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On this particular morning, however, she is thinking about tonight's Carson show, and though she will be on for only a few minutes, she has been preparing for weeks. She tested her jokes for two weeks at The Horn, an unglamorous little night club in Santa Monica. Now they are ready and, excusing herself, she takes a call from Bob Dolce, one of the talent coordinators for the Carson show, who listens as she reads her carefully rehearsed routine from a three-page typewritten scenario.
First, she tells him, she will talk about the Queen, who has just completed a visit to California, and runs through her jokes about the Queen's clothes ("Gowns by Helen Keller"). Then she suggests that if Carson wants to interrupt her—the Tonight show is only slightly less spontaneous than a shuttle launch—he might ask her if she saw Nancy Reagan during the Queen's visit. "I'll say: 'She was at my house for lunch! Do you know why people turn off on Nancy Reagan? She's too pretty. They expect her to look like Eleanor Roosevelt.
John, I saw a picture of Eleanor Roosevelt. I thought she was wearing a gas mask.'"
And so on, stopping at several of Rivers' other targets, including her own supposedly ugly body ("They show my picture to men on death row to get their minds off of women") and her fictional friend, Heidi Abromowitz, the town tramp. She wants to do a new joke about poor Heidi—"She had more hands up her dress than the Muppets"—but she is afraid that it might be too raw for television. "I love that line more than life itself," she tells Dolce before she hangs up. A few minutes later, after checking with network censors, he calls back:
The joke about Heidi can stay in, but one off-color comment about the Queen has to go. Rivers accepts quickly and that night is all fizz and sparkle, giving not a hint that she has traveled the same ground many times before.
Is there anyone, sovereign, subject or just plain citizen, safe from Rivers' barbs? "Deformed children," she answers. "And religion I'm very careful with. Otherwise, no. Everyone I've ever made a joke about has been huge. Who cares if I tell Sophia Loreri she's a tramp? She doesn't even know who I am. All I am saying about Elizabeth Taylor is what everyone else is saying. She ought to thank me. I'm part of the reason she lost weight.
"Comedy should always be on that very fine line of going too far. It should always be on the brink of disaster. Otherwise, it's pap, and who cares? It's boring. Then you become the grand old lady. The audience will make a subject sacrosanct anyway. Death, for example. They just don't want to laugh about death. I think we should. When my mother died, I kept going by doing joke after joke. I get rid of things through very black humor. I have a wonderful Karen Carpenter joke: 'I have no pity for anyone who becomes thin enough to get buried in pleats.' I tried it three times, and audiences gasped. They're just not ready for it."