“She wasn’t neurotic about dying, but she thought about it a lot,” said Margie Stern. “I think it was always tied in to her vision of who she was. She was terrified of losing it. She said, ‘I’m just so scared of forgetting my lines.’ We had dinner on the Sunday night before the Thursday when she went into the coma. We were talking about a friend who was going gaga. Joan always said, ‘I don’t want to be incapacitated. If I can’t get up and work and do my act, I don’t want to live.’ She said, ‘I want you to save the sleeping pills for me. Just put me down; that would be it. I’m eighty-one years old. I’ve had a fantastic life.’”
Rivers talked constantly about such concerns. “In the last year of her life, she would ask me how old my mother was when she started to lose it,” Blaine Trump reported. “She felt that her mother started to lose it, and she would say, ‘I just don’t want to be around if I lose it.’ She said, ‘The greatest thing that could ever happen to me would be to die onstage.’”
Rivers had tried to prepare for the inevitable. “It’s in my will: I’m not to be revived unless I can do an hour of stand-up,” she said.
As her fears grew, she also made some practical changes. “She sold her house in Connecticut; it was like she was preparing,” said Trump. “She didn’t want Melissa to be burdened with that. And she was talking about selling her apartment and moving into the Pierre. It was closing in.”
If Rivers lived in a bubble, she found it very painful to be reminded of the harsh reality. “When she did Hot in Cleveland, where she played Betty White’s sister, she was so upset, because she said, ‘We really are old ladies!’” said Sabrina Lott Miller. “It brought her in full view of her mortality. She would look in the mirror and say, ‘Who’s that old lady staring back at me?’ She just hated that.”
And yet Rivers kept looking for new ways to ratchet up her career, even in the final weeks of her life. “We had dinner on August 14, and we were sort of celebrating Joan’s birthday in June and Aileen Mehle’s birthday,” Trump recalled, referring to the columnist. “Joan was talking about all of her projects. I was exhausted just listening to her schedule. I said, ‘Joan, I don’t know anybody who works as hard as you.’ She was really on fire; I felt like she was at the top of her game. I can’t imagine a woman who says she wants to die onstage saying, ‘I’m done.’ If she wasn’t busy, she was bored. She loved the creative process, and she always had ten ideas for a new show.”
Inspired by Judge Judy, Rivers and Andy Cohen were developing an advice show that would feature Rivers as the tart-tongued dispenser of wisdom. Cohen was amused to discover that it wasn’t her only new venture. “As I was pitching this show, my agent kept finding out about other things she was pitching,” he said. “I thought it was hilarious. The bitch was out there. She was not done.”
To Rivers, departing the stage remained inconceivable. “One of her maxims was, ‘When you retire, you expire,’” Joe Franklin said. “In her mind, if you retired, you’d die.”
The last year of Rivers’s life brought a milestone event that marked the end of a long and bitter estrangement. When Johnny Carson retired in 1992, Jay Leno took over The Tonight Show and hosted it until 2014—but he maintained Carson’s ban on booking Rivers as a guest throughout those years.
The exile seemed grossly excessive. “My agent would call maybe every two years and say, ‘People commit murder and they’re out in twenty years—what is it?’” Rivers said.
But when Jimmy Fallon succeeded Leno as host in February of 2014, he invited Rivers to appear on his first show, which coincidentally occurred on the forty-ninth anniversary of her first ever appearance on The Tonight Show. “It’s about time!” Rivers said. “I’ve been sitting in a taxi outside NBC with the meter running since 1987.”
Rivers appeared with other stars that included Robert De Niro, Will Smith, Lady Gaga, Mariah Carey, Kim Kardashian, Sarah Jessica Parker, and U2, and Fallon’s gesture meant a great deal to her. “I thought, how darling, and sweet, and sensitive,” she said. “I was so emotional.”
“She was so crazily, overwhelmingly touched that Jimmy Fallon had her on his first show,” said Andy Cohen. “That was huge for her—major, major. She told me the car dropped her off at the wrong entrance to Thirty Rock, and it was the same one she used to do Johnny Carson. She said, ‘Thank you,’ and started to cry.”
Rivers turned eighty-one that June, and she made more headlines over the summer. “Rivers has been very active lately,” Deadline.com reported in August of 2014. “Last month she stormed out of an interview with CNN’s Fredricka Whitfield, after Whitfield called Rivers’s trademark fashion blasts ‘mean,’ and asked Rivers if she was concerned the fur she was wearing on the cover of her new book might offend animal rights activists. ‘You’re not the person to interview someone who does humor,’ Rivers snapped as she exited.”
During the interview, Rivers was exasperated by the familiar charge that she hurt celebrities’ feelings. “You really think Nicki Minaj cares I didn’t like her dress?” Rivers said.
Whitfield pointed out that Diary of a Mad Diva contained jokes about the deaths of Casey Anthony’s baby and Princess Diana, among other sensitive subjects. Rivers replied that “life is very tough” and jokes give people “a vacation for a minute from horror.” But when Whitfield mentioned that Rivers was wearing fur on the cover of her book, Rivers erupted. “Are you wearing leather shoes? Then shut up!” she said.
It was at this point that Rivers astonished Whitfield by walking off the set. “Are you serious?” Whitfield asked.
She was indeed. Rivers complained afterward that the CNN interviewer “was a news reporter and not an entertainment reporter. She did not seem to understand we were talking about a comedy book and not the transcripts from the Nuremberg trial. Every question was an accusatory one designed to put me on the defensive. She seemed to miss the point that Diary of a Mad Diva is simply a very funny book, and as Winston Churchill said, if you can make one person laugh, even for a minute, it’s like giving them a little vacation.”
Rivers described Whitfield as “very judgmental, very nasty, very opinionated, very negative,” and then added, “It was like my wedding night, ya know?”
Although Rivers denied that the whole flap was a publicity stunt to promote her new book, she milked it for all it was worth. “She shrewdly kept the spotlight trained on herself—three days later stopping by David Letterman’s CBS late-night show, where she began to poke fun at June Allyson—America’s sweetheart circa 1940—and Dave walked out in protest, leaving Joan to interview herself,” Deadline reported.
Rivers had made a joke about losing an endorsement deal for Depend adult diapers. “Letterman then calmly removes his jacket and walks offstage, pretending to be grossed out by the joke, but Rivers proceeds by interviewing herself. ‘How’s your sex life, you old bitch?’ she asks, before responding with a joke about vaginal dryness,” Rolling Stone reported. “When it becomes clear that Letterman is riding out the gag for the long term, she even throws to commercial like an old late-night pro.”
Generating a steady stream of such controversies to keep people talking about her, the obstreperous eighty-one-year-old seemed full of life, and her penchant for causing trouble was undiminished. “This summer alone, she first raised hackles in July when she called First Lady Michelle Obama ‘transgender’ and implied that President Obama is gay,” Variety reported.
Looking back on those months, her friends were divided about what was really going on in Rivers’s mind. “She was just exhausted,” said Sue Cameron. “It was too much for her. She said, ‘I can’t fly back and forth across the country every week.’ She knew it was too much now, and she was taking steps to lower the stress. She said, ‘I think I want to buy something on the San Juan Islands off Seattle. Would you like to live there with me?’ She wanted complete isolation and nature, but close enough to a major airport so she could get back to New York. She’d never even seen the San Juan Islands, but she was going to live th
ere.”
Others scoff at the idea. “There were all these fantasies, and she would throw things around, but that didn’t mean one thing,” said Margie Stern. “She was tired, but she wouldn’t have left New York.”
Her coworkers didn’t believe she would ever have gotten off the merry-go-round voluntarily. “She had so much energy,” said the Beechman Theatre’s Kenny Bell. “She would say, ‘Don’t get old—aging sucks,’ but the energy she had would give forty-year-olds a run for their money. She was an inspiration. If you could get old like her, it’s not so scary.”
But the unrelenting activity was driven by the same desperation that had always hounded her. “Her whole life, she was chasing something,” said Mark Simone. “Even when she walked, she was running. Bob Hope created this character, and he was happy for the rest of his life. Not like Joan. She was never satisfied. She was always running to grab something. She was always trying to do something else.”
Her friends understood why. “I think probably the answer to Joan is her mother,” said Lonny Price. “Is it too simple to say she didn’t get enough love from her mother? It’s such a cliché, but it’s true.”
While virtually everyone admired her energy, some saw Rivers’s example as a warning. “She seemed to me a cautionary tale about not getting your identity and your self-esteem from performance, from fame, from money, from work,” said Lisa Lampanelli. “It’s the deep hole that therapists talk about. What do I fill my deep hole with? Fame? Possessions? Relationships? Money? No, that didn’t work. It’s about filling the hole with something else besides work. When I watched the documentary, I thought, ‘Oh—I have to be careful about that.’”
Others preferred to emphasize the satisfaction she derived from her achievements. “I think she was happy,” said Ricki Stern. “She enjoyed her life. Anger fuels everything, but in her everyday life you didn’t see anger. But you knew her whole thing was, ‘Life isn’t fair, so you power through it with comedy.’ She was very sensitive to life’s unfairness, and the way she processed it was through humor.”
Rivers may never have caught what she was chasing, but she made the most of the journey. “She loved life,” said Andrew Krasny. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who loved living as much as she did.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Grand Finale:
Sudden Exit, Pursued by Bear
For Joan Rivers, August 27, 2014, seemed like an ordinary day. She had scheduled a minor surgical procedure for the following morning, but she had been as busy as ever all week, even though it was the tail end of the dog days of summer—a time when even Manhattan slows to a torpid crawl.
“I was with her in Toronto for two of the last five days before she went into the coma, working till midnight,” said David Dangle. “The day before she went into the clinic, she had a meet and greet for Time Inc. A friend who saw her said she was white-hot—he’d never been so entertained.”
Rivers appeared at the event in the Time & Life Building to promote Diary of a Mad Diva, and that night she performed at the Laurie Beechman Theatre. “She was full of life,” said Kenny Bell. “She had to get up early the next morning for the procedure, but she was in such good spirits.”
In her act, Rivers joked about her own mortality. “She said, ‘I could drop dead right now, and you guys would be so lucky. You’d be invited to every dinner party in town, and you could say, “I was right there! One minute she was talking about vaginas, and the next minute she was on the floor!”’” said Shade Rupe, a longtime fan who was in the audience that night. “If you had me guess her age, I’d say she was in her fifties. She was so on. She didn’t miss a step, she didn’t go ditzy, she didn’t forget anything, and her timing was amazing.”
When Bell said good-bye to Rivers after the show, they were both exhilarated. “We were laughing so hard she was practically dancing down the street,” he said.
“She killed that last show of hers; she really nailed it,” said Steve Olsen, the owner of the Beechman. “Joan knew about cycles, because she had so many setbacks, but she died on top. She left here at nine thirty at night, after her final performance ever, and twelve hours later she was in a coma.”
Rivers had every intention of keeping up her usual pace during the days to come: she was planning an appearance the following night at the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, New Jersey. But August 27 turned out to be the last day of her functional life. The next morning, fate intervened in the form of a catastrophic medical mishap that resulted in her death on September 4.
When Rivers suffered cardiac and respiratory arrest while anesthetized for a routine procedure at Yorkville Endoscopy, many people assumed that she was undergoing yet another cosmetic surgery. The actual truth was as ironic as it was poignant: she was just trying to diagnose a lingering problem with the asset that had carried her to fame and sustained it for half a century.
Always raspy, her voice had seemed particularly hoarse of late, and Rivers was concerned enough to pursue treatment. Before she was anesthetized at the clinic, she signed a written consent form allowing for an upper endoscopy, which examines the digestive tract, and a possible biopsy.
Even before the procedure began, those charged with her care had allegedly engaged in curious irregularities that may have violated regulatory and medical protocols. The medical personnel who gathered in the room for Rivers’s endoscopy included Dr. Lawrence Cohen, the medical director of the clinic; Dr. Renuka Bankulla, an anesthesiologist; and Rivers’s longtime ear, nose, and throat specialist, Dr. Gwen Korovin. Dr. Korovin’s presence that day may have cost Rivers her life.
In early 2015, Melissa Rivers filed a malpractice suit against Yorkville Endoscopy. According to the complaint, Dr. Korovin was not licensed to perform any medical procedures at the Yorkville clinic and should not even have been allowed into the room. After Rivers was sedated, Dr. Korovin performed a transnasal laryngoscopy, which examines the back of the throat and vocal box—even though that procedure had not been discussed.
“The complaint says Bankulla raised questions given that Rivers had not authorized the additional procedure—but Cohen ignored the objections and allowed Korovin to go on with the laryngoscopy,” the Washington Post reported. “The complaint notes that during the laryngoscopy, Bankulla had trouble keeping Rivers’s oxygen saturation at a safe level, and her oxygen dipped again during the endoscopy. The doctors ‘failed to properly observe and monitor Joan Rivers’s vital signs which were deteriorating,’ it states, adding that her blood pressure and pulse were also dropping. When the endoscopy was done, Korovin wanted to do another laryngoscopy. Again, a concerned Bankulla raised objections.”
Dr. Bankulla had ample reason for concern. “The anesthesiologist warned that the cords were extremely swollen, and that they could seize up and Ms. Rivers would not be able to breathe,” The New York Times reported. “‘You’re such a curious cat,’ Dr. Lawrence Cohen, the medical director of the clinic, Yorkville Endoscopy, scolded the anesthesiologist, according to the suit…Dr. Cohen dismissed the anesthesiologist’s concern as ‘paranoid’ and let Dr. Korovin proceed, the suit said, with disastrous results.”
After Rivers died, various news organizations published rumors that one of the doctors also took selfies of his unconscious patient, a charge later affirmed by court papers filed for the lawsuit. The complaint alleged that Dr. Cohen snapped photographs of Rivers and Dr. Korovin with his phone, saying that Rivers would “like to see these in the recovery area.” Rivers did not at any time “authorize Cohen to take photos of her while under sedation and while undergoing medical procedures”—but no one in the room objected, according to the lawsuit.
Rivers never made it to the recovery area. Her heart rate slowed to dangerous levels, a condition called bradycardia, and her oxygen levels also dropped as she suffered from “an airway obstruction and/or laryngospasm,’ a closing of the vocal cords,” The New York Times reported. “But, the court papers say, Dr. Bankulla did not demand a ‘crash cart,’
which might have had a drug like succinylcholine to relax her muscles and allow insertion of a breathing tube, then waited several minutes before calling for help. When she did, two other anesthesiologists arrived, and one of them tried to administer oxygen through a mask, to no avail. Dr. Bankulla looked around for Dr. Korovin to punch a hole in Ms. Rivers’s throat—an emergency cricothyrotomy that she should have been trained to do as an ear, nose, and throat doctor—but Dr. Korovin had fled the clinic, according to the suit.”
According to ABC News, “The lawsuit language is blunt: Korovin, it said, ‘abandoned her patient, Joan Rivers.’”
After Rivers went into cardiac and respiratory arrest, further time allegedly elapsed before critical measures were taken. “Twelve minutes after the doctors called ‘code blue,’ someone dialed 911 for an ambulance,” the Washington Post reported.
Rivers was rushed to Mount Sinai Hospital, where she was placed in a medically induced coma. She died a week later without having regained consciousness. The New York medical examiner subsequently determined that Rivers died from brain damage due to lack of oxygen.
The subsequent lawsuit accused the doctors at the clinic of being “reckless, grossly negligent, and wanton” and of having abandoned Rivers “when emergency procedures were necessary to save her life.” The complaint also alleged that “none of the medical personnel at Yorkville Endoscopy who were present during the procedures performed on Joan Rivers possessed the knowledge, training, and ability to handle the medical emergency.”
Last Girl Before Freeway Page 42