Last Girl Before Freeway

by Leslie Bennetts

  Rivers was especially noted for her annual Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Seder dinners, to which she invited a rotating array of friends, family members, and colleagues. “They were lovely and fun, and you never knew who the hell was going to be there,” said Joan’s friend Pete Hathaway, who was particularly struck by the dinner table company of Jean Harris, the infamous private school headmistress who killed her former lover. “I remember Joan put me next to Jean Harris after she got out of jail. I asked her about it, and she looked me in the eye and said, ‘I did murder a man. I deserved to go to prison.’”

  Whatever the guest list, the dinners were elaborately formal. “One year I had nowhere to go on Thanksgiving, and she invited me,” said Lonny Price. “It was so elegant it was like you were in a magazine. I was not used to Thanksgiving being that kind of production. We went around the table, with everyone being asked what they were grateful for—it was very haimish and lovely. Every time you stepped into that house it was like you were in a photo shoot for House & Garden.”

  “She had a beautiful, elegant, curated life,” Dangle attested. To furnish that life, Rivers was a compulsive shopper and inveterate collector whose mania for acquisition never waned. Always avidly materialistic, she had an unquenchable hunger for expensive property and possessions. Nothing ever assuaged her childhood feelings of deprivation and inadequacy, but she always seemed comforted by her ability to afford such luxuries, and she developed a connoisseur’s eye.

  “Joan called Sotheby’s out of the blue and got me, and she bought a very important piece of eighteenth-century French furniture, a Louis XV ormolu mounted writing table from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman,” said Pete Hathaway, then a director of European furniture at Sotheby’s. “I was stunned that she was calling about a very important table. I thought, ‘Holy shit—she lives really well, and she’s got lovely things!’”

  Their initial transaction developed into a lasting friendship as well as a business relationship. “Joan collected across the board—eighteenth-century furniture, porcelain, silver, jewelry,” said Hathaway, who is now the proprietor of Ragamont House, a catering and event venue in Salisbury, Connecticut. “She had masses of silver, very grand. You name it, she had it: champagne buckets, silver pheasants, candy dishes, nut bowls, silver finger bowls. I’ve never seen so much silver in my life. When Joan gave a dinner party, the table was just ablaze with silver. I thought her taste was wonderful, but it was very elaborate. She told me that when she did her apartment, she told Louis Malkin, her interior designer, ‘I want a combination of Marie Antoinette and Jean Harlow.’ She said, ‘And I got it!’ She loved satins and silks and tassels and gilded things. She lived very grandly, but Joan was very Hollywood, so a lot of it was very theatrical, including the way she would dress for her dinner parties. There was sort of an Auntie Mame, costumey side to the way she dressed.”

  When Rivers bought a country house in New Preston, Connecticut, owning a second home opened up a whole new range of buying opportunities. “Joan’s thing was sixteen sets of china in the country: ‘If I have weekend guests, I don’t want to see the same china twice,’” Dangle said.

  Stockpiling enormous quantities of possessions seemed to give her a sense of security that represented a hedge against any future setbacks. “She would go to Manolo Blahnik and order four pairs: ‘If I’m broke, I’m going to have good shoes,’” Dangle reported. “I think the whole idea of being broke stayed with her all her life: ‘It might all fall apart, but I’m going to have four pairs of gorgeous $2,600 crocodile shoes.’ In the early 1990s, $2,600 was a lot of money. She would find a Chanel shoe she liked and get six pairs.”

  Rivers also engaged in some competitive gamesmanship to protect her stylistic prerogatives. “If she saw something really great that someone else wore, she would go to Bergdorf’s and buy up all of them to prevent anyone else from getting it,” said Valerie Frankel, Rivers’s ghostwriter on Men Are Stupid…and They Like Big Boobs. “She definitely had that side.”

  But Rivers was as interested in a bargain as she was in couture. “She wasn’t a snob; she liked what she liked, and I don’t think she was ever a label girl,” said Dangle. “She could wear Zara, and she could wear Valentino—whatever made her look good. She could wear a $40,000 Verdura bracelet and mix it with some stuff she bought at the airport. I loved that. It was not just about the designer; you like it because you like it. She liked expensive china, but she also got cheap and cheerful furniture.”

  As Rivers’s finances restabilized, she began to emulate the charitable activism of New York’s reigning socialites in addition to their sartorial chic and luxurious homes. The responsibility of noblesse oblige is a bedrock principle with blue bloods on both sides of the Atlantic, and thanks to one of her elegant new friends, Rivers found a cause that remained deeply meaningful for the rest of her life.

  “Joan was involved with God’s Love We Deliver for twenty-five years,” said Karen Pearl, the president and CEO of the organization, a nonprofit charity that delivers meals to homebound people with AIDS. “She was brought in by Blaine Trump, and she fell in love with what we were doing.”

  Upper-crust WASP women have a long tradition of old-fashioned altruism on behalf of a wide range of causes, but Trump’s do-gooder commitment was unusually bold for its time. “Joan asked me what I was doing on Thanksgiving, and I said we were going to deliver Thanksgiving meals for God’s Love We Deliver,” Trump recalled. “She said, ‘I would love to do that,’ and that was the beginning of a really important, meaningful relationship with God’s Love We Deliver. Every Thanksgiving, she would go deliver meals, and then she’d do Thanksgiving dinner at her house.”

  Founded in 1985, God’s Love began during the early years of the AIDS crisis, when many creative communities were being ravaged by the mounting death toll. For Rivers, this cause was very personal. “Joan was losing her best friends—her hairdresser, her makeup people, some of her business partners,” Pearl said. “They were dying from this horrendous disease, and nobody was doing anything, because taking on HIV/AIDS meant taking on the issue of men having sex with men. Joan was outraged, and she felt she had to do something. We were bringing food to people who were otherwise isolated and starving, and Joan thought it was amazing. She was hooked from the beginning.”

  But AIDS carried a terrible stigma, and many leaders shrank from dealing with it. President Reagan’s response to the growing national health crisis was “halting and ineffective,” as his biographer Lou Cannon put it.

  “Talk about using your voice—Reagan wouldn’t even say the fucking word,” said the comic Judy Gold.

  But Reagan’s fellow conservatives had no qualms about expressing their hatred and contempt for the victims. Pat Buchanan, Reagan’s communications director, wrote a 1983 op-ed for the New York Post claiming that homosexuals “have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.” Buchanan’s policy prescriptions included the recommendation that homosexuals be prohibited from handling food.

  William F. Buckley, the right-wing author and founder of the National Review, demanded that HIV-positive people be double-branded. “Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals,” he wrote in The New York Times.

  Other conservative leaders cloaked their hostility in religion—like Reverend Jerry Falwell, the founder of the Moral Majority, who proclaimed that “AIDS is the wrath of God upon homosexuals.”

  In the prevailing atmosphere of fear and intolerance, Rivers’s involvement was particularly noteworthy. “At that time, there was such fear of an AIDS pandemic that people thought we were both nuts,” said Trump. “But Joan was fearless. Anytime we needed her to do a fund-raiser, she was there.”

  That public commitment really stood out during the early years of the AIDS crisis. “Joan never shied away from controversy, and she was the first celebrity to do an AID
S fund-raiser,” Pearl said. “I think it was hugely brave, and I don’t use that word lightly. AIDS was something nobody wanted to name or touch or do anything about. Joan took on the subject, and there was never a time when she said anything that was not heartfelt or loving. She was a hero then, and I think she stayed a hero for people who were living with HIV/AIDS.”

  The gay community responded with gratitude and deep affection. “When you’re gay and in the closet it’s the most painful thing, and Joan was so loving and accepting when AIDS was hush-hush,” said Judy Gold. “She had trannies on TV in the 1980s.”

  In later years, God’s Love expanded its mandate to serve patients with cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, heart failure, multiple sclerosis, and other illnesses. As soon as her grandson, Cooper, was old enough, Rivers began bringing him with her to make holiday deliveries.

  “It was very important to her, because she wanted him to understand that there are people in our city who are in great need, and it’s an act of honor to be able to help them,” Pearl said. “It wasn’t done from the perspective of ‘I’m better, because I’m doing something for somebody else.’ It was more like, ‘I’m lucky, because it’s a privilege to serve others and make their lives better.’ She really meant it—and she didn’t just drop stuff off either. She came in and talked to you. She came at this like one person visiting another. She’d be sharing tips with women in their eighties about how it gets harder to get up every day.”

  Rivers’s dedication was so fierce that she sometimes put her commitment to God’s Love above her own interests. “One time we had a benefit where Joan was supposed to deliver some lines, and after the show she didn’t come to the after-party,” said Blaine Trump. “It turned out she’d gone to the emergency room; she had some heart fibrillation, and she didn’t want to ruin the show.”

  When Rivers was a contestant on The Celebrity Apprentice in 2009, she chose God’s Love as her charity to play for. “She won over $500,000 for us,” Pearl reported. “People knew about God’s Love because they followed Joan.”

  For the rest of her life, Rivers never flagged in her commitment to God’s Love. But as the years passed, her enthusiasm for other aspects of her New York incarnation began to wane. She enjoyed having a country house, but she grew increasingly weary of the cross-country commute to see Melissa and Cooper in Los Angeles. She wanted to spend more time with them, so she started trying to simplify her life, first by selling the Connecticut house and then by reevaluating her Manhattan lifestyle. She was proud of the gilded showcase she had created, but perhaps it had served its purpose.

  “She thought it was stupid to be rattling around in a $20-million-plus apartment that was bought for entertaining when she wasn’t entertaining anymore,” said Hathaway. “She just wanted a more scaled-down, normal life. When the Plaza went condo, she and Cindy Adams and Barbara Walters were talking about getting cojoined apartments in the Plaza and sharing butlers and maids.”

  Thinking that she might buy a place in Los Angeles and maintain a smaller pied-à-terre in New York, Rivers put her elaborate apartment on the market in 2009, asking $25 million, and again in 2012, asking $29 million.

  The apartment—whose monthly carrying costs were $25,337—didn’t find a buyer then, but it did after Rivers died. “It sold for the asking price, which was $28 million,” said Hathaway.

  The Queen of Comedy had wanted to create a home fit for a monarch. It turned out that the apartment was purchased by Prince Muhammad bin Fahd, the sixty-five-year-old son of Saudi Arabia’s late King Fahd.

  When the prince took possession of the apartment, he immediately ordered a gut renovation.

  Chapter Fifteen

  High Society: Putting On the Ritz

  The night Rivers met the man she described as “the love of my life,” he was still married to and living with someone else—a Vanderbilt, to be precise. For Rivers, this inconvenient fact was a minor detail she would gloss over in subsequent accounts of her long relationship with Orin Lehman, a philanthropist and conservationist from a prominent New York family.

  The very fact that Rivers was hobnobbing with Lehmans and Vanderbilts reflected her new incarnation as a New York society lady. Living in California during the Reagan administration, Rivers managed to befriend such social icons as Nancy Reagan and Betsy Bloomingdale, the wife of Alfred Bloomingdale, an heir to the Bloomingdale’s department store fortune. For the next phase of her life as a single woman in New York, Rivers’s aspirations centered around the WASP elite of bold-faced names like C. Z. Guest and Blaine Trump, whose seemingly effortless style she admired as the epitome of inherited privilege and superior status.

  “She was very much interested in becoming a society girl,” said David Dangle, who redesigned Rivers’s look to resemble that of the women she envied. “Blaine Trump became her friend, and there were a lot of galas. She wanted that world.”

  To Rivers, acceptance by the doyennes of Manhattan society—the well-bred “swans” Truman Capote idolized before betraying their secrets in “La Côte Basque,” and their successors, the “social X-rays” Tom Wolfe satirized in The Bonfire of the Vanities—represented the imprimatur of class she had always hungered to acquire for herself, through success if not by birth.

  Another powerful lure was simply the frenetic schedule of their social scene, which offered an endless array of benefits, black-tie balls, ladies’ lunches, charitable commitments, and other glamorous diversions that helped to fill up the open evenings that Rivers dreaded.

  The occasion where she met Lehman was given by Marylou Whitney, the philanthropist and widow of Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney. “It was at a party in Saratoga, and all the horse people were there,” said Robert Higdon, Rivers’s escort that night. “Orin Lehman was Alfred Bloomingdale’s cousin, and ‘Lehman’ was a very aristocratic name.”

  The scion of a distinguished family, Orin was a great-grandson of Mayer Lehman, a founder of the Lehman Brothers investment house. Orin’s great-uncle was Herbert Lehman, who served New York State as a two-term governor and then as a two-term senator.

  Orin also had a penchant for marrying into other rich and well-connected families. His first wife, Jane Bagley, was a Reynolds tobacco heiress, and his second wife was Wendy Vanderbilt, an artist.

  A Princeton graduate and a war hero, Orin served as an Army pilot during World War II, when he was seriously injured in the Battle of the Bulge. He lost his leg and received the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Purple Heart.

  Although he tried going into the family business, five years of working as an associate at Lehman Brothers convinced him not to pursue a career in finance. “I had some money and didn’t want to devote my life to making money,” he told The New York Times.

  His attempts to run for elective office were unsuccessful—a liberal Democrat, he lost his races for Congress and for New York City comptroller—but he found his mission in public service. The defining job of his career arrived when he succeeded Robert Moses as New York State’s commissioner of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, a job he held for eighteen years, which made him the longest-serving commissioner in the history of New York State.

  As steward of the state park system, Lehman was widely respected for his commitment to conservation. He hiked New York’s trails by balancing himself on metal canes, and employees of the park system referred to him affectionately as Father Nature.

  In recalling the night he first met Lehman, Higdon said he was predisposed to being charitable —“Orin had crutches, so you’re very forgiving to someone”—but Lehman antagonized him immediately.

  “At the time, I think I was working for Margaret Thatcher, and he made some sarcastic comment about her,” recalled Higdon, who served as a White House aide during the Reagan administration and later became executive director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, then of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, and finally of Prince Charles’s Washington-based Prince of Wales Foundation.

  “
I turned to Joan and said, ‘This man is the biggest jerk,’” Higdon reported. “She said, ‘I think he’s very attractive!’ I said, ‘Well, then trade places with me.’ And she did—and that was that.”

  Rivers and Lehman proceeded to have an extremely good time, which astonished Higdon. “I think he’s the biggest ass I’ve ever met in my life, but they had chemistry—there’s no question about that,” he said. “I think there was a huge physical thing with them; she said the physical chemistry was incredible.”

  But Lehman, who was twelve years older than Rivers and the father of three daughters, was also married and living with his longtime wife—not yet separated, as Rivers would later claim. On that night in Saratoga as well as on another occasion, at designer Arnold Scaasi’s house, Higdon said, “There was Orin and Wendy—they weren’t separated. In fact, we gave them a ride home. But Orin and Joan went to lunch the next week, and within a few weeks he was part of our lives.”

  How this happened depends on whom you ask. “When Joan met Orin and he was flirting with her, he was separated from Wendy Lehman,” said Blaine Trump. “Joan was an old-fashioned girl, and she called me and said, ‘Is Orin married? Because I don’t want to go out with anyone who’s married.’ He wasn’t officially divorced, but he was separated, so she thought it was okay to go out with him. She really was a traditionalist.”

  Orin’s then wife tells a different story. “I didn’t like Joan,” Wendy Lehman said. “I met her before Orin did, and she was very funny and all that, but she was after Orin before she knew I was leaving him.”

  According to Wendy, she had already decided to end her marriage but had not yet told her husband when he first met Rivers. “We were at a party, and she gave us a ride home, and we had a funny time in the car,” she said.