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Last Girl Before Freeway

the Life, Loves, Losses, and Liberation of Joan Rivers
Feb 08, 2017mswrite rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
I remember the young(er) Joan from her tv appearances on classic variety series like The Ed Sullivan and Flip Wilson shows and of course her stand-up and chats with Johnny Carson on the old Tonight Show. I liked that self-deprecating Joan and found her quirky looks attractive if not conventionally pretty. She was a lot more interesting to me than the caustic Fashion Police diva who went on to have so many plastic surgeries she came to resemble a caricature of herself. Nor was I particularly a fan of Rivers's evolution into the potty-mouthed and mean-spirited comic she became, the first example of this being the Elizabeth Taylor fat jokes, which were relentless, got old fast, and seemed pointlessly cruel. Thus one of the most entertaining passages of Leslie Bennetts's bio chronicles the deliciously funny revenge taken by La Liz, now svelte and ravishingly beautiful again, the night she showed up on the arm of invited guest George Hamilton to an elegant dinner party given by Joan and her husband Edgar Rosenberg. It's so wonderful of you to invite me!" Taylor purred, and the speechless, mortified Rivers was a nervous wreck throughout the entire evening. ("It was done so deftly," Hamilton recalled. "Joan felt more humiliated than Elizabeth ever felt.") Bennetts also explores, in almost exhausting detail, the traumatic effects of the debacle that was River's first talk show on the then-fledgling Fox network in 1986, a career move that effectively ended her marriage and sparked a legendary feud with former mentor Carson; and Edgar's shocking suicide a year later. Her husband's decision to end his life in a Philadelphia hotel room led to a lengthy estrangement between Rivers and their daughter Melissa, who blamed her mother for her father's death. (Their appearance together in the 1994 tv movie "Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story" remains one of the more bizarre episodes in the annals of showbiz.) All that said, there's something truly touching about Joan Rivers, who all her life was a walking monument to insecurity. It's impossible not to admire her moxie and her work ethic, her uncanny ability to rescue and reinvent herself in the wake of so much emotional devastation.