In America Joan Rivers was probably the most successful woman to stand before a microphone and spin funny yarns. For her, nothing was off limits, not even her husband’s suicide or her own addiction to plastic surgery. Her comedy had a shock factor that no woman had dared to attempt before.
Her popularity spanned the Atlantic. In Britain she was never short of offers from chat show hosts — they liked the fact that there were no holds barred for Rivers and her acerbic thrusts. Virtually in the same breath that she used to discuss her own plummeting breasts, she would talk less than kindly about the Queen or the American first lady of the day. She told Mick Jagger, “Iron your face”. Then added, “Joan Collins isn’t here. She’s being carbon-dated”.
Famously, Jack Lemmon once walked out of a Rivers performance complaining “this is disgusting”, but she was typically unapologetic. “As comedians we are all laughing because life is so horrible. I would have made jokes in concentration camps. You have two choices, laugh or die.”
She was born Joan Alexandra Molinsky in 1933 (a year that frequently changed in accounts of her life to 1935 and beyond, but later came to be accepted). Her parents, Beatrice and Meyer, were Jewish immigrants from Russia who, fortunately for their daughter, settled not just in New York but in Brooklyn, the part of the city that had served as a nursery for so many earlier performers as well as her contemporaries. Later, however, they moved to the more upmarket Westchester County.
Rivers would say that education was the guiding force in her early life. After attending Connecticut College, she obtained a BA in English literature and anthropology at Barnard College, New York City. She always told jokes that kept her friends and family amused; even in those days she contemplated that this singular talent might lead to a career, but it certainly was not her parents’ idea of what a nice Jewish girl should do.
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Her first job was as a tour guide at Rockefeller Center in New York and later she became a fashion consultant to a chain of clothing stores. That pleased her parents but she had other ideas. She met an agent named Tony Rivers who made two suggestions: that she go into showbusiness and take his name. He was not proposing anything romantic, merely that his name would look better in lights than Molinsky.
Her first acting job was working with a former neighbour — Barbra Streisand — in a play called Driftwood, which ran for only six weeks. Still trying to make it as a serious actress, she had a small part in the 1968 Burt Lancaster film The Swimmer. She then switched to comedy and began learning her trade at comedy clubs in Chicago and in Greenwich Village. Desperate for money, she wrote scripts for the rabbit puppet Topo Gigio’s appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show for the $500 payment. “For $500, I’ll write for Hitler,” she said. She landed a spot on the Tonight show, then hosted by Jack Paar. However, it was when Johnny Carson took over from Paar that she really began to make progress.
Carson told Rivers in front of millions of viewers that she would be a star. She would later claim that his mentoring made her “feel like Johnny Carson’s daughter” — so much so that she never stopped thanking him in public. After her first appearance, she was featured on Ed Sullivan’s programme — in front of the camera this time — the biggest light-entertainment show in America. She was such a hit that she was offered her own chat show, with Carson as her first guest. She also made two comedy albums, The Last Joan Rivers Album and Joan Rivers Presents Mr Phyllis and Other Funny Stories.
In 1978 she made her debut on the Strip in Las Vegas as the opening act for the Australian singer Helen Reddy. Before long, she had her own Las Vegas show at Caesar’s Palace.
She made a fortune from another comedy album What Becomes A Semi-Legend Most? which really summarised her mock modesty. She never considered herself a “semi” anything. It was a time before comedy DVDs and before comedians offered the kind of vulgarity on television that is now commonplace. Comedy LPs were big sellers in America, much more so than in Britain.
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Rivers was given her own talk show, The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers by the nascent Fox TV network. It was scheduled at the same time and in direct competition to the Carson show. Her mentor was infuriated. He would later say that every time she tried to ring him, he put the phone down. He would not have felt so angry, he claimed, had she told him about the show herself and not left it to Fox to give him the bad news.
Fox, however, were not happy either with her or her second husband Edgar Rosenberg, who was also her producer. (Her first marriage was to James Sanger in 1955, but it ended after only six months.) Both were fired. Three months later, in May 1987, the British-born Rosenberg committed suicide. It was all due, his widow said, to the humiliation of the sack from Fox. She admitted that she heard of his death while receiving liposuction treatment.
She became estranged from their daughter, Melissa, when she told audiences that she had insisted on Rosenberg’s ashes being scattered around the fashionable Neiman Marcus department store — so that she could visit his grave five times a week.
There would be regular doctor appointments and bouts of bulimia which, she said in her 1997 book Bouncing Back, made her contemplate suicide herself. Her frequent visits to a cosmetic surgeon were legion. Her first was in 1965 when she had her eyelids lifted. She once said: “I wish I had a twin. So I would know what I would look like without plastic surgery.”
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The sheer number of cosmetic operations merely proved that she was never short of money. When the TV Guide channel hired her to be their anchor woman for all its award shows the three-year contract was said to be worth $8 million.
Despite her occasional barbs about the royal family, in 2005 she was one of the only five Americans invited to Prince Charles’s wedding to the Duchess of Cornwall. In 2011 Rivers moved to California to be closer to her relatives, particularly her daughter Melissa with whom she had by then made up. That became the subject of a new show, Joan and Melissa: Joan Knows Best? that featured the two of them. Melissa, an actress and producer, survives her.
Like many comedians, the fact that she made other people laugh did not always mean she herself was happy. Rivers had been known to burst into tears in the middle of a simple conversation. “The glass is always half empty,” she would say. “And there’s a hole in the bottom.”
In her 2012 book I Hate Everyone, Starting With Me she admitted to loathing obituaries but loving funerals. “That’s how I meet new men,” she said. “The minute it says ‘Sadie Schwartz’ I know, ‘Go to that funeral’. ”
Throughout the highs and lows of her career, Rivers remained proud of her achievements. “God help the next queen of comedy,” she said, “for this one’s not abdicating”.
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Joan Rivers, comedian, was born on June 8, 1933. She died on September 4, 2014, aged 81
CORRECTION: In our obituary of Joan Rivers (Sept 5) we described Topo Gigio as a “rabbit puppet”. Topo Gigio was in fact a mouse. We apologise for the error.