By JERRY TALLMER
Good times and bad times,
I’ve seem them all and, my dear,
I’m still here.
Plush velvet sometimes,
Sometimes just pretzels and beer,
But I’m here.
— Stephen Sondheim, Follies
It is only one floor, the top floor of a huge old town house just off Fifth Avenue, but what a floor. Bedroom, dining room, music room, library, even – yes! — a ballroom. We’re sitting in the library, her two dogs, Lulu and Max, dozing at her feet. “They’re both rescued dogs,” says Joan Rivers. No pretzels, no beer, just a banana which she peels and eats as we talk. “They’re very good for you,” she says.
This used to be the entertainment floor, back in the day. The whole house belonged to one person, a relative of J.P. Morgan. “It was called the Spencer house.” Split-second pause. “Someday it’ll be known as the Joan Rivers house.” Pause. “The portrait out there where you came in is soon to be replaced with a portrait of Miss Rivers by [British artist] David Remfry.”
It’s certainly a large enough place for tiny Joan Rivers, who has lived here since 1989, to rattle around in, aided and abetted and ministered to by her assistant, Jocelyn Pickett, a descendant – Rivers says – of the George Pickett who led that charge at Gettysburg.
A two-page biography supplied by publicist Judy Katz starts thusly:
Joan Rivers is a force of nature, and one of the hardest working celebrities in the world. Comedienne, Tony-nominated actress, best-selling author, Emmy Award-winning television talk-show host, playwright, screenwriter, motion-picture director, columnist, lecturer, syndicated radio host, jewelry designer and cosmetic-company entrepreneur, red-carpet fashion laureate, businesswoman and, most importantly to her, mother and grandmother …
What have you not done, I ask. Is there anything at all you haven’t done?
“Oh yes. I’ve never been in a real movie. Been in little movies, but I’ve never had a major part in a major movie. Never had a major part in a sitcom. Do I have any regrets? Of course. But who knows? Who knows that I’m not going to get it yet?”
The one-woman Edinbugh Fringe Festival performance she had done in London and Sydney, Australia, five years ago, was titled Broke and Alone. Did those two words apply literally?
“Well, according to my accountant I’m broke.”
And alone? Is there no one you’re at the moment –
“I don’t think anyone is interested in who you’re going out with at this age,” the Joan Rivers who was born June 8, 1933, says with a dispatch that shuts that door.
You know, Miss Rivers, the first time I really became aware of you was something that happened, something you said, when you were a regular on the Johnny Carson show back in the early ’60s.
“No, the late ’60s,” she corrects.
The late ’60s. It was a joke you told. As memory has it: My sister just gave birth to her first child. Oh, how she screamed and screamed and screamed. The whole neighborhood could hear her screaming. [Long pause.] And that was just the conception! Well, I’d never heard anything like that on television before.
Ms. Rivers tries to keep from smiling. “In those days,” she says, “we were very daring.”
Was Carson shook up?
“Oh no. You have to understand that everything was vetted before it went on. It just looked like he was surprised.”
One of the considerable traumas of Joan Rivers’s professional and perhaps emotional life was when Carson cut her dead – to the point of hanging up on her on the telephone, and never speaking to her again – after she hadn’t told him she’d been given her own late-night TV talk show – opposite his — on the then newborn Fox network.
Any reflections about that at this remove?
“I do not dwell on the past,” she says, even more tersely. “You can’t change it. I don’t even want to think about it. Okay, that was like shit. Then you move on.”
She pauses, is silent for a moment, then says: “Walking here just now to meet you, I passed twin boys on the sidewalk. One had a club foot. A 5-year-old child with a club foot? Can’t run, can’t play tennis, will have trouble with girls. What chance does he have?”
Oh, one day some girl will like him –
“I hope so,” she replies. “But until he gets there, it’s going to be a long trip.”
Did you, I ask, have your own club foot, so to speak?
“In my girlhood I was never the pretty child. Never the smartest. Always an outsider. Always, and still am.”
How come, Ms.Rivers?
“I think all comedians are.”
At birth in Brooklyn she was Joan Sandra Molinsky, daughter of Beatrice Cushman Molinsky and Dr. Meyer C. Molinsky. Her father was from Odessa, her mother from St, Petersburg. Here in America they spoke English – not Russian, not Yiddish. “I’m terribly sorry they didn’t speak Russian or Yiddish.”
After two years at Connecticut College (the Molinsky family had moved to Westchester), Joan transferred to Barnard, from where she was graduated in 1954 with a BA in anthropology and English.
“Barnard girls are smart girls,” she says, in contradiction to the self-denigration just a few moments earlier. So I ask: How do you account for being a smart girl?
“Good genes.”
She wants me to know that she’s not only been in plays, and on the Broadway stage, but has written the plays she’s been in, among them Fun City, about women’s liberation, and Sally Marr, who was Lenny Bruce’s mother, and now a new one that to date goes only by the working title of The Joan Rivers Project. “I’m no good at titles.”
Lenny Bruce! Sally Marr, the mama who took him to burlesque shows when he was a little kid!
“I interviewed her for weeks. She lived to see it on Broadway.”
Lenny Bruce, I say, was my god.
“Lenny Bruce,” Joan Rivers says, “was everybody’s god. But I wonder what he would say about what people are talking right now” – i.e., endless, witless dirty talk.
Had she ever worked with Lenny Bruce?
“No. I wish. In the early ’60s, when I was starting out in the Village at the Bitter End, we used to run across the street [Bleecker Street] to catch Lenny’s act at the Café Wha?, the place where he was busted.”
How did Molinsky get to be Rivers? In honor of the Hudson River?
“No. I knew I needed a name, and I had an agent named Tony Rivers. He said: ‘I’m going to send you out, but I can’t send you out as Joan Molinsky.’ ” Short pause. Then, with scorn: “These people who spend 50 years figuring out their names … ”
Even with an agent, there’s only one way – was only one way – to get work.
“You make the rounds, make the rounds, make the rounds. I was 22, 23, right out of college. No, my folks were not happy that I was in show business, but they lived to see my success.”
Success in some things, tragedy in others. Marriage to Edgar Rosenberg, the British-born television producer who helped convince Fox to give Joan her own show directly competing with Carson’s. The birth of their daughter Melissa in 1968. The suicide of Rosenberg in 1987, after a long, dark miasma during which – so she would later write – he very nearly drove his wife to a suicide of her own. The resultant brief estrangement between Joan and her daughter. And the collapse of her talk show on Fox.
Anything to say about it all, looking back?
“Oh, I’m so bored with that. Everybody goes through so many ups, so many downs. So many losses. If you’re alive, you’re a survivor. I lecture on survival. I go around the room. Everybody has had at least one devastating thing.”
How many have you had? Serious ones?
“About six.” Two beats. “That knock you over.” Two beats. “Five, certainly.”
So now, Miss Rivers, you’re a grandmother. How’s that feel?
“I was thrilled for my daughter. But the baby” – Cooper Endicott, who became 8 years old on December 1, 2007 – “bored the hell out of me the first year. But now he’s sweet and he’s funny and adorable and he can speak to you on the phone. His first name is really Edgar, after my husband, but you can’t do that to a child” – a Jewish child, she means – “except in England.”
We haven’t talked about the Joan Rivers Collection, her line of jewelry that’s visible on QVC, the shopping channel; or about her voluminous and continuous charity work; or about her work for the UN; or about face lifts, and so what; or about her current weekly stand-up gigs at the Cutting Room on Manhattan’s West 24th Street.
On Sixth Avenue at Spring Street, a block away from the offices of this magazine, there is an organization called God’s Love We Deliver, which does just that, brings food to people who cannot afford it or go out of the house to get it.
“I do very little, actually,” she says. “I’m on the board. I help raise money. I run in a marathon in Central Park on their behalf. I deliver some meals.”
She does as much and more for the National Osteoporosis Foundation, and many another cause. Does she ever say no?
“No.” Modifies that: “It’s hard. You can’t help but set some limits after a while. Everyone comes at you.” Pause. “There’s no such thing as a bad charity.”
At the United Nations she’s “an ambassador” for the sections on drugs and human trafficking – “everything to do with child trafficking, child selling, bondage in marriage, abuse in marriage. Bringing public awareness to it. For instance if I go on the Larry King show, and Larry wants to ask me about it.”
Meanwhile, down at the Cutting Room:
“I get up there, every Wednesday night, full of Fury, and Anger, and Venom. That’s what makes it good, makes my act good. One long furious rant – and it’s funny.”
One of the dogs at her feet – Lulu, the Boston terrier – is stirring.
“Just say: Life is great, life is fine. The only negative about all this is the loss of friends, the loss of people with a common history.” She looks down at the dogs. “And the fear of buying a new pet and not being around to take care of it.
“But yes, busy is happy, and I’m busy. Life is great. And I’m still here.”
