Still Talking (40 page)

The public pushes right in, does not see anybody but you. This is difficult for men. Some are furious at the intrusion, and I never see them again.

Others join in too

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much and clown with the fans. Either way, I am embarrassed.

A celebrity is really barred from normal life. Even in private I find it difficult to be spontaneous among the civilians outside of show business.

At a dinner party, if I mention a celebrity friend, suddenly guests are asking, “Oh, do you know her?” So you feel isolated. You are coming from a different castle.

Show business is like a giant cousins’ club. I can be myself with showbusiness people because an unwritten celebrity code says we do not talk about each other to civilians. With civilian men who are not yet real friends, I have to be always on guard, careful not to give away real intimacies. If I tell a man that my business manager had a tail and two weeks later we split up, sooner or later that man will be saying at dinner parties, “Did you know Joan Rivers’s business manager had a tail?” Fifteen years ago Elizabeth Taylor had a romance with a man named Henry Wynberg. He sold the story to the Star-including private pictures.

Now that I’m going out a lot, I’m aware of how some women are treated by their husbands and lovers-the lack of respect. I will not settle for a man who does not appreciate me, does not think he’s getting the prize package.

The package may be a bit older by then, may take the stairs a bit slower-but unless he thinks he is getting the best in the world, I’m not interested.

19

…

Mhead was churning with the words, “Don’t dream but wouldn’t it be wonderful if … keep smiling; the cameras are on you …. God, for once let it happen …. No matter what happens, smile. ” It was June 28, 1990, at the Emmy Award ceremony in the New York Marriott Hotel. I was there, and the screen was flashing the nominees for Best Talk Show Host-Sally Jessy Raphael, Phil Donahue, Oprah Winfrey, The Frugal Gourmet, and Joan Rivers.

I had made it back from the dead with The Joan Rivers Show, produced by the Tribune Corporation.

Susan Keith from Loving opened the envelope. “The winner is, JOAN RIVERS.”

The instant was entire, immaculate joy, nothing mingled in it, no fear, no guilt. Total happiness. My feelings were a sheet of shining glass, not a bump, not a mark, not a scratch, clean, pure glass with sunlight streaming through. One of the purest moments in my life.

If I had fallen and broken both legs, I still would have gotten onto that stage. On my way up Donahue kissed me, and later his wife, Marlo Thomas, had tears in her eyes. I know Phil was genuinely pleased I had won-which is very rare in this business.

At the podium I started with a joke: “I always had a fantasy as a child that I’d win one of these, but I never thought I’d be this old when the fantasy came true.” I thanked all the Tribune people as honorable, decent men, thanked my amazing staff, my own people, and Melissa. Now I understood why winners thank everybody.

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You want to share the joy, let it spill onto your friends and loved ones.

I went on, “Two years ago I couldn’t get a job in this business. My income dropped to one sixteenth of what it was before I was fired. My husband, as you know, had a breakdown. It’s so sad that he’s not here because it was my husband, Edgar Rosenberg, who always said you can turn things around. And except for one terrible moment in a hotel room in Philadelphia, when he forgot that, this is really for him, because he was with me from the beginning. “

I could not continue. I was crying. Welling up in me was the tragedy of Edgar’s whole life, the futility of his suicide. I wanted to tell him, “We’re back. We’re back, you idiot. “

As I made my little speech, I felt an intense empathy with the crowd, a respect in a silence I could almost reach out and touch. I was speaking to my peers, who had all known their own pain, the fear that next year they would not be here. We all share a profession lent to us by businessmen and audiences who can leave us in a day. We had all started out as children reaching for a foggy something we only half recognized, and we had all fought through humiliation and degradation and become household names-an incredible achievement. United by struggle and luck and anxiety, we were a kind of club, and I think when I made it back, they were thinking, Thank God. That could someday be me, too.

Feeling a rush of triumph, I thrust the Emmy above my head-like a Lilliputian Statue of Liberty. At that moment I was the top woman in my profession. There was a rightness to the universe. Hard work had done what I had been taught it should-it had won the award, won the dream. I had proved that I did belong in the business. I had done it twice, twentyfive years apart, against all odds, which meant I could do it again in 2015.

Afterward, clutching my Emmy, I raced out of the hall to a limo to drive to New Jersey to a private plane for a flight to Las Vegas and Caesars Palace.

Along the road we realized we were famished, and we stopped at a

McDonald’s. I was not going to let go of that Emmy, so I carried it inside, and Miss Top of Her Profession stood in line for her burger, clutching a gold statue.

The turn in my luck that led to the Emmy began in early March of 1988. Still knocking on every possible door, I saw an item in The New York Times saying that the producer Manny Azenberg planned a repertory company at Lincoln Center. I called Manny, who had known me as an actress ever since Neil Simon wanted to rewrite The Odd Couple for two women, me and Nancy Walker. I told Manny to keep me in mind, and he said he would think about it.

Two weeks later he asked if I was interested in replacing Elizabeth Franz in the role of Kate Jerome, Eugene’s mother in Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound.

Even with the Pulitzer Prize that he won for Lost in Yonkers, I think Neil Simon is the most underrated playwright in America; the critics always give him backhanded compliments, but he has such depth, such insight into human pain-and he does it with humor. Instantly I told Manny Azenberg I wanted to pursue the part. He said, “Come and look at it and we’ll talk.”

Suddenly I was terrified. Acting had always been a diamond I carried hidden in my pocket. Now, after all these years, I did not want to reach into that pocket unless everybody was going to say, “Wow, we’ve got to get sunglasses. “

Exhausted by my doubts and anxieties, I traveled to New York to see Broadway Bound-and fell asleep during the second act. Fell asleep! So I missed the mother’s big scene where she describes the one magnificent moment of her life, going to a dance where George Raft chose her to whirl with him around the floor. Talk about Freud!

The second time, believe me, I kept my eyes open and saw the part was wonderful. I knew that woman, that poor lady who did everything she thought was right and lost her husband and her boys in the space of three months.

That was me in the last scene all alone, polishing the dining-

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room table where nobody would ever eat again. Polishing that table, I knew the disintegration of a family.

I told Manny I was interested, and he told me I would have to come in and read. That was fine with me. Other people were saying, “Stars don’t read for parts.” But I knew better. Colin Higgins, the director, once told me that Burt Reynolds, at his height, wanted the part of the Sheriff in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas so badly, he asked to audition.

After four intense days working with Nina Foch in California, I reported in early April to the Minsky Building in New York. I read for Manny and Gene Saks, the director. Neil Simon had told them not to offer the part unless they were 100 percent sure. “We’re not looking for a celebrity stunt, ” he said.

Manny and Gene offered me the part then and there. After twentyfive years, my first love had called me up. I was ecstatic.

I telephoned Melissa to tell her I had the part. She was thrilled for me, glad that I was making my way. I learned later that she had been worried about me, and kept asking friends, “Is my mother all right?” We felt truly bonded, but our relationship was the last unfinished business from the suicide. We still had to work through and close off the blame, the survivors’ legacy.

We had compartmentalized in ourselves, created the fond-mother-and-daughter box and the anger box, which was kept closed and shut away. But the compartments sometimes leaked, and suddenly in a phone call, the anger would flash back and forth between us-both of us needing the other, feeling abandoned. Our relationship became more and more unstable, both of us playing out upon each other our hurt and loss.

Our major bone of contention was the house on Ambazac Way. Melissa wanted desperately to keep it-wanted to hold on to the scene of all her childhood memories, of her happiness, her roots-in total, her father. But nowadays she was almost never home and planned after college to move into a place of her own.

I, however, had come to hate Ambazac. It depressed me. It was too large. I felt imprisoned at night behind those locked gates with a patrolling guard.

I wanted to leave the house and live in my New York apartment. When my accountant told me I could not afford both places, Melissa and I were at loggerheads. Terrible, hurting things were said by both of us-until we made peace, ventilated our anger in sessions with her therapist.

Then, in a plane to Chicago, I made my decision. I stood at an airport phone and made maybe the hardest call of my life. I toed Melissa, “I know the house means so much to you; I will stay in California. I will sell New York.” I hung up and cried for an hour.

Later in the day, she called back. “Sell Ambazac,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. Home is where you are, Mother. “

That was our major turning point. The healing began. Forgiveness began. A week later we had some days together in Ambazac, and she slept in my bed, she on my side, I on Edgar’s.

My four days of rehearsal with the cast of Broadway Bound began in the four days before the opening on June 20. They were very skeptical about me, not happy at all.

Both Linda Lavin, who had created the role, and Elizabeth Franz had used roughly the same movements, same timing, same line readings, both playing the mother as a tough, proud woman who had one shining moment when she danced with George Raft. I played Kate Jerome as a woman beaten down by life. Every day from two o’clock on she had always cooked the dinner and set the table. At the end, polishing that table, she is left with only the memory of her one moment with George Raft.

Kate Jerome was a great part for me because I felt sorry for her and yet admired her, so strong, so proud, so angry. In a way I played the women in my audiences whom I know so well. I played her funny, funny, sad. To play Kate, I tapped into that part of myself that had seen many, many dreams go awry.

In my version of “Method acting” I find a memory that will make me feel the way my character needs to feel. For.

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the George Raft scene I recalled a time that is like a rainbow to me. I was in high school. Six of the most popular boys in the school took me with them on a three-hour drive around Manhattan in one of their father’s convertibles. The top was down, the radio was playing, and it was a bright spring day. For the first time in my life I felt pretty and young; everything was ahead of me. You have to savor those moments. The rest of life is just waiting to have them again.

The evening of my first performance Dorothy Melvin stood at the stage door refusing everything. At the Fox opening I had been inundated with flowers and telegrams, so this time I did not set myself up for such hurt. It would have been bad luck. In my dressing room I was very nervous, my hands sweaty, a tingling in my fingers, shooting pains in my legs. Melissa came up from college and cued my lines for me until curtain time. Elizabeth Franz came by and wished me well-a classy woman.

Afterward Manny Azenberg said, “Terrific, terrific. It was all your doing.

Don’t forget that”-which was lovely. He knew I had received little help onstage from anybody. The cast was cool to me. I was still not one of them.

Manny staggered the invitations to the critics over the next week, so I would not be hit with all the reviews in one night. But the critics liked me, and, relieved, grateful, I felt as though I had escaped a prison. The performance went fairly well, and I received an ovation. They wrote: “Rivers’s performance simply amazing”-“Joan is riveting”-“first and foremost an actress”-` `unexpectedly stunning.” The New York Daily News said, “There’s no doubt that Rivers is, after many years as a comedienne, still an actress.”

Clive Barnes of the New York Post went to the theater “not expecting very much.” He wrote, “Rivers has always struck me as precisely the kind of vulgar, raucous individual, rude, insinuating, and so much else, that I thoroughly dislike.” He then went on to write, “Rivers is beautifully truthful and touching. Her coolly understated acting looked neither contrived nor phony. The shtickstuck, jokey, elbow nudging naturalism of television had

been abandoned and Rivers was indeed Broadway bound …. I went to scoff and stayed to admire.”

The tickets, which had been twofers, went back up to full price, and the curtain came down ten minutes later at night because people were laughing.

The actors had to play again to the balcony. They were amazed when I got applause after my big scene. Their faces were shocked when I got standing ovations and three curtain calls. But they still fought me onstage, trying to take over scenesand were flabbergasted that I had the stagecraft to hold my own and protect myself.

People do not realize how much craft standup comedy requires. Making everything sound fresh each night, as though it just entered your head, requires acting. Standup is like being in the same play for five years.

One by one the actors stopped fighting me, and we became a terrific cast working together. The first to come around was Adam Philipson, who played my son. I had just finished the George Raft scene with him, and he whispered through the back curtain, “That went very nicely.” I was so proud to be accepted.