Take It From Joan: Choice Bits From 'Enter Talking'
In 1986, killer comic Joan Rivers wrote a memoir about her slippery path to stardom; here, T. Bloom compiles some of the standout moments
There’s a genre of literature I like to refer to as “Star Lady memoir.” Even the worst ones tend to be pretty revealing in terms of lifestyle inspiration and obscure gossip about figures long dead. The best ones tend to be written very candidly, with the intent of making a splash in the short term and then, ideally, forgotten over the longer term; these books were typically allowed to fall out of print after a relatively short run, and back in the days before the internet, an author could get away with some pretty shocking admissions (including outright lies) and then quickly move on as if nothing had happened.
Many recent memoirs tend to be a little more manicured, with the Star Lady’s eternal legacy in mind, although every now and then you get someone like Gabourey Sidibe or Jodie Sweetin or E. Jean Carroll (this may be the only place those names will ever appear side by side) who isn’t afraid to lay it all on the line, speaking frankly about the raw experience of… well, being themselves.
So the Star Lady memoir isn’t dead; it just takes more guts than the average image-obsessed celebrity (or their publicity team) has access to. And let’s not forget, some success stories are honestly quite boring. Suffering sells more books, and many Star Lady memoirs rival The Passion of The Christ in terms of misery on public display.
Enter Talking by Joan Rivers is definitely in that league. Written in 1986 after she’d already become a notorious, perhaps even inescapable presence in the comedy world, complete with TV and film credits, the book shines a spotlight on every one of Rivers’s neuroses and career missteps, beginning with her early childhood fantasies of stardom (she mailed an 8”x10” photo of herself to MGM Studios — in a frame) to the moment decades later when she finally broke through, as a last-minute guest of Johnny Carson’s on The Tonight Show.
Many see comedy as a place to hide, especially once one has developed a larger-than-life persona for for facing public. If a comedian’s book is charming and outrageous enough, it’s possible readers won’t notice a lack of intimacy in the personal details. We all want to be liked, so it’s hard to fault an author who approaches their memoir as a form of PR, who casts themselves (humbly) in the role of a good-hearted wannabe who worked hard to earn their fame.
Rivers takes a different tack, essentially informing her reader: I was ugly, I was delusional, I was a coward, I ripped off other comedians at every opportunity, and past a certain point I only kept trying because I was mad at my parents.
That’s not a direct quote, though each of those points recurs as a major theme throughout Enter Talking. Perhaps she was trying to get out ahead of those who might be quick to dismiss her as trivial or self-aggrandizing, based on her gossipy stage persona. But truly, Rivers also considered herself saved by the church of comedy, in which a comic’s most raw and painful experiences could act as a lightning rod for connection with the audience. If you couldn’t charm them, you could shock them with your audacity, simply by speaking the truth about yourself.
This is the tone she sets for readers as well, exemplified by this bit on the second page in her book.
“Ultimately, despite my anger, I think my mother and father were innocent. They intended the very best for my older sister and me. But the two of them — really all four of us — were trapped by their Russian childhoods and by the sad toxic mismatch of their marriage — the tragedy of Beatrice Grushman locked to Meyer Molinsky.”
And then she proceeds to linger over these entertaining dramatis personae for several chapters, alternating between love and anger as she spins a sort of supervillain origin story for herself: the little girl whose dreams of showbiz provided a necessary escape from a world in which children were not allowed to have needs or feel special.
Rivers pinpoints the exact moment when that dream was formed:
“I sometimes think of the day I discovered it. In the gymnasium of Brooklyn Ethical Culture School I was a kitty cat in the prekindergarten play, a hit in a major role performed in front of a semicircle of chairs filled with grades K through three and teachers and parents. On my head was a kitty cat hat made of bunny fur with pink felt ears. Afterward, wanting to continue my happiness forever, I refused to take it off. I wore it home, wore it at dinner and in my bath, and wore it in bed that night, sitting there feeling especially pretty in my silk pajamas from Paris — ice blue, with a lace collar and lace cuffs and crystal buttons.”
“I was waiting, very excited, for my father to bring up guests from the dinner party downstairs. I knew they would make a fuss over me, saying, ‘Aren’t you darling,’ and be really impressed because on my blond curls was my kitty cat hat. I wanted to experience again the feelings of that afternoon in front of the audience — the ecstatic sense that I was a pussycat because grownups were accepting me as a pussycat — the sense that I could say, ‘I want to be somebody wonderful and walk out on stage and be the princess,’ and the world would say, ‘Yes, you are the princess.’ That day I found a place where I could put aside real life and rewrite the rules, redo my life.”
Real life stubbornly refused to conform to these fantasies, while Rivers remains sympathetic to the hand her parents were dealt, accepting them as the flawed humans they proved to be, she refuses to sentimentalize their struggles or gloss over their ruinous priorities. Of her father, the busy Brooklyn doctor who avoided his home life at all costs, she concludes: “If my father did not feel loved by his children, it was his fault.”
She also felt betrayed by her own appearance, which became “obliterated by normality” in her post-kitty cat years. Considered overweight for her age, she fell victim to endless bullying and torment, driving her further into her fantasies even if attaining them seemed less possible than ever.
“I remember in particular Jane Weissman’s party. She was the hot girl at Adelphi, an apprentice vamp who played the guitar and was thin and had long hair that flipped under and wore lipstick and deodorant. She invited the whole class to a costume party and my mother decided I should go as a Russian girl. She put me, four feet eight and 120 pounds, into a red turtleneck and dirndl skirt and embroidered an old hat with pearls and ribbons that hung down the back. We found boots. She really thought I was going to a costume party and I absolutely thought I was going to be fine in that getup.
Of course, on the big night everybody else was in togas and skimpy little Daisy Mae costumes — and I marched in as Mother Russia. Nobody danced with me. When we played spin the bottle, I went into the dark room with a boy who right away said, ‘Let’s forget this,’ and the next time in the room another boy took my nose and twisted it, which makes you realize you are not attractive. So I sat in Jane’s kitchen and played with her dogs and called my father to come get me.”
Such was Rivers’s commitment to THE DREAM (as she calls it) that rejection often awakened a terrible ferocity in her. When a summer camp play cast her not as Snow White, the role she’d campaigned for, but as Dopey (handing the lead instead to a girl whose parents had donated funds to the restoration of the playhouse) she staged a revolt among the campers and ended up being sent home early.
From that time on, Joan became “a doer with manic energy,” making sure she was on the organizing committee for every production and overseeing how roles were distributed. Privately, she invented a stage and screen persona for herself, ordering pencils and stationery stamped with the name “J. Sondra Meredith.” She was also deeply lacerated by the rejection she encountered at every turn, overlooked for close friendships and singled out for disparagement by boys.
“I trotted down the dormitory stairs to meet my blind date,” she writes. “The guy frowned, turned to his friend, and said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ A moment like that — and there were many — takes every open wound and makes you feel like nothing, and I wondered, since I was nothing, why I could not disappear. Another time, at the beach, I was wearing a little robe and when I took it off to go swimming, the blind date said, ‘Oh my God!’”
These are anecdotes that many (especially women) will find relatable, but in our narrator they seem to have stirred an especially jagged form of madness. Throughout these formative years, Rivers was determined to stand out on the basis of her talent and personality, but equally desperate to blend in and find acceptance among her peers. “All my life I have been two people wrestling in a bag,” she observes. And to give you a sense of the timeline, she didn’t end up on the Carson show until 1965, when she was already in her thirties — considered quite old for a woman trying to make a proper career in the business.
Every single year between college and The Tonight Show was a continuation of that wrestling match. As a woman cutting her teeth in the business in the ‘50s and ‘60s, bombing over and over in grimy burlesque halls and then later clinging tenaciously to the edge of Greenwich Village’s star-studded counter-culture comedy scene, there was no degradation she could think to heap upon herself that others hadn’t already thrown at her by others in the industry:
“I did anything to be remembered, but mostly made jokes: ‘Should I give you my resume — or should I save you a step and throw it right into the wastebasket?’ I did idiotic things like crawling on my hands and knees all the way from the door to the secretary’s desk, and suddenly she saw this hand appear over the edge of the desk holding a rose. I found their appointment books and wrote in pencil, ‘Get Joan Molinsky a job. She is a good kid.’ When I gave them my eight by ten glossy, I’d draw a mustache on my lip, or a bubble coming out of my mouth reading, ‘I need work.’”
Month by month, year by year, she watched as many of her fellow wannabes (such as Barbra Streisand) became quite famous; meanwhile she’d already begun hearing from agents that she wasn’t truly good enough, that it was too late for her, everyone had already “seen” her. And to an extent, she agreed with them: Joan still hadn’t learned how to write her own material, and often just cribbed funny lines that she heard other comics say on TV, praying no one would notice (and occasionally they did). Or she purchased material from hack comedy writers, and did her best with that; one agent even required her to change her name to Pepper January, with the mandatory tagline: “Comedy with spice!” He was so enamored with this gimmick that when they parted ways, he kept the name and tagline to force onto someone else.
In the 1960s there was still was so little precedent for the kind of person Rivers hoped to become, and discovering that niche for herself required the aspiring star to continually overcome her endless parade of humiliations — which, she’d gradually learn, would end up serving as potent material for her act — in order to set foot onstage. As such, she includes many jaw-dropping tales of her bombing in front of audiences, including, notably, at the Jewish social club her family belonged to, in front of all their friends. She had to live it, so why spare us?
On the bright side, the downtown comedy and nightlife scene also put her in close proximity with many gay men, who became her loyal friends and most appreciative audience. “I have never been truly close to women…” Joan writes. “I was not in competition with these gay men, but had the same interests, same goals, same humor. They were what I wished my sister had been. This was the first time anybody had ever said to me, ‘Wear blue. You look great in blue.’"
This kinship became a major sore spot in dealings with her parents as they became increasingly impatient with their renegade artist daughter’s career struggles, fretting about her proximity to lowlifes and “fairies.” One such argument even provoked her to pack up and move out of their house on the spot. Having finally known real support in the queer world, she’d worked up the courage to face the poverty and drudgery that came with pursuing stardom full-time.
And of course, this extreme familiarity makes it all the more hilarious when she diagnoses one gay director as “flamboyant till you thought he would sprain every ligament… We decided that he was truly demented, that we were dealing with a banana in a cake.”
Because this book is actually a scalding self-evisceration instead of promotional puff piece, you’ll find it is stuffed with insights that remain relevant to comics, outsiders and aspiring whatevers to this day, despite almost sixty years having passed since most of these anecdotes took place. For example: “Your anger can be forty-nine percent and your comedy fifty-one percent, and you are okay. If the anger is fifty-one percent, the comedy is gone. Comedy is anger, but anger is not comedy.”
But Joan’s story abruptly winds to a close immediately following her big break on The Tonight Show, a clear statement that the author considered these formative struggles to be far more impactful than anything that came as a result of it — and perhaps too, the telling served as a balm for her own anger, which she remained careful to temper in her stage routine, even though it seemed at times like her humor danced on a knife’s edge. It was a familiar blade to her by then, one which had started out very crude and dull, and which she had sharpened and mastered the use of through endless trial and error, long before anyone heard Johnny Carson say her name TV.
“A friend told me that onstage I reminded him of a car window filled with the faces of eager, peering dogs,” she writes of those early years. Even decades later, she was never embarrassed to have been that person, as fresh as the pain still clearly was. Perhaps not everyone can personally withstand the kind of fire and acid that makes this sort of alchemical transmutation possible, but thankfully Enter Talking remains a handy reference to contradict anyone’s claim that it simply can’t be done.