After Edgar’s death, Diller made repeated efforts to mend fences. Two years later, Rivers appeared at NATPE, the annual convention for independent television stations, to promote her new daytime talk show. At the end of a long line of people waiting to meet her, she was shocked to see Barry Diller.
“Ten minutes later, when he reached me, he took my hand. ‘I wish you luck,’ he said. ‘I know you do,’ I said,” Rivers reported.
For public consumption, she claimed to have processed her anger and to feel mostly “a terrible sadness” about what had happened at Fox. Under different circumstances, she said, “Barry and I could have been friends and worked well together.”
In 1992, Diller left Fox and purchased a $25 million share in QVC, the television home shopping network where Rivers had started selling her own jewelry and clothing line after Edgar died, when she couldn’t find bookings. The QVC venture had since grown into an important part of Rivers’s income, and she was initially terrified by the news that the man who came so close to destroying her television career would once again be her boss, at QVC. But Diller quickly reassured her with a gracious telephone call, and their dealings remained amicable.
Looking back on the whole saga now, Diller declines to accept any blame for Edgar’s death. “It’s absurd,” he told me. “I’m the first person to take on almost any guilt, but I feel none—zero. I had so little dealings with them. I would never get on the ground and have a fight with him; all my dealings were basically indirect. The problem was that the show failed. It was my responsibility to order the show up, so if that affected him, yes, it’s collateral damage of a kind—but I had no dealings with him and no relationship with him. In the later period, we were adversaries, because the show was failing and we were decision makers. I did at some point take him out of the situation, because it was so destructive. If you terminate somebody, and then they go and commit suicide, yes, you’re a causal agent, probably. But if you’ve acted correctly, and decently—and I have zero issues on that in my history—there are no casualties. This was public: we canceled the show. We did not terminate the show because Edgar Rosenberg was the producer—that’s crazy. We removed him, and I may have been the one who had to tell Joan. But I have no responsibility for Edgar Rosenberg’s death.”
As time passed, Joan apparently decided they were all culpable. “She blamed herself for letting Edgar get involved in the Fox mess when she knew what he was saying was wrong,” said her friend Robert Higdon. “She said, ‘Edgar was wrong. I knew it, but I couldn’t go against my husband.’ She was very aware of the fact that it was a mistake in her career, having her husband be her manager, but she was exceedingly loyal and very traditional. She would use the f-word in her act, but she was like Brooke Astor in some ways. If it’s your husband, you just don’t do certain things; you treat them with respect.”
Despite the surface civility Rivers managed to muster in public, the truth was that she bore grudges forever, and her real feelings about Diller were no exception. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, she often made jokes about the tragedy, and her most shocking was one she aimed at her nemesis. By 2001, fourteen years had passed since Edgar’s death, but Rivers remained furious enough to envision her former boss being incinerated at the top of the World Trade Center on that fateful morning.
Caroline Hirsch retains vivid memories of a particularly shocking example. “The joke I will never forget was when she said, ‘Did you ever think of who you wanted to meet for breakfast at Windows on the World on 9/11? I would have breakfast with Barry Diller,’” said Hirsch, who now owns Carolines on Broadway. “I was like, oh my God! She still held Barry Diller responsible for her husband killing himself and for ruining her career.”
But Rivers also held Edgar responsible. “She said to me once, ‘He tried to be a producer, but he wasn’t a producer,’” Mark Simone recalled. “He thought he could be a manager, and he botched everything. I think she knew he fucked everything up.”
In one of the last interviews Rivers ever gave, a long talk with the Daily Beast in 2014, she said, “When I was fired, he knew it was his fault, and he committed suicide. I always think of Samson pulling down the temple. Edgar just took all the columns away and pulled it down. We were all down in the rubble, and he didn’t want to dig himself out.”
She blamed his decision on cowardice—a luxury she had never permitted herself. “His health was a huge issue, he was just miserable, and he couldn’t imagine fighting his way through another surgery, but Joan thought he was a quitter,” said Blaine Trump. “She didn’t understand weakness.”
Chapter Eleven
Recovery: The Long Road Back
The one-two punch of losing the Fox show and her husband effectively vaporized Rivers’s career. Seemingly overnight, she was transformed from the Queen of Comedy into a social and professional pariah.
A big professional failure would have been hard enough to survive for a fiftysomething woman who had the temerity to break new ground and defy her longtime mentor. “The Johnny Carson thing was huge: he branded her as a traitor,” said Andy Cohen. “She had to completely redefine herself after her husband died. She was not getting booked on Carson or Letterman, and she did not have the sheen of ‘I’m one of the top five comedians in the country.’”
But the double whammy inflicted by Edgar’s suicide added immeasurably to Rivers’s public image problems as well as to her private grief. When he killed himself, the shock among insiders in the media and entertainment industries generated horrified gossip about why he had committed such a violent act and what that signified for his bereaved wife.
“We all were so staggered that he killed himself,” said Liz Smith. “Joan and I were not real friends, but Edgar liked me, because nobody ever paid any attention to him. I thought he was a real nice man, but later other friends told me that he had mismanaged her career. I hate to say this, but I think he wasn’t good enough for her. I just felt that Joan had arrived and he hadn’t kept up. Maybe that’s why he killed himself.”
Others were even more blunt: one friend said his immediate reaction to news of Edgar’s death was that “Joan’s life is going to be ten thousand times better without him.”
But in the immediate aftermath of Edgar’s suicide, such a prospect seemed unthinkable to Rivers. As usual, she tried to put up a good front, and her coping mechanisms revolved around humor—but that strategy was sometimes misconstrued, even by her intimates.
A decade after her husband’s suicide, Rivers finally chronicled her gradual return to mental health in Bouncing Back: I’ve Survived Everything…and I Mean Everything…and You Can Too! In the book, she described the painful breach in her relationship with her daughter that began to fester within days of Edgar’s death.
“At the shiva, I was still able to laugh, but Melissa went deeper into her shell, which profoundly upset me,” Rivers wrote. “She was appalled by my telling jokes just hours after Edgar’s funeral. Where were my tears?…What she didn’t understand was that my feelings were so overwhelming that I was able to deal with them only in the way that I had always dealt with pain: by laughing through my tears.”
But Rivers quickly learned that this tack often generated visible opprobrium. After the week of shiva ended, she and Melissa went to a Los Angeles restaurant one night for dinner. When Joan opened the menu, she commented, “If Daddy saw these prices, he’d kill himself all over again!”
“For the first time since the suicide, Melissa laughed,” Joan reported. “Anger left her eyes, and I saw the old sparkle there. I also saw every head in the restaurant turn toward us disapprovingly. Her husband dead a week, and they’re laughing!”
Wherever she went, Rivers found herself under scrutiny, and people seemed all too ready to pass harsh judgments on her behavior. “About four months after Edgar died, I was in a coffee shop with friends and one of them cracked a good joke. I laughed hard,” Rivers reported. “And then a complete stranger came over and said, one slow cold word at a time, ‘I. K
new. Your. Husband.’”
Although some observers respected Rivers’s obvious determination to carry on, others apparently felt she should be weeping and rending her garments behind closed doors. “I thought Joan conducted herself in an admirable way,” Liz Smith said. “Shortly after the funeral, she went away on a cruise, and a friend of mine told me that on the trip, ‘we called her the merry widow.’ That began to go around, and Joan was outraged. She called herself that. She made a joke out of everything, including Edgar’s death.”
Rivers also tried to distract herself with constant activity. “She said, ‘Now we’re going to go Jewish skiing. Don’t say no. Don’t be stupid. I’m taking you,’” Sue Cameron reported. “So Melissa and Joan and I and our hairdresser went to Salt Lake City in a limo, and went to Deer Valley, to the Stein Eriksen Lodge.”
Cameron was unfamiliar with the rules of Joan’s favorite sport, but her friend was happy to explain. “Jewish skiing is this: You get up in the morning and the lodge brings you breakfast,” Cameron said. “Around eleven in the morning, you take the tram to the ski area, where you’re in a heated shed. Joan’s skiing outfit was black ski pants, black suede cowboy hat, black fitted Chanel parka, and jewelry. She looked fabulous. The instructor comes with you, and you go down the bunny hill two or three times, and then it’s ‘Okay—lunch!’ You go and have lunch, and after lunch you go on one more ride, and then Joan goes, ‘Okay, time to go home.’ There are one or two masseuses waiting for us in the condo, and we all get massages, take naps, and have showers. Max does everyone’s hair, and then you go into town and have dinner, and then go to the old vintage clothing store. Park City is where we found two matching Temptations jackets, electric blue with black satin lapels. We each bought one, so we became Temptations for a week.”
Despite such diversions, finding work remained Rivers’s overriding priority, and she felt real panic when her agent told her no one wanted to book a comedian whose husband committed suicide. Her career was “ice-cold,” she said—the hardship she had always feared most.
In truth, it was only two months after Edgar’s death when Rivers got the opportunity to perform again. This was her chance to do spin control and set the tone for the next chapter of her career. As soon as she took the stage at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, she went right for a suicide joke in a preemptive strike.
“I wanted the audience to see I was able to deal with it and so should they—and not have them sitting there through the whole act waiting for it to come up,” she wrote in Still Talking. “I steeled myself for the first joke: ‘My whole life has been so horrendous this year—as many of you may know—because of my husband’s suicide and being fired by Fox. Thank God my husband left in his will that I should cremate him and then scatter his ashes in Neiman Marcus. That way he knew he would see me five times a week.’ When I had their laughter and their relief, I knew the show was going to be okay.”
As time went on, Rivers added other suicide jokes to her repertoire. “My husband killed himself. And it was my fault. We were making love and I took the bag off my head,” she said.
She also made similar cracks with Melissa, firmly convinced that they were helpful. When she took her daughter back to college in Philadelphia, Rivers was appalled by the “hovel” where she was living in off-campus housing near the University of Pennsylvania.
“Melissa, I’m glad your father is dead. If he saw this, he would kill himself again,” she said.
“We laughed. It was our first healing moment,” Rivers reported in Still Talking.
But Melissa had her own burden of anger and sorrow to process. “Melissa blamed Joan for her father’s suicide,” said Cameron. “Edgar was already so depressed that Melissa felt Joan’s leaving him at that time pushed him right over the edge. They did discuss divorce before Edgar’s suicide, and that’s why Melissa got so angry with her mother. She felt her mother was just throwing her father away completely, and she felt that contributed to Edgar’s suicide. He couldn’t think of a way out, but he was medically depressed, and he wasn’t in his right mind when he killed himself. If he hadn’t done that, they would probably have been separated for a few weeks and Joan would have taken him back.”
In 1993, Rivers told People magazine that the painful estrangement from her daughter lasted for a year after Edgar’s death. “‘The way I see it,’ explains Joan, ‘Melissa blamed me.’ After all, Joan and Edgar had only recently separated when he killed himself. ‘But,’ says Joan, ‘she wasn’t going to turn to me by the casket and say, “You killed Daddy!”’ Instead, Joan says, anger simmered under the surface as the two ‘tried to go on with our own lives and were both so broken that we couldn’t help each other…I was totally alone, with no career, no husband, no child. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I really thought about suicide myself.’”
People added, “For her part, Melissa avoided Joan, blaming her mother and feeling abandoned. ‘I didn’t want to know [what my mother was feeling],’ she says. ‘It was her problem. I was going through my own thing.’”
Melissa always believed that her father was misunderstood and his contributions to Joan’s career insufficiently appreciated. Her grief at losing him was exacerbated when her mother started to date other men with what Melissa saw as unseemly haste. “Melissa began to criticize me constantly,” Rivers reported. “She couldn’t understand that I had to be busy all the time to maintain my sanity, something I hadn’t always taken good care of.”
When one man invited Rivers and her daughter to spend Thanksgiving with him, Melissa was outraged, according to her mother. “‘If we’re not having dinner at home, I’m not coming!’ she cried. ‘We belong at home, in California. Daddy’s body isn’t even cold. Mother, how could you plan a holiday with some other man? How could you!’”
Beset by challenges of every kind, Rivers felt completely overwhelmed. Her husband and her job had vanished, her daughter was furious with her, and she was terrified of the future. She had no one to lean on; her father had died in 1985, ten years after her mother, and Joan felt responsible for her sister, who was widowed in 1977, as well as for Barbara’s children. But they lived on the other side of the country, as did Melissa. Without a pressing schedule of professional commitments, Joan didn’t know what to do with herself. When she went out seeking respite from sadness, she was racked by wild mood swings—the manic life of the party one minute, a sobbing wreck the next. Her beloved family home seemed big and empty, and she was desperately lonely.
But Rivers also wondered whether her unwelcome solitude might be haunted by Edgar’s unquiet presence. She and her staff joked that if Edgar ever came back, the dog would bite him, and the dog suddenly started barking at senseless times for no apparent reason, refusing to shut up even when Rivers tried to wrestle him physically into submission—not usually a difficult task with a Yorkshire terrier.
Other unsettling portents kept intruding on her fragile state of mind. “Every night at ten of seven, Edgar’s alarm clock would ring, and nobody could shut it off,” Rivers reported. “We would turn up the temperature on the air conditioner and come back to find it down to ice-cold, the way he liked it.”
Rivers believed in ghosts, and some in her inner circle insisted that Edgar was manifesting himself to them. One day their bookkeeper mentioned that she’d been pouring coffee when Edgar walked through the kitchen, dressed in his pink shirt and beige pants. Several days later Rivers’s assistant said she saw him on his way upstairs, wearing the same outfit.
Torn between fear and indignation that her noncorporeal husband made himself visible to others while neglecting to visit her, Rivers called a Catholic church and asked for an exorcist to come to the house. The priest forgot his holy water, but he went from room to room, praying for peace in the Rosenbergs’ home. “I prayed for peace in Edgar’s soul,” Rivers said.
If Edgar was lurking, however, he wasn’t helping his baffled wife to deal with the mechanics of her physical environment. From operating the burglar alar
m and the VCR to coping with the business affairs that Edgar always took care of, Rivers realized that she had no idea how to manage many of the practical functions necessary for her to lead an independent life.
Money was another unexpected issue. Before Edgar died, he revised his will and left everything to Melissa, and Rivers soon discovered that she had serious financial problems. “I was $37 million in debt,” Rivers told Esquire magazine in 2007.
“He was not in his right mind, because of the drugs he was on, and he was making terrible business decisions and investments,” explained Martyn Fletcher, Rivers’s London hairdresser. “He invested in companies that were going down, and he left her in such terrible financial shape. Joan said if he came back she would kill him again for doing that.”
Her accountant said she had to cut her huge overhead, so she started worrying about whether to sell the house or reduce her staff. But Rivers was woefully unprepared to assume responsibility for economic decisions. “Without Edgar, I was a financial idiot,” she said.
Feeling that every aspect of her life was spiraling into chaos, Rivers turned to one thing she could control: her body. Compulsively gobbling sweets in regular bouts of stress-related eating, she started making herself throw up so she wouldn’t gain weight—and soon became a full-fledged bulimic.
It took years for Rivers to recover fully from the shock, grief, guilt, and anger she felt about losing her husband, and some of the scars would last forever. But staying strong for Melissa was always her overriding concern—and her most powerful hedge against despair. “I decided that for Melissa’s sake I had to keep going,” Joan said. “Otherwise, I would give her the same message as Edgar—that suicide is the only way out. So I felt she had to see me climb out of the well.”
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