“Looking back, I think Edgar and I were, from the beginning, headed for tragedy,” she wrote in Still Talking.
They first bonded over their shared interests, and on paper the new couple seemed to have a great deal in common. Both were so driven to succeed in show business that their hunger resembled an addiction—but their underlying needs were very different.
Rivers was eternally propelled by her insatiable need for approval—and she didn’t require a psychiatrist to explain where that came from. She spelled it out very clearly in Still Talking.
She had always felt emotional distance from her father, whom she saw as perpetually too busy to pay attention to his children. But it was her mother’s lack of demonstrativeness that imbued such a hunger for visible affirmation in Joan.
“My mother, Beatrice, a formal, queenly woman, was my rock of security, always there for me, solid, always taking my side, defending me, totally loyal. Her children, by God, were the best. If she saw any faults in me and Barbara, nobody heard about them. I adored her,” Rivers wrote. “But her love could not come out as tenderness. There were no loving arms encircling us. I remember reaching over and touching my mother’s hand in the theater. I do not remember her ever touching mine. Her love was expressed as worry, making sure Barbara and I had everything we should—education, good manners, know-how in society, the right clothes. I was a disappointment to her. She could not understand why I wanted to be an actress. In her mind I should be like my sister, Barbara…My mother did not realize my need for the love and approval that can well up from an audience.”
For Rivers, performing satisfied her deepest cravings. “Show business is the ultimate wish fulfillment, the dream of being eternally beautiful, eternally talented, eternally loved, and wealthy,” she said in Still Talking. “Once you’ve had that, you spend the rest of your life trying to keep it coming.”
When Rivers met Edgar, he also seemed to be “hooked into that high,” she observed. “Edgar was launched into production at the top, and he chased that feeling for the rest of his life.”
But it wasn’t approval that Rosenberg sought. Born in Bremerhaven, Germany, where his father owned a butcher shop, Edgar and his family spent much of his childhood fleeing from the Nazis, first to Hamburg, then to Copenhagen, and finally to South Africa. The fears, losses, and chronic insecurity he endured in childhood shaped his adult life in ways that his wife understood only in retrospect.
“Whereas my show business addiction is drinking in love on a stage, his drug was to be the boss, answering to no one,” she explained in Still Talking. “At the time I believed he was simply a strong, take-charge person, but ultimately events turned that need into a flaw that brought us both down. I think Edgar craved control because he had such a hard time handling uncertainty. And I believe the reason lay in his past. Whenever a goal had been in his grasp, it had been yanked away.”
Stiff, formal, and aloof, Rosenberg maintained such emotional distance that he hid a critical chapter of his past, even from his wife. It was only in the six months before he died that Rivers learned he had suffered from tuberculosis as a boy in Cape Town. Highly contagious, the disease carried a terrible social stigma until the years following World War II, when antibiotics finally provided an effective treatment. As a child, Edgar had been ashamed as well as bereft when he was exiled to a sanitarium and then nursed and educated at home. His memories of that time were so painful that when he finally shared them with Joan at the end of his life, he begged her not to tell their college-age daughter how traumatic his experience had been.
As the coddled son of a doting mother and her housekeeper, who disapproved of him having a wife, Edgar didn’t marry until he was forty. After he met Rivers, he continued to work as a producer, but he soon became her unofficial manager as well.
“Edgar was a tiger for details, and I was not,” she said. “Throughout our life together, he ran the business side—balanced my checkbook, filled out the checks for me to sign, picked my photographs, answered the mail, met with the accountants, invested the money that was starting to come in, handled the bank transfers. So I would not be upset and distracted, he solved problems he never told me about. He protected me by reading all the contracts, and amazed the lawyers by spotting the weaknesses…He trusted no one.”
As Rosenberg assumed more control over Rivers’s career, the arrangement seemed to work for both of them. “The bigger I became, the more power he, as my husband, wielded behind the scenes,” she said. “My career became us. Success in life equaled success in my career, and Edgar and I knew how to build my career, but we arrived at our heights in the grip of our pasts. Edgar was driven by his need to prove himself a major player. I was driven by my insecurity, my need to be loved, my easily hurt feelings, my obsession with loyalty, and my need to win. We were united by the anger that waited in both of us, the rage at accumulated half-remembered injuries that set us side by side against the world.”
But even in the early days, Rosenberg often alienated people inadvertently. Rivers performed regularly at Downstairs at the Upstairs, and they enjoyed hanging out at the club, but Edgar wasn’t popular with his wife’s colleagues. “Edgar was the tough one, and the impression I got was that they didn’t like him, because he was very demanding,” said David Finkle, who also spent time at the Downstairs, as a songwriter and producer. “People like that get the reputation for being difficult from people who are less good at their jobs. I think Edgar was the hatchet man for Joan even then, and I guess she thought, ‘This is the kind of person I need to help me get where I want to get.’ But he probably was nastier than he needed to be. He was obviously a depressed guy.”
Lou Alexander observed the same dynamic. “People I knew who met him didn’t care for him,” Alexander said. “He had an attitude. He came on very strong. He had to be the bad guy.”
As Rivers’s friends and associates got to know Edgar, many were surprised by her choice of mate. “I never got it,” said Sandy Gallin, who first met Rivers in the early 1960s and later became her manager while she was living in California. “Joan was really smart, and Edgar, I thought, pretended to be smart. He was a star’s husband, but he wanted people to think he was a very big producer and had a very big past as a producer in London. I never believed his made-up background. He had this accent, and he was always dressed in his blazer and tie, and it was like, oh my God, you gotta be kidding. I felt sorry for him.”
Some industry veterans were openly derisive. “Everyone knew Edgar was full of shit. They would laugh about it,” said one.
If Rivers was convinced by Edgar’s affectations of class, others found them far less persuasive. “He was a Jewish guy who tried to look like a fancy elegant pompous British guy, but he was in way over his head—way out of his league,” said Mark Simone, a longtime New York radio personality who had Rivers on his show “like, four hundred times.”
The pros at The Tonight Show were equally unimpressed. “She needed a guy, but when she came up with this guy, I almost shit,” said Shelly Schultz. “When she brought him over to the show one night, everyone held their head like a massive migraine went through the staff. He was this short guy—shorter than her—and he was pretentious. He had kind of an unpleasant persona. He was arrogant. He was just not likable. She was kind of giddy—to her, he was Marlon Brando—but we looked at her and said, ‘Is she kidding?’ This guy had zero going on. He wasn’t even funny, which is the biggest crime of all. Be an asshole, but be funny. But he was just an asshole. And he was a total fucking fraud. They said he was a businessman. Guess what business? Nobody knows. She said he was a producer. She was rewriting history. He was a producer of what? We never learned that. Nobody knew who he was. Between us, on the staff, we had a hell of a reach. There were seven writers, three or four talent coordinators—and none of us knew him. None of us ever heard of him in the context Joan described. It was bullshit.”
Edgar soon developed an annoying tendency to interfere with the process at hand. To a busy
staff trying to put on a show—whether onstage at the Downstairs or on the air at NBC—Edgar’s need to control the minutiae of his wife’s career was simply exasperating, and many coworkers were doubly infuriated by what they saw as his lack of competence. “There was a line somebody wrote back then—it may have been me,” Schultz said. “We decided that Edgar could fuck up a two-car funeral.” He raised a hand as if unrolling a sign across his forehead: “F-u-c-k u-p!”
Edgar’s old-fashioned formality also seemed out of place in an era when Frank Sinatra and his jaunty Rat Pack personified masculine cool with their sly, knowing bad boy humor and sexual savoir faire. In the jaded, cynical precincts of the entertainment world, Edgar seemed more like the pompous, incompetent detective played by Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther movies.
Henry Bushkin, who published a memoir in 2013 called Johnny Carson, is developing the book into a musical whose characters include both Rivers and Rosenberg. “I refer to Edgar in the play as Inspector Clouseau,” Bushkin said.
Although they eventually fell out, Carson considered Bushkin his best friend for many years and often joked about Bombastic Bushkin in his monologues on The Tonight Show. But even to Bombastic Bushkin, Edgar seemed pretentious and self-important.
“Edgar was a strange man,” said Bushkin, who also served as Rivers’s lawyer for a time. “Everything with Edgar would be, like, hush-hush, top secret, cloak-and-dagger, but you’re making everything far more important than it really is. He was British, fastidiously so, with the cigarette holder and the whole nine yards, but he was strange-looking, and he had these weird, big spectacles. I think Joan was one of the smarter show business people; she didn’t miss a trick. But it was hard to reconcile how funny she was onstage with how dull he was. I always thought they were very pleasant as a couple—it was certainly my impression that they liked one another—but we wondered what she saw in this guy.”
Barbara Walters, a good friend of Rivers, was equally unimpressed. “I never found Edgar particularly appealing, and he was certainly not a great talent,” she said. “The appeal of Edgar was that he wanted to marry her.”
Many observers attributed Rivers’s decision to the pressures imposed by her religious and ethnic background. “I thought, here’s a Jewish chick from Brooklyn who’s basically a two-feet-on-the-ground kind of person,” Schultz said, “but even though she’s starting to have some success, she still needs a guy in her life, because that’s just the history of the Jewish family: get married! You’re not a success until you have a family. When you come from a very middle-class Jewish family, the mentality is such that when she brought Edgar home, her mother said, ‘Oh, perfect—Joan, don’t let this one get away!’ He wasn’t a glamorous guy; he wasn’t a wise guy. He was a short Jew who professed his love—a Jewish mother’s dream.”
Deeply impressed by her new husband, Rivers seemed oblivious to such caustic opinions. She saw her marriage as an advantageous match that rescued her from a life of discouragement and deprivation—“living in a dinky struggle apartment over a deli, wearing struggle clothes,” as she put it.
Having achieved her two most important goals, Rivers enjoyed the second half of the 1960s as “a sweet, happy time.” She relished her status as the producer’s wife, meeting people like David Niven and Rudolf Nureyev through her husband and going to parties on Sam Spiegel’s yacht in Monaco. In return, Rosenberg drove her to gigs in the Catskills and hung out at the Stage Delicatessen after her New York City performances, sharing sandwiches at 4 a.m. with Rodney Dangerfield, Dick Cavett, George Carlin, Dom DeLuise, and Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara.
She and Edgar lived in an apartment on Fifth Avenue, and her career was flourishing; she appeared on The Tonight Show once a month or so, going on anytime she called up to say she was ready. She hired Dangerfield to help her write new jokes.
Her only problem was that her new and improved life deprived her of the usual fount of material about frustration and disappointment. Domestic chores were a reliable source of shtick, but that wasn’t enough to sustain a career. “My act is complaining about my life, and in those years I was content,” Rivers said. “There was no humor in being happy and having a terrific husband.”
Turning from desperate-single-girl jokes to clueless-married-woman jokes, Rivers told her audiences that she wore a nightgown with feet to bed on her wedding night. She said she knew nothing about sex because all her mother had told her was that the man gets on top and the woman goes underneath—“so I bought bunk beds.”
As innocuous as such jokes were, “people were shocked,” Rivers reported. “I was breaking new comedy ground with talk about women’s intimate experiences and feelings, with jokes like, ‘I have no boobs. I went to nurse my daughter. She sucked on my shoulder. I moved her to the breast and she lost four pounds.’ But compared to the standards of today, my act then was extremely mild.”
The atmosphere of the time was so repressive that The Ed Sullivan Show, where Rivers also performed regularly, forbade her to use the word “pregnant” on the air—even when she was obviously expecting a baby. In that era, many female teachers were forced out of their jobs when their pregnancies became apparent, and pregnancy discrimination hadn’t yet become a legal issue that transformed employment practices, as it would years later. The prevailing cultural mores decreed that it was unseemly to mention a woman’s pregnancy, or even to allow the public—let alone schoolchildren—to see any evidence of it.
When Rivers got pregnant, she wrangled with Sullivan over mentioning her condition on the air, but he wouldn’t budge. She finally had to compromise with the silly line “Soon I’m going to be hearing the pitter-patter of tiny feet,” as if her infant would scamper out of the womb wearing ballet slippers.
Since marrying Edgar, Rivers had morphed from a career-obsessed single girl into a contented wife, and she became an equally doting mother when Melissa arrived in 1968. Her desire for a child had come as a surprise: “Edgar had shown no interest in having a child during the first two years of our marriage. I was caught up in my career and had never been the one who went ‘Kitchy koo’ to that baby in the park…I did not reinvite people who brought their kids over,” she wrote in Still Talking.
But marriage had not satisfied her unfulfilled emotional needs. “My mother was wonderful, but basically cold,” Rivers said. “My father was preoccupied. Edgar was not a sponge for love. I was a touchy-feely person surrounded by repression.”
Having a baby seemed to offer the opportunity to love unconditionally as well as to be loved in return, and when she got pregnant, Edgar was also thrilled. “He loved seeing me so happy, and I think, too, he was proud of this proof of his manhood,” Rivers observed.
A child provided another vehicle for living out her dreams, and Rivers bequeathed her mother’s preoccupation with class to her daughter by choosing a middle name that signified wealth. “She was Melissa Rosenberg,” Sue Cameron said. “The Warburgs were one of the most moneyed Jewish families in Europe, so Joan put ‘Warburg’ in.”
Her new status as wife and mother seemed to fulfill all her most cherished expectations. “My career had not yet become the glue that held my life and marriage together,” Rivers said in Still Talking. “The rock at the center of my tiny universe was still the baby and the home and the marriage.”
She felt very fortunate—and for a while, what she had seemed like enough. “I hate to be corny—but I’m so happy!” Rivers told TV Guide.
But the change in circumstances required Rivers to update her material, so marital sex became a new staple of her act. Her punch lines had always revolved around her own deficiencies: “My body is so bad, a Peeping Tom looked in the window and pulled down the shade.” As a married woman, she focused on Edgar’s ostensible lack of carnal interest in his wife: “Before we make love, my husband takes a painkiller,” she claimed.
Marriage hadn’t solved the underlying problem: “I have no sex appeal,” Rivers said. “If my husband didn’t toss and turn, we’d never h
ave had a kid.”
Her weight was an ongoing theme: “I stepped out of the shower the other day and my husband called me ‘Fat, fat, the water rat.’”
And yet there was often a curious disconnect between Rivers’s jokes about her sexual ignorance and the promiscuity she alluded to before her marriage. Sometimes her humor was directed outward, skewering the sexual double standards that allowed men so much more latitude than women. “A man sleeps around—no questions asked,” she said. “But if a woman makes nineteen or twenty mistakes, she’s a tramp.”
At other times, she was more explicit about being a sexually liberated single woman. During the early 1960s, her stand-up routine often closed with the punch line “I’m Joan Rivers, and I put out!”—a shocking claim at a time when the sexual revolution was just beginning to gather steam and hypocrisy remained the requisite posture for young women who were supposed to remain virgins until their wedding day.
Rivers usually made herself the butt of such jokes, but Edgar was occasionally relegated to the role of sucker. “When the rabbi said, ‘Do you take this man,’ fourteen guys said, ‘She has,’” Rivers claimed. “My husband bought the horseback riding story, thank God.”
As the sixties got under way, Rivers wasn’t the only pioneer claiming such new territory. The FDA approved the birth control pill in 1960, and when Helen Gurley Brown published Sex and the Single Girl in 1962, it sold two million copies in the first three weeks. The book, which led to Brown’s appointment as the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan, was a harbinger of the changing attitudes that would soon transform American society. It would be many years before the magazine published regular features on orgasms and blow jobs, but Brown’s groundbreaking best seller encouraged women to become financially independent and to have sex before marriage—if not instead of it.
Rivers was always candid about having had premarital sex, but it wasn’t until long after Edgar died that she admitted to having been unfaithful during her marriage—a revelation she shared with Howard Stern on his radio show. In a 2012 interview, Rivers confessed that she had had several extramarital affairs while she was married to Edgar—including a one-night stand with Robert Mitchum after an appearance together on The Tonight Show in the 1960s, when she was a relatively new bride. Rivers also told Stern that she had an extended affair with actor Gabriel Dell during the out-of-town and Broadway productions of her play Fun City in 1971, and that she had “left Edgar over” this affair for several weeks.
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