In the Broadway production, Linda Lavin had already won a Tony Award for creating the role of Kate, and she was replaced by Elizabeth Franz when she left the play. Both actresses were formidable acts to follow, and Rivers could hardly have faced a tougher set of judges than the seasoned professionals whose job it was to choose the next Kate Jerome.
Simon was one of the most successful playwrights in American history, Azenberg was his longtime producer as well as a leading producer and general manager for others, and Gene Saks, the director of Broadway Bound, had already won Tony Awards as best director for each of the preceding two plays in the Eugene trilogy, Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues. Together the three men comprised one of the most successful teams in the theater business.
As gimlet-eyed experts they were not willing to fill a pivotal role with an untested actress—even a celebrity. But when Rivers auditioned, they were unexpectedly impressed with what they saw.
“There was some trepidation—that she wasn’t an actress, and that it would be Joan Rivers,” Azenberg admitted. “She was a name, but she got the part because she earned it. She did not play Joan Rivers; she acted the text. She came on time, and she commanded our respect because she came prepared. She had seen all the others in the role, and she knew what she was doing. She came almost letter-perfect with the dialogue. If somebody comes like that, you know they’re serious—and you also know they’re frightened. We liked her, and we didn’t have to tap-dance around her. She was good, and she behaved really well. There was no attitude; she was absolutely un-diva.”
Most important of all, Rivers was believable as a middle-aged, middle-class housewife from the 1940s. “At the time, she looked like a real person; she hadn’t had all that cosmetic surgery,” Azenberg said. “There was authenticity. She played a legitimate role as a serious woman, and she knew who that woman was. The woman is a mother, and the husband leaves. The woman’s father says, ‘What are you looking for?’ He says, ‘Something else…’—and he’s gone. There’s no explanation; he just leaves. The loneliness of that character—Joan knew.”
For Rivers, earning the role represented the fulfillment of a lifelong dream as well as the best possible therapy. “After twenty-five years, my first love had called me up,” Rivers said. “I was ecstatic.”
Even better was winning the respect of the critics, however grudging—and some of them were grudging indeed. “Rivers has always struck me as precisely the kind of vulgar, raucous individual, rude, insinuating, and so much else, that I thoroughly dislike,” Clive Barnes wrote in the New York Post. But in the play, he found her “beautiful and touching,” he said. “Her coolly understated acting looked neither contrived nor phony. The shtick-stuck, jokey, elbow-nudging naturalism of television had been abandoned, and Rivers was indeed Broadway bound.”
Barnes’s final verdict: “I went to scoff and stayed to admire,” he admitted.
Joining the cast of Broadway Bound gave the stagestruck Rivers the ultimate validation—the prize she had fantasized about since childhood. Becoming part of the theater community felt like “sheer joy,” she said, and walking onto the stage every night was simply “bliss.”
But the experience also provided a critical turning point in her recovery from Edgar’s suicide—not only by giving her meaningful work of the kind she valued most, but also by creating new hope that the future might contain other equally unexpected possibilities.
“Broadway Bound saved my life,” she said.
As important as the play was to her, Rivers didn’t rely on one job. “The first time I met her was about six months after Edgar killed himself, and she was burying her grief in her work,” said Steve Olsen, the owner of the West Bank Cafe and the Laurie Beechman Theatre, where Rivers performed in later years. “She was doing the Neil Simon show on Broadway, and she was doing her comedy act at Michael’s Pub on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights after the Broadway show. She was flying to Los Angeles on the red-eye after the Sunday matinee to tape four Hollywood Squares on Monday.”
By the time Broadway Bound closed, Rivers had gotten another break. She was asked to do a syndicated daytime television talk show for Tribune Entertainment, and that experience turned out to be equally surprising.
Rivers still felt bruised and battered by her treatment at Fox, which she saw as having tainted her reputation. She made no secret of how traumatic it had been, and how scared she was of fending for herself. “The name of her production company was PGHM, which stood for ‘Please God Help Me,’” said Bill Reardin, a longtime television production executive.
But at Tribune, Rivers was startled to find herself working for corporate bosses who agreed to her needs, refrained from second-guessing her, and remained supportive. “They gave me respect and returned to me my self-respect as a talk show host,” she said.
She also discovered that she still commanded respect from the fellow professionals she needed to put together another show. “I wanted desperately to work for Joan Rivers, because I thought she was a great talent and thought it would be wonderful to work on a show with her,” said Reardin, who was thrilled to land an interview with her in 1989.
Knowing Rivers’s public persona, Reardin expected a tough cookie—but what he actually encountered was more like a Jewish mother. “For some reason, I was kind of prepared that I wouldn’t really like her,” he admitted. “I really wanted to work on the show, but I thought she might be horrible to work with. So I walked in, and she’s having breakfast, and she puts a hand on my arm and says, ‘You’ve got to eat—what do you want to eat?’ She was always very concerned about people, and she wanted to know about them: ‘Are you okay? Do you have a boyfriend? Do you have a girlfriend?’”
Rivers’s gift for instant intimacy not only put Reardin at ease but drew him into an exclusive and conspiratorial club. “We went over to CBS for a meeting, and one of the CBS executives said, ‘Joan, we’d like you to do some test shows and focus groups in June, before your show starts,’” Reardin reported. “Joan stands up and says, ‘Look, my husband killed himself, and I’m taking Melissa and going to Europe. I’m not doing test shows in June.’ We leave and get in a fancy van, and she slaps my knee and says, ‘That suicide bit works every time! I’m going to Europe, but Melissa is not coming with me.’ I thought, ‘I love this woman!’”
Reardin signed on with the Tribune company as the executive in charge of production for The Joan Rivers Show, and he stayed with that show and its spin-offs, Gossip! Gossip! Gossip! and Can We Shop?, for the next five years. “She was wonderful to work with,” he said. “She was just a pleasure. I don’t ever remember a harsh word with her about anything. She was so loved by everyone.”
That said, Rivers didn’t hesitate to do whatever was necessary to get her own way. As Reardin described it, her credo was “Do unto others before they do unto you. Fuck them first, before they fuck you.”
And yet he found the experience of working with her to be unexpectedly benign. “When she wanted something, she usually got it,” he said. “She would throw a little fit every once in a while if she wasn’t getting what she wanted, but basically it was an act. It wasn’t every day that she threw a tantrum, but she would knock over a fax machine and go storming out—and as she went by she would wink at me. It was all about acting.”
Rivers was equally creative in coming up with a new persona for the show—one that reflected the image she wished to project for her new life in Manhattan. David Dangle, a former actor then working as a costume designer and art director for theater and television, was asked to meet with Rivers about remaking her style. “Sunday morning at 8 a.m. was the only time she had,” Dangle reported. “She was this little tiny woman—five foot two when I met her, and a size zero. She was in her late fifties, but she had a great figure.”
A different stylist initially got the job, but Rivers was unhappy with the results, and a couple of months later Dangle was called back and hired to redo Rivers’s look. “She said, ‘I want to look like a
New York rich bitch!’” he recalled. “She wanted to look like Blaine Trump, Nancy Kissinger, Betsy Bloomingdale—very WASPy, very New York and Fifth Avenue.”
That took some doing. “When I met her, she had had a lot of big 1980s hair, so she changed her hair,” Dangle said. “It was a sleek pageboy, and the makeup was toned down. I got rid of the shoulder pads and the flashier California look. She wore beautiful clothes in California, but fashion was changing. It became more elegant, more New York, and I tailored her a lot more.”
According to Marlaine Selip, who became the supervising producer on The Joan Rivers Show, “David went to places like Le Cirque and drew people, and then he created that look for her. She looked like a million bucks. She had Chanel jewels and tailored outfits and wonderful bags, because she was always carrying stuff. She looked rich. People tuned in just to see what she’d be wearing.”
Dangle recalled a gay bar in New York that regularly turned on the show so patrons could see Rivers’s opening monologue. “They went to live TV and watched her,” he said. “It was because she was hilarious, and also because she was wearing some pretty fabulous things—Galanos, Oscar de la Renta, Michaele Vollbracht, Chanel, Armani, Donna Karan, Helmut Lang. She wanted to be looked at as a New York style icon, and she started becoming known for having great taste. She got a lot of great press for her look, and that was very important to her. She wanted to make a statement: ‘Look at me!’”
For Rivers, the metamorphosis echoed the narrative she had reenacted so many times before. “The world kicks her in the can, and she comes back stronger than ever,” said Dangle, who received Emmy Award nominations for costume design three times in five years for doing Rivers’s wardrobe. “Coming back from the ashes was always a big thing for her: ‘I can rise again!’ She was leaving California, starting her life again, reinventing herself, building an incredible mansion, becoming a new person. She was about reinventing, reinventing, reinventing—she was a genius at that.”
Dangle found Rivers to be easy to work with, but only after he learned to accommodate her preferences. “I’m of the school where you become quiet when you’re in somebody’s dressing room,” he explained. “One day I was quiet and the makeup artist was doing her thing and the hairdresser was doing Joan’s hair, and everyone was being very respectful, and Joan finally said, ‘It’s too fucking quiet—call somebody up and yell at them!’ Silence pissed her off. She thrived on energy, chaos, noise. She loved a crisis. She didn’t want that funeral parlor tone. She wanted people talking, laughing, complaining, and telling stories. The more chaos and drama, the better, and she loved people fighting.”
Rivers was also an inveterate busybody. “She had spectacular hearing,” Dangle said. “You could be two rooms over, saying, ‘I talked to Bob…,’ and she’d be, ‘Who talked to Bob?’ You couldn’t whisper; she heard it. And if she couldn’t hear it, she had to know: ‘What are you talking about? What did he say?’ Constant curiosity.”
The Joan Rivers Show went on the air in September of 1989, and her staff was impressed with the way she tackled the demands of a live daily program. “She went into it with such verve and vigor, and her general state of mind was good,” Reardin said. “She went down in flames at Fox, and she couldn’t get a job, she couldn’t get hired, and she was broke, although her idea of broke was not my idea of broke. But she’s a survivor, and she was determined to be successful.”
“She was strong, she was a fighter, and she held it together,” Selip said. “She knew it was a challenge, but she was up to the challenge. Her intention was to win: ‘I’m not going to roll over and play dead, and we’re going to succeed. I’m going to do what I have to do to make sure this wins.’”
But putting on a Joan Rivers show wasn’t easy. “In terms of name recognition, you didn’t have to sell the host, because everyone knew her, but people had strong opinions,” said Randi Gelfand Pollack, the program’s booker. “Every time she went off in a monologue and said something, it was like, ‘Oh, we’re not going to get that guest!’ Some people would say, ‘I will never do that cunt’s show.’”
Rivers’s employees were nonetheless struck by the gap between Rivers’s public image and the woman they worked with every day. “She wasn’t what she seemed; she was much deeper than that,” said Selip. “When I first went in, I didn’t realize how smart she was. She loved books, and she read and read and read—all different types of books. She was curious about everything, and she was smart, smart, smart. She just loved knowing what was going on, and she was always very current. She was a really interesting person, and she liked smart, quick-witted people to work with, so everyone could be funny. I learned so much from her. She had broad interests, and she was multifaceted. She wasn’t a one-trick pony.”
Throughout her life, Rivers remained interested in a range of subjects so broad they often seemed bizarre. When she read a book review that intrigued her, she not only bought the book for herself but sent copies to friends. “There were constant packages going out to people,” said David Dangle. “Then she’d ask, ‘What did you think about it?’ The last few books I got from her were on the weirdest topics. There was Charles Manson’s biography; a book about a nineteenth-century aerial artist; a book about the alimentary canal called Gulp, by Mary Roach; and a book about the Romanovs and Russian history. Who do you know that’s fascinated by Charles Manson, aerial artists, the alimentary canal, and the Romanovs?”
Rivers’s fierce work ethic, passionate curiosity, and hard-earned skills paid off with a major reward the year after her show launched, when she won television’s Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Talk Show Host. Her fellow nominees were Oprah Winfrey, Sally Jessy Raphael, Phil Donahue, and Jeff Smith of The Frugal Gourmet, and when she beat them all, she was overwhelmed with emotion.
“I had made it back from the dead,” she said. “The instant was entire, immaculate joy, no fear, no guilt. Total happiness…One of the purest moments in my life.”
But she also felt genuine grief that Edgar couldn’t witness her triumphant comeback. “Two years ago, I couldn’t get a job in this business,” she told the audience in her acceptance speech at the Emmy Awards. “My income dropped to one-sixteenth of what it was before I was fired. My husband, as you know, had a breakdown. It’s so sad that he’s not here because it was my husband, Edgar Rosenberg, who always said you can turn things around. And except for one terrible moment in a hotel room in Philadelphia, when he forgot that, this is really for him, because he was with me from the beginning.”
She had to stop there, because she was crying too hard to continue. “Welling up in me was the tragedy of Edgar’s whole life, the futility of his suicide,” she said later. “I wanted to tell him, ‘We’re back. We’re back, you idiot!’”
Edgar’s death freed Rivers from the burden of carrying a dysfunctional partner who hindered her career. Despite its tragic ending, her marriage had served an even more liberating purpose: after more than two decades as a wife, she was also able to move beyond the obsession with finding a husband that had warped her youth.
Single again, Rivers no longer viewed marriage as a top priority. “I just remember her being very career-driven,” said Selip. “She dated, but I never got the sense that she felt she wouldn’t be complete without a man. I think she would have liked that, but it wasn’t a must-do. I think there had been an expectation in her life, placed in her when she was young, that she would marry well, have kids, and have a nice life. Back then it was going against the grain to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute—I want to do something of my own. I want to be my own person.’”
As a divorced single mother, Selip saw Rivers as an inspiration. “She had a nice life—but it was of her own making,” Selip said. “My relationship with her was like, ‘Hey, girls can do anything and still have a nice relationship with a man! We don’t have to sit here and wait for a man to take care of us!’ I don’t think she thought anyone was ever going to take care of her. It wasn’t like ‘Someday my prince will co
me…’ She knew she had to take care of herself.”
Although Rivers loved doing the daytime talk show, it elicited mixed reviews, even from its staff. They admired how hard she worked, and gave her full credit for managing with far fewer resources than her male peers.
“There was a period when the Tribune company launched a late-night show with Dennis Miller, and they asked me if I would go to L.A. for three months and fix the show,” Larry Ferber recalled. “Both Joan and Dennis were on for an hour daily, but Dennis had thirteen writers, and Joan had one. One of Joan’s gifts was spontaneity, and one day she had Leona Helmsley as a guest. Helmsley was crying these crocodile tears and saying, ‘I don’t know why they’re persecuting me—I’m not Jeffrey Dahmer! I haven’t killed anybody!’ And Joan said, ‘We don’t know that, Leona—we haven’t checked all the hotel rooms yet!’ This was somebody who knew how to listen, and she did it better than anybody.”
Even so, the show wasn’t a great success. “She was so good, but the content of the show was crap,” said Ferber. “She had the most brilliantly wicked sense of humor, and it wasn’t being utilized. The turning point came when we had on Angela Bowie and Howard Stern. The talent coordinator said that Howard wanted to meet Joan before the show, but he had a hidden camera and he was going to try to seduce her. So Howard says, ‘You’re so hot!,’ and Joan says, ‘So are you!’ He completely freaked out. She said, ‘I know about the damn camera!’”
But as soon as Stern went on the air, he upped the ante. “Joan was dressed in a beautiful fitted suit, and Stern comes out, and she goes to greet him—and he dips her and grabs her ass,” Selip recalled. “She’s laughing, and it’s so funny because she’s going with it. He goes, ‘Joan, you are so hot—I can’t believe your husband killed himself!’ She burst out laughing, because she knew what guts it took for him to say that—and that would be something she would do. They were similar souls. On the show, it was like playing tennis: he would say something outrageous, and she would come right back.”
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