Last Girl Before Freeway

by Leslie Bennetts

  Grefe counted herself among those dismayed by Rivers’s increasing vituperativeness over the years. “She used to tell jokes, and she just seemed like a comedian, but later on it was making fun of people. Her humor was all at other people’s expense, and there’s a big difference between those two things,” Grefe said. “As time went on, she only got worse. In her later years, she looked desperate for attention. She was a bully. Rather than hit yourself, you go after other people to make yourself look good. With Rivers, fat shaming was a lot of it, but it was all body shaming and envy—talking about beautiful women to make herself feel better.”

  And yet Rivers’s aggression had other effects as well—some of them distinctly liberating. Western society has long prescribed a wide range of social strictures that discourage women from expressing anger. As Rivers gave vent to her stored-up rage, the effect on some women was electrifying.

  The Girl Most Likely to…, her movie about an unattractive girl who undergoes plastic surgery and kills all the people who once humiliated her, resonated with other girls who identified with the protagonist’s pain. “I was homely, and it was my fantasy to become beautiful and kill everyone,” said the comic Kathy Griffin. “The Girl Most Likely to…was really influential for me.”

  As Rivers’s comedy grew ever more insulting, Griffin was amazed. “I remember thinking, she’s known as a person who puts down people,” Griffin recalled. “There was that quality of ‘Oh my God—what’s she going to say next?’”

  Reactions to such humor varied; people who came from similar backgrounds viewed it as normative. “Nobody in my family thought Joan Rivers was mean, because I came from a family where we were like the dueling Griffins,” Griffin admitted. “It was the kind of humor you’d now call snark.”

  But others found it deeply transgressive. “It’s really hard to shock me, and I was really shocked by her,” said Margaret Cho. “She was so hard-core. Joan taught me how to be nasty. I loved her for that.”

  For Cho, Rivers embodied a thrilling message of female autonomy in a world of toxic male domination. “Korea is very patriarchal and really sexist, and I came from a family of women who were so submissive to their husbands, who were terrible—cheaters and child molesters who abandoned their families and left the women behind with the children while they went gallivanting around,” Cho said. “Joan wasn’t afraid of making fun of men, which to me was incredibly invigorating and hopeful. She signified a kind of womanhood that I aspired to, that I hadn’t experienced before.”

  The victim of rape and incest while growing up, Cho was raised to believe that women simply accepted such crimes. “All the women in my family did was apologize to men, cook for them, take care of them, and get abused, physically and sexually,” she said. “For them, to disrespect men was to court certain death. Joan showed incredible disrespect to men, which to me was power. She had so much strength, and she didn’t pull any punches.”

  Rivers was also a powerful inspiration for young women interested in performing. “Joan Rivers is one of the reasons I got into stand-up comedy,” said the comic Joy Behar. “She taught me I could get paid to trash the people I love.”

  Lisa Lampanelli always wanted to be a comic but held off until she “hit thirty and said, ‘It’s now or never,’” she recalled. When she listened to albums by Don Rickles and Joan Rivers, she was galvanized by what she heard. “I thought, ‘These people got balls,’” Lampanelli recalled. “I just love women who say too much and then you got to defend it. I love fearlessness and nonapologetic humor. I thought, ‘This Joan Rivers is crazy—but in a good way.’”

  Until Rivers elbowed her way into the spotlight, such ballsy comedy was seen as quintessentially male. From Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Bob Hope, and Don Rickles to Daniel Tosh and Ricky Gervais, insult comedy has been practiced by generations of men who slam offensive slurs at everyone from other performers to their own audiences. Such verbal assaults are readily accepted in comedy, in which it’s considered an honor to be abused as the subject of a roast, and even performers who don’t specialize in insult techniques often use them to silence or deflect hecklers.

  But the rules are different for women. Social science research has documented a wide array of double standards requiring women to be more likable in fields that range from business to politics to entertainment. Women who fail to tone down their aggression and conform to female gender stereotypes run a high risk of being disliked—even if they’re fictional characters in films or novels: critics often denigrate female artists for creating female protagonists they deem insufficiently appealing.

  Rivers typically walked a fine line between aggression and ingratiation. “One day we had Joan Collins on the show, and Joan Rivers said, ‘Oh, she’s back there with six sailors,’ and Joan Collins almost walked,” reported Larry Ferber, the executive producer of The Joan Rivers Show. Anxious not to lose her guest, Rivers rushed to placate her. “Joan Rivers said, ‘I was joking! I respect you!’ And they became friends.”

  But Rivers never stopped insulting a long line of victims, and in emulating the tactics used by her male counterparts, she paved the way for the female successors who have since incorporated insult comedy into their own material, from Kathy Griffin to Sarah Silverman and Lisa Lampanelli.

  Having discovered that trashing celebrities was a reliable crowd-pleaser in her stand-up act, Rivers went on to parlay that principle into lucrative television content. The entire premise of Fashion Police—which assembles a panel of commentators to critique the outfits of stars who appear on the red carpet at awards ceremonies—is based on the entertainment value of bitchy cracks about the sartorial missteps and physical flaws of famous people. Rivers was always the show’s most merciless critic, and the poison darts she aimed at hapless luminaries won her many new fans in her final years.

  But others were put off by Rivers’s evolution from a gentler Joan into one of the world’s most uninhibited mean girls. Early in her career, Henry Bushkin and Johnny Carson went to see Rivers do stand-up at a club, and both men loved her act. “She was terrific,” Bushkin said. “Her material was sex stuff, family stuff. It was self-deprecating humor, not sarcastic.”

  But Bushkin often found himself recoiling as Rivers’s humor grew sharper over time. “I never appreciated the latter Joan, quite frankly, because I thought she was too nasty and sarcastic—unnecessarily cruel, for no reason,” he said. “I much preferred the more self-deprecating fun stuff, like, ‘Every time I go in to buy trashy lingerie, they say, “Do you want it gift wrapped?” They think it has to be for someone else.’ To me those were her funnier days.”

  As her excesses grew more frequent, even her longtime fans were horrified. “She went too far sometimes,” said Lou Alexander, one of her first mentors. “She made fun of the three girls who were held captive in Ohio and raped. That was wrong. I said to myself, ‘Joan—wrong!’ These three girls were raped and didn’t know if they were ever going to see their families again. There’s nothing funny about that. How can you make fun of these three poor girls living that way with a monster?”

  To many people, Rivers’s jokes about Ariel Castro and his kidnapping victims represented her callousness at its worst. In an offhand comment, she had compared the living quarters of the three captives to her own accommodations while staying with her daughter and shooting a reality TV show: “Those women in the basement in Cleveland had more room,” she said.

  But when her initial remarks were criticized, Rivers was not contrite. “They got to live rent-free for more than a decade,” she said. “One of them has a book deal. Neither are in a psych ward. They’re okay. I bet you within three years one of them will be on Dancing with the Stars.”

  When questioners kept pressing the issue, Rivers became exasperated. “I’m a comedienne,” she said. “I know what those girls went through. It was a little, stupid joke. There is nothing to apologize for. I made a joke. That’s what I do. Calm down. Calm fucking down. I’m a comedienne. They’re free, so let’s move
on.”

  Resolutely defiant about such criticism, Rivers always defended a comic’s right to make fun of absolutely anything. If people complained, her usual replies were irritable rather than placatory: “Oh, give me a break!” and “Grow up!” She felt no compunction about any of her jokes, no matter how insensitive or hurtful. “If it was offensive, Joan would say, ‘Good. Comedy is not funny unless it’s a little bit dangerous. You get up there and you have to surprise people and wake them up,’” said Valerie Frankel, who coauthored Rivers’s book Men Are Stupid…and They Like Big Boobs.

  Some people accepted that rationale. “It was cruel, but it’s not wrong,” said Bill Reardin. “It’s her job to make people laugh. There’s tragedy, yes, but she said, ‘Get over it. Let’s not mourn.’ It was a principle, and it should be a principle with any comedian that you can’t start censoring comedians. I don’t think it’s particularly nice to poke fun at people’s physical characteristics, but I’m not a comedian.”

  Others were not convinced. “She thought, ‘There’s nothing I can’t use; there’s nothing I will not say. I will not edit myself about anything,’” Lou Alexander said. “She would get into fights with a lot of people. She said, ‘What do I care?’ But there were certain times she left a bad taste.”

  To some extent, Rivers was just playing the odds. “She made me laugh more than any other person, but sometimes I would think, oh my God, someone’s going to shoot her!” said Sandy Gallin. “She did go too far, but she got away with it. For the 50 people in the audience who may have been offended, there were 950 people who were on the floor, rolling.”

  When people accused Rivers of crossing some invisible line, she attributed her aggressiveness to the wounds she herself had suffered. “I am tasteless,” she acknowledged. “If you are a current comic and do not offend somebody, you are doing itsy-bitsy cutesy-wootsy pap. If 10 percent of the people hate me, I will be fine. I always want to have one couple that gets up and leaves. That means I am still on the cutting edge. However, my whole humor is actually based on the loneliness and hurt of being left out, of being thrown over—which I always fear and dread…In my pain, in my upset and anger, I am railing at the world.”

  Although concessions were rare, Rivers occasionally did agree to back down. “We had a writer on The Joan Rivers Show who was the mean Joan Rivers—he wrote most of the Elizabeth Taylor jokes—and at one point we started to do Delta Burke fat jokes,” recalled Larry Ferber, the show’s executive producer. Ferber and a plus-sized woman who worked on the show went to Rivers to express their concern, and the woman told her, “I don’t think it’s wise to be doing this; you’re offending women in the audience.”

  “And Joan stopped,” Ferber said. “She respected the women in the audience, and she respected someone she worked with who happened to be large.”

  But for the most part, people simply avoided tangling with Rivers, afraid of her lacerating tongue. One of the few to take her on was the comedian Pat Cooper.

  “She was working at Caesars Palace, and she was ripping everybody off, and she was rude to Elizabeth Taylor, and nobody’s standing up to this girl,” Cooper said. “She’s a bully. So I wrote this little cartoon book and put it in a big basket of fruit and said, ‘Only big people can give it and take it. I know you’re one of the big people.’”

  Titled “Justice for All: Pat Cooper vs. Joan Rivers,” the cartoon pamphlet named some of her regular victims in its dedication—“to the Elizabeth Taylors, Queen Elizabeths, Karen Carpenters, Princess Grace and children, Nancy Reagans”—and added, “This book was written to ‘balance the books.’”

  Cooper’s portrait of Rivers was scathing. “Joan Rivers is the only woman with scar tissue on her tongue,” one cartoon said. “Jake LaMotta was the Raging Bull, Joan Rivers is the Raging Bullshit,” said another. “Her favorite food is Elizabeth Taylor’s garbage,” read a third.

  The pamphlet portrayed Rivers as venomous from infancy to adulthood. “Baby Joan’s teething ring” showed her in diapers tonguing a cobra. When little girl Joan asked her father if she could go out to play with the other children, he said, “Sure, but first put on your muzzle.” As an adult, she was loveless—“If she was a hooker, she would still be a virgin,” one cartoon read—and friendless, according to a picture that showed her sitting at Thanksgiving dinner with a large turkey and a table surrounded by empty chairs. Cooper also took shots at Rivers as a professional, depicting her at a talk show microphone with the caption, “Joan has a new sponsor…rat poison.”

  Rivers failed to discern whatever humor Cooper thought he was conveying. “I get this phone call: ‘You son of a bitch! You oughta drop dead!’” Cooper recalled. “I said, ‘You’re the real bully—but you’re a coward. You won’t tell them to their face.’ And I hung up on her. Then my wife calls Joan Rivers and says, ‘You got some nerve to abuse my husband who was nice enough to send you a basket of fruit! My husband says it the way it is—you can’t take it! He thought you’d have a little humor!’ And so Joan apologizes to my wife. She says, ‘How would you like to have lunch with me? You sound like a nice lady.’ My wife comes back and says Joan felt a little embarrassed that she would call; she said, ‘He must be a hell of a guy if you defend him.’ I get a call a week later, and they offer me two jobs with Joan Rivers.”

  Although Cooper did work with her again, he also ended up telling her off again and denouncing her as a bully. But even that was not the last of their interactions. A few years later, he had an interesting exchange with Edgar Rosenberg.

  “I did her show on Fox, and her husband, Edgar, said to me, ‘Pat, have patience,’ because he knew I knew,” Cooper reported. “He said, ‘You’re the only one who ever stood up to her.’ He was a gentleman, and he was respectful to her, but I don’t think she gave a damn. She’s the boss. I don’t remember her giving him credit. And she blamed him for the Johnny Carson thing. Why blame someone else when you’re an idiot? She’s hurt a lot of people who are nice people.”

  Rivers’s cruelty was highly selective. “Joan’s attitude was, if you’re rich and famous, you’re a target, but she would never do that to an ordinary person,” said Larry Ferber.

  But Rivers’s penchant for kindness was equally selective—and it could be just as over the top. Despite her eager embrace of the theater of cruelty, she was well-known for being nice to strangers who approached her. Some stars are rude and dismissive with fans, but Rivers—who found their attention as necessary as oxygen—was always delighted to give an autograph, take a picture, and ask about people’s lives.

  Jesse Kornbluth helped Rivers write the commencement speech she gave at the University of Pennsylvania when Melissa graduated in 1989. To develop material for the speech, Kornbluth asked Rivers a series of questions, one of which was, “Joan, how do we treat the little people?”

  “Why, we treat them better,” she said. “We only shit on people at our level or higher.”

  Kornbluth once saw Rivers at a lunch where he mentioned that his wife and daughter never missed Fashion Police. Rivers asked how old his daughter was, and Kornbluth told her she was twelve. He assumed that was the end of it: “Joan playing to a crowd—my daughter would never hear from her,” he said. “But a few weeks later, a package arrived with a Fashion Police badge, a bracelet from the Joan Rivers collection, and a lovely handwritten note. And I thought, ‘The little people—we treat them better.’”

  Kornbluth was also impressed with the effort Rivers made to express her appreciation for those who rendered support services. In a later essay for the Huffington Post, he reported that every time he went to dinner at Rivers’s apartment, she would “call for the waiters, cooks, and kitchen staff to come out. She would thank them. And the guests would applaud. I never saw another New York hostess do that.”

  Such gestures extended beyond the home. Before Rivers started performing at the Laurie Beechman Theatre, she did stand-up at a nightclub called Fez and at the Cutting Room, both of which eventually closed. “O
n the final day at Fez, she comes in followed by people with hand trucks,” said Chip Duckett, who produced her live shows in New York. “She had a bottle of wine for each person, with an individually signed label—fifty or sixty people, including every server and every bartender. She did the same thing at the Cutting Room when it closed. She personally thanked everyone who cleaned a bathroom at those places. She treated everyone with that kind of respect. You show me anyone else in show business who would do that.”

  Rivers’s reasons were doubtless multidetermined: ingratiating herself with fans and coworkers and cultivating new customers with free gifts might both be seen as shrewd brand-building activities that would ultimately redound to her own benefit. In other circumstances, however, her version of noblesse oblige could be so generous as to appear genuinely altruistic.

  “She did a lot of things anonymously,” said Dorothy Melvin. “She would read about a child in the Midwest who had a prosthetic leg stolen from their car, and she anonymously sent money to replace the leg. This woman really cared about people.”

  Rivers’s compassion sometimes resulted in an enduring connection. “Joan was at the Riviera in Las Vegas, and it was the middle of the night after the second show, and we went to the coffee shop to relax,” said Melvin. “There was a girl named Lynn who bussed the tables. She was a high-functioning person with Down syndrome, and the waitress was berating her. Joan was always protective of the underdog, and she got so angry she yelled at the waitress. She said to the hostess at the coffee shop, ‘If anybody abuses that girl, I will go to Walter Kane and I will have her job!”

  Kane was the entertainment director of Howard Hughes’s hotel-casinos, and Rivers was more than capable of making good on her threat. But she didn’t leave it at that.

  “Then she went back and sat Lynn down with us and started talking to her,” Melvin reported. “Lynn was getting married, and her fiancé worked at the Hilton, and they were going to Disneyland on their honeymoon. Joan said, ‘Did you have a nice wedding shower?,’ and Lynn said, ‘No. I don’t have friends.’ The next morning we started calling every entertainment office—the Sands, the MGM Grand—telling them that Joan was giving a wedding shower for this girl, and everyone had to come and bring a gift. She wanted one woman to come from each office. She gave Lynn a wedding shower at the Riviera.”