Last Girl Before Freeway

by Leslie Bennetts

  Before the program ended, Stern also managed to one-up his host with her own guest—thereby scoring a publicity bonanza for the show. Angela Bowie, the ex-wife of David Bowie, had written a memoir called Backstage Passes: Life on the Wild Side with David Bowie. Its rock star content notwithstanding, Rivers’s initial interview was boring.

  “Joan was the best listener, but she got nothing out of Angela Bowie,” Ferber said. “Stern came out and teased her—‘Good interview, Joan! You didn’t get anything out of her!’ So they brought Angela back, and they double-teamed her. They said, ‘Oh, come on, you must have found David in bed with somebody!’ She said, ‘Well, there was the time I found him in bed with Mick Jagger…’ Joan said, ‘Yes!’ When she walked off, she said, ‘I haven’t had this much fun in years!’ The quote ended up on the front page of the Daily News—‘Dancing in the Sheets’—and we started to get that kind of press a lot.”

  An exchange with Larry King elicited another round of headlines. “He had just come from the Miss America contest, where he was one of the judges,” Ferber recalled. “Joan said, ‘What was it like?,’ and Larry said, ‘All the girls were so pretty!’ Joan said, ‘Come on, you can’t tell me that out of fifty women they were all beautiful!’ He said, ‘Well, to tell you the truth, Miss Pennsylvania was a dog!’ And that made the headlines, so we really milked it. The next day, we booked Miss Pennsylvania and her mother.”

  Ferber acknowledged that Rivers had to badger King to get him to say what he did. “Did she dig at it? Yes, she was persistent,” he admitted. “But it was great television. It was what Joan was doing at her best, using her interview skills with wit.”

  Humor was also Rivers’s preferred mode at the office, where she cracked as many jokes behind the scenes as she did before an audience. “At that time, the show was on for an hour live at 9 a.m., and we had a briefing at 6 a.m., so we would come in every morning exhausted, because getting up at that hour is exhausting,” Selip said. “Joan would have been out the night before—she had incredible energy, and she was out constantly—and she would critique the evening, and we’d laugh and laugh and laugh. If we had taped that, it would have been the show. We would literally laugh for forty minutes in that meeting. She would have been at some stuffy dinner, doing her high-society thing with what she called the fah-fah-fahs—she loved to be in their company, and they loved her because she was so brazen. She’d go, ‘Didn’t I see you at Erasmus high school?’”

  After getting to know the unpretentious Rivers they dealt with at the office, staffers were often disconcerted by the grande dame she morphed into at home. “The first time I was in her house, it was a shock,” said Selip. “I was seeing her every morning at work, when she’d be down and dirty, making smart comments—anything goes. And then you walked into this palace, which was beautiful and tasteful. It was regal—it was gold leaf.”

  Such visible evidence of wealth provided eloquent testimony to how much Rivers had accomplished. “She made all that money herself,” said Bill Reardin. “She would go anywhere as long as there were some bucks in it. At three o’clock in the morning, she’d be going into some sleazebag motel to sleep because she’d had a show somewhere. When she was staying in a hotel, she’d take all the amenities from the hotel room and go out in the hall and take extra soap from the housekeeping cart. She said, ‘I don’t ever want to run out of shampoo again.’”

  Although Rivers took obvious pleasure in her wealth, friends suspected that her pride was mixed with other emotions. “She certainly amassed a fortune, but I think she felt guilty that she was successful, so she always felt she had to give and be good,” Reardin said. “I would fight to pick up a check, but I never once succeeded. It was so hard to do anything for her.”

  When someone did, Rivers always wrote a personal thank-you note. Such rituals helped to keep her busy—a paramount concern now that she was living alone. In New York, she socialized constantly, saw everything on Broadway, consumed cultural experiences, and bombarded her employees with a personal warmth that verged on familial, turning everyone from coworkers to her hairdresser into friends who became a surrogate family.

  “I’ve worked with a lot of famous people, and I’ve been in Joan’s houses more than I’ve been in the houses of any of the other people I’ve worked with,” Reardin said. “She was always so gracious about having parties for the staff and having me over for dinner. She was never stiff, never intimidating, but she was very elegant. One of the things I learned was that casual, to me, is khakis and a polo shirt, but to Joan, casual is a tie and jacket. If you had nothing to do for Christmas, it was ‘Come on over!’ It didn’t matter what walk of life you were from. So the parties were prominent people from the staff, her daughter, her sister and two kids, and Howard Stern and Lainie Kazan and Phil Spector—he was running up and down the steps waving a gun—and C. Z. Guest and Blaine and Robert Trump and the Gay Men’s Chorus. You just never knew who was going to be there.”

  No one could escape her maternal instincts. On Reardin’s fiftieth birthday, he suffered an episode of cardiac distress. “I get to the hospital, and I’m on a gurney, and they’re sticking tubes down me,” Reardin reported. “I’m in a room with a curtain, and all of a sudden I hear, ‘You can’t go in there!’—and it was Joan. I said, ‘Joan, what are you doing here?’ She said, ‘I wanted to take care of you—that’s why I’m here!’”

  Such attentions won the enduring loyalty of her coworkers. “I really loved her,” said Selip. “She was kind, and she was thoughtful.”

  Having experienced deep grief, Rivers was also solicitous to others who were suffering. “I lost both my parents during that show, and when my mother passed, Joan was in Atlantic City—but she paid a shiva call to my brother’s house in Rockland County,” Ferber said. “She must have stayed an hour and a half; this wasn’t a token call. My mother had brain cancer, and Joan sent flowers to the hospital every single day for two months before she died. That’s the kind of person Joan was. She’s one of the few people in my life that I will always miss.”

  Despite her loving gestures, Rivers never pretended to be a saint. “We were doing a show in L.A., and she wasn’t happy with some decision, and we were in the producer’s office and somebody standing in the room saw a fax machine hurled horizontally across the doorway,” David Dangle recalled. “She said, ‘Now you know I’m not happy, because I flung a fax machine across the room.’ She knew how to make people sit up and listen. She could blow up and scream and be a banshee, but five minutes later it was all forgotten. She didn’t have the ability to stay mad at somebody. I hold grudges and stay pissed for a long time, but she would let off steam and get it over with. Everyone was traumatized, because she’s Joan Rivers and she’s screaming and yelling—but it was healthy for her to be able to get it off her chest. She let the pressure off and then she’s fine. One day she screamed at the top of her lungs for about thirty seconds, and then she said, ‘I feel so much better! I just needed to do that right now.’”

  The Joan Rivers Show ended in 1993, defeated by various challenges. Some had to do with its host, whose wit was more serrated than soothing. “I think she did a good job in daytime, and we did some hilarious stuff, but what I realized about Joan was that people either loved her or hated her, and in daytime TV that’s hard,” said Selip. “You’re supposed to be more likable—somebody you could spend time with. She really was a late-night person. You look at Chelsea Handler and the opportunities that cable TV presented—if there was cable and Netflix and all the things we have now, Joan would have gone there, but back then there were no options.”

  The production team tried to come up with other formulas, but their efforts met with mixed success. “We did a separate show called Gossip! Gossip! Gossip! where she would sit with gossip columnists and dish,” Ferber said. “It was sold to the USA Network, and it was really the grandparent of Fashion Police. She started on QVC around the same time, and she was so successful on QVC that the Tribune company, our partner, ca
me up with a concept called Can We Shop?—which was disastrous. They hired a merchandise manager, and he would choose the merchandise. One day Joan was selling a toilet bowl cleaner. Do you think this woman ever cleaned a toilet bowl in her life?”

  But Rivers felt that no paying gig was beneath her, and the more the better. “Joan was doing Can We Shop? plus all her club dates,” said Reardin. “She just always wanted to work.”

  No matter how bad a show was, she was distressed when it ended, and concerned for those whose livelihoods depended on it. “When Can We Shop? was canceled, Joan was very upset for me,” Ferber recalled. “I said, ‘Do you know how much the staff hated that show? We called it Can We Stop?’ She couldn’t stop laughing.”

  But her coping mechanism was always the same. Whatever the setback, she responded by looking for the next big thing—and she embraced all opportunities with alacrity, no matter how unlikely they seemed. Like a phoenix risen from the ashes, Rivers began to build a new image as an indomitable warrior who coped with the worst and always managed to triumph over any obstacles that confronted her.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Art and Commerce: All in a Day’s Work

  As Rivers clawed her way back into the limelight, her resilience stunned her friends, foes, and fans. “I watched with amusement and amazement,” said Shelly Schultz. “She carried on her career until Edgar convinced her to do something incredibly stupid, which she did, and then her career collapsed. She had a bad reputation, and then she fought her way back—miracle of miracles! There was a saying about her: that this chick would show up on a flatbed truck or in somebody’s refrigerator for the right price—it’s all about the money.”

  Rivers’s insatiable appetite for remunerative work may have reached its apex in 1994 with an autobiographical television movie that dramatized her stormy relationship with her daughter following Edgar’s suicide. She saw nothing wrong with this idea. “I thought it would be a terrific thing to do,” she said.

  But when it aired, critics and viewers were equally appalled. “Were Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story (NBC) not so ghoulishly creepy, it would be an instant camp classic,” Ken Tucker wrote in Entertainment Weekly. “Joan and her daughter, Melissa, portray themselves in an autobiographical TV movie about the aftermath of the 1987 suicide of Rivers’s husband, Edgar Rosenberg. From the opening sequence, in which shots of Joan in a hospital for a liposuction operation are contrasted with scenes of Rosenberg overdosing on pills and liquor, you realize that Tears and Laughter will be absolutely shameless. The movie doesn’t avoid any awkward moment, from mother and daughter going through Rosenberg’s personal effects (“His Filofax!”) to Joan’s monologue directed at her husband as he lies in his coffin. You watch…and then catch yourself feeling like a voyeur speculating on things that really should be none of our business. Happy viewing.”

  Viewers agreed. In the movie’s IMDb listing, the first headline that comes up is “One of the Worst Movies Ever Made.” The second headline calls Tears and Laughter “an exploitation of egos,” and the third, which describes the movie as “unintentionally funny,” adds the following: “Joan Rivers writes such insightful, razor-sharp books about her life and her family that it’s an automatic disappointment…What happened to this woman’s voice, to her sense of truth? Nearly everything in this biographical drama rings false.”

  That commenter complained that even “the heated arguments between mother and daughter” didn’t come off as convincing, although “they may work as camp”—a prophetic remark, since some Rivers aficionados admit to their gleeful participation in Tears and Laughter viewing parties that have retained an enduring appeal over the years, particularly among those under the influence of recreational drugs.

  “People quote lines from it all the time,” said the actor and theater director Lonny Price. “‘I didn’t kill Daddy! You didn’t kill Daddy! Daddy killed Daddy!’ It was unbelievable.”

  Despite almost universal pans, Rivers retained positive memories of the project in later years. “We had the best time doing it,” she said. “It was very therapeutic for me and Melissa. It was wonderful for us, because we bonded tremendously.”

  Rivers also insisted that the movie performed a public service by helping to destigmatize suicide. “We got sacks of mail saying, ‘Thank you! My mother killed herself.’ ‘Thank you! My brother killed himself.’ Nobody ever talked about this before,” she said.

  Her daughter’s memories are less enthusiastic. More than two decades after it was made, the mere mention of Tears and Laughter still elicits an expression so pained that it evokes the typical reaction to root canal surgery rather than pride at a major credit on one’s résumé. Melissa eventually managed to forgive her mother for the movie as well as for her father’s death, but Tears and Laughter remains one of the chapters she would rather expunge from her family’s historical record.

  As the 1990s progressed, there was no shortage of other projects that were driven by dollar signs as well as Rivers’s unflagging resourcefulness. The most lucrative was her decision to design jewelry, clothing, and beauty products and sell them herself on QVC, the televised home shopping network whose acronym stood for “Quality, Value, Convenience.”

  QVC was founded in 1986 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where the first item sold was a bathtub radio called the Windsor Shower Companion. Four years later, Rivers started peddling her wares on the network, which was far from glamorous at the time.

  “In those days, only dead celebrities went on [QVC],” Rivers told the Staten Island Advance in 2004. “My career was over, I had bills to pay…It also intrigued me at the beginning.”

  Although Rivers’s QVC business looks like a no-brainer in retrospect, it certainly didn’t seem like it at the time. “Everyone told her not to do it,” said Blaine Trump. “She said, ‘I’m going to do it.’ It turned into serious money, and she made a fortune with it. That was the beginning of Joan coming out of the really sad time.”

  Rivers’s relationship with QVC started when “a businessman came to her through her plastic surgeon,” David Dangle said. “They were looking for a celebrity to endorse a skin care line, and the businessman had the idea of going to QVC, which was new and kind of tacky and gross. QVC said they were interested, but they said, ‘Why don’t you do a fashion jewelry line with Joan?’”

  The timing was fortuitous. “QVC came at a low point in her career, when work dried up,” Dangle said. “Joan didn’t say no to a lot of things, and at that point in her life she said no to nothing. Her attitude was ‘grasping at whatever I can,’ and she very smartly saw that there was something there. She threw herself at QVC, even though her joke was that it was dead celebrities selling things—Carol Channing selling cubic zirconia and saying, ‘Diamonds are a girl’s best friend!’ Joan didn’t look at QVC as though ‘this is beneath me,’ or ‘this is a bad career move.’ I don’t think she was ever a snob.”

  To Rivers’s surprise, the QVC venture took off like a rocket. “They go on the air and it’s an instant, insane, brilliant success—everything sells out immediately,” Dangle said. “Joan realized, ‘I can do this on my own.’ The idea was to do fashion jewelry based on Joan’s collection of real jewels, and her taste in real jewels. They signed me up to be the product development guy.”

  When Michael George, the current president and CEO, arrived at QVC in 2006, he asked Rivers about her start with the company. “She said, ‘I needed a job, I needed a new opportunity, and I took a chance on QVC,’” he recalled. “She shocked me with her bluntness: ‘My husband committed suicide, I got fired from the Fox show, and I needed to work.’”

  Rivers’s instincts were shrewd: her gaudy taste turned out to be a good fit with the home shopping network’s Middle American audience. Her own collection “was initially very Chanel-inspired—pearls, and the bee pin Edgar had given her, which was the very first thing she sold on QVC,” reported Dangle.

  Her famous bee pin—one of Rivers’s signature
pieces—was based on a gift that Edgar had had Van Cleef & Arpels make for her. The Rosenbergs saw the bumblebee as a metaphor for Joan herself. “It was diamonds, with sapphires for eyes, and to her it symbolized her body,” Dangle explained. “It’s chubby, its wings are tiny, and it shouldn’t be able to fly—but it does. To Joan, the message was that you can achieve the impossible.”

  But Rivers was happy to borrow inspiration anywhere she could. “She would go up to Brooke Astor and say, ‘I love it—I’m going to copy it!’” said Robert Higdon. “We would be traveling and she would go into jewelry stores and say, ‘I’m going to try this.’ I would see things come out of QVC that we had seen in Paris or Turkey that summer.”

  A firm believer in trying as hard as possible, Rivers was always convinced that sheer effort could mean the difference between success and failure. She would never have gone out of the house without doing her hair and makeup, and the products she sold on QVC reflected her determination to maximize her effect by whatever means available. Onstage, she wore a flashy sequined jacket over her black pants and top; going out, she jazzed up even the simplest outfit with an elaborate piece of jewelry—or several. In life, as a performer and in her business, Rivers upheld “the idea that it still matters to dress up with statement pieces,” as George put it.

  Rivers also made sure her customers understood her philosophy—including its symbol, the bee pin. Her fans knew what it meant to her—and what it could also mean to them if they adopted it as their own inspiration. The message was clear: With enough determination, we can all accomplish great things, no matter what the obstacles!

  Having depended on Edgar to manage the business of her career, Rivers began her QVC line with little confidence in herself as a businesswoman. Driven by a sense of desperation and necessity rather than any real faith in her ability, she didn’t have an easy time at first. “The first deal she made going in with a jewelry company did not protect her, and she had to fight and buy her way back out of it,” said Robert Higdon. “It was yet another mountain she had to climb.”