And Edgar was unable to absorb the blow. His intimates failed to realize it, but by this point he had been contemplating suicide for some time. “About two months before he died, I was having lunch at Le Dome and he came over to me and said, ‘There’s something I want to ask you. Promise me you will always take care of Melissa,’” Cameron recalled. “Melissa was absolutely the apple of her father’s eye, and I said, ‘Of course,’ but I didn’t pick up on what that meant.”
The news that Rivers’s program was being canceled broke on May 15, when she hosted her final show. Fox was so desperate to get rid of her that it handled her departure in a way that still astonishes industry insiders. “What was incredible is that Fox dropped Rivers in the middle of the May ratings sweeps,” Daniel Kimmel explained in The Fourth Network. “The ‘sweeps’ are the periodic measurements of the home TV audience that are used to establish advertising rates.”
Dumping their signature show at such a crucial juncture caused intense consternation among Fox’s affiliates. Reported Kimmel: “‘You just don’t make a change like that in the middle of a ratings book [the report of the sweeps period], and if the Fox people were thinking like broadcasters, they wouldn’t have done it,’ said one disgruntled general manager—Dennis Thatcher of WOIO, Fox’s Cleveland affiliate.”
After Rivers left, The Late Show carried on for a while with Arsenio Hall as host, and then limped to its final fate with Ross Shafer before being canceled in October of 1988. In retrospect, the verdict on Joan’s effort would be succinct: “The show was doomed and disappeared in six months. Johnny Carson had prevailed again,” Bill Carter wrote in The Late Shift.
Rivers was still angry with Carson, and she felt tremendous fury toward Fox and Barry Diller—but she also blamed her husband. “I was deciding very, very deep in my heart that if Edgar had not been involved, I would have made the show work,” she confessed. “I saw myself throwing away everything I had wanted since the day I was conscious in order to save this man’s pride. Too, somewhere in myself, I was looking to Edgar to save me—I had always looked to him—and he had failed.”
Some cynics just shrugged and concluded that both Rivers and Rosenberg had simply been outclassed by a more lethal opponent. “Barry Diller is not a success because he’s not ruthless and smart,” Liz Smith said dryly. “Barry is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Joan just encountered somebody who was more ruthless and smart than she was.”
As Fox replaced Rivers with a series of other hosts on The Late Show, she found herself without work—always the source of her greatest anxiety—and grappling with the question of what her career might be without the Fox program or The Tonight Show. Television had always served as the essential foundation for her stand-up bookings, but now she was left without an outlet to give her such consistent national visibility.
She also had to confront the fact that her partnership with Edgar was irrevocably damaged by the demise of their show. The atmosphere at home grew poisonous. “I realized that this man, who had built his life on being my champion, had turned against me. I had become his Barry Diller,” Rivers said. “Even the simplest exchanges became loaded and dangerous.”
She told Edgar they had to get professional help, but he rejected the idea of marriage counseling, insisting that they could work out their problems on their own. Despite his protests, other intimates sensed the depth of his distress, and Sue Cameron had a terrible premonition. “About two weeks before he died, I woke up crying in the middle of the night,” she reported. “In my dream, Edgar had died. I felt his death with my whole body. I was lying there and it was like the life went out of my body.”
Exasperated by Edgar’s obstinacy, Rivers finally resorted to threatening him: while out of town on a business trip, she said she wouldn’t come home until he agreed to accept some form of intensive treatment.
By this time, her intimates thought she was really sick of the whole situation. One confidant was Tommy Corcoran, whom she considered her best friend until his death several years later. “Tommy said Joan had been putting up with so much shit for so many years, and when the Fox thing happened, she was like, ‘I can’t stand this anymore’—and she left him,” said Pete Hathaway, a close friend of both Corcoran and Rivers.
With the threat of separation hanging over him, Edgar finally capitulated, saying that he would do as his wife asked—but only after he made a quick trip to Philadelphia to see his best friend, Tom Pileggi, whom he described as “the brother I never had.” Melissa had persuaded him that talking to Pileggi would be helpful, so Edgar flew to Philadelphia, checked into the Four Seasons, and spent three days with Pileggi, going over voluminous records of everything the Rosenbergs owned. As usual, Edgar was focused on getting their affairs in order, which meant attending to every detail.
He and Pileggi also made several trips to an eighty-seven-acre site in Bucks County where they had once hoped to build a controversial development called Two Ponds. One of several real estate projects that Pileggi and the Rosenbergs were involved in, it was eventually abandoned because of intense local opposition.
Beset by medical, professional, financial, and emotional woes, Edgar continued to argue with Joan on the telephone. She wasn’t the only one who thought he needed help; his doctor wanted to put him in the hospital in a psychiatric unit, but Edgar refused. At one point he even told his wife, “I’m so depressed I’m going to kill myself,” but she didn’t take the threat seriously.
“I remember making a flip joke: ‘Don’t do it till Friday, because Thursday I’m going under anesthesia,’” said Rivers, who had scheduled liposuction to be performed at a hospital in Los Angeles.
As she had hoped, Edgar laughed.
But he made the same remark to Pileggi, who immediately called Joan to say that he wanted to check Edgar into a hospital in Philadelphia. Again Edgar refused, and he made his friend a promise. “I won’t do anything foolish,” he told Pileggi.
Another remark Edgar made to Pileggi would haunt his wife when its chilling implications became clear after his death: “Pride can kill a man, and that’s all I have left.” And yet everyone close to Edgar believed that he would never actually commit suicide. “We all thought he was too much of a control freak, had too much pride to say, ‘I’ve lost,’ was too rational for suicide—which he used to call ‘a permanent solution to a temporary problem,’” Rivers said.
Given Edgar’s habitual secretiveness, it was easy to underestimate the depths of his despair. “After his death, his psychiatrist was surprised,” said Melvin. “He said, ‘We were both big fans of Winston Churchill, and all we ever talked about was Churchill.’”
Edgar finally agreed to check into a hospital soon after he arrived back in Los Angeles, and Pileggi arranged for security to check his hotel room every hour during the night before his flight. Meanwhile, Edgar continued to make his usual meticulous plans for the immediate future. He asked Melvin to arrange limousines to take him from his hotel to the Philadelphia airport and to pick him up at the airport in Los Angeles. He told her to have his accountant meet him at his house at 9 a.m. on Saturday and then to arrange for another limo to take him to the hospital at 10 a.m. “It was a normal conversation,” Melvin said.
From Philadelphia, Edgar also made an appointment for a doctor to check him out physically at the hospital before he went into therapy. He even arranged for a security guard to be posted at his hospital room door in Los Angeles.
On Thursday afternoon, he called his daughter from Pileggi’s office, told her he was coming home on Friday, and promised not to harm himself. Before leaving Pileggi for the evening, he agreed to meet him the next morning for breakfast, and once again promised not to do anything foolish. He asked his friend to call off the hourly security checks at the hotel so he could get a good night’s sleep, and Pileggi agreed.
On his way back to the Four Seasons, Edgar stopped at a barbershop and had his beard shaved off. He also bought a tape recorder and three blank tapes. At the hotel, he ph
oned Melvin to ask whether she had reconfirmed his flights and limos.
When Melissa called him that evening, she thought he sounded good enough that she didn’t need to phone him again later that night. Pileggi called and Edgar reassured him as well, saying, “I’m fine. I’ll see you for breakfast.” His psychiatrist phoned from Los Angeles, and Edgar said he was coming home to enter intensive therapy.
Then he recorded three farewell messages—one for his wife, one for his daughter, and one for Pileggi—and put them in three separate hotel envelopes, adding his Rolex watch and his gold money clip to the one for Melissa. He marked each envelope with three Xs for kisses. He left tips in other envelopes for the maid, the bellhop, and the maître d’ at the hotel restaurant. He put business papers and instructions in a manila envelope and addressed it to Joan Rosenberg. He left out a note listing the people who should be notified of his death, packed his bag, and unlocked the door. He leaned a picture of Joan and Melissa against the bedside lamp.
“Then he swallowed the bottles of Valium and Librium he had been saving,” Rivers reported. “Next, completing the combination he knew had killed the columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, he removed the miniature scotch and brandy bottles from the courtesy bar and methodically drank them from a tumbler.”
Some of their friends think Edgar was bluffing again. “I don’t believe he actually meant to die,” Melvin said. “To this day, I’m convinced that it was another cry for help gone wrong. He left the hotel door ajar, and he made it easy to be found. Because the one pill didn’t work, he took a bottle of pills. It looked like he fell and hit his head by the nightstand, so he may have been going to call for help when he fell and hit his head and it knocked him out. There was a list of phone numbers by the phone—doctors to call, numbers you wouldn’t need if you were going to die. I think it was a big show.”
Rivers herself felt as confused as she believed Edgar had been. “I guess I think that during all those days of mixed messages, he wanted in his head to die and in his heart to live,” she said. “I think he was throwing out cries for help to bring me back, but people get enmeshed in their stratagems until they don’t know if attempting suicide is a game or feel, by God, I’ve got to do it.”
Joan was obviously fed up with Edgar. “She was done,” Melvin acknowledged. “She saw that she had no life with him, and she would always blame him for the loss of her show and The Tonight Show. As far as she was concerned, he ruined her career. She could see clearly that anything she did to rebuild her career would be negatively impacted by Edgar, and that he just couldn’t be part of it—but without Joan, Edgar didn’t have anything. And he knew he was losing Joan.”
But her husband’s perspective was different. “I think Edgar felt very much the victim,” Melvin said. “I don’t think he felt responsible. He didn’t want Joan to leave, and he was not angry at himself. I think it was more of a ‘poor, pitiful me.’”
Edgar arranged his death the same way he handled everything else: with compulsive exactitude. “It was a very final action,” said Cameron. “Everything was in order. His financial affairs were in bad shape because of a bad deal with Tom Pileggi, and they had huge overhead, but he left Melissa all the money.”
Edgar died on August 14, 1987. He was sixty-two years old. Since Joan was in the hospital undergoing liposuction, it was nineteen-year-old Melissa—at home in Los Angeles, where she was getting ready to return to college in Philadelphia at the end of the summer—who received the call that her father’s body had just been found in a Philadelphia hotel room.
So it was Melissa who had to call the house staff together and organize the secretaries to notify friends and acquaintances, Melissa who summoned Dorothy Melvin back from a trip to Oklahoma, Melissa who began planning her father’s funeral. And it was Melissa who had to break the news to her mother. “I could remember, as if it were a century ago, waiting in the hospital room that morning after minor surgery, and Melissa suddenly appearing, short of breath from running,” Rivers wrote later. “She said, ‘Daddy’s dead.’”
Recalling that day in a 2005 interview with her mother on CNN’s Larry King Live, Melissa remembered her first reaction as “complete and total disbelief,” she told Joan. “Then the thought of getting to you, because we were not in the same place, before someone else did, so that became the pressing moment for me. I remember you were at the end of a very long hallway, and it was like a very sort of Hitchcockian moment when I saw you walking out of a door and it was one of those moments where you feel like you’re running but the hallway keeps stretching. It was incredibly surreal. It wasn’t happening. I was watching myself go through the motions. It was almost a physical disconnect for me.”
Joan’s first reaction was to be overcome with guilt. “I moaned over and over, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,’” she said. “In my head I screamed the words, ‘What have I done? What have I done?’ If I had made that one phone call to Edgar saying, ‘Come home,’ he would still be alive. I had killed Edgar as surely as though I had pulled a trigger.”
The shock was followed by a surreal numbness that soon gave way to rage when Rivers found herself sitting on the bathroom floor at home, screaming “You bastard!” to the husband who had abandoned her and their daughter.
“She was really furious with him, and what he did to Melissa,” said Margie Stern, who became Joan’s close friend in later years. “I think he was a failure, and her career was going downhill because of him. Suicide is the ultimate ‘Fuck you.’ I think he said, ‘See you later.’”
Edgar’s other intimates were as blindsided as his family. “I went up to Kim Novak’s house in Carmel to visit, and her husband called me and said, ‘Edgar Rosenberg just committed suicide,’” Cameron reported. “It was terrible; they had to get an escort for me to get on the plane. When I got to Los Angeles, I went right to the house. Joan was sitting on the couch. She wasn’t crying or anything; she was just furious. She was so angry at Edgar for deserting Melissa. She said, ‘I don’t care if he wanted to leave me, but you don’t do that to a child.’”
Although Edgar made methodical preparations for his death, he failed to foresee at least one major logistical problem he created by killing himself in a Pennsylvania hotel room. When the medical examiner’s office refused to release his body, Joan—in desperation—finally called the First Lady. “Edgar killed himself in Philadelphia and I couldn’t get the body out of there,” Rivers told the Daily Beast in 2014. “My daughter was going mad. I thought, ‘I’ll call the White House.’ It was 2 a.m. there. I said, ‘It’s Joan Rivers and it’s an emergency. I must speak to Mrs. Reagan.’ They woke her up…I said, ‘I can’t get Edgar’s body out of Philadelphia.’ She said, ‘Let me see what I can do.’ The next day his body came back to L.A. Nancy Reagan got Edgar’s body out of Philadelphia for me. You don’t forget that, especially when the chips are down.”
Edgar’s funeral was held at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, and a thousand people came, from Milton Berle, Elton John, Barbara Walters, and Kirk Douglas to Cher, Bea Arthur, Jon Voight, and Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley. But Edgar’s best friend refused to attend; when Edgar promised Tom Pileggi that he wouldn’t do anything foolish, Pileggi had replied, “If you do, I won’t come to your funeral!”—and he kept his word.
Another absentee was Rivers’s former mentor, who had introduced her to her husband. “I was amazed that I never heard a syllable from Johnny Carson,” Rivers said. “Forgetting that Hollywood is purely a business town, I thought he would have, for a moment, remembered that he had known Edgar even before I did, and let bygones be bygones.”
Rivers handled the logistical requirements of her husband’s death with her usual correctness. “After the funeral, we came back and Joan did everything perfectly,” Cameron said. “We sat shiva for eight nights, and she had a different fabulous restaurant cater it every night. She knew exactly what to do in terms of manners, which is why Melissa did everything perfectly when Joan died.”
Joan’s deepe
st grief continued to focus on her daughter. “The only time I saw her cry was about Melissa,” Cameron said. “She would hang back in the kitchen, and she grabbed onto the doorjamb and said, ‘Look at Melissa—she doesn’t have a father! How could he do that?’”
To compound her pain, Edgar’s suicide recalled agonizing memories of her mother’s death. They had quarreled right before Beatrice died of a heart attack, so Joan felt as though she had precipitated it—and now she felt as if she had murdered Edgar. Her remorse about having told him he couldn’t come home was so acute that she couldn’t even bring herself to listen to his farewell tape, but she did read a transcript of his final message to her.
“I cannot bear to be shunted aside and be a fifth wheel,” Edgar had written. “I know this is not your fault. This is all my doing. I had the heart attack, and I’m a changed person. But believe me, when I fought, I always fought for you.”
With Edgar gone, there was no one fighting for Rivers, and her problems quickly multiplied. “A week or two later, she was completely alone, sitting in the kitchen, crying,” Cameron reported. “She said, ‘I have been blackballed by everyone. I have no nightclub engagements, no personal appearances. They don’t think a woman whose husband committed suicide can be funny. I am now a single woman and I have been dropped by every social list; they consider me a threat. I have nothing here.’ They really did have big problems. She couldn’t get a job as a comic.”
Melissa had a strong opinion about whom to blame for their troubles. “Melissa referred to Barry Diller as ‘the man who murdered my father,’” Cameron said.
But for Joan, assigning responsibility was more complicated. “She hated Barry Diller, and she was very angry with him, but she also knew he had a valid point,” Cameron said. “She recognized that Edgar’s behavior was not helpful. She blamed both Barry and Edgar, because they put her in the position of basically having to cancel her own show.”
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