Barbs for the Queen (and Others)

By Gerald Clarke

Bitchy Joan Rivers is the funniest woman in America

"If I say anything vicious, just add afterward the words: 'She laughed.' " So, to grant the lady her request and, at the same time, to avoid repeating those two words several dozen times, please regard most of the punctuation marks that follow as shorthand symbols for "Joan Rivers laughed."

Assume then that she laughs when she makes a joke about Queen Elizabeth's taste in clothes, something like, "I put a doily under the Kitty Litter. She was very impressed. She took it home for a hat." Supply giggles also when she takes on Nancy Reagan: "She's a great lady. She never swears. She told me to go and reproduce myself." And realize as well that Rivers is smiling when she tosses darts at her favorite target, Elizabeth Taylor: "She pierced her ears and gravy came out" or "Mosquitos see her and scream 'Buffet!' " or "She stands in front of a microwave oven and yells 'Hurry!' "

Be certain too that the corners of her mouth are elevated into a grin when Joan Rivers talks about Joan Rivers: "Right now I'm the meanest bitch in America."

Well, given the competition, probably not, but it is safe to say that her outrageous, bitchy brand of humor has earned her the title of the funniest woman in the country. When she is host of the Tonight show, which she now is more than anyone else except Johnny Carson, she sometimes outdraws the man himself in the ratings. She is one of the few stars who can still pack houses in a depressed Las Vegas; her twelve-city tour in February was an instant sellout; and last week Geffen Records released her first album in years, What Becomes a Semi Legend Most? Next week she will be the host of NBC's Saturday Night Live, and on April 18 she will take over the Carson show again for a week. "I think the country is ready for me," she says. "People have come around to me, which is terrific, because, God knows, I haven't changed."

Except, perhaps, to become more secure onstage and a little more insecure off. This morning, as she talks about herself in her house in Beverly Hills, gobbling a rainbow selection of vitamin pills and munching an unpalatable-looking dish of diet food, she is more jittery than usual and speaks even faster, as unlikely as that may sound. In a few hours she will be a guest on the Tonight show, and that is even harder on her nerves than being the host. "Johnny gave her her break," explains her husband, Edgar Rosenberg. "And she always wants to shine for him."

Rivers always wants to shine, and except for the time she spends every day with her daughter, Melissa, 14, there is scarcely a second when she is not polishing her material. All over her house, elegantly decorated with French and English antiques, there are pads stashed away and pens and pencils inside pretty enameled boxes. When she is not working on jokes, she is thinking up TV and movie scripts. Though it received bad-to-middling reviews five years ago, Rabbit Test, her film comedy about the first man to become pregnant, is still returning profits. Now she is preparing to make a movie about television, Situation Comedy, which should blister the networks the way her fat jokes do Elizabeth Taylor.

On this particular morning, however, she is thinking about tonight's Carson show, and though she will be on for only a few minutes, she has been preparing for weeks. She tested her jokes for two weeks at The Horn, an unglamorous little night club in Santa Monica. Now they are ready and, excusing herself, she takes a call from Bob Dolce, one of the talent coordinators for the Carson show, who listens as she reads her carefully rehearsed routine from a three-page typewritten scenario.

First, she tells him, she will talk about the Queen, who has just completed a visit to California, and runs through her jokes about the Queen's clothes ("Gowns by Helen Keller"). Then she suggests that if Carson wants to interrupt her--the Tonight show is only slightly less spontaneous than a shuttle launch--he might ask her if she saw Nancy Reagan during the Queen's visit. "I'll say: 'She was at my house for lunch! Do you know why people turn off on Nancy Reagan? She's too pretty. They expect her to look like Eleanor Roosevelt.

John, I saw a picture of Eleanor Roosevelt. I thought she was wearing a gas mask.'"

And so on, stopping at several of Rivers' other targets, including her own supposedly ugly body ("They show my picture to men on death row to get their minds off of women") and her fictional friend, Heidi Abromowitz, the town tramp. She wants to do a new joke about poor Heidi--"She had more hands up her dress than the Muppets"--but she is afraid that it might be too raw for television. "I love that line more than life itself," she tells Dolce before she hangs up. A few minutes later, after checking with network censors, he calls back:

The joke about Heidi can stay in, but one off-color comment about the Queen has to go. Rivers accepts quickly and that night is all fizz and sparkle, giving not a hint that she has traveled the same ground many times before.

Is there anyone, sovereign, subject or just plain citizen, safe from Rivers' barbs? "Deformed children," she answers. "And religion I'm very careful with. Otherwise, no. Everyone I've ever made a joke about has been huge. Who cares if I tell Sophia Loreri she's a tramp? She doesn't even know who I am. All I am saying about Elizabeth Taylor is what everyone else is saying. She ought to thank me. I'm part of the reason she lost weight.

"Comedy should always be on that very fine line of going too far. It should always be on the brink of disaster. Otherwise, it's pap, and who cares? It's boring. Then you become the grand old lady. The audience will make a subject sacrosanct anyway. Death, for example. They just don't want to laugh about death. I think we should. When my mother died, I kept going by doing joke after joke. I get rid of things through very black humor. I have a wonderful Karen Carpenter joke: 'I have no pity for anyone who becomes thin enough to get buried in pleats.' I tried it three times, and audiences gasped. They're just not ready for it."

If Rivers has her way, some day they will be ready, and the only constant in her life, besides fear of poverty, is determination. When he first met her in the mid-'60s, Husband Edgar recalls, she was so frightened onstage that she was afraid to touch the microphone; she was convinced that the perspiration on her hands would cause it to electrocute her. Three weeks before she made her first appearance on the Carson show in 1965, her agent told her she should give up the business: Everybody had seen her, and she was too old. (How old, she refuses to say, but she graduated from Barnard College in 1954 and cannot be much younger than 50 now.) Still, she continued.

Her determination is all her own. Her fear of poverty she inherited from her mother, who had been born to wealth in Imperial Russia, lost it in the Revolution and, despite marriage to a prosperous doctor, lived in horror of ever being broke again. During her own years of struggle, when her parents refused to help her further a career they disapproved of, Rivers was desperately poor, making only $6 a night in sleazy strip joints. Now that she has money, she too is afraid to lose it and is terrified, as her husband says, of winding up indigent in a nursing home.

"I wake up at night and say, 'What if I'm not funny in the morning?' " she says. " 'It's gone. It's over. Goodbye to the house, goodbye to Melissa's horses and the dogs, make sushi out of the goldfish.' I always think it is just going to go away. Success is very fickle, and you must never think it is going to last forever, because it will not. Every time I go onstage, I say a little prayer, 'Thank you, God.' " Rosenberg, whose family fled Germany for South Africa after Hitler came to power, has similar fears and is trying to amass his own fortune by implanting developments amid the rural beauties of Bucks County, Pa.

This year, and for some years past, Rivers has had success and more, and if she ever does wake up and find it hard to think of anything funny to say, she can always retreat to her reserve supply, twelve drawers of jokes carefully catalogued and cross-indexed on 3-in. by 5-in. cards. While she talks to her two secretaries, she lets a visitor browse through the headings; such topics as Drugs, Face Lifts, Beverly Hills, Homosexuals, My Body, and No Sex Appeal, which has the most entries, more than 400. "I can't stand it," she says whenever she hears a chuckle. "Which one are you laughing at?" Finally, she stops work and comes over to go through the cards herself. "Here's a good one about Heidi Abromowitz: The last time she made love she said, 'Was it good for you?' 'Yes,' said the Navy." She laughs, pulls it from the drawer, and that night several million people hear it on the Johnny Carson show.

--By Gerald Clarke This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.