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 In the
late seventies, I was working at an urban slave’s wage for a very small
public relations agency in New Orleans. My boss was a talented publicist
and an even better schmoozer, and we landed the regional Warner Bros.
account. This meant that we handled public appearance tours for movie
stars whose films were opening in the area. I worked with such stars as
Gene Kelly, Michael Sarrazin and Lauren Hutton, and I have a trove of
tellable tales, but none matches my memory of Joan Rivers.
It was 1978, and Rivers had just produced
Rabbit Test, a mediocre comedy
starring Billy Crystal, who played the first man to become pregnant. We
had scheduled a rigorous itinerary of newspaper, wire, television and
radio interviews for the director/comic, and almost all of the work had
fallen on me. I was also a Rivers fan, and was looking forward to
meeting her.
Our most active account was a famous French Quarter hotel, so naturally,
we reserved a suite for Rivers there. I showed up at the hotel very
early the day Rivers was scheduled to arrive, did an inspection to make
sure everything was perfect, and found that everything was abysmal. Not
only was there no fruit basket and welcome note, but the floor hadn’t
been vacuumed, the bathroom was dirty, and the furniture needed dusting.
The general manager’s secretary — a compulsive, sometimes unpleasant
woman — was angry with us for some imagined slight, and I was certain
she had sabotaged the order to have the suite prepped for a celebrity
visit.
A call to Housekeeping didn’t get me much more than equipment, so I
frantically cleaned the suite, expecting the star to arrive any moment.
Then I got word that Rivers’ flight had been cancelled. I was already
exhausted from normal preparations, not to mention all of the cleaning
and vacuuming. I called members of the news media to tell them their
interviews would be delayed, and they were not amused. By this time, my
boss had gotten wind of the fact that the hotel hadn’t cleaned the
suite, and she was beside herself with rage.
When Joan Rivers arrived, with nine-year-old Melissa in tow, she was
ready to get down to work. I explained to her that there were many
interviewers, and that we were running a couple of hours behind
schedule. Reporters were lined up in the hall outside the suite. “Send
them in,” she told me, and that was when we began playing a game that I
might have been better at if I’d been told the rules.
“Come in, come in, have some coffee!” Rivers would tell a reporter. She
was funny, charming and intelligent, answering all questions and paying
close personal attention to each reporter. But when her interviewer
leaned over to pour a cup of coffee or to get a fresh pad of paper, she
would turn slightly toward me and mouth “Get rid of him!”
“I’m afraid we have to stop now. Ms. Rivers is running very late because
of her flight. I’m really sorry.”
“No, no, no!” Rivers would then assure the interviewer. “Finish your
interview. Don’t worry about the time. I insist.” Then she would roll
her eyes toward me and almost imperceptibly motion Get Him Out! with her
hand. Eventually, I became fairly adept at this new version of Good
Cop/Bad Cop, though I had a terribly difficult time getting some of them
out of the suite, what with Joan’s grabbing them by the arm and saying
“Stay, stay!”
At the end of the day, I had to deal with the Jewish mother aspect of
Joan. “Eat, you’re not eating enough,” she would tell me at dinner in
the hotel restaurant. She knew I was at the point of exhaustion, and she
hovered over me. I was her connection to Things That Worked Right, and
she didn’t want to lose me. She was also a genuinely kind woman,
inherently open and full of mischief.
One night, she decided she wanted to buy a T-shirt for Melissa, so she
asked me to accompany her across Bourbon Street to one of the tacky
T-shirt shops that line the Quarter. Rivers, like many entertainers,
will tell you that when she’s leading her non-stage life, she’s not
“on”. Don’t believe it. She couldn’t help herself — she was almost
always on, and I was almost always laughing myself sick.
We stepped into one of the shops, and Rivers tried to negotiate a simple
purchase with a not-too-bright teenage girl who had no clue who her
customer was. The girl couldn’t get anything right, and finally — in
total frustration — Joan leaned over the counter, looked her in the eye,
and asked “It’s not your career, is it?” I couldn’t control my outburst
of laughter and scurried toward the exit.
One of the interviews Joan did was with a local radio personality who
made her crack up by telling her “the thing about chickens is — no
matter how much weight they gain, it never shows in their face.” She
asked him if she could have the line, and he was pleased to give it to
her. I saw her deliver it a few months later on television.
One of the last interviews we did was with my former live-in partner. I
knew he would make Rivers laugh, and he did. About halfway through the
interview, he took a break, and Rivers turned to me and said “You two
have something going on, don’t you?”
I was startled she had picked this up, and I explained to her that we
had once been an item but had broken up. I told her what he had said
when my mother had come to visit: “The whole time Diane’s mother was in
town, I had to keep my Valium in a holster.” I promised her I’d get her
the rights to this line, too.
After the interview, we waited in the hall for the elevator. When it
opened, out stepped my ex’s current girlfriend, a local judge. “That’s
who he’s with now,” I nudged Joan. “What?!” she called out loud enough
to turn heads. “That tramp in the elevator?!”
Years passed. I saw Rivers one more time from a seat at one of her
concerts. Her career soared, and throughout the world, we watched her
deal with everything from the Johnny Carson snub to the death of her
husband, Edgar Rosenberg. Every time I see her on television, I am
reminded of the wild week we spent together in New Orleans, and of my
favorite moment from that week. During one of our rare breaks, we sat in
Joan’s suite drinking coffee and talking trash. At one point, after I
said something that made her burst out laughing, she gestured toward me,
turned to her little girl and said, “Melissa! Get rid of her. She’s
funny.”
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