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If Rivers has her way, some day they will be ready, and the only constant in her life, besides fear of poverty, is determination. When he first met her in the mid-'60s, Husband Edgar recalls, she was so frightened onstage that she was afraid to touch the microphone; she was convinced that the perspiration on her hands would cause it to electrocute her. Three weeks before she made her first appearance on the Carson show in 1965, her agent told her she should give up the business: Everybody had seen her, and she was too old. (How old, she refuses to say, but she graduated from Barnard College in 1954 and cannot be much younger than 50 now.) Still, she continued.
Her determination is all her own. Her fear of poverty she inherited from her mother, who had been born to wealth in Imperial Russia, lost it in the Revolution and, despite marriage to a prosperous doctor, lived in horror of ever being broke again. During her own years of struggle, when her parents refused to help her further a career they disapproved of, Rivers was desperately poor, making only $6 a night in sleazy strip joints. Now that she has money, she too is afraid to lose it and is terrified, as her husband says, of winding up indigent in a nursing home.
"I wake up at night and say, 'What if I'm not funny in the morning?' " she says. " 'It's gone. It's over. Goodbye to the house, goodbye to Melissa's horses and the dogs, make sushi out of the goldfish.' I always think it is just going to go away. Success is very fickle, and you must never think it is going to last forever, because it will not. Every time I go onstage, I say a little prayer, 'Thank you, God.' " Rosenberg, whose family fled Germany for South Africa after Hitler came to power, has similar fears and is trying to amass his own fortune by implanting developments amid the rural beauties of Bucks County, Pa.
This year, and for some years past, Rivers has had success and more, and if she ever does wake up and find it hard to think of anything funny to say, she can always retreat to her reserve supply, twelve drawers of jokes carefully catalogued and cross-indexed on 3-in. by 5-in. cards. While she talks to her two secretaries, she lets a visitor browse through the headings; such topics as Drugs, Face Lifts, Beverly Hills, Homosexuals, My Body, and No Sex Appeal, which has the most entries, more than 400. "I can't stand it," she says whenever she hears a chuckle. "Which one are you laughing at?" Finally, she stops work and comes over to go through the cards herself. "Here's a good one about Heidi Abromowitz: The last time she made love she said, 'Was it good for you?' 'Yes,' said the Navy." She laughs, pulls it from the drawer, and that night several million people hear it on the Johnny Carson show.
—By Gerald Clarke