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The only good thing about getting old, says Joan Rivers, is that it frees her up to be more outspoken. You do wonder how anyone can tell. The comedian turned 75 this year and so what, she says in her new stage show, if the guys she dates are so old that when one gives her a love bite, he leaves his teeth in her neck?
Or that at her recent high school reunion, "women were dancing with urns"? At least she can say what she likes these days, though the bar for what qualifies as outrageous is, in her estimation, pathetically low.
Rivers takes pills while I fix a recorder. "These are my evening pills." They are laid out on a table in her New York apartment, which, with its triple-height ceilings and rococo furniture, looks like the staterooms at the palace of Versailles. On the sofa is a cushion with the inscription "I need a man to spoil me or I don't need a man at all", and Rivers, perched, small and elegant. After all that cosmetic surgery she looks, if not youthful exactly, then ageless, her face so firmly landscaped that only her eyes rove free. She is the first to make fun of it, but the point about cosmetic surgery, she says, is it enables her to "look in the mirror without vomiting. It's that simple".
Rivers was in the news in Britain in June for an outburst she says was a mistake. She assumed the ITV talk show, Loose Women, on which she had appeared to publicise her new play, was filmed with a seven-second delay to bleep out swearing. It was live so her assessment of Russell Crowe's character ("f***ing shit") went out uncensored, whereupon she was ejected from the show at the nearest ad break. Friends rallied to her defence. One, who produces The Today Show, sent an email saying: "Jane Fonda said worse on our show, so calm down." Another, who works on The View, sent a list, recalling Susan Sarandon said "f***". Rivers shrugs. "Bigger shows, bigger performers. So it's OK. They were very sweet, those messages."
Her voice is a little hoarse Rivers has been doing a season of shows at the New York venue, the Cutting Room. Her stage persona is a parody of the heartless Manhattan drama queen who waves a fox fur in the face of an animal rights activist and says: "Honey, this animal's been places you won't go while you're alive."
She is expert at teasing out an audience's hypocrisy. "Oh, I see," she says, turning to the crowd in mock disgust after a joke falls flat. "It's OK to laugh at the Jews, the gays and the immigrants - but 9/11, you draw the line?" And she does her you-people-are-disgusting screech.
In real life, Rivers is warm and generous with the proceeds of a show a week going to charity. She hates discord: "I like a happy set. I like everybody to love everybody." While writing the play she brought to the Edinburgh Festival - a look at ageing, set in her dressing room at the Oscars - she worked hard to ensure the other actors didn't feel undervalued: "I had to make sure each character has what I call an aria, so that at night when they go home, they say, that was fun, rather than, I stood there and supported that old bitch."
She says her reputation as a troublemaker came after she quit her job as a contributing comic on the Johnny Carson show and offended Carson so egregiously he never spoke to her again and put it about that she was impossible to work with. "When I left The Tonight Show, NBC put out very bad publicity about me, and for the next seven years people would say, 'I've heard terrible things about you, but you were fine."'
Her eyes narrow. "They were bad boys. Not nice people." Of the late Carson, she growls: "Pity for him. Pity to be that uptight. God. Idiot."
After her parents died, Rivers felt free to make her act a lot ruder. She was born Joan Molinsky, to a doctor and a housewife, both of whom, she says, lived to see her successful, which "was wonderful", given the doubts they had about her chosen career. But they would be horrified by her act as it is now. "My mother was a Victorian lady and she'd be in shock. Total shock. As would my father. And I think my daughter is, to an extent. But she's grown up with it, so I think she's learned to divide it away."
Rivers' comedy works, in part, because the first casualty is always herself and there is almost nothing she won't joke about, including her husband Edgar's death, 20 years ago, from suicide. Their only daughter, Melissa, was 17 at the time and now in her late 30s has named her son after him, which pleases Rivers.
Edgar was an English producer and mordantly funny. "He had to be funny for me to like him. He had a very dry humour. But everyone in my family is funny. Melissa is funny, my grandson is funny, my father was funny, my sister is funny - she's a lawyer, but she's funny. I think it's DNA."
Melissa has adopted her mother's surname on stage, which Rivers thinks "is great", and they work together occasionally as television presenters. "We're very complementary. She's not a comedienne, she's much more of an interviewer, so we weren't competing."
I wonder if there is anything Melissa has asked her mother not to joke about? "No, because she grew up knowing I never would. Even as a child, she was never the butt. The boyfriends were never brought into it. I think she worried a little when she got divorced, because I was so angry. And I would have absolutely demolished my former son-in-law on stage. And that's the only time she said to me, `I'm pleading with you, be careful. It'll just be harder on me.' So I didn't."
Those angered by Rivers tend to be other celebrities. For years, her commentary from the sidelines of the red carpet was a highlight of the Oscars. Most of the actors loved it, coming up to her to submit themselves to scrutiny. Julia Roberts said: "Come on, say it to my face." George Clooney: "Well, yes or no?" But there was the occasional sense of humour failure. "Diane Keaton was very angry with me, which was disappointing. Especially as I wrote a chapter for her stupid book on clowns. For free! Tommy Lee Jones, very angry."
Her eyes do a loop.
Rivers' career advice is, "say yes to everything", which is how she comes to be selling jewellery on American shopping channel QVC, despite being advised against it. "Because QVC, when I started, was disgusting. It was the lowest. If your career was in the toilet, you went on QVC." But the brand, the Joan Rivers Collection, has been so successful it's her main source of income. She also has a sitcom pilot in the pipeline and is writing a book about cosmetic surgery. "I will never be done," she says of surgery. "If I look in a mirror and I get very depressed, I will probably do something. Right now I'm fine. But who knows? One day I might wake up and go, oh God, I can't look at myself."
At her recent school reunion, she says, "you could see the women who had done something [surgical] and those who hadn't".
Does she think her daughter will go in for it? "That's interesting, because I bet she's going to be averse to it. We're very opposite. She wears very little makeup, wears casual clothes, lives in a pretty house but totally different from how I live.
" I always say to her, 'When I die, sell everything. You're not going to want 130 service plates and 240 finger bowls and 1000 wine glasses'." She looks around the apartment and smiles. "I say to her, sell 'em all and get what you want."
Get what you want: it's the hard-earned moral of Rivers' story.
JOAN RIVERS
Born: Joan Alexandra Molinsky, June 8, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York
Early career: As a comedian in the 1960s on The Tonight Show and The Ed Sullivan Show; graduated from a live opening act to a headliner.
The rise and rise: Hosted her own late show, then quit Johnny Carson's Tonight Show; he banned her from returning as a guest and they never reconciled. The Joan Rivers Show ran from 1989 to 1994.
* Hosted red carpet specials for the TV Guide channel 2005-07; fired because the TV Guide chiefs decided they wanted a "friendlier face".
* She appeared as herself in an episode of Nip/Tuck in 2005.
Did you know? When Rivers was given a pink Logie at the 2006 Australian Logie Awards, she threw it away, saying it was the ugliest award she had seen.
- OBSERVER
