Rivers never threw away a joke — or anything else
When the comedian Joan Rivers died in 2014, her daughter, Melissa Rivers, faced the task of cleaning out her mother's Park Avenue apartment and multiple storage units. She discovered 80 years of personal archives straight out of “Hoarders.” They included 56 scrapbooks, 56 card files of jokes, transcripts of every television appearance and comedy routine.
Melissa Rivers and Scott Currie (Joan Rivers' longtime collaborator) have curated the mass of this ephemera into “Joan Rivers Confidential,” a lush coffee-table-sized scrapbook. Arranged chronologically, it spans from her first grade report card to the program from her star-studded Fifth Avenue funeral.
The peaks and valleys of Rivers' career have been well-documented in her own comedy sketches, autobiographies and the poignant 2010 documentary “A Piece of Work.” But this collection of yellowed newspaper clippings, scripts, notes for gags, ticket stubs and publicity photos provides a surprisingly intimate and insightful portrait of her dogged scramble to succeed 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, N.Y. Her childhood as an ugly outcast provided long-standing material for her comedy routines. Here we see the photo of a chubby 8-yearold 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.'”)
Joan was determined to flee Larchmont and make it in showbiz. The path to Joan Rivers was hard won. This collection contains programs from her performances in “Othello” at Barnard and a 1959 off-Broadway play in which she costarred with a then-unknown Barbra Streisand. There are not-particularly-funny routines from her first forays as a stand-up.
In 1965, she got her big break after seven failed tryouts: an appearance on “The Tonight Show” hosted by Johnny Carson. By this time, the Joan Rivers persona was well-honed: a pretty, blonde women in a little black dress and pearls who wise-cracked about her single-and-desperate status. There are newspaper clippings of her triumph that night as he 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. There are transcripts of her many 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 award-winning movie scripts. Magazines from Parade to Playboy ran features about her sex life with her new husband, Edgar, her maternity wardrobe and her decorating tips for her Eastside apartment.
In the 1970s and '80s, her humor style morphed, from jokes about her own foibles to skewering celebrities. But in the late 1980s, Rivers' meteoric career crashed to earth. She quit as permanent guest-host of “The Tonight Show” to start her on talk show on Fox. Carson refused to speak to her again. Soon after her new show was canceled after only eight months , her husband/manager, Edgar, committed suicide.
The final section of the scrapbook documents her improbable reinvention as a red carpet critic (who coined “Who are you wearing”), “Celebrity Apprentice” winner, QVC jewelry hawker and star of the hit series “Fashion Police.”
Unfortunately, the last section is padded with too many less-than-scintillating thank-you notes from her A-list friends. But at its heart, “Joan Rivers Confidential” is Joan Molinsky's scrapbook. We can see the girl in her bedroom in Larchmont, pasting in the play programs and awkward headshots to be preserved for posterity when she became a big star.