Joan Rivers has fought the ageing process and, in a way, she has won. Donald Clarke finds the comedienne and talk-show host is as sharp as ever
So, what does Joan Rivers look like up close? How tautly stretched are her leatherette cheeks? Do 71-year-old eyes still cower within last week's carefully re-modelled sockets?
Well, a notable thing about plastic surgery is that, when indulged in to this extent, it turns the face into an inanimate object. And inanimate objects that are neither as big as the Grand Canyon nor as bright as the Aurora Borealis look pretty much the same in real life as they do on TV. No new insights about Joan's appearance can be gained from sitting beside her in the Ritz Hotel that could not be gleaned from watching her sell jewellery on the QVC channel or bad-mouthing Russell Crowe's cummerbund outside the Oscars. She comes across, just as you might expect, like an exquisitely dressed alabaster marmoset: too unreal to be properly unsettling.
"Photographers are always saying, 'Oh we like wrinkles'," she says. "Well go and photograph somebody else then. I am constantly looking at my hands and thinking: oh God, my mother's hands. There is nothing nice about being old. People often ask me why I hate old women? Because I am one and I hate that."
Considering how sharp her mind remains and how nimble she is on her feet, it would be reasonable to assume that, had she not gone under the knife so early and so often, her face would have aged well. But, sadly, we shall never know.
Watching a tape of the routine that Rivers will deliver next month in Dublin's Gaiety Theatre, I was gleefully taken aback by the savage energy she still brings to her comedy. No other stand-up manages to do quite such amusing things with disgust, misanthropy and righteous fury. Her act offers continuing proof that you can get away with almost anything if it is funny enough.
"It's easier to shock people at this age because you are more free," she says. "The only thing that age has done is free me up to say what I really wanted to say in the old days. Back then I would be too terrified that they would fire me or whatever. They have already done all that to me now. It really frees you up when you feel they have done everything terrible to you they can do."
Yet she still gets in trouble. Shortly after September 11th, 2001, she found herself the target of outrage when she suggested that a small portion of those widowed by the attacks might regard receiving $5 million compensation for their husbands' lives as a good deal. Does she regret that now?
"Oh no. I never took that out of the act. All I said was that you can't tell me that out of 2,500 widows there weren't, maybe, three that weren't so upset when they got a cheque for $5 million. I was so angry about all the objections. Come and see the show. Don't you dare try and ruin my career without coming to see the show."
The shock factor is part of the gag, isn't it? It wouldn't be quite so funny if it weren't so outrageous.
"Oh I love taking them down that path. Sure. But there must be some people who would think: '$5 million and I got rid of Harry. Not so terrible. Thank you Osama.'"
The very first people to be outraged by Joan Rivers's antics on stage were her parents. The child of a Jewish doctor, Joan Molinsky was born in Brooklyn in 1933. She attended snooty Barnard College and, after graduating with honours, worked in the rag trade for a while before marrying her boss. After only six months she walked out on the poor man and set about becoming an actor. I would guess her solidly middle-class parents were appalled.
"Oh God! Appalled is exactly the word. They didn't know anybody in the business and so they just thought it was tawdry and disgusting. And when I was starting out as a comic, I was playing strip joints, so they were absolutely right."
Rivers was working as an office temp in- between acting jobs when somebody pointed out that, rather than the $8 a day she was then clearing, she could earn $10 being a comic. The only female comedians about in those days were the bawdy opening acts at strip clubs. Joan, with her prim wardrobe and college-educated brain, cut a very peculiar figure, and she admits that the suburban humour she plied at first was drab and non-threatening. But she loved the work "and the money", and by the beginning of the 1960s she found herself a part of the burgeoning Greenwich Village coffee house scene.
"Oh it was a wonderful moment," she says. "There was Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, Woody Allen, George Carlin: all of us wandering round. Bob Dylan was around the place. I was really in the right spot at the right time. Everybody there was into their craft. You'd watch each other's work and learn. We had a real sense of honour though: you did not steal from other people. Simon and Garfunkel were there and Mama Cass. A whole new sound was coming in."
What really changed Rivers's approach to comedy was her first sight of the radical comic Lenny Bruce. Even now, she goes into a kind of rapture as she describes listening to Bruce's profane meditations on the hypocrisies of post-war American society.
"He was incandescent," she says. "There was nobody before or since. Woody Allen will sit and tell you about Mort Stahl or Bob Hope. Oh please! They are just comics with clever lines and points of view. Lenny changed everything, because he told the truth. A lot of what I do comes from him."
There is no question that she delights in pointing out uncomfortable truths. But the Joan Rivers we see on stage is surely something of an invented persona. Throughout her career she has been urging women to avoid education, dress nicely and marry some rich old guy who will allow them to live in idle luxury. Yet, she left just such a husband to further her own career.
"Yes, I was miserable. But I really wished I could have stayed in that sort of marriage. I wished I could, but I can't."
But she would never have urged her daughter Melissa to marry for money, would she?
"Oh, in a hot second. I am so angry with Melissa, because she is now divorced and because she is not going after some old rich guy who is going to give her a great life. Wouldn't it be nice to have somebody who had a big boat and just said: 'Here are the keys. Off you go'? No man ever took me to the furrier. Wouldn't that be nice for Melissa if she could have all that?"
So this money-grabbing harridan on stage is the real Joan?
"Well that is part of me. It is all the stuff I have thought but never said. But that is not who I am when I come round to dinner."
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She has often said that comedy is a great weapon for revenge.
"Absolutely! I never start a fight. But don't you start with me. Don't you start on my people. Don't you start on my daughter. The French! Those anti-Semitic bastards, they get it in my act whenever I can: their morals, mores and smells."
Rivers's big break came when she made a triumphant appearance on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show in 1965. Later the same year, she did a similarly successful turn on the Ed Sullivan Show, and the world opened up to her. For the next two decades she barked her way about America assuming ever more strident tones. In 1983 she became the permanent guest host on Carson's programme, but left a few years later to present her own chat show. Johnny did not take it well and, even now, there is bad feeling in the industry about the split. Astonishingly, Rivers has never been asked to appear on either Jay Leno or David Letterman and puts this omission down to the continuing perception that she deserted the grand old man of chat.
"Oh yeah. It is the old boys' club," she says. "I left Johnny and they never forgave me. My agent says that even murderers serve their time and come out. But if you are blocked you are blocked. I always find it fascinating that the hand of Carson is still present. I left when my contract was up and Johnny claims I never called him and that is not true. He is now an old and unhappy man sitting somewhere in Malibu. He doesn't go out. He is a recluse and hereI am with a major tour and a TV show and my own jewellery line."
She claims that she developed her red carpet shtick - making acidic comments about movie stars' clothes outside awards ceremonies and such - as a way of compensating for the access she was denied on the two main chat shows.
"My big fantasy is to get booked on Leno, walk on and say, 'You haven't had me on in 17 years, so go f**k yourself' and then walk off."
Joan Rivers's annus horribilis came in 1987. Her husband and manager of 19 years, Edgar Rosenberg, committed suicide after a series of business set-backs. Meanwhile Joan's career was faltering. Her chat show, The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers, was cancelled and, failure breeding failure in the entertainment industry, no promoters seemed interested in booking her stand-up act. She has always made it clear how angry Edgar's suicide made her feel.
"Oh, I still am angry," she says. "Suicide is the ultimate desertion. And it doesn't happen through illness or whatever. It is that person's choice: 'I am in such pain.' I understand that pain, but he destroyed years of my daughter's life that should have been happy years. I can tell you that whenever the good times came again I walked past his picture and said 'F**k you! I am going to enjoy this. We have this lovely grandchild and you are not here to enjoy it, you fool. Ah, you don't deserve to be here.' Very, very angry."
At the time Melissa felt Joan could have done more to prevent her dad's death, and mother and daughter enjoyed a very public falling out. Melissa also objected to the fact that Rivers immediately sold everything that reminded her of her husband.
"I sold his house a week after he died. He loved that house. And then I sold this old Mercedes that he loved. I hope it ended up with some rotten German. That son of a bitch!"
Perhaps the least useful thing F. Scott Fitzgerald ever wrote was that are no second acts in American lives. The country seems have been built on the belief that there is no lemon so bitter that it cannot be turned into lemonade.
Rivers went back to the small clubs where she had started out and got her act back into shape. She began lurking beside red carpets. She turned up on the QVC (Quality Value Convenience, since you ask) shopping channel, hawking her own jewellery.
"I was the first star to do that and I just love it," she enthuses. "When I first went on, there would be just dead celebrities and me. I'd be sitting there next to two body bags. Now everyone is doing it."
Whereas she can be very funny on the red carpet ("Kathy Bates doesn't like what I said about her? Oh, I'm devastated! Annette Benning is upset with me? My head didn't hit the pillow all night!"), the QVC stuff is just plain cheesy. She doesn't still need to flog earrings to insomniacs does she?
"I love it. I take it really personally when somebody doesn't buy my stuff. Look at this watch. You are a fool if you don't buy it."
Melissa Rivers, now also a TV presenter and reconciled with her mom, believes that Joan can never accept the fact that she is a success. And, despite the braggadocio and the grandstanding, a hint of insecurity still hangs about this singular personality. Though she came from a middle-class background, she tells me that her parents always lived beyond their means and, like many children of Jewish immigrants, she still fears poverty.
But I think what drives her most strongly is a desire to say the things we all think, but keep to ourselves for fear of causing offence. (Lenny Bruce would be proud of his accidental prodigy.) She is as funny as any comedian still working and we should be grateful that she is never quite content with the world.
"Nobody is 100 per cent happy," she laughs. "But I'm 80 per cent there. Hey, a guy tried to pick me up on the plane yesterday. An 85-year-old man admittedly. He's coming onto me, telling me that in the second World War he was a pilot. I thought: oh God, it's come to this."
She fights her rubbery face into a smile.
It is clear that Rivers adores being interviewed and loves the attention that she is still receiving. I simply cannot believe, as she stubbornly maintains, that she would have been as happy if she had married some rich, ugly bloke.
"No. You are wrong," she laughs. "Ari Onassis and I would have had a great time. We would have had separate lives and come together for major events. I would have owned The Ritz. This would have been the Joan Rivers Ritz Hotel."
Joan Rivers performs in the Gaiety Theatre on October 10th. Tickets, €25-€32.50 from Ticketmaster outlets