Joan Rivers is shocked. It’s difficult to put this into any kind of realistic
perspective, but let’s take the sacking of Rome as an insufficiently
spectacular metaphor. There go the Romans, conquering most of Europe and
large parts of Africa, sacking city after city after city as they go, until,
one day, whaddya know? Someone only goes and sacks them. Except, in
this case, the barbarians are not a horde of rampaging Visigoths, but the
producers of ITV1’s daytime chat show Loose Women.
On the morning we met, Rivers was firmly ensconced on the self-consciously
risqué panel of ladies, swapping banter about sex and celebrity, when one of
the presenters, Jackie Brambles, asked her if she liked her job as
red-carpet host for the entertainment channel E! - did she enjoy chatting to
the famous as they showed off their frocks? “If they’re nice,” Rivers
replied with a frown. “You get someone like Russell Crowe, and you want to
say to the camera, he is a piece of - get ready to bleep this - f***ing
shit.”
The presenters - who had moved on to Rivers from a piece about how women who
haven’t had sex for ages really miss it, and had just shown a picture of a
naked man apparently holding up his hat with an erection - were appalled.
“We haven’t got a bleep!” they shrieked, hands clasped to their cheeks.
After the break, Rivers wasn’t in her chair. She had been removed. This she
didn’t like.
“These idiots came running onto the set, ripped me off my seat and dragged me
off, saying, ‘Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.’ When the audience saw my empty
chair, I worried that, because of my age, they might think I’d wet it
because my diaper leaked. People always ask me, ‘What haven’t you done, Miss
Rivers?’” She says all this at breakneck speed, almost by way of
introduction, as I enter her presence in her favourite suite at the Ritz.
“‘You’ve done this and that, been nominated for an Emmy and a Tony. You’ve
hosted shows, you’ve acted, done stand-up, lost your husband to suicide,
been bankrupted by a business partner [who made off with $37m in the 1990s]
- what haven’t you done?’ Well, until today, I’d never been kicked off live
television.” She pauses, looks grim for a second, then growls: “Assholes.”
She doesn’t look too upset, although, to be fair, she has had a lot of work
done and her face isn’t moving much. But now that she’s wrapped in black
cashmere, with a pot of tea and something called a Love Bar to chew on,
she’s positively cheerful. And, of course, in this internet age, getting
thrown off a show for swearing didn’t do her any harm. Quite the opposite.
While we were speaking, her publicist saw the first YouTube post going up.
Since then, her quote has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times across
plenty of websites, and even made Classic TV Moment of the Week on the UK
website GirlieGossip.com, putting her next to the Sex and the City review
and a Q&A with Hilary Swank.
Indeed, if Rivers’s life can be said to have a moral (Rivers on morality: “A
man can sleep around, no questions asked, but if a woman makes 19 or 20
mistakes, she’s a tramp”), it’s that you should never give up in the face of
adversity – except, if she had written that, it would be funny. In fact, she
has written it, and it ismainly funny. Joan Rivers: A Work in
Progress by a Life in Progress is the story of her life and will be
performed as a play in Edinburgh and London. It’s set on the night, six
years ago, when she was covering the Oscars for E! and the producer sacked
her, then sent her out to work the rug. “I’m still doing the job, so it
didn’t work, but when it was happening, I was thinking, ‘Nobody would
believe our business could be like this. It’s almost like a play.’ And
that’s how it started.”
The play deals with all the issues. And, boy, does she have issues. Born in
Brooklyn to Russian-immigrant parents 75 years ago, she believes she
inherited humour from her doctor father. On a fishing trip, she remembers
making grown-ups laugh as a distinctive thrill. When her career as an
actress was going nowhere, someone suggested she try stand-up comedy. “It
was one of the secretaries when I was making the rounds, looking for work,”
she recalls. “She said, ‘You’re funny, you should do stand-up.’ I used to
make the secretaries laugh because if they laugh, they like you, and they
say to the boss, ‘She’s funny, give her something.’ I still do that. Nothing
has changed.”
In 1965, she was booked for the first time on the hit American television talk
show The Tonight Show and was an instant success. Soon afterwards, she
married Edgar Rosenberg, a British TV producer. Their daughter, Melissa, was
born in 1968. By the 1980s, she was booming - a mansion in Bel Air, the
permanent guest host on The Tonight Show when Johnny Carson was away,
selling out concerts at Carnegie Hall, headlining in Vegas, hit albums and
best-selling books. Then everything collapsed overnight.
Knowing she would never be named as Carson’s successor, she left to present
her own show on the new Fox network. Carson never forgave her. His stamp of
disapproval, and the cancellation of her show after just seven months,
started the downward spiral. Then, in 1987, her husband committed suicide in
a Philadelphia hotel room. He’d been depressed and had clashed with network
executives over the ratings of his wife’s show, then she had walked out on
him - so he overdosed on Valium. She was having liposuction at the time, and
her daughter had to let her know.
For a moment, Rivers faltered. She tried to fall back on humour, taking
Melissa to dinner after the shivah, looking at the menu prices and saying:
“If daddy were alive, he’d kill himself all over again.” But it didn’t work.
The two didn’t speak for a year. “She blamed it all on me - she was 19. Who
else are you gonna blame it on? And she was the last one to talk to him
while he was alive.”
So, Rivers was left alone, and the gags were all she had to fall back on. She
has always joked about her failures and inadequacies - “I knew I was an
unwanted baby when I saw mybath toys were a toaster and a radio”; “Before we
make love, my husband takes a painkiller”; “I have flabby thighs, but
fortunately my stomach covers them”. So, she did the only thing she knew.
She told jokes about her pain: “My husband wanted to be cremated. I told him
I’d scatter his ashes at [the department store] Neiman Marcus - that way,
I’d visit him every day.”
“One of the earliest jokes I did about my husband was that I was the one who
really caused Edgar’s suicide, because, while we were making love, I took
the bag off my head,” she shrugs. “You laugh to get through it. I started
thinking about jokes while I was walking uptown on 9/11. So, all of those
things go into the play. I try to tell it from my point of view, and I have
footage of Melissa telling it from her point of view. I say why Carson must
have hated me - because I hate it when people do their autobiographical
shows and moan, ‘Everyone crapped all over me.’ Well, maybe you deserved a
little crap.”
So, why is she the first to spread it after years in a business where only ego
succeeds? “There is not one female comic who was beautiful as a little
girl,” she states emphatically. “Tell me one funny woman who was ever
beautiful. ‘Oh, Gwyneth Paltrow, stop, please, stop, I can’t stand it.’
Angelina? Men don’t want you funny. It’s all about coping when you’re not
being the pretty girl, and you’re not being the first one asked to dance,
and the bottle spins and lands on you and Stuart Wein doesn’t want to kiss
you.” It feels as if there must be a little more to it than that - yes, the
plastic surgery can follow from hating the way you look, as can the humour.
Yet why the drive to keep on hacking away, relentlessly, at the age of 75?
While she’s performing the play in Edinburgh, she will also be doing
stand-up two nights a week - an extension of her current midweek show at an
89-person comedy club in an unfashionable part of Manhattan. Why bother?
Isn’t it time to stop? What has she left to prove?
She’s not fighting for the sisterhood: “I was just interviewed for a
documentary on my least favourite subject - women comedians and how we’ve
all been kept out. These two women came to my house, very serious, and
asked, ‘How long did it take for you to get into the room?’ I said, ‘Let me
tell you something: if Hitler had four good jokes, he’d be in the room.’ It
has to do with funny. Then they talked about how women help each other. I
said, ‘I hate to tell you, but if it was between Sarah Silverman and me for
a job? I’ll kill her and she’ll kill me. There’s no sisterhood in comedy.’”
Is there a windmill she’s tilting at? “Yes. Age. One of the reasons I am so
happy - there’s lots happening again. Four times in my life, I woke up and
the diary was empty. That’s the worst feeling in the world. My Broadway show
and my talk show were cancelled on the same Friday. And I went that night to
see Barbra Streisand, whom I’d started with, perform for 20,000 people at
Madison Square Garden. That was a very bad night. Now I’m doing a pilot, I
have two books coming, I have my play, I’m in a series that they’ve shot and
they hope will be successful, I’m doing stand-up and I’ve got my jewellery
company. At this age, to be wanted - you are fighting every single step of
the way.”
And, I say foolishly, it must make you proud to see so many young female
comics inspired by your work. She almost snarls. “They all come up to me and
say, ‘Without you, I couldn’t be here, the barriers you broke down.’ I say,
‘Get the f*** away from me. I still could take every one of you with one
hand behind my back. Outta here.’” She grins. “Talk like that at my funeral,
but not till then.”
Joan Rivers: A Work in Progress by a Life in Progress is at the
Underbelly, Edinburgh, August 7-25, then at the Leicester Square Theatre,
WC2, August 29-September 18
