The mortifying night when Elizabeth Taylor came to dinner left Liz Smith feeling that she had been “present at an epic event in Joan’s life,” she said. That evening also seemed to kill off Rivers’s enthusiasm for trashing her gracious guest. “She never did attack Elizabeth Taylor again,” Smith reported.
Rivers subsequently gave Smith a wide berth, or so the columnist believed. “She didn’t particularly appeal to me, and I didn’t particularly appeal to her, and I always felt she wanted to avoid me after that, because I was there on the night of her greatest comedown,” Smith said. “I felt she just wished I would disappear without her having to kill me, because I had been witness to her humiliation.”
But Rivers took pains not to let it happen again, and she went to considerable lengths to prevent Taylor from upstaging her in the future. “Joan did an AIDS research event at Spago with Elizabeth Taylor, and Joan knew that Elizabeth was always late,” said Larry Ferber, a television producer who later worked with Rivers. “She had her limo driver circle Spago for close to an hour until they spotted Elizabeth’s limo, and Joan got out at the exact same moment, and they walked in together.”
George Hamilton has his own theory about the underlying psychodynamics between Rivers and Taylor. “The evening at Joan’s house would not have been what it was if not for Joan adoring Elizabeth,” he said. “Elizabeth was the face of a generation, or two, that wanted to be her. I think Joan wanted to look like Elizabeth Taylor, and anyone who doesn’t have that, I think there’s an envy factor. But the truth was that Elizabeth didn’t care that much about beauty; she was only the guardian of it. Elizabeth had a world of success in her life, and she didn’t need to have someone’s opinion of her. But to see her allow it to slide away—I think Joan felt that was wasting it, and she might have felt angry about it. She may have felt that Elizabeth let her down.”
Rivers later admitted that this was precisely what she felt. And as far as she was concerned, her fellow females agreed with her. “Audiences have always dictated with laughter what they want to hear,” Rivers wrote in Still Talking. “When I eventually tried to drop such jokes from the act, people called out, ‘What about Elizabeth Taylor?’”
According to Rivers, the reason was the anger they all shared. “We women were furious when the most beautiful of all women let herself go,” she said. “As long as she was sexually viable, I could be viable. If she became a slob, there was no hope for any of us. I felt betrayed—and so did women across America.”
Such women helped to make Rivers into a gigantic star. No matter what her detractors said, it was hard to argue with success of that magnitude—and in those years there was no disputing her popularity. She was a regular at the casinos in Las Vegas, performing as the opening act for the biggest headliners of the era. After years of serving as substitute guest host for Johnny Carson, Rivers was named the permanent guest host of The Tonight Show in 1983. During that same year, she not only attended a state dinner at the White House with President and Mrs. Ronald Reagan, but also achieved the hallowed dream of generations of performers by headlining at the ultimate venue.
“I walked out on the stage of Carnegie Hall, and as I reached center stage, the audience stood up and cheered,” Rivers wrote in Still Talking. “I began to cry. The tears running down my face were from longing—the longing requited at last, to be on that stage, to be so validated after over twenty years of my parents saying, ‘No. Show business is not right for you,’ after fifteen years of telling bookers and agents, ‘I am good! I can do that.’”
Her mother had died too soon to witness such important validation. “How I wished she could have known her daughter was somebody,” Rivers said.
But the rest of the world certainly knew it. “One critic wrote, ‘Ignorance of Ms. Rivers’s skyrocketing ascendance into the ether of hype virtually amounts to contempt of one’s fellow man,’” Rivers reported. “The signals of stardom were all around me. Money was flowing in.”
The early comedy albums of the 1960s—The Next to Last Joan Rivers Album and Joan Rivers Presents Mr. Phyllis and Other Funny Stories—were followed by the best-selling What Becomes a Semi-Legend Most?, which was nominated for a Grammy Award for the best comedy album of 1983. Rivers’s fellow nominees were Bill Cosby, Monty Python, Robin Williams, and Eddie Murphy. Although Murphy won the Grammy, it was clear that Rivers had joined the big boys in the big leagues.
She had also become a successful author. After publishing her first book, Having a Baby Can Be a Scream, in 1974, Rivers waited a decade before writing her next one. When The Life and Hard Times of Heidi Abromowitz came out in 1984, it was a best seller.
During that heady period, Rivers constantly strove to expand her reach, but she wasn’t successful at everything. In New York, she had always regretted her failure to make it as a theater actress, and in Hollywood she was frustrated by her inability to sustain any lasting credibility in the movie industry. Not that she didn’t try. Ever a workaholic, Rivers spent years creating a movie comedy called Rabbit Test, which starred Billy Crystal in his film debut as the world’s first pregnant man and featured Rivers in a bit part as a nurse. Rivers wrote and directed the movie, and Edgar served as producer. But Rabbit Test seemed ill-fated from its inception. It was initially turned down by every studio, but the Rosenbergs raised money to make it on their own, only to see the project founder when the financing kept falling through. Rivers was so determined to prevail that she decided to mortgage their house, whereupon Edgar refused. When she threatened to divorce him, he capitulated—and suggested that they also mortgage her father’s house in Larchmont, which she could do without his knowledge.
After battling innumerable obstacles every step of the way, the Rosenbergs finally finished the movie, which was released in 1978 to devastating reviews. The headlines were as predictable as they were negative: “Rabbit Test Flops as Farce.” “Rivers’s Rabbit Flunks the Test.” “Rabbit Test Nauseating, but…”
“Miss Rivers has turned to directing without paying much heed to whether a whole movie constructed from one-liners is worth even the sum of its parts,” wrote Janet Maslin in The New York Times’ review of the film. “In her case, it’s not—and the one-liners weren’t all that sparkling to begin with. When it winds up on television, which is where a movie this visually crude belonged in the first place, Rabbit Test may improve slightly: constant commercial interruptions may help distract attention from the movie’s continuity problems, which are severe. And the coarseness of its comedy may not seem so insufferable to an audience willing to sit still for Laverne & Shirley.”
Rivers never directed another movie—but she had her career in comedy to fall back on, whereas Edgar was once again left with nothing to do. In his IMDb list of professional credits, Edgar’s résumé jumps from his 1978 credit as producer of Rabbit Test to his 1985 credit as executive producer of a mock tribute called Joan Rivers and Friends Salute Heidi Abromowitz, the unsuccessful television special the Rosenbergs made from Joan’s latest book.
Despite such a long gap, Edgar continued to function as his wife’s factotum. In public, Rivers always claimed that he relished that role. When People magazine asked her in 1983 whether Edgar was ever jealous of the attention she got, Rivers replied, “No, because we both realize that I’m a product. He says ‘Let’s make the product better,’ not ‘That bitch is getting too much adulation.’”
She also acknowledged that Edgar relieved her of the more unpleasant aspects of her own celebrity. “People think he’s the son of a bitch, but I’m the one who says, ‘You tell them to go to hell,’” Rivers admitted. “Edgar just makes the calls.”
But Edgar’s failure to achieve recognition for himself was a source of growing frustration for both of them. The biggest problem was his own dissatisfaction. If he had resigned himself to leading a quiet life behind the scenes, supporting his high-powered wife while accepting the lack of independent validation as an individual, the Rosenbergs’ lives might have played out very different
ly.
Instead, he never stopped hungering for a more important role that would bring him public prestige in his own right—and his quest to achieve such success through his wife’s opportunities would ultimately destroy his life and her career.
But neither of them knew that yet—nor did they suspect that they were nearing the end of what would, in retrospect, look like an idyllic era for their family. As that period drew to a close, the Rosenbergs even seemed to have weathered their daughter’s adolescence—almost always a perilous time for Hollywood offspring.
Controlling as ever, Rivers had handled the challenges with her usual determination. “Once, Rivers had TV viewers call a 900 number and vote on whether or not Melissa should buy a convertible,” People magazine reported in 1993.
Joan also tried to influence her daughter’s romantic choices. People continued: “‘Remember, I wanted to set you up with one of those 21 Jump Street guys,’ Joan says as Melissa rolls her eyes. ‘And what about the boy whose father owns North Carolina?’”
When Melissa was seventeen, she asked for contraceptives, and Joan took her to the gynecologist. “‘And then I slipped her $250 [for a hotel room] so that it wouldn’t happen in the backseat of a car,’ she admits. ‘It’s tricky because you know you’re opening up a can of worms. Melissa was starting to feel adult emotions now, and I worried, “Is this boy nice for her?” But at least she was going to have safe sex,’” People reported.
Whatever form Melissa’s rebelliousness took, she wasn’t in jail or in rehab, unlike many other children of stars. Never one to take anything for granted, Rivers was grateful for her good fortune, both domestic and professional. Life seemed fine, and she knew that her family owed its privileged circumstances to her own determination.
“I don’t know where the drive comes from, but I’m very blessed to be a workaholic,” she told Jane Pauley on the Today show in 1986.
That was disingenuous; Rivers understood quite well why she needed to keep getting up in front of one audience after another: “I want them to love me,” she said.
And she was equally clear about the rewards of that need—and how much she was enjoying them. “I’m a happy lady,” she said. “I’m a lucky lady. I have no complaints except my thighs.”
Chapter Seven
Victim as Enforcer:
Terrorizing Women into Submission
Rivers’s metamorphosis into a ruthless verbal assassin helped turn her into a cultural icon, and her uncompromising toughness won respect even from men who once disdained her girlish attempts to break into comedy. “She didn’t take shit from anybody, and I think everyone was a little afraid of her,” said Rick Newman. “You didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Joan Rivers. Verbally, she could just destroy you.”
There was no denying that Rivers had figured out a winning formula—one that became the foundation of a very successful commercial brand that endured beyond her death and left a lasting legacy. In a world where gladiators once killed one another to entertain the masses and people still pay to watch men’s brains get battered at football games and boxing matches, it’s not surprising that audiences revel in the comedy of cruelty. They have always taken particular pleasure in seeing women trash other women, and Rivers delighted in feeding that appetite.
One of her justifications was the implication that she only punched up, since she started out by skewering the most beautiful and famous women. “While Rivers has been criticized for putting down other women, if you examine her material, you’ll learn she always plays fair,” Roz Warren wrote in Revolutionary Laughter. “She’s just as tough on herself as she is on others, she never picks on anybody who can’t defend herself, and she only mocks upward.”
But that wasn’t really true, and Rivers grew ever more spiteful toward younger, less successful women as she expanded her attacks beyond the lucky few. To Rivers, the cardinal sin was the failure to try hard enough to conform to the dictates of beauty. She herself was willing to endure any discomfort to make herself more attractive, so other women had no excuse if they weren’t making the same kind of sacrifice.
Her disdain for such slackers extended even to civilians with no obligation to please the public. “One night I was walking in front of the Plaza Hotel with a woman and she said, ‘I can’t walk in these heels anymore,’” reported Mark Simone. “It’s eleven thirty at night, and here comes Joan Rivers, trotting down the street wearing five-inch heels. She said, ‘You young girls—you spoil yourselves! You wear sneakers till you get to work. I’m eighty-one, and I can walk in these heels, and mine are twice as high as yours!’”
To the end of her life, Rivers remained resolutely retrograde in many ways, as much a prisoner of a sexist society as a freedom fighter. A lifelong victim of the double standards that judge women more harshly than men, she also became one of their most lethal enforcers, and she was particularly vitriolic toward women who were homely or overweight. Instead of applauding them for liberating themselves from the strictures she had always railed against, Rivers was enraged by their apparent refusal to knuckle under.
“She was such a trailblazer, but she was very old-fashioned, and she felt resentment at the ones who were making it as fat, or not pretty,” said the comic Judy Gold. “It came from jealousy and self-hatred. She was seeing these people who weren’t going to conform, and it pushed her buttons: ‘I had to do this! I had to do that! And now you’re walking around like that?’”
Rivers found such resistance maddeningly provocative. “She was like the queen of insecurity, trying to not only conform herself, but to make everyone else conform,” observed Gloria Steinem. “But I see her more as a victim than as a perpetrator. I suspect that the insecurity inside her was an unfillable black hole.”
Perpetually tortured by her memories of childhood plumpness, Rivers’s overriding obsession had always been the quest to stay thin. “I think she was anorexic,” said Sue Cameron. “She basically never ate; she just ate Altoids. She was hungry, but she would talk herself out of it: ‘I’d better not do that.’ In her mind, she was still fat Joanie Molinsky, trying to get a man, and she hated herself. Her whole identity was about being fat, and she never realized she wasn’t fat anymore. She would always have a friend sit next to her so she could give her food to them. She would whisper under her breath, ‘Take my steak.’ ‘Take my fish.’ She would push food onto your plate so it would look like she was eating. It made me gain weight. I never saw her finish a whole meal, ever. She might have a lettuce leaf. It was awful.”
To Rivers, starving herself represented a triumph over the physical self she had detested since childhood. “I think it meant control over biology,” said Margaret Cho, who forgave Rivers her constant harangues about losing weight. Cho saw Rivers’s criticism as a well-intentioned attempt to help a friend be more successful by getting thin. “She valued it, because you would have more power in a world that values that more.”
Rivers didn’t always win her own battles with the temptations of the flesh. “She was a secret Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup addict,” Cameron said. “She kept them in the freezer.”
But Rivers labored ceaselessly to stay in shape. “She exercised all the time,” said Bill Reardin, a longtime television production executive who started working with Rivers in 1989 and remained friendly with her until she died. “You were talking to her on the phone and she was huffing and puffing on the treadmill.”
Having worked so hard at self-improvement all her life, Rivers was particularly incensed by Lena Dunham, whose success was not based on her looks and who didn’t conform to Hollywood’s mandates on female beauty. Dunham didn’t seem to care if people thought she was too fleshy—and she went out of her way to flaunt her defiance. On her groundbreaking HBO television series Girls, Dunham quickly became infamous for nude sex scenes that attracted disproportionate attention precisely because her body was so different from the hard-bodied ideal favored by the entertainment industry.
Some hailed Dunham for her bravery, wh
ich seemed like a radical act of subversion in the context of the unforgiving standards that usually prevail on camera. But Rivers’s response was as headline-grabbing as it was punitive. “Joan had an issue with overweight people,” Linda Stasi wrote in the Daily News. “In fact, she disliked them so much she tried to get HBO charged with crimes against humanity for letting Lena Dunham get so naked so often.”
Relentlessly trashing other women, Rivers was celebrated in many quarters for her particular brand of bitchiness. “Joan’s humor was drag queen humor, which is fear-based,” said Jason Sheeler, a reporter and editor who specializes in fashion and the entertainment industry. “It’s the guys who were always made fun of, so they make fun of themselves first. They say, ‘I’m just being honest and saying what everyone else is thinking.’”
But even those who enjoyed the jokes were sometimes put off by the human cost of such attacks. “Joan could be pretty awful, just by flat out calling people ugly,” Sheeler admitted. “Whoopi Goldberg once said, ‘The three words I hate are “fat,” “ugly,” and “stupid.”’ She said that on The View, and it totally changed my life.”
To experts on the mental health of young women, hurt feelings are not the only danger posed by fat shaming. “I hated it. I just find that appalling and always have,” said the late Lynn Grefe, who was president and CEO of the National Eating Disorders Association, the leading national nonprofit advocacy group in the fight against eating disorders. “I’m dealing with people with feeding tubes because somebody told them they were pudgy when they were eight years old. I don’t think people understand that fat shaming is as bad as making fun of people missing a leg. We’ve proven that it contributes to the development of eating disorders, and eating disorders have the highest death rate of any mental illness.”
Last Girl Before Freeway Page 14