Last Girl Before Freeway

by Leslie Bennetts

  Over time, Cameron became a real friend, forging a bond with Rivers that lasted until her death. Cameron often traveled and vacationed with the Rosenbergs, and such close proximity gave her an intimate view of Rivers’s private life—which was very different from the persona she presented for public consumption.

  “When she was really Joan, when she went home and there was no one around, she was in a bathrobe and glasses and no makeup, curled up in a corner reading a book,” Cameron said. “She would eat her meals on a stool in the kitchen.”

  But Rivers cared desperately about what people thought of her, and she was very conscious of creating the image she wanted for her new environment. “Her first question was, ‘Did I rent a house in the right area?’” Cameron recalled. “She wanted to rent a house in the very best area. I said, ‘No, you need to move to Bel Air.’ As soon as her lease was up, she moved to Bel Air. Her second question was, ‘Where do I get English riding lessons for Melissa?’ I got her the name of a riding academy, and from there our friendship just bloomed.”

  Even the details of her daughter’s hobbies had to be just right. “When she called me and said, ‘Who is the best English riding teacher for Melissa?,’ I had to find out who all the chichi people sent their children to,” Cameron said. “When Melissa had riding lessons or a riding exhibition, Joan would dress her in a ‘riding to the hounds’ outfit, with a black velvet helmet, high boots, jodhpurs, a red jacket, a white shirt, and a little black tie. It’s all about Waspiness.”

  As a hostess, Rivers often seemed to care more about social pedigree than about whether a guest was smart, interesting, or accomplished. “When she gave a dinner party, she made sure there was always someone like C. Z. Guest,” Cameron said, referring to the socialite and gardening expert whose husband was related to the Duke of Marlborough and Sir Winston Churchill.

  Rivers also worked hard at mastering the domestic management skills of the upper crust. “I remember Joan asking me to lunch, because she had just hired new butlers and cooks,” said the writer Jesse Kornbluth, who was divorced from Katharine Johnson, the daughter of the multibillionaire media mogul Anne Cox Chambers.

  “Joan knew I had been married to Katharine Johnson, and she wanted me to assess her help,” Kornbluth said. “She knew I was an aspirational Jew—like Joan. We’re having lunch, and she’s saying, ‘How is the cooking? How is the service?’ I think she felt I had greater expertise—East Coast expertise. Joan knew there was a larger social world than L.A.”

  And yet no matter how hard they worked at it, both Rivers and her husband had difficulty adjusting to Los Angeles. It was good for some new jokes. The living was easy—“too easy,” Rivers complained. “I miss the tension and anger of New York.”

  Even dying was easier. “They will not declare you dead in California till you lose your tan. You just have to lie there for weeks till you’re starting to fade,” Rivers claimed.

  But winning social acceptance was something else entirely. From school to camp to college and beyond, Rivers had never been gifted at figuring out how to be part of the cool crowd, and that challenge proved particularly difficult in Hollywood. Her idea of proper entertaining entailed formal place settings and finger bowls, but Rivers’s personal style—a lifelong legacy from her ever-striving mother—often seemed ill-suited to the informality and casual chic that were prized in Los Angeles. “She was indeed a fish out of water,” said Arnold Stiefel, Rod Stewart’s longtime manager, who managed Rivers’s book and movie projects in those years.

  Her partner didn’t make things any easier. “Joan without Edgar was a lot of fun, but it was not fun to be with Joan and Edgar,” said Sandy Gallin. “It was like she was with her grandfather.”

  Rivers was also deeply uncomfortable with the prevailing drug culture. She was happy to make jokes about it: “California is druggy, druggy, druggy. If it is white and it is on the table, they are gonna sniff it. I have a friend who OD’d in the beauty shop on dandruff.”

  But she didn’t participate. “She was at a party in Hollywood and somebody offered her cocaine,” reported David Dangle, a close friend who ran Rivers’s QVC company in later years. “She tries it, and somebody says, ‘Do you need a tissue?’—because she had snot running down her face. Her nose was running, and from that point on, she wouldn’t do it. You couldn’t put a gun to her head and get her to do it, because you lost control.”

  Whatever problems Rivers experienced in adjusting to California, her husband’s were far worse. His stiff, formal persona couldn’t have been more different from the bohemian, pot-smoking athleticism of the Hollywood movers and shakers whose habits dictated the prevailing ethos for men. In an environment where masculine style evoked the image of someone like Ryan O’Neal running shirtless beside the ocean in Malibu, Edgar was more like Richard Nixon, who famously wore a dark suit, lace-up shoes, white shirt, and tie to walk on the beach.

  But Joan had her career, whereas Edgar increasingly found himself without one of his own. The power brokers who ran the industry found his credentials unimpressive and his personality uncongenial, and he wasn’t making any progress toward his goal of succeeding as an independent producer. “His attitude became, ‘I’ll show those bastards!’” Rivers reported.

  Resentful at being slighted, Rosenberg suppressed his anger but refused to share his frustration in any meaningful intimacy with his wife. Neither could admit it, but each was secretly disappointed in the other. “I think Edgar believed he was married to a show business insider who would bring him in—only to find that I was an outsider too,” Rivers said. “Like him, I never fit in with the right people, never had that knack.”

  But even those who accepted Rivers often found her husband charmless. “A lot of people didn’t like him,” said Rick Newman. “You never heard that Edgar was a great guy.”

  As a father, however, he couldn’t have been more devoted, and Melissa adored him in return. Inside their own domestic world, the Rosenbergs managed to create their own showbiz version of a happy little family. “From the time Melissa was two, she watched Joan perfect her harshly innovative comedy routine,” People magazine reported in 1993. “The tot would sit in the wings of nightclubs like the one at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and wave to her mother, who stood center stage performing her routine. ‘By age five,’ says Joan, ‘she knew it verbatim. She’d say, “I hate to cook. I hate to clean. Housework is stupid. No woman was ever made love to because she scrubbed the linoleum.”’”

  Even then, Joan saw her daughter rather than her husband as the emotional core of her life. “Melissa is the one to whom I could give total affection and feel it being absorbed and returned,” she said. “I wish I had had ten children…After Missy, I had two miscarriages and a tubular pregnancy. Not having more is my only regret in life. We were going to adopt, and then Edgar changed his mind. I worry now because there’s nobody for Missy. When the chips are down, the only one who will take you in is a relative.”

  The Rosenbergs worked hard to make their daughter feel she was their top priority, even when they were on the road for Joan’s nightclub gigs. According to People magazine, “‘Mom and Dad would fly in from wherever for even minor school events,’ recalls Melissa, who attended a trio of private schools in Southern California. Confirms Joan: ‘I was even a Brownie troop mother. Now that was a picture.’”

  Being raised in Beverly Hills was challenging nonetheless. “I always wanted to be tall and blond, and I’m still having trouble with that,” Melissa told People.

  “Melissa grew up in a society where everyone who walked in the door was beautiful,” her mother explained. “Nicollette Sheridan went to her school. Missy always felt short and squat, but we constantly told her, ‘You’re the best! Go for it!’ In third grade swim meets she was three foot two while other kids were six foot two. And I would scream, ‘You can beat them!’”

  Trying to counter such influences, “Joan purposely chose schools that were not filled with the scions of show business,” Peo
ple reported. “‘I wanted her to see that other kids’ fathers are doctors and businessmen,’ says Joan. And there were family rules: when Joan and Edgar were in town, the family had dinner at 6 p.m. During the meal, all phones would be shut off. Then they would talk about everything—school and work, life and art, business problems and solutions. ‘We wanted Melissa to know about the good times and the bad,’ Joan says.”

  Within the charmed circle of the family, Edgar thrived, and he also won admirers among family intimates, who were touched by his devotion to his daughter and his high-powered wife. “When I met Edgar I loved him instantly,” said Cameron. “I often felt that if they got divorced, I would like to marry Edgar. I am bisexual, and I had a girlfriend at the time, but he was just magical. He was so funny. He was so acerbic—Noël Coward, Malcolm Muggeridge. He was actually funnier than Joan. She had fast, funny one-liners, but Edgar was the guy who said something under his breath that could kill you. I loved this man so much. He was an extraordinary intellect, and his eyes twinkled, but he kept it all in because he wanted Joan to be the star. He looked weak, but he wasn’t. He was watching everybody, mentally taking notes. At the end of the day they would go over everything together. He was her partner in plotting her career, and he was fine with it for a long time.”

  Cameron wasn’t the only friend who empathized with Edgar, but even his defenders acknowledged that he was a difficult man. “The entire range of opinions about Edgar has validity,” said Dorothy Melvin, who started working for the Rosenbergs as an assistant before she became Joan’s manager. “I don’t think Edgar ever got his due. Edgar was very kind in a lot of ways that people didn’t see, but he was a very tortured person, and he would erupt. He had a career in New York, and he was respected as Edgar Rosenberg, and then they came here and it wasn’t the same in L.A. In Hollywood, you have to be thought of as your own person, but Joan was the star of the household, and he was the adjunct. They worked hand in hand, and they were really one person. He never did anything without complete discussion with Joan, and she was very protective of Edgar and fiercely loyal to him. There were a lot of very old-world values in Joan, and she said, ‘That’s your husband and you have to protect him.’ She never did anything without Edgar. She always acquiesced to him.”

  But his lack of finesse sometimes cost her significant opportunities. In 1983, the writer and author Bob Colacello interviewed Rivers for Parade, the Sunday newspaper insert that had such an enormous circulation it was known as the most widely read magazine in the United States. “Edgar gave us such a hard time about the cover photo that the whole thing got canceled,” said Colacello.

  When he first went to interview Rivers, she was staying at a Holiday Inn in Albany, where she was performing. “I got to her hotel, and she had a pistol and was polishing the different parts,” Colacello said. “They had a limousine, and we went to Stockbridge to see the Rockwell museum. She and Edgar were real autodidacts, so on the way back they read aloud to each other from a history of the queen of France. I got a great interview, and Walter Anderson, the editor of the magazine, loved it.”

  Everything was fine until Edgar picked a fight over the control of his wife’s image. “Edgar told me they had done their own cover shoot, but she was in furs and jewels, which was all wrong for the Parade readership, where you can’t have a cover that looks like royalty,” said Colacello. “It was very presumptuous of them to do their own photo shoot, and they were like the king and queen of France with the furs and jewels. So I said, ‘We have to do our own shoot.’ Edgar demanded photo approval, and Walter said, ‘We don’t do that at Parade.’ But we worked out a compromise, and everything was settled until Edgar said to me, ‘We want approval of the retouching.’ I kept saying, ‘Edgar—thirty-five million readers!’”

  But Edgar wouldn’t budge, and his intransigence finally blew up the whole deal. “Walter Anderson was a nice guy, very easygoing, but when I went back to him, he said, ‘Fuck her. I don’t want the story anymore. She’s just not that famous,’” Colacello recalled. “This wasn’t investigative journalism, and nobody was out to get Joan. It just seemed overprotective and annoying. I thought the whole situation was absurd, from the gun, to the performance where she’s asking these upstate ladies if they used condoms, to the cultural journey, to the back and forth with Edgar’s requests. He lost her the cover of Parade. He did a very bad job for Joan.”

  Whatever her husband’s misjudgments, Rivers’s career was thriving, and she quickly became an icon to her fellow Jews and to gay men, two of the constituencies that would help form her most loyal fan base. “I grew up in St. Louis, and starting when she was on Carson, when I was in junior high school, it was like a holiday in my house when Joan was on,” said Andy Cohen, the host of Watch What Happens: Live as well as the executive producer of the Real Housewives franchise. “I was gay, and she was Jewish. We relate to very strong, glamorous women who pull no punches, and she was fearless.”

  Rivers stayed busy, appearing regularly on The Hollywood Squares, trying out new material at a club in Los Angeles, and going on the road to work as an opening act at major casinos, which quickly became an important part of the Rosenbergs’ lifestyle. “Joan was playing Vegas, Reno, Tahoe, and I was always sent up to interview them, so everyone ended up in Las Vegas every weekend,” Cameron explained. “She would arrange for me to stay at Caesars, where she was playing. Every Sunday I would walk from my room in my robe and meet Joan and Edgar in their robes, and everyone would read the L.A. Times and The New York Times and order room service, and we would just sit and read and talk. It was a New York experience. They lived a New York experience no matter where they were. They were always reading, always talking. Joan and Edgar lived a very intellectual life.”

  But Rivers never stopped looking for new creative outlets. In a brilliant stroke of karmic revenge, she wrote a screenplay inspired by the terrible blind date she had in college with the boy who was so disgusted by his first sight of Joan that he said angrily “Why didn’t you tell me?” to the friend who had fixed them up.

  That boy became a doctor and married a girl Rivers had known in New York. Years later, the same woman called Rivers in California, and Rivers invited her and her husband to a poolside supper party. At forty, the doctor husband was now fat and bald—and he had no idea there was any connection between the dumpy Joan Molinsky who had once repulsed him and the stick-thin, glamorous star he was now fortunate enough to be visiting in Hollywood.

  “He was all over me; everywhere I went, there he was, obviously a cheater, following me into the kitchen to get me alone,” Rivers reported. After the party, she joked to her friend Kenny Solms that she should have said, “Does the name Joan Molinsky mean anything to you?”—and whipped out a gun and shot him.

  Solms said, “That’s a movie.”

  So Rivers wrote a script called The Girl Most Likely to…, which became a 1973 made-for-television movie starring Stockard Channing and Ed Asner. A black comedy, it told the story of “a fat ugly girl who gets thin and beautiful and kills every boy who ever slighted her,” said Rivers, never one to forgive and forget. “That script came right from the heart.”

  In presenting plastic surgery as the solution to the ugly girl’s unhappiness, the plot certainly embodied one of Rivers’s most cherished fantasies. After being terribly disfigured in a car accident, the central character is treated with reconstructive surgery that transforms her into a beauty. In real life, Rivers didn’t resort to murder as punishment for those who had rejected her, but she spent the rest of her life chasing the tantalizing idea that an unattractive woman could undergo a complete metamorphosis and become so beautiful that she was able to avenge her painful past.

  As Rivers expanded her career, her husband’s languished, and it soon became obvious that his expensive office was unnecessary. So he gave it up and started to work from home—except that he really didn’t have anything to work on. Neither Joan nor Edgar wanted him to be a househusband, but he rejected his wife’s su
ggestion that he get a job, thinking that would be demeaning. Since he only wanted to be a producer, they decided that Rivers would continue to write screenplays and become so successful she could demand that her husband produce the movies.

  “Should I have known better by then? Of course I should,” she said in Still Talking.

  But like her husband, she too was the victim of a troubling gap between her aspirations and the realities of her career. The bad news was that her subsequent scripts were turned down and she wasn’t offered any acting jobs; the good news was that she did well in Las Vegas. Another performer might have been happy that she was in demand, but Rivers was upset about being pigeonholed as a Vegas comic when she wanted to win recognition as a serious actress or a success in the movie business.

  Instead of bonding over their mutual angst, the Rosenbergs let it drive a wedge between them. “Edgar handled his frustration by withdrawing into himself,” Rivers said. “He broke my heart. He pretended he was not suffering, but I knew he was…He was miserable. And I was miserable. With our wounds from Fun City, we could not comfort each other. Our marriage was shaky. He resented me for being busy, and I felt guilty for being busy.”

  When Joan tried to talk about how unhappy they were, Edgar stonewalled her and said there was nothing wrong.

  Rivers finally reached her breaking point one night in 1973 when she came back from an engagement at Harrah’s in Tahoe and realized she couldn’t face going home to her husband—so she went directly from the airport to the Beverly Hills Hotel with Melissa and her governess. A few nights later, she heard a scary noise at the back door of her cottage and thought someone was trying to break in. Instead of reaching out to the hotel staff, she called Edgar, who was there in ten minutes.

  The next day Joan went back home, and for a time the pressure seemed to lift; her brief rebellion had shocked Edgar into recognizing the depth of her distress, and he had reassured her by being the husband she could always count on in a crisis. But nothing really changed: they never talked honestly about his failure to establish himself as an independent player in Hollywood, they kept drifting further apart as intimate partners, and they handled their respective disappointments in counterproductive ways that were chillingly prophetic.