Free Still Talking by Joan Rivers, Richard Meryman Page A

flights of steep metal stairs with her wooden leg to tell me she was in the audience and loved the show.
    We talked for an hour-muted and soft. The room was garish with gangster furniture and flower arrangements. Sitting on the red velvet couch was this skinny lady with her cane. We talked about jokes-what works and what doesn’t work-about club owners we knew, funny things that had happened, and where comedy was going. This night was a rite of passage for me and, I hope, for her, too.
    I adored Totie in that hour. We were just two women alone together; we both knew that she was dying and I would never see her again.
     
    While choosing my material for the Carson show, I was extremely tense. In this business if you aren’t worried, that means you’re not working hard enough-which means you will not be around very long. The preparation was like studying for a test: Am I up-to-date? I would ask myself. Can I make this better? Are people bored with these subjects? The first time a joke comes to me, I’m tremendously amused, but after that I coldly rate them: good, medium, lightweight-fillers or killers.
     
    STILL TALKING 53
     
    Everybody’s appearances on The Tonight Show are loosely scripted-like a rigged Ping-Pong match. I would arrive early at NBC and go over my routine line by line with a talent coordinator, working out the questions I wanted Carson to ask and my answers: “Have Johnny ask me, `Are you entertaining a lot?’ and I’ll say, `Well, Edgar had his ex-girlfriend, Fatima, over and .
    . .’ “
    The coordinator decided what would make Carson laugh, and when the lines were set, I memorized everything so I could act them out-and then put my notes in my purse to study onstage during the commercial breaks. When the show was over, I marked the material not usedpreparing already for the next time. I was the woman who keeps the crusts and makes bread pudding.
    Waiting to go on, I would sit in the dressing room gazing at the monitor, studying with horrible fascination the guests who were not doing well, watching Johnny stop laughing and the guest speed up or slow down and twitch and stumble and sweat. In those early days I would be terrified, wondering, My God, is it the audience? Or the guest? Or Johnny?
    I would hear reports on Carson-“Johnny’s in a good mood,” or “Watch out for Johnny; he’s upset.” You did not really have to be told. If his mood was bad, the halls backstage were quiet, the makeup room empty while he was there. Nobody wanted to be picked on, get that displaced anger, his cutting, sarcastic remarks. On the air he might not play with you during your spot, might just turn off and leave you marooned in silence. He would even sometimes behave this way with people he liked.
    The stage manager would bring me from the dressing room to wait behind the curtain. As soon as I could hear what was happening onstage, the adrenaline would begin to pump. But maybe Carson would go off on a tangent, and I’d have to wait a few beats longer to make my entrance, and the adrenaline would fall away. Then suddenly I would hear Johnny say, “Now let’s bring her out”-and the energy would flash through me again. It’s a miracle I didn’t have a heart attack ….
    The lights always blinded me at first as I would go to

54 JOAN RIVERS
    the guest chair and fumble with my dress. At that moment I never looked at the audience. The whole relationship was just the two of us. I would start by saying, “Johnny, Johnny, if you only knew … ” as though a camera had been snuck into an intimate lunch with my brother, the confidant I told everything to because he wouldn’t tell a soul. That was the game I played in my mind. And Johnny went along, listening and commiserating with me.
    Carson played me like a harp. He knew where I was going, knew when to come in and when to lean back. We were George Burns and Gracie Allen, Mike Nichols and Elaine May. I do not think Johnny Carson is in tune with many people, but I