Still Talking (30 page)

Our previous doubts about Vandor were confirmed a few days later when he began his job as our Fox contact. “Just what do you do every day?” he asked Bruce McKay. Courtney Conte then undertook his instruction. Soon Ron was sitting silently in production and writers’ meetings, listening and watching. One evening Bruce came by the office late, and there was Ron typing at his secretary’s desk. When he saw Bruce, he covered the paper with his arms and asked him to leave. He was writing regular reports to the Fox executives. Barry Diller’s vision of our daily activities came almost entirely through the eyes of Ron Vandor via Kevin Wendle, both of whom I think hated us.

In our first encounter Vandor announced he was going to sit in and help pick my writers. Then he introduced two middle-aged men who wrote for local disc jockeys in St. Louis. I said, “You must be kidding. You must be absolutely kidding.” Disc jockey humor! That was the end of him and me. I think that with mature men in those jobs, experienced executives with a light touch and even some humor, The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers might still be on the air.

In late September, only a couple of weeks before airtime, another bucket of poison was dumped into the well. The issue was my safety on a live show. The Fox guards were old, retired cops-nice guys who sat at the door and had a Coke. Any nut could run on camera and start shooting. You only need one Sirhan Sirhan. Edgar made this a major

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power struggle with Barry Diller, even to the point of withholding crucial information from me.

When Edgar asked for the Gavin DeBecker security guards we had at our house, Barry was ice-cold. “This is my lot, and you are my guests,” he said. “The tail does not wag the dog.” But Edgar would not let up. Barry finally agreed that we could hire guards from some other agency-there was apparently bad blood between Barry and DeBecker. Edgar never told me this.

His position was, “If I let them dictate on this, they will dictate on everything. ” He worked me up to the point where I telephoned Barry and said, “I don’t feel safe without my private guards, so I cannot be your guest on the Fox lot.”

“Then don’t be my guest,” Barry answered. He was right.

I called him back, ate crow, and invited him over to the house to talk it over, just the two of us. So two people, one making millions and the other the CEO of Twentieth CenturyFox, argued for twenty minutes over which guards to use-none of whom carried guns. Still, after the meeting, where we discussed many other things as well, I felt we were comfortable with each other, understood each other.

As he left, I instinctively tried to lighten the tension by playing the foolish little girl trying to work her father. Giggle, giggle, giggle. I wanted Barry to go home laughing, wanted to put the fight in proportion, make it seem as silly as it was. I still hoped that Barry and I could turn all this into a game, the affectionate duel I had with Irving Haber at the Downstairs at the Upstairs. I teased, deadpan, “Now that I’ve been nice, can I have my guards?”

He thought my little joke was serious, thought I was trying to manipulate him. I now know that moment began eroding whatever trust and confidence Barry had in mehe told Alex B. Block, the author of Outfoxed, “Oh I knew so quickly. That’s the terrible part. I didn’t tell anybody but I knew.” So Barry, even before the show premiered, decided he could not work with me.

Neither one of us understood the other. When he had originally put on his charm hat with me, all the outward

signs had said terrific, funny, flexible. Only later did I discover that nothing in business is ever playful to Barry. Whereas my self-worth came from my audiences, Barry’s self-image was “corporate boss” in a battlefield where no prisoners are taken. Of course, I am a strong controller, and I was hoping, hoping-but I knew he had won. I am still amazed that anybody as powerful as Barry would react so totally to such a feeble challenge. He came to me all black-and-white, a Franz Kline. I was not going to win him over with charm and a twinkle.

From then on, I no longer had the full support of the Fox power center.

Those last two weeks before the show aired on October 9 were nonstop struggles. We still had not settled on an announcer. Fox wanted a sidekick who could become a star, a straight arrow, an everyman who would gasp, “Oh, no, Joan,” when I was outrageous and fiddle with his necktie. But I did not want an Ed McMahon. Carson is unable to stand there and just talk to the audience and be intimate. His eyes drop. He needs to talk to a friend who represents the audience. I like talking directly to the audience. It is my friend.

I worked in Atlantic City with a wonderful singer named Clint Holmes who I thought was just right-a black WASP. Fox did not trust my instincts and was nervous about a black man. Barry thought I would have to make him an integral part of the show or be criticized. Fox retained a casting agency in New York and Chicago that sent us endless tapes of confused candidates asking “What do you want me to say?”

A voice off camera answered, “Say, `The Late Show, Starring Joan Rivers. ‘

“

“The Late Show, Starring Joan Riversssss, ” they dutifully echoed.

Then I interviewed in person another series of beautiful young men, most of them suitable for casting a couch, blond corn-eaters from Iowa who had not been fully dressed until the day they auditioned. It was like casting for Chippendales. When I rejected them, the Fox execu-

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tives collectively decided the announcer would be an offstage voice and never appear. The day before we were going on the air, there was a blind audition, just voices on tape. Barry picked Clint. He winked at me. That was nice. His present to me. Good, I thought, everything is still fine between us.

But coming down the home stretch, Fox’s priorities seemed backward. The Carson people put the word out that anybody who appeared on my show would be blackballed at The Tonight Show. Our friend Jay Michelis, vice president of NBC, told me, “Our job is to destroy you.” It was a cold business war.

If I cut into Carson, that could cost NBC millions of dollars.

Billy Sammeth and the booking staff worked the phones around the clock. The day before the show aired, Wendle and Vandor, the executives in charge, called a meeting to ask if we should give the guests Hershey’s Kisses, mugs, or a jar of fortune cookies. Insanity. Nobody comes on a show because of presents. I wanted to tell them, “Let’s first get the guests. Phone Barry and ask him for his friends. “

When we heard about Carson’s threat, Barry said, “Don’t worry, we are behind you a hundred percent. I’ll get my friends, and you will have whoever is making Fox films. ” That meant Jack Nicholson, Barbra Streisand, Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas. All of Twentieth CenturyFox’s stars at one time or another. Maybe he called them once and said, “Barbra? Barry. For God’s sake I need a favor, honey. You got to do this for me.” We needed those calls. The crucial weeks were the third and fourth, not the first.

That is what Kevin Wendle, vice president in charge of prime time late night, should have been worrying about, not whether the tapestry in the greenroom worked with the club chairs.

Though the executives had been checking fabric swatches for weeks, the greenroom, where guests would wait to go on camera, was still unfinished a few days before the show, and panic set in. Courtney Conte had sensibly covered the halls and rooms with a serviceable, washable vinyl paper. Kevin Wendle and Garth Ancier de-

cided that Barry would not like the texture, and everything was redone with a perishable paper at a cost of thirtyfive thousand dollars. At the very last minute Barry brought in his personal decorator, who furnished the greenroom with seventy thousand dollars’ worth of expensive antiques. Their private little executive greenroom was done in English country-tweedy, lots of leather. When I heard they were hiring a bartender, I screamed, “Never mind the bartender! Give us another secretary, a messenger boy.”

Three days before we went on the air, I got a callplease come see your dressing room; the decorators are all upset. I had been busy reading stacks of writers’ material, watching tapes of comics, going in person to the Comedy Store, and had taken no interest in my dressing room. I had simply asked for two rooms, an outer room for my staff and an inner room with a sink to wash my hair and a private bathroom. I told them, “Just paint it peach.”

But they had given me seven rooms, including a little bedroom for naps. The wallpaper in one of the two bath rooms had been changed twice. I found it embarrassing.

I never did furnish it with any permanence just in case I walked in someday and found a stranger sitting at my dressing table.

I wanted to hang my SOLD OUT poster from my Carnegie Hall appearance but couldn’t find it, so instead I hung the Rabbit Test poster from Sweden, where it was a runaway hit. This gave me courage that maybe I did belong in such a huge suite. On the hall of the outer room, at the center of a line of nails, I hung a picture of Barry and me holding hands at the announcement press conference-but ripped down the middle-my side and his side. This was going to be my Barry-o-meter. When we were getting along the two pictures would hang side by side, Barry and me holding hands. If something was wrong in paradise, I would move them apart.

I imagined Barry checking the Barry-o-meter every day, and saying to me, “Oops it’s a bad day,” or threatening me-“I’ll move the Barry-o-meter!”

Another game.

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Eventually the pictures were so far apart, I ran out of wall space.

On the same tour I visited the studio for the first time. I had made two specific requests-no carpet under the audience’s seats because it absorbs laughter and applause, changing the acoustics-and a steep rise in the audience section so the noise would bounce out to the microphones. I found carpet on the floor and made Fox rip it out overnight. This eventually leaked out to the press as me being capricious and bitchy.

I stood behind the last row and looked down the steep slope of seats to the stage. I knew I belonged there. No doubt about it. What knocked me out, really killed meI was standing in the same distant spot, seeing the same scene I remembered from the first time I saw a television studio in the early 1950s. I had come on the subway from Brooklyn with my friend Connie Witty to see Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca.

That day flooded back to me, my certainty that this business was what I wanted more than anything else in the world. I remember that I did not know how I would get from the back row, down all those steps, past the cameras, and onto the stage-but I knew I was going to try, was going to do anything to make a whole theater full of people happy. And now I thought, That girl who was there-this is her studio. I wished I could tell that little girl, “Relax, you’re going to have your Show of Shows. “

14

…

T took seven months for Fox to kill me off. Every day of my life-since the show debuted on October 9, 19861 think of those months. But now the anger has dulled. My view is almost clinical, the distant bitterness one would feel about a relative who died five years ago due to medical malpractice.

The night of the premiere was the one moment of unity in the midst of the fighting, the time when we were triumphant and relieved that we had made our deadline, that we were launched. I myself felt terrific. The hassling since January was worth it.

Absolutely.

The night of the premiere, standing backstage, I heard the call over the speakers, “TWO minutes to airtime. Two minutes to airtime.” A red neon sign, QUIET PLEASE, LIVE SHOW IN PROGRESS, kept flashing like a police-light. Out in the studio the audience stamped and clapped. In the middle of a swirl of stagehands, writers, technicians, prop girls, Fox executives, I stood rigid, like a rock in a stream, my heart thumping against my ribs as I breathed deeply, pumping out the tension. Looking at this controlled frenzy, I thought, Everybody’s livelihood is on my shoulders. If I don’t work, they don’t eat. I prayed, “Please, God, let the show work. Let me still be good.”

The backstage loudspeaker was intoning, “Three seconds. Two seconds.” My hairdresser, Jason Dyl, gave my hair a last touch.

The announcer, Clint Holmes, shouted, “Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Joan Riv-ers!”

I plunged forward from the darkness into the brilliant dome of light; the audience was standing, and the applause 216

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washed over me. I went over to the audience and found people and shook their hands, I touched them, and even kissed two women. I loved every person there, and they were all telling me that they loved me back.

They made the whole Fox journey worthwhile because they were my family, opening the door for me. I had been waiting for that moment since I had left Carson, waiting through five months of fighting to get to that spot, to get back in front of an audience, to stand in front of people who wanted me to be a winner because that meant they had come to the right show, had picked the right horse.

When I turned and walked back onto the set, all the hassling with Fox fell away. I felt I was walking into the bright future. Fox would see that I had an audience in America and that people wanted me. I silently promised myself, If I have to write every joke myself, I’ll make the show work. If I have to beg every guest myself, I’ll make it work. If I have to run the cameras, sweep the floors, answer the phones, give up everything else in my life, I’ll stay right here.

The guests were remarkable. There was Elton John, who almost never does a talk show. He played “The Bitch Is Back” while I stood with my hand on the piano, almost buffeted by the force of the,sound and his startling energy.

There was a white-hot David Lee Roth, fresh from his split with Van Halen, wildly outrageous, full of sex, full of the devil. He interrupted a tour and flew out from the East, did the show, and flew right back. We had Cher, who rushed over from the set of The Witches of Eastwick to be my friend and sing “The Bitch Is Back.” And Peewee Herman-long before the tragic scandal-one of the biggest names in America at that time, was there to be silly with me, let me play. I thought, I wish my mother could see me.