At Joan’s insistence, they went into therapy, both separately and together, in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. In the past, Joan had always rejected the idea of psychiatry, afraid that if she explored the demons that drove her, any resolution might sap her drive or deplete her comedic material. But now, not knowing where else to turn, she found solace in seeing a therapist. As time went on, she became a fervent advocate who credited therapy with facilitating her own healing process and recommended it enthusiastically to others.
In her self-help book, Bouncing Back, she described many of the techniques she had used to aid her recovery, starting with a quick exercise to help others suffering from major blows to assess their situation. “Take out some paper or a notebook and in a few short sentences, write down the basic headlines of your challenge or your loss,” she recommended. “If I had known to do this after Edgar’s suicide, my statement would have looked like this:
“My husband of twenty-two years killed himself. My career is over. I am a widow, and my daughter, the most important person on earth to me, is now fatherless. Despite the fact that we live in a big house and have nice things, we are, because of bad investments, nearly broke.”
Her career seemed to have reached its nadir in Los Angeles, and Rivers decided it would be impossible to build a viable new life there. “Hollywood was a company town where nothing mattered except my current low status in the business,” she said.
Her personal prospects appeared equally bleak. Like many divorcées and widows, even those whose husbands hadn’t killed themselves, Rivers believed she was being dropped from guest lists and frozen out of the social scene by wives who saw a newly single woman as a threat. A lifelong culture vulture and a passionate theatergoer, she found herself visiting New York with increasing frequency, hungry for the kind of stimulation that was harder to find in Los Angeles.
She was deeply attached to her elaborately decorated house on Ambazac, and Melissa was horrified at the idea of selling the family home, but Joan decided it was time to go back where she came from and build a different kind of life for herself. Scouting for a new residence in Manhattan, she found an unusual apartment that was originally two eighteen-foot-high ballrooms, separated by a sliding door, in a Gilded Age mansion at One East 62nd Street. Built in 1897, the property had deteriorated into a certifiable wreck.
“It was now a broken-down warren of cloakrooms, maids’ rooms, and musicians’ changing rooms, and then vast spaces of no use whatsoever,” Rivers said. “It had been on the market for two and a half years without one bid, and by now plaster was falling from the walls, the floor was coming up. There was major water damage. Edgar never would have bought it.”
But the idea of “creating something from nothing” and making it into the vehicle for her fantasies proved irresistible. Even her financial woes were recast as an incentive: she figured that taking on such a project would jump-start her motivation to earn serious money as soon as possible. So Rivers bought the place and set about transforming it into the home of her dreams.
Given the decrepitude of the property, its renovation was a lengthy process, so Rivers took up temporary residence in a hotel for the duration. “She had a suite at the Carlyle, but she was such a nester she asked the management if she could recover the sofa,” reported the writer Jenny Allen, noting that Rivers filled her hotel room with stacks of books on the bedside table and personal touches like a needlepoint pillow embroidered with the famous Dorothy Parker line “What fresh hell is this?”
Allen was writing an Architectural Digest story about Rivers’s elaborate house in Los Angeles, and she was struck by the parallels between that place and the new trophy home Rivers was creating in Manhattan. “I’m always interested in women who make a big physical presence in the world, and Joan certainly did that,” Allen observed. “The homes she owned weren’t just tucked-away private aeries she could nestle in. They were big, and she wanted the town house to be big—as big as her public persona, even though that was in conflict with her private persona.”
When Rivers was widowed, she also faced the challenge of creating a different kind of social life for herself. “I met her when she moved to New York,” said Blaine Trump, who became a close friend. “Billy Norwich had gotten to know her, and he said, ‘Let’s have dinner.’ I expected a really brassy, crude Hollywood person, but she was very different from what I expected. She really wasn’t working, and she’d just been told by Barry Diller that she’d never work in Hollywood again. And she was mad as hell at Edgar. She was angry at the scars it left for Melissa.”
Rivers’s anger was visible to everyone, but Trump suspected that she also felt a greater sense of personal loss than she was willing to acknowledge. “She really loved him,” Trump said. “She really loved that he was ‘classy,’ that he had taste, that he was sophisticated, that he was worldly. That was important to her.”
George Hamilton was another friend who thought Joan was in denial about the extent of her own grief. “She was devastated,” he said. “I think she dearly missed him. She felt he’d left her. That was a partnership that ran very deep, I thought. Edgar was more like the master of ceremonies, there to introduce her. There are so many people like that—the strength behind someone. I think Joan had to have him to be herself.”
Without her husband or child, Rivers had to find other ways to fill the enormous vacuum created by their absence. In Manhattan, she might have devoted her energy to infiltrating various parts of the entertainment industry, whether in comedy, television, theater, or any of the other cultural worlds she loved so much. Instead, she sought out new friends who—like Edgar when they first met so long ago—seemed to personify class.
“Being part of society meant being accepted,” said Blaine Trump, an A-list socialite who was then married to Donald Trump’s brother Robert. “I think Joan was so scared by her mother and the idea that ‘she’s not going to amount to anything’ that that never left her. She always gauged her success on how people accepted her. She would say, ‘You won’t believe it—I was at the A table!’”
As Rivers made new friends, one of the first things they noticed was her thoughtfulness. “You’d be having dinner, and you’d say, ‘I haven’t read that book,’ and she’d say, ‘I’ll send it to you,’” Trump said. “With most people, it would never arrive, but she forgot nothing. She had a mind like a steel trap.”
But her emotional generosity extended far beyond superficial gestures. To a startlingly wide range of people, Rivers was someone who could always be relied upon in a crisis. “I went through a really dark couple of years, and she was the most caring, wonderful friend you could ever have,” said Trump. “When you’re going through tough times, she was front and center.”
After twenty-four years of marriage, Blaine discovered that her husband, Robert, was having a long-running affair with a girlfriend who worked in the Trump family real estate office in Brooklyn. “He had a whole other life with this woman for a long time, and when Joan found out, she went crazy,” Trump said. “She invited him to dinner at Isle of Capri, his favorite restaurant, and she just let him have it. She called me afterward and said, ‘I just want you to know I did this.’”
Blaine was devastated by her husband’s betrayal. “New York society queen Blaine Trump was so despondent when she found out her beloved husband, Robert Trump, was having an affair, she had an ‘accidental overdose’ on pills, several friends confirmed to Page Six,” the New York Post reported. “In October 2004, Blaine ended up staying at Mount Sinai for several days after she learned Robert had bought a $3.7 million house on Long Island for his girlfriend, Ann Marie Pallan, and, to make matters worse, was leaving her for Pallan.”
Rivers’s response was brisk and bracing. “Joan said, ‘Get rid of him! Good! Glad he’s gone! It’s over. It’s done. Move on. Look at this as a positive. Your life is going to be so much happier and better,’” Trump said. “As it turns out, I do have a much better life, and Joan was a big part of the initial healing p
rocess. She was a big cheerleader for me.”
But healing took time; the Trumps’ divorce was bitter and protracted, and it coincided with other emotional blows. “My father died, my best friend died, and there were days when I couldn’t get out of bed,” Blaine said. “Every day, when things were really rough, Joan would call and say, ‘What time do you want to meet?’ A lot of people don’t know how to help you, but her way of helping everyone was laughter. On the darkest days, she always found the humor in everything. She had to try to make you laugh and bring you out of the absurdity of the pain of life. She would call and say, ‘I’m coming over,’ and send a pot of fake flowers with a music box. She was always so funny.”
Rivers expended considerable effort to comfort a friend in need. “When my father had a stroke and died, Joan called me and said, ‘I’m coming,’” Trump said. “I said, ‘Don’t come.’ It was a big trip, but the next day I heard the doorbell ring and the housekeeper yells, ‘Miss Rivers is here!’ She just wouldn’t take no for an answer. I said, ‘What are you doing here?,’ and she said, ‘I just came for twenty minutes. I had to see you and make sure you were okay.’ That was Joan. Her friendship was beyond any friendship.”
Rivers also invented diversions to distract her friend from grief. “One day she said, ‘We’re going to Australia, and we’ll stop in Hong Kong. I’ve booked your ticket,’” Trump reported. “I said, ‘I can’t go.’ She said, ‘You’re going.’ And of course I went.”
Others tell similar stories. Rivers’s London hairdresser, Martyn Fletcher, became a close friend, as did his longtime partner, Digby Trout, a prominent restaurateur. “When Digby found out he had a tumor, she phoned him every day until he died,” said Fletcher. “We were supposed to go to Mexico with Joan at Christmas, but I told her he wasn’t going to be able to travel. She said, ‘If you’re not coming over, I’m coming to you.’ She flew over to have lunch with him, because she knew she’d never see him again. We went to Cliveden, the Nancy Astor house, and we had the most wonderful lunch. We laughed and talked about all the stupid things we’d done together, and that night she flew back.”
When Arnold Stiefel was hospitalized in Los Angeles, Rivers was thousands of miles away, but she quickly materialized at his bedside. “This wonderful crazy lady flew in from Canada to see me in the hospital and bring the nurses Joan Rivers jewelry so they would be nice to me,” Stiefel said.
Rivers got to know Pete Hathaway when he was a director of European furniture at Sotheby’s, and they became good friends. Hathaway later spent time in rehab for alcohol abuse. “Joan was wonderful during what I call my unfortunate incarceration,” he said. “I would go to the mailbox and there would be a hologram postcard of spiders. I would turn it over and it would say, ‘Don’t worry, it’s not the DTs! XOXO Joan.’ It would just make me laugh so hard. I was living in a sober house in California where the answering machine message said, ‘Hello, this is Sober Living by the Sea.’ One day I got a message saying, ‘This is Suicidal on the sixtieth floor—call me!’ It was Joan.”
As a widening array of new friendships filled the void left by the absence of her family, Rivers was also making a career comeback. “Everything started falling together again,” said Dorothy Melvin. “The jobs were coming to us; she was working. Joan was never content: she was a total workaholic, and she always wanted to work more. But we were doing QVC, and that took off, and we were always looking for new things, and it all just started building. She could never rest on her laurels, and she never felt she was ever on top again, but she was. It was the best time—and we were happy.”
Rivers’s social circle expanded to include such celebrities as the flamboyant multimillionaire Malcolm Forbes—bold-faced names she wouldn’t have known if Edgar were still around. “When we went to St. Petersburg on the Forbes plane for the opening of the Fabergé exhibit at the Hermitage, Joan and I were like merry widows, because I had a partner who died of AIDS,” Robert Higdon recalled. “She had a few pieces of Fabergé that were being exhibited, along with things from Forbes and the Queen, so it was a big moment for her. She said, ‘Oh my God, I wish Edgar were here!’ I said, ‘If Sam and Edgar were alive, we wouldn’t be here.’ She said, ‘You’re right. Fuck ’em.’ I’ll never forget how quickly she switched. When Edgar killed himself she moved back to New York and met Forbes and a lot of other people, but she wouldn’t have known Malcolm Forbes if Edgar were still alive.”
The eternal roundelay of life in New York helped her deal with one of the biggest challenges of all: learning to live an unpartnered life. “Being alone, not dreading another long night of anxiety and fear and remorse, was the last goal to be reached,” she admitted. “Gradually solitude became something to be desired.”
Not that there weren’t men in her life; in the years following Edgar’s death, Rivers had several romantic relationships of varying durations and intensities. Her paramours included Spiros Milonas, a Greek shipping magnate; New York lawyer Bernard Goldberg; and the philanthropist and conservationist Orin Lehman, who proved to be the most important.. But in the second half of Rivers’s life, it was increasingly her devoted array of friends who provided the emotional support that sustained her on a daily basis.
Rivers was also fortified by a changing perspective. Having weathered such terrible storms, she began to realize that her worst traumas had helped to produce some of her most important learning experiences—and the process of dealing with those challenges had left her permanently transformed.
“I have become my version of an optimist,” she said with considerable surprise. “If I can’t get through one door, I’ll go through another door—or I’ll make a door. Something will come up, no matter how dark the present.”
In weathering her trials, Rivers also learned the ultimate lesson of life, which is that change is the only constant—and that while the good times don’t last forever, the bad times eventually pass too. “I lecture on suicide because things turn around,” she said. “I tell people that this is a horrible, awful, dark moment, but it will change, and you must know it’s going to change, and you push forward. I look back and think, ‘Life is great. Life goes on. It changes.’”
By then she was able to admit the unexpected benefits that evolved from her husband’s suicide. “I understand it, and I feel terribly sorry for him, but I wonder if I’d be sitting here today talking to you if he had not killed himself—if we wouldn’t have ended up just a very bitter couple in a house on a hill somewhere,” Rivers told the Daily Beast in 2014. “He would have said, ‘That’s it, they can all go to hell, and we’ll just pull ourselves in.’”
Instead, the loss of her husband had liberated her to grow and establish a truly independent life of her own design. “My personal take was that she felt she was better off without him,” said David Dangle. “The marriage was kind of over, and there would never have been a QVC with Edgar around. He was a snob, and he wouldn’t have let her do that. He wouldn’t have liked the idea of her selling things on television; she was pretty vocal about that.”
Forced to fend for herself, Rivers ultimately achieved her greatest success—and her greatest satisfaction. “After he died, because there was nothing, I had to strike out again,” she said. “A friend of mine at his funeral said, ‘He’s freed you.’ I thought that was very interesting. And in a way he did, because I had to really start again—thank God.”
Although Rivers earned great wealth and fame in her later years, she was so traumatized by her previous setbacks that she didn’t feel secure. But the truth was that she achieved so much in her long and varied comeback that it arguably represented the height of her career. “She never felt she was on top again,” said Dorothy Melvin. “But she was.”
Chapter Twelve
Reinventing a Career: “I Can Rise Again!”
As always, work supplied the essential foundation for Rivers’s recovery. The first real breakthrough occurred in 1988, when she surprised virtually everyone by landing the role of Kate Jerome, the mo
ther in Neil Simon’s hit play Broadway Bound.
“She was a star, but we did not seek her out,” said Manny Azenberg, the producer. “She called and said she’d like to play the part. It was unlikely—who would have thought of Joan Rivers to play that part?”
But in some ways, it seemed like a good fit. “If you think about what her status was at the time, her husband was gone, and in the play the husband leaves and the character is alone,” Azenberg observed.
The third installment in Simon’s semiautobiographical trilogy of plays about Eugene and his brother, Stanley, a pair of aspiring comedy writers based on the playwright and his own brother, Broadway Bound traces the dissolution of their family as they discover that their father has been cheating on their mother.
With her children grown and her husband abandoning her after thirty-three years of marriage, Kate is a poignant character. In an Act II monologue about a fleeting encounter with an old-time movie actor that New York Times theater critic Frank Rich called the “indisputable peak” of the play, Kate tells Eugene “about the most glamorous incident in her life—a night at the Primrose Ballroom, thirty-five years earlier, when George Raft asked her to dance…It’s a mesmerizing journey to a bygone working-class Brooklyn where first-generation American Jews discovered the opportunities and guilt that came with the secular temptations of a brash new world.”
As a girl from her own fractious family of Brooklyn Jews, Rivers brought a visceral understanding to a juicy role. “Kate is a remarkable achievement—a Jewish mother who redefines the genre even as she gets the requisite laughs while fretting over her children’s health or an unattended pot roast,” Rich wrote. “She’s a woman who takes ‘her own quiet pleasure’ in a world that goes no farther than her subway line, and if her life is over once her dinner table is deserted, she greets her fate with stoical silence, not self-martyrdom…a survivor, not a victim, of an immigrant family’s hard path to assimilation.”
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