Still Talking (9 page)

Not once. Feeling that I was drowning in the pool of silence, I pushed on with, “Some-

body broke into Mr. Phyllis’s apartment, and they took his roommate. They thought he was a piece of pop art.” I was so afraid of seeing Sullivan frown that I did the whole act to a French Impressionist painting right above his head. “Hey, the stewardess was such a tramp … ” I told the gold frame while Ed’s wife, Sylvia, sweetly tiptoed through the room.

I was right back to the first time I stepped on a stage and bombed. When you are a success, audiences take you on faith; they no longer judge you.

But here in Ed Sullivan’s living room, I knew the jury was still out. I felt sweaty, felt myself shrinking into my skin, felt my shoulders hunch, my feet go pigeon-toed. At times like this you cannot as an adult run screaming from the room, so you force yourself to finish and leave whole.

But in the midst of that kind of panic, I talk too fast, get too loud, and don’t wait for the punch line. I swallow the key words of a joke: “I was so desperate I wrote my (mumble) on men’s room walls. All I got back was (mumble) towels.” Nobody knows what’s going on!

But Ed must have had an inner chortle that day, because he let me on the show. He somehow decided, though, that Edgar was a doctor, and so for the rest of our relationship he would say, “Hi, Doctor, nice to see you, Doctor. The little lady is doing just fine.”

Sullivan had the pulse of America. He had hunters who looked for acts, but he was the one who made the final decision. He personally saw the crowds for the Beatles at Heathrow Airport in England and decided to bring them to America. He was the first to put Elvis on TV. Every performer in America fawned over him. I was in Sullivan’s dressing room when he was angry at Shecky Greene for a particular joke. Shecky, then one of the top American comics, was saying, “Ed, I didn’t mean it that way, Ed. Ed, that’s not what the joke is. Ed, I’m telling you, please, Ed, Ed, Ed.” Nobody now has the power of Ed Sullivan. Today there are too many channels, network clout is diluted. I think that’s a big reason why Johnny Carson is quitting while he’s still somewhat ahead-before his ratings are

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dragged down by all the cable channels and new late-night choices.

I was once on The Ed Sullivan Show at the same time as the Rolling Stones.

They were white-hot. The limo bringing Edgar and me to the theater could not get through the police cordon holding back the mob of teenagers. We had to get out and walk. In the midst of all this hysteria, Ed Sullivan walked into their rehearsal, took one look, and said, “They’re not going on my show unless they wash their hair. ” Fifteen minutes later I went into the makeup room, and there were these four scruffy guys with their heads leaning back in the washbasins.

Their dressing room was big enough for a Steinway piano, and their idea of a joke was to destroy it. My dressing room was next door, and, given what I was about to do, my idea of a joke was not much better. Our windows looked out on Fifty-second Street, and a throng of screaming, hysterical, lovesick teenagers. Ed had sent me a dozen red roses, and foolishly, for laughs, I took one and threw it out the window. Thinking it came from Mick, the girls rioted, hundreds of them breaking through the police line, turning over the sawhorse barriers, trampling each other to get the Jagger rose. I was terrified.

The police came up looking for the person who started the riot. “Do you know who threw the rose, Miss Rivers? Somebody could have been seriously hurt. “

“Disgusting!” I said. “Who would do such a thing!” Meanwhile, staring them in the face was a vase with eleven roses in full bloom.

The show was live-rehearsed and performed in one day: Ed Sullivan Sunday-in a theater so old, to get to the front of the theater from backstage, you had to go through the men’s room. When I was called forward to check my cue cards, I would knock on the men’s room door and yell, “Here I come! Shut your eyes! Shut your eyes!”

During the last years before Ed had to give up the show, he became increasingly dotty. Once Jane Morgan was singing “Bolero,” and he walked on the stage and said, “Everybody clap along.” To a bolero beat? Sometimes on the air he would ask questions that made no sense. He

called Woody Allen over after Woody’s act and asked him for no discernible reason, “How’s your father? Is he better?” Woody, improvising, said, “He recognizes me now and he’s able to blink.”

Talk about potentially embarrassing moments, Kate Smith, everybody’s substitute Statue of Liberty, was, close to the end of her life, also getting a bit dotty. In fact, one of the most horrifying symptoms of this was … well, she had a reputation for flashing. One year, during the Academy Awards, Bob Hope wheeled poor Kate out onstage to sing “God Bless America,” so afraid she would flash that people backstage fastened the hem of her dress to the wheelchair! The whole time she was singing she was plucking at her dress. I swear.

Now, back to Ed.

After months of jokes and talk about the patter of tiny feet, Ed called me over-I was nine months pregnant-to ask on the air, “Are you married?”

“Yes, Mr. Sullivan.”

“That’s right. That’s right. The doctor. The doctor.”

As he declined, Sylvia became so protective of him. She was wonderful. I admired her, admired their marriage. She was Ed’s best friend in the world, the one he could turn his back on and not worry. They did everything together, made all decisions together. Very much a team. This I understood.

Regardless of how successful I was becoming, I continued to see comedy as a stepping-stone to a legitimate acting career and the respect I believed only came with acting. Standups are considered funny, but not artists, not sensitive-there’s no talent to it, anybody can do it: “Hey, you want to hear funny? You come down and talk to my secretary. She’ll kill you. Ask her about her mother-inlaw. “

From girlhood I saw myself as Katharine Cornell, treading the boards, the toast of Broadway. I tasted that respectability in Barnard College, where I was the leading actress, performing in every play I could-starring in Lady Windermere’s Fan and Juno and the Paycock.

In 1967 1 wangled permission to sit in on Lee Stras-

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berg’s classes at the Actors Studio, a tiny, beat-up theater in the West Forties. The women wore corduroy slacks, crew necks, no makeup, hair plain-because an actress isn’t bothered with worldly thoughts. Everybody knew each other-very cliquey. If you were accepted, you were royalty, a Method actor, which meant that if you were not yet famous, you soon would be, because you are talented and part of the elite.

Marlon Brando always took classes when he was in town, as did the Wallachs-Eli and Anne Jackson-and Paul Newman. Major actors, struggling to advance their craft, did works in progress by major writers. Strasberg, who sat in the center of the front row, criticized everybody equally, and the response from these talents? “That’s right, Lee. Thank you. It’s true. I was working for heat and didn’t get it.” Just being in the room was the most exciting thing in my life.

I talked about this at brunch one afternoon at Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme’s apartment, and Eydie asked if she could come with me. When I picked her up, she was dressed as if she were going to a Hadassah luncheona fur stole, suit, hat, gloves. At the Studio, I turned toward the back row where I always hid. Eydie, being Eydie, led me right down to the front. Right at our shoe tips Joan Copeland did a scene from a Tennessee Williams work in progress.

It was one of those fabulous acting moments that leaves a stunned silence, that stillness that is an appreciation far greater than any applause. In that silence Eydie Gormewith her Eydie Gorme voice-said, “Listen, we can do better than that. Let’s show ‘em. We’ll get costumes and makeup and do a scene from Arsenic and Old Lace.” Every head turned.

Eydie sat there impervious. I was mortified. I never could make myself go back. My stage acting mattered to me so desperately, I did not have the courage, the confidence, to push myself into that charmed circle. I could not bear the possibility that they would say no, that I might find I did not have talent.

I longed for the Eydie Gorme brass, envied her strength

and confidence. Barbra Streisand, recording a song, does fifty takes; Eydie sings a couple of times, and it is done. We did a Carol Burnett Show together-the three of us were playing the Supremes in a comedy skit, and Eydie took me aside and said, “Let me show you how to read this line to get a laugh.” And she was right. I got my laugh.

I have never been able to step out front and say, “I’m Joan Rivers and I know!” I have always worked to get what I want through subterfuge, through winning hearts to get people’s minds, through men-through Edgar. I have feared that people are going to smell my fear, my ingrained terror that in fact I am a fraud. That has been my Achilles’ heel. I am too fearful to just go in and push and make the sacrifice. I so admire Cher, who just stopped her income and said, “I’m going to act.” I’ve heard she went so broke she had to sell back a diamond bracelet to David Geffen, the man who gave it to her in the first place. I never had the courage to say, “I’m giving up everything, the house, the cars, Melissa’s private school. I’m going to take a year off and act. “

The only feature film I was every offered came early that same year, 1967.

Edgar and I were invited to dinner by Frank and Eleanor Perry, who had done David and Lisa. Edgar had become a friend through Telsun, and they were my first taste of Park Avenue liberalism. After dinner the women discussed a march on the UN-but I never found out what they were protesting. The big issue was what to wear.

“Shall we wear our mink coats? Is it too upper class?” “Well, I’m wearing the Dior coat with the matching dress-and I’ll carry a Hermes bag. I am not embarrassed by who I am.” “Should it be the Herm6s or the alligator one?”

“Well, maybe you’re right. I’ll do the mink after all. They should know that people like us care.” I was asked if I was going to march. I said, “I don’t have the outfit.” Nobody laughed.

Frank was directing The Swimmer with-Burt Lancaster and wrote in a part for me. The film was an adaptation of

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a John Cheever story about an aging Lothario who decides one afternoon to swim home cross-country, pool by pool. At each pool are people and incidents that peel open his entire life. By the end you realize he is a fraud and failure.

I made a joke and called my role “Chaplinesque.” That is, I played a tramp.

Burt Lancaster reaches the pool of a former mistress, played by Janice Rule. To get back at her, he picks up a slutty girl with a heart of gold named Joan. That’s me. I am excited because I think he’ll come away with me; then Janice tells him off, and I get dumped. Typecasting.

On Monday we went to Burt’s trailer and read the lines through, and Frank explained what he wanted. As we left, Lancaster said, “Honey, wait a second.” I went back in, and he said, “Forget everything he just told you.

This is how we’re going to do it.”

He redirected every line so that there would be no sympathy for me. Frank wanted a happy girl who then got hurt. Lancaster was going to be Mr.

Wonderful who came up against a mean bitch, and was right not to go off with her. Trying to please both men, I was going back and forth between line readings, and nothing made sense.

I was also experiencing what acting in the old Hollywood movies must have been like with those big stars fighting for their screen time, using every trick. In my scenes with Lancaster, he would step backward, forcing me to turn my face toward him and away from the camera. While I was speaking my lines, he was constantly in motion, shaking his drink, wiping his mouth, moving his hands. Since eyes go to motion, the attention would be on him.

No actor was allowed to touch him. If I laid a hand on him, then the camera would have to show whose hand that was. That is the old movie rule for bit players-“Always touch the money.” Then they cannot cut you out of the scene.

I had been a Burt Lancaster fan, but here he was refusing a little bit player her moment in the sun. This was the first time I came up against a star who was not generous, somebody totally self-centered, somebody out to kill.

However, Frank Perry was smart. He just kept saying, “Cut. Do it again. ” My scenes were supposed to take two days to shoot. Finally, after seven days of reshooting my two little minutes on the screen, Frank said, “I know what the son of a bitch has been doing all week. Now do it the way you and I want.”

That was the wrap.

The picture was semipanned, but I got singled out with some positive mentions. When Vincent Canby of The New York Times said I was “especially interesting,” I was thrilled.

No movie offers came as a result of The Swimmer. I thought doors would open, thought somebody would read the reviews and say, Let’s take a took at her. I was so young and optimistic I even thought a Broadway musical might fall in my lap, and just in case, I should be ready.

I had never been able to sing. The first time I tried to carry a tune, my voice got a hernia. But if there was a song in my throat, I was going to find it. I began studying voice twice a week with the man who coached Lauren Bacall in the hour just ahead of me. To me, Bacall was a major star.

Twice a week I would arrive, and the teacher would say, “Miss Bacall, do you know Joan Rivers?” And Bacall would say to this little piece of garbage that was following her, “No, how do you do. ” I’d say brightly, “Yes, we met last week.”

That little scene was repeated month after month as I grew bigger and bigger and bigger with my baby. Each time I thought, Sooner or later, she’s got to remember me. A blind woman would say, “How are you feeling?” I mean, I could no longer button my coat. Finally I decided not to remember her, either. When she said, “No. How do you do?” I would answer, “No. How do you do?” At that time, standing up to Lauren Bacall, I felt great.