Last Girl Before Freeway

by Leslie Bennetts

  If Rivers managed to behave herself at such times, there were other occasions when she rebelled against royal protocol. “One time at the Prince of Wales dinner, Prince Charles’s equerry came up and said, ‘Prince Charles would love you to say a few words at dinner,’” Trump reported. “She said, ‘Oh my God, I haven’t prepared anything!’ The equerry said, ‘Miss Rivers, just so you know, there will be no “fuck”s in the toast.’ So she got up and said, ‘I’ve been told I can’t say “fuck.”’ Being outrageous gave her so much pleasure. She just loved it.”

  Rivers remained friends with the royal family until she died, but back in New York, her interest in her socialite lifestyle eventually waned. “In the last ten or twelve years of her life, the society thing stopped being something she cared about, and there was the realization that that world completely bored the pants off her,” Dangle said. “Is it fun to go to the Met gala and sit with all these women who don’t have much to say? Their lives are rather empty, and Joan had a very full life. I don’t think she needed to go to another one of those dinners; it was more fun to go to the theater.”

  And Rivers’s passion for such cultural riches was eternal—as was her contempt for anyone who didn’t appreciate them. “If you don’t go to Broadway, you’re a fool,” she said in an interview with New York magazine. “We’re in the theater capital of the world, and if you don’t get it, you’re an idiot.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  But Is It Good for the Jews?

  Sex, Politics, and Religion

  During Rivers’s lifetime, the modern American women’s movement liberated her along with millions of others, breaking down laws and customs that held women back and creating innumerable new opportunities. Although Rivers benefited from those changes, she consistently refused to embrace the goal of equality that inspired them.

  “She would say, ‘I don’t want to be identified as a feminist,’” Kathy Griffin reported. “It would always drive me crazy.”

  But Rivers’s objection was personal rather than philosophical: she feared the label might diminish her appeal as a performer. “She said, ‘No one wants to see a feminist! I can see those ticket sales flying out the window!’” Griffin reported. “She said, ‘That word isn’t always a good word to be associated with. Does that mean men won’t come to see your shows?’ She felt it was something that could limit her audience base.”

  Since the definition of a feminist is someone who believes in social, political, and economic equality for women, Rivers’s position struck many of her friends as a ludicrous exercise in intellectual dishonesty, since anyone who does not believe in social, political, and economic equality for women is, also by definition, a bigot. “I used to laugh about that and say, ‘Look, honey, you’re a feminist!’” said Griffin. “She broke barriers; she did everything a feminist does. She was the living embodiment of what a woman can accomplish through true grit and being unapologetic, so you don’t get more feminist than that.”

  Confronted with such denial, Rivers’s intimates generally responded by rolling their eyes and focusing on her actual life rather than her professed opinions. “She was a feminist, whether or not she accepted the title,” said Margaret Cho. “She was able to empower herself, and she broke through in an era when we didn’t hear women at all. She inspired so many women to give voice to their feminism. Women are always trying to be pleasing, but Joan was contrary. She didn’t want people to put her in any kind of category; she wanted to define herself in every way. She got to decide who she was.”

  But who she was remained stubbornly paradoxical. Although Rivers prided herself on keeping up with the times, many of her attitudes were firmly rooted in the past. Gloria Steinem saw her as “a transitional woman,” the product of an old-fashioned culture whose life was shaped by social upheaval but who never revised her own thinking, particularly about traditional gender roles.

  “Joan was prefeminist to the bone,” said Steinem, who was one year younger than Rivers. “She was a kind of queen bee who broke boundaries inadvertently, but didn’t see herself as a member of her own community.”

  To many onlookers, the resulting contradictions were perplexing. Hollywood is often considered a bastion of liberalism, and comics are an iconoclastic breed—but Rivers’s politics were distinctly conservative. “Joan was Republican verging on Royalist,” said Bob Colacello, the author of Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House.

  As with feminism, the roots of Rivers’s opinions on politics seemed very personal. “The basis of her thought was money and protection,” said Sue Cameron. “She was in favor of the death penalty, and her view was, ‘You try to kill me, I’m going to kill you first.’ To her, Republican values meant lower taxes and a strong defense. If your motivation is ‘I don’t want to be broke’ and ‘I don’t want to be killed by an Arab,’ and you believe the Republican Party will keep you alive and keep you solvent, that’s the one thing that would influence her. She just ignored the social stuff.”

  For Rivers, personal security came first, and she never felt secure. Sabrina Lott Miller was a firearms instructor and part-time bookkeeper at the Beverly Hills Gun Club when she went to work for Rivers in 1988, and her NRA certification was one of her job qualifications. “Joan would have death threats, and she always felt like she had to have extra protection,” said Miller. “She wasn’t Annie Oakley, but she could be if needed to protect herself. It was all about security.”

  Miller has worked for the Rivers family ever since, although Joan once came close to shooting her. “I was staying in Melissa’s apartment in New York, which could be accessed through the back stairs in Joan’s apartment, and the staff forgot to tell Joan. In the middle of the night, I was coming through the door in the ballroom and there was Joan on the balcony—she had her gun cocked,” Miller said. “She was like, ‘I don’t know who you are, but your time’s up!’”

  Despite such pugnacity, Rivers gravitated toward women like Nancy Reagan and Betsy Bloomingdale: rich, Republican, rigidly self-controlled wives who concealed their more lethal tendencies behind saccharine smiles and silken manners. As a comic, Rivers broke barriers, flouted the rules, and made fun of gender norms. She also made her own money; having agonized over her mother’s financial dependency, she vowed as a child not to rely on a husband to support her, and she never did. But when it came to her social life, she consistently chose the company of pampered wives who expected wealthy, patriarchal husbands to buy their $20,000 handbags and fabulous homes. Rivers didn’t hang out with rebellious feminists who questioned establishment politics and traditional sex stereotypes; her friends believed in face-lifts, couture clothes, and lacquered hair that wouldn’t budge in gale force winds. “Republican equals the right place setting,” said Cameron. “Feminism was just fodder for her act. Feminists had hairy legs and Birkenstocks and bad clothes.”

  Rivers clearly preferred the protected lily-white world of her powerful, entitled friends over more diverse or iconoclastic milieus—and yet here too she was curiously inconsistent. “She was a bit of a contrarian,” Blaine Trump admitted. “She was very conservative, but socially very liberal. She had tons of gay friends, and she thought everyone had the right to be whoever you are and whatever you are—but underneath it all she was very traditional. She was not modern.”

  Rivers was beloved by gay men long before she stepped forward as a public spokesperson for God’s Love We Deliver during the AIDS crisis, so her allegiance to the GOP seemed particularly puzzling when it came to LGBT issues. “She was very early on gay rights and accepting transsexuals, very progressive,” observed Steve Olsen, owner of the Laurie Beechman Theatre.

  Many of her adult fans became obsessed with her in adolescence, when her humor stood out like a beacon that could lead them to more tolerant communities than the ones where they were born.

  “When you’re a seventeen-year-old boy in a ten-thousand-person town in Arkansas, and the only person you thought might have the same feelings you do is a six-foot-seve
n black man who roller-skated down the interstate and got arrested, you definitely know which famous people are accepting of gay people,” said Jason Sheeler, the fashion news director of Departures magazine. “You’re always looking for subtext, hunting for clues about who would be cool with you, and you would know who was a friend of gays. You knew Joan Rivers was on your side. She was the friend you wanted.”

  Jeff Cubeta, a New York–based pianist and songwriter who grew up in a blue-collar Pennsylvania family, found Rivers’s comedy to be a comforting escape from a difficult reality. “One thing that resonated for me was that I knew Joan didn’t have support from her family, and I didn’t either,” said Cubeta, the son of a factory worker and a hairdresser. “That was something I had to struggle to overcome.”

  For such fans, Rivers’s defiance of social norms was thrillingly transgressive. “There was this honesty, a no-holds-barred, I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude,” said the comedian and television personality Billy Eichner. “She was also very fashionable and flamboyant and larger than life. It was like she was comedy’s answer to Cher.”

  “She’s probably the only female comedian who is a gay icon,” observed the actor and director Charles Busch, who is particularly renowned as a drag artist. “She started off with the self-deprecating-ugly-girl comedy, and gay men could identify with her presenting herself as an outcast with humor. She had a mixture of strength, flamboyance, vulnerability, and survival tactics that a lot of those ladies share, from Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli to Streisand.”

  Rivers always had gay friends, but in her later years she grew increasingly bored with rich Republican wives and gravitated more toward the witty, stylish men who adored her company. “She didn’t have to compete as a woman for gay men,” said Lonny Price. “It wasn’t about her being attractive. She could be Auntie Mame.”

  Rivers even got herself ordained online by the Universal Life Church so she could perform the marriage ceremony of Preston Bailey, the floral designer of her daughter’s lavish wedding. If not as extravagant as Melissa’s, his nuptials were flamboyant in their own way. “In 2013, the self-proclaimed ‘queen of the gays’ officiated at a King Kong–themed ceremony for Preston Bailey and Theo Bleckmann atop the Empire State Building,” the Huffington Post reported in 2014.

  But Rivers didn’t stop with Bailey’s wedding to Bleckmann, a musician and composer. Two months before she died, she was signing copies of Diary of a Mad Diva at a Manhattan Barnes & Noble where a couple named Jed Ryan and Joe Aiello were waiting to buy the book. “She mentioned being an ordained minister, and I jokingly asked [Ryan], ‘Do you think it’s true? Maybe she’ll marry us.’ And he goes, ‘Ask her.’ So I did,” said Aiello.

  Rivers not only performed an impromptu ceremony; she also agreed to do the whole thing again after the couple realized that they hadn’t completed the requisite paperwork.

  Given the GOP’s unrelenting hostility to gay marriage and women’s rights, Rivers’s identification as a Republican required a tacit acceptance of the viciously discriminatory policies the party has espoused toward two of her core constituencies. To some extent, her iconoclasm was simply a manifestation of her penchant for being a troublemaker. She just loved to provoke people, even if that meant agitating close friends—a pastime she seemed to regard as sport. With one couple whose politics were very liberal, she liked to taunt the husband by saying “schvartze,” a pejorative Yiddish word for a black person that is comparable to the word “nigger.” Giving Rivers the benefit of the doubt, the couple laughed off such slurs. “I never believed anything she said about anything,” the wife admitted. “It was always joking.”

  Like Rivers’s stance on feminism, many of her views on issues seemed determined more by self-interest than by principle. In 2013, the writers at Fashion Police went on strike over wages. They put in sixteen-hour days and worked up to forty hours a week, a schedule that made it impossible for them to hold down other jobs, but they were paid only one-sixth of the Writers Guild’s minimum weekly compensation for comedy-variety shows. They wanted to join the Writers Guild of America, West, the union that represents Hollywood writers, but E! had resisted their efforts.

  Rivers herself was a member of the Writers Guild, but when the writers sought her support, she was anything but sympathetic to their plight. “She just blew up on us, cussing and screaming,” said Todd Masterson, one of the show’s writers. “She pounded her fists on the table. She threw a binder on the ground. She stormed out of the room and stormed back in the room.”

  The guild filed an unfair labor practices charge against E! and Rivers’s production company, alleging that the Fashion Police writers were owed $1.5 million in unpaid regular and overtime wages. Frustrated by a lack of progress, the writers finally went on strike—whereupon Rivers denounced them publicly as “idiots” and “schmuck writers.” After the strike dragged on for more than a year, WGA spokesman Neal Sacharow publicly assigned blame: “One of the biggest obstacles is that Joan Rivers, a WG member and host of the show, not only refuses to stand with the writers but has actively stood in the way of their efforts, even illegally threatening that they could lose their jobs if they unionized,” he said.

  Rivers avoided expulsion from the WGA by agreeing to stop writing for the show for the duration of the strike and by urging both sides to settle, but her conduct horrified many of those involved. One of the show’s former writers, Dennis Hensley, finally landed a gig with a cruise ship, where a play he had written was performed. Its plot revolved around the murder of a talk show host, and the suspects were the show’s writers.

  In such disputes, Rivers seemed primarily concerned with her own benefit. The catchphrase “But is it good for the Jews?” is a staple of Jewish humor, but Rivers’s choices were often driven by a simpler calculation: “Is it good for Joan?”

  At times, however, those who tangled with her were surprised by the virulence of her conservatism. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the musician and producer Nile Rodgers recruited more than two hundred musicians and other celebrities to record his song “We Are Family.” The director Spike Lee shot the music video, and the late Danny Schechter made a documentary chronicling the recording sessions.

  “Nile Rodgers admired Joan Rivers, and he reached out to her,” recalled Schechter, a veteran television producer and cofounder of Global Vision, an independent international news syndicate. “The idea was to support an education project to promote tolerance, but her reaction was to denounce it. She attacked it politically, and she was really vicious to the people from WAF who spoke to her on the phone. She cursed them out; it was very upsetting.”

  The WAF group decided to include her reaction in the documentary. “I felt that was an important element—not everyone was singing ‘Kumbaya,’ and Rivers spoke for the hardheaded right-wing point of view,” said Schechter. “Not only did she refuse to comment, but her lawyer called me and said, ‘If you mention this in any way, we will sue you for defaming her.’”

  The experience convinced Schechter that Rivers was a “fascist,” he said. She was certainly no fan of progressivism; she loathed New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, whom she blamed for a divisive approach that pitted rich against poor. But she may have reconsidered her reflexive Republicanism when it came to other candidates, according to Charles Busch. “She told me she voted for Obama. She kind of whispered it to me,” he said.

  Many of Rivers’s friends saw her conservatism as a function of her strong identification as a Jew. This too seemed somewhat contradictory; Rivers had, after all, changed her surname, gotten more than one nose job, and spent much of her life trying to emulate the WASP elite. “As much as she talked about being Jewish all the time, I think she really would rather have been a WASP,” said Sue Cameron.

  But such yearnings coexisted with a strong sense of her original identity. “Joan was very proud of being Jewish,” Bill Reardin said. “She insisted that our business cards for The Joan Rivers Show be what she referred to as Israeli blue, which was
the blue from the Israeli flag. Culturally, she was very Jewish.”

  When she was in her seventies, Rivers got a tattoo on the inside of her left arm that said 6M, for the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. A rabbi later told her that getting a tattoo was forbidden by the Torah, but she was proud of her visible brand, modest as it seemed to younger aficionados of the art. “She went over to Lady Gaga and said, ‘Look at my tattoo!’” Margie Stern reported. “Lady Gaga said, ‘You call that a tattoo?’”

  The feminist film critic and author Molly Haskell believes that Rivers’s Jewish heritage was formative in shaping her humor. “Jewish women were already outside the WASP social contract,” Haskell said. “They’re not genteel women, with all the traits typically inculcated in gentile women—compliant, unchallenging, uncritical, tamping down their intelligence. There’s a tradition of mordant Jewish humor that’s very different from the cheery optimism of the Mormons, or the idea that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say it. Jewish women don’t have the same inhibitions that gentiles do. They’re not as penalized for speaking out. Jewish mothers are very frank and funny and often brusque.”

  Rivers’s passions included a fierce allegiance to the Jewish state. “Israel was very important to her, and for her, the Republicans had a better stance on Israel,” Cameron said. “She was becoming more and more Netanyahu-esque.”

  Despite her identification as a Jew, Rivers didn’t believe in the religious tenets of Judaism, nor did she practice most of its rituals; after her performances at the Laurie Beechman Theatre, her standing order upstairs at the West Bank Cafe was a shrimp cocktail. “I’m never going to say that she was a traditional or an observant Jew in any sense, but it goes to her essence,” said Abigail Pogrebin, who interviewed Rivers for her book Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish. “The whole thing about moxie, about ‘Don’t tell me I can’t do it!’—it’s a Jewish mantra, this idea that you can: ‘I will show you how wrong you are! Don’t tell me I can’t join this, go there, be this, accomplish that!’ That’s been our history, and that was coming out of her pores—and I recognized it, because I was raised like that too. Her beginnings were about defiance, in a way, and I’m not sure your underpinnings ever leave you—the drive, the ‘Don’t stop,’ the ‘It’s never enough!’”