Last Girl Before Freeway

by Leslie Bennetts

  Nor did Rivers relinquish her role as fairy godmother after the wedding. “Every year, Joan would say, ‘Did we have the Razens yet this year?’” Melvin reported. “And every year, once a year, we had Lynn and her husband, and Joan would pay for a limo to pick up Lynn and her parents and take them to a good dinner and bring them backstage after the show. Who does that? It was so kind. We also had her son, Chadwick Twain—they lived at the corner of Chadwick and Twain—until he died in a swimming pool at the age of two. She never forgot them in all those years. That was the ultimate kindness.”

  Unlike many donors, Rivers didn’t perform such acts for recognition. “She never looked for credit for any of her philanthropy,” said Arnold Stiefel.

  But it gave her great pleasure to spread her wealth on behalf of chosen beneficiaries, just as it had at the beginning of her career when she was able to fly her parents to Chicago and pay for their dinners. Having fought so hard to establish her career, Rivers spent much of her middle age thinking she had surmounted life’s most difficult challenges and could look forward to a future of taking pleasure in the rewards.

  She had no idea that the worst was still to come—let alone that it would destroy everything she had built for herself in all those years of struggle.

  Chapter Eight

  The Temptation of Joan: Poisoned Apple

  More than three decades after it happened, show business veterans still argue about the legendary feud that Rivers created with Johnny Carson when she left The Tonight Show to create a rival program. After appearing with Carson on April 25, 1986, to plug her new memoir, Enter Talking, Rivers announced that she had signed on with the fledgling Fox network as host of her own talk show. But she hadn’t told Carson beforehand that she was leaving, and many people saw that choice as an epic betrayal by an ungrateful former acolyte. Others defended it as a normal rite of passage that was unfairly penalized by a jealous mentor and a sexist industry all too eager to punish an uppity woman for having the temerity to strike out on her own.

  To this day, everyone from the general public to those who were intimately involved in the saga still debates the respective roles of loyalty, duplicity, incompetence, rank opportunism, and bungled communications in creating a cold war so lasting that Rivers was banned from The Tonight Show for nearly thirty years. After Carson retired, Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien abided by their predecessor’s fiat, and Rivers’s long exile ended only when Jimmy Fallon succeeded Leno as the host in 2014, a few months before Rivers died.

  The feud was as petty as it was mean-spirited. “When The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson went off the air in 1992, I asked them if we could use some clips of Joan Rivers with Johnny Carson, and they said no,” reported Larry Ferber, the executive producer of The Joan Rivers Show, the daytime talk show Rivers was doing at the time. “They put rumors out that she was a bitch, that she was difficult. A couple of weeks later, there was something in the papers that [said] ‘She’s at it again—Joan Rivers is trying to steal material from The Tonight Show.’ Joan was so hurt.”

  As with most long-running vendettas, the bad blood between Carson and Rivers is often oversimplified by partisans on both sides. But the situation might have been even more complicated—and its underlying cause far more malignant—than anyone understood until now.

  After Rivers’s death, Carson’s former producer and Rivers’s former manager ran into each other by accident at a shopping center in Los Angeles. They hadn’t spoken in nearly thirty years, but when they started to compare their respective pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, both were stunned by the unfamiliar picture that emerged.

  Was it conceivable that the real culprit had remained hidden until this late date?

  With the possible exception of that one bad actor, whose motives are very much open to question, it seems clear that nobody else on either side ever wanted such a rupture to occur. In the mid-1980s, when Rivers’s career was flourishing, she remained deeply grateful to Carson for launching her career, and she certainly had no desire to alienate him in any way.

  That said, there’s also no question that her own actions subsequently turned a heartwarming story of patronage given and longtime affection received into a breach so bitter and familial it evoked King Lear. Rivers never meant for that to happen, and she felt grief as well as anger about it for the rest of her life.

  The ugliness of the estrangement was variously blamed on putative villains who ranged from Edgar Rosenberg to the billionaire mogul Barry Diller to Rivers herself. But the new suspect has potentially transformed the entire equation with a chilling alternative scenario.

  Could a relatively minor player, one apparently motivated by sheer malevolence, have provided the pivotal plot point—a secret memo ostensibly prepared by NBC brass that excluded Rivers from consideration as Carson’s successor—with a gratuitous act so vicious it seems to have been imported from another play entirely? Was the move that wrecked Rivers’s career and ended her husband’s life actually triggered by a behind-the-scenes Iago as stealthy as he was malicious?

  And finally—most heartbreakingly—could the whole catastrophe have occurred because that bitter, twisted person was trying to be funny?

  Since the field in question is comedy, the question of who and what is funny provided the larger context for the debacle from the outset. Johnny Carson reigned as host of The Tonight Show for nearly three decades, and many people—most of them comedians—served as guest hosts over the years.

  Joey Bishop hosted a total of 177 times, mostly in the 1960s, and Rivers racked up 93 hosting credits during the 1970s and 1980s. Other guest hosts ranged from Bob Newhart, Jerry Lewis, and David Letterman to Kermit the Frog, but it was Carson’s worshipful “daughter” who began to outshine the star and draw higher ratings.

  “Of the various comedians and personalities who substituted for Carson, including David Brenner and Bill Cosby, the most successful was Joan Rivers,” Daniel Kimmel wrote in The Fourth Network: How Fox Broke the Rules and Reinvented Television. “Her shtick was that she was a chic Jewish suburban housewife, and she complained about her marriage, being a mother, and—somewhat shocking in its day—sex. What made her different was that the few women stand-ups around then, like Phyllis Diller, played somewhat grotesque characters. Rivers, with her aggressive repartee and stylish outfits, looked like someone you’d see at a supermarket or a PTA meeting. By 1983, the fifty-year-old Rivers had achieved stardom.”

  That was the year Rivers was officially designated as Carson’s permanent guest host, a role she had essentially been filling for the previous year. No matter where else she performed, The Tonight Show served as the underlying platform for her career and the source of her greatest visibility, and her perceived success as Carson’s understudy supplied a vital part of her self-image. She never stopped being grateful for his role in making her a star, but she understood quite well that she would always be the acolyte. “It sounds stupid, but eighteen years later it’s still very much master-servant,” she told People magazine in 1983. “He comes to see me, and it’s the boss coming. He gave me everything.”

  In some ways, of course, they were two of a kind. No matter how much recognition performers achieve, Rivers knew how much of their self-esteem and sense of well-being are derived from ongoing success. Once accustomed to constant adulation, they usually have a difficult time giving it up. As a stand-up comedian, she readily admitted that she too was dependent on applause for her sense of self-worth.

  “When I am rejected by an audience, I feel total self-hatred,” she said. “I want to stop the act and spit in my own face. The larger the audiences, the worse I feel.”

  Long experience with the titans of the industry had also taught her what a tough bunch they were. “Nobody wants to admit these great icons are killers,” she said. “When I dared cross Johnny Carson to go to Fox, he came on like a gutter fighter—and let his representatives do the talking. To succeed in this rough business we all have to be killers—myself included. God knows
what any of these people came out of and how hard they had to fight, what humiliations they suffered. Johnny Carson once said, ‘I started in Bakersfield doing magic off the back of a truck to guys standing in cornfields.’”

  Rivers recognized the competitiveness inherent to the breed—including her own. When she published Still Talking in 1991, she was pushing sixty, but she wasn’t anywhere near ready to cede the field to up-and-coming rivals. “I really hate to be admired by young comics,” she wrote. “I am not ready. I am still one of you guys. I have not peaked yet. I do not know my full potential—maybe stage or movie acting, maybe directing or writing. I suspect no star, no matter how big, wants to be put on a pedestal. Then you are a monument to yourself, by definition part of the past. I still think of myself as absolutely the present.”

  The dynamics of Rivers’s relationship with Carson were also complicated by gender, whether or not they ever had the sexual encounter she subsequently claimed. Men of his generation didn’t expect younger women to threaten their dominance, particularly when the woman in question was a disciple and the man was the undisputed king of an industry where he had reigned for decades.

  In later years, Rivers herself would invoke gender in trying to explain their estrangement, as if she were the favorite daughter of a Lear-like monarch who felt abandoned. “Johnny banned me,” she said. “He was very angry I left and I really never say this, but I think it was because I was a woman…I left and a wall came down, and I think because he really liked me the best.”

  Carson was only eight years older than Rivers, but both her partisans and his believed that he was totally sincere in championing her career the way he did. “When you go back to how he put her on the show, you saw Johnny’s enjoyment of all his guests, but you always felt he was looking at Joan through different eyes,” said Dorothy Melvin, who was the Rosenbergs’ assistant for years before becoming Joan’s manager. “It was the pride of a parent: ‘I enjoy you so much, you’re giving me pride and joy, I’m having the best time just looking at you!’ You could see it in his face. And she adored him—until she felt he turned on her with the memo.”

  If Rivers had been single, it is entirely possible that she and Carson would have remained friends until he died—even if a would-be Iago had tried to poison their relationship. But with Edgar Rosenberg as her anxious, insecure, endlessly striving partner, Rivers was vulnerable to the lure of any proposal that seemed to offer her spouse more power and respect.

  Still deeply in thrall to a lifetime of indoctrination that women should put their husbands’ needs before their own, Joan was just as desperate to see Edgar succeed as he was. He prided himself on being the ultimate defender of his wife’s interests, but when it came to his own thwarted ambitions, his capacity for self-delusion was as powerful as his need for external validation.

  In 1986, the fatal opportunity for self-destruction was provided by the legendary, formidable, fearsome Barry Diller.

  Now the chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp and Expedia Inc., Diller originally began his career in the mail room of the William Morris Agency after dropping out of UCLA after one semester of college. As ruthless as he was brilliant, Diller quickly made a name for himself as a cold-blooded power player; in 2012, Business Insider described him as one of the leading “executives who rule by fear.”

  Starting in 1974, Diller served for a decade as chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures. He left in 1984 to become chairman and CEO of Fox, the parent company of Twentieth Century Fox. Two years later, the Fox Broadcasting Company was launched as a commercial broadcast television network that was intended to compete with the existing big three: ABC, NBC, and CBS.

  When the Rosenbergs began their dealings with Diller and Fox, Edgar was already in a weakened state, and had been for quite a while. In 1984, at the age of fifty-nine, he suffered a heart attack that was triggered by an argument between Melissa and her parents over where she should go to college. When she was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania, her parents were thrilled by the prospect of her attending a prestigious Ivy League institution. But Melissa insisted she wanted to stay in California, live with a girlfriend, and go to UCLA. Her parents were horrified, a screaming match ensued, and Melissa ran out of the house with Joan in hot pursuit.

  “Melissa and Joan were in the driveway, and Melissa wanted to go somewhere, and Joan didn’t want her to go, and I heard Edgar say, ‘Dorothy! Dorothy!’” Dorothy Melvin reported. “I ran back in and Edgar was a gray that I’d never seen in my entire life. He was upstairs standing on the landing, leaning on the railing, and I ran screaming for the security guard, who was trained in CPR.”

  They realized that Edgar was having a heart attack, and the security guard started doing CPR. “Melissa was hysterical, screaming and screaming,” Melvin said.

  Although Edgar survived the heart attack after undergoing triple bypass surgery, he suffered from weeks of life-and-death complications that left him deeply debilitated. Like her mother before her, Melissa eventually capitulated to parental pressure and headed for college in the Northeast, but the terrible fight that precipitated her father’s collapse left her with an enduring burden of guilt and anxiety.

  As for Joan, the crisis provided a terrifying reminder of how much she had come to depend on her husband. “After Edgar’s heart attack, suddenly I realized that I drew all my strength from Edgar,” she said.

  And he was no longer the tower of strength she had relied on. “Depressions plagued him, and he retreated to his bed for hours—or he was swept by mood swings. Some emotional governor was missing. The rage that reached back to his childhood was now on a hair trigger,” Rivers reported. “He came out of the hospital with his mind muddled, distracted and forgetful. I still think his brain might have been damaged during those episodes when he was brought back from death. He had trouble grasping complexities and remembering details. His memory was so undependable, he carried his own phone number in his wallet. When he did stumble mentally, his embarrassment and self-disgust were profound.”

  Everyone knew that Edgar was vulnerable to another heart attack, and the fear of a recurrence haunted the Rosenbergs for the remainder of their time together. “For both of us, death was now a palpable presence, waiting just out of sight,” Rivers said.

  Despite Edgar’s apparent recovery, his behavior changed in ominous ways, further eroding his wife’s trust. “The keystone of Edgar’s character was the need to keep himself and the world around him in control. So any loss of control—helplessness—left him vulnerable and terrified, put him in a downward spiral,” Rivers wrote. “His sense of impotency fed his fear, which increased his frustration—which came out as anger—which increased his loss of control—which multiplied the fear and anger—which made people avoid him—which made him even more isolated and angry. He was driving himself crazy—and driving everybody around him crazy too. The one element that gave him a sense of power, even manhood, was money.”

  So Edgar threw himself into a frenzy of spending, redecorating the Rosenbergs’ house with lavish expenditures and buying Joan such treasures as a Fabergé pin once owned by the czar’s sister, along with Marie of Romania’s necklace of Fabergé eggs. Alternately seduced by the extravagant gifts and dismayed at her husband’s lack of judgment, Rivers was too afraid of fighting with him to try to control his excesses.

  She dealt with her marital problems in a state of what she called “constructive denial,” choosing to believe that this difficult period would pass while focusing on her own independent life as a performer. When she was on the road, she had fun; escaping her tortured spouse was a relief. “After twenty years of marriage I was happy because I was not with my husband,” she said. “That is a terrible, terrible truth to admit to yourself. I was barely able to face it and felt guilty and frightened and pushed away the thought because there was nothing I felt I could do to change the situation.”

  But going home felt like coming back to “a prison.” Edgar was “resentful and competitive,” cuttin
g her off in the middle of a sentence in social situations and tyrannizing her with petty forms of control like monopolizing the television remote control. “He would not let me read Time and Newsweek until he had read them, even if that took him a week—so I had to take out duplicate subscriptions,” Rivers said. “Any book he bought I could not read first—so two copies of the same book sat on our bedside table.”

  And yet Edgar continued as his wife’s Svengali, the manager who wielded the power to control key decisions about The Career, as they still referred to Rivers’s professional life. When the opportunity they had both coveted suddenly appeared on the horizon like a tantalizing Trojan horse, the stage was set for their mutual destruction.

  “He was a man too unstable to be the ‘rock’ in command of my impulses, persuading me with pros and cons and practical consequences,” Rivers said. “His natural caution had increased to paranoia, and his priorities were reversed, details becoming more important than fundamental issues. This man, fighting for his sanity, still searching for a source of ego and self-respect, was the husband who would soon be leading us into the jungle of Fox Broadcasting Network, a place populated by men able and willing to kill us.”

  In July of 1985, flying back from London after doing a series of BBC television shows, Rivers dozed off while Edgar read a Newsweek cover story about Rupert Murdoch, the publishing magnate who had bought Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, along with six Metromedia VHF television stations: in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Dallas, Chicago, and Houston. Fox was planning to use those stations as the nucleus of a fourth broadcasting network, and Edgar realized that Fox, in order to get attention for its new network, would need a big name to head a high-profile show—a name like Joan Rivers.