I did my first gig of hundreds with her at the Haymarket Theatre, London. It was in 2001, a few weeks after 9/11. I watched astounded from the wings as a ranting grandmother, half a century older than the smuggest "alternative" comedian, reduced the house to puddles with volley after volley of furious, jugular wit. Seventy-five minutes, non-stop. And then it did stop. She became quiet.
"No, it’s good that we can laugh," she murmured. "After what America has just been through."
The audience froze, obediently. She carried on. "I was there in New York that day. The day the Twin Towers came down. Three thousand people died." The silence was absolute. "That’s three thousand widows." A shake of her head. Angels passed.
"Each of whom got three million dollars..."
You could hear the knuckles whitening. Christ, I thought, she’s not going to go there, surely?
"And do you know, maybe two, maybe three of those widows weren’t so very unhappy?"
Rivers in 1966, and at the height of her fame in 2004 (Images by Getty/WireImage/REX)
Like a bomb it came: the biggest laugh of the evening, the biggest laugh I’ve ever heard. As she came offstage I passed her a towel. "Bloody hell, Joan, that was brave. No other comedian would dare go there."
Dripping with sweat, shaking with excitement and rage, she held my face. "But we have to, don’t you see? You do see that? I live in Manhattan, I’m Jewish, I’m a woman against all these stupid men. I’ve got to do it. Because unless somebody does, America will go mad. Unless we laugh, they’ve won!"
News raced around the world that Rivers was "doing 9/11 jokes". For a couple of years, work for her in her home country proved harder to come by. She was quite right: America did go mad. The same thing happened again recently, on this side of the Atlantic. Her remarks on Gaza, taken out of their blackly comedic context, threatened the tour. Demonstrations, we were warned, had been planned outside every theatre we were booked to play. A notably sententious Newcastle City Council threatened to pull the venue.
I was working on a new opener: 'She’s Old And She’s Confused’. But Joan knows what governments, terrorised by posturing baboons, have forgotten: that against fear, ridicule is the most powerful weapon we have.
Touring with Rivers was like travelling with Graham Greene’s ever more demented Aunt. Just half a dozen of us, in a bus built for 40, weeping with hilarity as we zig-zagged across the counties. Joan, swathed in glamour, trolley-dollied, or re-dubbed the ever-more-convoluted plotlines ofDownton Abbey which played permanently on the video.
Her energy was galactic. Every day had to have its memorable treat. In Melbourne it meant getting up at 4am to go and look at penguins on St Philip’s Island. She loved penguins, but even the penguins were asleep. Stonehenge was opened up especially for her. ("Nice," she remarked to the stones, "having something of my own generation to talk to.") In Manhattan, when we did our own modest season at Michael Feinstein’s cabaret club, she opened for us.
Joan Rivers performing on stage in one of her sold-out shows
To her inner circle she was kind to a fault, and loyal as a limpet. She was after all a Jewish Mom. She picked up the tab for every meal. One didn’t dare admire an object in a shop window: if one did, it would be delivered to one’s room.
We were put into the same hotels: Cliveden, the Balmoral, the Ritz, for which she, not the producer, privately paid. For this upcoming tour, the booking at one such had been thrown into doubt after its unexpected occupation by the exiled Thai royal family. Joan was planning, she told me, to growl excerpts from The King And I beneath her usurped bedroom window.
Her own enormous apartment off Park Avenue was actually a ballroom nicked by JP Morgan from a French chateau, furnished in flawless Louis Quinze and Aubusson, and festooned with photographs of the Prince of Wales. (The admiration was mutual.)
Yet she never forgot her tough early days, the dips in her own career which followed her husband’s suicide and her accountant’s embezzlement - the source of some of her fiercest humour. She retained a passion for free food. In the VIP lounge at Kuala Lumpur airport, our heads cracked together as we simultaneously lunged for the complimentary olives. Onto the plane we staggered, racked with laughter and holding bloodied handkerchiefs to our heads.
In Southend, in a futile effort to repay her generosity, we treated her to a Local Experience: fish and chips and a trip to Poundland. She adored Poundland and the Poundlanders adored her. She was never aloof, never remote from her public. Face to face with those who intercepted her getting into limousines, or with tear-stained nutcases at stage doors, she was attentive, compassionate, and considerably more patient with the selfies than Our Own Dear Queen. "Never forget," she rasped, "who is paying for all this."
On Wednesdays, when in Manhattan, she’d go to a scruffy comedy club on 23rd Street and do an hour. The door money went to charity. "Why, Joan?" I asked her. "You’re a prime-time TV star, you’re a multi-millionairess from your jewellery empire, you’re in the Hollywood Hall of Fame, you’re adored the planet over. You’re 81. Why don’t you just have a night off?" "Ah, but Kit, you know and I know, that in that hour’s stand-up, one new joke will come to you unprompted. And that’s the joke I take to Vegas. And if I don’t, it dies. And if it dies, then I die."
Rivers on the Graham Norton Show on BBC 1 (Image by Ian West/PA Wire)
For all her foul-mouthed tirades, she was very much the gentlewoman offstage. She liked Country Life, dogs, old pewter. Her deep Anglophilia was inculcated by her husband, a Rugby College alumnus. Maybe that’s why she favoured us, as (her words) her Paid Escorts.
She sought out antique shops everywhere we went: even in Canberra, where, let’s face it, antiques are scarce. She loved a stately home, particularly if it was not generally open to the public.
James McConnel, my cabaret partner, is well-connected. He could telephone battalions of grandees in decaying piles. On our last tour, Joan was lapping him up, and I was getting furious. Then (Peterborough to Southampton it was) I had a brainwave. I knew the chatelaine of Highclere Castle, the equally energetic Lady Carnarvon, from charity gigs. “Fi. Big favour. Lunch, for Joan Rivers. And not just lunch. The Full Downton. State dining-room. Footmen behind each chair. Carson and Mrs Patmore a-bobbing."
The only problem was that there was a local ladies’ fundraising party going around the house at the same time. “Don’t worry,” growled Joan. “I’ll lie low. I’ll remain incognito”. Incognito? Joan had perhaps the most distinctive face in show-business. We managed to keep the two parties apart until finally they colliided at the door to the Tutenkhamen exhibition in Highclere’s cellars. There was no escape.
“Look out ladies!” I yelled in mock horror. “One of the mummies has broken loose!” There were the howls of delighted recognition and disbelief to which we had become used. Joan was adorable to them, and the charity raised a great deal more than it would otherwise have done.
Rivers and Kit Hesketh-Harvey at Highclere (Image by Kit Hesketh-Harvey)
Always, always, there was laughter. Joan, seated after-show between Baz Luhrmann and Mick Jagger above Bondi, setting the table a-roar, as she nibbled her usual broccoli and Altoids. Joan, greeting a stadium full of young people howling for her as she judged a Dog Fancy Dress Competition. (The Boston Terrorist won). Joan, on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall as she was given a 10 minute standing ovation. "Old Woman Rivers/That Old Woman Rivers/She just keeps rolling along...."
She never said goodbye at the end of a tour: she couldn’t bear it. No emotion dared she display, because that warm-hearted lady felt it too much. Just a mock mwah-mwah, and then with a snap of her Manolo Blahniks, off to another airport gate, another gig.
I don’t want to say goodbye either. More than ever the world needs somebody to explode the towering vanities of Putin, of fundamentalists, and of the Kardashians.
