Joan Rivers, the Brooklyn-born insult comic, author and red-carpet commentator, died on Thursday. She was 81.
“She passed peacefully at 1:17 p.m. surrounded by family and close friends,” her daughter, Melissa, said in a statement. “My mother’s greatest joy in life was to make people laugh. Although that is difficult to do right now, I know her final wish would be that we return to laughing soon.”
According to the Associated Press, the New York State Department of Health is investigating the circumstances surrounding Rivers’ cardiac arrest during an outpatient procedure.
Rivers, the boundary-breaking stand-up artist whose acerbic monologues took her from Greenwhich Village coffeehouses in the early 1960s to “The Tonight Show” in 1965, and on to her own late-night show, daytime talk, cable fashion commentary and a jewelry business, was a put-down artist before women were allowed to be such a thing.
Despite breaking barriers for women in comedy and influencing artists such as Sarah Silverman, Kathy Griffin and many others, she did not consider herself a feminist.
“It’s all about the funny,” she said.
She appeared in Denver numerous times, hosting the local Emmy Awards and playing the Comedy Works, most recently with shows at Comedy Works South in 2009 and 2010.
Born Joan Molinsky in Brooklyn, N.Y., the 1954 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Barnard was a self-described competitive workaholic, driven by the experience of not being considered a beauty as a girl.
In a 1990 interview with the Denver Post, Rivers spoke openly of being hurt by the entertainment industry elite. Hollywood is “very cliquish,” she told the Post. “I was not in the A group. I was in the X group, you know, when you’re invited because you’re fun but not really one of them.”
Rivers left the Johnny Carson guest-host niche after three years in May 1986 to start her own late-night gig, “The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers,” on Fox. Her relationship with her former mentor ended badly, after she attained the highest ratings of any guest host, sometimes higher than Carson. According to legend, Carson hung up on her and they never spoke again. It remained one of the greatest professional disappointments of her life.
Rivers’ Fox show was canceled in May ’87, and in August, her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, committed suicide. Her personal tragedy, her diets and plastic surgeries were well-documented. While her critics were unsparing — often justifiably so, given her own harshness in the media — she remained irrepressible. Within months of Edgar’s death, she was making black-humor jokes as a way of working through her grief.
She went back to Broadway for six months. Rivers was nominated for a Tony Award for the play “Donna Marr and her escorts” in 1994. She was also nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Recording in 1985.
After rejecting a number of sitcom scripts, she settled on the talk- show format.
She also produced autobiographies “Enter Talking” and “Still Talking” and the comedy anthologies “Having a Baby Can Be a Scream” and “The Life and Hard Times of Heidi Abromowitz.” (The latter about “her former best, best friend, Heidi Abromowitz, the girl whose come-hither look inspired the discovery of penicillin.”)
Rivers did largely untouted charity work as well, and served as national spokesperson for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.
Perhaps because of a childhood rooted in Depression-era values, she remained remarkably sanguine about her ups and downs.
“Bitter? What am I going to be bitter about?” she told the Post in 1989. “I had rough breaks. Everybody — and I’m not being cute — has rough breaks. Everybody goes through a lot in their lives. I’m doing well. I’m healthy. I’m going to see old age.”
Her trademark phrase — “Can we talk?” — and her omnipresent red-carpet work made her one of the most accessible personalities in stand-up, despite also being one of the bawdiest. But according to Rivers herself, the entertainment industry at large was her home.
“What haven’t I done yet that I’d still like to do?” she said in a 2010Denver Post interview. “Everything. I’d love to go back to Broadway. I’ve never been in a good movie or a regular on a series, which is quite surprising. There are so many things I just love about the business. I don’t care what aspect of it. I just love it.”
After performing at Denver’s Comedy Works South in 2010, Rivers handed out boxes of jewelry from her QVC collection to all the staff members at the club.
“That may sound like a silly, nothing-type thing, but it was a lovely gesture,” said Comedy Works owner Wende Curtis. “It’s the thought. People remember how you make them feel.”
Curtis, who echoed others in calling Rivers “a tough broad,” had a standing offer for Rivers to perform at her club anytime she wanted.
“I remember sitting in the green room watching her get her hair and makeup done and listening to her journey and where she’s been,” Curtis said. “People take for granted certain things about her, but when I was watching her while I was growing up, she really did buck against the good-old-boys’ club in the entertainment industry. And she remained one of the most generous people I’ve ever met.”
Some would quibble with that statement. A strike by writers on her E! network show “Fashion Police” left some younger comics with a bitter taste in their mouths over what they described as low, unfair pay for their work.
“Hey @hallmark what do you have in the way of sympathy cards for petty daughters of dead millionaires who ruined your life?” tweeted Los Angeles-based stand-up Bryan Cook shortly after the news of Rivers’ death. Cook, a striking writer on “Fashion Police” since April 2013, also wrote a number of tweets that cannot be republished here.
Rivers also courted controversy with her off-the-cuff remarks, including recent ones about the conflict in Gaza that critics dubbed as racist.
Still, for many comics who knew or performed with Rivers, the news of her death was a sad demarcation point in show business.
“My heart is torn in half,” wrote comedian Sarah Silverman on Facebook. “She wasn’t done.”
Denver comic Phil Palisoul, who performed with Rivers at one of her 2010 Comedy Works South shows, remembers Rivers opening up the green room to his mother so she could meet and talk to Rivers before the show.
“It’s funny, (Rivers’) stamp of approval about my comedy to my mother was the first time that my mother turned around and really thought I was good,” Palisoul said. “I married a female comic (Denver’s Nora Lynch), and that job only exists because of people like Joan Rivers.”
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830, jostrow@denverpost.com or twitter.com/ostrowdp
