Still Talking (19 page)

I admire Elizabeth Taylor because she is still here and still famous. She did not turn out to be a child star in the category of Peggy Ann Garner.

Malcolm Forbes’s date was not Margaret O’Brien. There is a lot of steel there, the strength to plow through life and achieve what she wants. She is a killer. We all spot each other.

I first met Elizabeth Taylor in 1973 at Roddy McDowall’s house and found her to be a man’s woman, uninterested in me and my talk about children.

Years later Elizabeth and I were asked to cohostess a dinner benefit for battered children at Spago. I knew that people would pay a thousand dollars a plate to see Joan Rivers and Elizabeth Taylor walk in together-and so did the benefit chairman. And so would every newspaper and magazine in the country.

Edgar phoned Elizabeth’s assistant and said we should arrive together. She said, “Fine, we’ll meet you there.” That smelled fishy. Taylor was always late, so the little peon, Joan Rivers, would be waiting around for the queen to walk in.

Finally the assistant agreed to send one of her guards to Ambazac with a walkie-talkie. He would tell us when Elizabeth left the house. I said, “They’re not going to tell us the truth. We’d better find out when she really leaves,” and I staked out Elizabeth Taylor’s house with my security men. When Elizabeth’s man came, he told us her limo had left and we should go, but my man radioed, “The limo is not even at the front door.” “We’ll wait,” I said. Her man went crazy.

An hour later I got the word from my stakeout-“Her limo has pulled up to her door.” I got into my limo and

made her man ride in a lead car. We set off. The lead car turned right and drove into the hills, taking him far beyond the range of his radio contact with Taylor. I turned left and proceeded down Sunset Boulevard.

My stakeout radioed that Taylor still had not left. We pulled to the curb and waited. Finally we spotted her limo and pulled out ahead of it, driving in tandem to Spago’s restaurant, where the dinner was to be held. I stopped at the door and got out. Taylor’s limo zoomed past up the hill. Dressed in an Oscar de la Renta black velvet dress and about $3 million in sapphires lent me by Winston, I ducked into a little alley and waited beside a row of garbage cans. In about ten minutes Elizabeth Taylor arrived ready to make her solo entrance. I scooted out to the sidewalk and said, “Liz, hello.” We went up the steps side by side, the Bobbsey Twins together as camera lights popped.

I thought it was all amazing, ridiculous, hysterically funny-and classic Hollywood. An international superstar, who will go down as one of the biggest stars of the century, is playing games so she can make her own entrance into a restaurant.

While Elizabeth Taylor jokes registered me with the general public, my partnership with David Brenner, that wonderful comedian, elevated me to a new, heady level within the entertainment industry. He and I had always admired each other’s comedy. The son of a former vaudeville song-and-dance man, David had been a television writer, producer, and award-winning documentary filmmaker, but chucked it all to follow his heart and be a standup comic. By 1981 he had become one of the other substitute hosts for Johnny Carson and a friend.

David suggested we tour together. Everybody worried that ninety minutes of uninterrupted comedy would wear audiences out; they’d stop laughing. But David and I were two separate shows. His stage persona is clean-cut, low-key, and mild, never offensive, a storyteller-observer describing the lunacy of life-the flip side of me. And we all know what I’m like onstage.

It was a perfect match.

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We sold the idea to the Diplomat Hotel in Florida and broke the attendance record set by Liza Minnelli. As a result, our lives were booked for the next two years.

Edgar and I and David went on the road together-the happiest time I ever had performing. We had such funplaying tricks and games, one always trying to outdo the other. David hated to be recognized, so we would do things like scream at him out the car window- “DAVIIID! DAVID BRENNNER!” We had everybody in a restaurant applaud him when he came out of a men’s room. We had pizza delivered to him at 5:00 A.M.-and he pretended it never arrived.

“What pizza? I didn’t see any pizza.”

We were in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and went into a terrible antique shop full of knickknacks to kill some time. As we were leaving, I said, trying to be nice, “You have a lovely store, but I have an appointment now, so I’ll come back later.” David immediately said, “Excuse me, Joan, but exactly when are you coming back? I don’t want to buy anything in this store and I will not be back, but we all heard you, Joan, say you are coming back, so let’s find out exactly what time. ” I was dying. Dying! “Threethirty,” I murmured. And I did it, too. I came back and bought something. I had to.

Edgar loved joining in. Once David’s limo pulled up parallel with ours and David pointed at our front tire, acting as if we had a flat. Suddenly Edgar rolled down our rear window and, bang, mooned him. Everybody was flabbergasted. For Edgar to do that was like watching Winston Churchill drop his pants. But David won that game in the end. When we got to the theater, he said, “You shouldn’t have done that, Joan.”

Everywhere we went, we sold out in theaters seating three and four thousand.

Finally in 1982 the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas decided the format worked and booked us. This was the turning point for me. The show opened with the audience hearing us on the sound system tossing a coin backstage to see who went on first. The show was better with the easiness of David coming first, so we agreed I

would always win the toss and go second. I became, ipso facto, the closing act. A headliner.

By 1983 I had reached that state I describe so enviously about others. I was white-hot. The first inkling came that February. A promoter sold me on a performance in New York at Carnegie Hall early in a national tour I was planning. I was overwhelmed. I do not like playing my hometown, because if the audiences don’t like me, if The New York Times hates me, I still have to walk those streets again, feeling unwanted.

But Carnegie Hall was Carnegie Hall. As a child I had been dragged there by my mother for an injection of “culture,” walking in with my hand in hers and looking at the huge posters of Jascha Heifetz and Toscanini with a slash across them saying, SOLD OUT. I had gone there with dates, with Robert Sherman to hear Nadia Rubenstein, with Edgar to hear Leonard Bernstein. I knew that rows of doors in the back, the awful ugly plants on the stage, the creamcolored paint and moldings.

At that time very few pop acts had played Carnegie Hall, so its aura of class was far more imposing than today. It was still the pinnacle of music-where every major name in that world continued to perform. When Mischa Elman was asked on the street how to get to Carnegie Hall, he answered, “Practice, practice, practice.”

And New York is New York. For me this city was the scene of years of frustration and failure. I knew those audiences, people who had seen it all, done it all, who were cool and smart-the Catskills with a B.A. If I bombed, I would be confirmed as just a Vegas comic. If I hit, I would have a new, subtle definition on the East Coast, touched ever so lightly with “art.”

The second inkling that I was white-hot was a call from Calvin Klein, asking me what I was planning to wear. I said I had no idea. So Calvin designed the most wonderful tight, tight, tight, tight black satin dress with a square neck and a square back, a slit up the side, and a wide cinch belt to die for. It was stunning. The press loved it; The New .York Times put it on the cover of one of their

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fashion issues. I even wore it on Saturday Night Live-and so did Joe Piscopo. Calvin designed an identical dress for Joe for a skit called “The Dueling Joans.” Hilarious.

I systematically guarded against getting all worked up. I scheduled Rochester the night before, so New York City would be just another stop on the schedule, another onenighter doing two shows-even though co-owner Steve Rubell was giving a major party in my honor at Studio 54. I deliberately booked a show the next night in Syracuse to get me out of town quick, before the reviews could hurt me. Was I terrified? I guess I was, deep down, but somehow I succeeded in blocking the fear. If it had come to the surface, God knows if I could have even got through the stage door.

Billy Sammeth went in a day ahead. He called me in Rochester with the news that both shows had sold out the morning the tickets went on sale. People had spent the night outside in sleeping bags. Scalpers were getting up to four hundred dollars a ticket. Now my poster had a slash across it-SOLD

OUT. The promoter wanted to hold me over for two more shows. I refused. In and out. And don’t get excited.

I walked out on the stage of Carnegie Hall, and as I reached center stage, the audience stood up and cheered. I began to cry. The tears running down my face were from longing-the longing requited at last, to be on that stage, to be so validated after over twenty years of my parents saying, “No. Show business is not right for you,” after fifteen years of telling bookers and agents, “I am good! I can do that. “

The tears were there for my mother. She had been dead from a heart attack for two years-the person I had called every day, the one who listened and listened to all my drivel, always took my side, ready to pick up the sword and kill the enemy next to me. She was the person I did my tricks for. How I wished she could have known her daughter, was somebody.

I did my act, the same one I did in Las Vegas, the same one I did in Rochester. I am what I am, and that was what I thought was funny. I did all the tried-and-true routines-

stewardesses, nurses, gynecologists, marriage-“On my wedding night Edgar wanted to make love with the lights on, but I said, `Shut the car door.’ “

I gave lots of good advice to ladies who wanted men. I told them, “Don’t cook. Don’t clean. No man will ever make love to a woman because she waxed the linoleum`My God, the floor’s immaculate. Lie down, you hot bitch.’ ” I told them, “Education doesn’t count. Only looks. No man ever put his hand up a dress looking for a library card.” I said, “If you break up and he wants the ring back, swallow the stone. No man will look through shit for a diamond.” Pause. “Nancy Reagan told me that.” Everything worked.

Tremendous laughter. Applause. For the first time I really felt what it was like to be a star.

That night the Studio 54 crowd came to celebrate, but for me it was just another version of Jim Nabors’s party when we first arrived in California-we knew hardly anyone. David Geffen of Geffen Records. Bianca Jagger. Barry Diller, then chairman of the board of Paramount. The press was everywhere. Guards had to wedge the two of us through the throng.

Inside, Calvin Klein and I stood on a high catwalk and waved down at the crowd. They put me in a private room so packed nobody could move. Andy Warhol was there. Truman Capote. I didn’t know any of them-not Steve Rubell, not Halston, not anyone.

The next night I was in the kitchen of my Syracuse hotel suite reading the New York reviews, which were all bouquets. My hometown had welcomed me back with huzzahs. But the room had no heat. So the toast of Carnegie Hall was sitting in Syracuse with her feet in the oven to keep them warm. Show business is so insane. People think celebrity performers lead glamorous fairy-tale lives, but the only real fairy tale occurs when we’re performing onstage.

Something had clicked in America-partly because something had clicked in me. I had always loved clothes. But I was conservative. Basic black with a circle pin. I was the Edith Piaf of comedy-the audience shouldn’t be distracted from my mouth.

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When Edgar and I were first married, I went to Saks and bought a tiny summer silk dress, very pretty, with a black-and-white boa. Edgar hated the boa. He said, “You look like a chicken. Like a Mafia wife.”

I did listen to Jason Dyl, my hairdresser, one of those men who know if you put a diamond pin here, a bow there, something ordinary becomes truly glamorous. He kept telling me I looked too plain, and I put myself in his hands. He puveverything together for me. Jason had found his Barbie doll.

He sent me to Bob Mackie, the biggest theatrical dress designer in the world. I must have been the first person in history to walk into Mackie and say, “I want a dress but I don’t want a bead on it.” This was during the height of the bead. So Mackie designed a dress with one beaded sleeve.

Onstage I felt like the whore of Babylon-but everyone loved it.

So I figured, if I can wear beads, maybe I can show a little cleavage.

Within six months there were plunging necklines. And so many beads in my closet, you had to wear sunglasses when you opened the door. Then it became, what the hell. Let’s have a good time. Add a boa.

Look at all the stars. Look at Lily Tomlin, at Bette Midler. Barbra Streisand. Look how they change, get prettier with more money and assurance. And with help from the great photographers. Diana Ross.

AnnMargaret at her height. Their mouths open, eyes flashing. I was always an ugly duckling, never the one to look seductive, but Harry Langdon took pictures of me with the hair and wind machine that Edgar and I could not believe-a shot for a comedy album cover in a full-length black mink with nothing underneath and just a leg coming out. Glamour was coming into my life.

When I became Johnny Carson’s permanent guest host, all the designers began to call me. It was a lot of Oscar de la Renta, Perry Ellis, Yves Saint Laurent, Trigere, Mary McFadden, Donna Karan, Anne Klein. The only one who wouldn’t lend clothes to me was St. John Knitsunlined St. John Knits.

I was asked by ABC to go to London and cover Fergie’s

wedding and Amen Wardy of Newport Beach offered to bring clothes to me. I looked outside that morning, and down the street was one of those huge, huge moving vans, too big to get in the driveway. In the truck was the whole fashion world, everything my size. Dresses, four. Shoes, six and a half.