Still Talking by Joan Rivers, Richard Meryman Page B
Authors: Joan Rivers, Richard Meryman
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possessions away from him.
Perhaps this one terrifying moment of helplessness accounts for his continuing need to own things. Edgar did not have one shirt, he had fifty.
I do not know how many watches he owned. After two years, as anti-Semitism grew in Denmark, the Rosenbergs decided to move to South Africa, a haven for many European Jews. They settled in Cape Town. By now, after all the uprooting and losses, Edgar was a loner-shy, introverted, awkward at making friends, indulged by his mother. But he was a star student who read a half-dozen books a week. I suspect his whole persona-what inner security he had-was built around being that voracious reader and superior intellect.
Six months before he died, he told me his darkest secret. As a boy in Cape Town, he developed tuberculosis. “Don’t tell Melissa,” he kept saying, his voice aching with shame. In those days in South Africa-and much of Europe, too-tuberculosis carried a social stigma. Virulently contagious, Edgar was instantly ripped out of school and sent three hundred miles north to the Neelspoort Hospital in a desolate, arid region called the Karroo. “It was horrible, horrible,” he told me. “Don’t tell Melissa.”
When he came out of the sanatorium, he was more than ever an outsider, kept at home, nursed by black servants, educated by a tutor. And then a relapse sent him back to Neelspoort.
His escape during his adolescence and young manhood was reading theater biographies and playing over and over the songs of Noel Coward and Cole Porter. So he was
STILL TALKING 73
thrilled when, to be close to relatives in the New York area, the family moved in 1948 to America, the very seat of show business.
Starting as a night clerk in a bookstore, Edgar moved on to an advertising agency, and then made it into show business. He was hired at NBC as a production supervisor and coordinator, planning and arranging the labor, materials, and equipment. As the expediter and budget controller, he was involved in every move in a production, and eventually became a troubleshooter for the semilegendary producer Mannie Sachs. During those early days of television, Edgar wrote the network’s first handbook for production supervisors.
That was the perfect job for Edgar-details, details, details, checking, checking, checking. He must have been brilliant. My secretary found an NBC
memo thanking Edgar for his job on a Martin and Lewis telethon-“a rare combination of long range planning, continued rechecking, and talent that had appeal, sincerity and dignity.”
In 1954 he joined an NBC subsidiary as a full-fledged producer, doing closed-circuit TV shows for demonstrations and sales meetings at major corporations like Pan American, Ford Motor Company, Humble Oil. During that time he had become good friends with Tom Rosenberg, the son of Anna Rosenberg, who sold his mother on hiring Edgar to add television expertise to the office, and considered him “one of the most creative guys I’ve ever seen, prolific with ideas, many of them first-rate. “
The decision to do the show began the fusion of my career with Edgar’s.
That was not our plan. It just happened. I was frightened by the responsibility of carrying a show on my shoulders, and Edgar and I obsessively hashed out every decision. I had a joke based on the truth”My marriage is wonderful because when I wake up in the morning, I’m thinking of me and so is he.” Still in bed, Edgar would say, “I figured out during the night that the contract should read … “
Telling me, “You deserve better,” he handled the agents. He was the one who said, “No, she won’t go into Mr. Kelly’s for less than a thousand dollars a week; that’s
74 JOAN RIVERS
what George Carlin got. She’s headlining and she’s hot and she’s on the Carson show. She doesn’t have to prove herself. ” I was in the background saying, “Oh, we’re going to lose the job.” And he was saying to the agent, “… and we
Perhaps this one terrifying moment of helplessness accounts for his continuing need to own things. Edgar did not have one shirt, he had fifty.
I do not know how many watches he owned. After two years, as anti-Semitism grew in Denmark, the Rosenbergs decided to move to South Africa, a haven for many European Jews. They settled in Cape Town. By now, after all the uprooting and losses, Edgar was a loner-shy, introverted, awkward at making friends, indulged by his mother. But he was a star student who read a half-dozen books a week. I suspect his whole persona-what inner security he had-was built around being that voracious reader and superior intellect.
Six months before he died, he told me his darkest secret. As a boy in Cape Town, he developed tuberculosis. “Don’t tell Melissa,” he kept saying, his voice aching with shame. In those days in South Africa-and much of Europe, too-tuberculosis carried a social stigma. Virulently contagious, Edgar was instantly ripped out of school and sent three hundred miles north to the Neelspoort Hospital in a desolate, arid region called the Karroo. “It was horrible, horrible,” he told me. “Don’t tell Melissa.”
When he came out of the sanatorium, he was more than ever an outsider, kept at home, nursed by black servants, educated by a tutor. And then a relapse sent him back to Neelspoort.
His escape during his adolescence and young manhood was reading theater biographies and playing over and over the songs of Noel Coward and Cole Porter. So he was
STILL TALKING 73
thrilled when, to be close to relatives in the New York area, the family moved in 1948 to America, the very seat of show business.
Starting as a night clerk in a bookstore, Edgar moved on to an advertising agency, and then made it into show business. He was hired at NBC as a production supervisor and coordinator, planning and arranging the labor, materials, and equipment. As the expediter and budget controller, he was involved in every move in a production, and eventually became a troubleshooter for the semilegendary producer Mannie Sachs. During those early days of television, Edgar wrote the network’s first handbook for production supervisors.
That was the perfect job for Edgar-details, details, details, checking, checking, checking. He must have been brilliant. My secretary found an NBC
memo thanking Edgar for his job on a Martin and Lewis telethon-“a rare combination of long range planning, continued rechecking, and talent that had appeal, sincerity and dignity.”
In 1954 he joined an NBC subsidiary as a full-fledged producer, doing closed-circuit TV shows for demonstrations and sales meetings at major corporations like Pan American, Ford Motor Company, Humble Oil. During that time he had become good friends with Tom Rosenberg, the son of Anna Rosenberg, who sold his mother on hiring Edgar to add television expertise to the office, and considered him “one of the most creative guys I’ve ever seen, prolific with ideas, many of them first-rate. “
The decision to do the show began the fusion of my career with Edgar’s.
That was not our plan. It just happened. I was frightened by the responsibility of carrying a show on my shoulders, and Edgar and I obsessively hashed out every decision. I had a joke based on the truth”My marriage is wonderful because when I wake up in the morning, I’m thinking of me and so is he.” Still in bed, Edgar would say, “I figured out during the night that the contract should read … “
Telling me, “You deserve better,” he handled the agents. He was the one who said, “No, she won’t go into Mr. Kelly’s for less than a thousand dollars a week; that’s
74 JOAN RIVERS
what George Carlin got. She’s headlining and she’s hot and she’s on the Carson show. She doesn’t have to prove herself. ” I was in the background saying, “Oh, we’re going to lose the job.” And he was saying to the agent, “… and we
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