Still Talking (15 page)

a week, neither of which brought in substantial money. So I went on the road for eighteen weeks a year; half my life was spent in hotel rooms, drilling my daughter in spelling over the phone. I had no choice if I wanted that house. Donna Karan does not have to go personally to Cleveland to sell her dresses. But I was the product. I had to go to Cleveland myself. One year I missed the entire blooming of the rose garden, and Edgar cheered me

up by bringing newspaper horns full of huge roses to my hotel room in Las Vegas.

Edgar and I began a happy, productive period in our lives. We had found our California mode. Knowing we were lucky-my career was only getting bigger, Melissa more extraordinary (every mother thinks that, I know-but she was!)-making sure the luck was not capricious, we worked like two little squirrels hectically gathering nuts. Edgar’s line was, “We live an Italian opera.” Each night we went together to where I performed, developing material. During the day the phone rang constantly-six lines lighting up-managers, agents, lawyers, publicists phoning. Edgar fielded the calls, when necessary turning to me with questions.

“Carol Burnett wants you for the March fourteenth show. Do you want to do it? It would mean giving up two weeks of Reno.” “I don’t know. What does Sandy Gallin say?” “I’ll get him on the other line …. Sandy thinks we can switch Reno. He’ll get back in twenty minutes.”

“Okay, the Sands will switch, but you’ll be opening for the Carpenters, and I don’t think you’d be as good with the Carpenters; their audience wouldn’t understand you. Maybe we can move the Carol Burnett date.” Twenty minutes later: “Yeah, the Burnett people want you a lot, so they’ll switch.”

“Can you find out if the Burnett people will pay for Warren? He’s doing my hair very well.” Ten minutes later: “They won’t pay for Warren. They already have a hairdresser.” “Maybe they’ll pay half.” Ten minutes later: “Yeah, okay, they’ll go for half. They want you to do fifteen minutes.” “I can’t. I don’t have enough new material.” “They want fifteen minutes.” “I can’t. See if they’ll take seven.” Twenty minutes later: “They’ll take ten.

And they want to know if you can sing.”

Soon my publicity man would be on the phone. “TV Guide just called me.

They’re doing a thing on ladies in television and how they exercise. What does Joan do for exercising?” “I don’t exercise” “Don’t say that. You can get into TV Guide. Figure out something you can do.”

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“How about that I go up and down on my toes while I’m brushing my teeth?”

Somebody in our staff was always having a crisis. Our secretary was single and dating, so we were part of her adventures. She went out with a doctor, drank too much and threw up in the toilet of his apartment and chipped her tooth on the rim. She thought he should pay for it because it happened in his house. “He won’t pay,” she told us. “What do you mean the son of a bitch won’t pay,” and I got on the phone with the doctor and said, “You should pay because it was your toilet and you bought her the drinks.”

Finally Edgar and I hired her a lawyer and she got the money.

I told her she should meet my lawyer-and they liked each other and began courting. “My wardrobe is your wardrobe,” I told her. The day they got engaged, she brought me back twelve dresses.

At the end of each day everybody gathered in the office; Melissa would arrive on the bus from school, and we would talk over the day. Life was warm and busy and very exciting. Even the guard dogs were happy, eager to love us and kill everybody else.

The one selfless section of our life was Melissa. She was Edgar’s sole object of unreserved sentiment. Her confirmation in Sunday school was the first time I ever saw him close to tears.

For me, Melissa was the one to whom I could give total affection and feel it being absorbed and returned. I relished being a mother, watching my child form and grow into a young lady. We wanted Ambazac to be a place kids liked to play. There were silly races in the back gardengiant steps, umbrella steps, backward steps. Kids into the pool, out of the pool. “Mrs.

Rosenberg, Harry’s got a nosebleed. ” Pizza trucks arrived, and Cokes were handed out. Churning life. Damp footprints leading upstairs. Terrific. Six kids on the floor of her room in sleeping bags, the sounds of girls’ voices and giggling filtering into our bedroom.

When she was only eight, Melissa got into horseback

riding in a big way. We sat outdoors cleaning tack at night, laid out her riding clothes on a chair and two ribbons for her hair, then up at six to go to the horse show. On Thanksgiving weekend it rained four days and was the best time we ever had. The WASP mothers looked like Paddington Bear working in the muck and the mire in their rubber boots and slickers and rain hats.

Always cold, I wore an old, old mink coat. Melissa was absolutely mortified.

For years she would come into our bedroom in the middle of the night and go to sleep between Edgar and me, and then suddenly she was too big, but I would wake up and she was there on the rug in her Charlie Brown sleeping bag, the last present she got from my mother. Then came that first symbol of maturity-her own phone-but a Snoopy phone. I loved walking into her room to hear Melissa saying to a girlfriend, “Can’t talk now about him, she’s here.” My big sophisticate was talking into Snoopy’s arm.

But I fear that Melissa has suffered the burden of having a celebrity mother. When we went out together, I tried to make it her occasion, but there would be that commotion when I arrived, the paparazzi swarming in.

She grew up always a star’s daughter never sure of her own identity, never certain whether the teacher liked her for herself or wanted to come to dinner to meet Mom.

I worried that she would slip into that lazy Beverly Hills star-child syndrome. A lot of rich kids slide through school, knowing Mommy and Daddy will take care of them. Melissa, from age fourteen, always had a summer job; she got into the best school and studied her way through. We had our fights, but she never ruled us. In the seventies and eighties with drugs in her school, and lots of abortions, she remained a real kid, making her own Christmas presents even though there were three Mercedes in the driveway.

She never became jaded.

No doubt part of the parental equation was guilt. I am sure that my career seemed to Melissa an unbeatable rival, the fascinating, exciting sibling she could never equal. When

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1 was home, I still locked myself away in the library in the afternoons to work on screenplays. In truth, there were some successes-a CBS series called Husbands and Wives that ran for nine weeks, for instance-but my real interests lay in a collaboration effort on a script with Jay Redack, the producer on the original Hollywood Squares and a brilliant comic writer. The idea for the movie was Jay’s-what if a man became pregnant? Sounds ridiculous, right? But at the time it stole my creative heart. We called it Rabbit Test, and one of Melissa’s childhood memories is hearing Jay and me at night laughing our heads off.

Rabbit Test was intended to be a movie of sight gags and foolishness. For example, we had a scene where a warm, wonderful housewife was so protective of her family that she sprayed their food with Lysol, a scene where Queen Elizabeth dropped her pocketbook in the Palace and out fell a picture of Nat King Cole, half a sandwich, a tampon, and a motel-room key.

Again, you see these sight gags on paper and they don’t read “funny”-but think about Blazing Saddles, Airplane!, and Hot Shots!, lightweight movies that make you laugh out loud at nonsense.

The script was turned down by every studio. I had so hoped we could achieve even a modest hit so we would be accepted as a husband-and-wife partnership and do more projects, growing better and better.

Just at that time I had a cancer scare. A mole that had been removed from my side came back, and I thought, That’s it. Everything is all over. I told Edgar, “If anybody who rejected our script comes to my funeral, you throw him out. ” I made him promise.

Then Danny Melnick of MGM, the youngest and hippest of the studio heads, called us on a Friday afternoon and said, “We’re going to do this. I love it, and we can make it for a dollar thirtyfive.” Edgar and I were hysterical with excitement. The following Tuesday, Melnick left MGM.

For a year Edgar and I worked to raise the money to make the movie ourselves. We spent four and a half

months courting one woman who wanted to be around show people and whose husband owned a lot of RCA stock. Finally she promised us twentyfive thousand dollars. Then at a large party that must have cost close to forty thousand dollars at one of the most expensive restaurants in Los Angeles, she said, “Well, twentyfive thousand dollars is a lot of money. I think I’ll send the script to my daddy.”

Courting a rich couple in Chicago, we flew there and talked and talked, and they brought us to their apartment for a party and showed me off. They had me autograph their living-room wall. We realized that none of these people had any intention of investing.

We courted a man who owned supermarkets in Indianapolis. We flew a Pennsylvania orthodontist out to Los Angeles and took him with us to a party at Johnny Carson’s house. He finally gave us twenty thousand dollars-and then at the end called for an audit. Another investor, Sam Goldwyn, Jr., kept changing his mind-yes, no, yes, no-until he finally did send us a check. But he didn’t sign the contract.

Then Embassy Pictures offered $500,000 if we could match it. I was performing at the MGM Grand, and in all my Las Vegas newspaper interviews I kept repeating, “Anybody wants to invest in a very funny movie, let me know.” One night in my dressing room I received a letter handwritten in pencil. It read, Dear Miss Rivers, 1 am very interested in investing in your movie. Please excuse the pencil. 1 don’t have a pen with me. It was signed, Thomas Pileggi.

I told my secretary to call Mr. Pileggi and find out if he was for real.

She came back and said, “He truly wants to invest.” I got on the phone and liked what he said. I learned later that he was in Las Vegas for a builders’ convention and had seen me on TV and thought I was finny. “It takes a powerful person to make me laugh,” he told me. “I’m a very serious person.” And he liked to see people fighting the system, doing something on their own.

A week later Tom flew out to California at his own expense. I came into the library, and there was this cute,

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boyish man-medium height, brown hair, a round, deceptively innocent face-and he was holding two gift-wrapped boxes, which we immediately opened. They contained little gold Italian horns on ropes that men were wearing instead of neckties, and Edgar, who did not wear any jewelry, took his right out of the box and hung it around his neck.

We told him the terms-15 percent-and he said, “Fine,” and wrote out a check for $150,000 and gave it to us. He did not want a contract. He told Edgar, “You’re an honest man. I can tell by your face.” Edgar said, “You may never see the money again. Nobody has ever trusted me like that.” Tom answered, “You can only hurt me one time.” It was friendship at first sight. Tom told me later, “I read him, and he read me.”

With money from Tom Pileggi, Sam Goldwyn, Jr., Embassy Pictures, and some small investors, we had our $500,000, and we began signing up actors.

Suddenly two investors dropped out and we were $100,000 short. I told Edgar, “We are going ahead. I’m not waiting. I’m going to mortgage the house.”

Edgar said, “Absolutely not.” I told him, “Then I’m going alone. I’ll get a divorce and use the settlement.”

There was no stopping me. I was insane. Possessed. My brother-in-law had just died of cancer at age thirtyseven, and that reminded me, whatever it is you want, do it now. And the movie had become me. I had to prove that the script was funny, that I was funny.

Edgar knew I meant what I said. He got in the car and drove away. I have no idea what went through his mind, but he returned two hours later and said we should also mortgage the Larchmont house, which I could do without my father’s knowledge. This was a moment when I truly needed my husband beside me-and he was there.

We began shooting, and Edgar invited Tom Pileggi out to California to watch. They became as close as brothers.

Tom saved our lives a second time. Sam Goldwyn, Jr., who had not signed the contract, suddenly threatened to pull out unless he got a much higher percentage on his

money. We were already shooting-this could have been a financial disaster.

Tom quietly said, “Whatever you need, you got from me.” He gave us another $150,000-and we let Edgar have the pleasure of calling Goldwyn and saying, “So long.” Goldwyn was astounded. It was one of the great days of Edgar’s life.

People were seeing our dailies, and the word went out that we had a very funny movie. Ray Katz negotiated a three-picture deal with Columbia Pictures-my own offices and a secretary. This was what I dreamed of having, but I turned it down. Perhaps I had been on the outside so long, I had an outsider’s mentality, a fear of the establishment, a belief that all executives were the enemy who would find me out.

I thought my passion was to do my own movie, free of enormous studio overhead, free of executives with the power to tell me what to do and what was funny and whom to cast. When I chose Billy Crystal for the lead, Columbia would have thrown me out of the office because at that time Billy was nowhere.

I knew Billy from the comedy circuit, and my instincts were right-he turned out to be a good actor. He got everything immediately, was funny, needed little directing, and didn’t overact.

Though I set out to make a slick, far-out comedy in the tradition of Animal House or The Naked Gun, I see now that it became, by necessity, more like a very funny home movie, full of awkwardness, but also full of freshness, energy, and spontaneity. We had no money; so when we needed a little girl, there was Melissa. If we needed a nurse to run through a hospital ward, I was the nurse. When we wanted a cashier to beat up an old lady, who better than my collaborator, Jay Redack? When we had a dinner scene, we used our own place mats.