Last Girl Before Freeway

by Leslie Bennetts

  According to Schultz, Roy Silver, who managed both Cosby and Rivers, persuaded him to take a look at Cosby. When Schultz booked him on The Tonight Show, the young black comic was a huge success. “He was so likable, so cute, you just wanted to embrace him as a person,” Schultz said.

  “Then Roy called me again and said, ‘Come see this chick Joan Rivers—she’s funny.’ And she was adorable. She was homely and plain, but she had some funny stuff, and you couldn’t help but like her. She had the same quality Cosby had. There’s a word in Yiddish—haimish—that means humane, or warm. She was haimish. So I came back to The Tonight Show and said, ‘Roy Silver has this girl, a goofy little broad from Brooklyn.’”

  According to Schultz, he then helped to shape Rivers’s debut in a process that was standard operating procedure. “The way we worked on The Tonight Show was this: nobody just came on,” he said. “The interview was written. The response by the guest was written. The retort by Johnny was written. This was a fail-safe show. So I brought Joan in and worked with her to prepare her spot. A stand-up spot is six minutes, and she had a hodgepodge of material, so I said, ‘Take this out. Put this in.’ Show night comes a couple of nights later, she comes on and she kills them—destroys them. She was so good Johnny waved her over to sit down.”

  Whatever the differences in their recollections, all concerned agree that when Rivers finally got a shot on the show, everything clicked. She was introduced as a girl writer, her chemistry with Carson was immediately apparent, all her material worked, and those few minutes changed her life forever. By the time she finished her appearance, Carson was wiping his eyes. “He said, right on the air, ‘God, you’re funny. You’re going to be a star,’” Rivers marveled afterward.

  By the next day, she was. “Rivers Stay Near Our Door” was the headline in an effusive column by Jack O’Brian in the Journal-American. “Johnny Carson struck gleeful gold again last night with Joan Rivers, another comedy writer who was an absolute delight,” O’Brian wrote. “Her seemingly offhand anecdotal clowning was a heady and bubbly proof of her lightly superb comic acting; she’s a gem.”

  And suddenly, the endless struggle was finished. A lifetime of battling against the people who told her no, who said she couldn’t do it, who thought she wasn’t good enough—all the rejections and hardships wiped away as if by a magic wand. “Ten minutes on television, and it was all over,” Rivers said.

  That single appearance produced a “miraculous, instantaneous career turnaround” that transformed Rivers from a pitiable never-was has-been into a hot new star anointed by King Carson.

  Her success stood out in other ways as well. “It’s very hard in the world of comedy to become a star without a vehicle,” said Cary Hoffman, who became a talent manager after a long career as a comedy club owner. “Robin Williams would have had a hard time becoming a star without Mork & Mindy and Good Morning, Vietnam. For Ray Romano, it was Everybody Loves Raymond. Without a vehicle, it’s just you and a microphone and your thoughts. But Joan never did her own sitcom. She never did a great film. The vehicle was Joan. And Joan became a star.”

  Rivers’s auspicious debut launched an enduring relationship with The Tonight Show, which served, for many years, as the foundation for her burgeoning career. Carson—the white-bread all-American boy from Iowa and Nebraska, a user-friendly WASP who epitomized genial Midwestern masculinity—proved the perfect foil for Rivers’s edgier, far more ethnic comedic persona. A few years later, when Rivers was trying to broaden her national profile, agents at William Morris told her she was “too New York” and “too Jewish” to succeed in the heartland. But on The Tonight Show, Carson was the consummate straight man, and the combination of his easy paternal affability and Rivers’s jittery, eager neuroticism worked brilliantly whenever the two performed together.

  At a lunch interview with me, Shelly Schultz described Rivers’s appeal in the early days of her career. “Joan knew nothing about show business. How green was she?” He held up a piece of asparagus from his plate and wiggled it. “But she knew what she wanted to be, and she was very determined, and she was funny, and she was sweet. She didn’t look like a bitter old chick. She was always creating new stuff; she was very prolific. So we’d create a spot, and she never bombed—not even close. She always came on with fresh stuff.”

  When Henry Bushkin first met Johnny Carson, they went to see Rivers perform. “She was appearing in a little club, and he wanted to go see it,” said Bushkin, who became Carson’s lawyer and was one of his best friends for nearly two decades. “That’s when I first met her. She was demure, wearing her little black dress, and it almost looked as if her hair was ironed.”

  Rivers invited Carson to join her onstage, where their easy banter proved that their comedic chemistry wasn’t confined to the television studio. “He had been drinking, and he went up and they did a few bits onstage, and it was terrific,” said Bushkin. “There was some sexual innuendo: she said, ‘I’m using the coil now.’ Johnny says, ‘A coil?’ She says, ‘It’s the new birth control device.’ He says, ‘Does it work?’ She says, ‘Yes, but every time Edgar and I have sex, the garage door opens.’ That was the early Joan. It’s not the nasty Joan. She was almost happy. She didn’t strike me as attractive at all, but I thought Johnny really liked her as a person, and thought she was a terrific comedienne. There was nothing other than great like for her.”

  But if Carson was generous about his protégé’s growing success, other members of the boys’ club failed to rejoice at the sudden ascent of a female rival. “They were hostile because they didn’t want competition,” Schultz explained. “Comics are difficult guys who are very competitive. They dis each other, and they’re more competitive with women. A woman comes in and presents herself with a different persona, and she stands out. A chick like Joan Rivers comes on, gets on Johnny Carson, and explodes. These guys who’ve been banging around for fifteen years are really pissed off. ‘That ain’t funny! What’s funny about that?’ It’s funny because it’s coming from a young woman, and she’s delivering it, but it’s a very hostile environment. It’s like being on the road with ISIS: they also want to cut your neck off.”

  Would-be rivals weren’t the only men who expressed their hostility. For the careers of female comics, the cost of male resistance is impossible to quantify, but its toll can be discerned in lost opportunities, critical double standards, wage gaps, and other professional obstacles. For Rivers, the penalties also included an ugly threat of violence from Jerry Lewis, one of the biggest names in comedy.

  For nearly sixty years, Jerry Lewis hosted an annual Labor Day telethon to benefit the Muscular Dystrophy Association. After observing that the long-running event had been good for Lewis’s career, Rivers offended the legend by voicing her revulsion at the way he used the children’s disabilities as fodder for his own melodramatic histrionics.

  “He was standing there with a child next to him saying, ‘This kid is gonna die.’ And I said, ‘I will never do this telethon again,’” Rivers said. “You do not say in front of a little boy who is going to die, ‘This child is going to die.’ Who are you? You unfunny lucky, stupid asshole.”

  Enraged, Lewis responded by sending her a letter that read, “We’ve never met and I’m looking forward to keeping it that way. If you find it necessary to discuss me, my career, or my kids ever again, I promise you I will get somebody from Chicago to beat your goddamned head off.”

  Lewis added a postscript: “You do know that you’re not allowed to threaten people. So if you go to [the police], show them this letter, they’ll arrest me. But I want you to never forget what it said. Here’s the number of the police chief of Las Vegas. Call him if you want to!”

  For once, Rivers was scared into silence. “Done. Never talking about him again! I don’t want to have my knees broken over Jerry Lewis,” she told one interviewer. “Do you understand you can be arrested for that? That is a real threat. We hired guards, my husband and I, and we didn’t take him to court…My last w
ords are not gonna be ‘But I was only kidding.’ You’re not happy, you want me to shut up? I’ll shut up. Fine!”

  But Lewis neither forgave Rivers nor forgot his threat, which he brought up many years later in a 2014 SiriusXM Town Hall interview with Maria Menounos. “I always feel bad when somebody passes away—except if it was Joan Rivers,” he said. “She set the Jews back a thousand years.”

  Despite Rivers’s promise, she proved characteristically unable to keep her mouth shut. When Anderson Cooper mentioned Lewis’s warning on CNN, Rivers said, “Well, when did we last laugh at Jerry Lewis? Look, the French think he’s funny. Those idiots.”

  On another occasion, she added, “I don’t think there’s ever been a female comic who’s liked Jerry Lewis.”

  When Rivers began her career, the disdain of such male titans could prove an insurmountable barrier to women’s success. By the time she died, female comics were able to shrug it off as irrelevant.

  Tina Fey summed up the prevailing attitude in her 2011 best seller, Bossypants. “Whenever someone says to me, ‘Jerry Lewis says women aren’t funny,’ or ‘Christopher Hitchens says women aren’t funny…Do you have anything to say to that?’” she wrote. “Yes. We don’t fucking care if you like it.”

  Performers aren’t the only ones who have changed; so have audiences—and neither feels compelled to defer to the dictates of condescending men. Armed with economic autonomy and the freedom to make their own choices about how to spend their money and time, women have created a growing demand for content very different from the male-centered entertainment that prevailed when Rivers was young.

  “I don’t give a fuck whether the men think we’re funny. Women think we’re funny,” said Blair Breard at the panel “Women Aren’t Funny: Debunking the Myth.”

  The executive producer of the Louis C.K. show Louie, Breard added, “I write content for me. We control the money, and we control the content.”

  In Why We Laugh: Funny Women, Whoopi Goldberg passed along some words to live by for the next generation. “The best advice ever given to me was ‘Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke,’” she said.

  Chapter Four

  Stardom and Wifedom:

  Happily Ever After?

  The early months of 1965 made Rivers into a success, erasing all the professional disappointments that had dogged her for more than a decade. To her astonishment, the second half of that same year made her romantic dreams come true as well—and once again Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show provided the means to a fairy-tale ending.

  Most women don’t envision Prince Charming as short, stocky, bespectacled, pretentious, and middle-aged, but for Rivers at thirty-two, Edgar Rosenberg was the willing, appropriate Jewish husband she’d spent the last decade searching for—the answer to her mother’s most fervent prayers.

  Although his actual job was in public relations, Edgar fancied himself as an independent producer, and he was working with Peter Sellers to develop a movie about a traveling clown. When the script needed a rewrite, Edgar asked The Tonight Show to recommend a comedy writer. He and Rivers were introduced, and Edgar took her and her manager to lunch at an elegant French restaurant. Then he set up another meeting to discuss the script, arrived in a limousine, and whisked Rivers off to the Four Seasons.

  Ever her mother’s daughter, she was deeply impressed with Edgar’s British accent, his incessant name-dropping, his Cambridge education, and his personal style. “I could see that this forty-year-old winner producer in a Dunhill blue suit and Lanvin shirt had class—a classy way of talking, a classy way of dressing,” she said.

  Edgar also seemed very successful, at least to Rivers: “He was producing five movies for the United Nations and was Mr. Big—called Monsieur Le Patron on the movie set in France, telephoned by the likes of Cary Grant, Ava Gardner, Sean Connery, and Joe Mankiewicz.”

  Such credentials were somewhat misleading. Eight years older than Rivers, Edgar worked as an employee at a public relations firm where he handled accounts that ranged from the Rockefeller brothers to Encyclopedia Britannica. After convincing the Today show to do on-location broadcasts that promoted such products as scuba diving equipment made by a client of his, Edgar came up with the idea of creating a series of television movies about the United Nations. He convinced his boss, Anna Rosenberg (who was not related to Edgar), to let him form a production company called the Telsun Foundation, and he persuaded such stars as Yul Brynner, Peter Sellers, Edward G. Robinson, Rita Hayworth, Eva Marie Saint, and Marcello Mastroianni to participate.

  To Rivers, such names were dazzling, and she was even more impressed when Edgar invited her to work on the clown script with him and another writer at a Caribbean resort where Sellers was supposed to join them after a few days. “I was thrilled,” said Rivers.

  But nothing in her background had prepared her to deal with such jet-set getaways. When she arrived at Round Hill, “an incredibly posh enclave of cottages” in Jamaica, she was embarrassed to realize she had packed inappropriately: instead of breezy beach cover-ups and sandals, she had brought sweaters with pleated skirts, panty girdles, and stockings with matching leather pumps and bags.

  The other guests, Joe Mankiewicz’s son and his wife, soon had a fight and left, and Sellers and the second writer were both waylaid by other plans. So Rivers found herself unexpectedly alone with her host, whom she continued to address as Mr. Rosenberg.

  But Mr. Rosenberg seemed oddly uninterested in working on the job at hand, which puzzled her. Rivers was very eager to prove herself as a screenwriter, so she tried to behave like a professional associate rather than a date—which seemed appropriate, since Edgar made no physical overtures or even verbal expressions of warmth. And yet she did enjoy his dry sense of humor and his erudition, which was intimidating: “He had seen everything, heard everything, read everything, and, worse, retained everything,” she said.

  Rivers also felt a deeper sense of connection. “There in Jamaica the British public school accent and reserve came off as courtliness, an elegance that was extremely appealing because it reminded me of my mother and was what she wished she had married,” she observed.

  Looking back, she recognized that Edgar sensed an equally profound kinship with her. “He understood right away what my life was all about, knew that the mouthy girl onstage was not the real me, knew the real me wanted to live well and have beautiful things,” Rivers wrote in her second autobiography, Still Talking. “I realize now that he understood because he had the same dream, the same consuming obsession with show business and success—and the same insecurity and hunger for respect. He had spotted a soul mate.”

  On her third day in Jamaica, Rivers went for a swim and then returned to her room, whereupon Edgar appeared in the doorway. “Suddenly, when I saw him, I had a deep sense of well-being, of coming home, a certainty that he was what I had been looking for, that this was absolutely right! Yes, so quickly,” she said. “It was as if…in a split second, with one step forward, we went from absolutely nothing to everything. We made love, and then, as though it were the natural order of events, he proposed and I accepted. Everything fit. Here was a man I could trust, who was going to take care of me. We were a good match—he gave me class, I gave him warmth. We filled each other’s gaps—he was the intelligent one with the English accent, and I was the performer, full of the fun he did not know how to have.”

  Believing that they had found their destiny, the new couple rushed headlong into commitment without giving themselves any time to get to know each other. Rivers convinced herself that all signs were auspicious: when she brought her betrothed home to Larchmont to meet her parents, Edgar and her mother got along immediately. “They were both formal and set great store by dignity. They were loners who had almost no friends and trusted very few people. They wanted the finer things. As Edgar used to say, ‘We’re both snobs.’ I was about to marry my mother,” Rivers concluded.

  Even by the clichéd standards of whirlwind romance, they formalized a shared f
uture with dizzying speed. Three days after they returned from Jamaica, Rivers and Rosenberg were wed by a judge in a Bronx courthouse, where Rivers wore a twenty-six-dollar dress from Bloomingdale’s.

  Years later, Rivers marveled at how surreal those events seemed and how much she had changed since then. Looking back at herself as a giddy bride, she admitted that she felt “absolutely no relationship to that girl. She still believed in happy endings,” Rivers observed wryly. “She was naive about the treachery, about the pitfalls, the backbiting, the meanness, the stupidity in big-time show business. The success that was happening for her seemed absolutely right and logical. She had worked hard and, by God, was a rising star with a wonderful, successful husband. Well, the movie should have ended there.”

  Real life turned out to be vastly more complicated than the romantic mythology that shaped Rivers’s dreams, in which Prince Charming provides the solution to all of a girl’s questions about the meaning of life. During their twenty-two years together, Rivers and Rosenberg presented a solidly united front to the world, and she was unwavering in her support of her husband. It was only after his death that she admitted the fateful truth she recognized far too late: that the seeds of their destruction were an integral part of their relationship from the outset.