This book was a gift from friends who know I always enjoyed Rivers' comedy. Bennetts has a great beginning with Rivers contemplating suicide after her husband has done likewise in the aftermath of the cancellation of her Fox talk show which he produced. She's devastated but her little dog jumps on her lap and she reconsiders. After this horrible setback, she bounces back stronger than before becoming a cultural icon while most of her contemporaries fade away. The rest of the bio is fairly standard but not up to the intriguing opening scene, offering insights into Rivers' driven personality and the contradictions in her career. She shattered sexist glass ceilings in comedy, but reinforced the chauvinist attitudes towards beauty and female roles. She made fun of men's shallowness but also derided women who slept around or had let themselves go such as the late-career, heavy-set Elizabeth Taylor. Bennetts also delivers a mini-history of women in comedy, but not a very deep one. She neglects to go very far back (no talk of Mae West or Fanny Brice), skips over some pretty big names (like Elaine May), barely mentions Lily Tomlin and Carol Burnett.
I met Rivers on a few occasions when I wrote for a theater newspaper in the 1990s. She was very gracious and warm. I ran into her at the Boy from Oz (she was an inveterate theatergoer). The show was a bio of Peter Allen and had received mixed reviews, particularly from Ben Brantley of the NY Times, but praise for its star Hugh Jackman. She told me "Anybody who doesn't like this show is an asshole." At another show, I think it was Shakespeare in the Park, I told her I loved the documentary about her life "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work." "Yes," she said, "I wrote and directed it." Well, she didn't really. The last time I saw her in person was at Barnes and Noble on Union Square where she was signing copies of her latest book. The store was packed and she was hysterically funny. "Isn't Meryl Streep a fantastic actress? Wasn't she brilliant in the lead role of Precious?"
It's amazing she lived through so much and went from guest shots on Carol Burnett and Flip Wilson, to her own reality and web series. The Fox fiasco would have ended most people's careers, but she plugged on. One wonders if Kathy Griffin will be able to pull herself back together after the photo shoot with Donald Trump's severed head. Many people recoil at Griffin and Rivers' insult brand of humor, but Don Rickles got away with it. Maybe because he was a man.
The book is fun and full of stories and quips, but kind of a letdown after the great opening.
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