An Important New Biography

Leslie Bennetts' Last Girl Before Freeway: The Life, Loves, Losses and Liberation of Joan Rivers (Little, Brown and Co.) is an engrossing, well-researched, and smart biography of the comedian who had such an enduring impact on popular culture. It is also a testament to a woman who persevered against incredible odds to achieve stardom, and maintain it right up to her death (in 2014) at the age of 81.

A polarizing figure for much of her career, Joan Rivers was a mass of contradictions, all of which the author fully explores here. Her groundbreaking work influenced practically every female stand-up comic to follow. Rivers was a trailblazer who gave women a bold voice, yet often seemed stuck in a bygone era where they were judged largely on their face and figure. Often crass and vulgar onstage, in her private life she hungered for elegance and was drawn to men who were courtly and dignified. Bennetts shows us a woman who could be both amazingly generous, and surprisingly petty. The book draws on numerous revealing interviews, some of which -- Barry Diller, Barbara Walters -- cannot have been easy to get. Some consider Rivers a comic genius; others saw a performer who didn't know the meaning of good taste or subtlety. Both sides get a fair hearing here.

This is one of the most interesting biographies of the year.

Joan's Birthday Cake

Born on this date in 1933, Joan Rivers managed the considerable feat of keeping her career going for more than 50 years. In the 1960s, she was a frequent guest on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show and The Ed Sullivan Show, and even briefly had her own talk show. At the time of her death in 2014, she was as busy as ever, doing her level best to stay on the cutting edge of comedy -- or perhaps step a bit over that edge.

Naturally, her humor evolved over the years, as did audience standards. In 1969, Joan was asked to provide a few of her "favorite jokes" for a syndicated newspaper article. Here's a sample:

"I had no luck baking my husband Edgar a birthday cake. While it was in the oven, the candles melted."

"I was so fat as a child that whenever I played Post Office, they sent me bulk rate."

"I never realized how bad a cook I was until Betty Crocker heaved a rock through my kitchen window."

Pretty tame stuff, next to her 21st century jokes. But whether you prefer that kindler, gentler Joan, or the later one who dropped knife-edged gags about Anne Frank and various modern-day celebrities, there's no doubt that the former Joan Molinsky fought hard for her place in the show business sun. It's not likely we'll forget her soon.

That Joan Rivers

Remember when it was just CBS, NBC, and ABC? Now there's a multitude of ways and places in which to watch TV. Ironically, what some of these platforms do best is give us a chance to see dimly remembered -- or never before seen -- curios from TV's vaults.

Hulu is currently unspooling That Show, a late 1960s syndicated talk show hosted by comedienne Joan Rivers, who'd previously made guest appearances on the likes of The Hollywood Palace and The Ed Sullivan Show. Aimed at a female audience, the format called for each segment to be devoted to a discussion topic. Joan began with a monologue on the subject of the day, then introduced an expert and a celebrity guest to the discussion. Later in the show, Joan went into her studio audience to take questions. I watched the series opener, in which a young and slightly giggly Joan, joined by her guest Johnny Carson (back when they were friendly), interviewed the proprietress of a nudist camp. As you can imagine, Joan had a few things to say about that.

Compared to the outrageous Joan Rivers we've come to know in the forty-odd years since, she's pretty tame on That Show. Still, as she confessed in a November 1968 interview with United Press International's Patricia E. Davis, Rivers had a tendency to set off censors' alerts. "I can't swear and I can't say 'Oh, God,'" she explained. "I've always said that to fill up a space between sentences but now every time I slip the censors blip me and subtract $35 from my salary." Since beginning the show a few months earlier, she estimated that she'd been bleeped on an average of three times per segment. Can you imagine how busy she'd be keeping those censors today?