Comedian Helen Lederer on Joan Rivers

0:00Today's guest is a writer and comedian who established herself on stage at London's Comedy Store more than a few decades ago. This summer, she was back on stage, this time in a West End production of 40 Towers. Helen Lederer, tell us who you've picked and why. I have picked the great and late Joan Rivers. I relate to her. In 1984, when I was a stand-up comedian, I'd been doing it, I think, a couple of years. I went to see an audience with Joan Rivers, and it was like this angel with this blonde hair and glitter. so stylish, but that's not the main thing, with gags, with content, ferocious, aggressive, intelligent, went where no one else I had seen has gone before.

0:47She's really important to me. Actually, you dug out a photograph of yourself in the audience looking at Joan on stage, and I can see the awe in your young face. Yes, in my very young face, a lot of bouffant, 80s hair. But the more you know about Joan, her work ethic, the tapestry of gags, I mean, she's a worker, she's a comedian's comedian, but also really vulnerable. And I relate to that vulnerability. She will not be put down and yet deeply insecure. That mixture of strength and vulnerability. I understand all of those thrusts and all those impulses, but her bitterness about her peer group and how they didn't include her.

1:27I really relate to that. Because of being a woman in a very male world, because I'm assuming there weren't that many female comedians around when you started out. No, there weren't that many. And what's interesting is looking at the archives of all the interviews that Joan did, certainly with male interviews. I've co-hosted with Terry Wogan myself, very lovely, benign, the more intellectual one of hard talk. She said she was an actress playing a comedian. I don't know if that's true. But I just remember seeing all these avuncular men trying to make sense of her, trying to get under her skin. And they didn't.

2:00She's impenetrable. And I love her for that. Now, you said you related to her. You relate to that aspect of feeling like an outsider. Yes. I mean, most comedians will say they're unhappy and an outsider. As she said, we're all complainers. I mean, you know, it's not record science to perhaps understand why you don't want to be loved. And we need to feel alive by keeping working. and me as an older person. You know, work is a vibrancy and I'm still driven by the thought of it, even if I don't get it. But I so relate to her vulnerability in the documentary that she made where she didn't have any say in the edit.

2:35Oh, I related to the bad reviews that was cheerfully being read out on her assistant's iPhone and having to let an agent go, tears in her eyes. It's an impossible life and I love it. Joan Rivers was born Joan Malinsky in Brooklyn in 1933, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. Success didn't come easily, but she was a real grafter, as you say, and she hit the big time as a guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in the mid-60s. And before long, she was familiar to TV viewers on both sides of the Atlantic. Now, you've heard it said before that the following may not be suitable for persons of a nervous disposition.

3:16Well, I'm giving the same fair warning tonight To anyone of a prudish disposition the rest of you stay where you are sharpen your wits broaden your minds. Here's Joan Rivers And here she is being introduced by Bob Monkhouse some four decades ago Gotta say right away. I am stunned by that outfit is beautiful. What happened was they lost my luggage coming over I had no clothes no clothes luckily. I found this on a chair next to my husband's bed, so And it came with a garter belt and stockings and a little diaphragm. Isn't that nice? I'm thoughtful of him. She also had a short-lived BBC chat show in the mid-'80s called Can We Talk?

3:58And her guests included Peter Cook, Barry Manilow, Kermit the Frog and the Page 3 girl Samantha Fox. And she asked all of them, including Kermit, about their sex life. In fact, she asked Samantha Fox if she was a virgin. She definitely set out to shock, didn't she? She lets people find the joke. I mean, there is irony. What's nice about Bob Monkhouse interviewing her is when you get the people who get humour together, it's a beautiful thing. But yeah, I saw the one with Peter Cook and they're like naughty children phoning up Nancy Reagan. Of course, she knows Nancy Reagan because Nancy Reagan already phoned her up and said, look, you can make jokes about me, my husband, but not the children.

4:35So I think she had a secret crush on Nancy Reagan. And she respected that, didn't she? Yeah, she respected that one. I think she can be inconsistent about her rationalisation. But always the themes were, you know, sex, betrayal, ageing, childbirth. Yes, all those things. But they're universally funny. And she had some very tough times, didn't she? There's a biography which I read, which starts in her mid 50s. She's just been fired from her talk show on Fox. Her husband, who was also her manager, took his own life and left her with over 30 million dollars of debt, which she had no idea she had.

5:13And as she liked to tell it, the only thing that stopped her from killing herself was who's going to look after her cantankerous Yorkshire Terrier Spike. Yes. So she would probably, yes, undermine it. But I didn't realise her husband also produced on the show that he was let go from and she was let go. Everybody gets sacked. Well, most people do. And so I love hearing her talk about how she drew from that, made jokes about it. So she goes to all aspects of humanity. And wow, we should be, well, we are very great. I'm very grateful for that. Well, joining us on the line now from New York is the writer and critic Joe Queenan.

5:51Welcome to Great Lives, Joe. I believe you were on Joan Rivers' radio show in the U.S. How was that? You must be a bit frightened, weren't you? No, I don't get frightened. I only get frightened if I don't get paid. She told the audience in no uncertain terms, you better laugh at everything he says. She just radiated this affection. She was great. People use the term legends, but legend just means old. To be a legend, you have to have had a past that is in some way mysterious, where there's things that can't be confirmed. Like, where did you go to school? Where did you grow up? What party did you—and that's what she was like because she had this somewhat mysterious past.

6:32People don't know that she went to Barnard, which is the sister college of Columbia University, which is like going to Oxford. People didn't know that. Some people thought she grew up in the suburbs in Larchmont, but she didn't. She grew up in Brooklyn, and then her parents moved when she was 19. But she would always use jokes about the suburbs. So she had this mysterious past. And to be a really good legend, you have to have things that can't be confirmed, like did you sleep with Robert Mitchum and stuff like that. But also, she had this fantastic feud with Johnny Carson. She had her own talk show.

7:06She didn't tell him. He just freaked out, never spoke to her again, wouldn't let her be on the show again, wouldn't let anybody who succeeded him in The Tonight Show have her on for like 20 more years. I just think it's so great that people had feuds like that where Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin never talked to each other again. And she was the center of this epic feud. Everybody knew about that story. She probably holds grudges, which I think is great. So do I. I agree with Joe that, you know, about the feud with Johnny Carson, but she would be very clever. If something hurts her, she would find a way to weave it into the interview.

7:43She wasn't your run-of-the-mill successful stand-up comedian, I agree, a legend. Now, she said that she had her epiphany moment playing a kitten on stage at primary school and the pleasure she felt at getting the applause. I'm quoting her here, I want to walk out on stage and be a princess and I want the world to say, yes, you are a princess. I mean, Helen, can you relate to that? When I was 10, I was writing plays and pretending to be David Frost. So that was my other role model. Slightly different from a princess. But it's still sort of centre stage. But yes, getting attention, being the person engaging with the audience.

8:18So I think it is an innate thing. But she was always a part of your life because she had been on the same television programmes as the Rolling Stones in the middle 60s because the variety shows had everybody on them, which would not be the case now because everything's segmented. There were these people here, these people there. But back in those days, you were aware of who she was. And I think you were also aware of how different she was from the male stand-ups. We hated the stand-up comics. And part of it was their routines were always, well, let me talk to you about my wife. Take my wife, please.

8:56But the wife didn't exist. It was just this kind of generic, mythical wife. When Joan Rivers was talking, she was talking about her husband. She was talking about a real person, and that was so different from those guys. Those guys were so tired. They were so lame. They were so predictable. She broke away from all that. Well, let's hear from Joan again. Here she is in 1990 talking to Jackie Brambles on Radio 1. I actually heard that we dragged you in off the street from filming. You're doing some filming around the West End and stuff. We did filming in a sex shop, which was unbelievable. I mean, you just read about these things, but you just don't...

9:32Did you find anything in the country? Oh, I brought many gifts for friends. Nothing for my daughter. Nothing for yourself? Nothing for myself that the crew would watch. Look what she's buying. No, no, no. So what are the main differences you find, apart from the lousy weather coming over here? Do you think people are very similar? Or do you think there's a huge chasm between Americans and British? Well, my husband was English. So that makes a big difference. You understand. And I think the British, once they like you as a performer, they like you forever. I think the Americans are much more fickle.

10:04We like you, we hate you, we like you, we hate you. Go away. Helen, did you know she was married to an Englishman? No, I didn't know. That wasn't one of the features that struck why I liked her so much. But she did say she married him four days after they met, which I was trying to think about the mechanics of that. But I think, strictly speaking, actually, he wasn't an Englishman. He was brought up in South Africa, but had a sort of English education. Yes. As we all know, an English accent goes down well on the other side of the pond, doesn't it? But I do wonder, yes, I do wonder that listening to her, you go, she knows what she's going to say.

10:39And I wish she was around now because she would just slice through stuff. I'm interested that you say you wish she was around now because I've actually wondered, watching a lot of her material in the past few days, whether she would survive now, whether she would be cancelled or being too nasty. I just have a feeling she would do something else. I mean, look at how she went on the QVC. She needed money. What do I do? As a shopping channel. Yes, I watch the shopping channel. I go, do you know, I quite like that pendant. Obviously, I didn't. But, you know, she said, oh, I could sleep with Fabergé in another life or something.

11:11I mean, but she will do anything. She said, I wear a diaper. You know, she disrespects and respects the establishment all at once. And I love that. Now, Helen, you appeared earlier this year on a travel show called Pilgrimage as one of seven celebrities retracing a medieval pilgrimage route through the Alps. So we walked a lot. Yes. Now, is that something Joan Rivers would have done? Do you know she would? Because depending on where it came to her in her life, she wanted to be with the Trump one on The Apprentice, The Celebrity Apprentice. She wanted that because it was FaceTime TV. And I've done a lot of programmes that people say, why?

11:47I remember Dawn French asked me why. I thought, well, OK, you wouldn't need to, Dawn. I need to. It's money, it's work, it's profile, and it might lead to putting on that play that you really want to put on or advertising slimming pills. Who knows? Jo Queenan in New York, let's spool back a little bit now. We mentioned that Joan's big break was getting on to the Johnny Carson show. They then had their falling out and so on. But what was she doing before she hit the big time on the Johnny Carson show? You know, she worked the Borscht Belt. She did all these small clubs. She did all the retirement places.

12:19She did everything like that. She worked in Greenwich Village at all the clubs. She liked working. And, you know, Bob Dylan, who she knew from those days, he's the same way. He just works. He just never stops touring. But she was on a lot of different television programs before she got her big break on Carson. Because she once told an interviewer that her ferocious drive came from growing up fat and ugly and that her older sister was prettier, smarter and better. And Helen, here's a photo of her in 1965 when she's 32 years old. I mean, describe what she looked like then to us. Well, she looked very different, but didn't we all when we were 32?

13:01But yeah, her face changed and she had really kind of kooky, amazing modern hair, you know, like in sections. I thought, how do you get your hair like that? She changed her nose, her mouth. Yeah, she definitely had a nose job by then, hadn't she? You could see a little ski jump. Yes, a lot of comedians. I mean, I was fat and wheezy with a hairband. You know, I don't say that you have to be that to be a comedian, but that desire to not be ugly stems from childhood. And if she thought she was ugly, then that explains a lot. She was glamorous, though, wasn't she? Always looked well turned out. Very glamorous.

13:34You're listening to The Great Life of Joan Rivers, nominated by Helen Lederer. And here is Joan on BBC's Hard Talk, the news interview programme with Tim Sebastian. My looks. Looking back, you're lucky, because if you were attractive, I wouldn't be sitting here with you. I'd be a dentist's wife somewhere, but I was always the looks. You were not a pretty child. You were not attractive. You were not the ones sought out. You were not the cheerleader. You were not, you know, the class player. You didn't get to be Snow White. I got to play dopey, literally. Dopey. I don't forget. I forgive, but I don't forget.

14:11And so the humour covered everything. I was not the class clown. I was the class wit. Jo, she had quite a temper, didn't she, which you referred to on one of your Radio 4 archive shows, A Brief History of Anger. Here she is from a famous appearance on Midweek with Dark As How. Since black offends, Jo, I would make it... Wait, no, just stop right now. Black does not offend me. How dare you? How dare you say that? Black offends me? You know nothing about me. You sat down here. How dare you? The use of the term black offends you. Well, the use of the term black offends me? Where the hell are you coming from?

14:55You have got such a chip on your shoulder. I don't give a damn if you're a black, white. I do. I couldn't care less. It's what the person is. And don't know. But don't you dare call me a racist. I don't know you. I don't think it was personal, Cherry. The term black offends me? I don't think it was personal, Jane. Oh, I think it was. When someone says the term black offends Joan, I will not sit here and be sad. How dare you say that to me? I think this is a language problem. No, I don't. I think this is a problem in your stupid head. You had a child, you left them, your wife said you weren't there, you married a woman, you deserted her, now your son comes back, he's got problems.

15:33Where were you when he was growing up until he was eight years old? May we continue? Yes, you sir, but don't you dare call me a racist. Don't you dare call me a rape. I'm sorry. I know, but I will not be there. How dare you? And on and on it went. I mean, we were playing the whole thing. I mean, it's blistering stuff. But what was interesting there was, yeah, don't you dare, don't you dare, like real enunciation, was that she then went for him as well and his private life, like leaving his wife or whatever. Yeah, not being a good father. I mean, she got pretty personal pretty quick. And it comes, and that's when you see something.

16:05You really see the steel, the fight and the hurt in her. She is not going to be mailed on that one. And then at one point I thought she was going to be turning on Libby Purvis as well, just for even speaking. So, yeah. But it's aggressive though, isn't it? I mean, it's a clue to what she might have been like that behind the scenes. Come to my house. I mean, nobody is the same. As she said, we're all different parts wherever we are, in the shop, at home, whatever, shouting at someone. We don't do that enough here, do we? We don't. We're polite. We're boring. Was she like that offstage as well? I think so.

16:40I think that that was her personality. I mean, remember, she grew up surrounded by male comedians. Nobody cared what the male comedians looked like. They didn't even talk about their appearance. She always had to talk about her appearance. And she used very unusual gestures. She would sort of lunge at the audience in a way that people hadn't done before. She was all over the place with her arms and everything like that. But that was her. And reading the details of her life, it seems that she was involved in as many failures as she had hits. I mean, do you think that's fair? Yeah. And Americans love comeback stories like Frank Sinatra was down and out.

17:16And then he came back and made From Here to Eternity. People love the fact that she was down. She was back. She was down. She was back. She had this failure. She was on this show. It got canceled. You were aware of everything that she was doing because she was ubiquitous. Trump's like that now. You couldn't not know what Joan Rivers was doing because she was doing 50 million things and she was always doing outrageous things. Now, in 1986, she was offered her own chat show on Fox, which meant leaving NBC. And she claimed that Johnny Carson, as you mentioned, never spoke to her again. I mean, was that true, do you think?

17:54Yes, I do think that was true. I think that that was the one thing that she said in her entire life that was absolutely true. So she becomes the first female to have her own talk show. She goes up against Johnny Carson. She gets annihilated. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. None of that hurt her career. Everything contributed to the legend of Joan Rivers. And the show flopped. That was the other thing. Rivers didn't shoot herself and she refused to give up and slink into oblivion. Written off as a lost cause. She started over. She invented new opportunities and she went on to achieve the impossible.

18:32I mean, she did rise up from the ashes again, didn't she? Yeah. And part of it was she had a lot of talent. I mean, other people do a talk show, they get cancelled. Goodbye. That's the end of your career. It happens to actors all the time. But she was larger than life and she knew it. Helen, do you have any advice for anyone whose life and career is in free fall? As if I would know anything about that. Showbiz is very, very nasty. She knows it's nasty, but she's attracted to the light. You keep going. You do something else. Somehow she made needy funny. I don't know how she did it. As Jo says, very unique, contradictory, but very present.

19:09Now you've written a memoir, Not That I'm Bitter. How would you compare your lives? I'd compare my own sense of myself with the business that she describes, particularly the pain. I mean, I did many shows in Edinburgh Festival and I'd read a review and then I'd go, I'll just read another one because it can't be as bad as that one. And then it was. That is an experience. You're doing your best or you're doing what you think is good. And she cared. She wanted to be taken serious as an actress. So I think she didn't get what she wanted, even though to the outside eye she was the queen, the best. Somehow she never thought she was.

19:52And I wouldn't compare myself to the notoriety of Joan Rivers, but I understand the life. She had so many strong qualities that I don't have. I don't think I'm driven enough, but that's why I admire her even more. She's a role model. Jo, I mean, I remember there was a time when she was never off British television. She was on every chat show going. Why do you think she was so popular over here in the UK? I have no idea. I have no idea. When I was told about this program, I had no idea that Joan Rivers was as well known. I assume she was popular because she wasn't like she wasn't certainly wasn't British.

20:32I mean, my wife is from the Cotswolds. She wasn't like my wife. I would say, Jo, that she releases us. She releases that sort of, we're not going to go there. We want more from her and then we want to be shocked by her. And then these avuncular male presenters want to kind of not pity her, but try and draw her out of herself. She doesn't need to be drawn out of herself and talk about her lack of confidence. She's got ounces and ounces and ounces of material, really clever clogs material about being ugly. She's the winner. You know, when you go on talk shows, whatever they are, radio shows, television shows, the presenters don't care.

21:09Presenters are like, yeah, you're here. OK, sell your book, blah, blah, blah. When she was doing things, I think you had a real sense that she was there. She was if she was with Letterman, she was engaging with Letterman in a way that he would not engage with a lot of other normal movie stars, TV stars, musicians. She was engaging with him as a human being. And she always said that, that she hated people who did routines like I was in the supermarket the other day with my mother-in-law. And she'd go, you were never in a supermarket and you don't have a mother-in-law. Well, let's hear from Joan again.

21:44Here she is on BBC Breakfast. And what I do when people get on the show with me is I just ask them what I want to know about. Like what? Oh, with Joan Collins, if she could remember if she had a computer with her, how many men she slept with. I mean, that kind of thing, you know. And apparently a lot of people do want to know this a lot of people say they don't but they really do Have you ever interviewed Elizabeth Taylor at all? Well, we can't get her in the studio these days because they have double doors, but we had her when she was thinner She was gonna come back as soon as she finished lunch.

22:17She promised me that two years ago I guess I would I like Elizabeth Taylor I think and she said about me I don't know what she thinks of me. But I think she's terrific. The men still find her sexy, though, even though she's fat. It's quite an uncomfortable listen at times. I mean, it's pretty unpleasant about other women. She is, but she got the studio people laughing by the end because they couldn't contain themselves, because who does that? I mean, who says that? And also nowadays you wouldn't use the word fat anyway, but she'd find another, if she was here now, she'd find another way to truth us.

22:56She truths us. Yeah. I mean, Jo, she could be quite nasty, though. Do you think sometimes she went, she stepped over the line? I mean, that was her deal. Her deal was stepping over the line. She wasn't out there to be polite or civil or to be just clever. And she could get away with it because she ridiculed herself all the time. She made fun of her appearance. She made fun of all the facelifts. She talked about all that kind of stuff. So she could get away with it. I mean, her later career was a bit of a marvel, no question. probably summed up in the title of her own book, Bouncing Back. So she wrote plays, she wrote books, she did radio, endless television, jewellery, which she sort of peddled on the shopping channel.

23:39She reinvented herself as an aspirational brand. She even found time to attend the marriage of Prince Charles, as he was then to Camilla Parker Bowles. I mean, what do you make of late career Joan? Joe? A lot of people who are famous are famous for a particular thing. like you were in The Godfather or you were in The Beatles. Joan Rivers wasn't famous for any particular thing that she did. She was famous for being Joan Rivers. She invented herself. She invented this living legend persona, and that's what made her famous, and that's why she could keep coming back, because she was her own brand.

24:19And who was she competing against? She wasn't competing against anybody in her own age group. And when she started, she wasn't really competing with the male comics because they weren't funny in the way that she was funny. They weren't outrageous. She was outrageous. But she came in at a time when, yeah, you're right. I don't think it was pre-alternative comedy when, you know, it's now more normal, shall we say, for women to be on a level playing field content wise. But she was in her own category. I don't think it made her happy, but she had to live who she was, as it were. that kept her alive.