Even then, there was at least one more bombshell still to come. In the final year of her life Rivers unexpectedly made one of her most incendiary claims: that she had had sex with the mentor she had once worshipped, the man she was widely regarded as having betrayed by leaving The Tonight Show to do a television show of her own—Johnny Carson, from whom she had remained estranged until his death.
When Rivers first appeared on The Tonight Show, she was thirty-one years old and Carson was thirty-nine. Already married to his second wife, he was the father of three sons from his first marriage. But his personal life was chronically turbulent and lurid, at least by the standards of the era. When he died in 2005, Carson had been married four times and endured three acrimonious, expensive divorces, accompanied by reports of infidelity.
And yet his romantic profile as a roué provided a striking contrast with the awkward social persona that people were surprised to encounter off the air. On television Carson was always the genial guy everyone loved, but in person he was a painfully shy man who avoided large parties and didn’t seem to know how to carry on a conversation.
“I felt sorry for Johnny in that he was so socially uncomfortable,” said Dick Cavett, another comic whose career received a crucial boost from The Tonight Show. “I’ve hardly ever met anybody who had as hard a time as he did.”
The screenwriter and director George Axelrod, who wrote The Seven Year Itch and often appeared on the television show What’s My Line?, had a similar view of Carson. “Socially, he doesn’t exist,” said Axelrod. “The reason is that there are no television cameras in living rooms. If human beings had little red lights in the middle of their foreheads, Carson would be the greatest conversationalist on earth.”
Carson’s extreme social discomfort led him to devise various stratagems to avoid the ordinary interactions most celebrities learn to finesse. With interviewers, he typically refused to talk about his childhood, his personal life, politics, or controversies. When journalists tried to ask him questions, he offered a list of prepared answers:
Yes, I did.
No, I didn’t.
Not a bit of truth in that rumor.
Only twice in my life, both times on Saturday.
I can do either, but I prefer the first.
No. Kumquats.
I can’t answer that question.
Toads and tarantulas.
Turkestan, Denmark, Chile, and the Komandorski Islands.
As often as possible, but I’m not very good at it yet. I need much more practice.
Carson’s notorious unease was never visible on the air, where he seemed warm and comfortable. In his appearances with Rivers, he listened to her woe-is-me laments with avuncular kindliness, responding with the sympathy of an older, wiser confidant. In return, she was always obsequious, presenting herself as his surrogate daughter, lavishing him with praise and expressing her effusive gratitude for everything he had done for her. “I adored Johnny Carson,” she said in Still Talking.
But their ostensible rapport was apparently limited to the brief sessions of bantering for the benefit of their audiences. “Our friendship existed entirely on camera in front of America, and even then, during the commercial breaks, when the red light went off, we had nothing to say to each other,” Rivers wrote later.
Although Carson’s liaisons with a bevy of other women made headlines over the years, no one ever suggested that Rivers was one of his sexual partners. Those who knew them both were therefore shocked when Rivers, a few months before she died, suddenly claimed to have had “a one-night bounce” with Carson back in the day.
Although he had been dead since 2005, a long-lost Carson sex tape surfaced in early 2014, and gossip websites buzzed with items suggesting that the late talk show host was “hung like a horse.” As Rivers headed into the L.A. airport one night, she was accosted by a TMZ camera crew about the sex tape and asked whether she’d like to see what was on it.
“I’ve seen it,” Rivers said airily. “How do you think you got on the show?”
It’s hard to think of another eighty-year-old woman who would generate a public sex scandal about herself and her long-deceased professional mentor, but Rivers achieved her apparent goal. Her unexpected revelation generated a round of breathless headlines, including “Johnny Carson’s penis…I TOUCHED IT!”
If her claim was true, Carson would hardly be the only entertainment industry power broker to have exercised that kind of droit du seigneur. But their friends didn’t believe it. “It never happened,” said Dorothy Melvin, Rivers’s longtime manager. “Joan would seize any chance, especially in her later years, to get publicity. Johnny was dead, and nobody would refute it. Joan wanted to be talked about, so she said outrageous things.”
Men who knew both parties were equally incredulous. “Never happened,” Shelly Schultz said firmly. “In my wildest imagination I could never see that. The very idea that she said that—it’s all about self-aggrandizement. And to discredit him, maybe. Johnny could have any guest he wanted. If you saw Joan Rivers back then and you were Johnny Carson, she wasn’t even on page twelve. She was a cute, scrawny little Jewish girl from Brooklyn. There was not anybody that I know of who wanted to jump her bones.”
Carson was dignified rather than lecherous at work, according to Schultz. “He was discreet, in that he wouldn’t do a wink and a nod with us,” he said. “He didn’t talk salaciously about any of the guests. He never said, ‘And I screwed that woman!’ He may have, but we didn’t know it.”
Other Carson associates cited similar reasons for rejecting Rivers’s claim. “I didn’t believe it for a moment,” said Henry Bushkin. “I thought it was just pure Joan. It was all bullshit, but it was theatrical. It gave her something else to talk about, but I can’t imagine it to be true. If you saw the women Johnny had one-night stands with year-round, he wouldn’t have been attracted to Joan Rivers.”
Rivers’s friends were just as dubious that she ever had a fling with Carson. “I know she didn’t. It just wasn’t in the equation,” said Robert Higdon, a longtime confidant.
Higdon found her boast about Mitchum equally implausible. “One day she called me up and said, ‘Is Robert Mitchum dead? I just said on the radio that I slept with him,’” Higdon recalled. “She said, ‘If he’s dead it’s okay, but if he’s alive it could cause some problems.’ I said, ‘The next thing you’ll tell me is you slept with John F. Kennedy!’ She said, ‘I did. I just never told you.’”
Higdon’s explanation: “She’s a comedian,” he said. “Living inside her head—it must have been a difficult place to be. It just never stopped. She would say these things all the time, and it got to the point where I would just disregard it. People would say, ‘I can’t believe Joan did that!,’ and I would say, ‘It was a joke.’ Her friend Tommy Corcoran said she had Tourette’s disease: she would just say whatever. He would look at me and say, ‘It never happened.’”
Rivers herself left ample room for that interpretation. “There is nothing I won’t do for publicity,” she admitted. “Humiliation does not exist in my vocabulary. I never had the cushion to say, ‘I won’t do that.’”
Some of Rivers’s outlandish statements may have been designed to get attention, but others were motivated by empathy, according to Higdon. “If you said to her, ‘My husband beats me with a brick,’ she would say, ‘I know exactly what you mean—my husband did the same thing, and you have to leave him!’ If you said you fell out of a 747 over the Atlantic Ocean, she would say she had done it too and was there to support you. It was compassion: ‘I’ve been there too.’ And the person would feel, ‘Well, isn’t that sweet—she knows my pain!’ She wanted everyone to feel included.”
Whether or not Rivers indulged in the occasional dalliance, marriage and motherhood formed the core of her personal life during the late 1960s and the 1970s. And her marriage appeared to flourish, even as it gradually changed from an intimate relationship into a quasi-professional one.
Insidious but inexorable,
that process progressed as if it were a natural evolution—even inevitable, given the personalities involved. For a while, Roy Silver continued as Rivers’s official manager, but Edgar quickly became her unofficial one—“because we both saw him as the one person in my life who was 150 percent in my corner, the man who would protect me from all those people in show business who try to use and exploit you,” Rivers explained.
But to entertainment industry veterans, that scenario was a toxic cliché virtually guaranteed to produce an unhappy ending. “This is an old story in show business,” said Shelly Schultz. “When a star or a burgeoning star marries somebody, the new mate tries to be the manager. They will eventually become the manager, and that person’s career will go into the toilet for a certain period of time. There isn’t a wife or a husband of a star who hasn’t interfered in the star’s career. I’m sure Roy saw the handwriting on the wall. He would say, ‘Any minute now!’ We joked about it. Edgar was short, and one time we were sitting in a meeting at The Tonight Show and somebody said, ‘There really are eight dwarfs.’ It was like there was a bad odor permeating from somewhere—oh, it’s from him! He gave me the fucking creeps.”
As Schultz and Silver foresaw, Silver was ultimately replaced as Rivers’s manager, and Edgar hired the late Jack Rollins, a top manager who also handled Woody Allen. For the time being, the star’s husband continued to play a role behind the scenes, but his hunger for more power gradually skewed the Rosenbergs’ professional decisions in ways that would soon warp Rivers’s entire career.
Chapter Five
Westward Ho: California Dreamin’
As a girl, Rivers wanted to be Katharine Cornell, the toast of Broadway—not Phyllis Diller or Totie Fields, the disheveled crazy ladies of comedy. No matter how successful she became as a comedian, she never got over the idea that her achievements were a poor second best to respect as a serious actress.
So Rivers was thrilled when she met the director Frank Perry and he wrote a bit part for her in the 1968 movie he made from “The Swimmer,” a celebrated short story by John Cheever. The film starred Burt Lancaster, and The New York Times gave Rivers a favorable mention in its review—but no further movie offers were forthcoming.
The prospects in television seemed brighter, and the following year the William Morris Agency offered to package a television talk show for Rivers. Unfortunately, her husband seized on that idea as a crucial opportunity for himself as well.
“Edgar wanted to be the show’s producer—which meant quitting Anna Rosenberg,” Rivers reported in Still Talking. “I kept saying to him, ‘Are you sure? Are you sure? What’s going to happen if the show doesn’t work?’ To me, he was already a movie producer, and this little half-hour morning show seemed like a comedown. I worried that he was giving up his power base.”
At the time, she didn’t realize that Telsun was running out of steam and that Edgar hadn’t come up with any other films to produce. He didn’t want to resume his duties as a public relations employee servicing the company’s clients; he wanted to be a big-time producer, and his wife’s new gig looked like the ticket to his own success.
“The William Morris TV show package was irresistible because it put Edgar at the top with complete control,” Rivers said. “The decision to do the show began the fusion of my career with Edgar’s. That was not our plan. It just happened.”
For a while, this dynamic seemed to meet the needs of both partners. “I was frightened by the responsibility of carrying a show on my shoulders, and Edgar and I obsessively hashed out every decision,” Rivers said. “I had a joke based on the truth—‘My marriage is wonderful because when I wake up in the morning, I’m thinking of me and so is he.’ Still in bed, Edgar would say, ‘I figured out during the night that the contract should read…’”
Rivers liked having everything revolve around her, and she admitted that her career provided the “romance” in her life—and even that she saw it as her “lover.” While this relegated Edgar to the role of functionary, she thought their relationship was doing fine. “As my mother used to tell me, nothing is perfect, and this marriage was working,” Rivers insisted.
With a notable lack of originality, Rivers’s new show was named That Show, and she was delighted when Johnny Carson agreed to be a guest on the pilot. She wanted to send him a significant present to express her gratitude, but what to give the man who already had everything?
Why, her most precious possession, of course.
So the Rosenbergs dressed up the infant Melissa and dispatched a nurse in cape and uniform to take her to NBC and deliver her to Carson. The nurse found him in the middle of a staff meeting, handed him the baby, and announced, “Mr. Carson, this is for you.”
Rivers reported his initial reaction in Still Talking: “The joke around the show was, Johnny went white because he thought maybe the baby was his.”
But Carson relaxed when he found the note attached to Melissa, which read, “Dear Mr. Carson—My parents don’t know how to thank you for what you did for my mother, so they wanted to give you something they really love, and that’s me. My name is Melissa Rosenberg. I weigh twelve pounds. I eat very little. Please bring me up Jewish.”
Carson thought the prank was funny, and for a time everything else seemed to proceed just as smoothly. The Rosenbergs managed the schedule of Joan’s program so she could tape three shows in one day and two the next, leaving her time to fit in club dates during the rest of the week. In January of 1969, she also became a regular guest host on The Tonight Show.
“It was a proud, happy time for everybody,” she recalled.
But That Show soon lost its luster. There were problems with the syndication process, Rivers grew weary of the grueling schedule, and she was cavalier enough to think this was just the first of many such opportunities. She was relieved when the show ended—but Edgar was “extremely upset” about its termination, which marked the end of his role as producer.
Not knowing what else to do, he continued to piggyback onto his wife’s projects. Rivers was still obsessed with the theater, a passion she was determined to pass along to her daughter. “I would take her with me before she could sit on the seat,” Joan said.
Unable to persuade anyone else to put her onstage, Rivers wrote a stage comedy called Fun City as a starring vehicle for herself. Her husband and Lester Colodny were credited as coauthors of the play, which chronicled the misadventures of Jill, an “up-to-the-minute feminist” who was “active in all sorts of causes” but deficient in the womanly arts of domesticity and romance. There was no mistaking Fun City’s autobiographical elements—“Her fiancé wants to marry her…Trouble is, he’s Italian and her Jewish mother mistrusts Italians,” according to the blurb that advertised the play—and when it flopped on Broadway at the beginning of 1972, its failure dealt Rivers a major psychological blow. She had finally dared to reach for her ultimate dream—and she was definitively rejected.
Instead of consoling his wife, Edgar took a sleeping pill and refused to talk to her. “This was our first failure as a team, the first major stress on our marriage, and we did not band together,” Rivers said. “We did not go to each other for comfort. We drew apart.”
The Tonight Show had always been based in New York, but in 1972 it moved to Burbank, California, further weakening Rivers’s commitment to her lifelong home base. Looking out of her windows one night at the glittering lights of Manhattan, the grief-stricken Rivers made a sudden, dramatic decision. “You don’t want me, New York, I don’t want you. We’re out of here!” she said out loud.
And so the Rosenbergs moved to Hollywood, driven as much by anger as by a positive agenda for the future. “We had no idea that as the plane flew over Mississippi toward Los Angeles, Edgar’s doom was sealed,” Rivers observed later. “After so much struggle in his life, after finally experiencing his dream in New York, he was on his way to the one place in the world where he could never be appreciated for himself, on his way to becoming a star’s husband.”
For Rivers, the move made sense. “Joan had always wanted to come here, and she decided this was the time to try Hollywood,” said Sue Cameron, who was a columnist at the Hollywood Reporter when she first met Rivers. “She wanted to break out. She always wanted to be an actress more than anything, and she wanted to star in a sitcom, she wanted to do television movies, she wanted to do all the variety shows.”
But Hollywood was unfamiliar territory, so Rivers set about infiltrating the new milieu. “I got a call from her press agent saying, ‘Joan Rivers would like you to come to her house for lunch. She’s new in town and would like to meet you,’” Cameron reported. “Joan decided I was going to be her guide to L.A., because she didn’t really know anybody.”
For Rivers, such strategic tactics were standard operating procedure. “Joan always wanted to become best friends with the press,” Cameron said. “It’s no accident that her friends were people like Barbara Walters, Cindy Adams, and me. She made sure that whoever was the big press deal was her friend. If you had an outlet, even for an hour, she always kept you on her list, because she never knew where you were going to be. She could always get someone on the phone if there was a problem. It was very calculated, but we ended up loving each other.”
When the Rosenbergs first arrived in Los Angeles, they moved into a rented house in Coldwater Canyon. “I was greeted by the guy we called Archie the Ice-Skater,” said Cameron. “He was a gay guy who had aged out of being an ice-skater, and she gave him a job as her assistant. The table for lunch was set magnificently.”
Last Girl Before Freeway Page 10