Last Girl Before Freeway by Leslie Bennetts

Author:Leslie Bennetts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2016-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Art and Commerce: All in a Day’s Work

As Rivers clawed her way back into the limelight, her resilience stunned her friends, foes, and fans. “I watched with amusement and amazement,” said Shelly Schultz. “She carried on her career until Edgar convinced her to do something incredibly stupid, which she did, and then her career collapsed. She had a bad reputation, and then she fought her way back—miracle of miracles! There was a saying about her: that this chick would show up on a flatbed truck or in somebody’s refrigerator for the right price—it’s all about the money.”

Rivers’s insatiable appetite for remunerative work may have reached its apex in 1994 with an autobiographical television movie that dramatized her stormy relationship with her daughter following Edgar’s suicide. She saw nothing wrong with this idea. “I thought it would be a terrific thing to do,” she said.

But when it aired, critics and viewers were equally appalled. “Were Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story (NBC) not so ghoulishly creepy, it would be an instant camp classic,” Ken Tucker wrote in Entertainment Weekly. “Joan and her daughter, Melissa, portray themselves in an autobiographical TV movie about the aftermath of the 1987 suicide of Rivers’s husband, Edgar Rosenberg. From the opening sequence, in which shots of Joan in a hospital for a liposuction operation are contrasted with scenes of Rosenberg overdosing on pills and liquor, you realize that Tears and Laughter will be absolutely shameless. The movie doesn’t avoid any awkward moment, from mother and daughter going through Rosenberg’s personal effects (“His Filofax!”) to Joan’s monologue directed at her husband as he lies in his coffin. You watch…and then catch yourself feeling like a voyeur speculating on things that really should be none of our business. Happy viewing.”

Viewers agreed. In the movie’s IMDb listing, the first headline that comes up is “One of the Worst Movies Ever Made.” The second headline calls Tears and Laughter “an exploitation of egos,” and the third, which describes the movie as “unintentionally funny,” adds the following: “Joan Rivers writes such insightful, razor-sharp books about her life and her family that it’s an automatic disappointment…What happened to this woman’s voice, to her sense of truth? Nearly everything in this biographical drama rings false.”

That commenter complained that even “the heated arguments between mother and daughter” didn’t come off as convincing, although “they may work as camp”—a prophetic remark, since some Rivers aficionados admit to their gleeful participation in Tears and Laughter viewing parties that have retained an enduring appeal over the years, particularly among those under the influence of recreational drugs.

“People quote lines from it all the time,” said the actor and theater director Lonny Price. “‘I didn’t kill Daddy! You didn’t kill Daddy! Daddy killed Daddy!’ It was unbelievable.”

Despite almost universal pans, Rivers retained positive memories of the project in later years. “We had the best time doing it,” she said. “It was very therapeutic for me and Melissa. It was wonderful for us, because we bonded tremendously.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.