Last Girl Before Freeway

by Leslie Bennetts

  Gurian, who wrote jokes for Rivers and other comics, admired her endless pursuit of self-improvement. “My sense of the plastic surgery was that she was doing it for herself, not for what anybody might think of her,” he said. “She may have started out as a plain-looking girl, but she created a beautiful woman. If that’s what you look like at eighty-one, you’ve got to give her credit.”

  Rivers’s views about superficial appearances could be as paradoxical as her other opinions. She mocked younger performers who refused to accept starvation diets and cosmetic interventions, and yet she could also show surprising compassion for someone else’s vulnerabilities. When Jeffrey Mahshie, a costume design consultant who has worked for many fashion designers, appeared on a show that Rivers was shooting at Barneys in Beverly Hills, he was dismayed by the arrangement of the furniture. “I walked in to the set and said under my breath, ‘Oh,’” he recalled. “Joan said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Nothing.’ She said, ‘No, what?’ I said, ‘The way the chairs are set up—that’s not my best side.’ She said, ‘I totally understand,’ and she had them flip the set for me.”

  Most stars would not have reacted to a guest’s insecurity with such sensitivity, let alone rearranged the set. But this incident involved a man. When it came to other women’s vulnerabilities, Rivers alternated between trashing their flaws and making jokes about the social forces that oppress them.

  Aging did offer abundant fodder for new material: “The fashion magazines are suggesting that women wear clothes that are ‘age-appropriate,’” Rivers said. “For me that would be a shroud.”

  She joked about menopause, once a topic women were ashamed to mention: “I had a friend going through menopause come to lunch today. Her hot flash was so bad it steam cleaned my carpet.”

  Some cracks revolved around her cosmetic procedures: “I’ve had so much plastic surgery, when I die they will donate my body to Tupperware.”

  Other complaints called attention to the things she hadn’t fixed, as when she compared her neck to a turkey’s wattles: “I saw what’s going on under my chin. I don’t want to be the one the president has to pardon on Thanksgiving.”

  Sagging breasts were a favorite topic: “My breasts are so low now I can have a mammogram and a pedicure at the same time,” she claimed.

  The indignities of age inspired some unforgettable images: “Old women are suctioned to the ground. Boobs, out of a brassiere, in the morning—it just goes. I use my left boob as a stopper in the tub.”

  Ever pragmatic, she chose to look on the bright side: “I like colonic irrigation because sometimes you find old jewelry.”

  No matter how taboo a subject had been, Rivers insisted on dragging it out into the spotlight. “I think she was great for aging women,” said Caroline Hirsch. “She talked about things no one would ever say, from her dried-up pooch to dating a man who was crippled. What makes it all funny is that it’s true.”

  Having spent decades making fun of her sex life, Rivers was undeterred by senior citizenship: “My love life is like a piece of Swiss cheese: most of it’s missing, and what’s there stinks.”

  “Don’t talk to me about Valentine’s Day. At my age, an affair of the heart is a bypass.”

  The aging process simply updated her lifelong shtick about being sexually undesirable: “My vagina is like Newark. Men know it’s there, but they don’t want to visit.”

  And: “The only way I can get a man to touch me at this age is plastic surgery.”

  And: “My best birth control now is just to leave the lights on.”

  Not to mention: “My sex life is so bad, my G-spot has been declared a historical landmark.”

  She also mocked her own attempts to remain sexually viable: “You know why I feel older? I went to buy sexy underwear and they automatically gift-wrapped it.”

  For anyone who knew what had happened to her romantic life, that last joke was particularly poignant. After nine years, Rivers’s relationship with Orin Lehman was suddenly blown up by his gift of sexy underwear to another woman, Monique Van Vooren.

  “Orin was at the store, and he was putting a charge for Monique on a credit card, and Joan got a phone call from the store, because it was a huge charge,” Blaine Trump explained. “That’s when it hit the fan. At that point, everything Joan and Orin did, they did as one, and her account handled Orin’s accounts. Joan said, ‘Monique Van Vooren? Are you kidding me?’ Orin swore they were just friends, but she said he was cheating. She said, ‘That’s it.’”

  Adding insult to injury was Orin’s choice of paramour. A D-list singer and actress, the Belgian-born Van Vooren had been a fixture on the New York scene for decades—and she was six years older than Rivers. “Joan was so horrified that it was Monique, this face-lifted freak,” said Pete Hathaway. “She dropped him like a hot potato. It was literally in one second, like—‘That’s it!’”

  Rivers was as implacable as she was heartbroken. “He cheated on me,” she told the Daily Beast in 2014. “His accountant called me. The lady he had been seeing had been making purchases using his money. The accountant thought it was me and was calling to tell me to go easy. I finished with him the very same day, which was stupid. He called me every single day for a year, but I was so hurt and so betrayed.”

  “The shutter came down,” said her friend Martyn Fletcher. “She said, ‘I would never forgive him. He let me down, and I’ll never trust him again.’”

  Rivers portrayed the breakup as having been her choice, but there were also rumors that Lehman had tired of the relationship. “I heard both that he dumped her and that she dumped him because he was cheating on her,” Larry Ferber said.

  In either case, Rivers saw no room for equivocation or ambiguity. “It goes back to being an old-fashioned girl,” said Trump. “She really thought they had a fabulous relationship, and when he betrayed her, she said, ‘I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering, who’s he doing now?’ She traveled so much, she felt she would never be able to trust him again.”

  But the sacrifice left Rivers bereft. “She was so sorrowful,” said Sabrina Lott Miller, Rivers’s executive assistant. “She loved Orin to heaven and back, but she was not going to allow him to disrespect her. It was just like, ‘I’m going to have to love you from afar.’”

  When asked for public comment on the breakup, Rivers was venomous about anyone who might have been seeing Orin behind her back. “I didn’t mention names, but I said ‘two old European hookers,’” Rivers told Michael Musto of the Village Voice. “You know how many women have come forward and said, ‘That’s me!’? These old, old women who haven’t seen a tampon in fifty years, groping for green cards—it’s so distasteful…Trust me, this isn’t my group. I’ve never been a felon. When was the last time you came to dinner at my house and I had Eurotrash hookers?”

  Rivers’s friends were furious about Orin’s disloyalty, which even the men blamed on the delusional ego of the aging male. “At eighty-seven, they think they’re twenty-two,” Robert Higdon said disgustedly. “If someone gives them a wink, they think, ‘I’ve still got it, and I’m going to take a run for it!’”

  But Van Vooren may also have been a formidable romantic rival. In 1996, the actor and female impersonator Charles Busch was appearing in an Off-Broadway show called Swingtime Canteen when Van Vooren and a group of her friends visited him backstage.

  “I had never met her before,” said Busch. But he was aware of her name. He once went to a beauty supply store in the theater district to buy the face-lift tapes beloved by drag queens, only to be told, “We’re all out—Monique Van Vooren has taken them all.”

  When Van Vooren visited his dressing room, Busch was “partly in drag,” he said, “still wigged and made up in my character as a glamorous 1940s movie actress. I had removed my costume and I was just wearing my belted backstage kimono.”

  As the visitors complimented him on his performance, Van Vooren didn’t say a word. “And then, just as her party was about to leave, she moved in clos
er and sensuously slipped her hand down my kimono, lightly caressing my bare chest,” reported Busch, who is gay.

  He was even more startled when Van Vooren whispered a memorable suggestion in his ear. “She purred intimately, in a very Marlene Dietrich manner, ‘I would love to get you in a bathtub and bathe you and perfume you like a courtesan in a seraglio,’” he said. “I quickly extricated myself from the situation, but I found her extremely alluring, and if she was even remotely serious, I deeply regret not taking her up on it.”

  Whatever Van Vooren’s feminine wiles, Rivers’s friends also suspected that Lehman was suffering from impaired judgment. “I think Joan tried to hide the dementia from people,” Higdon said.

  Among Lehman’s intimates, not everyone saw Van Vooren as the villain. Wendy Lehman was complimentary about his last paramour. “Monique was very nice with Orin when he was getting sick,” she said.

  But his ex-wife wasn’t surprised by his infidelities. “Orin did misbehave,” she said. “I think most men think they can have all of it. I think he had different lady friends and this and that. Oh, yes, I think so. Men always have a pattern.”

  As when Orin and Joan first got together, Wendy Lehman reserved her greatest disapproval for her ex-husband’s lapse in appropriate etiquette with Van Vooren. “Orin should not have done that. He should not have made it embarrassing for Joan,” she said.

  But in a parting shot at Rivers, Wendy compared her unfavorably with her successor. “Monique Van Vooren was much more ladylike,” Wendy Lehman said with delicate disdain.

  When Orin died in 2008, at the age of eighty-eight, The New York Times mentioned his late first wife, Jane Bagley, whom he had divorced many years before she died in 1988, and Wendy, his second wife, from whom he was also divorced. The obituary added that he was also survived by “his companion, the actress Monique Van Vooren.”

  After Lehman’s death, Rivers’s eyes welled with tears when she talked about their breakup. “I refused to speak to him,” she said. “I was really stupid and silly about it. I regret that now he’s dead.”

  When the Daily Beast asked if they had ever reconciled, she replied, “Yes, to a point. I saw him a couple of times. When I see friends finishing a relationship, I say, ‘Just be careful. Don’t shut every door. What upsets you in July will not affect you that much in November.’”

  By then Rivers had decided that any possibility of new romance was precluded by her self-consciousness about the physical ravages of age. Shortly before her death, the Daily Beast asked her if she was still interested in dating. “No, the hotel is now closed completely,” she said. “I look so bad in a bathing suit I kick sand in my own face. I’ve reached the point in my life where you think, ‘That’s it.’ You look at yourself and say, ‘How can you get a minus-forty-four dark room, pitch-black and then some?’ Maybe if Stevie Wonder called, I’d say ‘Okay.’”

  When the reporter asked if she ever got “horny,” Rivers replied, “Yes, but it’s not worth it. Old men have too many physical problems. And with younger men, as my mother always said, ‘You need to be the good-looking one.’ I miss being able to say to someone after a party, ‘Can you believe what that person said?’”

  The Daily Beast inquired whether men still flirted with her. “Yes, but it’s the most disgusting thing when they say to an older woman, which I am, ‘How’s my gal doing?’” Rivers said. “Go fuck yourself. I’ve had more good times than you’ll ever know, so don’t you dare patronize me.”

  In the same interview, Rivers was also asked if she had recovered from what Edgar did to her. “I moved on to a point,” she said. “I don’t really remember what Edgar was like. I lived with Orin Lehman for eight years, and can’t remember what he was like. You remember them but they all become fuzzy and wonderful. You no longer miss their sharp wit; you miss an idea. It changes tremendously, and probably for the better.”

  Time had given her a philosophical perspective on all of it—the loves and the losses, the triumphs and the disasters. “The only thing that’s saving me is my age,” she said. “Because I don’t care. I’ve been up, I’ve been down. I’ve been fired, I’ve been hired. I’ve been broke. What are you gonna do to me? Not like me? I don’t give a damn.”

  Although Rivers worked on her appearance until she died, attracting a man was no longer the goal of her efforts. “She wanted to look like a star,” said Martyn Fletcher. “She said, ‘The people on the street probably bump into a famous person once or twice in their life. I want them to say, ‘She looked amazing!’”

  Whatever else might be said about the way she looked, she was indisputably a star—and she knew how lucky she was to have achieved that and so many of her other goals. “I’m not bitching,” she said. “If life is 100 percent, I’ve got 90.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Back to the Top:

  Fighting Like “a Rabid Pit Bull”

  When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, he left an unfinished novel called The Last Tycoon, a roman à clef about the film producer Irving Thalberg and his rise to power in Hollywood. Although Fitzgerald didn’t complete it, the book became famous for a quote that many regarded as the writer’s epitaph: “There are no second acts in American lives.”

  Fitzgerald was only forty-four when he died of a heart attack, but the acclaimed novelist had long since become an alcoholic screenwriter who mocked himself as a Hollywood hack.

  Joan Rivers lived nearly forty years longer than Fitzgerald, and it’s hard to imagine a more compelling refutation of Fitzgerald’s dictum than the second half of her life. She was fifty-four years old when her husband killed himself and she discovered she couldn’t find work. What she accomplished over the next quarter of a century would be a stunning achievement for anyone, but for an aging woman in an unforgivingly sexist entertainment industry it was unprecedented.

  “She built an empire out of the dregs of her life,” said the comedy club impresario Rick Newman. “She was down at the lowest point of her career, and she turned it all around through hard work and talent and endless perseverance. It’s admirable—and astounding.”

  By any measure, Rivers created an astonishing array of successes during the comeback years of her late fifties, her sixties, and her seventies. “She lost everything, and we went from Edgar’s death and the complete loss of her career to filling houses, publishing books, doing QVC, the daytime TV show, the radio show, a Broadway show—look at what we did in the thirteen years after Edgar died,” said Dorothy Melvin, who was Rivers’s manager during that period.

  Rivers’s second-phase career had many component parts, some of which were new challenges she accepted in response to setbacks. “When she lost the daytime TV show, things were not good, so that’s why she had a radio show,” said the radio personality Mark Simone.

  Her opportunity opened up in 1996 with the death of Barry Gray, the iconic personality at WOR Radio. “I was called into my boss’s office, and he says, ‘So who’s replacing Barry Gray?’” recalled David Bernstein, WOR’s program director at the time. “I didn’t know, but the one thing I knew was that that wasn’t a good corporate answer, so I said, ‘Joan Rivers.’ I just pulled it out of my ass. I think it was her line, ‘Can we talk?,’ that made me think, ‘Talk, talk, talk!’ Joan Rivers was a talker, and I was an admirer and a fan. I knew she was well educated, and I thought she was a remarkable performer.”

  Bernstein also saw Rivers as the quintessential New Yorker. “To me, New Yorkers always have ups and downs,” he said. “Nothing is ever always one way, and you expect that in New York. We’re all in the soup together; we all survive this thing together.”

  Bernstein’s boss was dismayed to learn that his program director didn’t know Rivers, her agent, or her manager, and had talked to nobody about hiring her at WOR. Bernstein’s assistant was equally exasperated. “She said, ‘What the fuck did you say that for?’” he recalled. “She knew I was an idiot and had just pulled it out of the air.”

  Fortunately for Bernstein
, Rivers never disdained a potential opportunity, and her QVC earnings gave her enough financial stability to accept less remunerative commitments. Bernstein finally reached her agent at William Morris and explained that he had a two-hour slot to fill for a syndicated national show that went on the air five nights a week, from Monday to Friday. “Joan was doing QVC and stand-up, but I said, ‘I can give her a platform she never had before, and she can be really herself,’” Bernstein recalled. “He liked the idea, and we made an appointment with Joan.”

  Bernstein’s pitch was calibrated to address the frustrations Rivers had experienced with her television shows. “I kept harping on how she had never been able to be herself, how everything she had done was monitored and adjusted, but this was talk radio live, and on the radio no one knew what she was going to say,” Bernstein said. “She clearly liked to work and wanted to work, but I explained to her that this was not television or movies. I said, ‘We’ll never be able to pay you what you’re worth. But I can give you something different—the freedom to be a live, touchable, approachable personality.’ That’s what mattered to her.”

  At their next meeting, Rivers went over her calendar to see how her other performing commitments would affect the radio schedule. “She had a date marked ‘Red Ball,’ and she said, ‘Know what that is?’” Bernstein recalled. “I said, ‘A painful condition?’ She said, ‘I’m taking the job.’ My stupid, juvenile humor—that’s what made her take the job. She said, ‘If I can do my QVC stuff, then pay me what you want to pay me and I’ll do it.’”