Still Talking (16 page)

To reassure investors, we promised in the contract to hire from a list of top-ten cinematographers. Only Lucien Ballard was interested-very macho, very Hollywood, an eyepiece on a string. I thought he would be my mentor.

Instead I worked six weeks with a man who hated me

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and hated himself for working on the film for only the money-three thousand dollars a week, the biggest item in the budget. At lunchtime he took a nap.

He left on the dot of 5:00 P. M. He never stayed to see the dailies-unheard-of for a cinematographer.

Each day I would start the setup for a scene and ask, “Where do we put the camera, Lucien?” “Put it where you want.” “Where do you want me to put it?”

“Well, maybe over here. Set it up over here, Ernie.” Variations of that exchange happened again and again. We had a scene with a mother and a fat daughter, and instead of keeping a height chart, the mother marked the girl’s width on the wall and wrote down the date. Lucien refused to shoot it. “It’s not funny.”

I looked him in the eye and said to him, “I’ll take that chance.” He shrugged his shoulders. At that moment I was defying a man who could shut us down, and I would lose my house and my father’s house. Everything. I was terrified. But I was also furious. Furious. Yet I had to smile and pretend, digging my nails into my palms. To this day I can feel that anger.

But for the first time in my life, I was defying a male in authority, face to face without using Edgar. This was a real critical juncture for me. I had always kowtowed to male authorities, and let Edgar go into the final-crunch meetings of a contract negotiation, face those male lawyers.

If I had to deal with men, I tried to wheedle them around with feminine wiles-pleading, cajoling, teasing, laughing-which is the way I sometimes still find myself handling them. Old habits die hard. The Joan Molinsky of 1973 would never have applauded at the end of Thelma & Louise the way I did in 1991.

During the filming I had stopped all performing, a tremendous financial loss that put us even deeper in debtso when the editing phase began, I was grabbing any club date within reach of Los Angeles. The MGM Grand in Las Vegas turned an adjoining dressing room into an editing room. Every spare minute, even between shows, I

was there. Show girls would come in half-naked and stand behind us and watch the editing machine and laugh.

But assembling the movie, the film editor would ask, “Where’s the close-up, the medium shot?” They were not there. Sometimes we had to blow up parts of the frames to get from a medium shot to a close-up. Thanks to Lucien Ballard, we had ended up with little alternate camera coverage, and thanks to our tiny budget, we rarely had the luxury of retakes. Usually you have five hundred cans of film with lots of angles and distances. We had twenty cans.

The film was released in February 1978. The headlines on the reviews read, “RABBIT TEST FLOPS AS FARCE; RIVERS’ RABBIT FLUNKS THE TEST; RABBIT TEST

NAUSEATING, BUT …”

The film bombed.

Today, I still resent the cruelty, the spitefulness of those reviews.

Though, frankly, when I saw a videotape of Rabbit Test recently, the movie does look amateurish-bad photography, bad sound, bad lighting-everything unfocused and ugly-but there are fifteen hysterical minutes I am extremely proud of.

I believe that hell is not pain and fire, but boredom. I think you must take risks, must see how far you can push. If you really believe in something, you must try it, must do it. If you always take your shot, your life is going to be interesting. Failure is devastating, but here I am fifteen years later feeling that Rabbit Test was one of the most successful experiences I have ever had. It is part of my education, part of my consciousness.

It still managed to make enough money to pay off all its investors, and some say Rabbit Test has become a bit of a cult film. I had my movie set-they built my dollhouse-and people spoke my lines and I worked with a camera. I had the experience of sitting in my library and laughing for five minutes at the idea of our hero, Billy Crystal, sitting in a coffee shop going on and on about how money doesn’t bring happiness while in the background a little old lady who can’t pay her check is physically beaten up, and thrown out by the cashier. And then

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that idea became images on celluloid that were shown to thousands of people, who laughed the same way I had laughed a year and a half earlier. Hell, Rabbit Test may be on the shelf, but I can pull it out and know that I made it happen.

8

…

rr the showrooms of Las Vegas in the 1970s, doing twenty-eight weeks a year, I found my mass audiencethe hardworking women of America. Vegas turned out to be The Ed Sullivan Show with red velvet.

During that time I worked all the hotels along the strip, opening for everybody-Paul Anka, Lola Falana, Lou Rawls, Robert Goulet, Mac Davis, John Davidson, Shirley MacLaine, Tony Bennett, Trini Lopez, Frank Gorshin, Neil Sedaka, Tony Orlando, Bobby Vinton, Ben Vereen, Andy Williams, Petula Clark. I called myself the Strip Slut.

Though in my head I know comedians are considered the lowest rung on the ladder, in my heart there are moments when I burst with pride-those times when I make fifteen hundred people in a showroom laugh all at once, a sudden crack of laughter, explosive. This is why comedy is so difficult an art form. We all share what is sad-a child dying in her mother’s arms-but we wildly disagree about what is funny. Every joke must hit each of those fifteen hundred, each one feeling spoken to, one on one. When a woman twenty tables back says right out loud, “Yeah, my husband does that,” she feels I am talking to her-and that is a big thrill for me.

I never look at the men in the audience, never deal with them. For at least a third of my act, I feel they don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.

The rest of the time they laugh for the wrong reasons-the shock of hearing a woman joke about forbidden subjects, the pleasure of seeing the wife laughing. They get caught up in the sheer 112

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energy I am throwing at them, running and screaming around the stage-bang, pow, sock!

Everything I say is woman-to-woman. I work hard to reach the college-educated, professional women, but I am thrilled that the heart of my audience is the ladies who are making this country continue, the ones raising the children, taking the part-time jobs, staying home and getting through life the best they can. They were pretty in high school and wanted to twirl batons, and instead of college they got married and had kids.

These are women with a quiet determination, the survivors.

These women get my humor because it is earthy and basic and tells the truth, and these women know the truth. They live on paychecks, and buy lunch meat, watch the electric bill, turn down the thermostat. They have to make the rent, and just when they think they are ahead, along comes the dental bill. They would love life to be a little easy, would love to have some nice things. When I make jokes about marrying for money, they think, Yeah, because maybe they should not have married that unsuccessful boyfriend they thought they loved.

I like to think I am giving these ladies a moment of freedom, talking to them as though they are one giant girlfriend in the dark, so we can share what we feel but would never dare say in public. We know that it’s all foolishness, that tonight we’re just bitchin’ a lot and struttin’ around.

Life has not allowed them to take themselves very seriously, so they have a great laugh when I say to a big, fat, tired housewife sitting in the front row, “Okay, Rosemary, who’ve you been sleeping around with lately?”

Many of these women have given their lives to men and family, but they love to hear me say, “Come on, you old tramp. ” They want to think their life has been a choice, that they could have had the career, could have slept around with those sailors.

I am telling them that maybe they still have the capacity and looks and style and sex appeal to choose, to be the sexual person they were in high school. There is nothing worse for a woman than feeling no longer desirable. I once went to a birthday party for Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former

ambassador to the UN, and there were Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Walter Cronkite. I mean, it was heavy furniture. Not one of them had read The Life and Loves of Errol Flynn. To my surprise, Kirkpatrick was a very pretty woman. So in the middle of all this political power, I went up to her and said, “You’re so good-looking. You’ve got gorgeous eyes.” She dimpled and blushed. “Oh, thank you. How nice of you. Thank you.” One of the most respected social thinkers of our generation became absolutely girlish-what we all are. It was a lovely moment.

I think of myself as a kind of leader in a support group. This is a very, very angry country, and women are thrilled to hear another woman articulating their rage. In my act I am angry at what women have to go through in life. I am angry at very beautiful, very rich women who complain that life has short-shrifted them. Princess Diana, for instance: “She is always complaining, `I’m not happy. I’m not happy.’ She married one of the richest men in the world. His mother owns England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, New Zealand, Australia. By sleeping with Prince Charles, one day she will own-listen to the verb, own= England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia … .” Then I say, “I would screw a duck for Rhode Island. What does she want?”

That is a rough line, but it gets a huge laugh-from women who work a whole lot more for a whole lot less. I have another line I am shocked they laugh at. I talk about why I do not exercise. I say, “Jane Fonda had the best body in the whole world-and her husband left her anyway. Thank you, God.”

Big laugh.

Pretending Christie Brinkley is stupid gets another big laugh. She is so beautiful, and if a woman is sitting there in an over-blouse, fifty pounds overweight, and going back after the show to a mobile home, it is nice to hear that Christie Brinkley may at least be dumb. People come out of my act saying, “Good. Let’s hope.”

Audiences tell me what they want to hear. I am pushing to see how far they will allow me to go, what new areas I can open, how much deeper into truth and feelings. Some-

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times they stop me with a gasp. Sometimes I lose them, and then I need raw courage to stay onstage. But mostly they come with me, giving me tremendous warmth, a camaraderie, a total love going back and forth between us.

At the end of my act I give a woman in the audience a huge ficus tree and as I struggle across the stage with it the orchestra watches but does not offer to help. I say, “Fucking liberation. We did it to ourselves. ” Women love that line. I am raging out like King Lear-Queen Learscreaming in the wind, screaming for all us women.

My Las Vegas career began in 1969, while I was still in New York. I came out to open for Charles Aznavour at the Flamingo Hotel. I was terrified despite four years of toughening with Carson and Sullivan and the Downstairs at the Upstairs. Dealing with those enormous audiences has defeated great performers. Danny Kaye flopped in Vegas. So did Ethel Merman. Elvis Presley bombed his first time there and was so gun-shy, he waited thirteen years before appearing again. When I am rejected by an audience, I feel total self-hatred. I want to stop the act and spit in my own face. The larger the audiences, the worse I feel.

I took along a security blanket. I brought Melissa and the nurse and transplanted a piece of my Downstairs at the Upstairs cocoon, where I was queen. My accompanist, Rod Warren, came and sat in the midst of a thirty-twopiece orchestra-and Archie Walker, the maitre d’ who had always introduced me, came also. The loudspeaker announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Joan Rivers.” Then Archie walked on and said-as he had for five years-

“Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Joan Rivers.” That way I could pretend this was only the Downstairs. So I was crazier then. I admit it.

During one of my stints alone in Vegas, I discovered the companionship of a dog. I was in the beauty salon of the Tropicana Hotel eating a ham sandwich, and in stumbled a filthy, ragged poodle with bloody paws. I gave it the sandwich and a bowl of water. Nobody knew whose

it was, and I decided it was one of the dogs gamblers abandon when they lose everything and sell the van.

I cleaned him up and took him everywhere. He slept in the room with me-the first time I realized how wonderful it is to have something alive you can talk to-“What do you think. Should we get dressed? Should we watch TV? What do you want to do?” I loved him.

I got a call from the tennis pro at the Tropicana-“I hear you have my dog.”

He came into the dressing room and said, “Hello, Pierre.” The dog jumped to the ceiling with joy. Six months earlier the pro had been in San Diego at a tennis event, and Pierre had disappeared. The pro hung around two days looking for him and, heartbroken, came back to Vegas. Pierre must have walked 350 miles across city suburbs, mountains, and desert. It was like a Disney movie-finding his way to the hotel where his master worked. Then this stupid dog missed the pro shop.

For my “triumphal” return to Las Vegas I was “costarring” with John Davidson, which meant that I was opening the show, but more important, on the Riviera Hotel billboard our names were the same size. However, his name was above mine-the arcane intricacies of showbusiness rank and ego.

Bob Hope, who had just been in a movie with Davidson, was flying out to introduce John on opening night. Edgar and my manager had screamed on the phone, “No, no, no, Bob Hope must introduce Joan, too. She is the costar.

Otherwise you are implying that she’s just the little warm-up opening act, and here’s the real show now with John. ” The word came back from the biggest comedy star in the world, “No way.”

Well, I came onto that stage opening night with my adrenaline pumping-furious that a man of such stature would be so mean. In the front row were June Haver and Fred MacMurray, and on my first line, she fell apart. What joy. I felt the whole audience with me.