For Rivers, who was dealing with her own estrangement from the daughter she adored, the material resonated on many levels. But her schedule was so overbooked that her collaborators had to fight for her attention.
“She kept very busy, so part of the adventure was following her everywhere to grab time to write with her, from QVC to Atlantic City to Vegas,” said Erin Sanders, the former dramaturge at Second Stage. “I saw the backside of a lot of casinos.”
In shaping the story line, both of Rivers’s cowriters had to fight her tendency to turn the show into a stand-up routine. “She was tough as hell,” Sanders said. “I think she really wanted to be the playwright on this thing, but it was becoming just a series of jokes, which turned out to be the battle for the next two years. She needed a writer, and what I was trying to give her was some structure and dramatic tension—but her drive was always for the comedic moment.”
Rivers was also mercurial. “She would read through some pages and say, ‘I hate it! I just hate it!’” Sanders recalled. “And within the span of a couple of hours she would say, ‘I just love it!’”
The play turned out to be an odd collage of elements. Set in the auditorium of Our Lady of Esperanza High School, it features Marr teaching a night class called How to Die on Your Feet: The Art of Stand-Up Comedy.
“I want you to go home, dig deep inside yourselves, and I want you to come up with your most painful memory,” Marr tells her students. “I want you to take that memory and twist it, and I want you to make it funny—because that’s what comedy is all about. You want to be funny, you don’t start with funny and try to make it funny, because that turns to shit. Comedy comes from pain.”
The play incorporated many themes from Rivers’s own life, including her stubborn refusal to get off the stage—as when Marr, in an angry confrontation with her son, shouts, “Sally Marr is not retiring!”
But it also featured a disorienting series of curious juxtapositions. Highlights of the comedy class were interspersed with scenes that ranged from Marr teaching her son how to hone his comedic timing to harrowing glimpses of an elderly Marr lying in a coma after suffering a brutal rape by a burglar who nearly killed her.
“Dying’s nothing new to me,” says the comatose Marr. “I’m in show business. We die every day. I’m used to dying—and let me tell you something. Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”
The play’s final message was vintage Rivers. “At the end of the story, she realizes she has no money, and she’s sick, but she made people laugh, and that was an okay thing to be doing,” said Price. “If you can make somebody laugh, that’s not such a bad way to spend your life. That was Joan’s story too. It was a bit Pirandello-ish.”
When Sally Marr…and Her Escorts finally opened, the billboard outside the Helen Hayes Theatre featured a giant photograph of Rivers as Marr, wearing a fur coat that her son had supposedly given her. “She was more than Lenny Bruce’s mother,” the tagline read.
But the title character was inherently problematic. “Sally Marr was vulgar and disgusting,” said Lonny Price. “It was like a Jewish Mama Rose—with less appeal and less charm.”
Reviewers were torn between their grudging admiration for Rivers’s frenetic energy and their perplexity about the strange concoction she had assembled. In some cases, their views were also colored by a theater world snobbery that seemed to question what a showbiz hack like Rivers was doing at the Helen Hayes in the first place.
“In the category of hardest-working actress on Broadway, the winner is—drumroll, please—Joan Rivers in Sally Marr…and Her Escorts,” David Richards wrote in The New York Times. “The play purports to be the story of Sally Marr, a comedian of small repute whose chief claim to show business fame is that she is Lenny Bruce’s mother. The woman tearing about the stage in a wardrobe resembling an exploded salad bar is, in her more widely public incarnations, a finely turned-out talk show host and the purveyor of her own line of jewelry. Is Ms. Rivers also a great actress? No, she is not. But she is exuberant, fearless, and inexhaustible. If you admire performers for taking risks, then you can’t help but applaud her efforts.”
Although it was essentially a glorified one-woman show, Sally Marr featured nonspeaking roles by several of the character’s “escorts,” including the father she worshipped, the husband who left her, and the rebellious son she defended like a tigress.
“As for the sudden explosions of rage or terrible feelings of abandonment, you have the eerie impression they’re Ms. Rivers’s as much as they’re Sally Marr’s,” Richards noted.
The play tried hard to persuade audiences that Marr was an important figure. “I gave birth to Lenny Bruce and opened the door to modern American comedy,” the character proclaims. “So in a way I gave birth to Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Chevy Chase, Robin Williams, Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, and David Letterman. No wonder I’m exhausted!”
But when the play opened on May 5, 1994, the critics were unconvinced by Marr’s accomplishments and put off by the parallels with Rivers’s own history. “It is this play’s contention that without Sally Marr, a kind of dirty-mouthed Mama Rose, there would have been no Lenny Bruce,” Richards wrote. “Her outspokenness blazed the way for his iconoclasm; from her hatred of hypocrisy sprang his. It is Ms. Rivers, after all, who drives the patchwork script forward with the same manic energy that informs her stand-up routines. Her well-lacquered appearance notwithstanding, she has always had a combatant’s mentality. (What is her celebrated call to gossip—‘Can we talk?’—but the opening gong in her personal battle against sham?) She may not be Sally Marr, as Hollywood ads used to boast. But like her, she has played the lounges with ‘a two-rape minimum,’ had a husband abandon her, known crushing failure—and lived to tell the tale. I suspect that’s what this oddly confessional evening is really all about.”
Some reviewers were more caustic in their assessment. “It is not so much a barrel of laughs as a funeral urn of laughs,” Quentin Crisp wrote in New York Native. “Ms. Rivers flings herself into the show with an air of desperation, shouting mordant one-liners at other actors, none of whom speaks. All comedians are desperate people, and Ms. Rivers, because of her painful thinness, her harsh voice, and her tragic private—or rather, flagrantly public—life, is a cartoon of a comedian. While one laughs at what she says, one weeps for who she is.”
Most of the critics were disdainful about Rivers’s most cherished hope—that she would finally win recognition as a serious actress. “The always endearing Joan Rivers is out of her element as Marr,” David Kaufman wrote in the Village Voice. “She is simply too accustomed to playing herself—or at least her public persona—to effectively play anyone else.”
Even her collaborators had to admit that Rivers often misjudged the requirements of a stage performance. “She would not stick to the script,” said Sanders. “All of it relied on her to hit her lines, but things often got jumbled up, and it was very frustrating.”
Rivers was so used to winging it onstage that she didn’t accept the rigor of a theatrical performance. “She paraphrased a lot,” said Price. “She wasn’t used to having to do it exactly right, because this led to that, so she was not spot-on. She never really learned it. Joan was a natural actress, as all comics are. She was incredibly moving, and she had great access to pain. But she wasn’t skilled as a stage actress. She was always ahead of herself; she reached for the phone before it rang.”
Rivers also had a tendency to sabotage her performance. “Joan’s voice would go on her, and she would take prednisone,” said Price, referring to the corticosteroid drug. “The nights she didn’t take it, she was really good and connected to everything, but the nights she took it, the performance was off. I made her promise me that she wouldn’t take prednisone the night the critics came, but she was afraid her voice would fail, so she took it. She jumped whole chunks of the play. In one scene, she couldn’t remember the last line, and it was the cue line for the blackout, so the stage manager didn’t go to blackou
t. She just stood there saying, ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’ It was bad. We had worked on this for four years or whatever, and all the big critics were there that night, and she wasn’t on her game. I was ready to kill both of us. At that point, I was taken to a bar by the producer.”
Until then, audiences seemed to enjoy the play. “It sold pretty well in previews, and she got a standing ovation every night,” said Price. “It was a tour de force.”
And Rivers was overjoyed when she was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play as well as a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play. “She wanted legitimacy as an actress, and she was so proud of the Tony nomination,” said Price.
But Rivers didn’t win, which left her feeling aggrieved that she had “lost out to Diana Rigg, that slut-whore-tramp who happened to do Medea, and I had no children to set on fire.”
The nominations alone didn’t help ticket sales, and her collaborators blamed their lackluster pace on the star’s poor theatrical judgment. “She thought it was going to be this megahit, so it was really mismarketed,” said Sanders. “We should have started Off Broadway and built a following, but it was marketed to a Broadway audience, who read the lukewarm reviews and said, ‘I don’t need to see Joan Rivers stink on Broadway.’”
The timing was also unfortunate, since the play coincided with the release of the egregious Tears and Laughter. “The movie came out and basically stole all our headlines, because it was ‘Joan Rivers is a survivor!’” Sanders said. “Then we open on Broadway as ‘Joan Rivers plays Sally Marr as a survivor!’ There was a lot of Joan Rivers fatigue at that point.”
“The producer’s theory was that they could get her for free, and they didn’t want to pay for her,” Price explained. “She had her own TV show, she was on QVC, she had the play—she was completely overexposed.”
When Sally Marr closed on June 19, its failure was a terrible blow. “Joan was really crushed,” said Blaine Trump. “She worked so hard on that.”
That disappointment also coincided with another big change. “She lost the daytime TV show and Sally Marr at the same time, and she was devastated,” said Price. “She had worked so hard, and she was angry that the public didn’t support it. But like the phoenix, as always, she reinvents herself and rises again.”
Whatever its other failings, the final verdict on the play might have been the simplest. “With Sally Marr, she stopped being funny,” said theater writer David Finkle.
Even the show’s publicist admitted as much. “It portrayed a hard, tough group of people, and it was depressing,” said Bill Evans, who is now the director of media relations for the Shubert Organization. “There was a coldness at the center of Joan, and this show was pretty icy at the center. There was a desperation to it.”
Despite her emotional investment in Sally Marr, Rivers moved on quickly. “She was the type of person who said, ‘Okay, this is a disaster—what’s next?’” said Trump.
But Rivers never got over her yearning to make it as an actress on Broadway, and she didn’t give up on the idea that Sally Marr was the vehicle to help her do so. “In her mind, that was her baby; that was one of her proudest accomplishments,” said Robert Higdon. “I think she loved doing it.”
Before she died, Rivers was trying to revive Sally Marr in some form, and she even made sure that her beloved play accompanied her when she exited the stage for the last time. “They put the script in her coffin,” Higdon said.
Chapter Fourteen
Home Sweet Versailles:
Marie Antoinette Meets Auntie Mame
In 1988, when Rivers bought the derelict apartment she would turn into her legendary New York City residence, there were pigeons nesting in it. She had a grandiose vision for creating the home of her dreams, but the transformation of a wreck into a palatial penthouse was an agonizingly long and expensive ordeal.
Housed in a Gilded Age limestone mansion that was built in 1903 by John R. Drexel of the Philadelphia banking family, Rivers’s eleven-room condo would combine the top three floors of the seven-story residence at One East 62nd Street, which was designed by Horace Trumbauer in neo-French classic style. Among other amenities, her 5,100-square-foot triplex had five wood-burning fireplaces and two terraces with views of Central Park as well as the cityscape.
Increasingly enmeshed with her socialite friends, Rivers worked hard to cultivate the image of a well-bred grande dame whose gracious conduct was governed by the dictates of Emily Post. But she wasn’t above resorting to the manipulative histrionics of a screeching fishwife in the shtetl when such tactics helped to achieve other ends.
“One day she said, ‘Do you want to swing by?’” David Dangle reported. “It was two o’clock on a Tuesday, and there were no workmen at the apartment, but there’s a foreman sitting with his feet up, reading a magazine. She said, ‘What’s going on?,’ and he said, ‘The guys are on vacation this week.’”
Rivers’s reaction was comparable to what happens when a stick of dynamite is lit. “She lost her shit,” Dangle said. “She went crazy. She threw a paint can on the floor; she tipped over a ladder. There were tears. She literally went nuts on him. ‘I’m a widow! I’m living in a hotel!’ I didn’t know what to do—and then she turns and gives me a big wink, and I realized this was a performance to get this guy back to work.”
When the apartment was finally finished, Rivers was forced to confront another challenge. “She was convinced the house was possessed,” said Blaine Trump.
Rivers’s new residence apparently housed not only a persistent ghost, but an alarming amount of other “negative energy” as well, according to Sallie Ann Glassman, a self-described “mambo voudou priestess” (the spelling Glassman prefers to the usual spelling of voodoo) whom Rivers imported from New Orleans to deal with the problem.
“Joan had seen Mrs. Spencer, the ghost, and she brought in a parapsychologist who had a demon meter,” Glassman explained. “It went off the charts. There was one horrible thing after another in that apartment; it was one of the scariest, creepiest places I’ve ever been, in terms of the energy of it—a very unpleasant place. A lot of people had committed suicide over the years, in the apartment and in the building. Joan was okay with the ghost, but the negativity was really disturbing.”
After Glassman performed what she calls a “rather calamitous ceremony,” she said, “Everything got better immediately.” Just in case Mrs. Spencer wasn’t entirely mollified, Rivers also hung a portrait of her in the building lobby and left flowers for her in the ballroom.
With the malevolent spirits dispatched, Rivers was able to focus on her real priority: creating a home that would attest to the immense effort she had made to acquire a discriminating eye. “She had very beautiful, refined taste,” said Dangle. “She had important art: Kees van Dongen, Vuillard, Henry Moore, Rauschenberg, Milton Avery. She had knowledge of good furniture. The apartment had an incredible ballroom, incredible boiseries. She wanted to be perceived as being part of that world—a world she didn’t feel she belonged in: ‘Look at me! I wish my mother was here to see me today!’”
From the leopard-print carpets to the twenty-three-foot ceilings, Greek columns, gilded antique paneling, and crystal chandeliers, Rivers’s taste was so ornate that it invariably evoked comparisons with her inspiration, the Palace of Versailles. She herself described her style as “Louis XIV meets Fred and Ginger.”
Even the very rich were astonished. “When people would go to Joan’s apartment, they couldn’t believe it,” said Blaine Trump.
“The apartment was like a French salon; I couldn’t really fathom that somebody lived there,” said an entertainment industry journalist who attended Rivers’s elaborate six-course Thanksgiving dinner one year. “It looked like somebody’s fabulous aunt’s Parisian apartment—high ceilings, antiques, gold everywhere, very stately, old-fashioned, and traditional. There was a needlepoint pillow on a chair in the library that said ‘Lonely at the top.’ There was a bathroom next to the dining room, and wh
en I went in to wash my hands I was just in awe. The faucet handles were gold. I kept wondering if they were real gold.”
The needlepoint pillow actually said “It’s just as lonely at the top, only you eat better.”
Some observers were reminded of Czarist Russia. “It was like Anastasia’s grandmother’s apartment,” said the actor Charles Busch. “It was not a comedian’s apartment. It was dispossessed Russian nobility—an exiled empress.”
Others invoked a gaudy Las Vegas—but Rivers was in on the joke. “That apartment was a giggle for Joan,” said the writer Jesse Kornbluth. “It amused her to live in Versailles. Why did she want to live in Versailles? Because she could.”
“If you want to know how big her palace was, Buckingham Palace has one more closet,” said the comic Brad Zimmerman, who often opened for Rivers with his show, My Son the Waiter: A Jewish Tragedy. “My place would work very well in hers—as a hamper.”
Some saw a deeper meaning in her choices. Rivers spent decades re-creating herself, changing everything from her name to her nose to the entire structure of her face, and the preposterous excess of her home-decorating style just seemed like another iteration of a familiar theme.
“You’ve got to be a little nuts to do that,” said Shelly Schultz. “I guess she pretended she was somebody else, because it was awfully painful for her to get up and think about who she was. She was so demanding. She was so driven, she lived in Versailles because she thought she was the Queen of Sheba.”
But New York loves an over-the-top character, and Rivers had found the perfect home. If the exaggerated formality of her social style had seemed weirdly out of place in Southern California, her crystal finger bowls and elaborate place settings were well suited to the residential Fabergé egg where she became famous for her dinner parties.
As always, her plans incorporated her daughter as a central feature in her life. Having sold the California house where Melissa grew up, Rivers took pains to make her daughter feel welcome in Manhattan: the new showplace included “a cheerfully decorated one-bedroom apartment on the first floor that is reserved for her daughter’s use during visits,” People magazine reported.
Last Girl Before Freeway Page 27