Last Girl Before Freeway

by Leslie Bennetts

  “When Edgar passed a certain anxiety threshold, he would check out with denial and a sleeping pill. I, in turn, would lose myself in my daughter and a whirl of feverish activity,” Rivers said.

  Without an individual portfolio of his own, it soon became a given that Edgar’s role in life was to facilitate what both he and his wife referred to as The Career. “We run a factory, and Joan is the product,” he said.

  That dynamic allowed for a pragmatic division of labor, but it also gave Rivers a free pass to be “the easygoing sweetheart, smiling and joking,” while leaving Edgar to do the dirty work of making sure her interests were served. “I was being unfair, letting Edgar be the lightning rod for the hostility that floats around town,” Rivers admitted. “But that is built into the star/husband equation…So I let my husband take the heat.”

  As Rivers made more money, she also yearned to put down roots, and in 1974 the Rosenbergs moved to a twelve-room house on Ambazac Way in Bel Air. Designed by Paul Williams, an influential black architect, the new home was “a micro-Tara.”

  But at first it was largely empty. Shortly after Rivers moved in, she invited around twenty people for a curious quasi-social event. “We were told to come after dinner for coffee and dessert,” said John Erman, a television and film director who didn’t know Rivers but was brought by a friend. “There was almost nothing in the living room, and we all had to sit on the floor. Joan sat down and said, ‘I need to make money, and I’d like to go around the room and have everyone tell me what they think is the best way to make it.’ We all kind of looked at each other and rolled our eyes.”

  As far as Erman could tell, Rivers was clearly the one calling the shots. “I thought Edgar was kind of a schlep,” he said. “He was like the Frog Prince, following in her footsteps.”

  But over time, as Rivers made more money, she decorated the house as her private romantic fantasy—a tangible testimonial to her own success and the concept of class she had absorbed from her mother’s thwarted aspirations. “Joan’s lifestyle was like the Queen of Versailles, which she loved because she could afford it,” said Cameron. “Her house looked like Louis XIV; it was extraordinarily formal. It was an English colonial, and the living room was Fabergé eggs, Chinese screens, Oriental rugs, damask furniture. The dining room was very English, all dark wood and credenzas and another Oriental rug. The staff at the house called her Mrs. R., for Rosenberg. It was all very old-fashioned, very old-school. Edgar loved Rodgers and Hart, and I seem to remember them listening to Rodgers and Hart at cocktail hour.”

  Rivers’s taste satisfied a deep yearning to achieve what her mother had longed for, but it was distinctly out of step with the ethos of California casual. Years later, after Edgar had died and Joan was getting ready to sell the Ambazac house and move back to New York, the freelance writer Jenny Allen interviewed her for an Architectural Digest story. “She clearly loved the house, but she said, ‘It isn’t really a California house,’” Allen recalled. “It was all French, English, and Russian antiques—period furnishings. She said one of her friends once walked into the house and said, ‘Who died here?’ There was no Art Deco, no Arts and Crafts—Arts and Crafts style particularly appalled her—and there was nothing attesting to a career in show business. Not one showbiz poster or Vegas memento. She wanted to be perceived as worldly, generous—a lady.”

  Rivers took care to differentiate her real-life identity from her stage persona. “It seemed very important to her to make the distinction between her private self and her public act,” Allen said. “She said, ‘That’s just an act—it’s not who I am. I’m a doctor’s daughter from Larchmont.’ She seemed overly self-conscious about making this distinction; she returned to it several times.”

  When Allen wrote her story for Architectural Digest, the first draft began with that observation: “I said, ‘Joan Rivers is at least two different people. One of them is the one we see on television, but the other Joan Rivers is gracious, private, ladylike, correct, and elegant.’”

  Rivers was quite specific about the inspiration for that old-fashioned identity. “She said her mother was very elegant and obsessed with politesse, and she inherited that from her mother,” Allen said. “She used the word ‘homage’—she saw her house as an homage to her mother and her mother’s taste.”

  And yet with Rivers, contradictions always lurked just below the surface. “Underneath it all, Joan was like a cross between Town & Country and Road & Track,” Sue Cameron observed. “Town & Country was completely visible, but Road & Track was her ambition, which ran twenty-four hours a day.”

  In Los Angeles, the disjuncture between the Rosenbergs’ rigidly controlled style and the social mores of the freewheeling, drug-addled 1970s and ’80s could be jarring for everyone concerned. “Joan liked to give very formal dinner parties, and when she gave her first dinner party in Bel Air, she wanted it to go perfectly,” Cameron said. “The guests were Roddy McDowall and his boyfriend, George Segal and his then wife, Edgar and Joan and me.”

  Despite Rivers’s meticulously planned agenda, the dinner party careened out of control before the first course was over. “Roddy’s boyfriend had too much to drink, and he was upset because some trade paper had given him a bad review,” Cameron reported. “Even though it wasn’t me, he started in with vicious cracks about me, just because I was a trade paper writer, so I represented all the bad people. He got so abusive he went to hit me across the table, and Roddy had to put him in the car, where he passed out. So now there’s a beautiful roast with Yorkshire pudding on the table, and we just keep talking like nothing happened. And then Mrs. Segal goes to the bathroom, and she’s gone a really long time, and Joan finally says to me, ‘Do you mind going to check on Mrs. Segal?’”

  Cameron obliged, only to encounter a social challenge that couldn’t be ignored. “Mrs. Segal was passed out on the floor from some kind of drug, but her leg was blocking the door, so you couldn’t get the door open,” Cameron recalled. “So now the whole dinner party is ruined—there’s a guy in the car and a woman on the floor. Joan has been Little Miss Perfect the whole time, and she finally throws her fork down and says, ‘Fuck it, I’m ordering pizza.’”

  Rivers’s anger was unpredictable, and she sometimes lashed out in surprising ways; newly ensconced in the exclusive enclave of Bel Air, she loved to play the role of English country house chatelaine, but at heart she was still the aggressive little Jewish girl from Brooklyn.

  “Being Jewish was very significant to Joan,” Cameron reported. “In Bel Air, the property line of her backyard was directly up against the Bel-Air Country Club golf course, and the Bel-Air Country Club was restricted, like all the clubs in the late 1970s. Joan loved gardening, and one day she was back there pruning her roses, and all of a sudden a golf ball comes flying over. A man comes to the fence and says, ‘Lady, can I please have my ball?’ And Joan says, ‘You Nazi, I’ll have your balls cut off!’”

  Notwithstanding such eruptions, the Ambazac house was a dream come true for Rivers—but it was expensive to maintain, so she went on the road for several months out of every year to earn enough money to pay for her increasingly opulent lifestyle. And yet no matter how hard Rivers labored to perfect the stage setting for her life in Los Angeles, she continued to be dissatisfied with the marriage that anchored it.

  Sue Cameron was stunned one day when Rivers said she’d decided to make a public announcement that she was separating from Edgar. “She wanted me to release this,” Cameron said. “The message was that she was in Hollywood now and he didn’t really fit in. She wanted a whole new life, and she was interested in dating. So Edgar left. Melissa was eight.”

  Cameron saw the whole episode as motivated by Rivers’s show business aspirations rather than by any romantic yearnings. “It was the call of Hollywood,” she said. “It was very exciting; it was something she had to do. It was thrilling for her to be in Hollywood, and be in Vegas and Reno and Tahoe and Beverly Hills, and have all the limos. It was a huge dream. It mean
t so much to her.”

  Confronted with an unwelcome separation, Edgar patiently waited her out. “He knew she was going to come back,” Cameron said. “Edgar would call Joan every night before she went to bed, to make sure she got home from her date and was all right. He kept that up, and he kept that up. Finally she called me and said, ‘Where are you going to find someone who calls in every night to make sure you’re okay? Hollywood isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. I’m going back to Edgar.’ I don’t think it lasted very long—maybe two months.”

  But the separation didn’t cure the insidious cancer that was eating away at the heart of their marriage. “The more successful Joan became, the more she realized Edgar was a fish out of water in Hollywood, and I think she had less respect for him,” said Cameron.

  Even so, the family they had created together was now Joan’s world, and her mother’s death in 1975 sharpened that feeling. In her last conversation with her mother, Joan had been angry, and they had quarreled. Her father was recovering from a heart attack, and Joan wanted her mother to hire a live-in nurse for him when he came home from the hospital. Her mother refused, insisting that she would care for him herself.

  “Her mother had a heart attack, and she died that night,” Cameron said. “Joan never got to rectify it, and she felt terrible guilt.”

  A dozen years later, those feelings were revived and immeasurably exacerbated by Joan’s overwhelming sense of guilt about her husband’s suicide. But the intervening years were a halcyon time in which success seemed to make up for all the rest of life’s tribulations.

  And success on a grand scale was finally hers.

  Chapter Six

  The First Lady of Comedy:

  Nothing Is Sacred

  Rivers’s humor was always fueled by anger, but in the early years of her career her resentment was usually channeled into lampooning the double standards of a world that was unfair to women in general and to her in particular. Glints of the slashing knives to come could already be seen, but it wasn’t until she shifted away from self-deprecation and focused her rage on ridiculing other women that she became a real cultural assassin. Rivers’s true feelings hadn’t changed—her underlying motivation was clearly driven by jealousy—but the strategic decision to victimize women she saw as rivals who didn’t deserve their good luck turned her act into a potent weapon and transformed her career.

  Long before the term was ever invented, Rivers made slut shaming a staple of her act. If a woman was beautiful, men desired her—so she must be promiscuous. “You show me a woman with a naturally beautiful body, and I’ll show you a tramp,” she said.

  As an outlet for her suppressed fury, she invented a fictional character named Heidi Abromowitz, and whenever Rivers appeared on The Tonight Show she regaled Johnny Carson with regular bulletins about Heidi’s sexual precocity. “I’m telling you that at eight she knew more about reproduction than Xerox,” said Rivers, who claimed that Heidi was a former schoolmate.

  Carson always played along, cueing Rivers with leading questions to elicit fresh news about Heidi’s developmental milestones. These supposedly focused on specific skills: “Kissed a boy for the first time today. Very disappointing. It’s nothing compared to oral sex.”

  But adolescence posed particular challenges: “When Heidi had her braces removed, the entire football team sent her orthodontist a thank-you note,” Rivers said.

  She eventually published a collection of such jokes in a book called The Life and Hard Times of Heidi Abromowitz, which distilled Heidi’s philosophy of life as someone who mindlessly serviced an unending procession of men: “Never put off for tomorrow who you can put out for tonight.”

  Casting herself as the virtuous good girl, Rivers made a point of contrasting Heidi’s trashy behavior with her own: “We both decided we were going to give our bodies to the Harvard Medical School—only I was going to wait till I was dead.”

  But even a fictional character has limits, so Rivers began to broaden her focus and skewer actual people. She started by generalizing about groups that provoked her disdain. “The thing that really sticks in my mind was the jokes about how horrible female stewardesses were,” said Ann Northrop, cohost of the weekly television news show Gay USA. “She said that stewardesses ignore women on planes and treat them like dirt because all they want to do is flirt with men and marry rich guys, and they’ll throw a drink in your face while they go sit in the lap of a man. She had contempt for those women; it was just a blanket condemnation. To me, that kind of anger at women who had no real power was upsetting.”

  And yet even when she attacked stewardesses, Rivers acknowledged the sexist and ageist standards that discriminated against them. “They’re all single, and they’re very busy with the men, but they fire them at twenty-six, so they have a deadline,” she said.

  As her humor grew ever more cutting, Rivers became increasingly willing to skewer specific individuals, often in person. “You photograph so beautifully,” she told Ann-Margret, patting her knee in a joint appearance on the Today show in 1978. Then Rivers smiled brightly. “I hope she’s not happy. It just kills me,” she said.

  Rivers avoided therapists in those years, fearing that greater peace of mind could sap her professional drive. But a psychiatrist might have suspected that her hostility toward better-looking counterparts was rooted in sibling rivalry. Rivers grew up with a sister who was constantly praised as prettier, smarter, and more acquiescent, and the preferential treatment bred a lifelong rivalry. Joan’s success only exacerbated the tensions with Barbara. “She’s very much a Main Line Philadelphia lawyer,” Rivers told People magazine in 1983. “I think what I do embarrasses her terribly because I’m so unladylike onstage.”

  As Rivers got older, the primal unfairness of knowing that her parents favored her sibling was exacerbated by her growing anger about the many sources of unfairness every girl encounters in the larger society. By the time she got famous, anger had become the hallmark trait that defined her public persona for the rest of her life. “The way I’ve always described Joan Rivers is that she’s a mean, angry, bitter bitch, and I mean that as a total compliment,” said the comic Gilbert Gottfried in the Comedy Hall of Fame documentary Joan Rivers: Exit Laughing.

  But anger requires a target, and Rivers discovered another rich vein of material in the burgeoning field of celebrity gossip as publications like People magazine and the National Enquirer became a prime source of inspiration. Sometimes the humor simply violated the boundaries of good taste, not to mention what would later come to be known as political correctness. “I heard Mike Nichols recall a Joan Rivers joke he’d heard her tell in England: ‘The day I have multiple orgasms is the day Stevie Wonder hits a hole in one,’” George Plimpton said. “This seems to me tasteless on two counts, which is difficult in a single sentence.”

  But the jokes about women were always meaner. As far as Rivers was concerned, supermodels were all morons: “You want to get Cindy Crawford confused? Ask her to spell ‘mom’ backward.”

  And if an actress was rated a perfect ten, she too had to be stupid: “A woman went to her plastic surgeon and asked him to make her like Bo Derek. He gave her a lobotomy.”

  Since acting was the lofty occupation that Rivers revered, particular scorn was aimed at anyone who dared call herself an actress while also being beautiful: “Bo Derek turned down the role of Helen Keller because she couldn’t remember the lines.”

  Such jokes turned into a lifelong vendetta as Rivers became an avenging fury bent on smearing all the women she envied so desperately—the pretty ones who were chased by men, unlike lumpy little Joan Molinsky, who repelled all the boys. For the rest of her life, beautiful women remained perennial targets, no matter what else they might have accomplished.

  Long after Angelina Jolie became a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations and won an Academy Award for best supporting actress, Rivers was still portraying her as an idiot so empty-headed she peed on the floor on command, like a dog.

&
nbsp; “I’ve worked with stupid actresses—I’ve worked with Angelina Jolie. She saw a sign that said ‘Wet floor’ one time, and she did! I mean, she’s attractive, but not a bright girl—stunningly beautiful, but stupid,” Rivers said disdainfully.

  It soon became clear that venting such hostility was a good career move: the more venomous Rivers was, the more attention she got. “Joan started coming up with the put-down jokes of other big celebrities, and I said to her immediately, ‘This is going to take you to the next level,’” said Sandy Gallin, who was her manager at the time. “Edgar and my partner, Ray Katz, came down on me and said, ‘Stop telling her this. It’s going to ruin her career. It’s absolutely the wrong thing to be doing.’ But I thought you have to take chances if you’re going to go for it, and she agreed with me.”

  The new tack generated a publicity bonanza for Rivers. “She was hitting the papers with all her remarks about people who were bigger than her,” said Pat Cooper, a veteran comedian who worked with her. “She was jealous of anyone who looked better than her. She was not a bad-looking woman, but in her heart she was bad, and she hated anyone who was good-looking. She attacked everybody. I’ve never seen her give a compliment to anybody who was beautiful. She was hitting out at all of them. She’s a talented girl, but not a happy one. She was born unhappy. She would have liked to be born Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe.”

  When People magazine did a cover story on Rivers in 1983, the cover line read, “Can we talk? Nothing is sacred to the first lady of comedy.” The actual feature was a short Q and A, but Rivers managed to insult no fewer than three First Ladies, one former presidential daughter, Princess Grace and her “two trampy daughters,” and assorted actresses, one of whom was slut-shamed for having “hickeys on her knees” because she was dating a shorter actor.