The Rivers Wild

Who was missing from JOAN RIVERS. But she'll be back—and she still has plenty to say.

Entertainment Weekly
by Clarissa Cruz
10/01/2004

"I'm still angry about everything. My comedy is all about anger. It's all about 'This is not right, this is not fair' and 'Who are you kidding?"

RESPLENDENT IN A SILVER JACKET, LUXE FUR SCARF, black pants, and rhinestone-studded heels, Joan Rivers is angry as ever. As she frenetically paces the stage at the Stardust in Las Vegas, the crowd eats up her barbed mots on this steamy night in June. She tosses out a few zingers about Donatella Versace's face—punctuating the joke by scrunching up her own famously enhanced visage—and Rosie O'Donnell's hygiene (not printable in a family magazine) before directing her rage at born-again Christians. ''I hate Jesus freaks,'' she declares. ''They're ugly,'' she seethes, her huge cocktail ring bouncing sparkles around the room with every pointy gesticulation. '''Jesus loves me,' they say. If he loved you so much he would have given you a f -- -ing chin.'' If anyone in this blue-hair Vegas audience is offended, their qualms are buried by a room exploding in laughter. And that's the essence of the contradiction known as Joan Rivers: How can a woman be so reviled and so beloved? How can someone lob such barbs and not be heckled into oblivion?

''One thing that's kept me going is I really have never lied. I hate when celebrities lie.''

PERHAPS THE ANSWER LIES IN THE FACT THAT RIVERS IS so honest about her own foibles. In person, the 71-year-old is a lot less angry and more vulnerable than she is on stage. Two months after her Stardust gig, her petite frame is perched on a chaise in the library of her cavernous, gilded apartment overlooking New York City's Central Park. Her meticulously made-up face is remarkably mobile for someone who professes to have had as much plastic surgery as she has; it's also softer and prettier than it appears on television, where cameras highlight her features to sometimes bizarro proportions. The dark wood-paneled room is accented by a table crammed with framed photographs of 36-year-old daughter Melissa and Rivers' late husband, TV producer Edgar Rosenberg. Scattered on the furniture are needlepoint pillows embroidered with tropes that are ridiculously contrary to Rivers' public persona, such as ''I need a man to spoil me or I don't need a man at all'' and ''Life is uncertain. Eat dessert.''

The opulent surroundings are her reward for a four-decade career that plays like a warped Horatio Alger tale—rags to riches to rags to riches to more riches. The latest twist: In June, Joan and Melissa left their longtime home, E!, and signed a three-year deal worth a total of $6 million to $8 million to provide the TV Guide Channel with awards-show fashion commentary. (The channel, best known for scrolling TV listings, is in the midst of adding new programming.) ''I think E! forgot to nurture us a little bit. For two years they didn't give us a contract—we didn't even know if we were going to the Oscars this year. Suddenly this other network says, 'We want to give you contracts, we want to give you specials.' I will be doing celebrity interviews and have an idea for a reality show—it's going to be fabulous.'' (A rep for E! says that Rivers did have a deal for the last two years, but it was not a ''long-term contract.'')

Starting fresh with a fledgling network is a familiar position for Rivers, who in 1995 helped make over E!'s image -- and her own -- when she and her daughter donned designer gowns and accosted celebrities on the red carpet. These outings are the crux of one of the strangest entertainment enterprises ever built. She's made a bundle from the Joan Rivers Classics Collection, the costume-jewelry line she hawks on QVC. She has written several books (sample title: Don't Count the Candles: Just Keep the Fire Lit!). She taped a cameo for the season finale of Nip/Tuck, airing Oct. 5, and provided fashion commentary for an upcoming Golden Girls DVD. And she works the club circuit with admirable frequency -- most recently at Manhattan hot spot Fez -- to hone material for her Vegas act.

As her white-jacketed butler, Kevin, brings in toothpicked melon balls and luscious bite-size pastries on silver trays (she feeds most of the pastries to her three lapdogs, Lulu, Veronica, and Max), she opens up about her influence on celebrity style, her rise through the boys' club of comedy, and her absence from this year's Emmy Awards red carpet. She provides unsolicited yet sympathetic romantic advice while lamenting her own dating prospects (''If you don't hear from somebody for two or three days, you figure they're dead''). And she offers a parting gift of costume jewelry from her QVC line -- unexpected manners from a woman who has built a career on acerbically pointing out the flaws of the rich and the famous.

''I never went back on The Tonight Show, never on Letterman, never on Conan. It's a boys' club and I've been shut out.''

Born Joan Alexandra Molinsky in Brooklyn in 1933, Rivers studied at Barnard, where she starred in college productions of Othello and An Ideal Husband and graduated with a degree in English. After a brief, annulled marriage, she returned to the stage, this time on the New York stand-up comedy scene at a time when the clubs leaned toward testosterone-drenched tawdriness. ''Custer did better at Little Bighorn,'' Rivers jokes.

Her big break came in L.A. in 1965. ''I was brought up, like, seven times for The Tonight Show,'' she recalls. ''[But] I was rejected because I was too outrageous. They said a girl shouldn't be saying those things. Bill [Cosby] was on one night and the comic on that show bombed. Bill said to them, 'Joan Rivers couldn't do worse than that guy. For God's sake, put her on!' And they put me on.'' (Cosby declined to comment.)

Rivers married Rosenberg in 1965, and Melissa was born two and a half years later. Through the '60s and '70s, Rivers frequently appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and she became the permanent guest host in 1983. The two famously fell out in '86 when she launched her own late-night show on Fox, which was canceled in '87. Things got worse: Her husband (also a producer on the Fox show), distraught by the cancellation and a separation from Rivers, committed suicide in a Philadelphia hotel room that year. ''When Edgar killed himself it was such a rough time. I was fired from Fox, and Melissa wasn't talking to me,'' she says, her eyes filling with tears. ''I was banned from late night, Vegas gave up my contract.... That was the worst period of my life.'' After some mourning and soul-searching, Rivers returned to TV -- her daytime talk show, The Joan Rivers Show, won an Emmy in 1990 -- and reinvented herself as a screeching sartorialist when she joined E! in 1995.

''No one was on the red carpet. My agent told me, 'It's beneath you.' And I said, 'Hey, it's a job.'''

We turned walking into a building into an event,'' says Melissa Rivers. She's right: The pair's scathing fashion critiques have frightened even the most Prada-loving celebs. ''The red carpet is what it is because of Joan,'' says Rose Apodaca Jones, a red-carpet vet and Women's Wear Daily's West Coast bureau chief. True to her stand-up act, the elder Rivers is brutally honest and doesn't kiss a lot of celebrity butt. In turn, many stars have cleaned up their acts -- something Rivers laments. ''It's sad because it was so much more fun when stars dressed themselves and some would come looking like idiots. Now 99.9 percent look great because they have stylists. But there's always someone. There's always gonna be a Courtney Love. There's always gonna be a Lara Flynn Boyle. And there's always gonna be -- God bless her -- Björk.''

Some of the biggest gaffes are from Rivers herself. She famously asked then non-nominee Catherine Zeta-Jones, ''Are you excited for your first Oscar nomination?'' She enraged Elizabeth Hurley by asking her ''Are you an actress also?'' Most recently, she castigated Kevin Costner at this year's Golden Globes for getting his fiancée a modest engagement ring. (''They said it was antique,'' she sniffs. ''But it must have been antique from Lilliputian land!'' )

For all her influence, Joan's own style philosophy is quite old-school. ''Listen to what the straight men tell you,'' she says. ''What do I care whether my best friend thinks I have a pretty skirt? I never dress for women. I always dressed to look good for men. And still do.''

''The Carson show: done. The Fox show: done. Started E!: done. Who knows where this next thing will bring me?''

Rivers was absent from this year's Emmys for the first time in 10 years. E! has an exclusive contract with the Academy to air the Emmys preshow live, so there won't be a head-to-head fashion-police matchup till the Golden Globes in January. And in a Stockholm-syndrome kind of way, celebrities missed her presence. ''She will always tell you honestly what you look like,'' said Curb Your Enthusiasm's Cheryl Hines. Added The Sopranos' Jamie-Lynn DiScala: ''I said on the car ride over, 'What are we gonna do since Joan's not here?''' As starlets talked to Star Jones and Robert Verdi, who took over E!'s red-carpet coverage, Rivers relaxed at her country home three time zones away. ''I did not watch the Emmys,'' she said. ''If I'm not getting the award, I'm not nominated, or I'm not working it, why am I watching?'' She also bears no ill will to her replacement. ''If Barbara Walters called me and said, 'Star is not doing [The View], do you want to?' I'd say yes. My God, it's not that I was kicked off -- I left. It's fine that she did it.''

Instead of watching the show, Rivers took in a screening of Vanity Fair and offered a preview of what its star Reese Witherspoon might have in store for her at the Golden Globes: ''The costumes are so beautiful, it's like looking at paintings,'' she exclaims. ''Don't worry about the movie being'' -- at this point she lets out a big honking snore -- ''a little slow.''