Ever the eager beaver, Rivers tried earnestly to fit in. “She was grateful to be there, and she wanted to make sure everyone knew she was not a diva,” Bernstein said. “Every night she came in with M&M’s and coffee for the staff. She liked to keep everyone happy, and she was responsible. She was always on time, and she even worked when she wasn’t supposed to be there.”
But the results were initially disappointing. “She didn’t start out well, because she didn’t know radio, and when there’s no visual, you have to rely on voice timing and pacing,” Bernstein explained. “Joan was doing the show as an entertainer; she was performing, but it was not dialogue from the heart. She was doing The Tonight Show, and that’s not why people listen to talk radio. They like a person they trust and agree with and think will verify their own opinions. The jokes have to be told differently on radio; you have to make them part of the story, and tell them in a way that listeners can anticipate where you’re going, so they will stay with it. Onstage, she’s there with a smirk, but on the radio it’s theater of the mind.”
Three or four months into the show, Bernstein sat down with her to discuss her performance. “She knows there’s a problem, but she doesn’t know what it is,” Bernstein said. “She was very bothered that she might not be succeeding the way she wanted to be. I said, ‘You’re not really going in the right direction. You have taken the direction of many great talk shows—you’re being serious; you’re discussing issues. This would be a great show if it wasn’t hosted by Joan Rivers, but everyone who listens and calls in wants to laugh.’ I wanted it to be about issues she felt strongly about, but I wanted her to have some fun with it.”
Bernstein gave her several technical pointers on how to correct the moments when her performance went flat. Instead of fighting back, she was delighted to get such radio-specific instruction. “She said, ‘This is phenomenal—fantastic! I’ve never heard that before,’” Bernstein reported.
Another breakthrough came when Rivers finally gave vent to genuine emotion on the show. “One night she came in and she had been doused with red paint by the PETA people,” Bernstein recalled. “I think it was a fur coat Edgar gave her, and she was mad. I said, ‘Go on the air and be mad, but you have to say why.’”
Rivers spent five years at WOR, with her show airing from 7 to 9 p.m. for the first two years and from 6 to 8 p.m. for the last three. She also continued to juggle appearances all over the country, but no matter where she was working, Bernstein found her to be as generous and unpretentious as she was in the studio.
“Only once did I ever see her use the star thing,” he said. “We went to Montreal and Detroit, and we got snowed in. The next morning we go to the airport to get a commercial flight, and Joan says, ‘Melissa hates when I do this, but if I have to pull the FFF, I will.’ She meant ‘Flash the Famous Face.’ I’m thinking, ‘That’s about as humble as I’ve ever heard a celebrity be.’”
After meeting an airline agent who was also named Joan, Rivers—who always carried items from her QVC collections with her to press on strangers—pulled a wrapped piece of jewelry out of her purse, gave it to the other Joan, and succeeded in getting herself, Bernstein, and Dorothy Melvin on a flight.
“There were two seats in coach and one in first class, and Joan said to me, ‘You ride first-class,’” Bernstein recalled. “I said, ‘No way. I’ll never live that down!’”
Rivers’s generosity sometimes extended to unlikely recipients. During the summer of 1998, when the news media was preoccupied with the Monica Lewinsky scandal and its impact on the administration of President Bill Clinton, Lindsay Roth was a sixteen-year-old intern at WOR Radio. Rivers’s show was on at night, but one day when she was also substituting as an afternoon host, Roth invented a reason to enter the studio during a commercial break.
“I really believe in making your opportunities, and if Joan Rivers is going to be there this afternoon, I’m going to get in there and meet her,” said Roth, a bold girl who had been voted class clown in school.
“Who are you and what are you doing here?” Rivers demanded.
Roth was delighted. “It was challenging, but not unkind. It was not malicious at all,” she said. “It was like, ‘If you have the balls to come into my studio, I’m going to play with you a little.’ I felt like, ‘Okay, we’re on!’ She said something to me that was cheeky, and she threw in some double entendre. It was all about Monica Lewinsky. She was not treating me like a sixteen-year-old; she was treating me like any other person who worked there and walked in the door.
“I was quick, so I spit something back that was funny.”
When Roth left the studio, a staffer came running after her to say, “Joan wants you!” To Roth’s amazement, Rivers asked the sassy intern to appear on her show that night—a split-second decision that may have determined Roth’s entire career.
“She gave me an opportunity, and at that moment she gave me a gift: she let me show her who I was,” Roth said. “Someone else could have been scared by it, but I didn’t shrink. I gave it right back to her.”
On the show that night, Rivers bantered with Roth about the Lewinsky scandal. Her line of questioning revolved around what she saw as the central issue: “Would you shtup the president if you were in that situation?”
“There’s some risk in putting on someone who’s sixteen and has never been on the air before, but I didn’t fuck it up,” said Roth, who later became a television producer and novelist.
They maintained a long and cordial relationship that lasted until Rivers’s death, and Roth credits her with altering the course of her life. “She gave me a chance, and if I hadn’t taken her bait, my life would have been different,” Roth said. “To me, she represented women who were successful in show business. She was a woman who was not playing a part, who was funny on her own, who used her brains. Because she was always kind, she also showed me that you don’t have to be an asshole to make it in this industry. And you don’t have to stop. She understood that as you get older, it’s harder to stay relevant, and sometimes you have to shock the shit out of people.”
David Bernstein, who also stayed friends with Rivers after both left WOR, was equally impressed with her efforts to stay relevant as the years went on. “When she got Celebrity Apprentice, I thought, ‘Man, she’s managed to get the gigs to keep her in the spotlight’—and then she wins the damn thing and she’s the hottest name in showbiz!” Bernstein said with admiration.
And amazingly, she was. From its shameless beginnings to the vituperative histrionics of its middle to the dramatic ending with a triumphant win by a seventy-five-year-old steamroller, the Celebrity Apprentice saga offered the ultimate performance by the quintessential Joan Rivers—and a veritable primer on how to succeed at any cost.
In 2007, after seven seasons as The Apprentice, Donald Trump’s NBC reality game show started inviting celebrities to compete in order to raise money for charity. The following year, the program went after Rivers as a contestant. “Donald called me and said, ‘Would you talk to Joan? We want her for Celebrity Apprentice,’” Blaine Trump recalled. “He just thought she was terrific and funny and would add a lot to the show. He knew how competitive she was. When they agreed to have Melissa as part of the package, Joan said yes.”
For Joan, that requirement was nonnegotiable. “She had been offered The Celebrity Apprentice the year before and she had turned it down,” said Billy Sammeth, Rivers’s personal manager at the time. “I’ll give Joan this: she does still have class somewhere in there. You have to have the skill of a surgeon to go in there and find it at this point, but it’s still there. Deep down somewhere is that little Jewish girl from Larchmont whose voice goes, ‘No, this isn’t right.’ She told me, ‘I’d rather kill myself than be on Celebrity Apprentice.’”
But Rivers’s desire to create opportunities for her daughter ultimately triumphed over her aversion to the show, according to Sammeth, who related the saga to Kevin Sessums in a 2012 interview published by the Daily Beast.
“Just like there’s that little girl from Larchmont in Joan, there is another, bigger part of her now that is like Mama Rose in Gypsy when it comes to Melissa,” Sammeth said. “So she tells me that she will do the show only if they’ll put Melissa on it as well. At first they didn’t want Melissa, not at all, and it became a pissing match to get her on with her mother. It got from the point of they were dead set against having Melissa on the show to what a great idea to have both Joan and Melissa on the show. I just thought, who all must have turned down this show for them to finally think it was a great idea to hire Melissa Rivers?”
Joan agreed to be a contestant in 2008, but despite the face-saving designation of God’s Love We Deliver as her beneficiary, she was mortified when the agreement was finally reached. “So suddenly now Joan had to do the show,” Sammeth said. “She said, ‘I’m so embarrassed I am actually going to be on this. What am I going to tell people?’ It was the week that Paul Newman had died, so I told her just to tell people she was a last-minute replacement for Paul Newman. Of course, by the end of the show they have all gone from being ‘celebrity apprentices’ to sleep-deprived killers, which is exactly what Trump wants. Trump is really the scum of the scum of the scum.”
Kathy Griffin recalled Rivers as citing another motive: doing the show would enhance her ability to book club dates for her stand-up act. “Touring is directly correlated with how visible you are, and she said she did Celebrity Apprentice for the network face time,” Griffin reported. “She said, ‘That’s going to translate into selling more tickets on the road.’”
The agreement to include Melissa produced many of the show’s most memorable fireworks during season eight, when Joan and pro poker player Annie Duke were challenged to organize competing auctions. The season premiered in March of 2009, and Trump fired Melissa in an episode that aired the following month—which prompted her to storm out of the boardroom, verbally assault her teammates and the production crew, and refuse the obligatory exit interview.
In a recap at the website BuddyTV, the ensuing circus was described as “the celebrity meltdown of the century, when the Rivers women finally went off the deep end.”
After clashing with Duke in earlier episodes, Joan had compared her to Hitler, and when Melissa was fired they both blamed Duke and Playboy playmate Brande Roderick, another contestant. Melissa reacted with a screaming rant that made her foulmouthed mother look like the Church Lady by comparison. “‘They both f--ked me…like two little whore pit vipers! Whore pit vipers!’ Rivers shouted at her mother,” according to the website Reality TV World. Joan “had previously announced that she would quit the show if the younger Rivers was fired, as she packed her personal items and prepared to leave with her daughter,” the account added.
The resulting fireworks included Joan denouncing various opponents as Nazis, scum, the devil, pieces of shit, stupid blondes, and white trash, while Melissa contributed to the insults with “lying f--king whores” and “f--king bulls--t.”
“Now, I’m not one to judge, but overreact much? You’re on a reality TV show. Don’t pretend like you just unfairly lost your job,” admonished the reviewer at BuddyTV. “There are plenty of articulate ways Melissa could have fought back, but she didn’t say anything of value. Then Joan Rivers has to go off on Annie and Brande, who didn’t do anything to demean Melissa in the boardroom. What did the two of them think? They could gang up on Donald Trump on his own show so that they would win without deserving to win?”
Reality TV World pointed out that, while the footage of Melissa’s screaming match had been shot more than six months earlier, an April 2009 New York Post piece revealed that “time has apparently done nothing to change Rivers’s mind about her behavior.” “I said what a lot of women have wanted to say to those kinds of girls their entire lives,” Rivers told the New York Post. “It was like being in high school all over again.”
Melissa attributed her conduct to being tired. “Of course you don’t ever want to lose your cool…But I’m human. I was exhausted. I just got pushed too far,” she said.
“Rivers also attempted to suggest that, given [that] she eventually returned for an exit interview…in which she attempted to spin her behavior, she had somehow ended her…Celebrity Apprentice experience ‘as a professional,’” Reality TV World added sarcastically.
Although her mother threatened to quit when Melissa was fired, Joan stayed and won the season. But she and her primary antagonist maintained their hostilities to the bitter end.
“In the season finale of the hit NBC reality show, the seventy-five-year-old Brooklyn-born Rivers showed heart, tears, and ‘disgust’ for Duke,” the Daily News reported. “‘You are a two-faced person,’ Rivers told Duke, forty-three, in a live face-to-face smackdown…Duke fired back that Rivers would be fired from most Fortune 500 companies. She was especially miffed that the funny lady called her ‘worse than Hitler’ and suggested her friends were in the Mafia. ‘She’s an amazing lady, but she’s not a nice lady,’ Duke said of Rivers.”
She was, however, shrewd. Never one to waste an opportunity to cash in, Rivers made sure her QVC line reaped the commercial benefits of her exposure on The Celebrity Apprentice. “They filmed it in the fall and it aired in the spring, but the final episodes are live,” David Dangle explained. “We worked out with QVC that Joan would be wearing jewelry and clothing from her collection in each episode. She would come to QVC on Monday morning and sell her necklace she wore in the boardroom.”
The response was overwhelming. “We ended up doing about $15 million in sales of Celebrity Apprentice jewelry in thirteen episodes,” Dangle said. “We let the customers vote for what Joan would wear on her final episode. When she won, QVC broke into its programming. I sold the necklace she wore, and we sold $800,000 of that necklace in ten minutes of airtime. It was just fashion jewelry—black glass beads—but the necklace ultimately sold a million dollars’ worth.”
The Celebrity Apprentice also resurrected Rivers’s status as a hot celebrity. “That was when everything changed,” said Blaine Trump. “You could barely walk down the street with her. It was incredible to see the difference. Her career had gone through the roof, and it was really hard for her to go out and have a private dinner without ten people coming over to the table.”
In their Daily Beast interview, Sessums noted that Sammeth’s last act as Rivers’s personal manager was booking her on The Celebrity Apprentice. “I find that show so vulgar I might have considered that a firing offense myself,” Sessums said. “Donald Trump has Sonny Bono beat as a kind of used car salesman.”
Sammeth saw the unholy alliance between Rivers and Trump as a simple one: both of them were dazzled by his fortune. “She’s in awe of him because he has money. Power to her is money,” Sammeth said. “But I’ll tell you when Donald Trump showed his true colors to me. Joan took me to the Howard Stern wedding. We’re at the table with Trump. He goes, ‘Joan…’—he’s always so serious and humorless—‘Joan, you know who would have been a great booking for Celebrity Apprentice and the network wouldn’t allow it? O. J. Simpson.’”
Rivers’s relationship with Sammeth ended badly. “Joan waited until she won The Celebrity Apprentice and then fired me,” he said. “All during the filming of the documentary, she was loving and civil to me. Five days after she won, I got an email from her business manager telling me I was fired and that she was moving in a new direction…Let’s just say that Joan does not wear power well.”
Sammeth also served as Cher’s longtime manager, and he was eventually fired by her as well. He compared the experience of managing Cher to being a four-year-old holding the leash of a German shepherd. “The dog is dragging you down the street but you think that you’re in control because you’re holding the leash,” he told Sessums. “That’s what managing Cher was like.”
When Sessums asked him for “canine comparisons” to Rivers, Sammeth replied, “I hate to besmirch the reputation of an innocent dog, but a lot of the time her personality is like a rabi
d pit bull.”
After being fired by both Cher and Rivers, Sammeth retaliated. “He turned around and sued each of them for the commissions he said they still owed him,” Sessums wrote in the Daily Beast. “He felt more than wronged by their firing. He felt shunned. He wasn’t just humbled. He was heartbroken…He sued Cher for 15 percent of the profits of her Believe album. But in Joan’s case he went one step further. Not only did he demand $179,000 in commissions that he said she still owed him, including 10 percent of the $200,000 she won on The Celebrity Apprentice, but also sued her for $2 million, claiming that his character was defamed by the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, in which, he said, she and the filmmakers led the audience to believe that he just might be a drug addict because of his repeated disappearances for days at a time, which he insisted damaged his personal and professional reputations…He settled each case before they reached the courts.”
Sammeth’s view of Rivers as a rabid pit bull presents a striking contrast with the Rivers portrayed by the Trump family, a woman who is a stellar example of character and courage.
Donald’s daughter Ivanka, who served as a boardroom adviser for The Celebrity Apprentice, shares her father’s penchant for superlatives. “Joan said often that the show was incredible for her career at that specific point in time,” said Ivanka Trump, the executive vice president for development and acquisition at the Trump Organization. “It certainly was a tremendous vehicle for her. She performed tremendously well, and she won.”
Ivanka Trump sees the televised competition as the ultimate test of a contestant’s mettle. “I think what is amazing about the show is that you can’t be insincere under fire,” she said. “With the grueling challenge offered by the show, people’s character comes out. What you saw with Joan Rivers was tremendous heart, passion, and energy. She had more energy in her pinkie than the other teams did in the whole team. Joan is a very direct person, very head-on, and she wore her emotions on her sleeve. You’d know when she wasn’t happy and when she was.”
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