Still Talking (4 page)

My first appearance on The Tonight Show-my miraculous, instantaneous career turnaround-had been four months earlier on February 17, 1965, soon after Barbra Streisand hit in Funny Girl and Neil Simon went over the

top with The Odd Couple. Soupy Sales was going strong on television, and Joey Bishop was still a major comedian. Allen Funt’s Candid Camera was very big, and I had a job there as a writer. The Tonight Show was, of course, the show for a comic, and by then I had auditioned there seven times, once for a secretary who was eating a sandwich at her desk. Finally, my manager, Roy Silver, who represented Bill Cosby, used his clout and got me a guest appearance on Carson.

Virtually all of my jokes then were autobiographical, jokes I used to write down on scraps of paper and stuff into my handbag and see if they worked next time I managed to get in front of an audience. So my conversations on the air with Johnny Carson were really strings of jokes that told the story of my life: By six years of age I was a fatso who finished her midnight snack just in time for breakfast and ate so much she had stretch marks around her mouth. In high school my acne was so bad, blind people tried to read my face. In biology class a frog tried to dissect me. I sat out more dances than FDR. I was petting with a boy, and his hand went to sleep.

My father was a general practitioner-our family motto was, “A good epidemic means meat on the table.” My mother could make anybody feel guilty-she used to get letters of apology from people she didn’t even know. She was desperate to get me married. She used to say, “Sure he’s a murderer. But he’s a single murderer.” I was dating a transvestite, and she said, “Marry him. You’ll double your wardrobe.” She was a very elegant woman. When a flying saucer landed on the lawn, she turned it over to see if it was Wedgwood.

One area of my life was too painful for jokes-the relationship between my mother and father. They had emigrated as teenagers from Odessa, Russia-Meyer born into poverty, Beatrice into wealth.

Meyer’s mother came to New York, where the family chipped in to send Meyer to medical school. Beatrice’s mother hated her much older husband and ran away to New York, where her jewels were soon sold and she ended up as a midwife taking in boarders. Beatrice worked in a

STILL TALKING 23

shirtwaist factory and slept on two chairs. Her brother became a dentist and installed his mother and sister in fake luxury on the Upper West Side, where Meyer met Beatrice and married her.

I grew up in a home where my overworked GP father could never bring home enough money, and my mother, married to a man she didn’t love, was ashamed of poverty and consumed with upward mobility. Without money, we moved from Brooklyn to the snooty New York suburb of Larchmont, always with household help, always with my sister and me going to the best schools, always with screaming fights about money at home.

Though neither Beatrice nor Meyer knew how to express affection, I knew I was deeply loved. Meyer did not have the time to build a relationship with his children, and I resented him for working so hard for so little in return.

My mother, Beatrice, a formal, queenly woman, was my rock of security, always there for me, solid, always taking my side, defending me, totally loyal. Her children, by God, were the best. If she saw any faults in me and Barbara, nobody heard about them. I adored her. But her love could not come out as tenderness. There were no loving arms encircling us. I remember reaching over and touching my mother’s hand in the theater. I do not remember her ever touching mine. Her love was expressed as worry, making sure Barbara and I had everything we should-education, good manners, know-how in society, the right clothes.

I was a disappointment to her. She could not understand why I wanted to be an actress. In her head I should be like my sister, Barbara, who, at that time, was one of only two women at Columbia Law School. My mother did not realize my need for the love and approval that can well up from an audience.

I first discovered that euphoria way back in nursery school, playing a kitty cat in a class play. Knowing that people thought I was terrific, I had a feeling of safetyfat or thin, rich or poor.

From that day on I had tunnel vision. I still have it. I was going to be an actress in big-time Broadway “thea-

tuh” and the classics-Shakespeare, Shaw. I saw myself arriving nightly at the stage door, stepping out of a limo wearing a major fur coat with an orchid corsage and my hair in a pageboy-it was the forties, remember-and hurrying past a throng of adoring fans to give my all to my art. My parents made me feel wrong in what I wanted. They thought I had no talent. My father, who thought “actress” was a euphemism for “prostitute,” was terrified for me. My mother thought the stage was low class.

I had a joke in my act: “When I told my mother, `I want to be a Broadway actress,’ she said, `I’m not going to tell you no just now … first go to college and get your diploma. Then I’ll tell you no.’ ” Obediently I spent two years at Connecticut College and two at Barnard, majoring in English and graduating with high honors.

After I graduated from college, I tried it my parents’ way. I went to work at Lord & Taylor, rising very fast there and then moving to Bond’s, where I met the son of the vice president. He was what I thought they wanted-WASPy, Columbia graduate, a businessman, and cute, cute, cute. So we got married and moved to East End Avenue, and it was all terrific and it lasted eight months.

I became an office temp and kept auditioning for acting jobs. At the same time I was hanging out with all the other hopeful nobodies in Greenwich Village. My parents were wild. I was twentyfive years old, my friends were getting married. Everybody good was taken! I was inviting home people like Woody Allen, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Bob Dylan. Did you ever see a picture of Bob Dylan before he became Bob Dylan?!

I was taking the 9:25 P.m. train into New York, going downtown, and taking the last train home. They didn’t know where I was going, whom I was with.

And they expected the world. They knew I wasn’t that attractive. How could I make money from being a performer? I had always been funny, using humor as a way to be accepted and wanted. Laughing got me through the hurts, made life palatable. When I was eight or nine, my mother used to dress me at the fat kids’ shop in Macy’s, and I called it

STILL TALKING 25

the Henry the VIII Shop. Nothing has changed. Jokes still get me a place at the table.

I discovered that standup comics could make six dollars in an evening, so I tried that to keep me going until I was tapped for Ophelia. I humbled myself before sleazy agents, the kind of people who shed their skins every year. One stiffed me for six dollars. Another promised the actress Rosalind Russell to a Catholic church bazaar-and pushed me, instead, onstage into a wave of boos and hisses. My stage name came from an agent, a full-blooded American Indian named Tony Rivers, who told me that my name, Joan Molinsky, did not make it as a stage name. Without blinking, I said, “Okay, how about Joan Rivers? “

I was a loser working with losers-with a ventriloquist who moved his lips even when he wasn’t talking, with a trainer and his three tap-dancing chickens. I was “Pepper January, Comedy with Spice” in a strip joint where men with their hats on their laps yelled at me, “You stink! Fuck off!” In another club the manager fired me right onstage over the loudspeaker-“Get her off!” I worked at a nightclub where you passed the hat and the hat didn’t come back, at a club where the cigarette girls sold bullets, and, truly, at a Catskill resort where a man stood beside me translating each line into Yiddish-so the jokes bombed twice. I spent those seven years in my twenties fantasizing that I was Audrey Hepburn acting in a movie about all this. There was no way I could be myself and live through so much rejection.

But then came The Tonight Show. At the end of that first, life-altering segment with Johnny Carson, he said, still laughing, “You’re going to be a star. ” Years of failure and frustration fell away. In that instant, I put my dreams of legitimate acting on the shelf and became the hot girl in town.

Edgar telephoned me about rewriting the Peter Sellers script and, to discuss the project, took me and my manager, Roy Silver, to Chambord, which was the most elegant French restaurant in New York. At that time I was

living in a tiny apartment over the Stage Delicatessen and existing almost entirely on doughnuts and macaroni salad. During dinner Roy and Edgar talked. I was very shy.

Edgar was short, relatively thin, with black hair, a round face, and big, thick glasses on his nose. I could see that this forty-year-old winner producer in a Dunhill blue suit and Lanvin shirt had class-a classy way of talking, a classy way of dressing. He read classy books, had a classy mind.

He did not wear a pinkie ring.

He mentioned his creme-de-la-cr6me English education at Rugby and Cambridge, and dropped lots of names: Marcello Mastroianni, Alan Bates, Ben Gazzara. He insisted we come back to his place for a drink, and on the way told the limo driver, “Charles, don’t forget to pick up Miss Cardinale tomorrow.” I knew he meant Claudia Cardinale. He was too good to be true.

Roy and I went home in the limo, and we were blown away. “Son of a bitch,”

Roy was screaming, “if he can make all that money, so can we! ” Just five months earlier I had been performing in Greenwich Village dumps. Here, treating me as a professional screenwriter, was a man with four movies going in Europe, friendly with Peter Sellers and hobnobbing with the Sam Spiegel set-the highest echelon of show business.

I had a vision of doors opening to me-door upon door upon door to the horizon. Hugged in my arms was a real script bound in leatherette, the first I’d ever seen. Inside was a note from Peter Sellers saying, Edgar, let’s see what we can do about this. Everything was very, very heady.

Edgar set up another meeting to discuss the script. I was running out of black dresses. He arrived in a limo in front of the Stage Delicatessen and climbed the stairs to my tiny apartment, which featured a Castro Convertible bed and Aunt Alice’s desk. It had been Carol Burnett’s apartment before she hit. He came in the door carrying two dozen long-stemmed roses in an ugly green vasewhich I kept for years. Then we went to the Four Seasons with a Telsun associate producer, and there was more charm and name-dropping and showbusiness talk-but nothing about the Sellers script.

STILL TALKING 27

The restaurant served huge strawberries glazed with sugar and dipped in chocolate, but I didn’t dare eat one, worrying, Do you use a knife and fork or your fingers? These strawberries were too big to put whole into my mouth, and I was scared that if I took even a little dinky bite, the juice would squirt all over, and everyone would get red.

Roy closed the deal with Edgar. In a week I was to go down to Jamaica, where he would work with me in the mornings and with a writer named Eugene Burdick, author of The Ugly American, who was doing a Telsun script, in the afternoons. Peter Sellers would join us in a few days. I was thrilled.

On the plane I did not sit with Edgar. Coming along as guests were Joe Mankiewicz’s son Chris and Chris’s wife, and I sat with her. I was a little surprised. I thought the trip was pure business. We landed at Montego Bay, and Edgar drove us to Round Hill, an incredibly posh enclave of cottages.

No Jews allowed. No Christians, either. Talk about exclusive!

Jamaica seemed to be on a different planet from the United States, where civil-rights protests in Mississippi were making national headlines and troops were being readied for combat in Vietnam. Driving to Round Hill, I saw tourist women in flowing caftans, diaphanous cotton skirts, bare brown legs, and sandals and lots of toes. In a tropical paradise where you stuck a flower in your hair, my suitcase was full of nice little sweaters, pleated skirts, panty girdles, stockings, matching leather pumps and bags.

I felt humiliated. Not knowing what to bring put me into a different class-I felt like Stella Dallas.

Waiting at Round Hill were two telegrams, one saying that the married Mr.

Burdick was in California having an extramarital tryst, and the other that Peter Sellers was held up shooting a movie. So it was to be a foursome-with me still saying “Mr. Rosenberg.” The Mankiewiczes were in one cottage. I shared the other with Edgar. What’s going on? I wondered. If he brought me down there for romance, that was a turnoff. I have tremendous pride. I would not stand for an attitude of “Oh, she’s there if I

want her.” I marched over to lock the door between the bedrooms, but before I could turn the key, I heard the lock on his side go click. Click? How dare he!

At breakfast time the servants knocked and came in with knowing faces and two trays. “No, no, no,” I heard myself saying frantically, “Mr. Rosenberg is in the other room.” I was even more uncomfortable when Edgar showed no sign of wanting to work on the script. What had I got myself into? I did not want to be a date. I wanted to be a professional screenwriter.

I felt so embarrassed and self-conscious that I slipped away by myself and hid all day, wandering around this fabulous, absolutely empty rich man’s compound. On a hill, along a winding road bordered by huge bougainvillea bushes-orange, purple, red, pink-were big white onestory villas bought by people like William Paley and Adele Astaire. They used them in the prime months and rented them out in other months to equally wealthy people. Paul McCartney goes there. This was the off-season, when nobody was there. Our villa had been opened especially for Edgar, who had filmed a promotional documentary for Round Hill. I swam in a deserted pool.

That night the four of us sat on couches and played word games. I was good at them, but felt so wrong in my clothes, I clutched pillows in front of me as a camouflage. Edgar knew all the words. He knew history, politics, current events, music, theater. He had seen everything, heard everything, read everything, and worse, retained everything. We played Facts of Five, and while I was good at movie stars over thirty signed by MGM, he could do rivers that flowed into the Mediterranean.