Still Talking (18 page)

Las Vegas was like a town-sized, all-night house party. After the second show Edgar and I almost always went out. I loved the sight of him, in his English suits, enjoying drag shows, physique contests, talent night, nude shows. Suzie Midnight made my hairdresser eat a marshmallow stuck on her nipple. There are certain times in your life when you let loose, and Vegas was that time for me.

We spent most of our early morning hours listening to the comedians in the hotel lounges that had shows at 4:00 A.m. There was Totie Fields, terrific, Don Rickles at his height, and Shecky Greene, wonderful. I learned so much from Shecky about being free onstage. He had no fear.

He lay right down on the stage and stayed there and did jokes into the microphone and sang.

For a comedian, that is the ultimate trick. That is saying, “Invisible control is now taking over.” That is telling the kids, “I don’t want you to move for an hour while Nanny takes her nap.” Shecky could not translate onto television, and I do not see his name much anymore-but put him on a stage and he is fantastic. He gave me the courage to see how much of a lion tamer I could be, how far I could go putting my hand into the lion’s mouth.

Don Rickles was in the Casbah Lounge, and if he roasted you, that meant you were somebody. Sinatra-who once chartered a train to bring his friends to Vegas-was there one night with a beautiful girl. Rickles hurled at him, “Do you think she likes you for yourself? Tell her you’re bald. Tell her you’re poor.”

Don was and is fabulous and supremely outrageous. He would see a table of blacks and go into a shuffling sort of dance and say, “Gotta show’m we’re friendly. Show’m you got rhythm, then they don’t bother you. ” People insult Don when they call him an insult comic. Like Lenny Bruce, he is a truthful comic-and they both broke that ground for me. When I say, “Elizabeth Taylor wore yellow and ten schoolchildren got aboard,” people laugh out of embarrassment and out of the truth of it and because they also are thinking the unspeakable-the unspeakable that some comedians dare to say.

I am delighted to be called outrageous. That means I am still blasting people out of their comfortable complacency. I think to survive well, to have some happiness, we must face the world as it really is, face the truth about what we are and what we want. I know that now. Then we can go forward working from that truth-which I think really does set you free even if only for an hour at Caesars Palace. If Blanche DuBois took stock and said, “This is where it’s at, and I’m going to get rid of these schmatte clothes and get me a nice pants suit and look smart here, with a pocketbook and hat”-she would have been all right.

If a mother has been telling her chubby daughter,

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“You’re very pretty, and anyway, looks don’t matter”that is lying to make things easier. When I say onstage, “Looks count! Forget `inner beauty.’ If a man wants inner beauty, he’ll take X rays”-that fat girl knows that is the truth. I want to help her realize she has to pull herself together. If she keeps the delusion that life is going to be beautiful, everything will stay wrong. I was a fat tub of lard-was the whole front row of my class picture-but my mother kept reinforcing those myths. I am still waiting to wake up pretty.

Our whole society is so uptight, so puritan. What is so terrible about saying, “I would like to be wealthy,” about admitting, “I hate my brother,”

about saying, “My baby was ugly”? We are so afraid of our real feelings.

When I ask a lady if she would sleep with Onassis for $58 million, how dare she say no? I want to slap her. Fifty-eight million dollars in one night!

I tell them, “For a hundred thousand dollars I’d jump in with Big Foot.”

That shocks them into thinking.

Of course, I am using very silly things to try to crack people’s armor, attack their hypocrisy. For instance, I love getting a lady in the audience to admit that she would be a cannibal. What a taboo subject! But if you are lost in the snow and have not eaten for twelve days and were about to die of starvation, you are going to eat Shelley Winters. No question about it!

You are going to have her knee for lunch.

I am particularly disgusted that the public buys the hypocrisy of the men revered as national institutions. I want to scream, “Everybody, grow up!”

Bing Crosby, his son wrote, was always drunk. The public wanted Bing Crosby as a grand old man, but everybody knew he was a drunk who screwed around and beat up his wife. Another beloved American has a nest full of blondes in Vegas. That is his choice, but do not do family specials and talk about “My bride … ” A famous actor came on The Tonight Show and carried on about his happy marriage. I wanted to say, “Wait a minute! Everybody in the industry knows you can’t be left alone with a plant!”

I am furious at the comedians who do an hour and a

half of filth and then close with talk about God. One grand old man tells the filthiest stories, but always says, “This one was told me by my friend the monsignor.” He gets away with it because he has a sanctimonious manner.

With my persona, I cannot say, “Here’s one that my dear friend Rabbi Schwartz told me, and I hope you will enjoy it with me. A nun met a traveling salesman and … “

I am doubly furious because I consider myself a clean act, and the critics regularly pretend I am too shocking. I never read a discouraging word about Sandra Bernhard, who reaches inside her blouse and fondles a breast because it “feels so, mmm good.” Roseanne Barr ended her act with, “You don’t like what I say? Then suck my dick!” Whoopi Goldberg does an hour and a half of “motherfucker,” “cocksucker,” “fuckin’ bastards,” and people say, “Oh, the language is intrinsic to the performance art.” Go figure it.

Maybe part of my problem comes from walking onstage in a designer black dress, a piss-elegant woman who should be talking about the latest sale at Christie’s, doing Cartier jokes. And then watch out for what comes out of my mouth. But that is one reason why I am funny onstage. I think my commonness turns off the men and the real piss elegants, but turns on the regular people.

I am tasteless. If you are a current comic and do not offend somebody, you are doing itsy-bitsy cutesy-wootsie pap. If 10 percent of the people hate me, I will be fine. I always want to have one couple that gets up and leaves. That means I am still on the cutting edge.

However, my whole humor is actually based on the loneliness and hurt of being left out, of being thrown over-which I always fear and dread. I feel sorry for everybody and everything. I am upset about the guy waiting for the bus, for the old cleaning ladies coming out of office buildings at dawn. To me, every inanimate object has feelings and is full of pain. I keep sets of dishes, clothes, shoes, because, if you throw them away, you break their hearts. When I cut flowers, I never leave one alone on the bush, always leave behind a friend-or I cut them all so

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they can come into the house together. In my pain, in my upset and anger, I am railing at the world.

After a night of touring the Las Vegas shows, Edgar and I ended up at dawn with the other performers in the Sands coffee shop, which served great Chinese food. We felt part of a very special fraternity, hanging out and playing trivia games and table-hopping to listen to Milton Berle or say hello to Sinatra, who knew who you were and said hello back. “Hello, Joan.

How’s it going? How’s the kid?”

When I was at the Desert Inn, I got all my food free. But my whole group-my road manager, Billy Sammeth, Ann Pierce, my hairdresser, Jason Dyl, anyone who was visiting-would all sneak like naughty kids into the empty bakery kitchen and take pie plates and fill them with goodies still hot from the oven and laugh hysterically and, if anybody came, hide under the counters.

At the Sands the bellboys delivered guests to the bungalows in carts that were left charging at night in front of the golf-club pro shop. Edgar and I and Billy Sammeth would swipe them and have races across the fairways just at dawn, crackling through the fall leaves on the ground, the pale light slanting against the red and gold trees. We never got to bed before 6:00 A.M. Once somebody telephoned Edgar at three in the afternoon, and we were very annoyed.

Melissa loved Las Vegas. We put her in a nursery school to be with other children. At the Sands I sometimes had the star’s bungalow with its private pool, and I could swim with Melissa without people watching and eat on the terrace and really be a family.

There was no class structure. The stars and chorus girls and dancers were at all the parties-at Sammy Davis’s opening-night party, at Siegfried and Roy’s opening, with lions walking around, at Cher’s roller-skating party in Caesars sports arena, at the celebrity softball games, Sinatra’s birthday with Italian food shops built for the occasion around the ballroom walls.

At the Caesars fifthanniversary party fifteen hundred guests in formal dress sat at flower-heaped tables among reflecting pools. Live

butterflies were released. Two specially built summerhouses were hung with orchids, and the base of a fountain was covered with chrysanthemums, gladioli, orchids, and gardenias.

Edgar loved all of that, and he also had empathy for the grubby end of the business. He heard that the lead nude dancer in a show had cancer and might lose both breasts. At the Halloween Ball he found the girl and encouraged her and gave her a check to keep her going. She was so touched. He really saved her. He had a kind side that, in his shyness, embarrassed him, and he covered it up with gruffness.

He often did secret acts of generosity, was always ready to lend money. He was really full of sentiment-and embarrassed by sentiment. When he got up to make a toast, he would choke up so you could not hear his voice. And every time Melissa and I wrote that we loved him, he kept the note forever.

Around 1979 our Las Vegas world was transformed. Hughes and his Summa Corporation bought more and more hotels, and ran them like aircraft factories. Other huge, soulless, bottom-line corporations followed, and soon cost accountants in four-button suits were in charge everywhere, figuring profit per square foot. Now every department-the shows, the rooms, the coffee shop-had to be money machines.

The cover charges in the showrooms went up, and the stars were replaced by cheaper revues performed to taped music-shows named things like Boy-lesque, Splash, and Beach Blanket Babylon. Ultimately there were only three star showrooms-at Bally’s, the Hilton, and Caesars Palace. Performers had to pay to see other acts like everybody else. The paternalism was gone.

To increase profits, the corporations began targeting the broad public, marketing themselves to tour groups and conventioneers, who come with expense accounts and have to get up for meetings. Regiments of slot machines catered to the small-time gamblers, the men and women who save all year to come to Las Vegas, their glamour capital.

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Simultaneous with Hughes, there began to be fewer and fewer stars who could fill a showroom. Everybody’s acts had already been seen on television.

Costs soared. For many years twentyfive thousand dollars a week had been top, and then in 1955 Liberace opened at the Riviera for fifty thousand dollars. Eventually $100,000 was commonplace, and the next big leap was Dolly Parton, who demanded and got $350,000 a week. I hear Sinatra now gets $500,000.

You never hear anybody scornfully call such people “Vegas singer,” as though there were something disgraceful about the place and the money. But when newspapers want to dismiss you, they say, “Vegas comic,” which in their mouths means a crass, second-rate comic telling raunchy jokes for rough, blue-collar drinkers mainly interested in nude women and gambling.

A businessman I was interested in for a time frowned and told me, “My friends keep saying you’re a Vegas comic.” That makes me crazy. Johnny Carson has taken millions out of Vegas. Bill Cosby. Jack Benny. Bob Hope.

Sam Kinison. Robin Williams. Go sneer Vegas comic in their faces.

9

PICKED up People magazine, and there was Elizabeth Taylor on the cover, fat as a house. I realized that nobody had dared say about this icon, “She’s a blimp,” dared admit you could stamp Goodyear on her and use her at the Rose Bowl. I did not realize that this moment was going to skyrocket my career.

Since my job has always been to tell the world that the emperor has no clothes, right away, that night at Ye Little Club, I did an Elizabeth Taylor joke: “I took her to McDonald’s just to watch her eat and see the numbers change.” That got such a reaction, I went on, “I had to grease her hips to get her through the golden arches.” When I tried those two jokes on The Tonight Show, the reaction was an eruption of laughter way beyond anything I had ever experienced. I had hit a vein.

Audiences have always dictated with laughter what they want to hear, and they were telling me they wanted to hear about Elizabeth Taylor. The women loved having somebody else say the truth so they could go, “That’s terrible! Isn’t Joan Rivers mean to say that! Ha, ha, ha. ” Increasingly audiences waited for me to tell them that when Elizabeth Taylor went to Sea World and saw Shamu she asked, “Does he come with fries?” or that she had more chins than a Chinese phone book and loved to eat so much, she would stand in front of her microwave and yell, “Hurry!” When I eventually tried to drop such jokes from the act, people called out, “What about Elizabeth Taylor?”

We women were furious when the most beautiful of all women let herself go.

As long as she was sexually viable,

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I could be viable. If she became a slob, there was no hope for any of us. I felt betrayed-and so did women across America.

These jokes became part of my reputation. But if Taylor ever told me they really upset her, I would have dropped them from the act. I once asked her through Roddy McDowall whether the jokes hurt her. The message came back, “They don’t hurt me where I live.”