Joan in Full Throat

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Few are the descendants of the Greta Garbo school of celebrity reticence. Nowadays the aggressively reclusive are outnumbered by the aggressively revealing -- legions of withering semistars who feel compelled to serve up their private torment for public consumption. Books and movies happily package the failed relationship, the traumatic childhood, the life of chemically enhanced misery. Catharsis boosts careers.

And yet some celebrities enter the confessional business motivated by something more substantial than the prospect of publicity: the sunny conviction that the saga of their cruel lives will serve as a morality tale.

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 Rosenberg.

Now that's catharsis. But, says Rivers, discussing the movie in her Versailles-inspired Manhattan triplex, "it had to be done and had to be done right. Suicide hits one family in six. It is not dealt with; it is not discussed; it takes a family and destroys it. I still walk past my husband's picture and say, 'You son of a bitch.' There's still so much rage."

Mother and daughter decided to make the movie after getting a positive response from a People magazine profile in which they discussed the stresses on their relationship after Rosenberg's death. Rivers senior finds unfathomable the suggestion that her mission might have been accomplished more easily if two other actresses played the mother-daughter roles.

"They would have done it as two jerks," she says. "They wouldn't have done it honestly. The emotions had to be true. I just didn't want to see Victoria Principal pretending to be upset."

The TV 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 and winds up in the arms of an abusive, cocaine-addicted boyfriend before she gets herself straightened out.

For all its unpalatability, the story manages to carry a message about the capacity for survival, a theme that obsessed Rivers even before her husband's suicide and a theme that lies at the heart of Sally Marr and Her Escorts.

Written by Rivers with collaborators Erin Sanders and Lonny Price, the play is based on the life of comedian Lenny Bruce's mother, whom Rivers met in a Las Vegas coffee shop eight years ago. Deserted by her husband on their wedding night, Marr, already pregnant, became a so-so stand-up comic while she raised her son in a gay boardinghouse. When Lenny died of a drug overdose in 1966, she was left destitute and in charge of his only daughter.

"I felt such a terrible connection to her," says Rivers. "We both suffered such a horrible loss. She was left with Kitty, I was left with Melissa. And for her, there was always that incredible struggle to get by." It was the same sort of hardscrabble existence that Rivers remembered of her days in the early '60s, when she was scrounging for gigs on the New York City comedy scene: "I worked in a plastics factory; I slept in a car; I typed without knowing how."

The 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."