Way, way back…and Joan Rivers is on stage at Centre East theater in Skokie. Many in the crowd were expecting to hear comedic takes of her wicked past year, which included a feud with former mentor Johnny Carson, the fiery seven-month collapse of her much ballyhooed late night show on Fox and the suicide of her husband Edgar Rosenberg.
Always one to defy expectations, Rivers barely mentioned any of that except to say…
“I’ve just started dating again . . . you know I was married for 23 years.”
“When I used to sit in for Carson, they never let me have the good guests.”
“I cremated my mother-in-law yesterday . . . and she didn’t want to go.”
If she had been scarred by recent troubles, she did not bring them to the stage. She was, as before and ever after, a model of resilience and a total pro.
This child of New York first arrived here in 1961 to join the cast of the then-two-year-old The Second City and appeared in two months-long revues, “Six of One” and “Alarums and Excursions,” and often hanging out at Playboy editor/publisher Hugh Hefner’s mansion, before heading back home. In Manhattan she became a pioneering female comic in an era when most women in night clubs were either audience members or cocktail waitresses.
Her material on that long ago night in 1988 revolved around the shopping-marriage-sex axis that was long her onstage bread-and-butter, as in “If God had wanted you to cook and clean, your hands would be made of aluminum,” the size of engagement rings, birth control and — though she was only 55 at time — the sagging of her own body. The crowd loved it, loved her.
The next year, as she was about to launch a new network TV show, we talked and Rivers said, “We are all, the hosts, personalities. Is my persona on air a reflection of the real me? No, not really. It’s all a sham. Show biz. People, in the long run, tune in for the host. I worry about my guests shining but on any show I have no idea how things are going.”
What if the show fails?
“If it does, it does. Nothing can get to me anymore,” Rivers said. “I’m throwing every ounce of strength I have behind this show. But if it doesn’t work, hey, I’ll just move on to the next thing. I have my standup stuff and that gives me so many outlets. There are a lot of things for me to do. I’m really very shallow. Whatever works, works.”
We talked some more, about comedy and luck and fate.
Then she said, “In the last few years, I’ve really surprised myself. It must be something in the genes. I’m from peasant stock. Somewhere I must have had a great-grandfather who was caught in the rain and said, ‘No worry, I build hut with my hands.’ “
“It’s been a catharsis: Fox, Carson and my husband. A lot of people probably would have crashed. But, hey, here I am.”