As Jonathan Van Meter wrote in New York magazine, “Even at this late stage in her forty-year career, Rivers is nowhere near ready to cede the stage to a younger generation. (As her former manager Billy Sammeth says in the film, ‘Right now they see her as a plastic surgery freak who’s past her sell-by date…But God help the next queen of comedy, because this one’s not abdicating. Never will.’) I am reminded of an email she sent me a couple of years ago, when she was at yet another low point in her career. I asked her what she thought of Kathy Griffin. ‘I am her friend but also furious,’ she wrote. ‘She is the big one now. My club dates have simply vanished and gone to her. She will last as she is very driven. Like me, she wants it. But every time a gay man tells me, “Oh, she is just like you! I love her!,” I fucking want to strangle them. But, please God, let someone give me credit. I feel so totally forgotten. The fucking New Yorker did this big piece on the genius of Rickles, who is brilliant but who hasn’t changed a line in fifteen years. Meanwhile, I am totally “old hat” and ignored while in reality I could still wipe the floor with both Kathy and Sarah [Silverman]. Anyhow, fuck them all. Age sucks. It’s the final mountain.’”
If Rivers felt ignored by the larger culture, her fellow professionals were still paying attention. “She was very hip,” said Lisa Lampanelli. “Bill Cosby is square. Don Rickles does the same act he’s been doing forever. But Joan Rivers wanted more and different. She was a young old lady, and that’s cool as hell. I don’t get how she had that drive: ‘I’m going to figure out who the Kardashians are and make jokes about them.’ It’s not just talking about what she knows; it’s staying current.”
Even at the male bastion of the Friars Club, Rivers was acknowledged as unique. “She didn’t fall by the wayside the way a lot of entertainers did,” said Barry Dougherty. “These people have their peak and then they’re done, but she managed to keep up with the world. A lot of people aren’t aware the world has changed. They’re stuck; they can’t figure out how to make a new audience like them and want them. Joan did.”
Working as hard as humanly possible to maintain that standard, Rivers gave her younger admirers a master class in a rare set of skills. “We were in a pretty small club—but she was in a club of one,” Griffin said. “There is a world of difference between a lightly funny person who can be funny when they have a script and someone who can stand up and deliver an hour with a mouth and a microphone and nobody else but you.”
Griffin regarded Rivers as the ultimate role model. In her final years, “Joan was busier than ever,” Griffin said. “She had three shows on the air! She never lost that feeling that you gotta be chasing that next job. Joan’s whole career was a marathon, not a sprint. I was always saying, ‘How do you do it?’ She said she still feels like she’s holding on to the arm of the chair and white-knuckling it. She said, ‘You hold on until your knuckles are white, and if you start to slip, you hold on to the ledge by your fingernails.’”
That grim determination was equally apparent to nonperformers. “If you hang on to that ledge and someone tries to push you off, you grab on with your claw,” said Valerie Frankel, one of Rivers’s ghostwriters. “That was what she thought being in the public eye was: hanging on for dear life.”
Rivers’s try-as-hard-as-you-can ethos was so rigorous it inspired others to step up their game. “I don’t think I ever showed up at one of our dinners without Chanel head to toe,” said Griffin. “Joan was not going to come over in sweatpants, and she would give me the once-over. So I would overdress—put on Chanel on top of Herrera on top of de la Renta.”
Rivers maintained that rigor even at home. “If you went to dinner at Joan’s house, she was always dressed to the nines,” said Blaine Trump. “I just think she loved that feeling of being glamorous and pretty. It was part of the show.”
Rivers’s work ethic had always distinguished her from male peers with a greater sense of entitlement, but the difference became even more noticeable with advancing age. “I don’t think there were that many male comedians who were hitting a club once a week just to keep that muscle agile,” Griffin said.
Given the awful things Rivers said about other women over the years, her aversion to taking return fire seemed disingenuous; sometimes her attacks left real wounds. “Joan disliked me a lot—I don’t have any idea why,” said Lisa Lampanelli. “I got a call from Howard Stern one day, and he said, ‘She called you untalented and said you’re not funny.’ She hates me, and I have never met her. She said I only made jokes about dating black guys. At the time, I was married and hadn’t made jokes like that in seven years. I thought, ‘She’s misinformed.’ It just hurt my feelings. I feel sad when I’m misunderstood.”
Lampanelli let it go, but she finally erupted when Rivers renewed her hostilities. “Somebody tweeted to me and said, ‘Hey, are you going to be roasting at the Joan Rivers roast?’ I said, ‘Unless I’m roastmaster I would rather not take the time.’ Joan misunderstood it and said, ‘Lisa Lampanelli said we offered her roastmaster and she turned it down, and that’s just not true.’ I said, ‘You tell that fucking old cunt to get her facts straight.’ That cunt lied about me on Howard Stern. Joan said nice things about Sarah Silverman and Kathy Griffin, but I’m closest to her age. Maybe she viewed me as more of a contemporary.”
Rivers was more consistently kind to younger men, usually gay ones, and many of them adored her in return. “She was, like, my biggest champion,” said the comic and actor Billy Eichner. “Whatever I asked her to do, she would do, and she was as helpful as anyone could be. She would drop off DVDs of mine with Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel and say, ‘You have to see this guy.’ She did things like that all the time.”
But with everyone, Rivers took great pains to conceal the ravages of age. “She pushed herself to walk fast all the time, because she didn’t want people to think she was old,” said Margie Stern. “She never wanted to look like an old lady; she didn’t want people to know her knee hurt or her back hurt. No one was supposed to see. It was all this positive outlook for the world. She was always moving; she didn’t want anything to catch up with her. Life was catching up with her, but you never heard her complain. A lot of it was tied up in her ego. She wanted to be seen as strong, ready, professional. The woman was eighty-one years old, and she was slurring her words sometimes from total exhaustion, but she would never admit it. She wanted to be out all the time, and she never said, ‘I’m tired.’ She was older than I am, but I figured if she was going through life and not complaining, she was a role model for me.”
Rivers’s schedule was so brutal it seemed increasingly unreasonable. “The weekend before she went into the coma, she was in L.A. on Friday for Fashion Police,” said David Dangle. “She flew to Toronto on Friday night. She was on the air till midnight on the Shopping Channel, and she was back on the air at 9 a.m. She worked throughout the day. She stepped off the set and the car took her to the airport and she flew to New York Saturday night. It’s crazy. I do that trip and I’m a zombie for two days. She did a trip like that every day. She’d leave L.A. and fly to Seattle, leave Seattle and fly to Florida. There were no Fridays and Saturdays. Every hour was booked. Every day was booked.”
In 2012, Rivers performed forty-four comedy dates and fourteen Laurie Beechman dates, did one lecture, and went on a UK tour of thirteen more appearances. In 2013, when she turned eighty, she did thirty-eight comedy dates, twenty-four Beechman dates, and seven lectures. During the eight months that she lived in 2014, she performed twenty-six comedy dates and twenty Beechman dates and did three lectures. When she died at the beginning of September, she had another nine comedy dates, seven Beechman dates, one lecture, and a fifteen-gig UK tour scheduled for the remainder of the year.
“Here’s a woman who was at the top of her game—at eighty-one,” said the comic Brad Zimmerman, who often worked as Rivers’s opening act.
“She was never more relevant than at eighty-one,” echoed Judy Gold. “She knew more about popular culture than the average sixtee
n-year-old girl. She knew everything that was going on. I don’t know half the people she was talking about.”
In addition to personal appearances, Rivers was juggling the shooting schedules for three television shows: Fashion Police, Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best?, and In Bed with Joan, the weekly Internet show that Joan hosted from her bedroom at Melissa’s house in the Pacific Palisades. Her schedule also included regular trips to Pennsylvania for appearances on QVC and the weekly shuttle back and forth across the country.
Rivers was still churning out books as well. In 2012, she published I Hate Everyone…Starting with Me—which purported to answer the immortal question “How do I hate thee? How much time do you have?” Starting with Rivers’s version of the Golden Rule—“Do unto others before they do unto you”—she took on everything from ugly children, dating rituals, funerals, bad restaurants, First Ladies, closet cases, doctors, and feminists to hypocrites of all kinds. Her targets included Anne Frank and Stephen Hawking.
The book blurb on Amazon read, “Her career in comedy may have begun with self-loathing, but, after looking at the decrepitude around her, she figured, ‘Why stop here when there are so many other things to hate?’”
Rivers even managed to turn the fake blurbs on the cover of the book into a publicity bonanza. Although I Hate Everyone made The New York Times best-seller list, she claimed that Costco canceled its order and banned the book because it featured raunchy parody quotes among the testimonials on the back cover. Costco apparently considered Marie Antoinette’s alleged review to be inappropriate: “I don’t like her. Let her eat shit.”
Full of righteous indignation, Rivers showed up at a Costco store in Burbank, California, with handcuffs, a megaphone, and copies of her book. She handcuffed herself to a shopping cart and starting talking to the customers while autographing her book for fans. When the police arrived, it took them an hour to pry her out of the handcuffs because Rivers had thrown away the key. This gave her enough time to sell about a hundred copies of the book.
“It was a scene right out of Law & Order: STD,” she said delightedly. “I was giving special prices on my book. I was undercutting Costco!”
After being released, Rivers finally agreed to leave the store, and the police decided not to file charges. But Rivers insisted the incident constituted a violation of her constitutional rights.
“This is very frightening and it is truly about the First Amendment,” she told KABC-TV. “This is America, and I don’t want to see censorship. This is a store that sells three hundred rolls of toilet paper at the same time. And I say any customer that buys three hundred rolls of toilet paper deserves a funny book to sit on the toilet and read.”
Lest anyone question her understanding of constitutional law, Rivers said she should be able to interpret it as she saw fit. “This is a First Amendment issue—let the people choose,” she told the Daily News. “And if I’m misreading the First Amendment, that’s my right to misread it. That’s what makes this a great country. I’m never changing my cover. Did Anne Frank give her book a happy ending? It’s not about money. I’m considering myself now the Jewish Rosa Parks.”
Rivers turned eighty the following year, but she managed to publish yet another memoir, Diary of a Mad Diva, the year after that. Five months after her death, the recorded version won her a posthumous Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album.
Despite her determination to keep going, Rivers was too shrewd a businesswoman to make the mistake of so many executives who refuse to plan for their succession. During her last years at QVC, she gradually began to shift responsibility to David Dangle so he could carry on the business—an important priority because of her desire to keep providing income for Melissa and Cooper.
“Joan positioned it as ‘David and I,’” Dangle explained. “They put me on the air in the middle-of-the-night shows—never prime time, never daytime, but she always kept the name out there so the customer knew who I was. Joan and I signed off on every piece she made, and four or five years ago, we started putting me into some daytime shows. She was getting the customer to know me and like me, instead of saying, ‘Who is this dude?’ She knew one day she wouldn’t be here, and Melissa was very clear that she didn’t want to do it, so Joan was laying the groundwork for the day when she wouldn’t be here. She wanted the business to continue; there was too much money at stake. It took the pressure off her to have to sell.”
Although Rivers’s QVC business had been a consistent success for years, her friends saw it as one more example of the fact that she was perpetually denied her due—in business as in the entertainment world. “She was a mogul, but there was never a story on her in Forbes,” said Sue Cameron.
Nor did Rivers think of herself as someone who had made it and might therefore be able to relax. Despite a steady income from the QVC sales, she never stopped worrying about money. “She always thought she was going to be poor,” Cameron said. “She thought if she stopped for one second, she would be homeless.”
When someone referred to Rivers as “well-off,” she demurred. “No, I’ve always been salaried. I’ve never owned anything. I’ve done very well, lived very well,” she said. But when pressed, she added, “Sweetheart, I’m still working at Indian casinos in Omaha.”
Surrounded by rich friends, Rivers still saw herself as a working girl. “She had this magnificent duplex, but she never had a ton of money,” said Barbara Walters. “She was not a huge earner. I mean, okay, don’t cry for me, Argentina. She wasn’t poor. But she never felt that.”
And having money remained one of her greatest pleasures. “She was so grateful and happy,” said Cameron. “She had limousines. She had boats. She could go to Europe whenever she wanted. And she earned it all herself. Nobody gave it to her.”
But Rivers kept insisting she couldn’t afford to retire. “I don’t have money to do that. I could pull my living in and live okay, but I don’t want to live okay,” she said. “I’m very happy to live in my penthouse, very happy I can pick up a check, very happy to have a great life, and be able to spread my wealth a little bit.”
Spread it she did. “Joan lived very high on the hog, and there were tons of people on her payroll,” said Pete Hathaway. “There were cooks, maids, butlers, assistants, hairdressers, makeup artists—and she was paying all these expenses for Melissa, and for Barbara and her kids.”
Joan’s generosity also extended to coworkers. “There was a young engineer whose wife was sick, and he was having money trouble,” said Mark Simone. “She put $10,000 in an envelope and gave it to the station manager and said, ‘Give it to him, but don’t let him know where it came from.’ She was putting a lot of the children of friends and relatives through college.”
But it was her familial responsibilities that weighed on her most heavily. “She supported a lot of people, including her sister and her entire family,” Cameron said. “I sat with her one month when she was writing checks for all the people she was supporting, and there were so many checks for her to sign it was just stunning. She just gave away money to people. Her sister’s husband died, and Joan picked up the entire cost of that family for decades. They went through long periods of not talking; they weren’t talking when Barbara died, but Joan kept writing the checks. She felt guilty about her sister, because Joan made it and her sister didn’t. I think she resented supporting her—and also got pleasure out of it, because her sister was the favored one. But Joan was in control, because the person with the money is the one in control.”
Although Barbara had a law degree, she had stopped working and become a stay-at-home mother by the time her husband, who was a decade younger, died in 1977, at the age of thirty-seven. “Joan tried to protect Barbara, but she never quite recovered from the loss of her husband at such a young age,” Robert Higdon said. “That was one of the first things she said to me when I met her—she said, ‘My husband died.’ Barbara did have a meltdown after that, and Joan felt completely responsible for taking care of her. Joan had a big nut with that
family. Her biggest fear was not to be able to take care of everybody she needed to take care of.”
Despite that generosity, Joan’s friends saw her sister as envious and ungrateful. “Barbara was very jealous of her sister,” Dangle said. “Her husband died, but that doesn’t mean you have to be an angry harridan. It was abusive.”
“Barbara was a bitch,” said another one of Joan’s friends. “Joan was the earth mother to all these people who used her.”
No matter how extensive Joan’s largesse, Barbara managed to make herself look like the poor relation. “Joan was always handing over these five-year-old $100,000 mink coats to her sister, but Barbara would arrive in some stained schmatta and a raincoat,” said Pete Hathaway. “Joan was fantastic to Barbara, but the time I began smelling a rat was when Joan sent her interior designer, Louis Malkin, down to fluff up Barbara’s house—and Joan was picking up the tab.”
Barbara died in June of 2013, two nights before the gala celebration that had been planned for Joan’s eightieth birthday at the Metropolitan Club. Joan canceled the bash, which had a guest list of three hundred.
The following year, the Daily Beast asked her how losing her sister had affected her. “There goes your link to your childhood,” Joan replied. “She was the memory bank of our family. I have no one to call up and say, ‘Do you remember that time Daddy punched out our neighbor? Do you remember the time that Mummy bought the mink coat and didn’t tell Daddy?’ I am trying to be a good ‘mother’ to her children, but they’re in their thirties. We weren’t very close, but we were sisters. We fought, we made up. I miss not having ‘my sister.’”
The loss also intensified her own sense of impending mortality. “Now that I reflect back on it, I think she knew she didn’t have long,” said Robert Higdon. “Losing her sister made her aware; that was a big bell that went off. Her biggest fear was that she would have a stroke and be a burden to Melissa. In the world of show business, when do you turn your light off? When do you say it’s time to walk off the stage? She wasn’t ready to do that, but she wanted to be the one to make that choice. One of her biggest fears was that she could become insignificant. It never happened.”
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