Sharp-tongued comedian Rivers dead at 81
Former talk show host never stopped working
Joan Rivers, the raucous, acid-tongued comedian who crashed the male-dominated realm of late-night talk shows and turned Hollywood red carpets into danger zones for badly dressed celebrities, died Thursday. She was 81.
Rivers died at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, surrounded by family and close friends, daughter Melissa Rivers said. She was hospitalized Aug. 28 after going into cardiac arrest in a doctor’s office following a routine procedure. The New York state health department is investigating the circumstances.
“My mother’s greatest joy in life was to make people laugh,” Melissa Rivers said. “Although that is difficult to do right now, I know her final wish would be that we return to laughing soon.”
Under the immobile, plastic surgery-crafted veneer that became Joan Rivers’ unapologetic trademark as she aged, her wit remained as vibrantly raw and unruly as when she first broke her way into a comedy world belonging largely to men.
In a 2010 “Late Show” interview, David Letterman broached the plastic surgery issue: “You don’t look exactly like the Joan Rivers I used to know.” Rivers didn’t flinch.
“Our business is so youthful. … You do little tweaks, and I think if a woman wants to look good, or a man, do it,” she said. “It’s not about anybody else.”
Fashion and acting were the early dreams of the woman who grew up as a self-described “fatty,” but it was humor that paid the bills and ultimately made Rivers a star.
While the few remaining comedians of her generation retired, emerging only for special events, Rivers never stopped touring or taking chances. In addition to her own shows, she was a regular guest on talk shows, appeared as a contestant on “Celebrity Apprentice” (she won), guest-starred on “Louie” and was the subject of the documentary “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work,” in which, in one segment, the then 75-year-old performed back-to-back shows in Toronto, Palm Springs and Minneapolis. In recent years, Rivers was a familiar face on TV shopping channel QVC, hawking her line of jewelry.
At the time of her death Rivers had a show on E! (“Fashion Police”), one on WeTV (“Joan and Melissa: Joan Knows Best?”) a third on the Web (“In Bed With Joan”), a recent best-selling memoir (“Diary of a Mad Diva”) and a fall tour slated for Britain.
Rivers was a scrapper, rebuilding her career and life after a failed attempt to make it as a late-night host was followed closely by her husband’s suicide.
Rivers’ style was hard-driving from the start and her material only got sharper. She was ready to slam anyone. A favored target was Elizabeth Taylor’s weight (“her favorite food is seconds”), but the comedian kept current with verbal assaults on Miley Cyrus and other newcomers.
With her raspy voice and brash New York accent, Rivers turned the red carpet of the Oscars, Emmys and Golden Globes into a stalking ground for E! Entertainment, where she first began working in 1994. Her familiar query – “Who are you wearing?” – would quickly give way to snarky commentary.
The barbs could turn inward as well, with Rivers mocking everything from her proclaimed lack of sex appeal (“my best birth control now is just to leave the lights on”) to her own mortality.
Rivers never relaxed, always looking for the next and better punchline.
“The trouble with me is, I make jokes too often,” she told the AP in 2013, days after the death of her older sister. “I was making jokes yesterday at the funeral home. That’s how I get through life. Life is SO difficult – everybody’s been through something! But you laugh at it, it becomes smaller.”
She had faced true crisis in the mid-1980s. Edgar Rosenberg, her husband of 23 years, committed suicide in 1987 after she was fired from her Fox talk show, which he produced. The show’s failure was a major factor, Rivers said. Rosenberg’s suicide also temporarily derailed her career.
“Nobody wants to see someone whose husband has killed himself do comedy four weeks later,” she told the New York Times in 1990.
Rivers had originally entered show business with the dream of being an actress, but comedy was a way to pay the bills while she auditioned for dramatic roles. “Somebody said, ‘You can make six dollars standing up in a club,’ ” she told the AP, “and I said, ‘Here I go!’ It was better than typing all day.”
In the early 1960s, comedy was a man’s game and the only female comics she could look to were Totie Fields and Phyllis Diller. But she worked her way up from local clubs in New York until, in 1965, she landed her big break on “The Tonight Show” after numerous rejections. “God, you’re funny. You’re going to be a star,” host Johnny Carson told her after she had rocked the audience with laughter.
Her nightclub career prospered and by late that year she had recorded her first comedy album. Her personal life picked up as well: She met British producer Rosenberg and they married after a four-day courtship.
Rivers hosted a morning talk show on NBC in 1968 and, the next year, made her Las Vegas debut when female comedians were still a relative rarity.
In 1983, she scored a coup when she was named permanent guest host for Carson on “Tonight.”
Although she drew good ratings, NBC hesitated in renewing her contract three years later. Fledgling network Fox jumped in with an offer of her own late-night show.
She launched “The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers” on Fox in 1986, but the venture lasted just a season and came at a heavy price: Carson cut ties with her when she surprised him by becoming a competitor.
Her show was gone in a year and she would declare that she had been “raped” by Fox; three months later, her husband was found dead.
It took two years to get her career going again.
She was born Joan Molinsky in Brooklyn to Russian immigrants Meyer Molinsky, a doctor, and Beatrice.
After graduating from Barnard College in 1954, she went to work as a department store fashion coordinator before she turned to comedy clubs. She had a six-month marriage to Jimmy Sanger.
Survivors include her daughter Melissa and a grandson, Cooper.