Entertainment
Joan Rivers' Career Highlights Span an Amazing 50 Years, From 'The Tonight Show' to 'Fashion Police'
She was a controversial figure through the end, but there's no denying Joan Rivers was an icon. Joan Rivers died at the age of 81 on Thursday. Her career was long and varied, kicking off with a co-starring role with a young (and then-unknown) Barbra Streisand in the late 1950s, moving through countless red carpets, nominations for Grammys, Tonys, and Emmys, and living on talk shows. She spent decades on camera, her irascible wit and wrath a veritable staple in American popular culture. Her opinions were not for the easily offended, and she was never afraid to speak her mind.
Now that we've lost that voice, it's time to look back at the highlights of her long career, and at some of the ingredients that made this legend.
Guest On 'The Tonight Show'
She made her first appearance on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in 1965, wrote for the program, and by 1983, she was considered his regular guest host. Rivers has often spoken of Carson’s role as her mentor and father figure. They had a falling-out when she left the show, which Rivers wrote about in The Hollywood Reporter, writing:
“Looking back, and I never like to say it, the Carson breakup hurt me a lot, without realizing it. Even now, with our reality show Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best? or Fashion Police, when I say, ‘No, this is wrong,’ people say: ‘See? She is a bitch. She is a c—.’ If I were a man, they’d say: ‘So brilliant. He’s tough, but he’s right.’ Nobody ever says to me, ‘You’re right.’”
Image: NBC
'What Becomes A Semi-Legend Most?'
Rivers’ 1984 album got her a Grammy nom for Best Comedy Album in 1984. From that album:
“When a woman reaches a certain age people don’t think you’re attractive…and if they don’t think you’re attractive in my country, America, you’re just considered yuk, ugly…you know, and no one likes ugly women — the truth, the truth! — nobody likes you. I was walking in the door today to the studio and a man grabs me — I thought, Thank God, somebody likes me — he said, ‘How are things in Loch Ness?’”
'The Late Show'
When rumors of Carson’s retirement were spinning, Rivers was shocked to find herself nowhere on the list for possible replacements. When Fox offered her a hosting gig for The
Late Show With Joan Rivers, she took it. Rivers revealed in her eulogization of Carson that he’d never spoken to her again after that, and she was banned from The Tonight Show until Jimmy Fallon took over. Image: Fox
'The Joan Rivers Show'
Her work on her self-titled talk show won her a Daytime Emmy. The show ran for five years from 1989 to 1994. Reviewing the show after her Emmy win, Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker wrote that the show was “a better showcase for her funny edginess than her doomed 1988 Fox nighttime program was,” continuing on to describe a segment:
”Rivers books her share of product-plugging celebrities, but she’s beginning to specialize in more unusual guests. Recently, for example, there was a transsexual who believed she was eight months pregnant. Rivers had a doctor come on and perform an ultrasound test, right there on the air. He heard no fetal heartbeat. Rivers said to her guest, ‘Now, don’t be upset. If you have this baby, you call me from the hospital and we’ll come out and see you.’ The tone of all this was very odd, a mixture of humor, humiliation, and pathos.”
'The Life and Hard Times of Heidi Abromowitz'
Rivers’ first best-selling book in 1984 is described as “an ‘unauthorized biography’ of the comedienne’s free-living childhood friend,” a “notorious tramp.”
'Sally Marr...and Her Escorts'
This 1994 show, about comedian Lenny Bruce’s stand-up mother, ran on Broadway for 50 performances and got Rivers a Tony nomination. In July 2014 it was announced that Rivers would be bringing the show back to Broadway the following fall for a reading at the National Theater. In his review of the play’s original run in 1994, The New York Times’ David Richards wrote “Is Ms. Rivers also a great actress? No, she is not. But she is exuberant, fearless and inexhaustible…Between Ms. Rivers and Ms. Marr an understanding obviously exists.”
'Joan Rivers: Before Melissa Pulls the Plug'
Gotta keep those specials rolling. This one, in 2006, was a one-woman show. Rivers took aim at everyone from Paul McCartney to Kathy Griffin to Bravo. On Bravo, the network hosting the show, she exclaimed “this is the cheapest f***ing special ever made!”
'I Hate Everyone ... Starting with Me'
Another New York Times best-seller in 2012. Of the book, AP’s Brooke Lefferts wrote “Joan Rivers’ tongue is as sharp as her plastic surgeon’s scalpel, and she holds nothing back in her latest book…Rivers uses her pen as an automatic weapon, firing jokes on the page, with little prose in between.”
Image: Penguin Group
The Red Carpet
One shouldn’t ignore the rest of her long, impressive career, but these days, Rivers is probably best-known for her red carpet commentary. Rivers and her daughter Melissa first hosted the E! pre-awards show for the Golden Globes in 1994. She became a staple of red carpet commentary over the ensuing decades. Rivers was always frank about her views on fashion; as she said during a set live at the Apollo, discussing the Virgin Mary:
“I put her in a Chanel suit, Manolo Blahniks, and a Louis Vuitton pocketbook. You’re the mother of God, look it! If she had looked like that, she would’ve gotten into the inn. The point is, it’s about looks.”
'Joan Rivers: Don't Start with Me'
One of the lines describing Rivers’ 2012 stand-up specials reads, “Grow up, check your sensitivity at the door and feel the comedic wrath.” Sounds about right.
Image: Showtime
'Fashion Police'
Rivers has hosted Fashion Police on E! since 2010. With close to 220 episodes in the bag, each one was more biting than the next.
