Six months before Joan Rivers died, last year, she went on the “Howard Stern Show”: two old friends, serial offenders, knocking down targets. They talked about Mayor Bill de Blasio. (“Rich against the poor!” she sneered.) Stern asked her opinion of Woody Allen, with whom Rivers had come up in the club scene, in the early sixties. “I think he’s brilliant. What Woody does in his private life is his private life. You want to be a pedophile, be a pedophile. I like . . . what’s her name? Ping-Pong. The wife. She wears yellow too much. Too matchy-matchy.”
Then, abruptly, Rivers changed the subject, to a topic more divisive than class warfare or Woody Allen: Lena Dunham’s body. “Let me ask you something!” she said. “Lena Dunham. Who I think is, again, terrific. How can she wear dresses above the knee?” Stern said that what he loved about Dunham was that “she doesn’t give a shit.” “Oh, she has to,” Rivers insisted. “Every woman gives a shit.” When Stern and his co-host described funny scenes from “Girls” of Dunham in a bikini, Rivers nearly sputtered: “But that’s wrong! You’re sending a message out to people saying, ‘It’s O.K., stay fat, get diabetes, everybody die, lose your fingers.’ ” In a passionate rasp, she made her case. Dunham was a hypocrite for doing Vogue, she said, because it showed that she cared about being pretty. Stern was another hypocrite, for his “tits and ass” jokes, for his hot second wife—would he have married Dunham? Stern said that he thought Rivers would “rejoice” in the younger woman’s freedom. “But don’t make yourself, physically—don’t let them laugh at you physically,” Rivers pleaded, sounding adrift. “Don’t say it’s O.K. that other girls can look like this. Try to look better!”
The discussion felt oddly poignant: Joan Rivers’s reflexive emphasis on marriage and weight, her hard-bitten advice for surviving in a man’s world, seemed almost naïve in the context of Dunham’s fourth-wave-feminist exhibitionism. (Why would Dunham want to marry Stern?) The “Girls” creator was violating the rules that Rivers built her life on—was hemmed in by, protested, and enforced, often all at the same time. From the nineteen-sixties on, Rivers had been the purveyor of a harsh Realpolitik, one based on her experience: looks mattered. If you got cut off from access to men and money—and from men as the route to money—you were dead in the water. Women were one another’s competition, always. For half a century, this dark comedy of scarce resources had been her forte: many hands grasping, but only one golden ring. Rivers herself had fought hard for the token slot allotted to a female comic, yet she seemed thrown by a world in which that might no longer be necessary. Like Moses and the Promised Land, she couldn’t cross over.
A devotee of rude candor, Joan Rivers had always blown a raspberry at the concept of “too soon.” After her husband, Edgar, committed suicide, she said she’d scattered his ashes at Neiman Marcus, so she could visit five times a week. Days after the Twin Towers fell, she called her friend Jonathan Van Meter and invited him to “Windows on the Ground.” According to the loving profile he wrote of her in New York, she had a pillow that read “Don’t Expect Praise Without Envy Until You Are Dead.” And for decades Rivers proclaimed (sometimes bitterly, but also proudly) that when she died she’d be sanctified, like her hero, Lenny Bruce. That prophecy has come true; since her death, in September, at eighty-one, she’s been celebrated as a trailblazer, a pioneer for female comics. The 2010 documentary “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work” cast a glow over Rivers’s later years, emphasizing her fantastic work ethic and how, after a series of devastating losses—when Johnny Carson blackballed her, her talk show was cancelled, and Edgar died—she’d stubbornly refused to fold, taking any gig she could get, high or low. (In one of the best scenes, Rivers riffles through her zingers, thousands of which are stored in silver file drawers with labels such as “Pets” and “Politically Incorrect,” “New York” and “No Self Worth.”)
That admiring portrait was true, but it obscured a more complicated reality: in “A Piece of Work,” there are plenty of Holocaust jokes, and some hilarious elder-sex bits, but not a single fat joke, although for many decades jokes about female bodies were Rivers’s specialty. There is no “Fashion Police,” and no red-carpet routine, no mention of the night Rivers said, when the twenty-two-year-old Kate Winslet was nominated for an Academy Award, that the actress’s fat arms had sunk the Titanic. Was that a joke or an insult? A message to Winslet or to other girls watching? (Try to look better!) This was the harder-to-handle part of Rivers’s legacy, her powerful alloy of girl talk and woman hate, her instinct for how misogyny can double as female bonding. In many ways, Joan Rivers was the first Real Housewife: she was brazen, unapologetically materialistic, a glamorous warrior in an all-female battleground—a gladiator. To honor her, as both a role model and a cautionary tale, you can’t airbrush that out.
When I first noticed Joan Rivers, she looked like the enemy. This was in the early eighties, at the height of her fame. She was Johnny Carson’s permanent guest host at the time—warm to his cold, abrasive yet charismatic, with a brash engagement with the audience. (Her trademark line: “Can we talk?”) I was a teen-age comedy nerd, into “SCTV” and Tom Lehrer, obsessed with Woody Allen and David Letterman. I was eager for female role models, of whom there were only a handful, other than Gilda Radner and the mysterious Elaine May, no longer on the scene. Yet Rivers terrified me. Glamorous in her Oscar de la Renta dresses and her pouf of blond hair, she was the body cop who circled the flaws on every other powerful woman—she announced who was fat, who had no chin, who was hot but, because she was hot, was a slut or dim. She made it clear that if you rose to fame the world would use your body to cut you down. The fact that she was funny made her more scary, not less: “What’s Liz Taylor’s blood type? Ragú!” I laughed, then hated myself for laughing.
But, if Rivers was chilling to me, I was a prig about her. Among other things, I didn’t understand much about the forces that shaped her—or that, during her own ascent, she hadn’t been an insult comic at all but part of a new wave of sixties experimental standups. Born in 1933, Joan Molinsky was the child of a doctor and his status-obsessed wife, who bought a fancy house in Larchmont as a “picture frame” for their two daughters. (The kitchen was painted pink, to be more flattering when they brought boys home.) In the early fifties, when Rivers was a chubby freshman at Connecticut College, that mating ground for Wasps (she later transferred to artsy Barnard), a blind date picked her up at her dorm. When she came downstairs, her date turned to his friend and said, in disgust, “Why didn’t you tell me?” Such rejections seared into Rivers a lifelong identity as a “meeskite”—an ugly girl—even after she slimmed down, bobbed her nose, and became, in society’s terms, attractive. Later, in 1973, she turned the anecdote into a TV movie, “The Girl Most Likely . . . ,” in which a former fat girl murders the men who rejected her.
In her gritty first memoir, “Enter Talking,” published in 1986, she describes her path as a Pilgrim’s Progress of heartbreak and ambition. She dumped her first love, a poet, for an early marriage—to the “right” kind of guy—that failed. She lived at home through her twenties, commuting into Manhattan in a beat-up Buick, dreaming of being a serious actress, “J. Sondra Meredith.” Instead, she took sleazy gigs as a strip club m.c., as Pepper January: Comedy with Spice. She bombed, twice, on the “Tonight Show” with Jack Paar. She stole routines; agents shunned her. Once, after a promising gig, her parents encouraged her to perform at their Westchester country club. She flopped so aggressively that the Molinskys sneaked out through the kitchen. Her father called her a “tramp”; Rivers ran away. For months, she was homeless; with the help of her Brooklyn boyfriend, she shacked up at midtown hotels, ducking the bill, fixing her face at Grand Central. Eventually, exhausted, she slunk back to her teen-age bedroom.
Then, when she was nearly thirty, Rivers’s act finally began to click, creatively. During a stint at Second City, in Chicago, in 1961, she introduced a character named Rita, a desperate, needy, aging single girl. Back in Greenwich Village, in dingy clubs like the Duplex, she experimented with this autobiographical material, raw stories of bad dates and shame about her body. She dished about birth control, her affair with a married man, and her gay friend, Mr. Phyllis. Her closing line was “My name is Joan Rivers and I put out.” When she saw a Lenny Bruce performance, she was electrified, struck by a routine in which he called the audience “niggers” and “kikes”; outrageousness, she thought, might be “healthy and cleansing.” One night, when Rivers bombed, Bruce sent her a note: “You’re right and they’re wrong.” She tucked it into her bra as a talisman, until she made her début with Carson, in 1965, her big break at last.
In those early years, her act was self-loathing, in the tradition of older female comics—she’d blow up her cheeks and hold out her arms, mocking herself as fat—but it also had an edge of empowerment. “The whole society is not for single girls, you know that?” she shouted, in 1967, on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” “A girl can’t call. Girl, you have to wait for the phone to ring, right? And when you finally go on the date, the girl has to be well dressed, the face has to look nice, the hair has to be in shape. The girl has to be the one that’s bright and pretty, intellig— A good sport. ‘Howard Johnson’s again! Hooray, hooray.’ ” She waggled her arms in fake enthusiasm, repulsed by her phoniness. “I’m from a little town called Larchmont, where if you’re not married, and you’re a girl, and you’re over twenty-one, you’re better off dead. It’s that simple, you know? And I was”—her voice became a growl—“The. Last. Girl. In. Larchmont. Do you know how that feels? . . . Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Twenty-four.”
In the Times, in October, 1965, Charles L. Mee praised Rivers as one of the New Comedians, who had broken away from Borscht Belt shtick. “The style is conversational, suited to television ‘talk’ programs,” Mee wrote. “It may take the form of Bill Cosby’s colloquial stories or Woody Allen’s self-analysis or Mort Sahl’s intellectual nervosities. But it is not Jack Benny. Benny may be a tightwad on stage and a philanthropist off. Not so with the new comedians. They write their own jokes and are expected to live them offstage as well as on.” Funky authenticity was her generation’s fetish. But Rivers’s act also worked because of her look. “Female comics are usually horrors who de-sex themselves for a laugh,” Eugene Boe wrote, in Cue, in 1963. “But Miss R. remains visibly—and unalterably—a girl throughout her stream-of-consciousness script.” In 1970, the Times published a trend piece about stylish comediennes—titled “The Funny Thing Is That They Are Still Feminine”—in which Rivers claimed that she dressed simply for strategic reasons: “That way you’re less of a threat to women.” Onstage and on TV, she had a girl-next-door cuteness, a daffiness and a vulnerability, that lent a sting to her observations: if this nice Barnard coed, in her black dress and pearls, saw herself as a hideous loser, clearly the game was rigged.
As the rare female New Comedian, Rivers’s persona also hit a nerve, playing as it did off a contemporary slur, the Jewish American Princess. In 1959, Norman Mailer had published a notorious short story, “The Time of Her Time,” in which a bullfighter gives a Jewish college girl her first orgasm by means of sodomy and the phrase “dirty little Jew”; the same year, Philip Roth published “Goodbye, Columbus,” with its iconic Princess, Brenda Patimkin. In 1971, Julie Baumgold wrote a cover story for New York, at once disdainful and sympathetic, called “The Persistence of the Jewish American Princess,” portraying the type as a spoiled girl who wouldn’t cook or clean. Obsessively groomed, the JAP has been crippled by her mother, who refuses to let her daughter call herself ugly. She’s “the soul of daytime drama,” waiting for a rich man to save her: “Clops and blows come from Above, but still she expects. It isn’t mere hope; it is her due.”
Rivers took that sexist bogeywoman and made it her own, raging at society from inside the stereotype: she was the Princess who did nothing but call herself ugly. She vomited that news out, mockingly, yearningly, with a shrug or with a finger pointed at the audience. “Arf, arf,” she’d bark, joking that a rapist had asked if they could just be friends. A woman I know used to sneak into the TV room, after her parents fell asleep, for the illicit thrill of seeing another woman call herself flat-chested. If Rivers’s act wasn’t explicitly feminist, it was radical in its own way: she was like a person trapped in a prison, shouting escape routes from her cell.
From the sixties to the eighties, Johnny Carson was, for aspiring comics, the model of a scarce resource: to get to the big time, you had to make it with Johnny. But Carson, notoriously, didn’t like female comics. In Yael Kohen’s “We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy,” from 2012, the show’s talent coördinator Patricia Bradford recalls the atmosphere: “They hired women over their dead bodies. They just didn’t want them there.” Even popular comediennes—Totie Fields in the sixties, Elayne Boosler in the eighties—couldn’t get traction. “I don’t ever want to see that waitress on my show again,” Carson told his booker about Boosler, when she was considered a top standup, the peer of Jerry Seinfeld.
Yet, back in 1965, Joan Rivers had slipped through the eye of that needle: she was funny enough, feminine enough, new enough, traditional enough, just right. It was a trick she never forgot—after years of struggle, she’d become, in her eyes, Carson’s daughter. The gig was a mercy booking: the “death slot,” the last ten minutes. In her black dress and pearls, Rivers was introduced not as a standup but as that rarity a “girl writer.” She did “Last Girl in Larchmont”; she told a story about her wig being run over on the West Side Highway. When the segment ended, Johnny wiped tears from his eyes and said, on camera, “God, you’re funny. You’re going to be a star.”
Within days, it was true: she got press, she got gigs, she got famous. Months later, she married Edgar, a British producer to whom she’d been introduced by Carson, just days after they met. For sentiment’s sake, she wore that same outfit on the night of her final appearance with Carson on the “Tonight Show,” in 1986, to plug “Enter Talking,” which was dedicated “To Johnny Carson, who made it all happen.” But, behind the scenes, she was insecure: among other developments, she had seen an NBC document that listed ten men as potential Carson replacements. Two weeks after her appearance, Carson learned that Rivers had signed to do a competing show on Fox. She called to explain; he hung up. He never spoke to her again. Two of Carson’s successors at the “Tonight Show,” Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien, honored the ban, and she didn’t appear on the show again until Jimmy Fallon broke the spell, six months before her death.
Still, for more than twenty years, Carson and Rivers had bantered, with him serving her the straight lines—“But don’t you think men really like intelligence?”—and her lobbing back the punch line: “No man has put his hand up a woman’s dress looking for a library card.” It was a heavenly match: their ideas about men and women were congruent, like Lego bricks. At first, she worked her single-girl material: “Looks matter!” Then she tried a streak of softer, Erma Bombeck-like material, exploring subjects like housework and breast-feeding. (One of her early books was a pregnancy guide.) In both iterations, she rarely criticized other women, other than the fun slut “Heidi Abromowitz” and abstract rivals, like the airline stewardesses who, in one of Rivers’s routines, cater only to men.
Then, in 1976, Rivers had a new breakthrough: she saw Elizabeth Taylor on the cover of People. As she wrote in “Still Talking,” the 1991 sequel to “Enter Talking,” she realized that “nobody had dared say about this icon, ‘She’s a blimp,’ dared admit that you could stamp Goodyear on her and use her at the Rose Bowl.” When Rivers tried Liz-is-fat gags, the audience exploded. If she cut them, they’d shout requests. “We women were furious when the most beautiful of all women let herself go,” Rivers wrote. “If she became a slob, there was no hope for any of us.”
These crude gags—about Liz, Christie Brinkley, Madonna—became her hottest material, on Carson and in front of Vegas crowds, as Rivers plugged into tabloid culture. Liz Taylor puts mayonnaise on aspirin! When she pierces her ears, gravy comes out. In “Enter Talking,” which she wrote well into her Hollywood era, Rivers never mentions her Liz Taylor jokes. But in “Still Talking,” five years later, she makes a case for these gags as a cathartic form of women’s humor. “I never look at the men in the audience, never deal with them,” she wrote, describing appearances in Las Vegas. It’s wives who get it: stay-at-home moms who wish they’d married rich; middle-aged women who love Rivers’s bitter blurt about how Jane Fonda had the perfect body and her husband left anyway. Rivers is explicit about her aim, which is not just to entertain but to educate: she wants fat girls to know that “they need to pull it together,” to resist their mothers’ dangerous lies about inner beauty. “If Blanche DuBois took stock and said, ‘This is where it’s at, and I’m going to get rid of these schmatte clothes and get me a nice pants suit, and look smart here, with a pocketbook and a hat’—she would have been all right.”
There’s a sympathetic way to view these routines: Rivers wanted women to be savvy, not naïve, about what the opposite sex was really like. She was a fiery pragmatist—another tagline was “Grow up!” During the seventies and eighties, she shared this message with the popular magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown, another skinny meeskite (although she called herself a “mouseburger”), the cheerful Machiavelli to Rivers’s angry Hobbes, who, in Cosmopolitan and her books, offered practical tips on how to thrive in a sexist world, albeit as a mistress rather than as a wife. For both women, there was little use in trying to change, or even reason with, men: you just needed to find a way to get their attention, then harness their power as your own.
At the end of her Vegas act, Rivers would offer to reward a woman in the audience with a ficus tree—she’d drag it across the stage, struggling, as the orchestra watched but refused to help. She describes the moment in “Still Talking”: “I say, ‘Fucking liberation. We did it to ourselves.’ Women love that line. I am raging out like King Lear—Queen Lear—screaming into the wind, screaming for all us women.”
“Michelle Obama is a tranny.” “What’s Adele’s song, ‘Rolling in the Deep’? She should add ‘fried chicken.’ ” All her life, Rivers defended even the most rancid zingers as a way of puncturing Hollywood puff, saying what we really thought—“punching up.” Stars could take it, Rivers argued. (“You don’t think so?” she said to Playboy, in 1986. “Jackie Onassis, with her eyes on either side of her head like E.T., is not fair game? With her $38,000,000?”) It’s boring to be offended, more boring than a bad joke. But, watching “Fashion Police,” Rivers’s celebrity panel, with its “twat” gags, I’d get queasy, the way I’ve felt at a bad bachelorette party: Is this how we bond?
Still, other times I get it. Among women, the pugilistic brutality can be delicious, the fun of using these goddesses (or Bachelorettes, or Housewives) as shorthand: conduits for taboo emotions like envy, disgust, fear, the anxiety of falling short. By most accounts, by the time Rivers died she was less embattled than she had been after Edgar’s death, when she struggled with bulimia and depression. She was close to her daughter and grandson, to the comics she’d mentored, to the gay men who dug her diva vibe, to the many who “got” and loved her. When I saw Rivers’s famous face, I’d wonder if part of the appeal of plastic surgery wasn’t the surgery itself. When it’s over, you’re new, whether you’re beautiful or not; you’ve made the battle visible, instead of pretending there was no battle. In her 2009 book, “Men Are Stupid . . . and They Like Big Boobs,” she put it straight: “It’s the way things are, accept it, or go live under a rock.” Or, as the women in my family told me, in Yiddish, “You’ve got to suffer for beauty.”
As a teen-ager, Rivers looked much like the teen-age Dunham: she was pudgy, with a beaming grin and friendly eyes. But the caption she wrote for the picture of her in “Enter Talking” reads, “The thirteen-year-old fat pig, wishing she could teach her arms and hips to inhale and hold their breath.” That makes me sad. But, then, she wasn’t wrong about the world that girl was walking into. Look at the male comics who were her peers at the Duplex: Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, and Mort Sahl, who became a devout anti-feminist. Look at Johnny Carson, or at Jerry Lewis, who is still repelled by female comics. In “Still Talking,” there’s a passage in which Rivers expresses her disgust “that the public buys the hypocrisy of the men revered as national institutions.” And yet her humor was rarely directed at men: these were jokes by women, for women, at women. There’s no reality series making fun of the men who wrecked Wall Street, but there is one, a hilarious one, adored by female viewers, devoted to their catfighting, parasitic, bedazzled wives.
There’s a poem by Sharon Olds called “The Elder Sister.” In it, the narrator talks about how much she used to hate her sister, “sitting and pissing on me.” But then she learned to see that the harsh marks on her older sister’s face (her wrinkles, the frown lines) were “the dents on my shield, the blows that did not reach me.” Her sister had protected her by being there first—not with love “but as a / hostage protects the one who makes her / escape as I made my escape, with my sister’s / body held in front of me.”
Maybe that’s true of Rivers: her flamboyant self-hatred made possible this generation’s flamboyant self-love, set the groundwork for the crazy profusion of female comics on TV these days, on cable and network, cheerleading one another, collaborating and producing and working in teams, as if women weren’t enemies at all. (Everywhere but in late-night TV: decades after Carson, there are still ten men on that list.) Rivers came first—and if her view darkened, if she became an evangelist for the ideas that had hurt her the most, she also refused to give in, to disappear. “I would not want to live if I could not perform,” she once said. “It’s in my will. I am not to be revived unless I can do an hour of stand-up.” That’s its own kind of inspiration. We can celebrate it without looking away. ♦
