “feeling light and alive with anger and recklessness, blasting them…and who the hell did they think they were, so arrogant. I was insane now, screaming, ‘I don’t care about you, don’t care about your goddamn show. You can go to hell’…I grabbed a glass ashtray and flung it, skidding it along the table onto the floor. Then, suddenly, I was empty. I said tiredly, ‘That’s what I think is happening in this room.’”

  The next day, Rivers and the William Morris agent were equally astonished to learn that Second City had chosen her for the available opening in the company. But instead of being overjoyed, Rivers found herself overcome with fear. When she arrived in Chicago, she checked into her hotel and then fell apart.

  “Only that night in Boston after the Show Bar had I ever cried like that—racking, heaving, convulsive sobs that went on and on till they hurt, and still I could not stop,” she recalled.

  She had spent so many years enduring constant rejection while continuing to insist, “I can do it!” And now, when someone finally told her, “Okay, do it,” her reaction was panic, as it had been so many years earlier when she was accepted for the Westport summer theater program and found herself too afraid to go.

  But this time, instead of running away from her dreams again, she pulled herself together, went to work, slowly made friends, and learned how to perform improvisational comedy—a discipline that taught her invaluable lessons which would influence her comedic style forever.

  “At Second City, we worked with the reality of the moment,” she explained. “In a play, if water starts dripping through the ceiling and hitting you on the head, you continue with Bernard Shaw. In real life you would stop what you are talking about and discuss the water and deal with it, and at Second City, whatever your partner did, you used it, responded to it, as you would in real life. That is one reason I talk to people in the audience—so I can work off them as a piece of reality, use them to trigger inspirations, make them into my Second City partner.”

  Among the most important things Rivers learned at Second City was that she hadn’t been wrong to trust her instincts instead of heeding the countless naysayers who told her to give up on her dreams. “I finally in Chicago came to believe, totally—for the first time in my life—that my personal, private sense of humor, my view of the world, could make smart adults laugh,” she said. “Those improvs washed away the scars of the Paar show and the awful times in front of terrible audiences…In Chicago I felt a comedy ego beginning to grow, which gave me the courage to begin tentatively looking into myself for comedy. Though I did not take my first toddler steps as a comic for another year, I was really born as a comedian at Second City. I owe it my career.”

  It was at Second City that Rivers began to develop the character of Rita, whom she described as a “man-hungry loser”—the desperate single girl persona that enabled her to explore many of the romantic, sexual, and marital subjects that would inform her work for decades to come.

  And yet even at Second City, Rivers never really fit in. Many of her fellow company members had em
erged from the University of Chicago with a cerebral comedic style that was very different from her own. “They were always accusing me of going for laughs. ‘Too jokey, too jokey,’ they would say,” she reported. “The whole Second City intellectual snobbery made me furious—their contempt for comics in general, their scorn for me in particular because I had actually played strip joints.”

  But Rivers was growing stronger by the month—learning how to perform, paying her bills, making her way alone in a new city, coping with the vicissitudes of life without being constantly propped up by the ever-obliging Nick Clemente. When Christmas arrived, she was thrilled to be able to bring her family out to Chicago, treat them to dinner, take them to plays and the ballet, give them money to shop at the better stores, and even pay for their taxis.

  “Of course, there was a thread of triumph in my pleasure,” she admitted. “I enjoyed being in charge, proving, after all the battling about my career, that I was right and they were wrong. I loved playing the star in front of them, smiling with a becoming mix of pleasure and modesty when people in stores and on the street said, ‘You’re the girl from Second City, right? We enjoyed the show.’”

  When her family left Chicago, Rivers gave her mother some money. Despite years of strenuous opposition to Joan’s career, her mother’s farewell was more sharp-eyed showbiz critique than mushy maternal gratitude. Appraising her daughter’s face, Beatrice said coolly, “You’ve got to get your nose thinned. It doesn’t work onstage.”

  Buoyed by her success at Second City, Rivers finally decided to go back to New York, where she assumed she would move on to greater heights—but her return proved an unexpectedly humbling experience. In Manhattan, out-of-town credits were viewed as meaningless, and nobody seemed to care that she’d been a star in Chicago.

  And yet coming home to Larchmont was surprisingly pleasant, even though Rivers was nearing thirty. After a time away, she appreciated the rent-free security of her parents’ house. Now that her ambitions had been validated with some real-world confirmation of her ability, her relationship with her parents improved.