‘Scrapbook’ a compilation that’s personal, insightful

When comedian Joan Rivers died in 2014, her daughter faced the task of cleaning out her mother’s mammoth Park Avenue apartment and many storage units.

Melissa Rivers discovered 80 years of personal archives, including 56 scrapbooks, 56 card files of jokes arranged by subject, transcripts of TV appearances and comedy routines, letters from celebrities and press write-ups.

She and Scott Currie, Joan Rivers’ longtime collaborator, curated much of the ephemera into “Joan Rivers Confidential,” a large scrapbook. The chronological book spans decades — from Rivers’ first-grade report card to the program from her star-studded funeral.

The peaks and valleys of her career have been well-documented in her own comedy sketches, in autobiographies and in the 2010 documentary “A Piece of Work.”

But this collection of newspaper clippings, scripts, notes, ticket stubs and publicity photos offers a surprisingly intimate and insightful portrait of her dogged bid to make it in the male-dominated world of comedy.

Born Joan Molinsky in 1933, the daughter of a Russian-born doctor, she grew up in suburban Larchmont, New York. Her childhood as an ugly outcast provided steady material for her comedy routines.

Here we see the photo of a chubby 8-year-old next to the joke cards with the heading “Fat Kid”: “Someone sent my picture to Ripley. Ripley sent it back: ‘I don’t believe it.’”)

Despite her parents’ expectation that she marry a nice Jewish doctor, Joan was set on fleeing Larchmont to succeed in showbiz.

The path to Joan Rivers was hard-won. This collection contains programs from her performances in “Othello” at Barnard College and a 1959 off-Broadway play in which she co-starred with a then-unknown Barbra Streisand.

Included are not-sofunny routines from her first stand-up forays in the early 1960s.

In 1965, after seven failed tryouts, she finally landed an appearance on “The Tonight Show” hosted by Johnny Carson. By this time, the Joan Rivers persona was well-honed: a pretty, blond woman in a little black dress and pearls who wise-cracked about her single-anddesperate status.

Newspaper clippings detail her triumph that night as Carson declared, through tears of laughter: “God, you’re funny! You’re going to be a big star!”

The next 100 pages record Rivers’ relentless labor to achieve Carson’s prophecy, including transcripts of subsequent visits to “The Tonight Show” and the other variety shows of the era.

She recorded comedy albums, wrote a Broadway play, a best-selling memoir and awardwinning movie scripts.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, her little-blackdress-and-pearls style morphed into feathered Bob Mackie apparel and highly styled hairdos.

Her humor style morphed, too, from jokes about her own foibles to celebrity skewering. Her most popular target was Elizabeth Taylor, and the book includes choice examples from her 850 “Fat Liz” jokes.

But in the late 1980s, Rivers’ meteoric career crashed to Earth.

She quit as permanent guest host of “The Tonight Show” for her own talk show on the fledgling Fox network. Carson refused to speak to her again. Soon after her show was canceled — after only eight months — her husband and manager, Edgar, committed suicide.

The final section of the scrapbook chronicles her reinvention as a red-carpet critic, “Celebrity Apprentice” winner, QVC jewelry hawker and star of the series “Fashion Police.”

“Joan Rivers Confidential” (Harry N. Abrams. 336 pages, $40) by Melissa Rivers