Last Girl Before Freeway

by Leslie Bennetts

  Pogrebin saw Rivers as representative of her cohort. “Everyone I know who was raised in that similar atmosphere, it’s like you are never done, and it could all go tomorrow,” she said. “I think Joan falls into the category of ‘They did kill us, they still would, and fuck them.’ That’s a brand of Judaism, and a brand of thinking, that I heard a lot from her generation—although not with as little discretion. She was the most blunt, about her aspirations and about anti-Semites—she had zero tolerance of them. When I go and speak at Jewish Federations all over the country, with women of her generation there’s a bit of a siege mentality. Joan is not just a comedian being extreme. She is representative of a certain strand of thinking that I do think is dated now.”

  Rivers’s use of pejorative words like schvartzes is offensive by any contemporary standard, but she refused to adapt her behavior to evolving sensibilities, let alone the demands of political correctness. In fact, she delighted in cracking jokes that reinforced Jewish stereotypes.

  Some involved sex: “I saw my first porno film recently,” she said. “It was a Jewish porno film—one minute of sex and nine minutes of guilt.”

  Other jokes upheld the cliché of a Jewish penchant for materialism and conspicuous consumption: pointing a finger at anyone sitting near the stage, she would pass judgment on a woman’s engagement ring, saying it was acceptable for “goyim” but mere “swimming jewelry” for a Jew.

  At times, Rivers seemed to go out of her way to be incendiary. At one dinner party she hosted, Rivers asked everyone at the table to describe themselves with a single adjective. “The adjectives people gave were things like ‘unstoppable,’ ‘triumphant,’ ‘superlative,’ ‘confident,’” recalled Jesse Kornbluth, who was one of the guests. “These were people who had willed themselves to be successful, as did Joan. So they get to me and I say, ‘Ambivalent.’ I remember Joan laughing at me and saying, ‘Get over yourself! You’re as ambitious as any of the rest of us kikes!’”

  When Melissa married the horse trainer John Endicott in 1998, Rivers had his family crest embroidered on the bustle of her daughter’s wedding dress. She was obviously proud that Melissa was marrying the kind of gentile who had a family crest—and yet she was also concerned that their son, Cooper, not lose his sense of Jewish identity. “The raising of her grandson worried her,” Pogrebin said. “She really wanted him to be a Jew.”

  Such feelings didn’t translate into being observant in any traditional way. When Pogrebin’s Stars of David was made into a musical, the composer William Finn was asked to write a Joan Rivers song. “We had a meeting, and she was talking about not having a temple, and I said, ‘I have a place you’re going to love,’” Finn reported. “I took her to a gay temple.”

  On the night before Yom Kippur, Finn brought Rivers to the evening service at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, a New York synagogue serving the LGBT and inclusive Jewish community. When she walked in, pandemonium broke out. “People were flying over their seats; they couldn’t believe it was her,” Finn said. “I’ve never been in a maelstrom like that—ever.”

  During the service, Finn was astonished by Rivers’s familiarity with the liturgical prayers. “I asked her, ‘How do you know how to daven so well?’ She said, ‘The way you’re praying reminds me of my father.’ She was so Jewish.”

  Although the service was lengthy, Rivers was game. “She’s, like, eighty years old, and she stood for, like, four hours,” said Charles Busch, who accompanied her that night. “I was bored out of my skull, and I sat down. She was like, ‘If I can stand, why can’t you stand?’”

  Despite the solemn ceremony, Rivers remained her usual acerbic self. “I said I was very touched when this old lesbian in front of us held the Torah,” Busch recalled. “Joan said, ‘It would have been more touching if she’d washed her hair.’”

  Although Rivers rarely went to temple services, she nonetheless saw them as meaningful. “She was more of a cultural Jew, but there was a very deep pride in it, and the traditions were important to her,” said Dorothy Melvin, who became an Orthodox Jew in her later years.

  One of the musical numbers written for Stars of David was a Rivers-inspired song called “High Holy Days.” “In the insanity of her day, in the voraciousness of her career, this was when she described the pause, the once-a-year time that she dialed down and sat there and felt like it was where she should be,” Pogrebin explained.

  If Rivers was an infrequent temple-goer, her support for Israel remained a constant, and her views on that were absolutist. “There were no shades of gray in the question of Israel’s existence or its politics,” said Pogrebin. “Being Jewish was in her DNA, and it doesn’t matter if she’s praying or fasting or observing in any traditional way. She’s 100 percent Jewish, and she owns that. Whether or not I agree with her extremism, I was refreshed by her unapologetic Jewishness. She thinks Jews are great in all the stereotypical ways—she thinks they’re smarter, she thinks they make good husbands. It’s a rah-rah Jew identity for her.”

  Rivers’s passion for Israel was so ferocious it could trump all other considerations, as Andy Cohen learned when he booked her on his show, Watch What Happens: Live. She was scheduled to appear with Maksim Chmerkovskiy, who made his name on Dancing with the Stars—but Rivers apparently had an issue with her fellow guest.

  “Before the show, I got word from Joan’s team that she was going to eviscerate this guy on TV,” said Cohen, who had no idea why Rivers would be hostile to him. “She was fired up in a way I had never seen her, and she said, ‘Just watch!’ I think she was just going to cut his dick off, so I did everything I could to keep them from interacting on the air. And then during the commercial break she said to him, ‘Where are you from?,’ and he said something about being pro-Israel. She turned on a dime, and they fell in love. She completely opened up to him.”

  Despite Rivers’s loyalties, she sometimes expressed her sense of Jewishness in ways that others found disturbing. “I sent a Jewish friend who was in Auschwitz to see her show, and he was very offended by her joke that she lost her whole family at Auschwitz and she was standing in the gift shop for hours,” her friend Margie Stern recalled.

  In 2013, Rivers made a crack about the supermodel Heidi Klum on Fashion Police: “The last time a German looked this hot was when they were pushing Jews into the oven,” she said.

  The Anti-Defamation League assailed Rivers’s remark as “vulgar and hideous.” Its national director, Abraham Foxman, said, “Of all people, Joan Rivers should know better. There are certain things about the Holocaust that should be taboo. This is especially true for Jews, for whom the Holocaust is still a deeply painful memory.”

  Defending herself on CNN, Rivers said, “It’s a joke, number one. Number two, it is about the Holocaust. This is the way I remind people about the Holocaust. I do it through humor.”

  Asked why she wouldn’t apologize, she said, “For what?,” and added that people should criticize anti-Semites instead of someone whose late husband lost his entire family during the Holocaust.

  The following year Rivers ignited one of the biggest controversies of her career with an unrepentant attack on the Palestinian victims of Israel. In August of 2014, a TMZ reporter asked her about the Gaza conflict and noted that almost two thousand Palestinians had been killed. When he posted a video of her response, it caused a firestorm. “Oh my God! Tell that to the people in Hiroshima,” Rivers said, raising her hands in mock horror. “Good. Good. When you declare war, you declare war. They started it. We now don’t count who’s dead. You’re dead, you deserve to be dead. Don’t you dare make me feel bad about that. They were told to get out. They didn’t get out. You don’t get out, you are an idiot. At least the ones that were killed were the ones with low IQs.”

  Describing the Hamas government as “terrorists,” Rivers added, “They were reelected by a lot of very stupid people who don’t even own a pencil.”

  The resulting furor was amplified by social media. The comedian Anthony Jeselni
k tweeted that Rivers once told him “she would die before she’d ever apologize for a joke,” but she did post a statement about the controversy on her Facebook page.

  “I am both saddened and disappointed that my statement about the tragedy of civilian casualties was totally taken out of context,” Rivers announced. “What I said and stand behind is, war is hell and unfortunately civilians are victims of political conflicts. We, the United States, certainly know this as sixty-nine years later we still feel the guilt of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The media, as usual, has decided to only quote the most out of context and inflammatory non sequitur rather than giving an accurate account of what my intentions were behind the statement. Along with every other sane person in this world, I am praying for peace. It is stupid and wrong and I am tired of bearing the brunt of attacks by people who want to sell newspapers or gain ratings by creating a scandal about me that is nonexistent.”

  Rivers’s statement failed to mollify those who felt that humor was an inadequate excuse for crossing such a line. When she died the following month, thousands of people tweeted that she deserved her fate because of her remarks on Palestine, and Variety reported that “the hashtag #karma saw a large spike on Twitter for a brief period.”

  “Karma at work there. Without a doubt,” one person tweeted.

  Such controversies inevitably emphasized Rivers’s combativeness, but her friends also saw her Jewish background as the underlying inspiration for great generosity, particularly when it came to her family. From childhood, Joan and her sister had a fraught relationship, and they took very different paths in life. “As far as Joan was concerned, her sister was the smart one, her sister was the pretty one, her sister was the beloved one,” said Dorothy Melvin. “They were very different from each other. Roddy McDowall said, ‘If you weren’t related, you would never be friends.’”

  And yet for most of their adult life, Joan took care of Barbara and her children. “Barbara was a young widow, and Joan was a Jewish girl, and as Jews we have an age-old obligation to make sure we always take care of family first,” Melvin said. “That is the Jewish way of thinking—that you have to be extra kind to the widow and the orphan. In her DNA, Joan felt she had to take care of her sister. Deep down, Joan was a real Jew.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Men Are Stupid: Beauty and Betrayal

  In 2009, Rivers published a book called Men Are Stupid…and They Like Big Boobs, which she claimed was a piece of wisdom that Marilyn Monroe had personally imparted to her. Having gotten everyone’s attention, Rivers subtitled the book with her own solution to this age-old dilemma: A Woman’s Guide to Beauty Through Plastic Surgery.

  In a subsequent interview, Rivers actually described the scene in which Monroe supposedly made her immortal remark. “It was a 1951 dinner party,” said Rivers, who was a college student at the time. “My father was a doctor, and so was the guy who hosted the party. Marilyn was very shy, so they sat her next to the least threatening person in the room—me.”

  According to Rivers, timid little Joan Molinsky finally worked up the courage to tell the beautiful blond actress that she too was hoping to have a career in show business.

  “Honey, let me tell you a secret,” Monroe allegedly replied. “Men are stupid and they like big tits.”

  When Rivers told this story to an interviewer decades later, she added, “That’s still true. Oh, my first agent, listen to this, this is in 1965: he told me that I was too old—too old!”

  By 1965, Monroe had been dead for three years, having succumbed to a barbiturate overdose that was declared a probable suicide in 1962, when Rivers was still a struggling nobody trying to get unpaid gigs in Greenwich Village coffeehouses.

  Valerie Frankel, who cowrote Men Are Stupid, doesn’t know whether Rivers actually met Monroe. “If Joan said Marilyn said it directly to her, it was probably a joke,” Frankel admitted.

  But Rivers’s personal guide to beauty was no joke. It began with an unapologetic statement of her worldview. “Okay, politically incorrect or not, let’s face it: men are stupid,” Rivers wrote. “They can’t help it. They’re wired to procreate, and Mother Nature has doomed the poor things. They are attracted to creatures that are their opposites, with hairless bodies, big boobs, slim waists, rounded butts—and this has become the beauty ideal many women aspire to achieve.”

  As far as Rivers was concerned, the way to attain this ideal was simple, and the reason for doing so was even simpler: “For many of us, having it all means getting a nip, or a tuck, or a little lift now and again,” she said. “Why? Because it makes us feel good.”

  Nor did she believe women should be embarrassed to admit to such stratagems. After dedicating the book to “all the women who’ve felt they had to keep their plastic surgery a secret, who’ve lied about having had it, and who’ve felt shame about needing it, wanting it, or doing it,” Rivers proclaimed that she herself felt no such shame about having needed it, wanted it, and done it.

  “She called it maintenance,” said Blaine Trump. “She started having little nips and tucks every year.”

  For Rivers, this hobby became virtually recreational. “Joan’s idea of a vacation was to check into a hospital and get something done,” said Lonny Price. “This was a sickness; she couldn’t stop. I don’t think it was anything rational. She was clearly addicted to plastic surgery. I think she always felt like the ugly girl. She was always screaming, ‘Everyone does it! I’m the only one who talks about it!’”

  In 2012, Rivers told Anderson Cooper she had undergone 739 cosmetic surgery procedures. She joked about having had so many that for every ten she did, she got one free, as in many rewards programs. “It’s a little like coffee—you just keep going,” she said.

  Rivers later claimed that she was kidding and the real total wasn’t that high, but she didn’t deny how extensive her interventions had been. “She once said there was not an original part of her body,” reported Larry Ferber.

  Her quest for self-improvement was so compulsive that Melissa felt compelled to stage an intervention on their reality show Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best? “At some point I think the risk outweighs the reward, so I wanted my mother to know how I felt about it, and I think I made myself pretty clear,” Melissa said. “I also found out that most of my friends are weak, and she turned them very easily.”

  Joan chimed in: “They all said, ‘You shouldn’t do it! You shouldn’t do it!’ And I said, ‘What if I pay for everybody in this room? What would you do?’ Every single person accepted.”

  “Joan would say, ‘Whatever makes you feel better about yourself, do it,’” Frankel explained. “Surgery made her feel better about herself. Whether or not it made her better by any objective scale, she liked it, so she did it.”

  She did it so often that she became very cavalier about the toll of such procedures. When Lonny Price was working on Sally Marr with Rivers, he found her blithe insouciance very disconcerting. “At one point she had a peel or something, and her face was falling onto the script in pieces,” Price recalled. “I said, ‘Joan, you have to go sit over there.’ She said, ‘Oh—okay.’ I don’t think Joan was embarrassed by anything.”

  Charles Busch had a similar experience while he was helping Rivers to develop the one-woman show she would perform in London. “One day she answered the door and her face had these horrible scabs all over it,” he said. “She said, ‘Oh, I just had a peel. But I can only work two hours today, because I have to do a show in Connecticut.’ I was just shocked that she was going to do a show with big scabs on her face, but she said, ‘I’ll just cover them up with makeup.’ Bob Mackie said, ‘Oh, I love Joan—she shows up at fittings with blood still in her hair.’”

  Confronted with such problems, Rivers’s usual approach was to ignore them—or to dissemble, if necessary. “At one point she was on television and her eyes were tearing, and she said she had some kind of infection, but she was lying,” said Price. “The truth was that she’d had some plastic surgery done. She said
, ‘They just pulled it too tight.’”

  Some of her interventions were so dramatic as to be shocking. “When she had cheek implants, that took everyone aback,” said Trump. “It changed the structure of her face, but she said, ‘Oh, it will settle in,’ and after a while it did.”

  Rivers seemed weirdly nonchalant about appearing in public during those interludes. “One night we were having dinner at the Carlyle and I remember being horrified,” said Pete Hathaway. “It looked like she had golf balls under her skin. I had no idea why she would even go out.”

  Such disfigurements didn’t even dissuade Rivers from going onstage. “She did a play at the Geffen theater that I helped her with, and she had so much filler you couldn’t see her eyes at all, because there was so much built up around her eyes,” said Charles Busch. “They were just like dark sockets.”

  Seemingly devoid of embarrassment, Rivers never lost her enthusiasm for correcting nature’s oversights. “I’ve been the public (lifted) face of cosmetic enhancement since the Stone Age,” she wrote. “My abiding life philosophy is plain: In our appearance-centric society, beauty is a huge factor in everyone’s professional and emotional success—for good or ill, it’s the way things are; accept it or go live under a rock…So why not do whatever you can to improve your appearance?”