Rivers was encouraged by her initial success in selling her wares, but she had a serious scare in 1992, when Barry Diller left Twentieth Century Fox and bought a $25 million stake in QVC.
“The phone rings one day, and we hear that Barry Diller is taking over QVC—Barry who fired her from Fox,” David Dangle recalled. “Within minutes the phone rang and it was Barry Diller, calling to tell her himself. He says, ‘Don’t worry, it’s going to be okay.’ He wanted her to know she didn’t have to worry. I thought that was pretty classy.”
Diller sold his stake in the company in 1995. Since then, QVC has grown into a multinational cable, satellite, and broadcast network received by 235 million households in seven countries—an $8.8 billion empire that shipped 173 million products in 2014, with online revenues of $3.5 billion.
Rivers has represented a significant factor in that success. Over the years, her line has included 7,600 separate items, with jewelry making up 60 percent of the company’s sales. “What we do is very item-driven, and one of the things that set her apart as a brand was that she was part of the creation of the product,” said Dangle. “Joan was the queen of costume jewelry, and it was her taste and her feedback on the product: ‘I like this, but what if we made it bigger?’”
The bee pin proved a perennial favorite, going through many redesigns before being reissued in its original form in 2015 to mark Rivers’s twenty-fifth anniversary with QVC. “We’ve literally sold millions of bees,” said Dangle.
Rivers applied the same attention to clothing and accessories. In terms of individual units, the company’s most successful Today’s Special Value was the Joan Rivers Lavish Luxury Sequin Scarf, which sold more than 88,000 units in one day.
By the final year of her life, the cumulative results were impressive. “We’ve done over a billion dollars’ worth of sales,” she told Bloomberg in 2014.
Given the up-and-down nature of her performing career, Rivers was particularly grateful for the consistency of her earnings from QVC, which enabled her to pick and choose among other projects. “She always knew QVC was the goose that laid the golden egg,” said Dangle. “Concerts come and go; there are times when you get a big fee and times when you have to lower your get—but QVC was a constant source of income for her. It was an annuity—a very solid revenue stream—and she valued that immensely.”
That said, Rivers’s profits weren’t quite as enormous as they might have seemed. During 2014, Forbes reported, “Rivers sold 1.2 million units through the channel, while the Joan Rivers Classics Collection alone generated $4.5 million in sales annually, according to the Hollywood Reporter.” But when Forbes analyzed Rivers’s actual income from QVC, its estimate of her take was far less than a billion dollars. “The real punch line: Rivers’s personal earnings from her fashion lines were just a fraction of that,” Forbes announced.
The network certainly made out well, as Forbes explained: “Considering $1 billion of Joan Rivers goods over the years, her income could have been an estimated $250 million pretax in that time frame. Though that sounds like a hefty sum, it averages to a relatively modest $10.4 million pretax a year.”
But even if Rivers grossed only $10 million a year from QVC, the business provided a vital source of economic security for a woman whose living expenses were perennially over the top. “She used to tell me all the time, ‘QVC saved my life,’” said Kenny Bell, the director of programming and special events at the Laurie Beechman Theatre.
Despite her lavish lifestyle, Rivers’s colleagues at QVC were struck by her indefatigable commitment to the unglamorous day-to-day grind, which required her to schlep down to West Chester, Pennsylvania, for marathon on-air selling sessions. “She had an amazing work ethic that she never lost—that drive, the sense that you have to earn your way no matter what you do,” said Mike George.
The road trip from Rivers’s home in Manhattan to the QVC studio took at least two hours, and the on-air schedule was grueling. “She would go on and do fourteen to eighteen minutes on a 7:30 a.m. show, and then do two hours solid from 10 a.m. to noon,” said David Dangle. “She’d do a two-hour show from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., she’d do another hit at 7 p.m., and then 10 p.m. to midnight. She would come down three or four times a month—in the last five years she would be at QVC on forty-eight visits a year. Just looking at her route sheet would make me sick.”
But her commitment never flagged. “Some celebrities think they can just endorse a product and that’s going to work, but we try to filter those people out, because the customer smells the phony,” said George. “Joan’s customers got that she was intimately involved with the product.”
She took pains to convey that engagement to her audience. “It’s the middle of the night, and everyone’s buying pins, waiting for the Ambien to kick in—but when other celebrities are on QVC or HSN, it often seems as if they’re seeing their products for the first time,” said Jason Sheeler, the fashion news director of Departures magazine. “They pick up a brooch or a handbag or a scarf, and they’re looking at it like, ‘What is this? This is shit, but it has my name on it!’ Looking at that shit at two in the morning, they’re as surprised as we are. But with Joan, she knew. She was always on message with her stuff. Joan was brilliant.”
Rivers trolled relentlessly for new buyers, carrying free samples wherever she went. “She walked around with shopping bags of gifts,” said her friend Margie Stern. “When I broke my hip, she literally brought a bag of gifts to give to the doctors in the hospital. I finally had to say, ‘I don’t want any of your crap—just keep it!’”
Rivers was convinced that such largesse could improve the patient’s care. “When Robert Higdon had heart surgery, Joan flew out to the Cleveland Clinic and brought a box of bee pins for all the nurses,” Blaine Trump reported. “She said, ‘I find that when you’re in the hospital, bribery works.’”
But Rivers was also trying to broaden her customer base. “Wherever she goes, she’s got dozens of boxes of her QVC jewelry she would randomly give to people like waitresses,” said Valerie Frankel, her ghostwriter on Men Are Stupid…and They Like Big Boobs. “It was generous but calculated. Getting her image out there in a positive way was just second nature.”
Some beneficiaries were less than charmed by her generosity. “Her jewelry line was just the gaudiest stuff,” said Erin Sanders, a writer who collaborated with Rivers on her Broadway show Sally Marr…and Her Escorts. “She would hand stuff out, and I would bring it home and my wife would look at this stuff like I was bringing her a giant turd.”
Given her sales record, Rivers’s products clearly appealed to a wide range of people. “We typically serve thirty-five-to-sixty-five-year-old women who love to shop and are inspired by shopping, but it’s a pretty diverse set of customers, and they’re pretty representative of the U.S. population,” said Mike George.
“I think QVC draws a more affluent customer than you would expect,” David Dangle added. “She’s got cable television. She’s got a lot of discretionary time. She’s a little older. Her kids are probably out of the house, and she’s got some discretionary income. Our average price point is in the $50s and $60s, and goes up to $300 or $400—and we have customers who buy dozens and dozens of items a year.”
For such women, home shopping represents an opportunity for companionship as well as consumerism. “These customers think of you as a trusted friend who’s going to give you good information,” said Dangle. “I think they looked to Joan as a girlfriend who was going to give them good advice on what to wear: ‘If it looks good on me, it will look good on you.’ She never sold schlocky stuff. A lot of people came and went who put their name on schlocky stuff, but Joan knew it had to be good stuff. There was this legendary moment early on when the clasp of a bracelet broke in her hand, and she said, ‘Full stop—I’m not going to sell this. If it broke on me, I don’t want it to break on you. It’s not good enough for you.’ She was sly like a fox. QVC was probably freaking out, but she knew the customer would say, ‘She does
n’t want me to have a bad one!’ It was brilliant. I would have just hidden the thing under my pillow!”
As with her comedy act, Rivers also kept developing new material so people didn’t tire of what she was selling. “Joan had a classic kind of style, but it never looked dated because it was a modern interpretation with current elements,” George explained. “Her line kept evolving and growing. There was always something new and different, whether it was being bold with colors or some interesting new stone, so it felt fresh, but at the same time it didn’t feel scary. It was not always the same old same old; you never felt like there was no reason to continue. She kept broadening the reach of the brand.”
No matter what she sold, Rivers shared her personal challenges on camera, which was a very effective marketing tool. “People connect with Joan’s life story, and she was always real on the air,” George said. “Whatever was happening in her life, she’d talk about it. Here’s somebody who is amazingly successful, but has led a real life with ups and downs. What matters is that you keep working at it, and the bee pin symbolizes that.”
Rivers’s laser-like focus on sales sometimes conflicted with her subversive instincts as an entertainer, and she couldn’t resist testing the boundaries of what was deemed permissible on the air. “It was very entertaining to watch her sell things, but occasionally it would go too far and I’d get the call: ‘We counted three “bitch”es, two “goddamn”s, three “whore”s, and a “dildo”—she’s got to dial it back!’” Dangle said.
But Rivers regarded her mandate as something more than making a sale. “Entertainment is a big piece of this business,” Dangle said. “QVC rates viewership as well as sales, and she had very high viewership, because whether you bought anything or not, she entertained you. She was making them a ton of dough—sales were phenomenal from the very first day—so they gave her very free rein. She was a brilliant saleswoman.”
Rivers also learned to be a competent executive. Despite her self-imposed dependence on Edgar during their marriage, it turned out that she didn’t need him, or any other man, to succeed on her own.
Over the years, the names she chose for a succession of companies attested to her growing sense of self-sufficiency. After Edgar died, she called her production company Please God Help Me—a desperate plea from a woman accustomed to having a man she could lean on. As her confidence grew, so did her willingness to go it alone. “She started out at QVC with a bunch of partners, but she finally got rid of them and formed a company called MAM, which stood for ‘Mine All Mine,’” said Bill Reardin.
It was actually called JMAM, for “Joan Mine All Mine.” Gaining her autonomy was expensive, according to Dangle, the CEO of JMAM as well as of Joan Rivers Worldwide Enterprises. “She wrestled the company back from a bunch of investors,” Dangle recalled.
Making it on her own was exhilarating. “She owned this business, and it’s a $50-to-$60-million-a-year business,” Dangle said. “She was proud that she built this.”
Rivers also relished the ability to take care of her loved ones. When her grandson was born in 2000, he inspired his grandmother to name another corporate entity CCF—“which is for ‘Cooper’s College Fund,’” said Dangle.
Given the scope of her success, some of her friends believe that Rivers never got sufficient credit for her achievements as a businesswoman. “Anyone else who built a billion-dollar company would have been on the cover of Forbes magazine,” said Sue Cameron.
But no matter how many bumblebee pins she sold, Rivers never stopped looking for other money-making ventures. Her career as an author was another well she continued to plumb, and she had written more than a dozen books by the time she died, both fiction and nonfiction. Their subjects ranged from childbirth to plastic surgery to recovery from trauma. “People really liked her books, because they identified with someone who goes through so many tribulations,” said Dorothy Melvin. “People thought, ‘If Joan Rivers can go through losing a husband and pull herself up by her bootstraps and start again, I can do it too.’ It gave them hope.”
In describing her trials, Rivers often brought a subversive perspective to topics usually treated with saccharine reverence. Her sardonic humor had an electrifying effect on many of her readers.
“When Sara Benincasa was six years old, she found a book in her parents’ basement that she knew she wasn’t supposed to read,” Amanda Hess wrote in a Slate essay after Rivers died. “She read it anyway. ‘I was like, “This lady is naughty! This lady’s a mom, but she doesn’t talk like any mom I’ve ever heard of!”’ Benincasa said. The book was Joan Rivers’s 1974 Having a Baby Can Be a Scream (styled like a children’s book, it was anything but). ‘It was a really amazing thing, now that I think about it,’ says Benincasa, now thirty-three and herself a comedian and author. ‘She planted the seed for what would later become my habit of saying things that women aren’t supposed to say.’”
During the ensuing years, Rivers used many different cowriters for her books, which varied as widely in quality as they did in topic. But her first two autobiographies—written with Richard Meryman—were serious and substantive. The first, Enter Talking, focused on her childhood and her long struggle to get started in show business—the saga of disappointment and rejection that culminated in a happy ending when Rivers’s career finally took off. Enter Talking was published in 1986, the final year when her work life and her family life both seemed to be flourishing.
The reviews were mixed. Publishers Weekly called it a “tediously detailed autobiography,” but Library Journal was more encouraging: “Who would expect a book by and about Rivers to be thoughtful, sensitive, and introspective?”
Her life collapsed the following year, and Rivers waited until 1991 before publishing her second memoir, Still Talking, which chronicled her falling-out with Johnny Carson, the failure of her Fox show, and her husband’s suicide. Although it never made the best-seller list, she claimed it sold more copies than other titles that did, and she told the Los Angeles Times she was “furious” that the book was slighted by the press and the publishing industry.
The earnest tone of those two books provided a considerable contrast with The Life and Hard Times of Heidi Abromowitz, Rivers’s fictional 1984 biography of the slutty character whose exploits she mined throughout her career. Rivers’s compass needle as an author seemed to oscillate wildly between serious efforts that genuinely attempted to describe her life experience and jokey books whose mission was simply to entertain and make money.
When Rivers’s last book, Diary of a Mad Diva, was published in 2014, the Daily Beast called it a “gleeful, messy barbecue of famous names, beginning with a quote by Kanye West proudly proclaiming to be a nonreader of books, to which Rivers’s dedication on the next page read in response: ‘This book be dedicated to Kanye West, because he’ll never fucking read it.’ There followed almost three hundred pages of jokes at celebrities’ expense. One, Kristen Stewart, threatened legal action, after Rivers wrote: ‘Many stars do only one thing well. The best one-trick pony is Kristen Stewart, who got a whole career by being able to juggle a director’s balls.’”
Rivers claimed she was disappointed when Stewart didn’t pursue any legal action against her. “It’s a shame, as I wanted her in court and made to touch a doll in the parts where the director touched her,” Rivers said.
But whatever else she did, theater remained the holy grail. And of all the creative ventures she took on during a life chockablock with a vast array of professional vehicles, the one closest to her heart may have been the original one-woman show she wrote and performed on Broadway in 1994.
Based on the life of Lenny Bruce’s mother, the play was called Sally Marr…and Her Escorts. Rivers always credited Bruce as a seminal influence on her development as a comedian, but his life ended with tragic abruptness in 1966, when he was found lying naked on the bathroom floor at his home in the Hollywood Hills, surrounded by a syringe, a burned bottle cap, and other narcotics paraphernalia. He was forty years old.
Rivers also felt a deep identification with his mother, who outlived her son by thirty-one years. Sally Marr was a woman whose son had died of an accidental overdose, a heartbreak that Rivers, whose husband had died of a deliberate overdose, understood all too well. But Marr was also a stand-up comic, dancer, and actress who—like Rivers herself—felt she never got sufficient credit for what she achieved.
Marr died in 1997, a couple of weeks before her ninety-first birthday, but she lived long enough to see the play that Rivers had fashioned from her stories, recollections, and jokes. Shaping that material into a genuinely theatrical experience was a lengthy process that ultimately included two cowriters, Lonny Price and Erin Sanders.
“When I met Joan, she had these tapes where she had interviewed Sally, and she had put together some transcripts, but she didn’t really have a play,” said Price, a veteran actor, writer, and director who also directed Sally Marr…and Her Escorts. “She brought me in to shape it with her. This was a difficult beast to tame; it didn’t have any story line or trajectory.”
For Rivers, the appeal of the material was obvious. “Joan adored Lenny, and she identified with him,” said Price. “She was not politically correct; she said whatever was on her mind, and she always pushed the envelope. She was fearless. Joan was very much like Lenny, and she thought she could play Sally, a Jewish woman of a certain age. Sally claimed she created him—not only as a mother, but also as a comic. She was a very salty, vulgar woman, and I’m sure she influenced him. I think they had a very symbiotic relationship, to a point—and then he tried to separate from her.”
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