Last Girl Before Freeway

by Leslie Bennetts

  Her intimates knew only too well that Rivers felt unappreciated throughout her entire life. “She would never have believed the outpouring,” Robert Higdon said. “She never believed she was loved. She would have been shocked. She never would have believed the tributes. I was just awestruck by the whole thing. She had no idea the world would respond that way.”

  Among showbiz veterans, some were struck by the sudden recognition of what her career had represented. Rivers was a fixture of the culture for so long that she had become like wallpaper—a perennial part of the scene that everyone took for granted until she was gone. “The interest in her is way beyond anything anybody understood,” said Mark Simone. “She had been there every moment of everyone’s life. A year ago she wasn’t the hottest thing on earth, but she is now.”

  Even that didn’t move old-timers to forgo their characteristic cynicism, and some noted that the effusive testimonials omitted the less appealing aspects of a more complex picture. “After my book on Johnny Carson was published, Joan got in touch and said, ‘I loved the book. I really appreciated how you dealt with Edgar’—that I didn’t knock him,” Henry Bushkin reported. “And I didn’t say she was a cunt. That was the eight-hundred-pound elephant at her funeral service.”

  But no one could deny Rivers’s significance, no matter how they felt about her. “She was a polarizing figure, but whether you loved her or hated her, you respected her,” said Lindsay Roth.

  Rivers even earned praise from those she had victimized. “Watching Joan Rivers do stand-up at age eighty-one was incredible: athletic, jaw-dropping, terrifying, essential. It never stopped. Neither will she,” tweeted Lena Dunham. “I told [comedian Marc] Maron I’d have a zinger when Joan died. But I didn’t think she ever would. She felt eternal, and anyway, zingers are her territory.”

  This didn’t stop Dunham from firing one off: “That being said, Joan is gone but a piece of her lives on: her nose, because it’s made of polyurethane.”

  Knowing that Rivers had feared being incapacitated, her intimates were consoled by the fact that she never endured such an ordeal. The believers among them imputed their own meaning to the way her life ended. “As it was, she went out on such a high; she just went to sleep without knowing,” Higdon said. “In some ways it was God’s way of saying, ‘Well done.’ He blessed her, in a way, with her departure. She would always say, ‘I don’t know what you mean about God’s grace,’ but I think she finally found it. Walking out of her service, I thought, there’s nothing unfinished here.”

  And yet there were slights that stung, despite all the accolades. The Broadway League, which represents the interests of theater owners and producers, initially refused to honor Rivers by dimming the lights on Broadway, the traditional posthumous tribute after the death of a theater world notable. Since Rivers was a playwright, a Broadway actress, a Tony Award nominee, and a constant theatergoer, the omission seemed curious. When the decision was challenged, the explanations only raised questions about whether a double standard undervalued Rivers’s contributions compared with those of famous men.

  Charlotte St. Martin, then the executive director of the Broadway League, initially claimed that Rivers did not meet the criteria for the honor, which was supposedly reserved for people who had been “very active recently in the theater, or else…synonymous with Broadway—people who made their careers here, or kept it up.” The league had accorded that honor to Robin Williams, who starred in one play, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, in 2011, and performed a stand-up special, Robin Williams: Live on Broadway, in 2002.

  St. Martin’s comments prompted a wave of social media outrage, spawning the hashtag #dim4joan. The Broadway League finally reversed its decision, citing the public outcry: “Due to the outpouring of love and respect for Joan Rivers from our community and from her friends and fans worldwide, the marquees of Broadway theaters in New York will be dimmed in her memory tonight, at exactly 6:45 p.m., for one minute,” the league announced on September 8.

  The next affront was delivered the following February during the Academy Awards ceremony, which omitted Rivers from the “In Memoriam” segment honoring those who died the previous year. “That was such a snub,” said Sue Cameron. “All her friends were just furious.”

  Robin Williams, Mickey Rooney, and Mike Nichols were included in the segment, but so were numerous executives, writers, and members of the production community whose names were unknown to those outside the industry. Since Rivers was a screenwriter, a director, and an actress in Hollywood feature films, she seemed more than worthy of mention, even without considering her contribution to the red-carpet phenomenon. “Rivers, per IMDb, boasts thirty-eight acting credits to her name in a career that spans sixty-three years,” People magazine reported.

  Fans were not mollified when the Academy issued a statement claiming it simply didn’t have room for all “the many worthy artists and filmmakers we were unfortunately unable to feature.”

  “Dear @TheAcademy: It was really shameful that you didn’t include #JoanRivers in your ‘In Memoriam’ tribute at the #Oscars. That was wrong,” one fan tweeted. Another added, “Omitting Joan Rivers from that ‘In Memoriam’ was genuinely disrespectful.”

  Rivers’s friends were even more outraged. “The Oscars were totally offensive,” said Robert Higdon. “Thank goodness she was recognized at the Tonys.”

  The Tony Awards did include Rivers in the “In Memoriam” segment, which featured Josh Groban singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” while pictures of departed notables flashed onscreen. But in other industries where Rivers had worked, the recognition of her contributions remained curiously inconsistent. She was included in the “In Memoriam” tribute at the Emmy Awards, but excluded at the Grammy Awards—even though she had won the year’s Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album earlier that very day.

  Elsewhere, however, interest in Rivers’s life remained intense. “When she died, we had an absolutely overwhelming and immediate response from the QVC customer base, from Facebook posts to calls to customer service,” Michael George reported. “I was amazed at the employee response. There was a very gut response of empathy and sadness and sympathy. I received so many beautiful letters from employees who had worked with Joan, and others from QVC people who never met her but felt connected to her.”

  QVC management was initially unsure of how to respond to her death, despite Rivers’s plan for Dangle to succeed her. “It was so unexpected; everyone just thought she would go on forever,” George said. “We wrestled with whether to continue the business, but the feedback from customers was to continue it, and I’m glad we did. Sales have remained strong. David had appeared with her quite frequently, and occasionally hosted by himself, so the customers knew him and his connection to Joan. As long as Joan Rivers Worldwide wants to work with QVC and our customers are responding, we would see that business continuing.”

  By the middle of 2015, Dangle felt confident about the changeover. “The transition has been smooth,” he reported. “We had a better first half of the year this year than we did last year. The customer is saying, ‘I miss Joan so much, but I’m so glad I can still buy the jewelry.’ Now Joan is making money for her daughter—and she’s not even here.”

  Rivers’s former coworkers proved equally devoted. A month after she died, Bill Reardin helped to organize a reunion of staffers from The Joan Rivers Show, and about forty people flew to New York to celebrate their former boss, while colleagues in Los Angeles participated on FaceTime.

  Many felt very emotional about her loss. “The day she died, I was sitting in my car in front of preschool, and I just couldn’t stop crying,” said Randi Gelfand Pollack, the show’s booker. “There was such a connection.”

  Most had maintained that connection, even though decades had passed since they worked with Rivers. “The last time I saw her, she said, ‘Come to see my show,’ and after the show we talked until one thirty in the morning,” said Larry Ferber.

  He was on a cruise in Alaska wh
en he got a text saying that Joan had gone into cardiac arrest, and he was so upset he considered canceling a speech he was scheduled to give about his years in the entertainment industry. “I thought, I don’t think I can do this,” said Ferber, who had titled his speech “Could They Talk” in homage to Rivers. “And then I thought, Joan would have said, ‘Get off your ass and go to work!’ So I did.”

  But the loss left him feeling bereft. “When she died, I cried,” he said. “I lost a good friend. She was one of a kind. There’s nobody like her. She’s irreplaceable.”

  Virtually all of Joan’s close friends felt the same way, and many wept while being interviewed about her, months after her death. The loss was most devastating for Melissa, but one consolation finally emerged with the resolution of her malpractice suit against the clinic and the doctors who had presided over Joan’s fatal procedure.

  In May of 2016, the Rivers family announced that an agreement had been reached in order to avoid protracted litigation and the doctors accepted responsibility for Joan’s death. The dollar amount was not released, but news reports described it as a multimillion-dollar settlement.

  “Melissa Rivers said in a statement that she was happy to be ‘able to put the legal aspects of my mother’s death behind me and ensure that those culpable for her death have accepted responsibility for their actions quickly and without equivocation,’” The New York Times reported. “She said she hoped no one had to go through what her family had endured and vowed to ‘work towards ensuring higher safety standards in outpatient surgical clinics.’…The lawyers for the Rivers family, Jeffrey Bloom and Ben Rubinowitz, said they did not reveal the amount of the settlement because they wanted to focus on improving patient care. But they said it was ‘substantial.’”

  A spokesperson for Yorkville Endoscopy said, “Our thoughts and prayers continue to go out to the Rivers family. We remain committed to providing quality, compassionate health care services that meet the needs of our patients, their families, and the community.”

  In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, Melissa Rivers added, “I hope that this sparks conversation about care and policy at ambulatory surgical centers. If talking about what happened to my mother can help even one other family, it will have been worth it.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Legacy:

  Laughter and Liberation

  Long before Rivers died, knowledgeable observers were describing her legacy in sweeping terms. “It’s impossible to overestimate her impact, both because she redefined what was possible for women in comedy and because she’s been a role model for so many,” Roz Warren wrote in Revolutionary Laughter: The World of Women Comics, which was published in 1995.

  Although that was true even then, the next two decades brought transformational changes to the culture as well as to Rivers’s career. By the time she died, many of the hottest names in comedy were women. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler had hosted the Golden Globes; Ellen DeGeneres and Whoopi Goldberg had hosted the Academy Awards. Sarah Silverman, Whitney Cummings, Kathy Griffin, and Margaret Cho made HBO specials, and Griffin has also made sixteen stand-up specials for Bravo, breaking the Guinness world record for the number of aired TV specials by any comedian on any network in the history of comedy.

  After turning down the chance to replace Jon Stewart as host of The Daily Show, Amy Schumer won an Emmy Award for her own Comedy Central show, Inside Amy Schumer. She also wrote and starred in the movie Trainwreck, which has grossed more than $100 million.

  Even more impressive was the $300 million gross of Bridesmaids, the 2011 movie that Kristen Wiig cowrote and starred in with Melissa McCarthy, Maya Rudolph, and Rebel Wilson. Since then, McCarthy’s box office performance has been so stellar that Forbes headlined one recent story “Can Melissa McCarthy’s Career Survive All These Hit Movies?” In the last three years alone, her films have included The Boss, Identity Thief, The Heat, Tammy, and Spy, among others. “Comedy is a man’s world, but it’s changing with these emerging stars like Melissa McCarthy, who’s hysterical,” said Larry King.

  If that represents the view of a man in his eighties, women half his age have a different perspective. “Women run comedy now,” Sarah Silverman said in the Comedy Hall of Fame documentary Joan Rivers: Exit Laughing.

  Virtually all of Rivers’s successors acknowledge their debt to her. “Her existence changed everything for women in comedy,” Silverman said.

  “I can’t think of a female comic who wasn’t influenced by her,” added Judy Gold. “I think she opened doors for everybody.”

  When Amy Schumer made the cover of Vogue in July of 2016, Jonathan Van Meter described Rivers’s influence on her. “Just after Joan Rivers’s death in 2014, Schumer gave a hilarious and moving speech in which she essentially said that Rivers was the reason she got into comedy. ‘I carried her with me for as long as I can remember,’ she said that night onstage, choking up,” Van Meter reported.

  When he interviewed Schumer for the cover story, her first words were about Rivers. “When I heard she had died, I was like ‘Well, that’s not possible.’ It really fucked me up,” Schumer said.

  But for most people, the full recognition of Rivers’s impact was a long time coming. “She had this insanely diverse career that people didn’t recognize until she was gone,” said Chip Duckett, who produced Rivers’s live shows in New York for nearly two decades. “She was such a chameleon, but when they looked at the whole of her career, a lot of people woke up to the fact that she had been such a trailblazer in so many ways.”

  Throughout that career, Rivers remained on the cutting edge of the culture instead of being relegated to the dusty past that had claimed most of her chronological peers. When Joan died, Sarah Silverman said she watched Fashion Police every week and was stunned by how much Rivers got away with in her commentary. “They were the most hard-core jokes on TV,” Silverman said. “You just can’t believe that she’s saying them.”

  The following month Silverman paid tribute on Saturday Night Live in a sketch that featured Rivers arriving on the celestial stage. “Heaven—are you serious?” said Silverman as Rivers. “Me in heaven? I guess I should be here—I’m practically a virgin. The last time someone was inside me it was Melissa.”

  Such cracks seemed eminently appropriate, given Rivers’s sixty-year track record of talking about what did and did not enter her vagina. On any family tree of comedy, performers like Silverman and Amy Schumer are direct descendants of Rivers. In an interview with The Guardian, Margaret Cho described Rivers as one of her “comedy parents.”

  Back in the 1960s, Rivers began skewering the double standards that judge women more harshly than men, and today’s younger comics are continuing that trend. Amy Schumer regularly sends up sexist values on her television show, Inside Amy Schumer, and some of her sketches have become instant classics—including one in which Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Patricia Arquette mocked the cutoff date that determines when a woman has passed her “last fuckable day,” as decreed by men. Another much-acclaimed segment, a parody of Twelve Angry Men, skewered Hollywood’s warped body expectations for women at a trial in which an all-male jury debated whether Schumer was hot enough to appear on television.

  “I don’t think she’s protagonist hot,” said Kevin Kane.

  “But Kevin James is?” John Hawkes asked.

  “She’s built like a lineman, and she has Cabbage Patch–like features,” said Paul Giamatti. “Her ass makes me furious!”

  And yet no matter how strenuously she made fun of ageism and sexism, Rivers continued to reinforce the rules of a male-dominated culture—whereas many of her successors make a point of defying them. When Schumer signed a $10 million book contract for her memoir, she was forthright in declaring that she was thirty-four years old and weighed 160 pounds—and neither of those facts rendered her undesirable, because she could still “catch a dick anytime I want.”

  Schumer refuses to subsist on Altoids in the name of beauty, and she is vocal about
her rejection of such self-martyrdom. “I am very into making up my own rules,” she told Vogue. “Like, I don’t want to play the game and succeed at it. I want to redefine it.”

  Schumer isn’t the only one. When Mindy Kaling’s book Why Not Me? hit number one on The New York Times best-seller list, Kaling tweeted that her ass was so big it split her skirt and she had to be sewed back into her dress in order to continue shooting her television show, The Mindy Project.

  From TV, movies, and stand-up to the book industry, women comics have sparked a burgeoning market for such subversive content. Tina Fey reportedly received an advance of up to $7 million for her 2011 book, Bossypants, which sold 3.5 million copies.

  But Rivers went to her grave still horrified by the refusal of such women to conform to the strictures that she herself had worked so hard to obey. Appalled by Lena Dunham’s penchant for disrobing on her TV series, Girls, Rivers protested that Dunham was “the first fat girl naked on television” and that viewers watched her with “their hands over their eyes.” Rivers also complained that if she ever had to see Dunham’s “ass, boobs, or tattoos” on TV again, HBO should be charged with crimes against humanity. Since Dunham was free enough to “have her fat ass on display,” Rivers added, why wasn’t she “free enough to have a fucking salad once in a while?”

  The contrast between Rivers’s values and those of Dunham provide eloquent testimony to a distinct cultural shift among the younger generation. In her HBO special, Amy Schumer: Live at the Apollo, Schumer refers to herself as a garden gnome, a fat tumbleweed, Gilbert Grape’s mom, “one of those inflatable things outside a car wash,” and super bloated, among other descriptions. “I’m not a real woman—I’m just harvesting organs for one,” Schumer said.