Last Girl Before Freeway

by Leslie Bennetts

  Men Are Stupid offers quite an array of options. Its contents include information on temporary and permanent ways to plump up your lips; wrinkle-erasing treatments that include collagen, Restylane, Juvederm, and other fillers; mole removal; skin resurfacing peels and microdermabrasion; laser zapping and other procedures to deal with rosacea, freckles, broken capillaries, and acne scars; cellulite; laser body hair removal and head hair transplants; “full, mini, and feather” face-lifts; facial implants and revolumizing fat transfers; “boob jobs, boob jabs, lifts, reductions, and all you ever wanted to know about how to tweak a nipple”; nose jobs; liposuction; tummy tucks and “mommy makeovers”; eye lifts for drooping lids and brows; vaginal rejuvenation, butt lifts, and advice on “how to work out your vagina”; and even a discussion of “what the hell happened to Michael Jackson?”

  Rivers resorted to many of those treatments, undergoing surgical procedures on her lips, breasts, nose, stomach, brow, eyes, and arms, in addition to getting regular injections of Botox, among other things.

  “She had her boobs reduced a couple of times, she had tummy tucks, eye job, lid job, nose, cheek implants,” said David Dangle. “She was big on chemical peels, dermabrasion, and fillers. I think she looked extraordinary for an eighty-year-old woman. Her skin looked flawless. She had lovely skin and she kept it nice and tight.”

  “She was having knee lipo when Edgar killed himself,” said Sue Cameron. “She even had her hands done to hold up all the products on QVC. She had a laser peel, and she would add fillers and bleach them.”

  But no matter what she did, Rivers never felt she was good enough. “She was insecure,” said Blaine Trump. “If you said, ‘You look great!,’ she’d say, ‘Oh, come on!’ She couldn’t accept a compliment. I’d always say to her, ‘Just say “Thank you,”’ but there was always that insecurity. She never thought she was beautiful.”

  During the early decades of her career, Rivers resorted to surgical upgrades while still remaining recognizable as the person she had been at the beginning of her adult life. As she explained it, her need to improve her appearance was deeply rooted in her unhappy childhood, when Barbara was the pretty one and their mother scrambled Joan’s brain with mixed messages, poking fun at her weight even as she maintained that “looks are not important.”

  But what scarred Rivers forever was the searing grief of being rejected by men. “No man ever told me I was beautiful,” she said. And she never got over her pain at all the times men denied her the reassurance she craved.

  “I think she got up every morning and hated herself and said, ‘I’ve got to do something to make myself like myself better,’” said Shelly Schultz. “To invest so much of that in your face, to change your look, you must not have been happy with the way you look. She must have seen something that bothered her or she wouldn’t have continued to do that. It must have been looking in the mirror and saying, ‘Oh, that’s wrong, let me get that tweaked.’ Anybody who does that to her face doesn’t have good judgment. Jocelyn Wildenstein was inexplicable, but Joan was right up there.”

  Jocelyn Wildenstein, the wife of art dealer Alec Wildenstein, became the poster girl for horrifying excesses in plastic surgery after undergoing what were rumored to be up to $4 million worth of procedures to make her look like a cat. The resulting face was so alarming that it earned her the nicknames Catwoman and the Bride of Wildenstein, but her efforts to please her cat-loving husband proved fruitless: he subsequently divorced her anyway.

  “Joan had a primal wound,” said Jesse Kornbluth. “Joan’s hunger was to be loved, but no one was going to say, ‘I can’t wait to fuck Joan Rivers!’ I think it was hard for her to get a guy, and I think she cared a lot. Sex is one level of validation of truth in a relationship; it’s how you take a relationship’s temperature. I think Joan felt great with a cock in her. For Joan, it was the ultimate validation that a guy liked her enough to fuck her.”

  Rivers always believed that youth and beauty conferred an unfair advantage, but as she got older, she was disconcerted to realize that some women kept attracting lovers, no matter what their age or the state of their face. “She was in awe of my mother, who had four husbands and was such a predator when it came to finding men,” said Sue Cameron. “When my mother was around eighty-eight, I remember her complaining she wasn’t having enough sex. Husband number four died when she was ninety-two. She had a boyfriend at ninety-five, when she died.”

  Fascinated, Rivers demanded to know how she did it. “My mother was a geisha,” Cameron explained. “She said, ‘You have to dumb down, serve him martinis.’ Joan wasn’t going to do that.”

  But Rivers’s hunger for affirmation involved more than sex or romance; she saw her fixation on appearance as the quickest route to self-esteem. “Looking good equals feeling good,” she wrote in Men Are Stupid. “I’d rather look younger and feel happy than look older and be depressed.”

  She credited her DNA for a good complexion, but she was candid about other strategies for improving her looks—and her penchant for turning them into products she could sell.

  “My hair is washed every day and done every day,” she said. “It’s a luxury to have a guy come to my home and do my hair every single day. It takes forever, about an hour, but it’s okay because we’re good friends. I also put the Joan Rivers fill-in hair powder. We did an infomercial on it and it’s our number-one-selling product on QVC. It’s un-fucking-believable. For ladies with thin hair, it makes your hair thicker and takes the shine off the scalp. Men use it too. And it doesn’t come out in the rain. I needed it for myself and that’s how I came up with the idea. I was twenty years old and filling my hair in with a pencil. Again, DNA—my mother had thin hair. So my guy, Raymond Rosario, he does all my hairpieces. I’m very much into pieces. He does a lot of the Upper East Side ladies. He knows how to tease. He can take an old Jew and make her look like a WASP. When Raymond does my hair I can walk into the Knickerbocker Club.”

  As with the Joan Rivers fill-in hair powder, Rivers was endlessly inventive about monetizing her beautification efforts. She was even willing to turn them into programming highlights by exposing herself for all to see, as Larry Ferber discovered in a memorable episode of her daytime talk show that featured her latest surgery. “The show was so popular she made the cover of TV Guide,” he said.

  Rivers believed it was crucial for an aging woman to look youthful in order to remain professionally viable—and many of her colleagues in the entertainment business saw that, rather than romance, as her primary motive for undergoing cosmetic procedures.

  “She knew her livelihood was to look young and hip,” said Larry Ferber. “She didn’t think she could look like an old lady and do what she did. When People magazine mentioned she turned sixty, she was furious.”

  If aging is inevitable, Rivers never accepted its toll. “I think it made her angry in her later years that women’s bodies change,” said David Dangle. “That pissed her off. She could wear anything at one point, but then the neck starts to go, and you can’t show the upper arms.”

  Colleagues always admired Rivers for being a trouper who believed the show must go on, but she was so blasé about cosmetic intervention that she sometimes made significant errors in judgment. From 1997 to 2002, she was host of a nightly talk show on WOR Radio, and one night the program director, David Bernstein, was horrified when Rivers arrived at the studio.

  “She walks in stiff-limbed, like a robot, and she’s orange—her face, her arms, her legs,” he recalled. “I said, ‘What’s happening?’ She said, ‘I had a little touch-up surgery today.’ It was head to toe. I said, ‘You can’t work,’ and she said, ‘You hired me to work. You don’t take a day off because you’re not feeling well.’ So she goes on the air, and I don’t like what I’m hearing. She’s slurring her words—not badly, but enough to catch my attention, and I don’t think the show is making a whole lot of sense. So I go to the studio at the very beginning of the break, about ten minutes into the show, and said, ‘I’m g
oing to take you off today.’ She said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because you’re a little off today.’”

  To Bernstein’s surprise, Rivers was cooperative. “She said, ‘If you say I’m off, I’m off.’ She was so grateful—‘Thanks for saving me, thank you for preventing me from embarrassing myself!’ We just switched to a tape. It was the only time I thought, ‘She can’t be on the air. She doesn’t sound like she normally sounds.’”

  To onlookers, the results of Rivers’s eternal tinkering were highly variable. “I thought at times she looked unbelievably great and at times the surgery had gone too far and she looked like a plastic surgery victim,” said Sandy Gallin. “Some people would say she looked like a freak. But sometimes you thought, oh my God, she’s seventy-eight years old and she looks unbelievable!”

  And yet no matter how much she did to herself, it was never enough. “One day she was at the office of the jewelry company and she said, ‘I look old, don’t I?’” Ferber recalled. “I said, ‘I’m not going to lie to you: you look a little older.’ She said, ‘No more surgery. I’m done.’ A year later, she walked into Primola and I almost didn’t recognize her. The surgeon got a little carried away.”

  In her later decades, that verdict was shared by a growing number of observers. “I ran into her at the airport, and I didn’t see Joan anymore,” said Dorothy Melvin, who had left her job as Rivers’s manager and hadn’t seen her in person in years. “The person I knew wasn’t there in her face. We were both crying, and I was thinking, ‘I don’t know her.’ I just wanted to scream at her, ‘Stop!’”

  On the cover of Men Are Stupid, Rivers gazes out at her readers with heavily made-up eyes stretched tightly upward on a taut, unlined face. Her lips are pursed in a pout frosted with iridescent lipstick, her white-gold hair is artfully tousled, her torso is swathed in a white blouse, and her neck is obscured by an enormous collar of crystal jewelry. A woman of unguessable age—she was seventy-six the year the book was published—Rivers looks like some kind of almost-human confection whose entire appearance constitutes a living monument to artifice of every possible kind. She is wholly unrecognizable as the woman with the long, horsey face who appears in photographs taken at the beginning of her career. Gazing at the apparition on the cover of Men Are Stupid, it’s hard to decide whether it should be stored in a wax museum or a giant refrigerator, lest the fembot cream puff begin to melt and droop before one’s eyes.

  Makeup was a crucial element of Rivers’s look, and her approach evoked an archeologist’s painstaking care with the stratifications of an ancient dig. “When I first went to see her about working on the book, she walked into the room in this bathrobe-y caftan with full makeup and hair,” said Valerie Frankel. “It was layers and layers of makeup. She would sleep with her makeup on. She took it off once a week, but every morning she put eyelashes on. She bought eyelashes by the crate.”

  After Rivers died, the gossip columnist Cindy Adams described her friend’s preferred style in the New York Post. “Joan never went out without the extensions, industrial-strength hair spray, lashes, makeup, perfect lipstick and assorted accessories,” Adams wrote. “She flew commercially to California every Thursday for TV’s Fashion Police. Makeup and hair was done in NY, even at 5 a.m., then reapplied in L.A. She lived the part. Did the job. ‘I owe it to everybody to look great. And I never want it to end,’ she said.”

  As for Rivers’s wardrobe, Adams added, “She wanted clothes ‘over the top.’ Glitz and shpritz. Sequins with rhinestones. Paillettes over bugle beads. Nothing was too much.”

  And Rivers lived up to her vision, no matter how humble the occasion. On what Adams described as “a slow unspecial Monday,” she and Rivers went to the Second Avenue Deli. “So what wardrobe goes with matzo ball soup?” Adams asked. “Miss Rivers selected a beaded jacket festooned with appliqued flowers. I said: ‘Joan, that’s a little much for a half-empty deli.’ Joan said, ‘Let them learn.’”

  Although Rivers was pleased with the image she created, her appearance eventually grew so distorted that some people found it deeply disturbing. “I thought she carried it too far,” said Liz Smith. “She became sort of alarming, just looking at her from afar.”

  “I saw her in recent years at a restaurant, and it was horrific,” said Gloria Steinem. “On the television screen, it doesn’t look so bad, but in real life it was shocking. She looked embalmed. I had to stop myself from going up and saying, ‘Joan, stop it!’ I do think it’s self-delusion. It’s like the frog in the water: it’s a little at a time—and then you’re cooked. Once you start, it’s very hard to stop, because you have to keep doing it.”

  Others were more forgiving. “I think it made her look better,” said the radio and television personality Joe Franklin. “Her eyes looked like slits, but the rest of her face was okay. She feared and hated getting older.”

  And Rivers’s angst was also the source of her success. “If she was a beautiful rich woman, we would not have Joan Rivers; we’d have a pain-in-the-ass debutante somewhere,” Bill Reardin said. “We had Joan Rivers because she had to overcome her looks and the fact that she didn’t have money.”

  As surgery, fillers, and injections increasingly froze her face, Rivers also developed a predilection for sartorial choices that constrained the rest of her. When Abigail Pogrebin interviewed her for Stars of David, Rivers had just come from the annual luncheon gala to benefit Central Park’s Conservatory Garden, which is traditionally attended by socialites in elaborate hats. Wearing a hat with an enormous brim and a skintight fuchsia-colored satin skirt, Rivers conducted the interview while perched precariously on a small ottoman.

  Pogrebin was alarmed by how circumscribed Rivers’s freedom of movement seemed, from head to toe. Her face was so arresting that Pogrebin found it difficult to focus on what Rivers was saying. “I couldn’t get past it; it was hard to sit there and watch,” she admitted. “It’s like you’re hearing a voice that’s coming out of a mask. It was a challenge to see the person in there. She couldn’t move her face. Everything was immobile.”

  So was her body. “She couldn’t move because of the skirt,” Pogrebin said. “She couldn’t get in the door because of her hat. Everything was in this frozen state of what she, I guess, would consider perfection. I was surprised by the spontaneity of the interview, because there was nothing loose or relaxed about her body or face. Or her home—this was not a relaxed home.”

  Pogrebin saw such choices as a manifestation of Rivers’s insatiable ambition. “It was part of the voraciousness: ‘If this is what it takes, I’ll do it, because I want to stay in it! I’m not done!’” she said. “It was about not getting offstage, not being finished, not sitting by the pool. It was about being laughed at and talked about, and being controversial. There’s a desperation to not going offstage, to doing dive comedy acts. I felt like there was just a frenzy—but it’s not as simple as someone who just needs the adulation. You have to look at the defiance.”

  Whatever career benefits Rivers derived from her preternaturally youthful face, she paid an ironic price that prevented her from achieving her most cherished goal. For female performers, artificial measures to make their faces look younger can also preclude the professional opportunities they were trying to preserve. Although acting remained Rivers’s lifelong dream, she didn’t seem to realize that the more she distorted her face, the less castable she was in the vast majority of roles.

  “I didn’t understand why she had to do that,” said the producer Manny Azenberg, who felt that Rivers’s choices in the years after Broadway Bound rendered her unusable onstage. “She became somebody else after all that surgery. It was so severe it changed everything for me. She could not have come back and played that part, because nobody in the 1940s would look like that. Anybody who looks like that can’t be cast as a nineteenth-century woman or as a twentieth-century woman; you could only be cast as somebody who’s had thirty-two operations.”

  But in comedy, the ceaseless interventions may have helped her to
remain viable. “There’s no question her career wouldn’t have lasted the way it did if she hadn’t had the plastic surgery,” said Rick Newman. “From a producer and manager’s point of view, I would say it was smart because it kept her looking young. Show business is a business where your physicality is very important, and there are very few older comedians who continue to be successful. It’s a very tough business, and it’s just hard to stay up there and sustain your career. Joan didn’t look like an elderly lady, even though you knew she was eighty-one and had a lot of work. Yeah, she looked like a freak, but I think it really worked for her; she joked about it, and it kept her in the public eye. I can’t think of anyone who has been able to sustain a career the way she did, year after year, decade after decade. She just kept reinventing herself.”

  Even in comedy, however, women are disproportionately penalized for aging. “It’s different for men,” said Newman. “Don Rickles is Don Rickles, even now.”

  Rickles may be pushed onto the stage in a wheelchair, but the men who book talent still favor women they perceive as sexually desirable. “When you’re a woman of a certain age, it’s infinitely harder than for the guys,” said Kathy Griffin. “The stigma still exists that chicks aren’t funny, and when you’re sitting there with the male heads of this and that who sign the checks, it’s easier if you’re conventionally attractive. I wish I was twenty-five and hot; I certainly don’t have the film and television opportunities that younger girls do. The number of jobs diminishes so greatly that I just create my own. Joan carved out a niche where she couldn’t be replaced or replicated.”

  If Rivers’s efforts to look younger were driven by professional goals, some men responded on a surprisingly personal level. “I had a crush on Joan Rivers from the time I met her in 1992,” said Jeffrey Gurian, a dentist turned comedian who was nearly a quarter of a century younger than Rivers. “She was very glamorous, very elegant, and I really liked her style. She would come out in a coat made of white feathers; Joan was dressed to the nines. She looked like a queen, and I thought she was beautiful. I used to think, ‘I wish I had the nerve to ask her out,’ but I’d think, ‘She’s not going to want to go out with me.’ I had to bite my tongue to keep from asking her out.”