But in fighting for what he perceived as his wife’s needs, Edgar immediately began to create unnecessary showdowns that generated a growing sense of ill will, alienating those whose support was necessary to make the new show a success. “Another pattern was begun: victories not worth the trade-off of anger,” Rivers admitted.
The combination of Edgar’s unpleasant personality and inept managerial style quickly tainted his wife’s budding professional relationship with Diller and other Fox associates. “There are these telltale things that are very small that register later, and you say, ‘There were signs,’” Diller observed.
Edgar’s role in destroying his wife’s relationship with Carson presents a somewhat murkier picture; some observers hold Rivers fully responsible for her actions, while others remain convinced that she was fatally misled by bad advice from her paranoid, controlling, insecure husband.
And then there are those who see Carson as the ultimate villain. “Joan deserved to have that show, but she knew he wasn’t going to give it to her, so she got her own show,” said Pat Cooper, who detested Rivers but doesn’t absolve Carson. “Johnny Carson was not a nice man. He was an evil man, if you ask me. Off the air, he was the biggest prick that ever walked down the street. He was a pig. He peed on my leg at Jilly’s one time.”
With so many powerful personalities, strong emotions, and competing interests poised to collide, the stage was set for an epic conflict. It turned out to be one for the history books.
Chapter Nine
A Thankless Child:
“How Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth”
During their negotiations over starting a new show, Fox had forbidden Rivers to tell anyone about their deal until the press announcement, which was scheduled for Tuesday, May 6, 1986—eleven days after her final appearance on The Tonight Show.
Rivers had sent Carson a copy of her new book, Enter Talking, which was dedicated to Edgar, “who made this book happen,” and to Johnny, “who made it all happen.”
But she hadn’t told Carson about her Fox show, even though some in her inner circle urged her to do so. “I kept saying, ‘You need to tell Johnny—you should be the one to tell Johnny,’ but I wasn’t the manager then, so I didn’t have credence at that time,” said Dorothy Melvin. “Johnny gave her so many breaks, and this was very unfair to Johnny, so I knew it would stun him and make him furious—rightfully so.”
Despite intense secrecy and many precautions, word of Rivers’s impending move finally leaked the day before the scheduled announcement, when the gossip columnist Rona Barrett notified the Rivers camp that she was going to use the item on the radio that night. According to Rivers’s chronology of events, Diller finally gave her permission to call Carson and tell him she was leaving The Tonight Show to start her own show at Fox.
But it was too late. Brandon Tartikoff, the president of NBC, had already heard the rumor and called Garth Ancier, a former employee who was now the head of programming at Fox, to ask whether Rivers was doing a new show there. Ancier was evasive, and Tartikoff, recognizing what that meant, called Carson to tell him the bad news. By the time Rivers phoned Carson, he was furious with her.
“When she called him, she said, ‘Johnny, it’s Joan,’ and he hung up—which made her angry too,” Melvin reported. “She felt she should have been given the chance to talk to him about it. She felt like the victim. How could he not understand, when he was considering all these people but her? How could he not expect her to go elsewhere?”
Carson had a very different take on Rivers’s defection, according to Henry Bushkin, who said he was the first person to inform his boss. “Some reporter called me, and I called Carson to tell him she had signed a deal with Fox, and then I called her new lawyer,” said Bushkin. “I was outraged. Carson’s reaction was, ‘She fucked me!’ He was pissed. It was not that she took another show—it was that she did it without talking to him or telling him first, so he wouldn’t look like the victim of betrayal. He said, ‘I’m never talking to her again,’ and he never did. This was totally in character for him; once he was through with people, he never spoke to them again. That’s what he was like.”
The resulting breach would be discussed for decades to come, with its various nuances dissected in excruciating detail, but one of the most succinct descriptions was offered by Bill Carter, who was then the media reporter at The New York Times.
“Carson cut her off like a traitorous child,” Carter wrote in The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno, and the Network Battle for the Night, his 1994 account of the men who vied for control of late-night television in that era. By the time Carson retired, they were indeed all men, but it is a reflection of the author’s perceptions as well as the overwhelmingly male-dominated television scene that Rivers is mentioned on only two pages of a 320-page book. Moreover, The Late Shift contains no description of Rivers’s long-running success as Carson’s substitute host, nor of his potential succession by a woman, nor even of the larger issue that persists to this day: the absence of female hosts in late-night television.
From the moment Carson refused to take Rivers’s call, the judgments by most industry insiders reflected harshly on her, even among putative allies. Rivers always maintained that Diller had muzzled her until it was too late to make things right with Carson, but Diller disputes that claim, insisting that it was her choice.
“I thought she had the obligation to go to Carson and talk to him about this,” Diller said. “She really should have gone to him in advance, not the day before. I just thought it was the right thing to do. She had a history with him, and it was a very good history.”
Diller also held Rivers responsible for preventing him from communicating with Carson in a timely fashion. “Johnny Carson was a good friend of mine,” he said. “We had an almost weekly poker game that went on for some twenty years. I had no issue with saying to him straight-out, ‘We’re going to have a competing show.’ I really wanted the ability to tell him myself, but I was precluded from that by her. She told me—or Edgar came back and told me—that [Johnny] would break it publicly, and that there would be unforeseen consequences.”
To the extent that Diller blames Rivers, however, he really means Rosenberg. “I think it was her husband, the beast Edgar,” Diller admitted. “I don’t really know.
Rivers’s former manager Sandy Gallin also attributes much of what happened to Edgar’s modus operandi. “I think Edgar gave her very bad advice on a lot of things. He turned everything into a little mystery and made everything extremely difficult,” Gallin said. “They were always so devious about their planning. Everything was secret.”
When the news of Rivers’s departure from The Tonight Show broke in the media, Carson was shrewd enough to be restrained in his public reaction. “I think she was less than smart and didn’t show much style,” he told the Associated Press.
Carson subsequently said much the same thing to Diller. “He never considered her a friend, but he felt it was professionally extremely discourteous,” Diller said.
Even Rivers’s friends agreed. “I think he had a right to be angry,” said Gallin. “He made her career, and for years he was so loyal to her—and then she announces she’s going on opposite him!”
But somehow Rivers had failed to anticipate Carson’s rebuff, and she was crushed by it. “Joan was devastated that people had the impression that she betrayed Johnny Carson,” said Melvin. “She never wanted to be the villain. She always wanted to be loved.”
Bushkin believes Carson would have been gracious if Rivers had handled the situation differently. “He told me many times that he would have wished her well had she come and talked to him. He would have told her she was making a mistake, but he would have wished her well,” Bushkin maintained. “Carson didn’t have a particular relationship with Dick Cavett or anyone else. He did have a relationship with Joan Rivers. He considered her a pioneer in women’s comedy, and a brilliant comedienne. He took pleasure in her success. Real affection existed between the two of
them. Had she met with him and told him, I have no doubt that after her show ended she would have gone back on The Tonight Show.”
Other industry observers shared that assessment. “She didn’t call before signing the deal,” said the New York radio personality Mark Simone. “The fact that he heard about it before she told him—that was the problem. Joey Bishop was in exactly the same position, and he never had a problem with Carson, who said, ‘I understand.’ They remained close friends. The same thing happened with Dick Cavett, who told me about it. Dick Cavett and Joey Bishop handled it the way you’re supposed to: they talked to him and asked for his blessing. If things had been handled properly with Carson, Joan would have been able to come back.”
And yet even his former associates concede that Carson didn’t necessarily see Rivers as a viable successor for The Tonight Show, despite his professional respect for her. “Johnny’s point of view was that she can’t sustain for more than a week at a time, because of the nature of her act,” Bushkin said. “People are going to get tired of it, annoyed with it. They’re going to want a break. There was nothing sexist about it. She didn’t wear well. She’d do Elizabeth Taylor fat jokes, and you start getting into a dangerous area in that some people find it offensive. Carson was right—it didn’t work—and the rupture was totally unnecessary.”
Others believed that ethnic prejudice may also have played a role. “She has higher ratings than Johnny, he’s not going to want her around—but I think it’s also true that Joan was high in certain markets,” said one industry insider who, like Rivers, was Jewish. “It doesn’t matter if San Francisco and New York and Los Angeles love her. You get to the Bible Belt, and they may not love her, because she’s a loudmouthed Jew with a filthy, vulgar mouth. The big advertisers want a chicken in every pot, and that’s what they really look at. I don’t think she was relatable to everyone.”
Bushkin also thinks Rivers was childlike in expecting her patron to feel a purely parental pride about her success. “She was finally getting her own shot to fly away, and she felt Johnny would be happy because he was always happy when people from his show went on to be successful,” he said. “Maybe she was quite naive in a way.”
But at The Tonight Show, the reaction was simply outrage at Rivers’s apparent treachery. “She never went to Johnny and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this wonderful opportunity, and I hope I have your blessings, but I wanted you to know,’” the former Tonight Show executive producer Peter Lassally said on the American Masters special “Johnny Carson: King of Late Night.” “She never did that. She never even mentioned it. He was furious with her, and I think rightfully so. It was that simple, but she just didn’t do it. After all the loyalty he showed her, it was a terrible decision.”
Among those who knew the Rosenbergs, many simply figured Edgar was the guilty party. “Reports were that Edgar called me and I didn’t return his phone calls. That’s not true,” Bushkin said. “The reality is probably that Edgar told Joan he called me, so he could put the blame on me, but he never did call me. I think he was the total reason it got screwed up. I think it was totally manipulation by Edgar. When the shit hit the fan, I think he told her he called me and I didn’t call back. It’s speculation, but I think Edgar felt Carson would get so pissed and possibly convince her not to do it. I sort of adopted Johnny’s attitude: I really felt betrayed as well. I felt the whole process was so badly planned—the secrecy, the lack of courtesy in the attempt to explain why she did it. Edgar had a penchant for not being obvious about anything; everything was designed for quiet and secrecy. No question I think it was Edgar.”
But Bushkin also acknowledged that Carson—who grew up with a famously unsupportive mother and subsequently married four times—had emotional issues of his own, particularly when it came to women he perceived as denying him his due. As a child, Bushkin said, “Carson turned to magic because he never got the applause at home, and he liked the applause. When you become a star, you become narcissistic by definition. If you are craving the adulation of the audience, that’s all you care about; that’s what you live for. So he develops narcissistic personality disorder on steroids, because he’s been fucked up by his mother, who was fucked up in her childhood.”
The result was that “Carson hated women,” Bushkin said. “Look at Carson’s relationships with women. He had no respect for the women in his life—and the respect waned the more independent they became.”
And Rivers had become independent enough to constitute a threat—which prompted many to suspect that Carson was simply unable to tolerate the prospect of being bested by a woman. “He was jealous of her, because her ratings were higher than his,” said Steve Garrin, a producer and voice-over artist who managed Pat Cooper and Joe Franklin in their later years.
Such observers saw sexism as the root of Carson’s ire, which reflected a double standard. “I don’t think he would have treated a man like that,” said Gay USA host Ann Northrop. “I think it was not only childish, but it was very misogynistic behavior.”
Carson may have had particular difficulty in his relationships with women, but he had trouble with others as well. “Johnny Carson was one of the most emotionally crippled guys I ever met,” said Liz Smith. “He was really antisocial. He was afraid of being friends with people. If you said anything about him, he would just sic that big Hollywood lawyer on you.”
In his relationships with men, Carson typically surrounded himself with employees and hangers-on; if he couldn’t tolerate women who jeopardized his status as top dog, he didn’t gravitate toward men who were his equals either.
Knowing this, some think he was simply unwilling to tolerate challengers of either gender. “Dick Cavett wasn’t a threat to Johnny Carson. Joan Rivers was. I don’t think it was sexism,” said Bill Reardin, a longtime television production executive at NBC, Tribune Broadcasting, and other companies, who worked with Jack Paar, Geraldo Rivera, and Dick Cavett, in addition to Rivers.
The darkest interpretation was one that cast Carson as a knowing villain who had figured out a diabolical way to sabotage Rivers while escaping any of the blame. “Johnny was a very sick Machiavellian puppy, and he could have orchestrated the whole thing,” said Sue Cameron. “Joan didn’t want to go to Fox, but Johnny ordered John Agoglia to not renew her contract with The Tonight Show. John Agoglia’s wife was a good friend of mine, and she said John had to keep stalling, and it was terrible because he couldn’t renew the contract. It was brilliant, and there was nothing Joan could do. Johnny could then say, ‘She betrayed me,’ and get really angry at her. But it was all a lie. It was really horrible, what happened to her. It wasn’t that Joan was ungrateful. She really revered Johnny, and she kept wanting to be absolved by him for something that she didn’t do.”
As time went on, Rivers seemed unable to resolve the question of how much responsibility she should take for what happened with NBC. She expressed some contrition when she wrote about the disaster in Still Talking. “I think the way Johnny found out was a shame,” she said. “He should have heard from me, and I like to think I could have made him understand. It must have been a huge shock.”
But she was also convinced that Carson didn’t see her as an equal, even when she regularly sold out five-thousand-seat houses. When male protégés like Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor did so, they were acknowledged for having achieved great success in their own right, but they didn’t incur Carson’s wrath.
So Rivers consoled herself by rationalizing that the outcome would have been the same no matter how she had handled the situation. When Carson finally did retire, she declared that “there was no way in hell I would have succeeded Johnny Carson,” and that she was therefore right to have left when she did.
She paid a high price that included ostracism as well as exile from NBC. “I think a lot of people never spoke to her again,” said Liz Smith.
But was that fair? Any real verdict on Rivers’s culpability ultimately depends on the trustworthiness of the secret in-house memo that NBC execut
ive Jay Michelis leaked to warn Rivers that she was not being considered as Carson’s heir. Key players have always insisted that this scenario seems implausible because there was no reason such a list would even have existed.
“I never saw one, I never heard of one, and it was our show,” Henry Bushkin said firmly. “If there was a short list to replace Carson, if it was an NBC list, it was never shown to me, and it was never shown to Carson. We had every right to pick the successor. As the lawyer, I would have been severely pissed to think they were assembling a list of possible replacements for Carson without consulting us. Brandon Tartikoff and Grant Tinker were running the network then, and both those guys were very friendly with Carson and myself. Carson Productions owned our version of The Tonight Show, so nobody at NBC was telling us what to do. The fact that Joan became the permanent guest host had nothing to do with NBC; it was a decision by Carson Productions. And there was never one moment of consideration of who would succeed Johnny Carson, because Johnny Carson was not ready to stop. This list makes no sense to me.”
Bushkin always suspected the Rosenbergs invented the story to justify Rivers’s betrayal. “When I heard it, I thought it was just a great excuse: ‘I wasn’t on the short list, so I had to take care of myself!’” he said. “I attributed what Joan said to showbiz. I think she really jumped at the chance of getting her own show, and the screwup was not talking to Johnny Carson ahead of time. Even if she dreaded talking to him, she should have told him. He never got over it. He wasn’t the type to get over things.”
Bushkin also disputes the idea that Michelis would have been a player in any top-level strategic planning. “I remember Jay Michelis, but he wasn’t very high up at NBC,” Bushkin said. “Who knows what he did? But it has nothing to do with us. If this guy showed her a list and she’s not on it and Joan accepted that without checking any further, it would have been a dreadful mistake on her part, on her husband’s part, on her manager’s part. What the fuck? There could have been no list that would have been in any way official without Carson having approved it—and why would there be a list, anyway? Maybe this guy made up the list. I would like to think it’s bullshit.”
Last Girl Before Freeway Page 18