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Authors: Joan Rivers,Richard Meryman

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I began looking forward to going on the road alone. Edgar would telephone and say wistfully, “You sound wonderful,” and I would say, “I miss you, I miss you”while a little corner of me was glad he was not there. I would be speared by guilt, thinking, What a terrible, terrible, disloyal way to feel. But when I came home to that pressure chamber, the house loomed like a prison.

I was frightened. Melissa was leaving the nest and going to college in Pennsylvania. I was living in a place without cheerfulness, with a husband in bed every night at nine o’clock holding the TV control wand. Feeling he was really a star’s husband, knowing that whatever power he still had came through me, Edgar was resentful and competitive. He would not let me read Time and Newsweek until he had read them, even if that took him a week-so I had to take out duplicate subscriptions. Any book he bought I could not read first-so two copies of the same book sat on our bedside table.

When we did go out to dinner, he wanted to be the star in social situations and would cut me off in the middle of a story and tell one he thought was funnier and better. At the table, as though it were a joke, I would say to him, “Hey, we’re on the same side,” but then I would step back. He was still my husband. I was glad that he could have even that place in the sun.

 

12


 

HE Late Show Starring Joan Rivers was a selfTcontained saga of the folly, the infantile behavior, the ego exercises, the fear and ambition, the pain and delight, that pervade backstage show business. The plot was driven not by business considerations, but by the characters’ needs and compulsions and terrors. Nobody in the drama rose above the foolishness. Not me, not Edgar, not the chairman and CEO of Twentieth CenturyFox, Barry Diller, not any of the lesser executives. To this day, so much of what happened makes no sense to me. All I know for sure is that when the curtain on the tragedy descended, the smartest man in Hollywood was the dumbest, forced to give five nights of late-night programming back to Fox’s. affiliated stations.

I was so deeply wounded, I nearly did not survive. And my husband was dead.

The story begins in July of 1985. Flying back from London after a successful series of talk shows on the BBC, I was asleep and Edgar settled into a Newsweek cover story about the British publisher Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch had bought the Twentieth CenturyFox Film Corporation for $325

million and spent $2 billion buying outright six Metromedia VHF television stations in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Dallas, and Houston, covering 22 percent of the country. With those as a core he planned to add affiliated independent UHF stations and form a quasi-fourth network that might eventually be broadcast globally on his Sky Channel sat-ellite.

Edgar realized that they needed a high-impact name like 182

 

STILL TALKING 183

 

mine to launch this network, to give them credibility with those stations they were courting around the country. I was Johnny Carson’s replacement, the number-one comedienne-talk person at that moment in America. ABC, to get me, had offered two specials, one of which was Barbara Walters’s time slot before the Academy Awards. Fox, with somebody like me as the lead ship in its fleet of programs, would no longer be dismissed with, “Yeah, right, a lot of Leave It to Beaver reruns,” a station you pass by on your way to the show you really want to watch.

Also, Edgar knew Johnny Carson had signed a twoyear contract with NBC. Our contracts with Carson Productions had always matched Johnny’s. But this time when we opened negotiations with Carson’s lawyer, Henry Bushkin, he offered us only one year. Suddenly the rules had changed. Why did I have one year to Johnny’s two? Was I on probation? I had once asked Peter Lassally how many nights he would allow me if I stopped being funny”seven or eight?” He succinctly answered, “Three.” If my ratings had dropped at NBC, someone else would have been in, and I would have been out with no place to go.

When Edgar broached the idea of approaching Fox, I said, “If you think it’s right, do it.” I was not really expecting anything, and happy that Edgar would have a deal to push that would engross him. I thought this would stabilize him, get his mind off the pills, the gallstones, the gout, the fear.

But I did not take the prospect seriously.

The day after we arrived from London, Edgar phoned our lawyer, Peter Dekom, and asked him to approach Fox. Peter had lunch with Murdoch and Barry Diller. Their interest was immediate and enthusiastic.

Discussions began, slowly at first, but then they began to snowball.

Something that had started in my mind as going along with Edgar suddenly became extremely serious. Now I had to decide if I really wanted to take this major, major step-and I was torn.

“Joan,” I would tell myself, “if you can do well at Fox, then sooner or later Johnny is going to leave, and your show will inherit those ratings.

You’ll be a huge profit center, and treated accordingly.”

184 JOAN RIVERS

On the other hand, what if the show didn’t work out? I would never be able to go back on NBC. What if Fox folded? Id be left with nothing.

But leaving Carson was having my security taken away, being told I had to grow up and stand on my own two feet.

“When Johnny is gone,” Edgar said to me, “so are you. Do you think anybody who takes over is going to say, `Let’s keep Ed McMahon and Doc?’ ” He pointed out that ever since my very first contract, NBC had never bothered to make me exclusive to NBC; I could have appeared opposite Johnny on any network. I said to Edgar, “They think nobody will ever want me.”

Then a friend-a real friend, Jay Michelis-smuggled me a list prepared by NBC naming the ten successors if Johnny retired. My name was not on it. I almost died. When we confronted NBC, the president, Brandon Tartikoff, denied such a list ever existed. But we had seen it. Edgar said, “There’s no future for you there. You’ve been deluding yourself. “

The negotiations with Fox continued until early in 1986. Edgar and I were very clear and simple about what we wanted. We required artistic control.

After all those years of fighting for guests at NBC, we wanted autonomy.

And since everybody wanted a show competitive with The Tonight Show-one that would immediately seem to have been on the air for several years-we required an equal studio, equal staff, equal budget.

We also wanted major money. If the show did not work, we would be destroyed, so we wanted to be destroyed with enough money in the bank so we would never have to work again. Edgar called it “fuck-you money.” Money that would let me go to the summer theater in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and work for $125 a week if I wanted to.

And we required three years. Edgar was savvy. He knew that talk shows take forever to establish an audience. The host has to become a friend, a habit, somebody people want to visit with every night for an hour. A new show has to take friends away from some other host-and people feel guilty for abandoning their old pal. These friendships come very gradually.

 

STILL TALKING 185

 

People try you out once from word of mouth, or because of a particular guest, or by mistake on their way to Johnny Carson-and they don’t pay a call again for weeks. We would be going up against an NBC habit that started not with Johnny Carson, not with Jack Paar, but went back over thirty years to Steve Allen’s original Tonight Show in 1953. Edgar used to say, “If Jesus came back on another network, they’d still turn first to Channel Four.”

Our need for a three-year deal became a major sticking point. Diller wanted two years, not long enough to make me give up the power base I had built on The Tonight Show. And at a deep, visceral level, I was terrified of leaving Carson. There was still that umbilical cord of loyalty and gratitude. He still represented safety to me. The Tiffany exposure of The Tonight Show was keeping me hot in my comedy-show career. Fox was the great unknown. The network might not even exist in three years.

I kept waiting for the NBC people to give me some reason to stay with Johnny. If they had offered me a twoyear contract, if they had offered me a role in a Movie of the Week, some specials, a series pilot, anything that said, “We want you,” I would have broken off with Fox.

At one point I called Peter Dekom and told him I could not leave Carson, I could not take the gamble. A showbusiness career is like riding a shimmering soap bubble, beautiful almost because of its fragility. If you are a television personality, the bubble is kept filled by visibility, reputation, freshness, currency, celebrity, excitementwhat Carson provided.

Without The Tonight Show I would be floating free in show business, a world of knives. Even the biggest stars have no shield. We are all piece-workers, always anxious and supersensitive, knowing that our only resources are talent and smarts.

 

Never in our relationship with The Tonight Show were we allowed to speak directly with Johnny Carson. That was forbidden. He was kept under a bell jar. Everybody had to deal with Henry Bushkin, his personal lawyer and mouthpiece in all business dealings. He once called and said, “We want you to go into this deal on a TV station,”

186 JOAN RIVERS

and when the man who runs Carson says that, you go in. A lot of people-including David Letterman and Neil Simon-lost a lot of money, but Bushkin got out whole.

For a while we had to use Bushkin as a “consultant” when we negotiated our contract with Carson Productions. Peter Lassally told us Bushkin negotiated all of his contracts. Now whom do you think Bushkin is going to favor, us or Carson Productions? But none of us had any choice. He could say to Johnny, “They’re no good. Get them out.” I’ve always heard that Bushkin was a major factor in Carson’s breakup with his third wife, Joanna.

In January of 1986, Billy Sammeth telephoned Henry Bushkin to discuss renewing our contract. Bushkin never returned the call-and later claimed that Billy never made it. That told us worlds. Edgar said, “You’ve got to get out while you’re on top and go somewhere else.”

At the beginning of March everything was still stalled. The negotiations between Barry Diller and Peter Dekom were hung up on the length of the contract, and there was still no communication at all from NBC or Bushkin, not even to close his offer of one year. On March 13 Billy Sammeth phoned June Baldwin, the director of business affairs at NBC. She was leaving the network and referred him to John Agoglia, executive vice president of business affairs for NBC. Billy phoned him repeatedly. Agoglia never called back.

On the twenty-first Billy phoned Brandon Tartikoff, who took no position on renewing me but did prod Agoglia into calling back. Billy told him we wanted to renewwhich was still true. But Billy also asked, “Does Joan have a place at NBC to hang her coat when Johnny isn’t there anymore? She wants some feeling that NBC really is her home.” Agoglia said I should sign for a year with Carson and then talk to Tartikoff about the future.

 

Simultaneously Barry Diller asked to make his pitch directly. He came to the house. Until then I knew him primarily as the best friend of my former manager Sandy Gallin. Sandy, David Geffen, Barry, and Calvin Klein shared a friendship legendary in Hollywood, a place not

STILL TALKING 187

 

known for enduring intimacy. Barry had been to the house a couple of times with Sandy for dinner, but he had made no particular impression on me. I knew him mainly from the few times a year I performed at a bar named Studio One, when he, among others, would come to the dressing room after the show.

At the house that day Barry’s performance was virtuoso. He was charming beyond charm, warming us up with wonderful stories-about driving around Beverly Hills with Katharine Hepburn and jumping over people’s fences and swimming in their pools.

Barry talked about playing poker with Carson and said Johnny was getting old and tired-like his show. Barry said, “I promise you he’ll be gone in one, two years.” He said there was no way NBC would make me the replacement, and only the Fox show could give me what I wanted. Movies would not do it for me, even if I had a huge hit. He told me, “You’re a television star. ” If we could not work out a deal, he wanted to keep the door open and stay friends-but he might not need me by next year. We still insisted on three years. I told him I would not give up everything for a twoyear contract. Finally he caved in and agreed.

A few days later we met for lunch at Barry’s house. Billy Sammeth came with us, and Barry had Jamie Kellner, president of Fox Broadcasting, who the previous year had tried to get me for his syndication company, Orion. It was another charm meeting to warm us up to accept the contract Diller would now work out with Peter Dekom. Barry took me on a tour of his house, and kept pointing out pictures of his ex-girlfriend, Diane von Furstenberg.

Diller and Kellner talked about their deep pockets-$100 million committed to launch the network. They discussed the show in broad strokes, promised any guests we wanted-“It’ll be totally up to you. We will give you the show.” They said they would not look at ratings for at least a year, were not expecting big numbers. Fox was in it for the long haul and knew the show would need a long time, even years, to find itself. If we had a terrific show, the numbers would come eventually.

188 JOAN RIVERS

Barry and Jamie were like two psychiatrists. They understood everything.

Jamie had my Carson numbers in front of him and agreed that Carson and NBC

were not treating me right. Barry and Jamie were my two champions. I wished I understood then that to operate in their league I needed a vinyl raincoat. When they told me they were my best friends, the words would have rolled down my arms, down my fingers, and hit the floor like drops of rain.

I suddenly wanted the show so much, I was completely taken in. I thought, This time the words are true. These people are different. I’ve made friends here. I liked Barry that day. He had a wicked sense of humor, he was up on everything, and I thought 1 had charmed him. I thought the exchange was real when our eyes met across the room and we would laugh. I thought all the bad I had heard about Diller-that he was a cold, ruthless businessman-was not true.

BOOK: Still Talking
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