Last Girl Before Freeway

by Leslie Bennetts

  Rivers had actually purchased the walker she used for the gag. “Even though she worked so hard for the money, it kind of blew away,” Stern said. “Someone else might say, do you really need to spend a hundred dollars to make a joke? But the end result was worth everything. She totally cracked me up.”

  The next time she was to meet Rivers for dinner at Sarabeth’s, Stern was waiting to cross the street at Central Park South and Sixth Avenue when two large young men accosted her. “They grabbed me under the arms, lifted me off the ground, and took me across the street,” Stern reported. “I said, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ They said, ‘Joan Rivers told us you couldn’t cross the street by yourself and we should carry you across!’”

  Both Stern and Rivers were patients of Dr. Gwen Korovin, the ear, nose, and throat specialist who was sued for medical malpractice after Rivers went into a coma during an endoscopy and died. Months before that, Rivers called Stern from the doctor’s Upper East Side office and demanded that Stern join her there right away.

  “Gwen is very thin and put together, and she wears chic little dresses,” Stern said. “But Joan said, ‘Gwen is wearing a sandal and her pinkie toe is sticking out from it—she has a malformed toe, and it’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen! You need to come over and see this immediately!’”

  Stern refused. “So we go to the theater the following Sunday, and she gets in the car and crosses her leg, and I look down and see that she has taken a piece of cardboard and glued it on her so it was sticking out of her shoe. She painted it with red nail polish and made it look like a pinkie toe. Who would do that—and not say anything? I was convulsed. So then we get out of the car and she goes up to perfect strangers and says, ‘What do you think—isn’t this disgusting?’ She went up to a Muslim lady who was totally covered with a mask and everything. She stopped everyone in the street.”

  At one point, Stern agreed to get a tattoo with Rivers for her WE reality show, Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best? “Joan chose a bee, like the Joan Rivers bee pin,” Stern said. “She was doing it on her rear, and she said, ‘I’m just going to pull down my Spanx’—and she jumps up and runs out of there. She completely panicked.”

  Although Rivers bailed on her, Stern was stuck with the results of her own commitment. “I would never have gotten a tattoo; I was doing it for her show,” she said. “I got a snake on my wrist. I said, ‘What does mine look like?’ She said, ‘It looks like a sick worm.’”

  Rivers subsequently got a tattoo of 6M on her arm as a reminder of the Holocaust. In deference to the subject, she didn’t show that on any of her reality shows, but everything else was fair game. “She was doing all these crazy things—she said, ‘Let’s do pole dancing!’” Stern reported.

  When they went shopping, one of their favorite haunts was a place Rivers called the Hooker Store, because it had “kind of flashy stuff,” Stern said. If she admired something, Rivers would press it on her. “You had to fight her off. If you said, ‘I like your bracelet,’ she’d be like, ‘Here, take it.’ I have two of her costumes. One is a huge hot-pink feather coat that William Ivey Long made for her. I always loved it, so of course she gave it to me. I wore it to the opening of the Metropolitan Opera. She was the best friend you could ever have.”

  Both women considered their unexpected bond to be an extraordinary gift so late in life, but Rivers also took care to maintain long-standing relationships. “You do a show with someone and when it ends, it’s usually over and done,” Bill Reardin said. “But I was friends with her for twenty-five years; it didn’t go away. She kept in touch.”

  Even if a relationship ebbed and flowed, Rivers made sure it wasn’t extinguished. “For several years after The Joan Rivers Show, I would see her all the time, and it was like nothing changed at all,” said Larry Ferber. “The last five years of her life, we totally reconnected. She remembered my birthday. She sent me an email that said, ‘Dear Larry, Happy birthday to you, / Happy birthday to you, / Happy birthday, dear Larry, / You’re a good-looking Jew.’”

  For a star of her stature, Rivers remained unusually open to making new friends as well as retaining old ones. Her taste for high society notwithstanding, she seemed anything but a snob. “I do a big party on Christmas Day, and last Christmas she came with a friend of hers who’s a countess,” said Charles Busch. “I’m on the left side of my building, and Joan gets mixed up and goes to the right side of the building and rings the doorbell. An older gay man answers the door in his underpants—and it’s Joan Rivers and the countess. He says, ‘Charles Busch is on the other side of the building,’ and Joan says, ‘Get your pants on—you’re coming with us.’”

  Finding romantic prospects was a lot harder than making friends. One episode of Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best? revolved around Joan’s desire to make a sex tape while being stymied by the difficulty of locating a costar. Landing a leading man wasn’t any easier in real life.

  “She asked people to fix her up, and my mother called a lot of single men living in Newport Beach, a wealthy community south of L.A.,” said Sue Cameron. “No one would go out with Joan. Every single man said they were afraid of her.”

  In New York, Margie Stern also tried to fix up Rivers, who dated one man for a while and then decided he was too cheap, because he let her pay for things. Another guy just seemed intimidated. “He didn’t open his mouth the whole time,” Stern said. “She was overwhelming—just bigger than life. Most men are threatened by that. You know how many men were terrified of her? My husband loved her, but he was always the odd man out. We would never let him talk.”

  Rivers was philosophical about the problem. “Men don’t like funny, aggressive women; we know that,” she said.

  Her standards were also lofty. “She wanted to be married, she wanted to have a boyfriend—but she wanted the Duke of Windsor,” said Mark Simone.

  Rivers might have accepted the Duke of Windsor, but friends suspected that her interest in having a man had become limited, if not theoretical. “This is what Joan wanted a man for: she wanted a proper escort for social functions, and she wanted someone to be in bed with her on Sunday to read The New York Times,” said Sue Cameron. “She and Edgar would sit and do that, and she also did that with Orin Lehman. It wasn’t about sex. She never talked about sex. I don’t even know if she liked it.”

  “I don’t think she gave a shit about men,” said Valerie Frankel, one of her ghostwriters. “She had had relationships, and she was fine with not having a relationship. She was in love with working.”

  Rivers always understood that about herself: “I love performing. It’s like a drug for me,” she said.

  “I would say, ‘Do you ever want to go out with anybody again?’” Blaine Trump said. “And she would say, ‘No. I don’t have time to think about a man in my life.’ In the last chapter of her life, she was so busy with Fashion Police and Melissa and the business. There was one man who had a fortune and wanted to date her, and she said, ‘I’m not going out with anyone. I’m too busy.’ I think dating was off the table. She was too busy with her career, and she just loved her career.”

  Although comedy remained at the core of it, Rivers never stopped trying to expand the parameters. “Her love of the theater, of comedy, and of her business just pushed her forward no matter what happened,” said Blaine Trump. “We went to the theater and went backstage, and she said, ‘Don’t you just love the way this place smells?’ I thought, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ But that was how deep her passion ran. She always said, ‘I’d be happiest if I just dropped dead onstage.’ She never wanted to be incapacitated or not able to remember her lines. At her seventieth birthday she said, ‘I’ve got ten great years left, but after that, I don’t know—it could be over.’ She looked on the years from seventy to eighty as a really happy, productive period in her life.”

  Margie Stern’s friendship brought a great deal of joy and fun to that era, but it also inspired an unexpected chronicle of Rivers’s career that substantial
ly enhanced the public understanding of her legacy. Margie’s daughter, Ricki Stern, is a filmmaker, and when she and her codirector, Annie Sundberg, were looking for a new subject, Margie suggested Rivers.

  “My mom said, ‘You walk down the street and people come up to her and it’s amazing to see how loved she is,’” Ricki Stern said. “When I met with Joan, I was amazed at how sweet and vulnerable she was. I thought, ‘There’s a lot more there. There’s a person there who could be part of a very intimate feature documentary.’ My background was in theater, and I understand the passion it takes to do that. You have to be open and vulnerable, but you have to learn to deal with constant rejection. Joan represented the hopes and dreams that all young performers have that carry them on. What Joan really wanted was to always have a place to perform, because her emotional happiness came from having the chance to play in front of a new audience. Being able to interact with the audience gave her the greatest joy. It was her oxygen.”

  To Stern’s surprise, financing the documentary proved surprisingly challenging. “No one would fund it,” she said. “That was so unexpected. People said, ‘I just don’t like her,’ or ‘She’s not funny,’ or ‘People don’t like old,’ or ‘I love her but she’s not our demographic,’ meaning that the demographics are young now and no one likes old comics.”

  Stern and Sundberg persevered, and they ended up making a fascinating film called Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, which presented a vivid portrait of Rivers’s peripatetic life and fierce obsession with performing. Released in 2010, it won widespread praise for humanizing a complex, contradictory character whose vulnerable side had not been glimpsed by most of her previous audiences.

  “Filmed over the course of fourteen months, A Piece of Work begins at a low point in Rivers’s career,” Matthew Jacobs wrote in the Huffington Post. “She bemoans the white space in her datebook, which in her mind signals a lack of desirability. But that nadir, like so many of the comedian’s others, turns into another success story. By the end, she’s been invited to participate in an all-star George Carlin tribute, landed the Fashion Police gig, and won The Celebrity Apprentice. Rivers didn’t reclaim the dominance she achieved during her days as a frequent Johnny Carson guest and the permanent guest host of The Tonight Show—when she also became a regular on the variety show circuit (The Carol Burnett Show, Hollywood Squares, Saturday Night Live) and was nominated for a Grammy for her 1983 comedy album—but no matter: Rivers had long ago secured legend status. By the time the documentary crew finds her, she has nothing left to prove, even if she refuses to take a day off.”

  Rivers didn’t see it quite that way; no matter how old she got, she never allowed herself the luxury of thinking she had nothing left to prove. She took great care to preserve her public image as an ageless wonder who showed no sign of slowing down, and she refused to leave the house without full hair and makeup.

  And yet she was astonishingly transparent in the documentary, appearing without makeup and exposing her deepest fears. “Making a warts-and-all documentary in one’s late seventies is itself quite daring, and for that the movie is both touching and provocative,” Jacobs wrote. “Rivers always wanted to be an actress but was never taken seriously once she developed her coarse comedic aura, so instead she sums up her career in one of the most evocative self-reflections of any timeworn celebrity: ‘My life is an actress’s life,’ she says while tearing up. ‘I play a comedian.’ It’s one of the documentary’s saddest, most revealing moments.”

  Rivers’s intimates were thrilled with the film, but they were surprised that it didn’t get more attention. “It blew me away, but it got no recognition at all,” said Margie Stern. “Joan said, ‘It’s because Hollywood hates me.’”

  Although she allowed the filmmakers to chronicle her fear of obsolescence, Rivers was offended by any implication that her star might have faded. “At one point, I said to her, ‘The film brought you back,’” recalled Margie Stern. “She said, ‘I never went anywhere.’”

  In actual fact, Rivers seemed to go everywhere, and the film crew that followed her around the country was exhausted by the demands of her daily schedule. “It was just so hard to keep up with Joan. She had more energy than any of us,” said Ricki Stern. “The travel was brutal, but that was part of her DNA. She had two assistants, because nobody could keep going. After two days with Joan, we were done; we’d need a break. But she would sign books till her fingers were numb, and she would never turn down a fan. She had the traveling down to a science. She would roll her little beat-up rolling bag into a place and unpack her own bag and wash her underwear in the sink and hang it out to dry. She was not a prima donna.”

  Rivers’s friends felt the same way. “We’d try to keep up with her, and after a ten-day tour, we’d be ready to go lie down in a darkened room for five days, but she’d be off on another plane,” said Martyn Fletcher, who traveled with Rivers as her hair and makeup artist on tours overseas. “She always said, ‘I’m so tired, I can’t do this anymore,’ so I’d say, ‘Well, you could stop.’ She’d say, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ She was too driven. She’d say, ‘What am I going to do if I retire?’”

  Daunted by her jam-packed schedule, her intimates just shook their heads. “I would say, ‘Why are you working so hard?’” Robert Higdon reported. “She would say, ‘I’ll stop when I don’t feel that wonderful feeling I feel when I walk out onstage.’ Joan had to keep working; it wasn’t a choice. It wasn’t to pay the light bill, although she did have to do that, because she lived grand. She needed to perform. She needed to create. She needed to work. That was her fuel. That was her air. As much as she would joke that she wanted a man to take care of her, if Rockefeller had said, ‘Marry me—I’ll take care of you,’ she would have snuck out of the house and done stand-up behind his back.”

  But in order to do stand-up, Rivers had to travel around the country, which was always hard for her. “She hated flying,” said Sue Cameron. “She had to do it, but she was afraid of crashing, so she would take Valium and close the shades all around her and put on a blindfold and go out. It was very difficult for her.”

  No matter what the rigors of the road, she remained a trouper. “Lots of comedians are nasty or curmudgeonly when they’re beyond the spotlight, but she was always so kind, and she had a great rapport with the crew,” Ricki Stern said. “It was kind of a lovefest—very comfortable. She was always the life of the party. She had so much infectious energy, and she had an outrageous humor that would just bubble up. You were constantly looking at the other people in the room and going, ‘I can’t believe she just said that!’ It was unfiltered. It might be what you were thinking, but you would never say it. It was always funny.”

  Although Rivers experienced the same kind of professional ebbs and flows during her seventies that most performers do at any stage in their careers, she enjoyed a remarkably successful decade overall. By the time she hit eighty, she was even more famous, wealthy, celebrated, and sought-after than she had been a decade earlier—a rare achievement for any entertainer.

  “That’s what I loved about the last few years of her life—she was hotter than ever,” said David Dangle. “Who at seventy-five is earning more money and filling more concert halls than they ever filled? I found that fantastic. It’s just thrilling.”

  And yet no matter how much she achieved, Rivers remained convinced that she was never accorded the recognition she deserved. The feeling of being unappreciated and overlooked had haunted her for decades.

  When Enter Talking was published in 1986, it received what Rivers’s coauthor, Richard Meryman, described as a “sneering” review in The New York Times. Meryman, a longtime Life magazine writer and editor, described the memoir as chronicling Rivers’s “search for the stage character who brought her success.” And yet when she achieved it, that persona “turned out to be the one that the entertainment establishment still mistakes for the true person and scorns,” Meryman wrote.

  To Rivers, her career always seemed like
an endless replay of her childhood as a social reject who couldn’t get into the cool crowd. “How many parties have you gone to that I’ve not been asked? How about 100 percent?” Rivers asked Larry King during one interview.

  King asked her why that was so, since she was “pretty, vivacious—you add to a party.”

  “I’m the only person that isn’t invited to the Vanity Fair party,” Rivers said, referring to the star-studded annual Academy Awards after-party, a coveted event that was a particular source of bitterness to her. “The garbageman says to me, ‘See you there.’ I go, ‘I’m not asked.’ I was in Vanity Fair one year and they didn’t invite me to the party.”

  “What’s your thought as to why?” King asked again.

  “A bad rep. I don’t know!” she said glumly.

  When Melissa Rivers published The Book of Joan, she was interviewed by Hoda Kotb at New York’s 92nd Street Y. Melissa complained that her mother was never able to wangle an invitation to the Vanity Fair Oscar party, even though she originated the formula that made the red carpet into the spectacle it has become.

  After the program, I emailed Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair’s longtime editor, to ask why Joan wasn’t on the guest list. “We never banned her from the Oscar party,” he replied. “We just never thought of inviting her or Melissa. They should have spoken up.”

  In fact, Melissa said they tried for years to get Joan into the party, enlisting friends like the late Dominick Dunne to beg for an invitation—all to no avail. Other reports have claimed that Carter didn’t include Joan because he thought she was vulgar.

  “She was always that girl with her nose pressed against the glass,” said Charles Busch.

  Despite her success, Rivers remained as insecure as she had always been. “When I was being honored with a Legend Award by Live Out Loud, which gives scholarships to LGBT youth, I asked Joan if she would give me the award,” Busch recalled. “She said to me, ‘I’ve never received an award for anything.’ After the awards, she was talking to the gay kids, and she told them, ‘One day you’re up, and the next day you’re fucking down. One day you’re up, and the next day you’re fucking down!’ She never lost her sense of the precariousness of everything she had achieved.”