But it seems equally preposterous that “a real friend” of Joan’s would have done such a thing to her. Fabricating a list suggests a level of malice that is almost incomprehensible—and yet when Dorothy Melvin ran into Peter Lassally at a shopping center in Los Angeles during the summer of 2015 and they talked for the first time in decades, their conversation suggested precisely that scenario.
By the time Rivers left NBC, she and Edgar had a long history of friendship with the Lassallys, but the relationship had become strained. Rivers’s comedic instincts were often at odds with Lassally’s sense of what was appropriate for the show, and she felt a growing tension with Lassally and Freddie de Cordova, the executive producer, as she became more successful—and less obedient.
“I think they eventually saw me as their baby who had grown away from them,” said Rivers, who also attributed such feelings to Carson. “I believe my relationship with Johnny was permanently shaped by his feeling, on some level, that I was his creation and so could be taken completely for granted. Indeed, I played that role, catering and kissing and thanking—and staying loyal beyond reason.”
When Rivers finally defied Lassally, the results were disproportionately damaging, thanks in part to Edgar’s tactlessness. In 1984, Lassally instructed Rivers to drop a joke from her monologue, and she told Edgar she couldn’t take it out—and that Lassally shouldn’t have asked her to do so.
“I was already being driven crazy by the show’s censor on questions of taste, and if I let Peter start editing my monologue for humor, he would be another door to fight through before I went in front of the camera,” Rivers explained.
A smarter go-between would have recognized the disagreement as a minor annoyance and made it go away. Instead, Edgar made it into an insurmountable problem by telling Lassally that Rivers refused to change the joke because she didn’t respect his judgment about comedy. “Peter was helpless and furious,” reported Rivers, who realized too late that Edgar had humiliated Lassally in front of his boss. Thanks to her tantrum and Edgar’s lack of finesse, she said, “fourteen years of friendship with Peter were gone.”
Rivers hadn’t wanted to establish a precedent by letting Lassally censor her material on The Tonight Show, but she was also convinced that the disagreement involved a larger principle that she considered vital. Throughout her career, she refused to capitulate to anyone else’s judgment about what was funny and what wasn’t, and she always treated the issue as a matter of life-and-death import.
And for her it was. Ever since the days when she would crawl into an agent’s office on her hands and knees, Rivers had viewed the ability to make people laugh as more important to her survival than food or oxygen. An incorrigible practical joker, she would go to extraordinary lengths to get a laugh, and her friends responded in kind.
That pattern could also help explain what happened with NBC, according to Dorothy Melvin, who originally got to know Rivers while working for Sandy Gallin.
“Her pranks were absolutely the best,” Melvin said. “She called up Kenny Solms, who was one of her closest friends, and said, ‘I don’t like you, and you know who else doesn’t like you? Edgar doesn’t like you, Melissa doesn’t like you, Dorothy doesn’t like you.’ Then she called back with more names, and then she called back with Acme Plumbing and the white pages of the phone book. She filled up his entire answering machine.”
Such acid-tinged antics were routine among Rivers and her friends—which may have led to a fatal miscalculation. “She and Jay Michelis played pranks on each other,” Melvin reported. “On his birthday, Joan hired a bagpipe player to stand outside his office and play the bagpipes the whole day, and even to follow him to the commissary.”
When Michelis smuggled Rivers the infamous list, “it was purported to be an interoffice memo at NBC,” Melvin said. “Joan was the permanent guest host for Johnny, and Johnny was nowhere near leaving the show, so the timing didn’t make sense. But the memo said, ‘These are the people who will be considered to replace Johnny Carson when he retires,’ and listed people like Garry Shandling and David Brenner.”
Melvin can vouch for the existence of the memo, if not for its authenticity. “I saw it,” she said. “I can still see it in my mind’s eye. Jay Michelis sent it to Joan and wrote on the memo, ‘You have no home at NBC.’”
The memo seemed to confirm the Rosenbergs’ most paranoid nightmares. “Joan was devastated and frightened,” Melvin said. “That was her great fear—that she didn’t have a future at NBC and it was time to start looking for something new. She thought she was riding the crest of a wave that would last for a long time, and all of a sudden the rug was pulled out from under her. There was a great deal of fear in the household about this, and they were renegotiating her contract at the time, and all of a sudden it was, ‘We need to look elsewhere!’”
But Melvin didn’t buy the ostensible reason why. “There were ten or twelve men on that list, all people who never got big numbers at NBC. Joan got the high ratings, and nobody on the list had the numbers Joan had,” Melvin said. “I never felt it was a real memo, because it made no sense. Why would they want somebody who didn’t get Joan’s numbers? Johnny was very proud of Joan; he loved her very much. Peter Lassally was her best friend, and it didn’t make any sense that these people wouldn’t say anything to her.”
Melvin was also privy to an intimate view of the falling-out with the Lassallys. “The Lassallys and the Rosenbergs were best friends,” she said. “They did everything together. The Lassallys would come with us to Vegas, to Tahoe, to Atlantic City. When all this happened, Peter felt betrayed by Joan and Edgar: ‘You’re my best friends—how could you do this behind my back?’ Joan called [Peter’s wife] Alice, and Alice said, ‘How could you do what you did?’”
But Rivers felt aggrieved as well. “Joan didn’t understand why her best friend didn’t tell her what was happening,” Melvin said.
So when Melvin ran into Peter Lassally and his wife nearly a year after Rivers’s death, the conversation naturally turned to her acrimonious departure from NBC. “I said, ‘If it hadn’t been for the memo…,’ and Peter said, ‘What memo?’” Melvin reported. “I said, ‘You don’t know about the memo? Oh my gosh!’ When I told him about the memo, he and Alice sat there with their mouths open. Peter was in shock. He said, ‘Dorothy, there was never such a memo. How would I not have been included?’ I said, ‘I thought you were part of it! I didn’t understand why you didn’t come to us, but I thought you were probably between a rock and a hard place.’ Peter and I were gobsmacked. I said to Peter, ‘This is a total bombshell. How could you not have known?’”
Unlike the Rosenbergs, who accepted the ostensible NBC memo at face value, Melvin had always been suspicious. “I have no doubt in my mind that it was manufactured; I’m absolutely convinced of it,” she said. “There was no reason for the memo to begin with. Johnny Carson was nowhere near retiring. I don’t think Joan questioned that it was real, but I kept saying it to Edgar. They didn’t pay attention. Joan just felt Peter was stabbing her in the back.”
Melvin now believes the entire sequence of events might have been deliberately set in motion by Michelis, either as outright sabotage or as a disastrously misconceived joke. “Was this all the result of a prank gone wrong, with Jay watching it all spiral out of control and laughing his head off?” Melvin said. “I’m sure if he fabricated it, he was enjoying it. He was very bitchy, and he liked to stir the pot and sit back and see what happened. I can still see his handwriting on the memo—he signed it ‘J. M.’ in blue pen. He probably sent that and got great glee out of it. Possibly he didn’t realize it would blow up the way it did. See what an elaborate web this wove?”
That explanation is consistent with his character, according to Melvin. “Jay was a ‘good friend’ with an underlying sense of meanness,” she explained. “He was downright evil—a mean, bitchy man. He called his secretary Miss Douchebag, and he called Joan Mrs. RosenJew. I was Cycle Slut, because my boyfriend took me
on motorcycle rides. The day of Edgar’s funeral, the phone rang, and he said, ‘Cycle Slut, tell Mrs. RosenJew that I will not be at the funeral, because I will be at my fabulously expensive home in Glendale driving around in my fabulously expensive Mercedes.’”
In response to a tragic death, such conduct seems unfathomably cruel. But if Michelis had engineered the whole catastrophe, he might have had good reason for avoiding the funeral—if not for communicating his regrets as viciously as he did.
“It was just so ugly,” said Melvin. “If this was not a real memo, the way Jay Michelis devastated lives, it wasn’t just a joke gone wrong. It was a joke that exploded and left such devastation in its wake that it was horrifying.”
Many of the players in the feud are now dead and can never tell what they knew or how they would apportion the blame for what happened. The list of the departed includes Rosenberg, Carson, Rivers, and Michelis, as well as John Agoglia and his wife, who were also friendly with the Rosenbergs.
Among the living, some still refuse to talk about the feud, including Peter Lassally, who declined repeated requests to discuss Rivers—or even his chance conversation with Melvin about the NBC list. And so it’s likely that the question of Jay Michelis’s motives will never be resolved.
In 1988, the year after Fox canceled Rivers’s show and her husband killed himself, Michelis died in bed at his home, surrounded by “drug paraphernalia and white powder,” as one news report put it. Small quantities of a substance “resembling powder cocaine” were found on a mirror, and a rolled-up dollar bill was found on a coffee table near the bed. Elsewhere in the bedroom, a “small paper bindle with cocaine” was discovered in a wooden box. A toxicological report subsequently confirmed that Michelis had ingested cocaine, but the cause of death was declared to be a heart attack. He was fifty years old.
“Whatever his guilty secrets, they died with him,” Melvin said.
In the years since, most people have accepted the conventional narrative that the Rosenbergs betrayed Carson and paid the price. But Melvin remains convinced that the memo was fabricated, and she is heartbroken that Rivers will never know the truth about what might have been a diabolical lie.
“It kills me that I can’t share this with her and say, ‘This wasn’t real,’” Melvin said. “But in my heart of hearts, I feel Edgar knew it wasn’t real. I think he just took it and ran with it because it gave him the chance to have his own show, where he could be in charge.”
Chapter Ten
Debacle: The Death of a Show,
a Marriage—and a Husband
When Joan Rivers got her own late-night talk show, it could have been a triumphant cultural milestone with far-reaching consequences—and many women saw it as such.
“It was huge,” the comic Lisa Lampanelli said. “Doing a late-night show is a big deal. It means you can do what the big boys do. Saturday Night Live was a boys’ club. The Harvard Lampoon was a boys’ club. All of a sudden, there’s this girl who’s playing with these guys. She was doing edgy material when it wasn’t safe for a chick to be doing it.”
Rivers certainly tried, but her efforts may have been doomed from the start. Looking back on the disastrous launch of her show at the Fox network, she would later describe the behavior of all the major players as driven primarily by fear. To the executives who had succumbed to Barry Diller’s siren call for a major gamble on a new venture, the stakes were nearly as high as for Rivers herself.
“All of them were frightened—terrified that they had left secure jobs for a network that would not work,” Rivers wrote in Still Talking. “So everybody was under pressure you can’t believe—including Barry Diller.”
For the Rosenbergs, who thought they’d signed on for an exciting creative challenge they could shape to Joan’s strengths and run as they saw fit, the result was frustration and conflict. “To protect themselves, all the Fox people wanted control, wanted to have input into the show, wanted to take over,” Rivers said. “They became like a sorority that would not let me in. The more they tried to control everything, the more petty the fights became, everybody grinding private little axes.”
Unfortunately, the worst ax-grinder was her own husband. “Maybe the most frightened of all was Edgar, who right from the beginning was nitpicking: ‘I insist on this. I insist on that.’ So right away the show became Edgar versus Barry—which included Barry’s chain of command,” Rivers reported glumly.
To their intimates, it seemed that Edgar misjudged the situation from the outset. “He thought, ‘I’m a producer now! I can go head-to-head with Barry Diller!’—but nobody goes head-to-head with Barry Diller,” said Dorothy Melvin.
Edgar’s inflated expectations set the stage for disaster, and the dysfunctional dynamic was quickly compounded by other errors. According to Rivers, Rupert Murdoch insisted that her show debut in early October, “which gave us and Fox just five months to set up the smoothly running machine NBC had assembled through decades. It was a herculean task: ready the studio—build the set, install the lighting, the sound system, the seating—hire a staff with top bookers to corral the guests, get excellent segment producers to preinterview and handle each guest, find first-class writers to think up the nightly monologue and the stunts, recruit a skillful producer and assistant to manage the show.”
Faced with innumerable challenges of every size and description, Edgar immediately went to war with Fox over one detail after another, fighting about everything from the space and the set to the producers, the staff, the orchestra leader, and the theme music, which was cowritten by Rivers. In retrospect, she would acknowledge many aspects of her husband’s contribution to the debacle.
“Edgar never dealt directly with Diller. He bucked him by being brusque and superior to his lieutenants,” she said. “Edgar was brilliant on ideas, brilliant on follow-through, but his missing chromosome was diplomacy. Getting a job done right was more important to him than finesse. And since the heart attack his patience had been stretching tight.”
Under physical, emotional, and professional stress, Edgar swiftly made himself persona non grata, which put Rivers in the untenable position of being caught in constant cross fire between her employer and her husband. “She was viewed as having this anchor around her neck called Edgar,” said Shelly Schultz. “He had made himself very disliked around the industry at a very high level, because she was operating at a very high level.”
Diller finally informed Rivers that Edgar was being destructive and making everyone unhappy, and he asked her to keep her husband away from the show. Rivers resisted, protesting that no one gave her specific examples of the problems he was causing, which left her unable to address them. Despite Edgar’s reputation as a maniacal control freak, she claimed that she and her husband simply wanted to be included in the decision-making process. “Diller could have controlled us so easily by giving Edgar a little respect and me some affection,” she complained.
Given Edgar’s predilection for waging full-out wars over minutiae, that seems unlikely, but such face-saving measures were not forthcoming in any case. Rivers admitted that her husband irritated a lot of people, but she saw him as the loyal warrior who dealt with all the mundane details that Diller’s inexperienced staff didn’t even know were necessary for the kind of program they were trying to create. “He was wonderful at all the horrible, boring things that make a show work,” she said.
In Rivers’s accounts of what happened at Fox, all roads eventually lead back to Diller, but she may not have understood some aspects of what was going on behind the scenes. “That show was risky anyway, because it didn’t have enough affiliates, so there was no way the ratings could be high. Joan was kind of a sacrificial lamb for Fox,” explained Sue Cameron, who was a former network executive as well as a TV reporter and columnist. “Diller only had the owned-and-operated stations, and he needed a big name to get the local stations to give them the time. He used Joan to get the affiliates; he was looking for them to sign on and give him the time slots. Jo
an was being used, but I don’t think she knew it.”
Diller’s perspective places considerable blame on Rivers as well as on her husband. “When we got into the planning of the show, I wasn’t involved very much in that,” he told me. “There was a long lead time, and we wanted to make the environment as good for her as we could. Around the only thing I remember during the preproduction stage is that I would hear little things that were bad, and that disturbed me, about her lack of preparation. As far as guest policy and other pieces of the show, there wasn’t very much, other than enormous attention to her dressing room. We really wanted her to be comfortable, and we had proposed things that were pretty nice, but I would hear tales about things like that, where there was more attention than there was on preproduction.”
Diller was dismayed by such “little signs,” he said, but they were soon eclipsed by a much larger issue. “The big sign came when I got word back from the staff that it seemed like Edgar was making the decisions I never thought he would make,” Diller said. “I thought Edgar was a business person or manager. We hired a very good executive producer, and then I got these tales back of Edgar taking over the show, in terms of making decisions. Joan was fairly absent; she was not engaged.”
On all sides, the new working relationships curdled very fast. In Still Talking, Rivers reported that as early as July, the Rosenbergs were already spending a fortune on lawyers who sent combative letters about various points of dispute. The legal bluster infuriated Diller, who responded by lecturing the Rosenbergs on “causing dissension and trouble.”
Last Girl Before Freeway Page 19