Last Girl Before Freeway

by Leslie Bennetts

  The country’s most admired former First Lady was fair game: “Jackie O. looks like E.T. without makeup,” Rivers said.

  Nor did Mrs. Onassis’s tragic widowhood protect her. “I use her as a great example of what women should do: always marry for money,” Rivers said.

  After calling herself and Edgar the tackiest couple in America, Rivers pronounced Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter the second tackiest: “When you go to the White House, you want finger bowls, not Rosalynn Carter hitting a pot and yelling, ‘Come and get it!’”

  Rivers claimed that President and Mrs. Johnson had neglected to invite her to the White House because she insulted their daughter: “I said Lynda Bird had no style. I said, ‘I took Lynda Bird into a shoe store, and she put her foot into the size measurer and said, “I’ll take it.”’”

  The same issue of People featured a picture of a plump Elizabeth Taylor, whose middle-aged weight gain marked a pivotal turning point for Rivers. On the life-altering day when she first saw an unflattering photograph of her childhood nemesis, Rivers’s reaction was comparable to the gory feeding frenzy that ensues when a shark smells blood in the water and targets a weakened prey. Rivers had finally found the definitive outlet for her anger, and the effect was galvanic. “I did not realize that this moment was going to skyrocket my career,” she said.

  That very night, Rivers performed at Ye Little Club in Los Angeles and delivered a joke about Elizabeth Taylor: “I took her to McDonald’s just to watch her eat and see the numbers change.”

  “That got such a reaction, I went on, ‘I had to grease her hips to get her through the Golden Arches.’ When I tried those two jokes on The Tonight Show, the reaction was an eruption of laughter way beyond anything I had ever experienced,” Rivers reported. “I had hit a vein.”

  “Rivers talked to her audience the way you’d dish with your close girlfriend. That included dissing other gals,” Roz Warren wrote in Revolutionary Laughter: The World of Women Comics. “Who can forget her infamous quip that in a People magazine cover, Liz Taylor looked like she’d devoured her previous husbands? It was mean. It was shocking…And it was hilarious. Because it was exactly what we were thinking ourselves, but were too timid (or too kind) to express.”

  People often found themselves torn between horror and admiration at the things that came out of Rivers’s mouth. “It was a crazy kind of courage,” said Gloria Steinem. “It was clear that she was desperate; to me it was like watching an addict. She couldn’t help but say anything she thought was going to get a laugh.”

  Rivers’s slash-and-burn tactics helped to establish a whole new persona that had an electrifying effect on her career. “America is, at last, catching up to the savage brand of humor she has been dishing out for more than twenty years,” People magazine reported. “In her midforties, Rivers’s career has never been brighter. This month she hosted Saturday Night Live on the heels of a hugely successful twelve-city tour (her Carnegie Hall debut sold out in two days); her latest comedy album, What Becomes a Semi-Legend Most?, is climbing up the charts; and she is putting the finishing touches on her autobiography.”

  Within the world of comedy, the roots of Rivers’s cruelty were all too familiar. “I think the comic has an angry and vicious mind,” said Shelly Schultz. “My mother used to tell me we didn’t know who we were running from, the Nazis or the Cossacks. The idea that you can make humor out of sad or awful things—Joan found that a caustic, nasty streak of humor was what made people laugh the hardest. She developed a persona, and people were just looking for the next mean thing she was going to say. They wanted to hear somebody say something terrible about somebody. If they didn’t want to hear it they would have rejected her, but they couldn’t get enough.”

  Ever the sharp-eyed social observer, Rivers didn’t hesitate to take on the social taboos of the time. Even abortion wasn’t off-limits. “She said, ‘I knew I wasn’t wanted when I was born with a coat hanger in my mouth,’” one director recalled. “People didn’t talk about things like that back then; illegal abortion was verboten, and at the time it ruined people’s lives. She broke ground because she dared to say things that other people dared to think were funny—and she got away with it.”

  That kind of material was based on her identification with women as a group who suffer from many of the same indignities in a sexist culture—a sympathetic and inclusive view of her peers. But as her success grew, her perspective began to shift from victim to oppressor.

  As had always been the case, Rivers’s looks provided the roiling core of her psychic pain, her rage at an unjust world, and—increasingly—the source of her creativity. Some people grow out of their discomfort with childhood’s awkward stages, but Rivers never got over hers, and weight remained a central obsession. “I was a fat tub of lard,” she said bitterly. “I am still waiting to wake up pretty.”

  As she got older, she learned how to starve herself to stay thin; early press coverage of her career as a budding comic mentions the fact that she seemed to live on Life Savers, a habit that was later supplanted by an addiction to Altoids, which constituted a major food group for Rivers in her later decades. “You’d go out to dinner with her and she would say, ‘Give me the largest glass of white wine you have and a piece of lettuce,’” said Arnold Stiefel. “She would only drink part of the wine.”

  But when Rivers got thin, she became increasingly unforgiving about other women’s weight problems. She deprived herself in the name of beauty, and she had no sympathy for those who didn’t—particularly if they’d been more fortunate to begin with.

  “She was really fanatical about the weight thing,” said radio personality Mark Simone. “She had been a fat kid, and that’s one thing she really hated.”

  “She had an eating disorder, so she would eat two Altoids and then have dessert,” said Andrew Krasny, a tennis announcer who worked as Rivers’s assistant and became a close friend. “If we want to be on television and in front of people, we have to learn self-denial, and Joan was very conscious of that.”

  Rivers saw beauty as such a priceless asset that it was unforgivable for a woman to devalue her looks by failing to take care of them. Such attitudes were hardly unprecedented; when fat shaming joined slut shaming as a staple of Rivers’s act, she was connecting herself with a long-standing tradition by ridiculing other women, thereby reinforcing the time-honored trope of women in catfights.

  “The culture hasn’t changed completely,” said Gloria Steinem. “It’s still safer to come to the public as someone who makes fun of women’s strength in women’s appearances. Joan was consciously doing that to other women, because it’s okay to do. It’s part of the stereotype that women don’t like each other, that they are competitive and don’t get along. If there’s a powerful group up here, and a less powerful group down there, the less powerful group is supposed to compete for the favors of the more powerful group.”

  For Rivers, making jokes about Elizabeth Taylor’s weight satisfied her professional goals as well as her personal needs. The jabs earned Rivers so much publicity that she got hooked on the response, which affected her like a crack addiction. The strategy was a brilliant career move, but it was also deeply gratifying on a purely psychological level. “Dancing on the grave of a former beauty was a gleeful thing for her,” said the comedian Margaret Cho, a good friend of Rivers in her later years. “It’s the ugly girls’ revenge.”

  At the time, such personal attacks seemed genuinely shocking, and the initial onslaught became an all-out siege that went on for years. The jokes were unrelenting.

  “Is Elizabeth Taylor fat? Her favorite food is seconds,” Rivers sneered.

  “They asked her what she wanted with her hamburger and she said, ‘A hot dog.’”

  “She’s so fat she could moon Europe.”

  And Rivers made no apologies for her nastiness. “I am delighted to be called outrageous,” she said, comparing herself to Lenny Bruce and Don Rickles. “When I say, ‘Elizabeth Taylor wore yellow and ten school
children got aboard,’ people laugh out of embarrassment and out of the truth of it and because they also are thinking the unspeakable—the unspeakable that some comedians dare to say.”

  As far as Rivers was concerned, her mission was “blasting people out of their comfortable complacency. I think to survive well, to have some happiness, we must face the world as it really is, face the truth about what we are and what we want,” she said.

  Some of her peers agreed. “It’s the truth, and a lot of people don’t want to face the truth,” said Larry King. “She was acerbic, and her comedy was rough. It cut people. I don’t think she was a warm performer. Don Rickles practically begs for your love, even as he’s cutting you, but Joan was biting. You’d go to her house, and she was magnificent; she was warm and a great hostess in person. But her stage persona was different. She broke barriers.”

  Although thin-skinned herself, Rivers had no sympathy for famous people who might be hurt by what she said about them. She seemed to think celebrities were impervious to such attacks—or should be. “Don’t your jokes hurt people?” the journalist Nancy Collins asked Rivers in the 1983 People magazine cover story.

  “If I thought I hurt anybody, I’d go crazy,” Rivers replied. “That’s why I pick on the biggies. They can take it.”

  “What hurts you?” Collins asked.

  “Everything. Everything! I’m terribly sensitive. I want to please everybody. I cannot work on a set unless everybody loves me and I love everybody.”

  And yet she remained willfully obtuse about the effect of her own cruel words on others. Years later, Taylor wrote candidly about how painful Rivers’s public ridicule had been for her. “I was dying. But I never said anything, because I didn’t want anyone to know,” she said. “Unfortunately, many people took my silence as license to be cruel. Comedians used my appearance for routines and one-liners. They went after me when I was totally vulnerable. There’s nothing the public likes more than to tear down what it has built up. I was built up as a movie star, and when I became fat the public was alternately thrilled and saddened. If Elizabeth Taylor could look the way I did, anyone could and that seemed a comfort to a lot of people. I could understand the fascination. What I still cannot understand is the deliberate cruelty. The jokes were often vicious and served no purpose other than to incite laughter over my misfortune.”

  Taylor was equally disdainful about her tormentor’s later attempts at self-justification. “Not so long ago I was at a benefit with Joan Rivers, who had been foremost among the entertainers who made my weight the butt of their jokes. When I was ready to leave, she grabbed my hand, saying, ‘Elizabeth, you look wonderful! I just want you to think about why I said those things about you when you were heavy.’

  “‘Okay, I’ll certainly do that,’ I answered, and tried to get away. She held on to my hand and repeated, ‘No, no, I mean it. I want you to really think why I did it.’

  “‘Okay, Joan, I’ll think about it,’ I answered as I extricated my hand and walked away. I didn’t have to think about it; I knew what she was implying. She was taking credit for my losing weight. But I don’t think you can justify cruelty and turn it around into a benediction. Jokes were made about my weight because they got laughs, period. In the end, I lost weight because I forced myself to face the truth.”

  Even that didn’t halt the barbed remarks. Rivers acknowledged that Taylor was a gold mine for her. “Without Elizabeth Taylor, I would not have been able to pay for my house,” she said. But she also admitted her annoyance at the star’s weight loss. “It upsets me, because one more year as a fat pig and I would’ve had a brand-new house,” Rivers complained.

  Taylor was too dignified to return fire, but she exacted a private revenge by playing an exquisitely calibrated practical joke on Rivers—one that was as subtle and classy in its execution as Rivers’s jokes had been mean and vulgar.

  Rivers delighted in having formal dinner parties at the house on Ambazac Way, which she had decorated in an extravagantly rococo style that featured high-end antiques. “If Louis XIV hasn’t touched it, I don’t want it,” she told People magazine.

  Eager to show off their home while building a viable social life among Hollywood insiders, the Rosenbergs planned one such evening to include Liz Smith, George Hamilton, and Roddy McDowall, who were close friends with Elizabeth Taylor.

  “I’d known Joan for years, and I said to Elizabeth, ‘I’m invited for dinner at Joan’s,’” Hamilton said. “She said, ‘Oh, Sunshine!’—she called me Sunshine—‘I want to go!’ Elizabeth had never showed any hurt from what Joan had done, but I just felt she thought it was an easy shot for a comedian to do that. When she heard I’d been invited to Joan’s house, she thought it would be a perfect time to show up and do nothing except look terrific.”

  And by this time, the violet-eyed legend was once again looking terrific. “She loved to eat, she just adored it, and she’d eat whatever she wanted—she’d eat crème brûlée—but then she’d pull herself together for a movie, and the minute she decided to lose the weight, she did,” Hamilton said. “Elizabeth and I were doing a western called Poker Alice, so she was getting ready for the movie and she looked fantastic. Her waist was so small, she had a dark tan—she loved the sun as much as I did—and of course no eyes were ever that color.”

  While they were plotting Rivers’s comeuppance, the co-conspirators took pains to keep their hostess in the dark about the social thunderbolt that awaited her. “When Joan invited me she said, ‘Bring whomever you want, but I need to know the name for the place card,’” Hamilton explained. “Elizabeth said, ‘I don’t want her to know I’m coming,’ so she chose her movie name from Giant, where she played Rock Hudson’s character’s wife, Leslie Benedict. I loved being part of this prank, and Elizabeth had confidence in herself to do it with humor—never maliciously.”

  On the appointed night with the Rosenbergs, Smith said, “We were sitting having a nice time before dinner when the doorbell rang, and Edgar went to the front door and then called for Joan as if there were a big emergency. Standing at the front door were Elizabeth Taylor and George Hamilton, who were having this much-talked-about fling. George loves to advise women about how to be more attractive, so he had taken her over and said, ‘Lose the weight, exercise, change the makeup!’—and now she was ravishingly beautiful again. He just stepped in and said, ‘This is Elizabeth Taylor.’”

  According to Hamilton, Rivers was momentarily struck dumb with consternation. “She stepped back, and she did not know what to say or do,” he said. “She just didn’t know how to handle it. It was the first time I had ever seen Joan really off. Elizabeth took the moment and said, ‘It’s so wonderful of you to invite me!’ Elizabeth knew how to make a person feel incredibly at ease—she had charm—and it was as though she walked onto a stage and was going to play this scene out.”

  And play it out she did, in an evening of excruciating discomfort for Rivers but utter delight for the other guests, who were enthralled. “Joan was aghast, but she had enough class to act normal,” Smith said. “Elizabeth gave me a big kiss and said, ‘Oh, so nice to see you!’ She had the support of Roddy and George, and she was enjoying this to the max. She was so glorious that night, so classy. That was the only time I ever saw Joan nonplussed, and we were all bitchy enough to enjoy it that Elizabeth Taylor had turned the tables on Joan after Joan had said all those horrible things about Elizabeth.”

  Having co-opted the part of grande dame for herself, Taylor left the role of anxious supplicant to her hostess. “Joan looked like she was the maid in Downton Abbey,” Hamilton said. “She was following Elizabeth around, trying to make her comfortable—and Elizabeth was very comfortable. Joan could recover from a bad audience booing her, but you can’t recover from somebody that you’re in awe of who you’ve maligned and taken cheap shots at, who comes in and smiles and steals the entire evening, totally without malice.”

  The effect on Rivers was devastating. “It was like an animal tranquilizer dart
that night, like a zookeeper shot that thing right between her eyes,” Hamilton said. “It was like a complete stop. I didn’t see Elizabeth ever say anything bad about her, and she never brought it up—that would have diminished her—but it was the idea that she never brought it up. What a grand gesture! It was done so deftly. Joan felt more humiliated than Elizabeth ever felt.”

  Joan’s husband didn’t fare much better. “Edgar was getting smaller by the moment,” Hamilton said. “It was like, ‘Joan’s gotten herself into another one!’”

  For everyone else, however, “it was an incredible laugh,” Hamilton said. “I remember Elizabeth having a smirk on her face. She didn’t have any gloat about having done it outwardly, but inwardly, the way she looked was like the cat that ate the canary. She didn’t say, ‘I showed her!’—not a bit! She didn’t need to do that. She just delivered the nuclear bomb.”

  Despite his loyalty to Taylor, Hamilton admitted that he usually enjoyed Rivers’s comedy, spiteful though it might have been. “Joan said what others thought and wouldn’t say,” he observed. “I always loved insult humor—that kind of Borscht Belt stuff. The bathroom humor anyone can say, but to say what another is thinking—that takes an acute sense of comedy. You lose your breath. Joan crossed all those barriers. She had her own brand of it.”

  But Rivers’s mean girl tactics were not necessarily compatible with her other ambitions, particularly the ones that involved being an elegant hostess with a grand house and an all-star guest list that might include some of her victims. “Joan took no prisoners, but at the same time she had an upwardly mobile social agenda as well,” Hamilton said. “She wanted to have a social life that was more than that of a comedian.”