Word: joans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Joan Rivers has made you laugh; now maybe...
...Joan Rivers possesses that certitude and has gone full throat in pursuit of it. In addition to starring in her own Broadway play, Sally Marr and Her Escorts, playing host on a syndicated home-shopping show and designing a lucrative jewelry line for the QVC shopping network, Rivers has embarked on what is certainly the most bizarre media treatment of personal hardship to date. Next Sunday the comedian, 60, and her daughter Melissa, 26, will star as themselves in the NBC movie Tears and Laughter, the story of how they coped with the 1987 suicide of Joan's husband Edgar...
...special spares little of the high drama. Joan Rivers depicts herself thrashing through her husband's well-stocked medicine cabinet after learning that he has killed himself in a Philadelphia hotel room. Later, still bereaved but completely broke, she appears on Hollywood Squares and, less than two months after Edgar is buried, returns to the stand-up circuit. (Sample joke: "My husband wanted to be cremated. I told him I'd scatter his ashes at + Neiman Marcus . . . That way I'd visit him every day.") All this reactive, forced levity doesn't sit well with Melissa, who throws tantrums...
...play relies more heavily on the shtick of Marr's actual routines than on the substance of her life and, like Tears and Laughter, may be dismissed merely as Joan Rivers in overdrive. But Rivers, who has endured more than her allotment of show-business rejection, likes to quote a line from Sally Marr: "I ain't afraid of death," she says. "I'm in show business. I died a million times...
Administration: Susan Lynd, Denise A. Carres, Sheila Charney, Donald N. Collins, Joan A. Connelly, Corliss M. Duncan, Ann V. King, Lina Lofaro, Anne D. Moffett, Judith R. Stoler News Desks: Brian Doyle, Waits L. May III, Susanna Schrobsdorff, Pamela H. Thompson, Diana Tollerson, Ann Drury Wellford, Mary Wormley...