But relations continued to deteriorate. September found Edgar arguing over everything from the number of telephones in the office to the secretaries’ deficient shorthand skills to catered dinners for the staff. “The more Fox refused to acknowledge Edgar’s demands, the more important they became,” Rivers recalled. “Feeling embattled everywhere, he fought back obsessively to get every detail of our production identical to the Carson show.”
Still exhilarated by the heady ego gratification of having landed her own show and serious money, Rivers didn’t realize how high the stakes were until much later. “I could have stopped all the fighting, could have said, ‘Edgar, you’re out of here. Barry, do what you want,’” she admitted. “But there is no way I could have banished my husband to being at home alone. I did not realize how seriously we were all crippling the future. There are always birth pains in setting up a new show. I thought that once we were on the air, the trouble would vanish.”
But every aspect of getting the show on the air soon turned into a nightmare—including the all-important challenge of booking top guests, which was an uphill battle from the start. The Carson camp put out the word that anybody who appeared on Rivers’s program would be blackballed by The Tonight Show, and the resulting chill intimidated many of the big names that Rivers coveted for her own lineup. NBC made it very clear that it was waging war on the would-be rival who had the temerity to challenge Carson by copying his show and encroaching on his time slot. “Our job is to destroy you,” Jay Michelis told Rivers.
Such tactics took a serious toll. “In a demonstration of just how powerful Carson still was, Rivers found herself one step removed from leper status in Hollywood,” Bill Carter wrote in The Late Shift. “Guests had to risk the wrath of The Tonight Show to go on with Joan.”
Although there was considerable crossover in their prospective audiences, Rivers also hoped to appeal to a younger demographic, which meant expanding the range of guests. Carson’s Tonight Show was increasingly perceived to be “stodgy and out-of-date,” as Carter put it. “One headliner comic told his friends, ‘When you go on that show, you can smell the polyester.’”
So when The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers premiered on October 9, 1986, it immediately signaled some momentous departures from precedent. Just by going on the air as host of her own program, Rivers became the first woman in history to have her own late-night television talk show on a major network—itself a revolutionary idea.
“Anticipation was high,” Daniel Kimmel reported in The Fourth Network. “Perhaps unfairly, she was expected to compete with her old boss, Johnny Carson, even though they’d only be going head-to-head for half an hour. The Late Show would air from 11 p.m. to midnight—an hour earlier in the Central time zone—while Carson didn’t start until after the late news at 11:30 p.m.”
On her first show, Rivers’s guests included Cher, David Lee Roth, Pee-wee Herman, and Elton John. Rivers was thrilled with what she had accomplished, but history would judge her harshly. “She did herself no favors by trying to turn into a hipster, booking rock-and-roll acts half her age and singing ‘The Bitch Is Back’ with Elton John,” Carter wrote disdainfully in The Late Shift.
The ratings returned a mixed picture. “It was foolishness to think Rivers could beat Carson, especially fresh out of the starting gate,” Kimmel wrote. “For the October 9 premiere, Rivers actually outdid Carson in the New York Nielsen ratings as well as in the competing Arbitron service ratings in Los Angeles, but in most places Carson enjoyed the higher viewership.”
As Rivers subsequently pointed out, her show was competing with the World Series during its first week, and Fox had far fewer outlets than the major networks. She nonetheless managed to score a 3.2 nationally in 98 markets, compared with 6.4 in 202 markets for Carson. In the coming weeks, her show began to average a 3.9 rating in big cities while falling into the 2s at small stations.
But the critics were scathing. “They said things like, ‘No need, Johnny, to lose sleep over the new challenger,’ and called the audience ‘moronic’ and ‘airheads,’” Rivers reported. “Tom Shales wrote in the Washington Post, ‘Maybe Rivers should spend less time at the beauty parlor and more time with her writers. The beauty parlor would appear to be a lost cause anyway.’”
Fox had promised to give Rivers at least a year for her show to find its audience, but the network immediately panicked; its ratings forecasts had been as unrealistic as Rivers’s expectation for an immediate triumph. Her hopes of appealing to a more youthful demographic than Carson’s audience also seemed increasingly misguided. “As the ratings started to slump in later weeks, the real question became whether younger viewers were interested in this type of TV fare at all,” Kimmel wrote.
Diller saw other problems as well. “Joan wasn’t a great interviewer, which was okay, but what I was really surprised about was that she did no homework,” he said. “I thought, these shows aren’t supposed to be judged on their first day, but I was judging the process—and I thought, oh God, we’re really in it. If you watch those first four to six months of episodes, you could see she wasn’t prepared. The interviews were awful, and there was no week-to-week, month-to-month improvement. I never could figure it out. I thought, okay, she’s been essentially in the most horrible environment, stand-up comedy—but that process is completely different from running a show. But instead of giving it up to professionals, because of her paranoia, she turned it over to her husband and became immediately defensive. The mistake we made was because of how good she was on The Tonight Show, but The Tonight Show was produced by Freddie de Cordova, and it was a totalitarian regime. What I know from Carson was that that show was a precision instrument. She didn’t have to do anything, because they did everything.”
The opposite of a totalitarian regime, The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers was more like a hydra-headed monster, with each serpent fighting to the death for control of the whole organism. “The show was not well reviewed, and then it was a natural implosion that turned to a lot of recriminations,” Diller said.
As her corporate overlords grew ever more anxious about her prospects, Rivers found herself under pressure in the one inviolate area where she would brook no opposition: the question of comedic content. She always insisted that no one had the right to tell her what was funny and what wasn’t—least of all a bunch of suits.
And they were suits, which was another problem. The people telling her what to do were men, but Rivers saw women as the core of her audience, and she felt that the executives opposing her instincts simply didn’t understand who she was.
“I don’t want to be Carson. I don’t want to be Letterman,” she told them. “I want to be me, my humor, whatever that turns out to mean.” She wasn’t used to having to define it, but her best guess was that it meant “silly, acerbic, female-oriented, gossipy, trying anything.”
Her nemesis remained unmoved. “Barry, very cool, just kept saying, ‘No. It’s not funny,’” Rivers reported.
And so in every particular—from the guests to the comedy to the mechanics of running the show—The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers became an ongoing battleground. Despite The Tonight Show’s opposition, Rivers managed to book celebrities who ranged from Nancy Reagan and Lucille Ball to Eugene McCarthy and Ray Charles. But the atmosphere behind the scenes was toxic.
“Throughout the fall of 1986 the show was two armed camps with little raids conducted back and forth across battle lines, destructive for all concerned,” Rivers said. “To this day I still wonder why Barry allowed the situation to disintegrate so totally.”
Edgar was indisputably a big part of the problem. “He did make a fuss about small things, because he couldn’t make fusses about big things,” said Sue Cameron. “Barry Diller emasculated him, and he was fighting for his own masculinity. He was becoming invisible, and it was very, very hard on him. By that time he knew he wasn’t the best producer for Joan anymore, and Joan knew it too. He had her back, in terms of taking care of Joan, but he really was
n’t the best producer for the show. That was a very hip show, and it was out of Edgar’s bailiwick. Television had become edgier, but Edgar was very old-school. He was a very proper gentleman, but time had moved on, and Edgar hadn’t moved along with it.”
If Edgar generated much of the conflict, Rivers wasn’t exactly a model of statesmanship; rising above the fray with dignity was never her style. Infuriated with Diller and his henchmen, Rivers decided to hide a fish in the executive greenroom, which was nicknamed Diller Acres, and gloat over their inability to figure out where the stench was coming from. “Talk about childish revenge!” she said later. “That’s for the third grade, not when you have the house on the hill with servants.”
The terrible irony was that the Rosenbergs and their Fox overlords shared the same goal: they all wanted to make the show a success—but no one seemed to know how. “Everyone involved was frantically trying to fix it,” Kimmel wrote in The Fourth Network. Panic bred angry conflict over each decision, no matter how minor its import, and meetings degenerated into shouts and insults.
Confronted by the Rosenbergs’ intransigence on matters large and small, their corporate partners grew increasingly exasperated. “When even the most well-meaning Fox executives tried to make suggestions for improving the program, the Rivers team dismissed them as if they were enemy agents,” Kimmel wrote in The Fourth Network.
“Did it get petty? You know, I’m sure it did,” said Garth Ancier, the former NBC executive who had become head of programming at Fox. “But at the end of the day, it was mostly based on the fact that the show unit was being operated as an armed camp separate from us.”
Kevin Wendle, Ancier’s number two in programming, saw Rivers as squandering potential goodwill with pointless opposition. “It was a shame, because here was a woman with all this talent, and she was so married to her production team that she didn’t want to hear ideas about how to make the show better, really,” Wendle said. “She saw any ideas that we came in with as interference. The more we suggested ways to make the show better, the more she resisted, the more friction there came between her and Fox.”
The Rosenbergs’ paranoia was further exacerbated when they heard that Fox was building a case to break Rivers’s contract while simultaneously conducting a campaign to drive her to the snapping point in hopes that she herself would breach the contract.
The disputes deteriorated from the petty to the ridiculous; when Fox prohibited Edgar from riding to the studio with his wife in her limousine, she said she would take Edgar’s Mercedes and the limo could follow her. “It was beyond childish,” said Dorothy Melvin. “It was a game of who was more powerful.”
One tantrum followed another until the bloodlust for winning at any cost eclipsed any sane perspective on what was at stake in a given altercation. “Edgar’s friend Tom Pileggi said to them, ‘Remember who signs your checks,’ which would have been very good advice for them to heed,” said Melvin. “For Edgar, everything was about the need to feel important, and Joan was the kind of woman who always thought she had to support her husband. But Joan had totally, completely misjudged Barry. I don’t think Joan ever foresaw that this would tear down the entire house of cards, but how could you even begin to think you’re going to go against Barry Diller? It was absurd. Edgar should have been very frightened of Barry Diller, but he felt Barry needed Joan in order to build his network. He thought Barry needed them more than they needed him.”
When the office bookshelves arrived and turned out to be shorter than Edgar wanted, he obsessed on the problem until even Rivers had to face the fact that he was cracking under the strain. “That was when I knew I was in deep, deep trouble,” she said. “It was the first time in twenty-one years that I could not reach him on a rational level.”
Edgar’s distress became so visible that close friends grew deeply concerned. “One day he had been looking awful and Joan said, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with him,’” Cameron said. “I grabbed Edgar, pushed him into a bathroom at Fox, and said, ‘What’s wrong?’ He said, ‘I’m very depressed, I have gout, I have ulcers, I have heart issues, I have no energy—I just don’t feel well.’ He was losing it. I was really, really worried, and I told Joan.”
One night Edgar and Joan had a bad fight, and Edgar slept in Melissa’s room. The next morning Joan left the house while her husband was still in bed, only to receive an urgent call during a meeting with her segment producers. It was Edgar, who sounded drunk and was mumbling incoherently. She finally made out something he was trying to communicate: “I think I’m having a stroke,” he said.
At least that was how Joan described it in Still Talking—but Melvin remembers it differently. “Joan was blaming Edgar for the fall of the show, because he butted heads with Barry Diller. So Edgar took a pill and called Joan and said, ‘I’ve just taken an overdose,’” Melvin reported. “He was at the house, and we were out in Burbank Studios, and we went to the hospital in an ambulance with sirens blaring. It was a fabricated suicide attempt—he only took one pill. It was a cry for help.”
Whatever Edgar’s motives, his wife discerned the deeper meaning behind his impaired state. “I think psychologically he was ill with the fear that he was more and more unnecessary, that I was subtly slipping away from him,” Rivers said.
But the Fox show was also slipping away from her. In February of 1987, Rivers was told that she would no longer be allowed to supervise her writers and segment producers, to give them any directions or make any decisions. “I would become a puppet,” she said.
Defiant as ever, she and Edgar ignored the directive and continued to function as they had before. But her bosses weren’t kidding. On March 20, a routine meeting devolved into a bitter argument that ended when Diller walked in, stripped Edgar of all his responsibilities as executive producer, and banned him from the set.
Enraged, Edgar lashed out at him. “You’re a tinhorn dictator,” he said. “I’m a rich man. I don’t need this!”
“Go fuck yourself,” Diller replied.
Rivers’s reaction sealed her fate. “I should have told Edgar to shut up,” she admitted in Still Talking. But instead, “I chose my husband,” she said. “And I would do it again.”
The reasons were rooted in her lifelong beliefs about the deference a wife owed her husband, no matter what the cost. She and Edgar had been married for twenty-two years, and her identity as a wife was crucial to her sense of who she was in the world. Her staff still called her Mrs. Rosenberg, and Mrs. Rosenberg couldn’t imagine putting other interests above those of Mr. Rosenberg when there was a conflict.
“I believe that marriage is a total commitment, that once you say ‘Yes’ to somebody, that is it—and I had received the same commitment from my husband,” Rivers said. “That was one thing I doubt Fox ever understood—that the bottom line of my behavior and marriage was loyalty. There is so little of it in life. It is the only thing you have left when everything else between two people is stripped away.”
Her decision made sense to her on an emotional level, but its professional consequences were predictably catastrophic. “We walked out of the meeting with Edgar’s dignity and our marriage intact,” Rivers reported. “But from that moment on we were dead.”
Some industry observers acknowledged that Diller had put Rivers in an excruciating position. “Barry Diller hated Edgar, and Edgar hated Barry Diller,” said radio host Mark Simone. “Barry Diller thought Edgar wasn’t a good producer, and he was right—but you don’t make a wife choose between her husband and her job.”
But the Rosenbergs, seemingly oblivious to Fox’s needs and long-term goals, had also failed to recognize a crucial fact: that by getting Rivers’s show on the air, they had already served their purpose in helping to launch the new network. After that was accomplished, the way they ran the show created so much enmity that they weren’t worth the ongoing effort required to sustain the relationship. When Rivers’s show began, Fox hadn’t yet created any other content, but as the network started to r
oll out other programs, its trailblazer seemed like more trouble than she was worth.
“Now that they were finally operating in prime time, the Fox executives no longer had an interest in prolonging the pain with Joan Rivers,” Daniel Kimmel reported in The Fourth Network. “She had done what they had hired her to do—give the new network some instant legitimacy—but hadn’t been able to move beyond that. In other circumstances her show might have been given a chance to grow, now that Fox had a prime time on which to promote it, but there was just too much bad blood.”
In the end, Fox allowed Rivers only seven months before pulling her off the air. “I think Barry Diller would have given it more time, but the main reason the show got canceled was that he didn’t want to deal with Edgar anymore,” said Mark Simone.
That view was widely shared. “Half the reason the show went off the air was because they couldn’t wait to get rid of Edgar,” said Shelly Schultz. “They hated him because he was a crazy man. He was a bully. He thought he was Cecil B. Fucking DeMille. He gave the impression that he invented Joan Rivers. Joan Rivers invented Joan Rivers. Nobody else invented her. She was a natural.”
While her departure was being negotiated, Rivers continued to go to the studio and do the show. To settle her $15 million contract, she agreed to a payment of a little over $2 million, which included damages for defamation and emotional stress. Although she recognized that most people would consider $2 million a fortune, the deal represented a devastating defeat to her.
“For that money I never would have left Carson and given up the foundation of my life, lost my status, lost fans, been forced to live forever with the perception that my show was a failure,” she said.
That perception also administered the fatal blow to her marriage. “When Barry Diller gave her the ultimatum—fire Edgar or lose the show—she knew it would kill Edgar if she fired him,” said Sue Cameron. “She told me she had to lose the show to save the life of her husband, but she resented him from then on. She was just wild with anger.”
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