Still Talking (39 page)

“Take a look,” he said, “this bathtub, a hundred thousand dollars.” Scored out of marble, one piece! Even Donald Trump, God bless him, with or without money sure manages to have a good time!

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The more my sensible advisers told me I could not afford this apartment, the more I wanted it.

Making this rubble into something fabulous would be a new focus for me, the first statement that I was now able to run my own life. Never mind that I was ice-cold and had no bookings. This would become the incentive to re-build my career because I would have to work extra hard to pay it off. It would be my Phoenix.

18

…

Nr mid-October I returned to the part of my life that, more than anything else, is me. I returned to the stage, the one place I felt I still belonged.

My first performance at Caesars Palace was going to be the moment of truth, the test of whether I could walk onto a stage and not break down. Whether audiences would think the wife of a suicide was funny.

In the dressing room before the show, I was almost shaking with fright.

There would be thirteen hundred people in the showroom, a sellout, all come to see the freak act. Would they accept me? Would they laugh? I banned all friends from the audience, anyone who would remind me of who I was-so in my head I would be just a funny lady with no past, trying to see if even one suicide joke would work.

Getting ready, I perversely refused to wash my hair”To hell with them!”-and then changed my dress four times to look good and slapped a diamond pin on my shoulder. I did not want to be glitzy show business. I wanted to be classy, wanted a minute and a half of dignity onstage before I said “shit.

“

When I walled onstage, the audience stood up, and the orchestra applauded by rapping their violin bows on the music stands. But I was still very shaky, and the musicians knew it. Without being asked, they remained behind the curtain, ready to go on and play if I could not cut it. I was so touched by their support.

Onstage I went right at the suicide. I wanted the audience to see I was able to deal with it and so should they-276

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and not have them sitting there through the whole act waiting for it to come up. I steeled myself for the first joke: “My whole life has been so horrendous this yearas many of you know-because of my husband’s suicide and being fired by Fox. Thank God my husband left in his will that I should cremate him and then scatter his ashes in Neiman-Marcus. That way he knew he would see me five times a week.”

When I had their laughter and their relief, I knew the show was going to be okay. Thank God. I discovered, however, that my audience no longer wanted to see me as a sexual woman. They wanted me to be their sister who had lost her husband and has no boyfriend. One night a man up front called out, “I’d sure like to sleep with you,” and the audience gasped.

When I tried new jokes about dating men, the audience became very quiet.

Here’s an example: “I don’t think I’m good in bed. I said to this guy, `Why don’t you call out my name when we’re making love?’ and he said to me, `I don’t want to wake you up.’ ” Silence. They were embarrassed, so I changed it: “I don’t think I’m good in bed. I once said to my husband, `Why don’t you call out my name …’ ” Same joke. Roaring laughter. Fascinating.

I knew by now that mourning is an emotional roller coaster, but I did think I was leveling out-and then, out of nowhere, I was hit again. Ironically it was the day before Thanksgiving that a friend called to read me an article she had just seen in an advance copy of Gentleman’s Quarterly. It was horrifying.

Illustrated with a savage caricature, it was written in the first person by somebody who signed himself “Bert Hacker.” A pseudonym. “I have known Joan Rivers for more than twenty years,” he began, “since the day when she used to crack up small clubs and dinner parties, before anyone knew her name.”

Hacker went on to say that he had met me by chance after the Fox firing, and I practically forced him to have dinner “right then and there.” He described me tearing into Edgar and confiding that I had told Edgar to “stay

out of my life.” When Hacker politely defended Edgar, he had me telling nasty jokes-“Really, when I think of the way he makes me crazy, I really wonder if they didn’t execute the wrong Rosenbergs. “

After Edgar’s death, Hacker was supposedly summoned by Billy Sammeth to attend our shivah. Depicting himself as the only kind person in a bizarrely ostentatious house, he portrayed a scene of utter crassness, with an unspeakably brassy, vulgar Joan Rivers telling savage jokes about Edgar.

Atone point Hacker had me on the phone telling my publicist to negotiate for a People magazine cover story, and saying, “I’ve done a lot of crappy stuff for People that I didn’t want to do. They owe me this one. Who’s got a bigger story this week?” I was devastated. You cannot imagine the lies the reading public will believe if they are endorsed by being published in a national magazine. I went over the details of the piece in my mind time after time after time, wishing I could just let it go but emotionally unable to. I had to set the record straight.

Hacker set the date for the dinner we were supposed to have had ten days before the shivah began-which was when we were in Ireland. People did have an article on the suicide, but the writer, a family friend and my collaborator on this book, came primarily as a mourner. When the shivah started, the article was already written, and I refused to pose for pictures, allowing him to choose old ones.

After Thanksgiving I announced a $50 million lawsuit pending a retraction.

I also offered $5,000 for the real name of Bert Hacker.

Meanwhile, I was again saved by my career. I was scheduled to depart on December 2 for a tour of Australia, booked before Edgar’s death. Just before I left, I learned that Hacker was a Los Angeles freelance writer named Ben Stein, a former Nixon speechwriter. He had never met me or been inside my house.

Almost immediately GQ-which publicly said the piece was only a spoof-began putting out feelers to settle. Stein’s lawyer telephoned mine and threatened that unless

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I called off the suit, Stein would release a statement that I was a lesbian and Edgar a homosexual and that I gave him the pills he used to kill himself. My lawyer wrote asking for a letter confirming this phone call, and Stein’s lawyer wrote back saying he had misunderstood. I am a little sorry the statement never happened.

Stein went on the interview circuit, insisting that what he had done was just emulating the reporting on Watergate by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and writing under a false name was “in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton and Samuel Johnson.”

My lawyers were getting depositions, and the bills were mounting. I was assured I would win, but I also remembered Wayne Newton’s $19 million victory from NBC. It was reduced on appeal to $5 million and he is still in litigation. After a lot of wrangling, Stein sent me a check for my favorite charity, and GQ printed a statement which included: It was never the intention of either Mr. Stein or GQ to portray Ms. Rivers in a negative manner. Instead, both Mr. Stein and GQ believe that the statements and actions which appeared in the article showed Ms. Rivers using her famous wit to get through a very difficult period. Both Mr.

Stein and GQ sincerely regret any inadvertent imputation of negative or inappropriate conduct to Ms. Rivers in connection with her late husband’s death. They have no reason whatsoever to believe that Ms. Rivers’ grief was anything but sincere, or that she was anything but a devoted wife.

For her part, Ms. Rivers wishes to emphasize that she did not mean to question the integrity of Mr. Stein as a journalist or of GQ as a magazine.

I had made my point to the public.

The three weeks in Australia in December were a flashback to the years before leaving Carson, when I was fresh and hot and writers reviewed my comedy, not me. The Australian audiences were loving, and one review even

said I should have a statue built in my honor. At last I felt the dark weight lifting a little, a kind of bittersweet happiness.

With my little group of helper-friends, I went sightseeing through grasslands, ranch lands, holding koala bears, petting kangaroos, spending three magical days in a semitropical rain forest. In the midst of all this natural beauty Bert Hacker and Gentleman’s Quarterly seemed, at last, far far away.

During the trip my friend Marci Goldberg died. Four months earlier she had been at Edgar’s memorial service, so alive, so beautiful, in pain yet denying anything was wrong, such a trouper. For her, no more dreams and plans to fulfill. She had always been there for me, someone I could truly depend on. I had a tremendous sense of fate, everything so much bigger than all of us, snipping off lives. I thought then that forces larger than I took away my career and my husband-and now my friend. At that moment I began to understand that my own courage, mine alone, would have to be enough.

I arrived back at Ambazac on December 23, feeling I had a career on some level in England and Australia. I felt together enough to fly to New York for Christmas with Melissa. In the hotel we had a little tree and presents, which we opened with Tommy Corcoran and Marci Goldberg’s daughter, Jessica.

Tiny, vital steps like sharing the ritual of opening Christmas presents with friends can bring a new calm, a small sense of self-reliance.

Back in California I had my first dinner party since Edgar’s death. Every piece of silver was polished, the house was filled with flowers. I learned again how to handle a car and drove myself out to the airport and back and was ridiculously proud. I went alone to perform at Carlos ‘n’ Charlie’s and forced myself to go alone to parties.

My concentration returned, and I could read again. I had a business lunch with Mel Brooks and represented myself entirely. Now I was worrying about the house, whether the roof was seeping water. With that came pride for my possessions.

I was beginning to master my business life-and found

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myself becoming much tougher, able to say a flat-out no without palming the job off on somebody else. I was proud of these new sea legs, of my ability to watch costs, check bank statements, to get on the phone to my business people and say, “Wait a second. Maybe we should form a separate corporation.

“

Though self-consciousness and guilt were never far from the surface, my pleasure was less manic, and it lasted longer. One afternoon Melissa, a college friend of hers, Tommy Corcoran, and I were in the Palm Court of New York’s Plaza Hotel. They were laughing and enjoying themselves, and I found myself thinking, Well, at least we have a semblance of a family, when suddenly a friend of Edgar’s came over from another table to offer condolences. The thin skin of our fun was broken, and the pain welled through.

We were out of there in fifteen minutes.

One of the best things, though, about this period was that my anger at Edgar was beginning to soften. I began having dreams about him. In my dream I would be talking to somebody, and he would show up. No explanations. And I would be furious at him. “You’re back?” I screamed at him in the dream, “After what you’ve done, no apologies?” Perhaps those dreams were part of a purging process, because the pettiness was melting away, the shock finally easing.

Now, I could allow myself to move on, to think more and more of the simpler times between the two of us, our relationship at the beginning. The good things in our life stood separately, unconfused by blame. I was able now to polish the barnacles off my memories of our marriage. A tremendous weight was lifting.

There was still one last area that remained full of fear and uncertainty-romance. I think a widow’s two most painful passages beyond her own sorrow are finding a new relationship with her children and dealing with the single men who begin calling for dates.

I enjoy the company of men, yet I was frightened that if men found the real me, they would dislike this person who was not very pretty, not easy to live with, desperately

shy, terribly driven, compulsive, a workaholic, a textbook of insecurities.

All women are still twenty when it comes to love. Nothing changes. I did go out with a few men but disliked being a date, being with somebody but not with him. I was not ready for the ritual questions. When a man’s hair is pepper-and-salt, asking “Where did you go to school?” feels stupid.

Some men didn’t even try to ask questions. All they were interested in was Joan Rivers the celebrity. One time an architect, a Princeton man, invited me to the theater in Pasadena. When I arrived, he had three friends with him who had been told, “Joan Rivers is coming,” and a photographer from the local newspaper was waiting. I was a trophy.

On the other hand, I was discovering, too, that no matter how much I wanted to be treated like everybody else, most men outside of show business cannot deal with what Dom DeLuise once told me: “The minute you leave the house, it is all public relations.” I began seeing a funny, funny man, Bernard Goldberg, to whom my career was an impediment, an embarrassment. When a New York Post photographer wanted to take my picture as we went in to a charity event, he tried to pull me away. Paradoxically I was delighted that he was unimpressed by who I was and simply liked the humorous widow Rosenberg, yet I was hurt that he could not accept my career, never went to see me perform. I told him, “This is part of the package when you untie the bow.”

In public I am constantly on display, constantly in a performance mode-tense, having to charm, a little distant, and extremely careful. If a man takes my hand, I pull it away. If he wants to talk deeply in a restaurant, he does not get my undivided attention. Once, while a new acquaintance was telling me about the year he spent watching his wife die of cancer, four people shoved paper in my face asking for autographs. In situations like this, it takes longer to turn people away than to give in and sign.