Still Talking by Joan Rivers, Richard Meryman Read Free Book Online Page A

show”-and then everybody could go about their business. But I could not have kept those two men from their collision even if I had realized from the first the enormity of Edgar’s pride, how great his need for recognition. And I never would have blocked him from being
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    the show’s producer. By then, our business partnership was an unspoken bargain at the core of our marriage.
     
    I look at pictures of myself in those days-my 1960s hairdo and pink nails-and feel absolutely no relationship to that girl. She still believed in happy endings. She was naive about the treachery, about the pitfalls, the backbiting, the meanness, the stupidity in big-time show business. The success that was happening for her seemed absolutely right and logical. She had worked hard and, by God, was a rising star with a wonderful, successful husband. Well, the movie should have ended there.
    The day I was married, I escaped my old struggling life-living in a dinky struggle apartment over a deli, wearing struggle clothes. As I crossed Fifth Avenue, all my hand-painted struggle furniture turned back into pumpkins. The second half of the sixties was a sweet, happy time.
    Overnight I made the tremendous psychological jump of saying, “I’m grown up now and no longer a kid in Greenwich Village.” I could release the side of me suppressed under those black dresses and hairpieces and boa, the me that wanted to bring out the Georgian silver and be my mother’s daughter.
    Edgar was making a very good salary with Anna Rosenberg, and we pooled our incomes. At that time in our marriage he had that WASP caution over building and preserving capital. But I began relishing the money I had never had. Immediately I bought new clothes. No, not Oscar or Geoffrey Beene or Galanos. Those designers were still far in the future. And my husband was conservativeanything other than a black dress and pearls to him was like wearing a scarlet letter. I had my parents’ house painted, put on a new roof, bought my father a Cadillac and my mother a fur coat. I had a great time.
    There was a playfulness to everything then. Our lives were young and adventurous and unpredictable, our expectations unlimited. Edgar had never had fun friends, was always the bachelor invited to dinner, and now I brought serendipity into his life-running out together to

36 JOAN RIVERS
    six different coffeehouses to see six different comics, going to three movies one after another, popping out to the Hamptons on Long Island to see friends.
    When I performed in the Catskill Mountains, Edgar drove me up, left hand on the wheel, his right hand reaching out to mine, or conducting the Broadway show tunes we played on a tape recorder. Sometimes friends came, six of us in the car, everybody silly, all laughing, driving back the same night and stopping at the Red Apple Inn for sandwiches. We’d get home to New York at 4:00 A.M. and go to the Stage Delicatessen where the other performers were just back from their Catskill dates-Rodney Dangerfield, George Carlin, Dick Cavett, Dom DeLuise, Stiller and Meara-and the generation ahead of us-Alan King, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme.
    I joined Edgar’s career as the producer’s wife. I was there by his side when he went to Nice for the filming of the Telsun movie The Poppy Is Also a Flower, starring Yul Brynner, Trevor Howard, and Rita Hayworth.
    Everybody stayed at the Negresco Hotel. In the middle of the night Rita woke up and did not know where she was and panicked and began smashing furniture. I was in the lobby when she was led through at 3:00 A.M. in a Chanel suit, surrounded by the doctors and orderlies that Edgar had called, all trying to calm her-“Rita, Rita, Rita”-and she was pushing and fighting and yelling, her hair disheveled and wonderful. We thought it was alcohol, but maybe the Alzheimer’s had begun.
    In show business everything is credentials, and in France Edgar was the one with the credentials, the producer from