Last Girl Before Freeway

by Leslie Bennetts

  Schumer “isn’t afraid to say insulting things about herself,” Mike Hale noted in The New York Times. “But she doesn’t do it with the self-mocking edge of a Joan Rivers. It’s a comfortable kind of self-deprecation, born of insecurity but delivered with a confidence that takes the sting out and gives the listener a smug feeling of complicity.”

  Younger women now claim the right to poke fun at anything they want. “The breadth of my genius lies in my range, from in-depth sociopolitical commentary to jokes about shitting your pants,” Cho said. “You have the entire human experience in there—a combination of being insightful and crass.”

  But Rivers got there first—and in challenging the prevailing restrictions of her time, she played a major role in expanding the ability of the entire culture to deal with the realities of women’s lives. When she started out, Ed Sullivan wouldn’t let her use the word “pregnant” on camera despite her bulging belly. Such taboos exerted a toxic influence on women’s lives, according to Dr. Anna Fels, a psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medical College and author of Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives.

  “Cultural silence about any subject conveys that it is disturbing, shameful, ugly, frightening—and important enough to need a cover-up,” said Dr. Fels. “Cancer used to be one such subject. Another was the sexual and reproductive experiences of women. Words like ‘vagina,’ ‘menstruation,’ or even ‘pregnancy’ were banished from common speech as ‘dirty words.’ Women didn’t know what their sexual organs looked like or even where they were. To be socially prohibited from mentioning, let alone discussing, their bodies, and particularly their sexuality—women’s identities were diminished. They in effect existed in a verbal purdah.”

  By using her wit to defuse such fraught subjects, Fels said, “Rivers began to change all that.”

  When Rivers first shocked people by mentioning unmentionable secrets like abortion, she was just trying to grab the attention of her audiences. But in doing so, she helped to liberate herself and everyone else from the societal stigmas imposed on women because of their gender. “She talked about the fact that once you tell the truth and let it all out, you don’t have to be afraid ever again,” said Mark Simone.

  As any visitor to comedy clubs can attest, women today have plowed through every line of demarcation that used to prevent them from sharing their experiences and airing their grievances. Susie Essman’s act includes jokes about blow jobs, G-spots, menopause, hot flashes, night sweats, thinning vaginal walls, and vaginal dryness. Female stand-ups routinely get onstage and talk about peeing, pooping, and farting. Amy Schumer discusses her urinary tract infections so much that they should get second billing at her engagements. After Tig Notaro was treated for breast cancer, she took off her shirt and performed topless, revealing her double mastectomy scars, in Tig Notaro: Boyish Girl Interrupted, her HBO comedy special.

  “There’s not that big a boundary between men and women anymore in terms of the material they can do,” said Catch a Rising Star founder Rick Newman. “To some of the audience, the double standard still exists, but nothing is sacred in comedy.”

  And over time, the cumulative impact of such incremental acts of defiance is incalculable. “This is how you turn the world around—through humor,” said Ricki Stern, who directed Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.

  Indeed, some analysts credit female comics with having moved to the forefront of cultural change. “Comedians Are Leading the Feminist Movement,” proclaimed the headline of a 2015 Mic.com essay by Dr. Marcie Bianco, an adjunct associate professor at Hunter College. “These comedians use satire to cut to the bone, and misogynists are too busy laughing to realize they’re bleeding to death.”

  Female comics are also expanding their scope. Thirty or forty years ago, Rivers was unusual in trying to work as a director, screenwriter, playwright, and producer in addition to being a performer. Today such multiple roles are commonplace. “Everything’s changed,” said the longtime club owner Caroline Hirsch. “Comedy was always the boys’ place, and now the women are rising. There are an amazing amount of women coming up through the ranks. They write their own jokes, they think outside the box, and they all want to produce. It’s much more permissive—of language, of content, of how women dress. The content can be anything—Amy Schumer is allowed to say ‘pussy’ on Comedy Central. Comedy has opened up a whole new world of what’s acceptable for women to say, and Joan kind of started it. She broke the ice there. When Howard Stern talked about Whitney Houston’s vagina at Joan’s funeral, that was Joan’s joke. Here she is, making fun of a dead person, which should be taboo—but it’s not. Looking back, Joan seems like even more of a role model, because she broke through when it was even harder to do.”

  Long gone are the days when women in stand-up struggled in vain to be heard. “I spend a lot of time in comedy clubs, and there are just as many women waiting to get up and get stage time as men,” said Barry Dougherty of the Friars Club.

  Gender barriers remain indisputable. The sexism is most obvious among the old guard. When the Friars Club held a ninetieth birthday party for Jerry Lewis, the New York Post’s Page Six reported that the “starry guests” included Robert De Niro, Jim Carrey, Richard Belzer, Chazz Palminteri, Jeff Ross, and Freddie Roman—“‘but not a single woman,’ noted a guest.”

  Nor has television changed as much as might have been expected. When Rivers got her own show on the new Fox network in 1987, she was the first and only female host of a late-night talk show. In 2015, a year after she died, Vanity Fair featured a photograph of late-night talk show hosts that prompted this analysis in the Huffington Post:

  “If you needed any more proof that late-night TV is still a man’s world, look no further than Vanity Fair,” wrote Emma Gray. “Ten men in suits (eight of whom are white) sit sipping whiskey for a recent story under the headline ‘Why Late-Night Television Is Better than Ever.’ The answer is certainly not diversity of any kind. It’s common knowledge that late night is something of a boys’ club. After all, there are exactly zero women hosting late-night shows on major networks right now. And women who are involved with late night, like Grace Helbig, who replaced Chelsea Handler on E!, are nowhere to be found on Vanity Fair’s cover. And it’s not just the hosting gigs that primarily go to men. The majority of staff writers on late-night TV shows are—you guessed it—of the dude (and pale) persuasion. Even Stephen Colbert—who wrote an essay for Glamour which acknowledged that late night is ‘a bit of a sausagefest’ and detailed how he hopes to celebrate women’s voices—only has two women on his writing staff of nineteen.”

  But such imbalances now provoke outrage rather than passive acquiescence. “The 100 percent male, 80 percent white Vanity Fair image didn’t go unnoticed by women and men on Twitter, who began calling out how tone-deaf it was,” Gray reported. “The men featured in the Vanity Fair story are generally excellent comedians. It’s great to celebrate the accomplishments of men like Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and Larry Wilmore, while looking forward to seeing what newcomers like Trevor Noah might do. But the Vanity Fair piece doesn’t even acknowledge the staggering gender gap until its final two paragraphs. ‘What’s conspicuously missing from late-night, still, is women,’ writes David Kamp. ‘How gobsmackingly insane is it that no TV network has had the common sense—and that’s all we’re talking about in 2015, not courage, bravery, or even decency—to hand over the reins of an existing late-night comedy program to a female person?’”

  The dial has moved slightly since then; in 2016, Samantha Bee got her own show on TBS and Chelsea Handler returned to late night on Netflix. Despite such incremental changes, however, “it’s not quite enough,” Gray concluded dryly.

  If the major networks are still a white boys’ club, Rivers’s influence has nonetheless permeated the culture in myriad other ways. Her stardom inspired countless women to follow her into the entertainment business, and many were particularly encouraged by the fact that she wasn’t beautiful. Rivers’s appearances on The
Tonight Show marked the first time the comic Cory Kahaney ever saw a woman telling jokes on television. “She wasn’t that pretty, but people laughed, and they loved her,” Kahaney said in a posthumous tribute to Rivers at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage. “I was a Jewish girl and not that pretty, and it gave me a vision of a possible future. I was so grateful for that.”

  To such girls, Rivers’s success proved that other qualities could compensate for physical attractiveness if a woman was shortchanged by fate. “She gave little outcast Jewish girls the permission to have a dream—to dream that you can do it,” said Judy Gold. “I’m a Jewish girl from New Jersey, and there was Barbra Streisand, Joan Rivers, and Bette Midler. They were not conventionally beautiful; it was all talent, tenacity, and hard work. Joan was a hero to me. I felt I could do it because she did it—against all odds.”

  Kathy Griffin grew up in an Irish Catholic family, but she felt the same way. “I knew when I was two that I wanted to do this,” she said. “It was pretty much my first thought: I want to be a comedian someday. I looked to everyone, but I related to Joan the most. She was the biggest, and she could roll with the big boys. Obviously sexism is alive and well—it’s still all middle-aged white guys signing the checks and doing the hiring and firing—but I watched this petite woman really roll with Johnny Carson, the toughest of all the boys’ clubbers. That was the first lesson she taught me. Of all the women who went before us, she’s the one who broke the glass ceiling for me. She stood up to the guys when the guys really hard-core fucked her. Who had her back? Nobody.”

  Rivers’s career gave younger comics an ongoing master class in how to succeed and stay relevant, and many fellow performers were particularly inspired by her resilience. “She’s the poster girl for perseverance,” Sarah Silverman said in Joan Rivers: Exit Laughing. “Her whole lifetime was a lesson.”

  Because Rivers shared her struggles with such candor, her story provided a compelling illustration of the fact that life is full of unexpected challenges, and survival depends on how you deal with them. “The attitude was, adversity makes you stronger, and you do not give up, and in the end you fucking win,” said Chip Duckett, Rivers’s longtime producer.

  Duckett was particularly influenced by Rivers’s courage and zest for daily life, even in the face of adversity. “She lived every day, wanting to keep going, wanting to be active regardless of her age,” he said. “It made me take stock of how fortunate I am, which I don’t think I was always aware of until I saw how she felt about it.”

  Many of Rivers’s former colleagues cite her as a professional role model who had a lasting impact on their careers. “What I learned from Joan Rivers was, always know how to reinvent yourself,” said Larry Ferber.

  “No one reinvented themselves better or more often than Joan,” said Judy Gold.

  For Rivers, that trait was rooted in perpetual insecurity. “It’s a struggle every day,” she said in the documentary Joan Rivers: Exit Laughing. “It’s quicksand. If you don’t reinvent yourself, you’re gone. I’m always just looking for another door to go through.”

  In doing so, she demonstrated the importance of enterprise over and over again. “Some of the other things I learned from Joan were, act on good ideas. Don’t sit on your ass and wait for it to come to you. Move!” said the former Joan Rivers Show producer Marlaine Selip.

  Rivers’s longevity also made a big impression on her successors, particularly the tremendous success she achieved in her seventies. “I find that so inspiring,” said Sarah Silverman.

  But Rivers’s influence wasn’t limited to those in show business; innumerable fans absorbed unexpected wisdom from reading her books and observing her life story. When Rivers died, Laura Haefeli was a college student aspiring to a career in comedy and working as an intern at Saturday Night Live. “Of any comedian, she was most herself, and I’ve had a hard time being myself,” said Haefeli, who grew up in a Catholic family and identifies as gay. “She did what she loved doing, and she got a lot of shit for it until the day she died. She definitely paved the way and showed me that I can do what I want and be who I am and go into the field I want. As long as you’re working hard and doing what you love, that’s all that matters, and she worked harder than all of them.”

  Men and women, gay and straight, young and old—all were affected by Rivers, whose range is suggested by how disparate her audience had become. Haefeli is in her early twenties; Bill Boggs, an Emmy Award–winning television talk show host, is now in his seventies. Over the course of several decades, Boggs interviewed Rivers several times, and he never forgot the ferocity of her drive for success.

  “She said to me, ‘You have to want it more than food. You have to want it more than your family,’” he recalled. “Here’s a woman who slept in her car—she was that dedicated.”

  Boggs sees Rivers’s relevance as extending far beyond show business. A motivational speaker who lectures about success all over the country, he is the author of Got What It Takes? Successful People Reveal How They Made It to the Top—So You Can Too! “Anyone who wants to accomplish anything in life should look at Joan Rivers, at the tunnel vision she had and the sacrifices she made,” Boggs said. “She is a role model for everyone.”

  In June of 2016, Christie’s auctioned off The Private Collection of Joan Rivers, a selection of possessions that ranged from Chanel and Judith Leiber handbags to diamonds to costume jewelry and “tons of china, service for all New York,” as Melissa put it. “My mom never saw a tag sale she didn’t like.”

  The auction raised a total of $2.2 million, with a portion of the proceeds going to Guide Dogs for the Blind and God’s Love We Deliver. The highest bid went for a nineteenth-century Fabergé frame, which sold for $245,000.

  Before the auction, the value of the Tiffany silver dog bowl engraved with the name of Spike—the Yorkshire terrier Rivers credited with having saved her life when she contemplated suicide in 1987—was estimated at $500 to $800.

  The dog bowl sold for $13,750.

  Epilogue

  Updates from the Afterlife:

  “You Were Fat, You Bitch!”

  On the one-year anniversary of Joan Rivers’s death, my cell phone pinged in the middle of the night. Sue Cameron was emailing from Los Angeles to tell me she had just seen a psychic and enjoyed a long chat with Joan.

  When we spoke the next day, Cameron assured me that she had consulted this medium before, the woman wasn’t a charlatan, and she always relayed information from the dead that she had no way of knowing in real life. “She works for various law enforcement agencies,” Cameron explained. “She doesn’t predict anything; it’s just whoever shows up to talk. She channels them. A lot of people come in.”

  Cameron had actually scheduled the session to reach out to her late mother, “but I was secretly hoping that Joan would come in,” she said. “And she did.”

  I wasn’t surprised to hear that Cameron thought so. Joan’s close friends were well aware of her fervent belief that spirits could survive death and communicate with the living.

  As a headline in the New York Post put it a few days before the one-year anniversary of her demise, “Rivers believed in ghosts.” According to the gossip columnist Cindy Adams, “Joan’s spectral fetish was strong. One holiday she wanted her hotel room changed. Upset, she told me, ‘I feel a distinct extra presence here. Curtains ruffled. I suddenly felt a chill. Like I’m not alone.’ Once, when accommodations couldn’t change, her grandson moved into the room. Another vacation in an old-fashioned historic inn, she jammed a chair against her door. ‘The closet moved,’ she said. ‘It slid in toward me. Not just once. Here’s something otherworldly. I feel it. Who knows what went on long ago? I’m not comfortable. I want out.’”

  Many of Joan’s friends experienced similar incidents. “She said she felt the presence of ghosts, and she was frightened of them,” said Blaine Trump. “She really was crazed on the subject.”

  Rivers was far from alone in that belief: 18 percent of adults
in the United States say they have seen or been in the presence of ghosts, according to a 2009 Pew Research Center survey, and 29 percent have felt in touch with someone who has already died. In 2013, a poll by the Huffington Post and YouGov found that 45 percent of Americans believe in ghosts, or that the spirits of dead people can come back in certain places and situations.

  Rivers saw dead people everywhere. “She was nuts about ghosts, and she always slept with the lights on,” said Robert Higdon, who recalled her wearing a miner’s headlamp to bed so she could illuminate her surroundings while they were on safari in Africa.

  “Wherever we were, there was a ghost,” Higdon said. “I had a country house in Middleburg, Virginia, and she said it had a ghost. Her dog knew it. She said, ‘Spike can tell there’s a ghost here.’ At Malcolm Forbes’s château in Normandy, she was staying in Malcolm’s room, and my room was cut through there with a secret passageway. I had to sleep with the passageway open all night, because she was afraid a ghost was going to get her.”

  When Rivers and her grandson went to Colonial Williamsburg, the historic site proved a particularly fertile ground for apparitions. “She saw two or three ghosts,” Margie Stern reported. “One was a black man in the mirror. When she went to the administration, they said, ‘Are you in room X? A lot of people have seen ghosts on that floor.’”

  At home in Manhattan, Rivers had calmed down about ghosts after exorcising her apartment, but anxiety often overwhelmed her when she traveled. “To me it was crazy, but she just was so nervous about it all, to the point where if she got to a hotel and felt something was off, she would change hotels,” Trump said. “She was really scared.”

  During one visit to Scotland, Rivers and Trump were heading for a house outside Edinburgh, “and somebody said, ‘I hope you’re not staying at such and such house, because that house is possessed,’” Trump recalled. “Someone else said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t stay in room number one!’ We got to the house, and they said, ‘Miss Rivers, you’re in room number one.’ Joan was just crazed. I said I’d switch rooms with her and she said no.”